Whitechapel c1870–c1900: Context and Sources

The Whitechapel historic environment is Section A of Paper 1. It is a source-driven study of one district of London's East End in the late Victorian period, and it accounts for twenty of the paper's fifty-two marks. The examiners are not asking you to solve any crime; they are asking you to demonstrate that you understand why policing this district was difficult, and that you can evaluate the sources surviving from it. This lesson establishes the social, economic and demographic context of Whitechapel between approximately 1870 and 1900, introduces the main types of primary source, and provides a worked example of a source utility paragraph in the style Edexcel rewards.

Where and when: defining the historic environment

Whitechapel is a district of London's East End, lying just east of the City of London and immediately north of the Thames dockyards. Between 1870 and 1900 it formed part of a belt of working-class and immigrant neighbourhoods that included Spitalfields, Bethnal Green, Stepney and Aldgate. The area was dense, poor and ethnically mixed, and it became notorious far beyond London for the unsolved murders attributed to Jack the Ripper in the autumn of 1888. Candidates must be able to describe its physical, economic and social features precisely.

Housing and overcrowding

Whitechapel's most distinctive feature was its housing stock. Much of it was early nineteenth-century terraced housing now in severe disrepair, supplemented by common lodging houses ("doss houses") and a shrinking supply of purpose-built tenements.

Type of accommodation	Description
Common lodging houses	Known as "doss houses"; a bed for 4d a night, shared rooms, cooking area, no privacy
Rookeries	Clusters of decaying tenement courts — the Old Nichol near Bethnal Green Road was the most notorious
Model dwellings	Philanthropic, rent-regulated flats — the Peabody Buildings and Rothschild Buildings (1887 for Jewish residents)
Court housing	Houses packed around narrow courts accessible only through an alley

Overcrowding was extreme. The 1891 census recorded parts of Whitechapel with more than 200 people per acre. Doss houses in particular attracted people with no other shelter — casual labourers, the elderly, prostitutes and the destitute. They were unregulated until the Common Lodging Houses Acts of 1851 and 1853 imposed registration, but inspection remained limited.

Two organised responses deserve mention. The Peabody Buildings, funded by the American philanthropist George Peabody from 1862, offered model flats at controlled rents. The Rothschild Buildings, opened in 1887 by the Four Per Cent Industrial Dwellings Company, specifically housed Jewish immigrant families. These schemes were important but small: they sheltered thousands, while Whitechapel held hundreds of thousands.

Work and poverty

Whitechapel was a casual labour economy. Regular, salaried work was rare. Most residents earned their living by the day or the task.

Occupation	Notes
Dock labour	Men queued each morning at the West India, East India and London Docks; "called on" by foremen
Sweated trades	Tailoring, boot-making, matchmaking — long hours, low piece rates, often home-based
Street selling	Costermongers, hawkers, flower sellers
Prostitution	Estimated 1,200 women working in the district in 1888 (Metropolitan Police returns)
Domestic service	For those able to obtain references

Charles Booth's Poverty Map of 1889 (updated through the 1890s) classified each street in London by income using colour codes: black for "lowest class, vicious, semi-criminal"; dark blue for "very poor, casual, chronic want"; light blue for "poor, 18s to 21s a week for a moderate family"; and so on up to yellow for the wealthy. Whitechapel was shown as a mosaic of dark blue and black streets interspersed with occasional lighter streets — a precise visual representation of concentrated poverty. Booth's seventeen-volume Life and Labour of the People in London (1889–1903), combined with his surviving notebooks of interviews with policemen, clergy and school board visitors, is one of the single most important sources for the district.

Immigration

Whitechapel was a port of arrival. Successive waves of immigration settled in the district because rents were low, lodgings were plentiful, and established communities provided mutual support.

• Irish immigration had been prominent since the 1840s famine. By the 1880s Irish families were concentrated in parts of Wapping and around the docks.
• Eastern European Jewish immigration increased dramatically from 1881 after pogroms in the Russian Empire following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. Between 1881 and 1914 approximately 120,000 Jewish immigrants settled in Britain, most arriving through the London docks, and many settling in Whitechapel and Spitalfields. Yiddish-language shops, synagogues and Hebrew schools became prominent features of the streetscape.

Tensions between established residents and immigrants were common. Anti-Irish hostility dated back decades; anti-Semitic hostility sharpened in the 1880s, fed by economic competition in the tailoring trade and by broader European currents of prejudice. The hostility would colour the Ripper investigation in 1888 (see Lesson 9).

Philanthropy, religion and reform

Whitechapel attracted reformers. The Salvation Army, founded in Whitechapel in 1865 by William and Catherine Booth (no relation to Charles), conducted street missions, ran soup kitchens and operated lodgings for homeless women. Dr Barnardo's first ragged school opened in Stepney in 1867. Toynbee Hall, the first of the university settlements, opened on Commercial Street in 1884, attracting Oxford and Cambridge graduates to live in the East End and run adult education and welfare schemes. The Whitechapel Board of Works (one of the London vestries reorganised in 1855) was responsible for paving, lighting, sewers and removal of waste; its minutes survive and are a major source for infrastructure conditions.

Gangs, alcohol and disorder

Organised and semi-organised crime added to Whitechapel's reputation. The Hoxton Mob, the Bessarabian Tigers (a Jewish protection gang emerging in the late 1890s) and residents of the Old Nichol engaged in protection rackets, street robbery and pub violence. Public houses were numerous (approximately one pub for every hundred residents in central Whitechapel), and alcohol-related disorder filled the docket of the Thames Police Court. Prostitution was concentrated around the lodging houses and pubs of Commercial Street, Dorset Street and Hanbury Street.

flowchart TD
    A[Whitechapel c1870-c1900] --> B[Housing<br/>doss houses, rookeries,<br/>Peabody/Rothschild Buildings]
    A --> C[Economy<br/>casual labour, sweated trades,<br/>dock work]
    A --> D[Population<br/>Irish 1840s+,<br/>Jewish 1881+]
    A --> E[Philanthropy<br/>Salvation Army 1865,<br/>Toynbee Hall 1884]
    A --> F[Crime & disorder<br/>gangs, prostitution,<br/>alcohol]
    B --> G[Implications for policing]
    C --> G
    D --> G
    F --> G

Sources for Whitechapel

Section A of the exam gives candidates two sources and asks them to evaluate usefulness (Q2a) and propose follow-up (Q2b). You must be familiar with the main types of surviving source.