Living Conditions Flashcards
What did the 1881 census state?
Whitechapel population: 30,700
Number of occupied houses in Whitechapel: 4,069
Rookeries were common in the slum areas of Whitechapel. What were they and how did they work?
Areas filled with lodging houses where people stayed in overcrowded conditions. People would pay for a room in a lodging house for one or two nights and each day they would work to earn money for a room for the following night.
What was a well known rookery of lodging houses in 1870?
Flower and Dean street
What state and reputation did rookeries have in Whitechapel?
They were in terrible state, toilets were outside and some dated back to 1600. They had a reputation for thieves, drunkards and prostitutes. Charles Booth classes it as a semi criminal area on his poverty map
What were workhouses in Whitechapel?
Those who couldn’t afford a bed for the night in lodging houses could go to a workhouse and were set up in the 1830s as a part of the poor relief system. They offered food and shelter for those to poor to survive in the community such as old and sick people.
What were conditions like in workhouses?
Deliberately unpleasant as families would be split up and parents could only see their children once per day. There were strict rules dictating what people ate, how they worked and the time they got up and went to bed.
Why were conditions so harsh in workhouses?
They were meant to deter people from claiming poor relief and made workhouses a place of last resort
What was the Whitechapel casual ward?
Place where the poor could turn to in search of shelter for one night. However it had only sixty beds and inmates had to complete work to earn their bed for the night, such as picking oakum or working in the workhouse kitchens and clean.
Why did inmates at the casual ward have to work?
It was thought that otherwise the inmates would be tempted to stay on at the expense of the taxpayers, who funded the workhouse union
In Whitechapel a notorious rookery was knocked down and in 1879 the land was sold to the Peabody trust. What were they?
A charity who built blocks of flats which were designed to offer affordable rent and by 1881 287 flats had been built on the Peabody estate
What were conditions like in the Peabody estates?
Built from brick, provided good ventilation and provided shared kitchens and bathrooms for residents.
What was the problem with the Peabody estates?
Weekly rents were too high for the people that lived in the area before, and tenants were kicked out immediately if they failed to pay rent. This led to more overcrowding as people tried to find more affordable housing
