Woolwich 'Dusthole' consisted of what is now Woolwich High Street and the area around the Arsenal Railway station.
The area which is now covered and part of General Gorden Square was a open railway cutting. In this time passenger and heavy goods steam trains operated along the North Kent line. The trains starting up from the station or passing through would send clouds of smoke and dust up into the air. Both sides had high buildings and this pollution had nowhere to go.
Although the local authorities had named the surrounding streets after illustrious admirals, due to their proximity to the Navel Dockyard, only the very poorest as well as tramps, criminals prostitutes and labourers crammed into the lodging houses and tumble down houses in the area.
......................... . The whole parish of Holy Trinity is on the river flat, and so without the alleviation of the currents of air possessed in every other part of the undulating hilly district of Woolwich and Plumstead. It is, in shape, an isosceles triangle, with four hundred yards of the Thames as its base and thirty yards of the Market Square as its apex. Into its thirty-two acres were crammed (without any lofty " model" lodging- houses or tenements) 4,300 people, so that while for Woolwich generally there were thirty-six persons per acre, in my parish there were 125. Into this triangle lanes and courts were crammed, while in many cases even the back yard of a house had been seized upon as a site for another house. The lifting of a brick in a yard showed a substratum of sewage. It was difficult to find any closet in the parish with a water-supply. Whole streets were without dustbins. Cellars were used as bedrooms. Seven adults were found occupying one very dirty room, with one bed, in a house let at five shillings a week for its two rooms, of which the lower one was quite uninhabitable, while the boards of which the whole dwelling was composed were broken away in several places so that the sky could be seen, and the walls were broken and black, and the roof leaked. In another house of ten rooms there were nine families and one closet, without a water-supply.
In the worst parts I found that the visit of the one inspector of the Local Board was four years ago, which was hardly surprising when he had five thousand houses in Woolwich to inspect. Into one bedroom the rain penetrated in so many places that the mother of six children said "Some nights we did not know how to keep shifting the children about in their beds to keep the water from dropping on them." In the lower room the smaller children could, and did, crawl through the holes in the floor, and the rent of this two-roomed house was £13 a year! Next door I picked from the floor-joists a fungus eighteen inches long that had grown in a fortnight, and I exhibited it at a lecture with the label, "Local Board Vegetation." Another house that was a regular death-trap from dampness (one of the chief causes of consumption) held two families in four rooms, and the rent of this suburban and riverside villa was only £18 4s. a year! There were eighteen public-houses and eighteen four-penny lodging-houses for tramps of both sexes and casual labourers at the docks and elsewhere. Part of the parish was locally and expressively called "The Dusthole," and formed an Alsatia for vice and crime that it was thought by the respectables and rulers of the town convenient to ignore, and even politic to allow. Mr. Montagu Williams, then our police magistrate, described it in print as the worst plague-spot in London, and had in vain called upon the Local Board to do something for its purification. Cannon Row, therein, was almost entirely composed of brothels of the lowest kind, and nearly one hundred crimes came from it to the notice of the police in six months. Rents were high, and frequently raised, sometimes because the owner had effected some so-called improvements, which were, in reality, a tardy discharge of his duty, and sometimes simply because there was then never an empty house, or even room, in the parish, and the difficulty of finding lodging near the work caused almost any rent to be paid.
Plainly,it was a mockery to preach " temperance, soberness, and chastity," until a better environment made better lives possible. I therefore had to .............................
"In Darkest England and The Way Out" by General William Booth
.... . There is scarcely a lower class of girls to be found than a girls of the 'Woolwich 'Dusthole'. The women living and following their dreadful business in this neighbourhood are so degraded that even abandoned men will refuse to accompany them home.
Soldiers are forbidden to enter the place, or to go down the street, on pain of twenty-five days' imprisonment; pickets are stationed at either end to prevent this.
One public house is shut up three or four times a day sometimes for fear of losing the licence through the terrible brawls which take place within. A policeman never goes down this street alone at night – one having died not long ago from injuries received there – but our two [Salvation Army] lasses go unharmed and loved at all hours, spending every other night always upon the streets.
The girls sink to the 'Dusthole' after coming down several grades. There is but one on record who came there with beautiful clothes, and this poor girl, when last seen by the officers, was a pauper in the workhouse infirmary in a wretched condition.
The lowest class of all is the girls who stand at the pier head – these sell themselves literally for a crust of bread and sleep in the streets." ...........................
Reference:
http://catsmeatshop.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/woolwich-and-assassinating-stinks.html
http://writingwomenshistory.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/girls-of-woolwich-dusthole.html
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