The London Labour office was led by Henry Mayhew with a team of collaborators, including publisher John Howden and collaborators Henry Wood, Richard Knight, Augustus Mayhew, and Horace St. John. The office published the London Labour and the London Poor serial (1850-52) after Mayhew broke with the Morning Chronicle in late 1850. The office was originally located at 69 Fleet Street, but moved to No. 16, Upper Wellington St., in April 1851. Nos. 18 onwards were published from Upper Wellington Street., which was located off the Strand. 

In Dickens, Reynolds, and Mayhew on Wellington Street, Mary Shannon explores how Wellington St. (including Upper Wellington St. and Wellington St. North) was a popular print culture hub at the mid-nineteenth century. The London Labour office was located down the street from George W. M. Reynolds's newspaper, Reynolds's Newspaper (1847 onwards) and Charles Dickens's magazine Household Words (1850-1859). The Lyceum Theatre was closeby and other popular print editors, periodicals, booksellers, and publishers worked from Wellington St. throughout the 1840s and 1850s (see Shannon 28). Shannon's study examines how the experience of th street was "one of working in a remarkably interconnected community, made up of interlocking networks" (3). 

Works Cited 

Shannon, Mary. Dickens, Reynolds, and Mayhew on Wellington Street: The Print Culture of a Victorian Street. Ashgate, 2015.

The articles below are texts that were published in the London Labour serial during the period when the office was located on Fleet Street. By plotting the Fleet Street office onto the individual maps for each article, the intention is to visualize where Mayhew and his collaborators were working from in London in relation to the locales and streets that were significant to their informants.  

In London Labour and the London Poor edition:

Phase 1

Of the Low Lodging-Houses. (Volume 1) [Map]

Statement of a Prostitute. (Volume 1) [Map]

Of the Street-Sellers of Rhubarb and Spice. (Volume 1) [Map]

Of the Street-Sellers of Live Birds. (Volume 2) [Map]

Of the Mud-Larks. (Volume 2) [Map]