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Labour of the People of London
, complete with maps and large black and dark-blue sectors. Booth divided the poverty he found into neat categories: ‘Lowest class, vicious, semi-criminal.’ And, beside that: ‘Very poor, casual. Chronic want.’ The situation was actually worse than the publication made out: one third of London's population, Booth found, fell under the latter two headings.
    28 Dean Street. I can't help myself, I have to take a look. The house is still there, but the ground floor is now a trendy restaurant. The waitressesdon't mind my going upstairs for a look. The one-time Marx residence, it seems, has been converted into a modern meeting place for young urban professionals, with halogen lighting, anonymous pastel-blue walls, a table with a dozen chairs and a big white poster with ‘Karl Marx’ written on it in little black letters. That's it. ‘Sorry,’ one of the girls says. ‘I don't know anything about Mr Marx either.’
    What would Karl Marx himself have seen along the way as he fled from overcrowded Dean Street to his table in the Reading Room of the British Library? Foreign visitors of the day spoke of ‘paths by Oxford Street, thick with human excrement, gangs of pale children loitering on filthy steps; the embankment by London Bridge where whole families huddle together through the night, heads bowed, shivering from the cold.’
    Booth's surveyors found thousands of sweatshops for women in London's back rooms. There they made brushes, glued matchboxes, folded decorations, filled mattresses.
    London's poverty never let up. In the summer, half the city stank of excrement. There were more than a hundred different sewer systems, run by eight different boards. During times of heavy rainfall, all the systems overflowed. Most of the faeces of the millions of inhabitants ended up in the Thames. To ward off the stench, sheets drenched in chloride were hung before the windows of the Houses of Parliament. The nuisance reached its peak in 1858, the year of the ‘Great Stink’. Only after the government intervened was a modern sewage system built.
    All this filth, stench, humidity and darkness was aggravated even further on the days of smog, the notorious London fog, an extreme form of air pollution that regularly blanketed the city up to the 1960s. The fog would come up suddenly, and throughout the years dozens of varieties of smog were noted: black as night, bottlefly green, pea soup, brown, plain grey, orange. On such days the city floated in a cloud of yellow, brown or green, with here and there a feeble dot of light from a gas lamp.
    London was the capital of a worldwide empire, but you couldn't tell that by looking at the city itself. Paris, well, now –
there
was a capital. A number of other European cities had modernised themselves in similar fashion. But London was an affront to the self-esteem of many Britons. Theircapital was almost devoid of beautiful squares or elegant boulevards, the traffic snarled, the streets were split by puffing steam trains on viaducts, one neighbourhood after another was destroyed for the construction of railway stations and Underground lines, the city's centre was encircled by endless slums.
    All this was largely due to the medieval manner in which the city was run. Strictly speaking, London itself consisted of only one little town, the City of London, with around it a series of ‘parishes’ responsible for running the metropolis at large. Government after government ran into a brick wall of fiercely defended parish rights. Central planning, indispensable for any metropolis for the construction of roads, water systems, sewage and rail connections, was almost impossible in London.
    For some, however, the chaos of London, this piling up of wayward building styles without much in the way of planning, constituted a political statement: an act of defiance against the absolute power of a ruler, against a bureaucracy, against a Haussmann. Many British subjects – then