What was London like in 1890?

I have always been interested in history… real history.

Not the type that is agreed on by the masses, but real encounters.

Britain is of course of interest due to high regional Rh negative frequencies.

Here is a reply from Quora to the question in the title:

My grandparents died in the mid 1960s but were born in the early 1870s. I can still remember them talking about growing up and living in London at the end of the 19th Century. They described it as booming, with buildings going up and things happening. Smelly because of the less than perfect drains and the number of horses on the streets (horse manure everywhere). Also the smell of people. Most people had a bath only once or twice a week unless they were wealthy. Very smokey and dirty from all the coal fires and cold in the winter. Single pane, loose sash windows let the cold and drafts in.
My grandfather described it as a very law-abiding time, partly because murderers would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law and hanged. Mind you he also said that there were areas in the East End of London that you just didn’t go to, it wasn’t safe and that was said by someone who had been a sailor then a ships captain before leaving the sea to run one of the docks in East London. He had sailed on the last sailing ships and went around Cape Horn under sail. An interesting man with stories to tell but one who had been made quite hard by his experiences.
The etiquette of illness and death was very different. Severe illness and death were much more common, almost the norm. You kept your curtains drawn at the windows if there was a death in the family and wore a black armband when out and about. He said you could always tell in what he called the ‘posh areas’ when someone was very ill because they would buy bales of hay and scatter it in the street in front of the house to quieten the noise of the iron-shod wagon wheels (expensive carriages by comparison often had rubber shod wheels. He said the smell of the straw mixed with the smell of horse manure was very distinctive.
They spoke quite a lot about the smell of street food such as fresh roasted chestnuts and the amount of music you heard on the streets from musicians and small bands, barrel organs etc.
Growing up as a boy some of that was still present even in the 1960s. I can remember the great fog of 1962. Fog so thick that you couldn’t see to cycle or drive a car. They used to put oil lamps on all the traffic islands and near traffic signs. They burnt back some of the smog and let you see just enough to inch forward. It was just starting to die away when I was young as the clean air act started to take effect.

https://www.quora.com/What-was-London-like-in-1890

How do you believe your life would have been had you lived in those days?

How do you believe/know your ancestors were doing during those times?