LONDON’S NOTORIOUS DEVIL’S ACRE

The Devil’s Acre was an infamous slum next to Westminster Abbey that subsisted during the Victorian age. The slum had its roots in the Middle Ages when the monks at the abbey gave a haven to debtors, cheats and other criminals. It was little more than a damp, dismal swamp, and home to a community of beggars, thieves and prostitutes. Police only made infrequent visits to the area and when they did, the local residents powerfully repelled them.

In the mid-1800s, the courtyards and gardens were built over and replaced by cheap housing that lacked ventilation, drainage and sanitation facilities. By the 1900s century, the area was the centre of poverty, vice, and crime in London. In the 1850s, Charles Dickens gave the area its infamous name, the Devil’s Acre. Several other parts of London could claim to be the most destitute – Shoreditch and Saint Giles for a start, but none were as horrendous as this area. And it was only a short walk from the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey.

The slum was a labyrinth of lanes, courts, and alleys, where vice, depravity, and crime could be found in abundance. With no sewage system, swarms of the enormous population lived in filth. Disease was rampant, including typhus and cholera.

Dickens was one of several philanthropists who were shocked that such an area could exist at the very heart of the British Empire. Westminster encompassed parliament as well as the prestigious Westminster Abbey, yet was also the home to thousands of people living a life of cruel despair and crime. The two existed sitting side by side, as though the problems never existed. In 1855, a lodging house in the Devil’s Acre was believed to have held over 120 people.

The plight of children in the area, many of them street orphans, also shocked those who went into the area to help. The City of London Mission felt that the area was so depraved that it had to be re-conquered for Christianity. For the second half of the 19th century, its ministers put together reports on the area founded on door-to-door calls in the district. One of the reports by missionary Andrew Walker depicted the degree of depravity.

He was stunned to learn they took orphans off of the street and placed them into a School of Fobology. In other words, pick-pocketing. The school was based in a pub the ‘One Tun’ in Old Pye Street. The Fagin like master of the school gave them a master class in the art of pickpocketing. This outraged the rich humanitarian, Adeline Cooper, into purchasing the One Ton public house and changing it into a new Ragged school. He did this with the assistance of the well-known reformer Lord Shaftesbury.

The pollution of the Thames had hit its peak in the Great Stink of 1858, and it forced MPs to support Joseph Bazalgette’s sewage system for London. Once there was no longer sewage flowing into the public’s drinking water, cases of cholera became almost non-existent. The Devil’s Acre, which had always been a poor area because of the marshy ground it stood in at the side of the Thames, was now separated from the river by the Embankment wall. With the development of Victoria Street. The land in the area became suitable building land and the old shanty town was gone.

The residents that remained were the deserving poor who found themselves re-housed in social housing provided by George Peabody. The new dwellings had good sanitary conditions and ensured that cholera would never haunt the area of Old Pye Street again.