Hickman’s Folly ran parallel and south of Wolseley Street and said to have been built on the site of a tannery. At one time it ran from Dockhead to George Row where it crossed the open River Neckinger by a bridge over Folly Ditch.
The street was part of Jacob’s Island. This ’island’ was probably created between 1660 and 1680 in the first 20 years of the reign of Charles II, when the tidal ditches surrounding and intersecting the island were dug. The ditch was supplied with water by the River Neckinger whose tidal mouth which had been formed into St Saviour’s (“Savory”) Dock, soon enclosed on three sides by warehouses. The oldest houses and their ’crazy wooden galleries’ dated from this period. Hickman’s Folly can be seen on the 1750s Rocque map marked as ’The Folly’ but most likely dates from before then.
Jacob’s Island became a densely built-up area of factories, tanneries, warehouses and mills. Houses, shops, small workshops and workers’ tenements were built between them.
Many houses owed curious features to their position over ditches, which served both as water supply and sewer. The ditches provided open space to build galleries for access with overhanging sleeping chambers and privies. Jacob’s Island got its ’island’ status from the main ditch – muddy Folly Ditch, once called Mill Pond – which surrounded it. Folly Ditch was six to eight feet deep and fifteen to twenty wide depending on the tide. ’The Rookeries of London’ by Thomas Beames noted in 1852: “Wooden galleries and sleeping rooms at the back of houses, which overhang the dark flood and are built on piles. Little rickety bridges span the ditches which were the common sewer for drinking and washing water [and excrement].”
Jacobs Island was especially known for tanneries and their associated stench. Tanning required animal hides to be soaked in urine and then kneaded with ’dung water’ – made from dog faeces, collected from the streets by ’dung gatherers’, usually children.
Folly Ditch circa 1860. Watercolour by J.L. Stewart (1829-1911)
Jacob’s Island by the 19th century developed a reputation as one of the worst slums in London and was popularised by the Charles Dickens novel ’Oliver Twist’. The principal villain of the book, Bill Sikes, dies in the mud of Folly Ditch.
A writer in the ’Morning Chronicle’ in 1849 described ’A Visit to the Cholera Districts of Bermondsey’:
“Out of the 12,800 deaths which, within the last three months, have arisen from cholera, 6,500 have occurred on the southern shores of the Thames … Here stands, as it were, the very capital of cholera, the Jessore of London – Jacob’s Island, a patch of ground insulated by the common sewer. Spared by the fire of London, the houses and comforts of the people in this loathsome place have scarcely known any improvement since that time. The place is a century behind even the low and squalid districts that surround it.
On entering the precincts of the pest island, the air has literally the smell of a graveyard, and a feeling of nausea and heaviness comes over any one unaccustomed to imbibe the musty atmosphere. It is not only the nose, but the stomach, that tells how heavily the air is loaded with sulphuretted hydrogen; and as soon as you cross one of the crazy and rotting bridges over the reeking ditch, you know, as surely as if you had chemically tested it, by the black colour of what was once the white-lead paint upon the door-posts and window-sills, that the air is thickly charged with this deadly gas. The heavy bubbles which now and then rise up in the water show you whence at least a portion of the mephitic compound comes, while the open doorless privies that hang over the water side on one of the banks, and the dark streaks of filth down the walls where the drains from each house discharge themselves into the ditch on the opposite side, tell you how the pollution of the ditch is supplied.
Continuing our course we reached “The Folly,” another street so narrow that the names and trades of the shopmen were painted on boards that stretched, across the street, from the roof of their own house to that of their neighbour’s. We were here stopped by our companion in front of a house “to let.” The building was as narrow and as unlike a human habitation as the wooden houses in a child’s box of toys. “In this house,” said our friend, “when the scarlet fever was raging in the neighbourhood, the barber who was living here suffered fearfully from it; and no sooner did the man get well of this than he was seized with typhus, and scarcely had he recovered from the first attack than he was struck down a second time with the same terrible disease. Since then he has lost his child with cholera, and at this moment his wife is in the workhouse suffering from the same affliction. The only wonder is that they are not all dead, for as the man sat at his meals in his small shop, if he put his hand against the wall behind him, it would be covered with the soil of his neighbour’s privy, sopping through the wall. At the back of the house was an open sewer, and the privies were full to the seat.”
After major cholera outbreaks in 1849 and 1854, the open ditches of Jacob’s Island were filled in. Also by the 1850s, the area had become separated from the Thames by a long row of large warehouses and industrial units on the river.
Hickman’s Folly was cleared in the late 1860s as part of a slum clearance initiative and by the 1870s, the London City Mission observed: “The foul ditch no longer pollutes the air … Part of London Street, the whole of Little London Street, part of Mill Street, beside houses in Jacob Street and Hickman’s Folly, have been demolished. In most of these places warehouses have taken the place of dwelling-houses. The revolting fact of many of the inhabitants of the district having no other water to drink than that which they procured from the filthy ditches is also a thing of the past. Most of the houses are now supplied with good water, and the streets are very well paved. Indeed, so great is the change for the better in the external appearance of the district generally, that a person who had not seen it since the improvements would now scarcely recognise it.”
A huge fire, which raged for two weeks had, by the time of the clearance, already destroyed most of the old houses in Hickman’s Folly and London Street (now Wolseley Street) and by 1875 those buildings that survived the fire had been cleared away. Victorian warehouses and tenement blocks were built in their place.
The very first blocks of the Dickens Estate were built after 1929 and this swept away Hickman’s Folly. Dombey House (with 28 flats), Oliver House (34 flats) and Pickwick House (52 flats). By the end of 1931, 31 flats at Copperfield House had joined them.
