In this paper, police files and court cases from the Copenhagen City Court from the late 1930s are used as a window into the ways in which the living conditions and everyday life on the street unfolded among 'prostitute' women in poor inner-city neighbourhoods. Bourdieu's notion of habitus is employed to analyse the social conditions under which the women became 'prostitutes', and the tricks of the trade that it was necessary to learn in order to 'work the streets' in poor inner-city neighbourhoods in a transforming Copenhagen in the 1930s.