Woodchester Street was very overcrowded in 1894-5 with an average of over 16 persons to house. Clarendon Street (later Clarendon Crescent), Cirencester Street and Waverley Road were also among the eleven worst in Paddington parish.

Woodchester Street and its neighbours were poorer than the cul-de-sacs off the south-west side of Harrow Road, where poverty and comfort were mixed and where Alfred Street, like Harrow Road itself, was considered fairly comfortable.

In Clarendon Street, where the more respectable women did laundry work, there were ’thieves and prostitutes’. Subletting, which had gone so far that a room might have different tenants by day and by night, could be controlled only by declaring buildings to be lodging houses. Such decay was unexpected, in that the houses were ’cast-off clothes of the rich’. It was attributed in 1899 to the canal, as elsewhere in London, to isolation arising from a lack of through traffic, and to the density of building.

If Woodchester Street had not been crammed in by the canal, it was possible that the decline would not have taken place.

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Main source:	A History of the County of Middlesex | British History Online
	Further citations and sources