page_title: Limehouse Cut
section_title: The smallpox hospital
hierarchical_section_title: Limehouse Cut / Social and industrial history / Pollution.  The cholera and smallpox controversies. / The smallpox hospital
caption_attribution_description: English: Indignation meeting in Limehouse at plan to erect smallpox hospital in crowded working district. (Facsimile of report in East London Observer, 13 January 1877.)
context_page_description: The Limehouse Cut is a largely straight, broad canal in the East End of London, England, which linked the lower reaches of the Lee Navigation to the River Thames. Opening on 17 September 1770, and widened for two-way traffic by 1777, it is the oldest canal in the London area. Although short, it has a diverse social and industrial history. It now connects to Limehouse Basin as a result of changes made in 1968.
  The Cut turns in a broad curve from Bow Locks, where the Lee Navigation meets Bow Creek; it then proceeds directly south-west for 1.5 miles through the London Borough of Tower Hamlets to Limehouse Basin.
context_section_description: In 1876 there was a smallpox outbreak in London and the authorities struggled to find suitable hospital accommodation.  Some patients were placed in a hospital in Hampstead but this attracted the ire of local residents; one of them, Sir Rowland Hill, sued.  The authorities then rented the disused Silver factory - sandwiched between the Limehouse Cut and Dod Street - and made plans to convert it into a hospital.  It infuriated East Enders that West End bureaucrats should send smallpox patients to a crowded working district in Limehouse ("Another opportunity for the West to look down on and revile the denizens of the East" sneered the East London Observer) and there were demonstrations in Trafalgar Square and threats of violence.
  Samuel Charlesworth, Rector of St Anne's Limehouse, wrote that it was a very bad place for patients anyway.  Highly insalubrious, it had no ventilation "to move the fog often settling there, except the current of offensive vapour moving up and down the fœtid canal."  He, the Rev. Charleswoth, knew the Cut was unhealthy because he lived next to it himself; his children "when at home always fail in health".  Opposite, six children of one family had died in one month — of some blood infection.  Their coffins had been superposed in the same grave.
caption: "Blow it up!". Smallpox hospital beside the Cut infuriates East Enders.
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