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Housing, Environment and Health in Early Modern London

This work, being undertaken by Richard Smith (principal investigator) and Gill Newton (research officer) forms part of a collaborative project with Vanessa Harding at Birkbeck, University of London and Matthew Davies, Mark Merry and Phil Baker at the Centre for Metropolitan History. It is generously funded by the Wellcome Trust (2006-2008) and follows on from our AHRB-funded research on reconstituting London families undertaken in 2003-2006, which formed part of the People In Place project.

Early modern London offers an unusual opportunity to study the relationship of environment and health in a well-documented but fairly distant historical context. London was a rapidly-expanding pre-industrial metropolis, growing from c. 80,000 to over 700,000 inhabitants between 1550 and 1750, coming to contain a tenth of the country's population and perhaps half of its urban population. Levels of endemic and epidemic mortality were high, and probably little alleviated by contemporary medical expertise. Principal causes of death changed over time (Landers 1993), while infant mortality was a substantial and possibly increasing component of the overall profile. London was unique for its time, but developments there pre-dated, and to some extent prefigured, the experience of provincial cities that mushroomed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Map of our study areas [click for larger version]

The project's goal is a better understanding of the extent to which environmental factors (including housing) and the social characteristics of individual, family and locality determined the disease and mortality profile of the pre-industrial city.

Our focus is on three contrasting areas of London in the period 1550-1750, exploring the ways in which a recently-created dataset can be further extended and interrogated to illuminate and map health and mortality patterns within those populations. The three areas under investigation are a cluster of five relatively wealthy parishes in central Cheapside, suburban Clerkenwell and extramural Aldgate.

Infant burials per house by street in Clerkenwell, 1734-53 [click for larger version] The relationship between overall mortality and infant mortality in Clerkenwell, 1570 to 1750 [click for larger version]

The following investigations are currently in progress:

• record linkage of a 10 year sample period of burial and baptism registers in St Botolph Aldgate, to obtain detailed analyses of adult and child mortality
• mortality patterns derived from new record linkage and previously created family reconstitutions, by month and seasonality of death
• the relationship between infant mortality, environment and feeding practices (related abstract and presentation slides)
• the spatial distribution of mortality in suburban Clerkenwell at street/alley level, correlated with housing age and quality and environmental factors such as availability of water supply and proximity of hazardous industry
• examining the duration and timing of outbreaks of epidemic mortality in Cheapside, Clerkenwell and Aldgate, and evaluating changes in the disease environment pre- and post- plague (related abstract and presentation slides)