If you stroll through Clerkenwell today, with its cafés, studios and converted lofts, it is hard to imagine the same streets 150 years ago. Yet in the 19th century, this district was notorious for its slums. Writers, reformers, and even Dickens himself came here to see the rookeries—tangled courts and alleys where poverty and overcrowding reached astonishing extremes. Behind the squalor was a system that turned misery into money. It was known as house farming.
House farming worked like this: an estate owner leased out whole houses to a middleman, the so-called house farmer, who then carved them up and sub-let them room by room, and sometimes bed by bed. The owner collected steady ground rent; the house farmer collected weekly payments from tenants; and the buildings were left to crumble. Repairs were rarely, if ever, done. The result was a grim cycle of rising rents, collapsing walls, and families crammed into damp cellars or airless garrets.
The worst concentrations were in and around Saffron Hill, Field Lane, Chick Lane and the narrow passages sloping down to the Fleet Ditch. Dickens mined these alleys for Oliver Twist, with Field Lane standing in for Fagin’s haunt. Contemporary visitors described the stench, the heaps of rubbish, and the press of humanity. Yet despite the conditions, rooms were always full. London’s population was exploding, and demand for lodging was insatiable.
Why did house farming endure? The answer is simple: it paid. Weekly rents kept the cash flowing in. Tenants, on insecure week-by-week agreements, could be evicted at the first sign of trouble. Families often paid more per square foot for a single dark room than their social betters paid for spacious homes elsewhere. Local authorities had little power to intervene, and until the 1870s landlords and house farmers operated with near impunity. For reformers such as Charles Booth, whose poverty maps shaded Clerkenwell in some of the darkest colours, the link between house farming and chronic poverty was clear.
By the middle of the century, change began to creep in—though not always for the better. The Metropolitan Board of Works, determined to drive new roads through the rookeries, cut Farringdon Road through Clerkenwell in the 1860s and later drove Rosebery Avenue through more crowded streets. These improvements cleared some of the worst warrens but also displaced thousands of residents. Into the gaps came new housing experiments: the Corporation Buildings on Farringdon Road, completed in 1865 and sometimes called England’s first council housing, and the nearby Peabody estates, built in the late 1860s. With sculleries and private WCs, these new blocks represented a different world—though the poorest families, those who had lived in the rookeries, often could not afford to move in.
One landlord’s name became a byword for the system: Decimus Alfred Ball. Ball began as an upholsterer and furniture dealer but made his fortune as a house farmer on the Northampton Estate, which stretched across much of Clerkenwell. He was singled out in the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes in 1884–85 as a textbook slumlord. Tenants described him demanding punctual weekly payments under threat of higher rents, all while neglecting repairs. To make matters worse, Ball sat as vice-chairman of Clerkenwell’s parish assessment committee, overseeing the very rates system entangled with his business.
The contrast between landlord and tenant could not have been more stark. While families squeezed into one damp room, Ball lived comfortably in Crouch End. When he died in 1890, he left more than £10,000—a fortune at the time—and a family mausoleum in St Pancras & Islington Cemetery. His name lives on in the records as one of the few landlords explicitly cited by reformers to prove that legislation was desperately needed.
House farming was more than an economic quirk: it was a system that shaped Clerkenwell’s streets, scarred its reputation, and fuelled the drive for housing reform. It explains why rookeries flourished here, why thousands were displaced by “improvements,” and why reformers pushed for the Housing of the Working Classes Act in 1885, which finally gave authorities the power to close unhealthy houses and hold landlords responsible.
Today, as we pass along Farringdon Road or stand on Saffron Hill, it takes imagination to picture the vanished courts and alleys where slum landlords once made their fortunes. But the echoes remain, and they are part of the darker history of Clerkenwell.
Step Into the Shadows
If you’d like to walk these streets with the past beneath your feet, join me for The Dark Side of Clerkenwell, a guided tour on Thursday 30 October 2025 at 6pm. Together we’ll uncover the stories of rookeries, radicals, and reformers; of crime, poverty and resilience; and of figures like Decimus Alfred Ball, who built his wealth on the backs of the poor.
Come and see a side of Clerkenwell that history books often keep in the shadows.