Opening paragraphs..........................

Welcome to the world of South London in the last decade of the nineteenth century.  It was frowsy;  it was shabby;  the shops were small and generally dirty.  It had none of the power or the energy of the more important part of the city on the other side of the Thames.  It moved at a slower pace.  All the accounts of it, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, describe it as a distinct and alien place.  It was in a sense cut off from the life of the greater London;  this may account for the air of exhaustion, and of torpor, which could hit the unwary.  It was the site of a small and noisome trades such as the hat-making and leather-tanning.  Factories abounded for the manufacture of biscuits, jam and pickles.  Glue factories stood adjacent to timber warehouses and slaughterhouses.  The predominant smells were those of vinegar, and of dog dung, and of smoke, and of beer, compounded of course by the stink of poverty.  By the end of the nineteenth century Kennington, the earliest home of Charles Chaplin, had all the characteristics of a slum.
-Peter Ackroyd,  Charlie Chaplin:  A Brief Life