Industrialisation and a surge in population sparked the rise of the Victorian Slum. Between 1700 and 1801 the number of people living in towns in Britain as a whole shifted from under a fifth of the population to over a third, by 1862 over half the population were living in towns. This dramatic change was attributed to a decline in employment within agriculture and a rise in urban industry. Low cost housing was built with no consideration for the needs of its inhabitants, houses were often without running water,no sanitation and with floorboards laid on bare earth, poor roofing and the use of ‘Billysweet’ a soap making byproduct instead of traditional mortar meant that houses were damp and of extremely poor quality and thus rapidly declined …show more content…
The large surge in population also created a surplus of labour which decreased wages and created more casual and season roles being common. Areas such as Old Nichol and White Chapel were over crowded and under-employed, with poor quality housing which fuelled the decline of the area and its rapid decay.

‘Close under the Abbey of Westminster there lie concealed labyrinths of lanes and potty and alleys and slums, nests of ignorance, vice, depravity, and crime, as well as of squalor, wretchedness, and disease; whose atmosphere is typhus, whose ventilation is cholera; in which swarms of huge and almost countless population, nominally at least, Catholic; haunts of filth, which no sewage committee can reach – dark corners, which no lighting board can brighten’ (Wiseman, 1850).

The situation undoubtedly got worse before it got better as more advances in industrialisation such as the construction of the St Katharine Docks lead to areas of slums being cleared with no other accommodation provided to those affected, which placed pressure on the already overcrowded slum housing