The REAL Bridgerton | Gin, Scandal and Georgian London | History for Sleep

In the middle of the 1700s, London fell into a strange and desperate fever. Gin was so cheap that the city's poorest could drink themselves out of their lives for the price of a scrap of bread, and thousands did. This is the story of the London Gin Craze. We walk through the narrow streets of Saint Giles, the most notorious gin district in the city, past the open drains and the coal smoke and the crowded dram-shops glowing warm on every corner. We step inside those low rooms to meet the people who drank there. Not the ruined figures of a cautionary print, but ordinary labourers, washerwomen, and street-sellers, seeking an hour of warmth and company at the end of a brutal day. And we meet the women who kept themselves alive by selling gin from their front rooms, one of the few trades open to them in Georgian England. It is a hard world and a vivid one, full of smell and noise and human feeling. Settle in, and let the streets of Georgian London grow real around you.