Somers Town

They know a trick worth two of that, as one of them says, only just catch me at it.

tried it once when we was all kids and the whole lot went into the house and I ain't never had no stomach for skilly note workhouse gruel end note since still if you like to pay for a pint of beer I ain't no ways particular and I haven't had a drop since yesterday so help me now it is just the younger of such as these who come from pauperdom itself into a condition which must unless by extraordinary accident lead to crime what becomes I would ask of the foundling the deserted infant whose only parent is the parish whose home is the workhouse ward what may become of him depends very considerably on the particular parish in which it may be his lot to be cast away it may be a haven or a quicksand on which a life is flung to lie a wreck thenceforth there will be great chance of the latter if instead of teaching him a trade under a competent master he is merely taught to botch at some common journey work set him by a teacher who for a wretched stipend and his rations fulfils the place of instructor in this that or the other calling the boy so mistaught comes out from the imprisonment of the four bare walls into the wide wilderness of the barer streets and being unable to compete with those who know so much more than he takes up any casual work or hangs about purposeless and hungry till he gets a job by some lucky chance his career is often too soon told the casual meal the common lodging house where his thruppenny bed may be next to that of an old thief the deadening of such moral influences as he may have brought with him from the parish the companionship which keeps him on that debatable ground which lies between the workhouse and the jail and at last except in rare cases a lodging in some foul room in a tenement filled with those who are worse and further on the road to crime than he a room with no furniture save a table and two broken chairs and a heap of ragged bedding and a creaking bedstead a room in which the windows are half glass half rags where the grate is fireless and rusty and the very rats starve so barren is the whole wretched tenement of food though thirty living souls and perhaps one or two dead bodies may all be there to-night and every night under one roof this lodging may be in Nichol Street Bethnal Green or in Little Kate Street Spitalfields or in the foul fever-haunted courts about Gray's Inn Lane or it may be in the purlieus of Somers Town or away near Kensington or in a blind quiet alley behind the glare and bustle of Whitechapel say near Flower and Dean Street or about Tiger Bay and Bluegate Fields or in Southwark in one of the shattered tenements where the landlord takes the rents under protest from some chancery litigant and the fence waits warily day and night for stolen goods in whichever of these places he takes up a lodging of his own he will probably share it with a girl a mere child of thirteen perhaps who is half street hawker half prostitute just as he is half casual labourer half thief they may live together till both go several steps downward and he becomes known to the police as a regular pickpocket and filcher while she no longer sells any wares except in occasional seasons of bad luck but is either seen flaunting on the streets or follows his business and her own together adopting him as her fancy it matters little to which of these districts they may betake themselves in all of them the rooms are equally foul and bare and dirty in each the streets have a strong family likeness in their dirty pavements their sunken steps their blurred and mud-stained windows patched with newspapers and stuffed with rags their broken and rickety stairs their foul landings their poisonous exhalations from choked drains and reeking cesspools and decaying filth their teeming inhabitants who stare sullenly from the fetid cellars or whose infants may be seen on the topmost stair above all in the pale sickly children with worn old faces and bent limbs in the slipshod angry shrill women who sit and stand about the doorways or congregate at the gin shop which is already flaring with gas on a hot summer's afternoon an hour before dark in the brutal or half-drunken ruffians who regard the passer-by with the look which seems to inquire of themselves or their companions whether robbery and violence are worth their while in the slinking figures which one sees for a moment in doorways round corners at the threshold of the public house but seldom in it speaking to clean but shabby women some of them with black eyes others with babies at their breasts few of them and these mostly the Irish with any covering for their heads the Irish adhering to their habit of wearing the shawl as a hood in some or all such particulars do these neighborhoods attain a bad pre-eminence the figures mostly of men which I have alluded to as appearing with something of a stealthy movement are thieves Not young cadgers, like him who was lately from the workhouse, but regular thieves of the ordinary stamp—the thieves of thief London, in fact.

Not the known cracksman: he and his like, for they are few, take furnished lodgings and live anywhere—Camden Town, Hackney Road, Islington, and for aught I know, but I think it likely, in Kensington.

Not the forgers, for they are criminal according to circumstances, and belong to no particular class.

Do you think, whatever the result, it will tell us very much about how the country thinks as a whole? And even if it does, does it matter?

Well, I'm going to say either yes or no, because it's such a strange constituency, not just in terms of its size and its shape and its demography, but also because it feels like it does have a lot of representation in there, but it probably doesn't have a lot of the bits like Somerstown, right, for instance.

So that's sort of right in the middle of the constituency.

But at the far south end of the constituency is Tottenham Court Road.

A room in which the windows are half glass, half rags, where the grate is fireless and rusty, and the very rats starve, so barren is the whole wretched tenement of food, though thirty living souls and perhaps one or two dead bodies may all be there tonight and every night under one roof.

This lodging may be in Nichol Street, Bethnal Green, or in Little Kate Street, Spitalfields, or in the foul fever-haunted courts about Gray's Inn Lane, or it may be in the purlieus of Somers Town, or away near Kensington, or in a blind quiet alley behind the glare and bustle of Whitechapel, say near Flower and Dean Street, or about Tiger Bay and Bluegate Fields, or in Southwark in one of the shattered tenements where the landlord takes the rents under protest from some chancery litigant, and the fence waits warily day and night for stolen goods.

In whichever of these places he takes up a lodging of his own, he will probably share it with a girl, a mere child of thirteen perhaps, who is half street hawker, half prostitute, just as he is half casual laborer, half thief.

They may live together till both go several steps downward, and he becomes known to the police as a regular pickpocket and filcher, while she no longer sells any wares except in occasional seasons of bad luck, but is either seen flaunting on the streets or follows his business and her own together, adopting him as her fancy.

Like, it, you know, it's like, it's a tale of two cities that you have the kind of, you know, you're kind of sandwiched between London Euston and King's Cross.

You have that kind of historic working-class Somers Town neighborhood.

You have, you know, loads of council estates between and behind the kind of leafy Victorian and Georgian terraces of Kentish Town and, and Camden, and you have a kind of real sense in a seat like this of that kind of historic middle and working-class coalition that kind of typified Laborism, and I think that does make it more difficult for Zach Polanski.

I mean, there's a kind of question as well about the kind of- real decline of his approval ratings over the course of the, the last few months, particularly, not particularly, let me, let me clarify that, but, um, definitely in London as well.

But I wanted a cat of peculiar order and of a Saracenic cast.

I walked miles and miles, till at last I found him residing at a very old-fashioned house in the Polygon at Somers Town.

Here was a genuine paradise of cats, carefully ministered to and guarded by a maiden lady of Portuguese birth and of advanced maturity.

Each of these nine cats possessed his own stool, a mahogany stool, with a velvet cushion and his name embroidered upon it in beautiful letters of gold.

So Labour ought to be able to hold this.

I'm actually, my office is in St. Pancras and Somerstown, so I know it very well.

And it does have a lot of, considering how close it is to two major international stations, a lot of council housing.

That is where Frank Dobson famously himself lived in a council house.

shouldn't over...

Hoban and St Pancras, which stretches around King's Cross... very posh bits like Primrose Hill, down to very, very deprived bits, Somers Town, around Euston Station, central, central London.

It's what we would think of as a reverse weather vane.

You would struggle to think of a constituency that looks less like the country than Hoban and St Pancras on almost any dimension.

Question one, what is Mary Shelley's birth date? Answer, August 30th, 1797.

Shelley was born in Somerstown, London on August 30th, 1797.

Her upbringing among radical thinkers helped shape the bold ideas that would fuel Frankenstein.

Question 2.

With dramatic flair, he fashioned giant cockroaches and bedbugs out of papier-mache and burned them in a public ceremony whilst builders were demolishing a block of slums that he had acquired.

All these improvements led eventually to the transformation of Somers Town.

Sadly, however, Jellicoe didn't see the full fruits of his work.

Increasingly, he suffered from ill health, which forced him to step down from the board of the St. Pancras House Improvement Society, and he died prematurely at the age of just 36.