Reminders of a Victorian past

Some of the focus will be on whether the transport system and wider infrastructure will be able to cope, along with what, if anything, the hapless Mayor Boris Johnson may do if it does not.

However more of the focus will be on London as the world city of the early 21st century.

But just as there still parts of Victorian London which are still in physical existence - the Metropolitan Line turns 150 next year, for example - so there are still surviving examples of the social attitudes and work relations of that period.

This point has been highlighted by the recent story of the stewards for the jubilee Thames boat pageant who were bussed in from outside London, not paid in some cases and left to sleep under London Bridge.

The government seemed unsure whether this was OK or not, but it echoed elements of Victorian London.

The workhouse was one of the cornerstones of the Victorian period, resting as it did on the "less eligibility" principle.

That is the idea that any paid employment would be better than the indoor relief of the workhouse.

Charles Dickens wrote about the Victorian workhouse in Oliver Twist and recent research has highlighted that his personal experience of the unfortunate victims of what was known as the Poor Man's Bastille was greater than thought.

As Raphael Samuel underlined in his landmark article on the Victorian London labour market, Comers And Goers, in reality the workhouse was not the bottom line for those with no regular employment.

There was a stratum who were deemed not eligible for indoor relief and had to look to charity for any outdoor relief they could find.

The jubilee stewards seem to have been in this general area.

They were certainly not offered indoor accommodation to sleep and their outdoor relief consisted of a sandwich.

The similarities with the landscape of Victorian London labour are considerable.

A recent summary of the experience of work for many in Victorian London has noted that "there were thousands of casual workers who picked up whatever unskilled and hand-to-mouth jobs they could find, porters, carrying advertising signs, helping at funerals."

Those who were unable to work lived by begging and scavenging.

Funerals are now a matter for professionals, but otherwise it remains a familiar picture.

The great chronicler of Victorian London and labour was Henry Mayhew. He wrote a series of investigative pieces for the Morning Chronicle in 1850 looking at the realities of London working life.

The paper described the series as "revelations of the inferno of misery, of wretchedness that is smouldering under our feet."

Mayhew himself had a clear view of what it all meant.

He told a public meeting of tailors in Bethnal Green in October 1850 that "morality on five thousand pounds a year in Belgrave Square is a very different thing to morality on slop wages in Bethnal Green."

Mayhew's rhetoric was sometimes xenophobic and anti-semitic, but his view on what should be done was to clear.

On October 28 1850 he suggested: "The best remedy was a combination of working men in trades union."

Would that Olympic London in 2012 will find a chronicler mirroring the best elements of the approach of Henry Mayhew - someone who can alert the wider public to the realities of low-paid and exploited labour as the Olympic spectacle seizes the media view of life in the capital.