Little London Court is today a complex of smart, new apartments and offices,
but the area once had the dubious reputation of being the meanest street in Old
Swindon.
‘Swindon has lost a colourful and romantic personality by the
death of Mr Angelo Vitti,’ the Advertiser reported following Angelo’s death on
Sunday April 21, 1940. As a lodging
house proprietor he became the friend, and earned the respect, of thousands of men
and women, a genuine family man and a friend of poor people.
The area was named after a small community from London who
settled there at the beginning of the nineteenth century. By 1807 it was
known as London Lane and in 1855 as London Street. Photographs exist of a thatched cottage still
standing shortly before the area was flattened during the 1960s.
In 1850 George T. Clark, an officer from the Board of Health,
made his damning inspection of Old Swindon.
There he found the town lacked a sewer system with the effluent from
houses draining into cesspools. All the
town’s wells were contaminated while the public water supply was the dirty church
pond.
Inspector Clark’s report and accompanying map published in
1851 noted blood flowing down Newport Street from one of three slaughter houses
in the vicinity, tainted water on Prospect Place and a filthy open pit in
Albert Street. In 1848 even the local
doctor had been laid up with typhus fever and the inspector reported continuous
typhus fever during 1850-51. In one
house in Cricklade Street five children had died during a seven week period.
Albert Street, built in around 1848 and named after Queen
Victoria’s virtuous husband, was the red light district of mid Victorian Old
Swindon. At the centre of this maelstrom
of depravity was the Rhinoceros public house, once described in court as ‘the
most notorious house in town.’ The first
landlady at the Rhinoceros when it opened in July 1845 was Lucy Rogers, a
former dressmaker. Frequently the scene
of bad behaviour where landlords flaunted licensing laws and one was even
accused of the manslaughter of his mother in law. The property was demolished
in 1963 to make room for garage extensions for Wiltshire Newspapers.
When the substantial premises came up for sale in 1859 it was
described as having five bedrooms on the first floor, a large bar, parlour,
smaller bar, little back room, taproom, underground cellar, large brick and
stone club room at the back with a shooting gallery, back kitchen with rooms
over and back entrance from Back Lane.
One person who tried to make a difference in this den of
iniquity was Angelo Vitti. Born in Sette
Frate, a small village in the Province of Frosinone, just south of Rome, Vitti
stopped off in France before moving to England in the early 1890s. He purchased the former Rhinoceros, by then a
lodging house, and eventually bought up the adjoining cottages as well.
But Angelo Vitti wasn’t the first to rent out rooms at the
premises in Albert Street. In 1881 Sarah
White was the lodging house keeper at number 25 and 26 Albert Street where among
her lodgers were musicians John Lewis, Henry Culverwell and John Fliseney.
Angelo Vitti
Old views of Little London and Albert Street are published courtesy of Swindon Local Studies Collection - visit the website on www.flickr.com/photos/swindonlocal
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