Never mind the chuggers, crawlers were much worse

Visitors to medieval London found a city of narrow streets teeming with disorder. According to one chronicle of 1190, the unpaved roads were full of madmen, friars and prostitutes, as well as "extortionists, nightly strollers, magicians, mimics, common beggars [and] tatterdemalions [ragamuffins]".

Three centuries later, Londoners submitted a petition complaining of the terrible state of the streets. In particular, they moaned that they were full of "swans, geese and herons", whose ordure was of "great stench and so evil savour that it causeth great and parlous infecting of the people".

By the Victorian period, London was beginning to look like today's metropolis. Yet although the streets were cleaner, they were littered with beggars, whores and thieves, many of them the casualties of the Industrial Revolution. "Carry no more money about you than is necessary," warned a guide for visitors in 1873, and "take care of your pockets at the entrance to theatres, exhibitions, churches, and in the omnibuses and the streets". Tourists were advised never to talk to "men who wish to show you the way, offer to sell smuggled cigars or invite you to take a glass of ale or play a game at skittles".

By this point, there were so many beggars on London's streets that it was impossible to estimate their combined numbers. Victorian writers divided them into different classes, such as "crawlers", who were "old women reduced by vice and poverty to that degree of wretchedness which destroys even the energy to beg".

Then there were "mud-plungers", who came out only in autumn and winter, taking advantage of the rain and cold to play on visitors' sympathy. There were "pavement-chalkers", who scrawled "I am starving" on a nearby slab; there were penniless military veterans, shipwrecked mariners, blind beggars and thousands of children.

As late as the 1950s, despite efforts to clean up the streets, visitors to London still commented on the air of disorder. Beggars were in short supply but an estimated 3,000 prostitutes plied their trade on the city's streets: one official report complained of their "flaunting themselves and pestering passers-by, causing an intolerable degree of embarrassment and giving visitors a deplorable impression of London's immorality".

By these standards, the street life of today, from Big Issue sellers to sandwich-board men, seems distinctly respectable. Though the chuggers are annoying, at least they represent good causes: better them than thousands of crawlers and mud-plungers.