UCL BLOOMSBURY PROJECT

History

It was a Trust established by George Peabody to rehouse London's respectable poor

By the 1880s it had constructed 5614 dwellings occupied by more than 20200 people (Charles Dickens (jr), Dickens’s Dictionary of London 1888: An Unconventional Handbook, 1888)

According to Dickens, “It was for some time feared that the class of accommodation was too good, and consequently too expensive for the actual artisan and labouring classes” but in fact they appealed to “Bricklayers, cabmen, charwomen, letter-carriers, messengers, needlewomen, police-constables, porters, &c.” – all of them people earning on average £1 3s 9¾d per week and paying on average less than 5s per week in rent (Charles Dickens (jr), Dickens’s Dictionary of London 1888: An Unconventional Handbook, 1888)

These buildings were much healthier places to live than the housing formerly occupied by such workers: “The death-rate of the Peabody-bdgs in 1887 was about 0.85 per 1,000 below London” (Charles Dickens (jr), Dickens’s Dictionary of London 1888: An Unconventional Handbook, 1888)

It took over the Bloomsbury-based Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes in 1965

It continues to provide both social and open-market housing for tens of thousands of people across the whole of London