first with the aspirational middle classes; and later, with the lower middle classes in more industrial areas of London such as the East End. While many areas of Georgian and Victorian suburbs were damaged heavily in The Blitz and/or then redeveloped through slum clearance, much of Inner London's character remains dominated by the suburbs built successively during Georgian and Victorian times, and such houses remain enormously popular. No view of London, either in the 19th century or today, would be without the terraced house. Living conditions Poverty In contrast to the conspicuous wealth of the City of London and Westminster, there was a huge underclass of desperately poor Londoners within a short range of the more affluent areas. The author George W. M. Reynolds commented on the vast wealth disparities and misery of London's poorest in 1844: In Central London, the single most notorious slum was St. Giles, a name which by the 19th century had passed into common parlance as a byword for extreme poverty. Infamous since the mid 18th century, St. Giles was defined by its prostitutes, gin shops, secret alleyways where criminals could hide, and horribly overcrowded tenements. Lord Byron excoriated the state of St. Giles during a speech to the House of Lords in 1812, stating that "I have been in some of the most oppressed provinces of Turkey, but never under the most despotic of infidel governments did I behold such squalid wretchedness as I have seen since my return in the very heart of a Christian country." At the heart of this area, now occupied by New Oxford Street and Centre Point, was "The Rookery", a particularly dense warren of houses along George Street and Church Lane, the latter of which in 1852 was reckoned to contain over 1,100 lodgers in overpacked, squalid buildings with open sewers. The poverty worsened with the massive influx of poor Irish immigrants during the Great Famine of 1848, giving the area the name "Little Ireland", or "The Holy Land". Government intervention beginning in the 1830s reduced the area of St. Giles through mass evictions, demolitions, and public works projects. New Oxford Street was built right through the heart of "The Rookery" in 1847, eliminating the worst part of the area, but many of the evicted inhabitants simply moved to neighboring streets, which remained stubbornly mired in poverty. Mass demolition of slums like St. Giles was the usual method