Spitalfields Life

Distinguished Historian Gillian Tindall offers an ambivalent history of the development of London over the last five hundred years. Gillian’s books include The House by the Thames and A Tunnel Through Time, A New Route for an Old London Journey.

‘London Going Out of Town’ or ‘The March of Bricks & Mortar’ by George Cruikshank, 1829

“I remember when it was all fields round here.”  How many of us have heard these words spoken by an older person describing some outer district of London? The huge spread of our metropolis is often seen as a modern evil but the truth is that each successive generation has lamented it for hundreds of years. EM Forster in his pre-First World War novel Howards End, writing of the ‘red rust’ of bricks advancing across meadows far from the main streets of the capital, was just another voice in a long, long tradition.

The red rust has been held at bay since the Town & Country Planning Act of 1934 and then by the establishment of the Green Belt. Yet the new Planning Act proposed by our present government looks set to unleash another wave of bricks. There is nothing new in attempts to curb the growth of our capital but less comforting is the fact that, although these attempts have often succeeded in moderating and organising London’s growth, they have hardly ever stopped it.

The first who tried to was Elizabeth I, by issuing a proclamation in 1580 forbidding any new house to be built within three miles of the gates of London. It did not work. Thirteen years later, the same order was reissued with objections to ‘converting great houses into several tenements… and the erecting of new buildings between London and Westminster.’ Suburban sprawl had begun.

The reference to the gates of London is significant. Like all European cities, London was a close-knit hub of small streets lined with houses, many with walled gardens behind. All was contained within the City wall and accessible only through eight fortified gates that were shut at night. But by Elizabeth’s time, England had not been invaded by for five hundred years and even the Peasants’ Revolt – when the City of London was stormed by the poor and angry – had taken place two hundred years earlier. The walls and gates were more symbolic than useful.

Before Elizabeth came to the throne, in Henry VIII’s reign, a suburb had developed beyond the Lud Gate and the Fleet River, on the slopes of what were to become Fleet St and High Holborn. To the north, Clerkenwell was still open country with just a couple of monastic houses set in fields and the other end of the City, beyond the Tower and Aldgate, was the same. But fifty years later, Elizabeth’s contemporary, John Stow, mourned encroachment upon the pastures by the Tower, where he had played as a child and fetched milk from cow-keepers.

“…this common field, all which ought to be open and free for all men… being sometime the beauty of this city on that part, is so encroached upon by the building of filthy cottages… and with other enclosures and laystalls… that in some places it scarce remaineth a sufficient highway…”

To the east, Whitechapel was already developing the utilitarian character it would maintain for several centuries while grander citizens sought to build their homes to the west. Another favoured but more distant suburb, a true out-of-town destination, was Hackney, the green and flowery village where the wealthy built themselves fine houses.

Forty years later, Civil War fortifications were constructed beyond the walls. These ditches and ramparts would have proved ineffectual defence though, as it turned out, they were never tested. Once the Commonwealth was over and Charles II was restored in triumph to the throne, the gates were opened wide, and left that way.

Quite soon, blocks of stones were being hacked out of the walls to construct houses. In 1666, when the Fire destroyed much of the City, many of those who lost their homes moved further out to Spitalfields, Shoreditch and Bethnal Green to the east, or westward to Holborn and St Giles, to Soho and St James’s. The City was becoming part of a far bigger conurbation than that which today is known as Central London.

For the next two centuries, there was a natural limitation to growth. As long all vehicles were horse-drawn, the metropolis was as dependent on fodder as the modern city is upon fuel for lorries and cars. Hay was as essential as petrol today. While London was still a small walled city, it was not hard to provide it. Those green meadows Stow wrote about had been just over the door-step, or rather the gate-step, and in distant rural districts such as St Pancras or Stepney there was so much space for grass that a range of other arable crops such as wheat and barley were also grown. But by the end of Elizabeth’s reign the demand for hay had increased to the level that all the fields as far as Highgate were given over to its production.

Two hundred years later, when London had grown a great deal more, swallowing Islington and Knightsbridge, and creating Camden Town, all the land as far as Watford was said to be ‘down to hay.’ Yet there is a limit to how far a horse-drawn cart can travel in a day to bring fodder back to the metropolis. In early nineteenth century London, developers filled in all the space between the villages and old urban suburbs, such as Shoreditch, were crammed with ever more people.

The true explosion in London’s size could not happen until horsepower was superseded. When railways began arriving in the eighteen-forties, deliveries of hay or anything else from much further afield became possible. In 1863, the Metropolitan Underground Railway opened as the first in the world, offering the possibility of ‘living in the country and working in town.’ For centuries, most employees had walked back and forth between work and home each day. Many of them adopted the new way of life encouraged by cheap workmen’s fares. Within a generation, the country where the new houses were being built turned into suburbia – ‘Metroland’ – and then inexorably into an outlying part of the ever-expanding capital. EM Forster’s ‘red rust’ became manifest.

Yet the fodder-for-horses problem remained until vehicles could be powered by another fuel and until electricity replaced steam power to run the Underground, permitting deeper tunnels and more destinations. Both these transformative developments happened within a few years of each other.

Much of our present Underground was built between 1900 and 1910. Meanwhile street traffic, which was almost entirely horse-drawn at the turn of the century, became dominated by horseless-carriages within a decade. The last horse bus in London ran on the eve of the First World War and the last horse-tram eight months later. During the War, those who still had traditional status as ‘carriage people’ sold off their horses and bought motorcars. Livery stables shut all over the capital as garages opened.

By the end of the century, most Londoners were dependent on their motor cars and ancient road-systems were crudely transformed to accommodate this twentieth century monster. Yet now the assumptions that made King Car dominant for the last hundred years are unravelling. The question of how London must adapt once again is huge. The only certainty is change.

John Stow, the first historian of London, grieved over the redevelopment of the city in his lifetime

Photograph © Estate of Colin O’Brien

You may like to read these other stories by Gillian Tindall 

The Bones of Old London

Memories of Ship Tavern Passage

At Captain Cook’s House in Mile End

In Stepney, 1963

Stepney’s Lost Mansions

Where The White Chapel Once Stood

The Old South Bank

Leonard Fenton, Actor

In Old Deptford

Lifesaving in Limehouse

From Bedlam To Liverpool St

Smithfield’s Bloody Past

The Tunnel Through Time

John Walker author of Out of Sight, Out of Mind – Abuse, Neglect and Fire in a London Children’s Workhouse, 1854-1907 explores the forgotten achievements of Henrietta Barnett

Photograph by Henrietta Barnett

Aspects of the work of Samuel & Henrietta Barnett as social reformers are well-documented. Samuel is remembered for founding Toynbee Hall and the Whitechapel Gallery, while Henrietta is celebrated chiefly for establishing Hampstead Garden Suburb.

Yet new evidence reveals Henrietta’s humanitarian achievements in fighting to ameliorate the plight of tens of thousands of workhouse children. Her work easily matches her husband’s in improving conditions for Whitechapel’s poor.

Henrietta Rowlands married the recently-ordained Samuel Barnett in 1873 when she was just twenty-two. They were both from comfortably middle-class backgrounds tinged with significant elements of social concern and reforming zeal. They sought a new parish, away from subrban London, where they could pursue their missionary ambitions. The Bishop of London posted them to St Jude’s, Spitalfields, which he described as “the worst parish in my diocese, inhabited largely by criminals.”

Much of the credit for their subsequent achievements is given to Samuel, his status enhanced by a two-volume biography written by Henrietta. By contrast, Henrietta’s autobiography remains incomplete, an unpublished manuscript gathering dust in the London Metropolitan Archives. If she been as assiduous in publicising her own achievements, perhaps the story that follows would have been appreciated more widely?

One of Samuel’s first actions, on arriving in Spitalfields, was to get himself appointed to the Board of Guardians which was responsible for the large workhouse on Vallance Rd. The Poor Law regime at the time, encouraged by local Guardians, offered no cushion in the form of welfare payments or ‘outdoor relief’ for those who fell on hard times. Destitution meant the workhouse and Whitechapel had one of London’s largest.

In the eighteen-fifties, Whitechapel’s Guardians built a children’s workhouse in Forest Gate to separate the youngsters from what they regarded as the feckless behaviour and bad example of their indolent parents. Many of the buildings survive today and can almost be seen beside the railway line between Forest Gate and Maryland from trains passing from Essex towards Liverpool Street.

This ‘school’ soon housed as many as nine hundred pupils from the ages of two up to fourteen or fifteen years old. Within a few years Whitechapel was subletting places to the Guardians of Hackney and Poplar to accommodate their children. In the second half of the nineteenth century, an estimated fifty thousand East End youngsters passed through.

Conditions were harsh. Children were forcibly taken from their parents and would be lucky to see them for two hours in three months. On arrival at the school, most were separated from their siblings, never to see them again until they left. They were shaven, given soulless uniforms and subsisted upon inadequate diets.

For the first fifty years, the establishment was run by ex-military personnel, whose focus was on discipline and cost-saving rather than child care. Classes of up to ninety pupils were taught largely by unqualified teachers. All activity was undertaken in silence and the dormitories were overcrowded. In modern terminology, it was a ‘total institution’ from which children were permitted no escape. In all but name it was a prison, yet the inmates’ only crime was being born into poverty.

The Forest Gate District School, as it was officially known, was an institution of the kind sometimes called industrial schools, promoted as establishments that taught children trades to keep them from poverty in adulthood. But this was one of many lies. The average age of children was a little over ten years and official reports condemned the ‘industrial’ training as inadequate. In reality, children were employed as free labour – scrubbing acres of floors, peeling tons of potatoes and mending tattered garments – to save staff wages.

After witnessing the conditions at the Forest Gate School, Samuel arranged for Henrietta to become a Poor Law Guardian, as only the second woman to do so. She was immediately appointed an unpaid governor of the school, as the first woman in England to hold such a post. And there she remained, as the only female governor, for the next twenty years.

Henrietta set out to humanise the system, particularly for girls, emphasising that a caring upbringing would have beneficial effects on their own children. Yet her pleas for reform were ignored, met with hostility and dismissed in the words of one patronising school inspector as ‘sentimental follies.’

In response, Henrietta abandoned governors’ meetings and sought to effect change by direct action. She took great delight in ensuring that the matron – the inappropriately named ‘Miss Perfect’ – address all the girls by their first names, rather than by numbers or the all-purpose ‘girl.’ She knew that subjecting girls to whole days polishing a floor or washing uniforms was not adequate training for the occupation most would face on leaving – domestic service. She and Samuel opened another home in Hampstead, where they took a dozen girls at a time and trained them in domestic service skills, in preparation for future employment.

Henrietta acknowledged the hazards girls might face when placed into service as young as fourteen. She was at the forefront in establishing the Metropolitan Association for the Befriending of Young Servants in the eighteen-seventies. Girls were visited annually in their places of employment, until the age of twenty-one, to ensure they were not physically or sexually abused or exploited, and were assisted in moving to new positions if necessary.

She led Sunday walks across Wanstead Flats and encourage her middle-class friends to visit and read with the children, bringing books to the library and supplying toys. She promoted a London-wide scheme to fund pictures for the bare walls of District Schools. She established the Children’s Country Holiday Fund, obtaining royal patronage in order to raise funds to send children on camping holidays in Essex.

Incrementally and almost by stealth, Henrietta Barnett humanised the conditions, particularly for girls, during her first fifteen years as a governor. But it was in the final five years of her governorship that she was to have her greatest impact on the school and the conditions of all workhouse children.

On New Year’s Eve 1890, twenty-six boys died in a fire in the school and the incident drew national condemnation, leading to changes in fire regulations for workhouses. Henrietta befriended one of the heroes of the fire, Henry Elliott, a porter who rescued other boys from the smoke-filled dormitories.

Although there was an inquest at which the superintendent of the school was praised for his swift action in minimising fatalities, it only later transpired – revealed in Henrietta’s writings – that the children had been locked in their dormitories so the staff could go out to celebrate New Year.

Worse followed three years later when an outbreak of food poisoning swept through the school, killing two children and seriously affecting up to a hundred-and-fifty others. At the inquest, Henry Elliott, hero of the fire, condemned the management for substituting fresh meat with the maggot-ridden meat which caused the poisoning. The governors suspended him as a trouble-maker and, even though his whistle-blowing was proven to be accurate, they fired him.

When the corrupt behaviour of the management which led to both the fire and food poisoning went unpunished, Henrietta Barnett drew upon her personal connections to effect change. Her brother-in-law, Ernest Hart, was editor of the British Medical Journal. Working with Henrietta, he undertook a two-year campaign against what became known as Barrack Schools, and the Forest Gate establishment in particular, which gained traction and attention in decision-making circles.

As her second line of attack, Henrietta provoked a Parliamentary Inquiry into Barrack Schools, led by former Liberal Minister, Anthony Mundella. His 1896 report was condemning, calling for closure and replacement with more child-centric, parent-led institutions. The force of the accumulated evidence was such that the President of the Local Government Board, the government department with oversight of Poor Law establishments, had no choice but to accept the recommendations.

Henrietta’s governorship at the school ended when the Mundella Report was published. But as she left, two of the country’s first working-class guardians and workhouse school governors arrived to complete her work.

They were Poplar’s Will Crooks, a former workhouse boy, and George Lansbury. Both later became Labour MPs but each cut his public service teeth, battling locally and nationally to get the Forest Gate District School shut down. Their plan was to move the children to more suitable accommodation in separate houses run by houseparents in Brentwood. Although cricitised for their extravagance, the homes they established later gained acclaim and royal patronage, becoming the model for twentieth-century children’s homes.

Henrietta Barnett deserves to be credited for this change. Frustrated by years of slow reform, she realised that the abolition of Barrack Schools was the only solution. She pursed the cause with a dedication and determination that changed the lives of tens of thousands of children for the better in East London and far beyond.

In a collection of essays published in 1933, Henrietta summarised what she found at Forest Gate and why it had to change.

“Children in the schools soon develop a stigma. … The whole life is too much like that of a prison or a convent. … the children who are brought up in such dread and artificial surroundings are ill-prepared to fit into a world where growth and change are universal laws.”

The abolition legacy is hers.

Photograph of boys at the Forest Gate District School in the eighteen-eighties by Henrietta Barnett

The Forest Gate District School

Images of the fire at the school from the Illustrated London News, 1891

Hutton Poplars, the replacement for the Forest Gate District School

Henrietta Barnett

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