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Wednesday, November 12, 2008, 14:40
So wrote the Rev Whitwell Elwin in 1842 in describing the notorious Avon Street, the 'plague spot' of Victorian Bath.
It is from this starting point that historian Graham Davis will begin his colourful lecture Low Life in the Avon Street District on Sunday.
The talk, which takes place in the Theatre Upstairs at the Mission Theatre, will also feature some dramatised presentations, bringing to life some of the characters who lived there.
These days, being largely taken up by the car park and bus station on one side and the City of Bath College car park and Mission Theatre on the other, it is hard to imagine Avon Street as a den of iniquity, frequented by the 'Girls of the Town' as the prostitutes were known.
And yet, in the early 18th century it was the red light district of Bath and by the middle of the century was the centre of cholera and typhoid epidemics.
Graham has written about the area in some depth in an essay, Vice and Vigilance in Victorian Bath, published last year in Bath Exposed!
In it he states: "The link between Bath's carefully cultivated 'genteel' image and the reputation of Avon Street became an important issue when the state of the Avon Street lodging houses, with their long association as brothels in Bath's red light district, featured in a public scandal in 1886-7."
The Bath Daily Chronicle of the time was at the centre of a minor sensation when it published the account of a London author who disguised himself as a tramp and reported on the conditions he found.
The Dottings of a Dosser, by Howard J Goldsmid, make for lively reading as the man seems to have been a bit of an early spin doctor, using colourful prose to describe his experiences.
He describes arriving at the lodging house disguised in 'terribly old and ragged clothes' and being 'accosted by a frowsy looking specimen'.
Later he befriended 'a big, red-faced man with dull, boiled gooseberry-like eyes, and a distinctly intemperate proboscis' who conducted him to a hostelry that 'was particularly dirty and unwholesome'.
"It was crowded to excess, and the humid walls steamed with the foetid breath of the half-tipsy occupants. One gentleman was delivering a political lecture, plentifully interspersed with oaths and obscenity . . . And to all this shocking and revolting conversation four little children were listening!"
There was an immediate flurry of response – both from those campaigning for new bye-laws to regulate lodging houses, and from Avon Street residents repudiating Goldsmid's experience.
The account was 'a tissue of lies' thundered a Mr George Gould, of 3 Avon Street.
"I have lived in the street for a number of years and know no such place in any respect either as regards the people he came in contact with or the description of any lodging house in this street.
"It is a sad thing that people go about the country in false colours doing all the harm they can to honest, hard-working people under the cloak of religion," he observed.
Graham attributes the exchanges to the existence of conflicting perspectives and interests and the reputation of Avon Street became something of a political football.
Some things never change, then.
Tickets for the talk at 7.30pm on Sunday November 16 cost £5 on the door, with bar and light refreshments available. Bath Exposed! is published by Sulis Press
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