Tyndall's-buildings is a court containing 22 houses... the basement story of nearly all... was filled with fetid refuse, of which it had been the receptacle for years. In some… it seemed scarcely possible that human beings could live: the floors were in holes, the stairs broken down, and the plastering had fallen… In one, the roof had fallen in: it was driven in by a tipsy woman one night, who sought to escape over the tiles from her husband.”
So George Godwin, editor of The Builder, described a Holborn court around 1859. He could, as he well knew, have described one of an uncountable number of courts and alleys clustered densely in the old suburbs around the cities of London and Westminster and in the ancient borough of Southwark. Many of these places predated the Great Fire of 1666, or have been cheaply run up since then, with passages cut through houses fronting the streets and leading to courts built on gardens and yards behind.
Some houses consist of just two rooms, one on top of the other; some were back-to-back with no through ventilation; all shared with neighboring houses earth-closets built over cesspits, and take their water from a common standpipe. In such places it was impossible to keep either bodies or dwellings clean; it was often easier to defecate in the streets, over gratings or in hidden corners than in the filthy crowded privies of the poor.
Tyndall's Buildings and their like may have been the archetypal slums of Victorian London but in fact slums came in many forms. In the early 19th century, as London grew and pressure on house-room increased, any open space – remnants of market gardens, marshy meadows not previously profitable for building, or the grounds of former farmhouses – became valuable terrain for the jerry-builder. These fag-end parcels of London clay would be leased for 21 years or even less, so builders had every incentive to put up hovels that would last no longer than that: without foundations; with dirt floors; with walls only half a brick thick; with yards and streets unpaved and without drains.
Such places were slums as soon as they were built. They might be clustered in large numbers in shanty towns which were sometimes named after the entrepreneur who had first developed the land. In London there was Tomlin's New Town in Paddington; Agar Town, north of Battle Bridge and today's King's Cross; and the Potteries, self-built colonies of potters', brickmakers' and pig-keepers' cottages west of Notting Hill.