[Work-in-progress post] Death in Irish Whitechapel: Cholera in Blue Anchor Yard E1, 1848

Looking from Cartwright Street towards Blue Anchor Yard, Royal Mint Estate on the site of what was Rosemary Lane, Whitechapel E1. (Photographed May 2023 © Breda Corish)

Updated 22 August 2024: Just to highlight this blog post is still a work-in-progress, published early in draft form for my MA history project assessment. The post will be completed and re-published in the coming months. Thank you for your patience. Do please get in touch via the Comments section below or Contact me directly if you have any questions or comment about this topic in the meantime.

The last blog post explored representations of Irish life in the area of Whitechapel known as Rosemary Lane. Walking today through the modern housing of the Royal Mint Estate which now occupies that space between Royal Mint Street and East Smithfield, we have to exert our imagination to envisage the jumble of courts and alleyways which once defined this heart of Irish Whitechapel. For the dissertation I wrote in the final year of my history BA, I immersed myself in the experience of sickness and death in Rosemary Lane in the summer of 1848. That was the time of London's second cholera epidemic and was coincident with an influx of refugees from Famine in Ireland.

This blog post will explore the experiences of the Irish workers and destitute poor in the early days of public health. And how Irish cultural practices around death and dying clashed with the new practices of sanitary reform.

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Featured locations:

• Royal Mint Street (Rosemary Lane), London E1 8LG

• Blue Anchor Yard, London E1 8LR

• East Smithfield, London E1W

Click here for a reminder of key events in the Timeline of the 19th Century

1848: London's second cholera epidemic

‘A court for King Cholera’ - Illustration by John Leech, Punch, 23 (1852), p. 139. Image source: Wellcome Collection, via Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license.

1848: Famine in Ireland & migration to London

‘Irish emigrants leaving home - the priest's blessing’, Illustrated London News, May 10 1851. Image source: New York Public Library Digital Collection, via permitted use.

1848: An Irish Wake in Hairbrain Court, off Blue Anchor Yard, E1

George Godwin, Another Blow for Life (London: Allen, 1864), p. 43. Image source: Public domain, via Google Books

Burial in St. Mary Matfelon

The site of St. Mary Matfelon church & churchyard. Altab Ali Park, Whitechapel E1. (Photographed August 2023 © Breda Corish)

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Coming soon - closing reflection

What do you think?

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Blog sources & further resources

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Locating Rosemary Lane

​The Ordnance Survey's 1848-51 London 1:5,280 Large Scale Town Plan - 42 sheets shows London at the time when people were fleeing the Great Famine in Ireland.

• Sheet VII.SE contains the area of Irish settlement between Rosemary Lane (renamed Royal Mint Street in 1852) and East Smithfield.

• This was demolished as part of the slum clearance programmes in the later 19th century but the historic map overlay function shows you how the current street layout still reflects the main thoroughfares that the Whitechapel Irish and new Famine migrants would have walked through.

More coming soon