THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

It has long been the boast of moving panoramas that their chief aim is to convey instruction.  They carry us across America, or from Southampton to India; they hop from city to city throughout Europe, or they glide past with certain pictures of Australia, but they avoid a sketch of London.  No speculator has ever been bold enough to grapple with the back streets-the human warrens on the south side of the metropolis; to start from Bermondsey, on the borders of Deptford, and wriggle through the existing miles of dirt, vice, and crime, as far as the Lambeth Marshes.

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It has scores of streets that are rank and steaming with vice; streets where unwashed, drunken, fishy-eyed women hang by dozens out of the windows, beckoning to the passers-by.  It has scores of streets filled with nothing but thieves, brown, unwholesome tramps’ lodging-houses, and smoky receptacles for stolen goods.

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There are hundreds of such courts at Wapping and Rotherhithe, on both sides of the river, filled with coarse drunken women, whose thick fingers are covered with showy rings.  Sometimes a crew of Malay sailors are enticed into these traps; raw spirits are sent for in basins and quart pots from the neighbouring public houses; robbery, quarrels, and madness follow, as a matter of course; knives are drawn, a “muck” is run, and the whole bleeding, riotous, drunken population roll out into the open thoroughfare.

Hollingshead/Ragged, 1861