Westminster
The heart of Harris's List — Covent Garden, Soho, and the West End
The heart of Harris's List — Covent Garden, Soho, and the West End
Westminster was the hub of the world of Harris's List. The vast majority of geocoded records in Harris's List Digital Archive are located in Westminster wards. The area around Covent Garden, the Strand, Soho, and St James's formed the geographic heart of London's entertainment industry and its sex trade.
Unlike the City of London, Westminster was not a unified entity under a single municipal authority. Its governance was split between a number of different authorities. The Dean and Chapter of Westminster Abbey were responsible for the ancient liberty of Westminster, which included the area around Westminster Abbey and Parliament. Each parish was responsible for its own affairs through a vestry, an assembly of ratepayers responsible for poor relief, maintenance of the roads, and parish policing.
This decentralised system meant that Westminster parishes varied greatly in the quality of their local governance. Wealthy parishes, such as St George Hanover Square, dominated by the gentry of Mayfair, had good roads and efficient watchmen, while poorer parishes, such as St Giles in the Fields, home to the notorious slum "the Rookery," struggled to deliver even the most basic of services. Westminster was a harder place to police than the City because of the lack of central government, and this, in part, explains the concentration of the sex trade in the area.
The St. James's ward dominates the statistics by an extraordinary margin. This large ward included the parishes of St Paul Covent Garden, St Martin in the Fields, St Anne Soho, and parts of St James Westminster, precisely the area of the city in which London's theatres, taverns, and night-time entertainment industry were located. Covent Garden piazza, Drury Lane, the Strand, and Soho are all located in this ward.
The West End ward, which is the second most prominent in the data set, comprises the fashionable thoroughfares of Marylebone, including those around Cavendish Square and Portland Place. This was a more affluent and residential area than Covent Garden, and the women represented here were generally from the more expensive end of Harris's List.
The Holborn and Covent Garden ward comprises the third group and includes the area between the western boundary of the City and the main entertainment district of Westminster. This includes areas such as Lincoln's Inn Fields, Drury Lane, and those around Holborn, a socially mixed neighbourhood with both respectable professionals and a lively night-time economy.
| Parish | Population (1740s) |
|---|---|
| St Martin in the Fields | 27,502 |
| St James Westminster | 25,600 |
| St George Hanover Square | 18,534 |
| St Anne Soho | 13,741 |
| St Clement Danes | 9,287 |
| St Paul Covent Garden | 5,024 |
The parish of St Paul Covent Garden is particularly noteworthy: this parish, with a population of only 5,000, has by far the greatest concentration of Harris's List entries proportional to its population size, reinforcing the extent to which the trade was woven into the fabric of this small parish. By contrast, St George Hanover Square, the wealthiest parish in Westminster with a population of 18,534, has relatively few entries despite being nearly four times the population of St Paul Covent Garden. The geography of Harris's List is not based on wealth or population size, but maps onto the entertainment district.