The Foul Jacobs island

Bill Sykes' Last Resting Place

London has always been a fascinating labyrinth of alleyways, post and pre-Roman roads, alleyways, waterways (above and beneath the ground) amalgams of discrete localities and each one with it’s own story to tell. Over the centuries tales have been spun some based in truth but others gilded by the city’s great writers.

By the mid-19th Century London's poorest areas were not healthy places to live in and some of the great Dickensian locations were particularly squalid–none more so than the infamous Jacobs Island. The fictional Bill Sykes came to grief in the non-fictional location of Jacobs Island a particularly squalid run-down area surrounded and dissected by stagnant, sewage-engorged ditches. Dickens knew the area well; he was taken there by officers of the river police, with whom he would occasionally go on patrol.

The man-made island stood in Bermondsey between the polluted Neckinger River and a ditch built as a mill run for the medieval Bermondsey Abby. It was a ‘rookery’ - an area of slum dwellers frequented by criminals and prostitutes. In Dickens’ day approximately 7,000 people existed in this dreadful place. The great man wrote: “On entering the precincts of the pest island, the air has literally the smell of the graveyard and a feeling of nausea and heaviness comes over anyone not prepared to imbibe its musty atmosphere” Jacob's Island was rightly dubbed "The Venice of Drains", "The Capital of Cholera" and "The Jessore of England". Children died young from water-borne and contagious diseases and it was never free of fever. It was a virulent breeding ground for epidemics of which cholera was the leading killer. One can only imagine the stench from cesspits, chimneys, drains, decomposing bodies, and the horse (and other animal) faeces covering every road.

After the serialisation of Oliver Twist incorporating Sykes', much deserved, death - politicians refused to believe that such a dreadful place could possibly exist in their city. In the book, Bill Sykes, flees the North London scene of his murderous crime. There was only one place for a soul so dark and that was Jacob’s Island - the worst slum in London (perhaps the world). From the bowels of this stinking dilapidation Sykes is hanged by his own noose.

On a happier note the ditches were filled in during the 1850s and the buildings razed to the ground in a conflagration that raged for two weeks in 1861. The finishing touches were applied by the Luftwaffe during the Blitz. Some parts of lost London deserve to be lost forever and this part is one of them.

Chris Marlowe

TripTide User