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Cooking, early-mid 20th Century

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Nutrition in the slums in early 20th century England

nutrition in old slums

Meals that poor people ate

Not everyone was fortunate enough to live like the ordinary people described on this website. There were still families who were desperately poor, who lived in slum conditions. For them, meals were very different from what my mother describes in the other pages of the menu.


London slums, early 1900s

Typical London slums, early 1900s people lived on little more than a subsistence diet.

The following information about food in the slums comes from the book Round About a Pound a Week which records the findings of a group of women who interviewed families of manual workers in a poor part of London in 1909-1913 under the auspices of the Fabian Society.

From their incomes of around a pound a week, there was little money left over for food, after the deductions for rent, funeral insurance, clothing, coal and other minimal necessities.

The book gives precise menus for a range of families with different numbers of children. Essentially the mothers and children had to exist for much of the time on sweetened tea with no milk and hunks of bread spread with margarine. The man of the house additionally had what was referred to as his 'relish' which was something additional for his supper - perhaps an egg, a rasher of bacon or a small piece of cheese or fish. It was essential to keep him fed well enough to continue working to earn the weekly income for the family. There was no state support other than the terrible stigma of pauperisation, which, in its worst form meant being admitted to the workhouse.

Death and disease was rife among the poorer families, as a result of poor nutrition and insanitary damp living conditions.

It was noted in the book that:

Also of note:


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