Charity and Hunger: London’s Forgotten Soup Kitchens with Philip Carstairs

Being poor and hungry in the long nineteenth century: the evidence from London soup Kitchens This presentation will explore some of the many soup kitchens that fed the poor of north and east London.

Soup kitchens flourished across nineteenth-century London and provided food to around a tenth of the population, but the buildings have almost all vanished.

Many of the charities were short-lived and almost all opened only during winter.

Understanding their forgotten story and how and why they operated will shed light on the lives of London’s labouring poor and middle class attitudes towards them at a time when there was little public welfare other than the Dickensian workhouse.