140 years later, shortly before his death at the age of 95, the London organized crime boss Bert Rossi told a ghostwriter, \u2018I\u2019ve kept my money, live in a nice part of London. Who\u2019d have thought an Italian boy from the Saffron Hill slums would end up living next door to Boris Johnson?\u2019 In these words, Rossi taps into Saffron Hill\u2019s close-to-legendary reputation as a London slum district. It is a reputation that stretches stretching back far earlier than Rossi\u2019s birth thereabouts in 1922, indeed beyond Dickens (in Oliver Twist<\/em>, Fagin\u2019s gang is based on Saffron Hill) as far back as the early-eighteenth-century. Then the \u2018Thief-Taker General\u2019 Jonathan Wild had a house on Saffron Hill in which he was said to dispose of bodies by dropping them into the waters of the River Fleet via a trap-door, and to have escape routes leading to Clerkenwell, on the eastern side of the river. An inn, the Old Red Lion, survived into the mid-nineteenth century, by which time it seemed a shameful yet fascinating relic of an earlier London: needing removal but also transmission via illustrated record.<\/p>\n The houses of this narrow north-south artery, crammed between the City of London to the east and Holborn to the west, backed on to the Fleet River or rather ditch. It was no doubt a physically repugnant area at least until the 1840s when today\u2019s Farringdon Road was cut through the area and the Fleet hidden away in a sewer.<\/p>\n The images show, from above, the entrance to St Peter’s Italian Church on Clerkenwell Road and, below, the blue plaque commemorating Joseph Grimaldi on Exmouth Market, EC1.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On Saturday I presented at the Modernist Studies Association in Colombus, Ohio, via Skype. Many thanks to organizer Sarah Fedirka, chair Courtenay and co-panelist Elizabeth Evans. It worked surprisingly well, on the whole, although reading my paper out without seeing the room and just trusting that someone was clicking through the slides in the right … <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blogs2.abo.fi\/urbanlit\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/104\/2018\/11\/31642736478_7e5633724f_o-300x169.jpg\")
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My paper works with a long timescale of modern and migration. This begins half a century before Smith and Thomson produced Street Life in London<\/em> when Italian political exiles began choosing the city as somewhere to live outside the reach of tyranny, and indeed reaching back to the turn of the nineteenth century heyday of the actor and comedian Joseph Grimaldi. The memory of this legendary clown was used to romanticize the area by a survival of the era of high modernism writing in the 1970s, Sacheverell Sitwell.<\/p>\n