Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [76]
But these were not London’s arrival cities. The historian Jerry White’s careful study of population statistics has revealed that the desperate poor of London were not the same people as the rural arrivals of London. “It was not in central London that newcomers took root,” he writes. “Provincial-born Londoners seemed most comfortable at the edge of London, that great new belt of the Victorian metropolis emerging from 1840 to 1880. The old troubled central area, inherited from the eighteenth century, was left to the cockney. Increasingly so as the century wore on.”18 The dispossessed were not migrants. Bethnal Green, widely considered the worst slum area in East End London, had the highest proportion of London-born residents in the entire city: 83.5 percent in 1881. “Poverty and distress is home-made,” the great demographer Charles Booth wrote at the time, “and not imported from outside.” Of course, given the huge influx, it is statistically likely that virtually every native-born working-class Londoner in the nineteenth century, including the destitute, had at least one parent who had arrived from the village. It is probably best to describe these terrible East End and South London neighborhoods as a sort of economic flypaper, trapping those who had fallen afoul of the tough upward scramble of the arrival city proper.
London’s great arrival cities took shape instead on the periphery, around the places where rural migrants disembarked. In the first half of the century, these enclaves were built by seasonal laborers on the semi-rural edges. The roads to London, when seasons changed, would be packed with rural tradesmen: brickboys from Devon, shipbuilders from the east coast, and women, domestic servants, from virtually everywhere. There was also a constant back-and-forth flow of labor to the cattle-sales settlements in Islington and Holloway and the market-farming enclaves in Chelsea and Fulham. Typically, farm women from Shropshire would walk to Fulham, find work on farms there, carry their produce to Covent Garden every day, and then walk back to Shropshire at the end of the season. This circular path continued up to the end of the 1860s, when better conditions and transportation links allowed many of them to settle and form families in Fulham. Hackney and Bethnal Green served a similar function for villagers from the east. The Irish made similar migrations, in which single men worked on the potato and wheat farms of London’s outskirts, remitting money back to Ireland in large sums and slowly drifting into the city, forming the great Irish arrival-city enclaves of St. Giles and Whitechapel. The famine sent tens of thousands of Irish flooding into London in the 1840s and 1850s, into overcrowded rooming houses in failed arrival cities around the metropolis, giving them a reputation for destitution and insalubrious living. But the economy bailed them out: By the 1880s, the Irish were, by and large, a well-integrated part of London life.
In the second half of the century, the London arrival city formed, at a scale never seen before, around the end-of-line railway stations. Migrants from Wales and Cornwall settled around Paddington, joined by rural laborers who walked in from closer villages. The very poorest of them, those driven out of the countryside by desperation, tended to settle in the rough enclaves of North Kensington and Notting Dale, a former pig-farming area, which became an infamous slum. They were joined by navvies from the railway and destitute inner-city slum-dwellers who had been forced out by redevelopment. Those from the north and Scotland, as well as a considerable population of Irish, made the