The Island

This hideous slum shakily straddled the confluence of the River Neckinger and the Folly Ditch – a lurching, slime-filled meander that separated the Island from the neighbouring foreshore and squeezed the crowded rookery inwards on itself in a swirling swamp of death and decay. Rotting wooden shacks and hovels leant wearily against each other, with rickety balconies, bridges and walkways propped unsteadily on wooden stakes that seemed to fight like ageing warriors against the silent suck of the mire below. A greenish mist hung above the bubbling ditch, and the stench of shit and putrefaction formed a sickly-sweet vapour that lined the lungs and closed the throat.

Most of the buildings had been hastily thrown up by avaricious landowners in the last century, and with the dearth of standards came a labyrinth of flimsy tenements crushed together in whatever way would fit. For many, windows were a luxury, and the majority of those were patched with mouldy paper or wadded with sodden rags; their shattered panes long since swallowed by the stenching bog beneath. Children were taken by consumption, dysentery and gaol-fever every day on the Island. For want of funds for a proper burial – or anything at all – their little blue bodies were slipped into potato sacks and swallowed by the Ditch, whose slow, endless hunger was a great leveller to all who called the place home. They poured their filth into it, they drew their water from it, they washed their linens in it, and they were completely and utterly stuck in the dark embrace of its horrible bend – a foetid moat with no bottom and no way out. From the Thameside edge of Jacob’s Island, you could look out across the river and see the fast enterprise of the City of London, but the City would never look back at you.