For centuries, those attempting to impose any sort of order on metropolitan London's seething and shifting population faced a daunting challenge. Nowhere else in the country was there such a dense mass of pauperism. Poorer parishes, mostly in east London, were often overwhelmed by the magnitude of poor relief, while wealthier parishes sought to avoid higher poor rates and the threat posed by the turbulent denizens of neighboring districts. So intractable did the obstacles seem to would-be reformers that the Whig ministry of the 1830s was initially inclined to exempt London entirely from the operation of the New Poor Law of 1834, until convinced by Edwin Chadwick that granting the capital an exemption would fatally undermine the measure. Political leaders were not the only ones intimidated by the size and complexity of the task. Poor law historians, who have long recognized the need for a comprehensive study of the administration of poor relief in London, have been put off by the sheer magnitude of the undertaking. Now this long-felt need has been abundantly satisfied by David R. Green's superb study.

A Reader in Human Geography at King's College London, Green brings the very special skills and approaches of the historical geographer to a daunting challenge. This field has already provided fresh insights and analyses of poor law history, most notably perhaps in Felix Driver's Power and Pauperism: The Workhouse System, 1834–1884 (Cambridge University Press, 1993). By providing dozens of maps, charts, and graphs of poor relief data, Green is able to convey a wealth of information much more efficiently than it could be delivered textually. Overall, the most striking feature of metropolitan poor relief is the extreme variation among parishes. Prior to 1834 there were 150 separate poor law authorities in London. Most were gaining population rapidly, as the population of London quadrupled in the nineteenth century, to 4,000,000 by 1900. The poor parishes of East London saw even faster growth, while some entities, such as the City of London, saw declining populations as the middle classes moved westward or to the suburbs, and residences were replaced by commercial establishments. The relatively few paupers and light burden of poor rates there and in most of the West London parishes bedeviled most attempts at equalizing the costs of relieving the poor.

The growing burden on the petty shopkeepers and other ratepayers of east London fostered various deterrent strategies, most notably the workhouse test. As early as 1803, nearly thirty percent of relief recipients were indoor paupers, a figure far in excess of that in rural areas, where it made economic sense to keep agricultural laborers on outdoor relief in the slack season. With the coming of the New Poor Law in 1834, a number of new workhouses were built, and London parishes and poor law unions, thanks to their large population base and compact nature, pioneered new designs and specialized functions. In line with much recent scholarship, the author devotes a chapter to the negotiating strategies adopted by paupers in their attempts to stay out of the workhouse, or to secure more favorable treatment within. A number of metropolitan newspapers, especially the Times, were vigilant in their investigations and revelations of workhouse cruelty. Many paupers were also adept at appealing to sympathetic magistrates.

The 1834 Poor Law also occasioned spirited defiance by local parish vestries against the new Poor Law Commission's directives. As Green puts it, the 170 parishes of London amounted to “separate ratepayer republics” (82). The tone of many of these assemblies was raucously radical. They opposed not only centralization but also, in a continuation of earlier opposition to select vestries after 1818, the oligarchic electoral system for poor law guardians. The most strident opposition came from the vestry of St. Pancras, which won an important victory over the Poor Law Commission in the Court of King's Bench in 1837. This triumph motivated activists throughout London to form the Central Anti-Poor Law Association, which greatly complicated the attempts of the harried local poor law inspector to insure compliance with the statute and with commission directives.

By mid-century, with the Potato Famine greatly increasing the number of Irish paupers in London, as well as the accelerating growth of population, the system was in crisis. It was compounded by the Poor Removal Act of 1846, which made it more difficult to remove long-term residents to their parish of settlement and was part of a strategy to shift the cost of poor relief from rural to urban areas. The Metropolitan Poor Relief Act of 1867, creating a system based on rateable value (involving a transfer from richer to poorer areas) at last established some semblance of fairness and coordination across the metropolitan region. If London was sometimes a laggard in poor relief reform, in many respects, as Green shows in his excellent book, it led the way.