Jacob's Island

Jacob's Island developed a reputation as one of the worst slums in London, and was popularised by the Charles Dickens novel Oliver Twist, published shortly before the area was cleared in the 1860s.

In 1865, Richard King, writing in A Handbook for Travellers in Surrey, Hampshire, and the Isle of Wight, observed that "Many of the buildings have been pulled down since Oliver Twist was written, but the island is still entitled to its bad pre-eminence".

Dickens provides a vivid description of what it was like: ... crazy wooden galleries common to the backs of half a dozen houses, with holes from which to look upon the slime beneath; windows, broken and patched, with poles thrust out, on which to dry the linen that is never there; rooms so small, so filthy, so confined, that the air would seem to be too tainted even for the dirt and squalor which they shelter; wooden chambers thrusting themselves out above the mud and threatening to fall into it – as some have done; dirt-besmeared walls and decaying foundations, every repulsive lineament of poverty, every loathsome indication of filth, rot, and garbage: all these ornament the banks of Folly Ditch.Dickens was taken to this then-impoverished and unsavory location by the officers of the river police, with whom he would occasionally go on patrol.

Dickens wrote in a preface to Oliver Twist, in March 1850, that in the intervening years his descriptions of the disease, crime and poverty of Jacob's Island had come to sound so fanciful to some that Sir Peter Laurie, a former Lord Mayor of London, had expressed his belief publicly that the location was a work of imagination and that no place by that name, or like it, had ever existed.

[3] In Charles Kingsley's 1850 novel Alton Locke, the title character visits Jacob's Island and sees the death of the drunken Jimmy Downes, who has been reduced to poverty, and the bodies of his family, taken by typhus.

[17] In addition to his fictional portrayal, Kingsley joined with Mansfield and fellow Christian socialist John Malcolm Forbes Ludlow in purchasing water-carts that were sent to Jacob's Island to supply clean drinking water to the residents.

In 1981, the area was one of the first in the London Docklands to be converted to expensive loft apartments, which have since been joined by new blocks of luxury flats, including a development by architects Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands.

Since the early 1990s the Jacob's Island area has undergone considerable regeneration and gentrification, with significant friction at times between the new land-based arrivals and the more bohemian set based in the houseboats moored just offshore at Reed Wharf.