In the 19th century even the poorest members of society tried to have a set of smart clothes which they kept for ‘Sunday best’, usually to wear to church. Many of these lower classes lived in cramped, overcrowded conditions and had no safe place to store such special items. It was common practice for people in this situation to pawn their Sunday best clothes on Monday morning and then redeem the pledge to retrieve them on Saturday. This process would be repeated every week. Many pawnbrokers in London had storage space set aside purely for this purpose.