Sanitation, Modernisation, Identity, and the 1851 Great Exhibition – The emergence and downfall of the St Giles Rookery.

Irish migration, modernisation, sanitation, and politics of identity, all overlap in the microhistory of St Giles.The St Giles Rookery was known as an Irish slum in central London.This thesis tracks the origins of the slum in the 1700s to the supposed "end of the Rookery" in the 1850s.By doing so, it provides a looking glass into the forgotten community of fifty-five thousand labourers who lived within the area.These people occupied the outskirts of London society, excluded from Britishness, many retaining their Irishness.Previously, historians on the slum have not put enough emphasis on the links between the rise of British public health, infrastructure projects, and the desire to quash slum living.By utilising firsthand accounts of St Giles, correspondence from within the Ministry of Health, and contemporary press articles, it is possible to draw new conclusions.This thesis posits that the slum was intrinsically linked with cholera and typhus pandemics and was marked for demolition by the construction of New Oxford Street in 1847.It argues against the narrative that the Rookery was dismantled within the 1850s, as other historians have, underlining evidence from contemporaries who continued to lament the state of the area until 1872.Instead, it points to the arrival of the 1851 Great Exhibition as an accelerationist event that forced the slum to be superficially reformed to hide it from the view of visitors.With the extension of Oxford Street cutting the slum into two, Londoners could go through St Giles on the new boulevard and not suspect the ongoing misery behind these new buildings.Behind this façade, the St Giles Rookery faded into obscurity over several painful decades.This begs the question, what is a slum?H.J. Dyos, doyen of British urban historians, posed himself that question at the beginning of his renowned "The Slums of Victorian London" article (1967).Dyos presents Robert Williams's 1893 attempt to give a comprehensive definition, "it generally is a cluster of houses, or of blocks of dwellings, not necessarily dilapidated, or badly drained, or old, but usually all this and small-roomed, and, further, so hemmed in by other houses, so wanting in light and air, and therefore cleanliness, as to be wholly unfit for human habitation."7 The key takeaway of this definition is the final phrase, "wholly unfit for human habitation."This is an adequate description of the Rookery in the period this thesis seeks to cover.Dyos points out that slum became a synonym for "rookery", an older term for the same kind of downtrodden area, in the mid nineteenth century.8 Identity, language, and religion are all crucial themes when discussing the place of Irish labourers within the Metropole.The vast majority of Irish Londoners in the Rookery were Catholic, Irish speaking, and largely illiterate.This means that they were mostly alienated from the world around them.This puts them in a different position from the Welsh and Scottish, most of whom at least shared Protestant ties with the English.The Irish alienation is best encapsulated by their large presence in London jails.Kevin O'Connor, a historian specialising on the Irish in Britain, argues that it is hardly surprising that the Irish grouped together in slums, "wherein they retained some semblance of their culture, spoke Irish and brewed drink."9 The Irish of St Giles could not readily form part of a cohesive 'Londoner' identity as it was too competitive between long term residents and new arrivals.Therefore, they retained their Irishness above all else.

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