Class, Ethnicity, Epidemics & Death in London. From Victorian times to 2020
Office for National Statistics analysis shows there were 55 deaths for every 100,000 people in the poorest parts of England, compared with 25 in the most wealthiest areas. BBC 1st May 2020
In 1849 Henry Mayhew started a series of articles for the Morning Chronicle which became London Labour and the London Poor.
He visited an area of Bermondsey in South London known as Jacob’s Island by the River Thames. In 2020 it is a cluster of upmarket residences near to London Bridge. Then it was a slum. 6,500 people had died in the area in the previous three months from cholera out of 12,800 in total. Mayhew wrote:
We might lay our fingers on the Ordnance map, and say here is the typhoid parish, and there the ward of cholera; for as truly as the West-end rejoices in the title of Belgravia, might the southern shores of the Thames be christened Pestilentia. As season follows season, so does disease follow disease in the quarters that may be more literally than metaphorically styled the plague-spots of London.
The pattern of poverty, housing & health continues 171 years on. The highest UK COVID-19 mortality rates per 100,000 population are in London: Newham 144.3; Brent 141.5;Hackney 127.4; Tower Hamlets 122.9 Haringey 119.3(Guardian 2nd May)
Philip Glanville, the Mayor of Hackney, has blamed “the links between inequality, poverty, ethnicity and health” for his borough’s death rate of 127 per 100,000. (Financial Times 2nd May)
Link to ONS statistics searchable by local authority area
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