Victorian Values: Alive and Well

Victorian slumStopped in my tracks the other day by a clip on the radio about a phenomenon in London called ''beds in sheds''. For those who haven't heard of it, such is the unaffordable price of housing, thanks to rich foreign investors buying up property, and rich developers refusing to build affordable housing, that unscrupulous house owners are throwing up primitive breezeblock structures at the back of their properties and letting them out to poor or immigrant families. No sanitary provision, no proper building regs. And local councils seem unwilling or unable to stop it happening.

Presumably these house owners must've been listening to Kevin McLeod (Grand Design bloke) who says if we want to meet the growing need for cheap 'affordable housing', we should model ourselves on the Victorian builders, who leased land and threw up street after street of houses at lightening speed. News for you, Kevin: we're already there.

My two books Diamonds & Dust and Honour & Obey are set just after the great Victorian house building boom, when speculative London developers maximised profits by using cheap cement, known as Billysweet, which never dried out, so these houses actually had their own internal weather system.

They also had no proper foundations, and floorboards laid on bare earth. As a direct result, by 1860 London had some of the poorest people living in some of the worst slums in the kingdom. (In those days, the immigrants were Huguenot silk weavers escaping from France, Irish escaping from famine and Jews escaping from Christians.)

At the same time, Parliament passed the Poor Law Act in an attempt to stop anyone who could work from receiving parish relief - it was thought that poverty was caused by 'moral failure', and paying such people only encouraged them to be idle and overpopulate. Is this resonating?

Dickens described these MPs and their property-owning chums as 'Experimental Philosophers ...whose blood is ice,whose heart is iron.'  I guess now we'd call them: 'Rich arrogant posh boys who don't know the price of a pint of milk.'

Nothing much changes ....