Читать книгу Miss Lottie's Christmas Protector - Sophia James - Страница 10

In the shadow of Westminster Abbey lay an area known as the Irish Rookery—a place of narrow streets, rundown buildings and hopelessness.

This area, once a sanctuary offered to debtors and criminals by the monks from the abbey, was by 1842 the haunt of the displaced Irish, who lived in a festering labyrinth of dark and impenetrable streets full of desperation and vice.

However, social philanthropy and charity-based movements were on the rise in Victorian England, as Christian duty encouraged acts to save the souls of those mired in poverty.

The Fairclough Foundation was one such organisation and it lay in Howick Place, just on the edge of Old Pye Street, the Perkins Rents, Great Peter’s Road and St Anne’s Street—home to some of the worst slums in all of London.