During the nineteenth century, slum clearance in London was done by the philanthropic middle class and government agencies under the pretense of providing better housing for the poor of London. However, the poor rarely benefited from slum clearance; more commonly it was the middle class who benefited. Slum clearance created more problems for the poor than it solved as they were usually displaced from their homes; and since there was no public housing yet, they were left with no place to go.
Large scale slum clearance began in London in the 1840s. The major concern of the first clearances was public health. Their goal was to rid the city of areas with low health standards and high death rates. At this time, there was a strong link between sanitary and moral reform. It was believed that a clean city atmosphere would result in a moral city population.
In 1846, the London Board of Health was established. They were given the power to close down any dwelling where living conditions were deemed hazardous or unhealthy. Unfortunately, the Board of Health had little concern for the people living in these condemned dwellings and felt no obligation to rehouse them.
The fault of the middle class at this time was that they were waging a battle against the image of the slum rather than the causes of poverty. With the beginnings of residential segregation, neighborhoods were beginning to be an expression of social position and people feared having their land value or social position decrease because of a slum. Very few people realized that in order to stop slums from developing, measures other than tearing down buildings needed to be taken.
Rather than replace slums with better housing it was usual to demolish slum buildings to make room for railways, street improvements or just more open space; which was hoped would make the neighborhood more enjoyable to live in. Slum clearance was cheap for the middle class, cheaper than developing a welfare state, a minimum wage or even lowering the price of food and clothing in the city. The cost of demolition fell on the landlords rather than then government or society and there was no need to purchase the land or rehouse the displaced people.
In 1875, the Artisans and Labours Dwelling Improvement Act, better known as the Cross Act, was passed. The aim of the Cross Act was to remove slums from London and to construct new working class dwellings in their place. For the first time reconstruction was an official part of slum clearance policy. This provision still did not, however, benefit the slum dwellers. The Cross Act specified that the same number of dwellings must be built, but it did not specify that the same people must be housed there. The Cross Act was concerned with reconstruction but not with rehousing. It soon became evident that it was not the displaced slum dwellers who were living in the new housing blocks but the slightly better off working class.
In some ways slum clearance actually made the problems of over- crowding in low-income areas worse. Many displaced people could not, or did not, want to move out of their community, so they merely moved in with their neighbors. This made some neighborhoods even more crowded than before slum clearance.
The demolition and rebuilding dome under the Cross Act benefited the city as a whole in the long run by replacing bad housing with cleaner working class housing developments. Slum clearance was used as an opportunity to restructure the housing market in London and move poverty out of middle class areas.