THE DARK SIDE OF VICTORIA’S LONDON

While the wealthy wanted for little, life for Victorian slum dwellers was a constant battle for survival that many lost, as a fascinating new reality series reveals

Under Queen Victoria, Britain was an industrial superpower and 19th- century London was the richest city on Earth. For the aristocracy, as millions have been witnessing in ITV’s brilliant costume drama Victoria, it was a time of wealth and ease. But there was a dark underbelly to the grandeur of Victoria’s court. In the drama, which ends tomorrow, there are glimpses of the other side of the coin: Prince Albert notices a young waif selling matches, while Victoria’s dresser is helping bring up a fatherless child. For many Victorians it was easy to ignore but just a few miles to the east of Buckingham Palace, thousands of people lived in abject poverty in the slums of Bethnal Green, and their struggles are explored in a fascinating new BBC2 documentary series.

‘This is completely the other side of the life you see in Victoria,’ says Dr Michael Mosley, who presents fivepart series The Victorian Slum. ‘There was a massive social chasm. When we think of Victorians we tend to revel in stories of the industrialists and the scientific heroes like Darwin, but there’s this vast swathe of people who have really been ignored.’

The series sees a group of 21st-century families move into a recreated slum in London’s East End for three weeks to experience what life was really like. At the top of the slum food chain were the shopkeepers, but the couple given that task in the series, Adrian and Wiebke Bird from Leighton Buzzard, quickly discover the difficulty of being kind to your neighbours while still paying your rent. Also at the top of the heap were the skilled workers. The Howarth family from Essex, who still work as tailors, emulate the real experiences of their Jew- ish immigrant ancestors in the relative luxury of a two-room flat. Lower down the ladder is Andy Gardiner, who only has one leg and who joined the experiment to see how the disabled were treated in Victorian times. Given the job of rent collector and dosshouse manager, he learns how horrific it is to tell vulnerable people they must leave their homes.

Then there’s the Potter and Oldfield family, three generations from Derby who must share one bedroom. Matriarch Heather Potter’s ancestors came from the area and she was keen to find out how they might have lived. Things quickly become disastrous, however, when her husband Graham injures his back on his first day of factory work. ‘It’s hard to grasp just how tough this life must have been,’ says Michael Mosley. ‘The world they were in was awful and for the families in our show it was

shocking to realise that their forebears had lived like that.’

The 21st-century slum-dwellers had to adapt fast. If they didn’t earn enough for the rent they could end up in the workhouse. ‘We knew it was going to be tough, we just didn’t realise how tough,’ says Heather Potter. ‘The hardest aspect was the hunger and how it made us feel so lifeless.’

In reality, by the late 1800s enough of a fuss had been raised in the press that the slums could no longer be ignored. ‘Even Queen Victoria got involved,’ says Michael. ‘She called on her prime minister Gladstone to look into social housing, which led to the first council houses. It was the beginning of the end of the slums.’

The Victorian Slum starts on Monday at 9pm on BBC2.

OLIVIA AND HEATHER OLDFIELD The granddaughters of Graham and Heather Potter, whose ancestors lived in the area, swapped their comfortable lives for hard work as they helped make matchboxes and flower decorations to keep their family...