Turnmill Street — 'Little Hell'
Turnmill Street in London is an ancient road famous for harboring Little Hell, a notorious Victorian slum cleared during the construction of Clerkenwell Road between 1874 and 1878. Originating from 12th-century mills along the River Fleet, the street evolved into a crime center mentioned by Shakespeare. In 1862, its overcrowded tenements suffered severe water rationing, and its infamy led Chicago to name a neighborhood after the area.
London · from the walk “Monks, Martyrs & Marxists” · audio ~4 min · Generated
Turnmill Street, London EC1R 5HP
- Turnmill Street originally took its name from 12th-century mills operating along the adjacent River Fleet in London.
- William Shakespeare referenced Turnbull Street, an earlier name for Turnmill Street, in his play Henry the Fourth.
- In 1862, residents living near Turnmill Street were restricted to one gallon of water per person daily.
- Authorities cleared the Little Hell slum on Turnmill Street by constructing Clerkenwell Road between 1874 and 1878.
How was the Little Hell slum on Turnmill Street in London destroyed?
Take a good look at where you're standing now. Turn-mill Street. Seems like a perfectly ordinary London road, doesn't it? Sleek offices, coffee shops, people rushing to Farringdon station. But beneath this polished surface lies one of the darkest chapters in London's history.......... This street is ancient... one of the oldest in the city. According to the antiquarian John Stow, it took its name from the mills that once stood along the River Fleet, which flowed right beside it. Those mills existed here since the twelfth century, grinding corn, but also fulling cloth, milling lead, and grinding pigments.......... But it wasn't the mills that made this street famous. One of the oldest streets in London, during the Elizabethan era, under the name Turnbull Street, it became "the most disreputable street in London," notorious as a centre of crime and prostitution. Even Shake-speare knew it by reputation. In the Second Part of Henry the Fourth, Falstaff mocks Justice Shallow for boasting about "the feats he hath done about Turnbull Street."
...... But the Real horror came in the Victorian age. The northern end of this street earned a name that made even the police hesitate... Little Hell. It was also called Jack Ketch's Warren. Nobody knows exactly why, though there had been a famous executioner by that name, but he lived three centuries earlier, in the reign of Charles the Second.......... The slum certainly lived up to the "warren" part. It was made up of numerous little courts with buildings squeezed in all round, reached via narrow alleys barely wide enough for a person to squeeze through. One of them, Frying Pan Alley, tells you everything you need to know. Its entrance was only two and a half feet across and twenty feet long, so narrow that you couldn't get a coffin out without turning it on its edge.......... And what about the people who lived here? In one typical tenement, just two rooms held an old Irishwoman and her son, plus a collection of women, children, and lodgers... twenty-five people sleeping together. In nearby Rose Alley, one hundred and sixteen people shared a Single toilet. In eighteen sixty-two, standpipes were turned on for just twenty minutes each day, and each person was limited to One gallon of water.......... And here's a detail most people never hear. By the nineteenth century, Clerkenwell had a murder rate estimated to be the Highest in all of London. The name Little Hell became so infamous that Chicago actually Borrowed it, naming one of its own rough neighborhoods after this very spot.......... So what finally destroyed Little Hell? Not charity. Not reform. A Road. When Clerkenwell Road was built between eighteen seventy-four and seventy-eight, the authorities deliberately aimed it right through the slums, using it as a tool of social policy to eviscerate Little Hell. The cheapest land to buy was slum land, after all. The warrens vanished... but the slums were not replaced with new housing. They were replaced with commercial warehouses and factories. The people who were evicted simply had to find homes in other slums.......... Stand here for a moment. Feel the width of this street, the open air above you. Two hundred years ago, you wouldn't have seen the sky at all.