Metropolitan Geographies of Debt, 1700-1900

Debt was one of the great drivers of geographical mobility in eighteenth and nineteenth-century London, as lodgers and tenants shifted around the city to escape the consequences of money owed to local shopkeepers and landlords. Much of this movement was random, affecting every part of the city. Some parts of London, however, were distinctively shaped by the complications of the credit nexus. From the middle ages onwards, debtors’ sanctuaries had established themselves where debtors claimed immunity from arrest by bailiffs acting on behalf of creditors. At the end of the seventeenth century these ‘pretended privileged places’ were suppressed by parliament, but their character lingered on. A number of these neighbourhoods were especially prominent and long-lived in Southwark where two of the great metropolitan debtors’ prisons, the King’s Bench and the Marshalsea, had a distorting effect on the local housing market. The peculiar notoriety of the slums of Southwark outlived for generations the passing of the old sanctuaries and the closure of the prisons. The spatial effects of debt even persisted in the suburbs of late-nineteenth-century London where several recently-built districts won a reputation for indebtedness, earning them the title of ‘Sloper’s Islands’.

Archaeology · Business · Debt · Economic history · Economics · Economy · Geography · Metropolitan area · Nexus (standard) · Parliament · Political science · Politics · Engineering · Finance · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law

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