Charles Bradlaugh
Urbanisation of Hackney 1820 - 1840
To the north-east of the City of London lies Hackney. By the turn of the nineteenth century, it was a semi-rural scattering of small hamlets. Hackney provided an escape from the noise and squalor of London for richer citizens, some of whom built fine houses.
It was not merely a bucolic retreat for the better off; the surrounding fields were smallholdings growing vegetables and salads for London’s tables. Ponds near Hackney Marshes grew watercress. Cows and sheep were driven along Hackney Road to Smithfield from farms in Essex. By the 1820s, when William Cobbett disparagingly described London as ‘the great wen’, London had spread out far beyond its city walls. Hackney’s rural idyll could not last.
From market gardens and ponds in 1804, to buildings, new roads, a canal, and Victoria Park in 1840. To the south, new railroads were being built.
London was now the capital of the mighty British Empire. Napoleon was dead and his French empire had been defeated by Wellington and Nelson. Britain’s navy had secured global supremacy. Despite the loss of its American colonies, Great Britain had a presence in Canada, the Caribbean, South Africa, India, Australia, and a scattering of colonies across the oceans.
The driving force behind this empire was trade. Although slavery was abolished in England in 1833, the enslavement of millions of Africans, transported to the Americas, had provided the funds for the growth of British industry and commerce during the eighteenth century. The empire provided markets and raw materials for the new factories. The invention of the steam engine by British engineers was revolutionising manufacturing, transport, and communication.
Maps of the time show London’s burgeoning growth but cannot show how this organism consumed, breathed, worked, sickened, improved, and entertained. The city attracted thousands of people for the opportunity to work, make money and find a place.
There was much work to be done. Grocers, brewers, furniture, and clothing manufacturers serviced this growing population. Lawyers and bankers built edifices in the City where they controlled the capital which was the lifeblood of trade. Canals, railways, and dockyards were built, attracting labourers by the thousands. Fields were covered by houses, shops, and churches. Theatres, gardens, and public houses provided relaxation.
We still recall the names of many of those manufacturers, traders, bankers, politicians, landowners, royalty, generals, and admirals. Their names are plastered all over London in street names, statues, buildings, and monuments. We know much less about the hundreds of thousands of labourers, factory workers, shop assistants, domestic workers, clerks who sustained the City.
Top: typical houses in Hoxton
erected in 1809.
Bottom:
Workers lived the interstices and outskirts of the City, in places like Hoxton. Hoxton Square was originally built in the eighteenth century for the genteel better-off. However, by the turn of the nineteenth century, workshops had been built in the front gardens and the houses turned into warehouses and offices for the furniture trade. Cheap housing was erected in the side streets to house the working population.
This is the world inhabited by Charles Dickens’ characters. parts of Oliver Twist, published in 1838, were inspired by his frequent visits to Hoxton and Shoreditch. Dickens himself, after working at the infamous blacking factory, became a clerk to an attorney. His portrait of Bob Cratchit personified the life of a clerk.
Charles
Bradlaugh’s father, also named Charles, was part of this world, a solicitor’s
clerk who lived in Hoxton in the early 1830s with his new wife.
Derek Perry
Copyright 2021