“A dirtier or more wretched place he had never seen. The street was very narrow and muddy, and the air was impregnated with filthy odours . . . Covered ways and yards, which here and there diverged from the main street, disclosed little knots of houses, where drunken men and women were positively wallowing in filth.”

The well-heeled residents of 21st-century Clerkenwell would not recognise the description of their chic streets in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. By locating Fagin’s thieves’ kitchen in Saffron Hill, he was choosing one of Victorian London’s most notorious slums; today, even a small flat on the same street can cost more than £500,000 ($954,000, €741,000).