Chequer Alley

Chequer Alley, with its network of connected alleys and courts, has been for many years the privileged refuge of the outcast and degraded; the haunt of intemperance, dissoluteness, and crime; ....They live together, a whole family in a single room, which serves for sleeping and all other purposes; their furniture scanty; their food coarse, precarious, and insufficient; their children growing up around them amidst sights and sounds which tend to deaden all their moral sensibilities, to develop the vile passions of their nature, and to render self-respect an impossibility. Many of them subsist on the wages of iniquity; many more by daily and habitual theft. (Frederick William Briggs, 1866) Chequer-alley means a whole zigzag neighbourhood, an agglomeration of alleys and courts, intersecting as wretched and poverty-stricken a district as can be found in all London -a puzzle-map of poverty, a maze of misery... .a vast sty in the midst of this Great City where 20,000 human beings herd together...(Thomas Archer, 1870)

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