Lost London, page 21
Although Peabody did not dictate the specific purpose for which the money should be used, he did drop a hint that was promptly taken up by the trustees: the construction of improved dwellings for the poor. The first Peabody estate, in Spitalfields, had opened in 1864, and it was followed by another nine estates in the next fifteen years, all built to the evolving designs of the Trust’s architect, Henry Darbishire.
Not everyone was impressed. The Victorian middle classes broadly held to the notion that the poor could be divided into three categories: the industrious or ‘deserving’ poor; the incapacitated poor, such as the disabled, orphaned or elderly; and the morally degraded poor, who were too lazy to work, instead wallowing in vice, crime and immorality. As Henry Mayhew had put it in London Labour and the London Poor (1851): ‘those that will work, those that cannot work, and those that will not work’. In this vein, a long article in The Times criticised the ‘superfluously wealthy’ and ‘unwisely benevolent’ for their philanthropy, pointing out that: ‘The model lodging house does not benefit the poorest class, except by diminishing the competition for the cheapest dwellings.’ The poorest of the working class were characterised as ‘comprising probably thousands of persons, who do not care for a decent home in the least; persons for whom dirt is in no way disagreeable, who do not object to vermin, whose nostrils are not offended by stench, who have no vestige of anything which can be called self-respect . . . and who could never be brought to take any sort of pride in their surroundings’. The assertion was backed up by reference to a talk by the Medical Officer of Health for Marylebone to the Society of Medical Officers of Health, in which he described a ‘certain proportion’ of the occupants of the worst housing as ‘examples of the retrogression of mankind towards savagery . . . In their filthy habits, their restlessness, their destructiveness, their intellectual deficiency, their love for strong drinks, their cunning, their moral obliquity and their ferocity, it is necessary to recognize that they belong to a different and inferior type from that which is displayed in reasonable men.’4
Largely because of the breadth and extent of such opinion, the government’s response to slum districts took a while to formulate. The first attempt to respond to the problem of slum districts like Whitecross Street was the Torrens Act of 1868, which empowered parochial authorities in London to demolish any building that the local medical officer reported as being in a sanitary condition that was dangerous to health, and consequently as unfit for habitation. But no provision was made in the law for compensation to owners, and as a result of this omission the Act of 1868 had no effect in supporting the movement for better working-class dwellings.5 Something more muscular was needed. In 1875, Parliament passed the Artisans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Improvement Act. Crafted by the Home Secretary, R.A. Cross, in consultation with members of the Peabody Trust, it empowered the Metropolitan Board of Works (MBW, the Board) to purchase – using compulsory powers if necessary – and clear slum areas deemed a threat to public health. The cleared sites then had to be sold on to developers who would undertake to rebuild them with working-class housing.6 There was an obligation to accommodate as many people as had been displaced through slum clearance, which invariably required high-density redevelopment, typically in four- or five-storey tenement blocks. Since these had to be provided with an adequate amount of open space, there was effectively a lower limit to the size of sites which could be dealt with through the 1875 Act.
By 1879, the MBW had accumulated a series of ten large sites and cleared them. The 15-acre Whitecross site was the largest of all and cost the Board £219,966 (equivalent to about £23.5 million in 2025). But the MBW could not attract bidders, except for the Peabody Donation Fund, and had to accept the Peabody trustees’ offer of just £120,000 (about £12.8 million) for a group of six of the cleared sites, including the Whitecross site.7 The Peabody Trust built eleven blocks of the Roscoe Street Estate to the west of Whitecross Street, near its junction with Old Street. The twelfth block, Block X, was just to the other side of Whitecross Street. The rest of the site acquired from the MBW lay on the eastern side of Whitecross Street. Here, the Trust built twenty-one blocks that constituted Peabody’s Whitecross Street Estate. The mega-development of thirty-three tenement blocks of the combined Whitecross and Roscoe Street Estates was completed in 1883. An article in the Pall Mall Gazette that year advised that: ‘You will be confronted, when you reach the top [of Whitecross Street], by several lofty structures, which form what, from the number of blocks, we have ventured to describe as Peabody Town.’8 George Howell, trade union leader and secretary of the Reform League, noted that: ‘The Peabody Blocks are growing in number and extent, so much so that, in the course of another twenty years, if they go on increasing in anything like the same ratio, they will be regarded as one of the sights of London by the “intelligent foreigner”, and by all American visitors to this country.’9 Indeed, by the end of 1883 the Peabody Trust ‘had provided for the artisan and labouring poor of London 9,693 rooms, exclusive of bath-rooms, laundries, and washhouses. These rooms comprise 4,359 separate dwellings, 73 of four rooms, 1,521 of three rooms, 2,073 of two rooms, and 692 of one room – occupied by 18,009 persons.’10
The Roscoe Street and Whitecross Estates accounted for almost 4,000 of these Peabody residents, with the Roscoe Street Estate accommodating about 1,200 of them. Henry Darbishire designed both estates, which consisted of five- and six-storey tenement blocks, six of which were arranged around a large communal courtyard. As Darbishire saw it, ‘one large playground to one large building is of much greater use than many small yards to as many cottages’.11 It has also been pointed out that Darbishire’s large interior courtyards were a means to ‘immunise’ the ‘deserving poor’ from the influences of surrounding slums and their residents. ‘Scale played a crucial factor here: one large piece of land has proportionately less perimeter than two small ones of equal size, meaning that there is a mathematical law of diminishing neighbourly contact.’12 The tenements themselves were in Darbishire’s recognisable pared-down Italianate style, though slightly less severe than his earlier Peabody estates. According to his own description, ‘The external walls are of picked stocks, relieved at intervals with flush bands of hard Suffolks. The external angles to the height of the string-course under the first-floor windows and the principal entrance doorway are of the hardest terra cotta. The cornice is composed of plain and bevelled Suffolk bricks, in alternate bands, finished by the filleted cast-iron eaves-gutter, which serves as the crowning member.’13 The roofs were of Welsh slate, the interior floors of the flats were of timber and the corridors were of concrete or stone. Perhaps austere and even forbidding in appearance, the estate nevertheless provided well-built, properly drained homes, with an adequate water supply, plenty of fresh air, and basic amenities that were otherwise beyond artisans’ means. Laundry rooms, water closets and sculleries were located outside the individual flats, shared by multiple families to ensure that they were properly used and cleaned. There was one water closet designated for men and one for women on each floor, serving four to five dwellings each. Outside, in the courtyard, there were pram sheds and a coal bunker.
If the income of a prospective family was more than thirty shillings a week (about £155 in 2025), they were not eligible as a Peabody tenant. Every member of every household also had to have been vaccinated against smallpox. No household was permitted to take in boarders; nor was anyone permitted to wash clothes other than those of their own families. Tenants were required to disinfect and whitewash their rooms at least once a year and take their turn in sweeping the shared passages each morning. They were not allowed to keep dogs or to paper, paint or drive nails into the walls. They were required to repaint their own ceilings once a year and told how often and at what time of day steps had to be cleaned and when carpets and mats may be beaten; and they were forbidden to hang clothes out of their windows to dry.14 A resident superintendent collected rents and monitored tenants for misdemeanours. The occupations of residents admitted to the Roscoe Street Estate consisted of a mix that typically included bookbinders, cabinet makers, carpenters, charwomen, messengers, nurses, painters, police constables, porters, printers, seamstresses and warehousemen.15
79 The Estate plan, 1909. For three generations, the Roscoe Street Estate grew into an established community, a bastion of social stability on the edge of the City. But most of the estate was lost one night during the Blitz. The Luftwaffe’s night bombing raids on London began on Sunday, 7 September 1940. London was then bombed for fifty-seven consecutive nights, the Blitz subsequently continuing, on and off, until May 1941. Six blocks of the Roscoe Street Estate were burnt out in an air raid on the night of 29–30 December 1940, when approximately 100,000 small, 2-pound incendiary bombs fell on London. A few months later, in April 1941, Block E was badly damaged by a bomb. The estate’s ‘war diaries’ (brief factual updates provided by the estate superintendents to the head office) recorded: ‘On the 16th a HE [high-explosive] bomb fell on E Block which was badly damaged. 19 flats have been knocked out. There are now 173 flats out of action on the estate. There was one death.’ Blocks F and X were burnt out on the night of 10–11 May 1941 during the final raid of the Blitz, when German bombers dropped 711 tons of high-explosive bombs and 2,393 incendiaries, killing 1,436 civilians. Air raids continued intermittently, however, often carried out by fast, low-flying aircraft carrying out brief ‘tip-and-run’ raids that were sometimes referred to as ‘scalded-cat’ strikes. Then, in June 1944, as the war situation turned against Germany, a campaign of V-1 flying-bombs targeted London in an attempt to terrorise civilians and undermine morale. The V-1, an early version of a cruise missile, delivered 850 kg of high explosive, and in addition to the destruction they wrought, they introduced widespread suspense and strain as civilians listened for their loud, buzzing jet engines to cut out, signalling the imminent descent of the bomb. The Roscoe Estate endured a near miss on 22 June 1944, when a V-1 partly demolished three blocks of the Whitecross Street Estate and caused significant blast damage to a Bovril factory on Old Street.
80 Street party to celebrate the end of the First World War, summer 1919. After the war, the blocks that were too badly damaged to repair were demolished, allowing the Trust to extend and redevelop the site. A new Roscoe Street Estate, consisting of two thirteen-storey blocks – two of London’s first tower blocks – together with two six-storey blocks, a three-storey block and a four-storey block, was completed in 1957. Two of the original surviving blocks were later demolished to make way for Banner House, a seven-storey addition that opened in 1972.
19
Lyons Corner House, the Strand
1915–80
T
he Lyons Corner House on the Strand was one of three flagship restaurants in the food and hospitality empire of J. Lyons & Company. Located between Charing Cross Station and Trafalgar Square, the Strand Corner House was close to both the office district of Westminster and Soho, the entertainment district of the West End. Lyons Corner Houses were part of the new consumer economy of Edwardian and interwar London, taking advantage of new economies of scale in food supply and distribution, a burgeoning middle-class market, and the emergence of a ‘feminised’ labour force. They were prominent elements in the democratisation of the dining-out experience and the development of a restaurant sector that, by the 1930s, had become a distinctive part of the fabric of London’s economy and culture. Corner Houses offered customers a predictable menu of food at affordable prices in luxurious settings with attentive service, and soon became regarded as iconic landmarks within central London.
81 Lyons Corner House, the Strand, 1915. Until the late nineteenth century, dining out meant, for most people, eating in pubs, taverns or chophouses with limited food choices; and often with sticky floors, greasy chairs and soiled tablecloths. For the wealthy upper-middle classes, members of the aristocracy and visiting gentry there were elegant dining rooms like Simpson’s-in-the-Strand and French restaurants such as Verrey’s (Regent Street) and Pagani’s (Great Portland Street). Metropolitan hotels such as Claridge’s, the Savoy, the Cecil and the Ritz also developed new high-end restaurants,1 while the needs and expectations of the same clientele could be met on their travels by steamship or long-distance railway. Cunard ships such as the Campania and the Lucania had large, luxurious dining saloons and, by the 1890s, most railway companies could boast Pullman cars, known for their exquisite interiors and high-quality service. But for London’s growing middle- and lower-middle-class population, opportunities for dining out were very limited. Things began to change at the turn of the century. One factor here, of course, was that the growing numbers and rising incomes of the middle classes represented a new market that induced providers to offer new, attractive and more affordable alternatives, including tea shops and cafés such as those operated by J. Lyons & Co. Another was that there were significant social and economic changes afoot that supported a much broader demand for restaurants. The lifeworlds of London’s Edwardian middle classes were changing significantly. One important factor was the so-called ‘servant problem’. Cheap domestic service had been the foundation upon which Victorian middle-class household economies and daily routines had been built. But by the turn of the century the supply of servants – including cooks – had begun to dwindle as more and more young working-class women were drawn to jobs in shops and factories. After the First World War (during which thousands of women had worked in munitions factories and offices), the ‘servant problem’ really began to bite, prompting more and more middle-class households to eat out on social occasions, and perhaps more often, if the ‘lady of the house’ had not yet mastered the art of cooking.
Another key factor was the changing shape of the metropolis, the forcing apart of home and work, leaving commuters to seek refreshment at lunchtimes and perhaps after work as well. The same new motor bus and Underground train networks that brought commuters to central London also allowed for weekday or weekend shopping trips, further bolstering the demand for affordable restaurants. In addition, the increasing feminisation of the service sector required lunch venues for female shop assistants and office workers that were accessible and respectable as well as affordable.2 Demand was met in the first instance by temperance ‘coffee houses’ such as Lockhart’s Cocoa Rooms – mimicking pubs in every way except for the sale of alcohol. Their popularity supported the growth of multiples and even subsidiary brands. Lockhart’s, for example, formed a subsidiary chain called Ideal Restaurants to tap into a more affluent clientele. Spiers and Pond, meanwhile, specialised in refreshment rooms at railway stations, operating almost three hundred of them by 1890. The Express Dairy company grew from a single dairy in Dean Street, Soho, in 1858, to twenty-four dairies combined with tearooms and restaurants by the 1890s.
The earnestness of many of the temperance coffee houses, however, proved to be their undoing.3 Most successful were firms that were only loosely aligned with the temperance movement. London’s first mass caterer was Pearce & Plenty, which catered to low-income workers with ‘large appetites but small means’ with its signature threepenny meat pies. It had been established by John Pearce from a series of mobile coffee stalls, dubbed ‘Gutter Hotels’, in the early 1880s. By the end of the decade, now incorporated as a company, there were twelve Pearce & Plenty restaurants, almost doubling to twenty-three within another decade and serving more than 30,000 hot meals a day in the City of London alone.4 Rebranded as the British Tea Table Company and reoriented to a slightly more affluent clientele of City clerks, the company had opened 84 restaurants by 1905, serving 120,000 meals a day. Meanwhile, the British Tea Table Company itself was outpaced by the growth of the Aerated Bread Company (‘ABC’), which began in 1864 as a chain of baker’s shops selling a patent brand of bread before extending to the provision of light meals and eventually operating 150 branch shops and 250 tea rooms in London. But ABC, in turn, was outpaced by J. Lyons & Co., which had not opened their first teashop (in Piccadilly) until 1894 and which by 1911 was serving half a million meals every day through 200 teashops, Corner Houses and restaurants.
As Scott McCracken notes, the success of these chains and the spread of mass catering owed a good deal to the speed with which large quantities of raw materials could now be transported from overseas. In the second half of the nineteenth century, railways opened up both North and South America and the interior of European colonies in Africa and Asia, while steamships brought agricultural produce to Europe at unheralded speeds. Chain teashops, like chain grocery stores, were a visible manifestation of the economic potency of empire: ‘its ability to draw goods to the imperial metropolis and to make them available for popular consumption’.5 Successful chains were also able to take advantage of the new availability of commercial frozen foods; the introduction of electricity to light their dining rooms and cook their food; and the introduction of the telephone, which made for easier contact with both suppliers and customers. Crucially, the successful chains also shared a more modern, aggressive business philosophy based on large-scale factory production, the exploitation of economies of scale, the vertical integration of business activities, and aggressive pricing policies based on small profit margins but high turnover.
The foundations of the Lyons catering and hospitality business were established on the basis of a thriving tobacco trade launched by a Jewish immigrant, Samuel Glückstein, after he arrived in Whitechapel from Germany in 1843.6 As soon as his business allowed, he sent for his parents and siblings. One of his daughters married Barnett Salmon (also Jewish, and also in the tobacco trade) and thus the S&G tobacco firm was born. By 1887 there were sixty S&G shops in London, Manchester, Leeds and Bristol, with their own horse-and-cart delivery service. It was the next generation of the S&G dynasty that moved into catering. Monte Glückstein had noted the poor state of catering at trade exhibitions and partnered with Alfred Salmon and Joseph Lyons, Monte’s brother-in-law, to form a new company. They used Joe Lyons’ name to front the company simply to conceal their ethnicity. For J. Lyons & Co.’s first contract, at a mining and engineering exhibition in Newcastle in 1887, they built a richly decorated two-storey refreshment pavilion in the style of an Indo-Chinese café. It was a noted success and was followed by a second contract at the International Exhibition of Science, Art and Industry in Glasgow a year later. Other contracts soon followed, but the company also began to look for a more settled outlet for its operations and duly opened its first tea shop, on Piccadilly, in 1894.7 Within two years it had opened another sixteen tea shops in London; and by 1900 there were thirty-seven, along with six in Manchester, four in Liverpool, and two each in Leeds and Sheffield. A 5-acre depot at Cadby Hall, at the rear of Olympia in Kensington, housed central kitchens, a bakery and a dairy, along with company offices, stables, storehouses, and workshops for joiners, painters and engineers.8 ‘From this factory daily deliveries of bread, confectionery, tea, cocoa and coffee were sent to every London branch and to private customers. As the carts and delivery vans carried the logo of the tea shops, Lyons’ brand name acquired an almost ubiquitous presence in early-twentieth-century London.’9 Lyons, observed the Middlesex County Times, ‘has become an institution, ranking only after the Tower, the British Museum and other places of public interest, which the Londoner regards as his own especial property.’10
