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1
PUBLIC HEALTH IN TOTTENHAM
1850 - 1872
"TOTTENHAM", according to the 1845 edition of Kelly's Directory for
London and the Home Counties, "is a suburban town, a railway station and
a parish. " It is a cryptic description; but it does by chance effectively
concentrate attention on just those features of the place around
which its subsequent history turned, For it was the railway - in 1845
a novelty of two years' standing - which, in due course, gave a twist to
the character of the quiet, exclusive and quite modern little suburban
town, setting it off to swallow up the whole of the ancient and extensive
rural parish and so to face the appalling problems of rapid unplanned
urbanisation. These are the foundations of Tottenham's mid-nineteenth
century history whether the subject is approached from a social or economic
or, as in the present case, from a sanitary point of view.
The Directory, in its dry way, has something more to tell. The
population "is approaching to 9,000". Of this number it lists 575 by
name-228 of them under the heading of "gentry" and the balance as "tradesmen".
When compared with sililar information provided by the Directory
for other districts in and around London, Tottenham stands out as particularly
well supplied, for its size, with tradesmen (a category which
after the manner of the day included also certain professional classes
for there are, for example, no fewer than twelve surgeons and physicians
in the trades list) and as strikingly flush with gentry. It was a characteristic
of the town to which every contemporary writer makes reference.
Albert Hill and Mrs Couchman in their separate "Reminiscences",Frederic
Compton in his "Recollections" of the neighbourhood and William Robinson
in his robust history of the parish, all write of the fine mansions and
villas straddling the High Road and the lesser roads, where men of independent
means or London merchants, bankers and business men - no longer
impelled to live in and over their City offices, shops and warehouses
found it so convenient and so healthy to live. The attraction of Tottenham,
as one writer puts it, was that it lay "out of reach of London
smoke cloud": and this was an advantage it shared with a number of other
"suburban towns" such as Highgate, Norwood, Sydenham and Blackheath, it
had scarcely a rival on the score of accessibility. The great Cambridge
to London turnpike passed on through Islington and Shoreditch to
the heart of the City. Forty minutes in phaeton, gig or carriage, or,
for the less fastidious, an hour in Issac's omnibus, and a gentleman could
be at his office desk. Behind him he left the local tradesmen and artizans
busy in their shops and workrooms and numbers of women and children who
worked at the two fitfully active local "manufactories", the one producing
crape and the other "India rubber". This hive of activity was mainly
confined to the High Road and the adjoining courts and lanes; some of
which straggled eastwards, among a warren of cottages where the poorer
classes lived, to the marshes and the Lea River.