Round About A Pound A Week ......... London life and London Poor ..... 1913

Round About A Pound A Week,

Now back in 1893 when Charles Booth made his London poverty maps our house on Lausanne Road was shown as “fairly comfortable, good ordinary earnings” while behind on St Mary’s Road the residents were “middle class, well to do”  all of which is there to see in the houses a century and a bit later.

And digging through the history of the people who lived there that is pretty much what they were.

But head a little north and just twenty years later and Mrs Maude Pember revealed searing poverty and the opening paragraphs of her book published in 1913 say it all.*

“Take a tram from Victoria to Vauxhall Station.

Get out under the railway arch which faces Vauxhall Bridge, and there you will find Kennington Lane.

The railway arch roofs in a din which reduces the roar of the trains continually passing overhead to a vibrating muffled rumble.”

And with those opening lines Mrs Maud Pember Reeves plunged into a detailed account of the lives of families struggling to make ends meet in the Lambeth of 1913.

Lambeth, 1876

She was a social reformer and feminist who served on the Executive Committees of the Women’s Trade Union League, the National Anti Sweating League, and the Central Committee for Women’s Suffrage along with the Committee of the Fabian Society.

And it was after a lecture given to the Fabian Women’s’ Group on the Economic Disintegration of the Family in 1908 that she and other members of the group set about recording the daily budgets and lives of working class families in Lambeth.

The book details everything from the area where they lived to the daily battle to bring up a family in damp and lousy properties, while balancing a household budget and the ever present threat of unemployment.

It is a book which compliments that of Robert Roberts’s description of life in Salford at much the same time. **

So given that I will no doubt be returning to the book I shall conclude with a little more from the opening chapter

Lambeth circa 1900

“From either end of the arch comes a close procession of trams, motor-buses, brewers’ drays, coal lorries, carts filled with unspeakable material for glue factory and tannery, motor cars, coster-barrows, and people.

It is a stopping-place for tramcars and motorbuses; therefore little knots of agitated persons continually collect on both pathways, and dive between the vehicles and descending passengers in order to board the particular bus or tram they desire.

At rhythmic intervals all traffic through the arch is suspended to allow a flood of trams, buses, drays and vans, to surge and rattle and bang across the opening of the archway which faces the river.

At the opposite end there is the cross current.  The trams slide away to the right towards the Oval. In front is Kennington Lane and to the left at right angles, a narrow street connects with Vauxhall Walk leading further on into Lambeth Walk, both locally known as the Walk.


Such is the western gateway to the districts stretching north to Lambeth Road, south to Lansdowne Road, east to Walworth Road, where live the people whose lives this book is about.

They are not the poorest people of the district.  Far from it!

They are, putting aside the tradesmen, whose shops line the big thoroughfares such as Kennington Road, or Kennington Park Road, some of the most enviable and settled inhabitants of this part of the world.

The poorest people- the river-side casual, the workhouse in-and-out, the bar room loafer – anxiously ignored by these respectable persons whose work is permanent, as permanency goes in Lambeth and whose wages range from 18s. to 30s a week."

Picture; cover Round About A Pound A Week, , Virago ed 1979 featuring an image from the Greater London Council Photograph Library and detail of the area in the 1870s from the 1872 OS for London, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/

* Charles Booth Online Archive Poverty Map http://booth.lse.ac.uk/cgi-bin/do.pl?sub=list_postcodes&arg0=SE15+2HU

** Round About A Pound A Week, Maud Pember Reeves, 1913, Virago ed 1979

***The Classic Slum, Robert Roberts, 1971