London’s Alleys: Grotto Passage, W1

In the heart of Marylebone, a narrow gap between rows of upmarket shops leads to an alley that was once a notorious slum.

The slums were built on the site of an actual grotto — an early tourist attraction built by John Castles in what was still countryside along the newly built Paddington Street. The grotto opened in 1738 and quickly became a fashionable place to visit to admire the shell-lined covered tunnels. John Castles built a second grotto in 1756, turning the original into a dining space and adding a cold bath that was later said to have therapeutic properties.

The grotto closed down in around 1780.

Meanwhile, the rest of the area had started to be developed around the grotto as part of the Howard de Walden Estate alongside the New Burial Ground (now Paddington Street Gardens), but by the end of the 18th century, a square of land to the east of the cemetery had become a notorious slum riddled with poverty and tightly packed houses built over the back gardens of the houses that faced out onto the main roads.

Grotto Passage was a very narrow route through the centre of the slum, although it was longer then than it is now, as the southern half was later renamed the highly unlikely Paradise Place (now Garbutt Place).

The area attracted the attention of social reformers in the late 1840s, and Grotto Passage gained early infamy thanks to the publicity given to the Ragged School and Refuge, which stood beside it.

Founded in 1846 by William Maxwell, in conjunction with Lords Radstock and Kinnaird and the Hon. Miss Waldegrave, it provided education for “the ignorant and depraved youth of both sexes”. Initially based in a former carpentry workshop, unsurprisingly for the area, it was quickly full and expanded into a purpose-built building in March 1860. In use until 1930, it was later occupied by the British Legion and was recently refurbished as offices, with a sales brochure that skims over the slums that it was once the heart of.

Back to the slums, it was said that you could find 120 houses within a 100-square-foot plot of land, a level of deprivation which would make it comparable to the infamous St Giles rookeries of Hogarth’s Gin Lane fame.

Many of the houses were just one room deep and had no back windows, just a single door onto the alley, and lacking sanitation, had to share cesspits and wash-houses. One example was Harrison’s Place, a small courtyard off Grotto Passage that was recorded in 1847 as having seven two-room houses with 47 people living in them, sharing two toilets that drained into the alley.

In 1854, things started to improve when the Metropolitan Sewers Commission finally laid proper sewers through the area. Still, poverty was such that in the winter of 1860-1 families in and around Grotto Passage were reportedly starving.

In 1861, Lord Radstock said of Grotto Passage that ‘everything has its price in gin, – coals, and even blankets, all go for gin’. This was also when rebuilding finally started to demolish the slums and replace them with social housing, led by Octavia Hill’s campaigning work to provide decent homes for workers.

It was to take until the 1880s though before wholesale slum clearance was finally completed.

Today, Grotto Passage is very much as it was when the rebuilding was completed, but also very much cleaned up.

Away with street urchins and women washing in the courtyard and in with posh lighting, scrubbed walls and lots of carefully pruned window boxes for the converted school. There is still social housing around the alley, all looking much better cared for than your average council estate.

For most of its life, Grotto Passage felt more like Scrooge than Santa, but posh offices aside, it still manages to fulfil its original purpose — to provide homes for working people — but with so much better homes than were originally built.