Join Oskar Jensen and Charlie Taverner as they delve into the history of those who lived, worked, and fought to survive in the streets of London through the ages
[ID: coloured satirical illustration of a Victorian street scene; people are seated on the floor and mingling about]
Doors: 7:00pm
Tickets £9 [£7 concession]
For almost ten years, Salon for the City has convened monthly to bring together authors, historians, artists or cultural commentators, talking on themes ranging across culture, literature, history, and beyond - but there is only ever one subject: London.
Oskar Jensen, author of Vagabonds: Life on the Streets of Nineteenth-century, will be delving into a story of resistance by London’s vagabonds…
In the decades after Waterloo, The Mendicity Society set out to cure London of its begging ‘problem’ by an ingenious system of meal tickets – but soon began to focus its energies on hard labour, systematic slander, and the deportation of migrants, all enforced by armed officers.
For more than fifty years, its committee kept a proud and public record of their activities. But they weren’t the only ones. In this talk, Oskar Jensen uncovers the scandalous truth of the Mendicity Society from the point of view of those who stood up to it – among them, a desperate lavender seller, a visually-impaired ex-soldier, two mixed-race teens, and a rebel busker.
Social historian Charlie Taverner, author of Street Food: Hawkers and the History of London, uncovers the history of street hawking in the city…
Until recently, London’s streets were packed with hawkers, crying ‘Strawberries, ripe!’, ‘New Mackerel, new!’ and ‘Milk below!’ For centuries, these traders fed the fast-growing city with perishable produce and snacks — wolfed down on the go.
Charlie Taverner shows how London has a long history of hawking and tells the cultural history of street food selling in London between the late sixteenth and early twentieth centuries.
As ‘street food’ flourishes as a fashionable dining trend, he tells the very different story of the poor hawkers who took up baskets and barrows to scrape a living and feed London’s dramatic expansion with fruit, fish, oysters, vegetables, milk, pies and sausages on the capital’s streets, offering a long-run, bottom-up perspective on metropolitan growth..