Two years before Charles Dickens’s published ‘A Cristmas Carol,’ my 4xGreat Grandfather John Wait (1797-1868) appeared on the 1841 Census with his wife and family. They were living in Three Cup Alley in Shoreditch, then part of Middlesex.
I will never know if John Wait celebrated Christmas. His family might have eaten rabbit if they were lucky and drunk gin and beer, which was easier to obtain then fresh drinking water. Although he was a carpenter by trade, life was getting incredibly hard for him. His family seem to have been one step away from the workhouse. I have discovered in the ‘Poor Law and Settlement’ records that he had applied for Church Relief in October 1840 because his wife Jane was suffering with rheumatic fever. Remarkably, Jane seems to have survived for another nine years. She was buried on 21st August 1849 at St. Leonard’s Church, Shoreditch.
The name Three Cups Alley has a quaint charm about it. But, in reality it was far from being a pleasantly old fashioned place. James Elmes in his, “A Topographical Dictionary of London” (1831) gives us a graphic description of it:
“The place alluded to is Three-Cup-Alley, Shoreditch, where shame to magistracy, and those in power, it excels in nastiness, its entrance is dark as Erebus , and the polluted smell that issues from the nauseous filth … The posterior parts of their dwelling. Are they not bestrewed with blood, offal and contaminated matter, from which an effluvia arises that darts through all the avenues of the brain, and maked the inhabitents wretched indeed.”
The area has changed considerably down the centuries. The alley first appears in John Rocques map of London in 1746 (shown). The north-south stretch was once known as George Street, while the grimmer east-west length was known as Three Cup Alley. With the construction of the railways in the 1860’s and 70’s most of the buildings were demolished - probably for the best.
