In Europe

chronicler Henry Mayhew wrote: ‘Because London is the largest of all cities, it is also home to the largest number of human wrecks. Wrecks, too, because their misery seems all the more miserable by reason of its juxtaposition with the wealthiest, most comfortable life in the world.’
    From 2.6 million in 1850, London's population grew to 5.5 million by 1891, and 7.1 million by 1911. A hundred years after the start of the Industrial Revolution, Great Britain was still a rural society in 1870. Two thirds of all Britons lived in the countryside or in small towns. By 1914, it was only a quarter.
    Between 1850–6, Karl Marx lived with his five children, his wife and a servant girl in two rooms at 28 Dean Street. Marx was and remained a burgher, unlike most of his contemporaries on Dean Street. When thinking of those times, there is always one photograph that comes to mind: the dilapidated shoes of three street urchins, the holes in their soles showing the bottoms of their bare feet, covered by a thick layer of dirt and calluses; six times an engrossing jumble of leather, iron and human skin.
    In 1885, the socialists claimed, one out of every four Londoners was living in dire poverty. The shipping magnate Charles Booth wanted to find out for himself, so he organised the world's first large scale sociological study, based on figures from the Poor Act, police reports and a massive door-to-door survey. Between 1891–1903 he published seventeen volumes of
Life and Labour of the People of London
, complete with maps and large black and dark-blue sectors. Booth divided the poverty he found into neat categories: ‘Lowest class, vicious, semi-criminal.’ And, beside that: ‘Very poor, casual. Chronic want.’ The situation was actually worse than the publication made out: one third of London's population, Booth found, fell under the latter two headings.
    28 Dean Street. I can't help myself, I have to take a look. The house is still there, but the ground floor is now a trendy restaurant. The waitressesdon't mind my going upstairs for a look. The one-time Marx residence, it seems, has been converted into a modern meeting place for young urban professionals, with halogen lighting, anonymous pastel-blue walls, a table with a dozen chairs and a big white poster with ‘Karl Marx’ written on it in little black letters. That's it. ‘Sorry,’ one of the girls says. ‘I don't know anything about Mr Marx either.’
    What would Karl Marx himself have seen along the way as he fled from overcrowded Dean Street to his table in the Reading Room of the British Library? Foreign visitors of the day spoke of ‘paths by Oxford Street, thick with human excrement, gangs of pale children loitering on filthy steps; the embankment by London Bridge where whole families huddle together through the night, heads bowed, shivering from the cold.’
    Booth's surveyors found thousands of sweatshops for women in London's back rooms. There they made brushes, glued matchboxes, folded decorations, filled mattresses.
    London's poverty never let up. In the summer, half the city stank of excrement. There were more than a hundred different sewer systems, run by eight different boards. During times of heavy rainfall, all the systems overflowed. Most of the faeces of the millions of inhabitants ended up in the Thames. To ward off the stench, sheets drenched in chloride were hung before the windows of the Houses of Parliament. The nuisance reached its peak in 1858, the year of the ‘Great Stink’. Only after the government intervened was a modern sewage system built.
    All this filth, stench, humidity and darkness was aggravated even further on the days of smog, the notorious London fog, an extreme form of air pollution that regularly blanketed the city up to the 1960s. The fog would come up suddenly, and throughout the years dozens of varieties of smog were noted: black as night, bottlefly green, pea soup, brown, plain grey, orange. On such days the city floated in a cloud of yellow, brown or green, with here and there a feeble dot of light from a gas lamp.
    London was the capital of a worldwide empire, but you couldn't tell that by looking at the city itself. Paris, well, now –
there
was a capital. A number of other European cities had modernised themselves in similar fashion. But London was an affront to the self-esteem of many Britons. Theircapital was almost devoid of beautiful squares or elegant boulevards, the traffic snarled, the streets were split