Daunton M. The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Volume 3: 1840-1950
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cityscape and provided destinations for citizens in motion. Urban networks make
tangible past choices as they mould present interactions. The reshaping of geo-
graphical landscapes in Britain has operated through the interconnections of an
urban hierarchy solidified by the combined investments of state and industry in
a century of rapid growth and change.
Lynn Hollen Lees
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Modern London
It is difficult to speak adequately or justly of London. It is not a pleasant place; it is
not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent.
You can draw up a tremendous list of reasons why it should be insupportable . . .
But . . . for one who takes it as I take it, London is on the whole the most possible
formoflife...Itisthebiggest aggregation of human life – the most complete
compendium of the world. The human race is better represented there than any-
where else, and if you learn to know your London you learn a great many things.
Henry James,
1
D
essence of modern London into a chapter, one cannot
help but be selective. I will focus on just four, interrelated aspects of
London’s history: government, social geography, economy and
Empire.
2
It is clearly impossible to understand London without examining the
‘problem’ of London’s government: the relationship between central govern-
ment, the Corporation of the City, London-wide authorities such as the
Metropolitan Board of Works and its successor, the London County Council,
and lower-tier authorities, initially parish vestries and district boards and, subse-
quently, metropolitan borough councils. But making sense of debates about
appropriate forms of metropolitan government demands a sensitivity to
London’s changing social geography: a nineteenth-century tension between
poor East End and rich West End, subsumed in a twentieth-century contrast
1
F. O. Matthiessen and K. B. Murdock, eds., The Notebooks of Henry James (New York, ), pp.
–.
2
At the outset it is worth noting two valuable bibliographic essays: J. Davis, ‘Modern London
–’, LJ, (), –, and M. Hebbert, ‘London recent and present’, LJ, (),
–. For a comprehensive listing of published work on London history, see H. Creaton, ed.,
Bibliography of Printed Works on London History to (London, ). See also three general his-
tories of London, all with detailed notes and/or bibliographies: R. Porter, London (London, );
S. Inwood, A History of London (London, ); F. Sheppard, London (Oxford, ).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
between working-class inner and middle-class outer London. Of course there
are numerous qualifications to be made to this caricature, to take account of
working-class suburbanisation, the survival of an elite West End and, more
recently, a sporadic gentrification of inner London, and a City that shifted from
mixed residential to almost exclusively non-residential in its pattern of land use.
Alongside these socio-geographical changes there were also major economic
changes: decline of some traditional industries, growth of a service economy and
especially of the City as centre of world finance, and interwar manufacturing
revival, but in an Americanised and suburban form. Even in the nineteenth
century social differentiation was increasing at the same time as the metropolis was
becoming economically more integrated. This was also evident in London’s con-
tinuing evolution as a centre of elite consumption – as reflected in the aristocratic
‘season’ and its extension into a nouveau riche world of grand hotels, restaurants,
clubs and theatres – which necessarily depended on low-paid, seasonal and casual
labour working what today would be regarded as ‘unsocial hours’. So a chapter
on London must also pay attention to the city’s economy, and to the relationship
of London with the rest of the world, especially its role as ‘Heart of the Empire’.
Before we can concentrate in detail on these four themes, several other ques-
tions merit our attention. First, with regard to the definition and ‘knowability’
of London.
3
The census first defined a London that was larger than the square
mile of the City in . This definition provided the boundary for both the
Metropolitan Board of Works, in , and the County of London, in . But
the built-up area of London had burst through this boundary long before .
‘Greater London’ came to be defined statistically in the s as equivalent to
the Metropolitan Police District, extending miles ( km) from Charing
Cross (Map .).
4
Although London might be seen as one organic growth,
unlike other ‘conurbations’ that linked several cities of roughly equal impor-
tance, its expansion embraced some quite substantial, previously independent
settlements. The issue of ‘localism’ versus ‘metropolitanism’ continues to the
present – do Londoners think of themselves as Londoners, or do they identify
with their local borough, or parish; or are all these administrative units artificial
impositions cutting across an allegiance to no more than the immediate neigh-
bourhood? To Roy Porter, London is a jigsaw, ‘a congregation of diversity’ in
which the absence of strong metropolitan-wide government meant that ‘confu-
sion permitted diversity and interstitial growth’, almost a postmodern celebra-
tion of an unorganised if not disorganised metropolis.
5
Secondly, we may question the existence of ‘turning points’ in the history of
Richard Dennis
3
On ‘knowability’ see M. Hebbert, London (Chichester, ), esp. ch. , ‘The knowledge’.
4
P. J. Waller, Town, City and Nation (Oxford, ), pp. –; P. L. Garside, ‘West End, East End:
London, –’, in A. Sutcliffe, ed., Metropolis, – (London, ), p. .
5
Porter, London, pp. , .
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London. Asa Briggs focused on fin de siècle London as a moment when the
metropolis particularly exemplified British history.
6
Pat Garside identified criti-
cal boundaries at and , perhaps implying that the whole intervening
half-century was one long turning point. Prior to , according to H. J. Dyos’
view, ‘London was, at one and the same time, central yet peripheral, economi-
cally secondary yet socially dominant, culturally inspirational yet parasitic.’
Modifying this interpretation, Garside concluded that ‘London’s economic
achievements in the mid-nineteenth century were not derived from, nor even
interdependent with provincial manufacturing towns: it was neither parasitic nor
ambiotic – it was separate, self-generating and highly successful.’ None the less,
there was a strong relationship between London and the provinces, in flows of
Modern London
6
A. Briggs, Victorian Cities (London, ), pp. –.
0
0
5 km
3 miles
1850
1914
Metropolitan Police District
London County Council
1960
City of London
Map . The boundaries and built-up area of London –
Source: modified from H. Clout and P. Wood, eds., London (Harlow, ).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
both labour and capital, especially for infrastructural projects such as railways,
and specialist financial and insurance services. By contrast, after , ‘London’s
own domestic problems were to force themselves forward as the national issues
of the moment.’ National policies were designed to solve metropolitan
problems.
7
The period between and may be considered transitional particu-
larly because of the city’s novel demographic experience, losing population
across an ever wider central area at the same time as it was growing physically
and numerically at the periphery. Until , ‘Greater London’ grew at a faster
rate than England as a whole. Until , even the area subject to the
Metropolitan Board of Works (later the County of London) was gaining popu-
lation more rapidly than England, but from to , the County grew more
slowly than the rest of the country. After , the LCC area started to lose pop-
ulation, such that ‘Greater London’ as a whole failed to keep up with the pop-
ulation growth of the rest of the country, and the proportion of the country’s
population resident in London peaked in at . per cent. The City, of
course, had long been in rapid decline as a place of residence: , residents
in , , sixty years later.
8
After the First World War, the County continued its gradual population
decrease, but outer London now grew so rapidly compared to the sluggish
increase elsewhere that in the s population growth in ‘Greater London’once
again outstripped the rate for England and Wales. Contemporaries concluded
that by London’s dominance was contrary to the national interest.
Compounding the interpretation of earlier observers, such as William Cobbett,
that London was a cancerous growth on the body of the nation, there was now
the fear that increasing geographical concentration of wealth and population
made the nation more vulnerable to air attack in time of war.
9
But, in most
respects, as David Feldman and Gareth Stedman Jones observed, the capital’s
primacy was just one of the ‘striking regularities and recurrences in London’s
history’. Continuing debates about racism and immigration policy can be com-
pared with agitation that prompted the passage of the Aliens Act in , a piece
of national legislation primarily intended to deal with a London problem; and
modern ideas of ‘underclass’ and ‘culture of poverty’ parallel the Victorian
concept of the residuum.
10
Porter, too, points to a congruence between late
nineteenth- and late twentieth-century London, for example comparing the
diagnoses offered by Mearns’ Bitter Cry of Outcast London and the Church of
Richard Dennis
17
The quotations are all from P. L. Garside, ‘London and the Home Counties’, in F. M. L.
Thompson, ed., The Cambridge Social History of Britain, –, vol. : Regions and Communities
(Cambridge, ), pp. , , .
8
Waller, Town, pp. –.
19
Garside, ‘London’, p. .
10
D. Feldman and G. Stedman Jones, ‘Introduction’, in D. Feldman and G. Stedman Jones, eds.,
Metropolis (London, ), pp. –.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
England’s Faith in the City.
11
Of course, there are also major differences: in
gender relations, in the role of women and as a consequence of the decline of
Empire. Such parallels and divergences illustrate how we constantly reinterpret
London’s history according to our own concerns, whether identifying the
origins of postmodern consumption practices in Victorian bazaars and depart-
ment stores, or re-evaluating the nineteenth-century manufacturing economy
in the context of more recent enthusiasm for ‘enterprise’ and ‘flexibility’.
(i)
Whatever else it may be, the period – constitutes the core of what
many cultural historians regard as ‘modern’. Writing about New York City in
the period –, David Ward and Olivier Zunz discuss modernity as the
combination of rational planning and cultural pluralism, the one creating order
– residential segregation, zoning, the efficient use of urban space – the other
reflecting the increasing diversity of urban populations.
12
To David Harvey,
order, mastery, rationality and planning are characteristics of the modern, in
contrast to the apparent chaos, relativism, diversity, even playfulness of the post-
modern.
13
But just as it has been argued that postmodernity is but a particular
kind of modernity, so we can envisage aspects of the postmodern in the modern
city of the late nineteenth century. For Marshall Berman, the roots of modern
urban life lie in the tension between enlightenment rationality and romanticism.
He traces the relationship between the discovery of self, self-knowledge and self-
identity on the one hand, and the organisation and ordering of society on the
other.
14
Berman’s argument, stressing the double-edged nature of modernity, provides
a framework for bringing together disparate themes in the history of London.
For example, we may set Charles Booth’s application of scientific principles to
survey, map and classify the people and places of London alongside George
Gissing’s novels which show how people experienced those places and con-
structed their own identities through their use of the city. We can interpret new
spaces – new streets like Charing Cross Road or Kingsway, new railway termini
and station hotels, department stores and chain stores, office blocks and facto-
ries, public parks and cemeteries, music halls and cinemas – as products of ratio-
nal planning and scientific management, but also as spaces for new kinds of
everyday life, and as potential spaces of resistance or subversion. James Winter
Modern London
11
Porter, London, pp. –.
12
D. Ward and O. Zunz, ‘Between rationalism and pluralism: creating the modern city’, in D. Ward
and O. Zunz, eds., The Landscape of Modernity (New York, ), pp. –.
13
D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford, ), pp. –.
14
M. Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air (London, ), pp. –. For Berman’s ideas criti-
cally applied to England, see M. Nava and A. O’Shea, eds., Modern Times (London, ).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
has noted how ‘Straighteners, regulators, cleansers, purifiers, conservationists,
and promoters of the municipal ideal, liberals most of them, tried to balance
their vision of a London that was ordered, rational, efficient, healthy, and safe,
in other words, “modern”, with a sense that the freedom of the public thorough-
fare disclosed what it meant to be English.’ It proved difficult to reconcile ‘the
metaphor of reform and a liberal devotion to individual self-determination’.
15
This is clearly demonstrated in Susan Pennybacker’s analysis of the failures of
LCC ‘Progressivism’ prior to the First World War. Far from making space for
personal freedom and self-fulfilment, the Progressive programme of regulation
and classification, embodied in public health officials, moral guardians, park
keepers, housing managers and licensing authorities, and designed to counter
fears of moral and physical degeneracy, legitimated the eugenics movement and
alienated the lower middle classes. In Pennybacker’s words, ‘intrusion and super-
vision were substituted for grander programmes of social amelioration or cultu-
ral enlightenment’.
16
This is not to deny an inherent modernity, which predated and continued
independently of the attempts of a modern council to regulate its reluctant cit-
izens. London was ‘modern’ despite the absence of effective planning. Positing
London as much as Paris as ‘capital of the nineteenth century’, on the basis of
‘its exemplary individualism’, Richard Sennett has suggested, first, that the
power of great landowners, especially in the West End, contrasting with the
weakness of metropolitan government, facilitated the development of a city of
class-homogeneous but disconnected spaces. London was characterised by estate
planning rather than town planning. But London also appeared excessively
orderly to Sennett (who has long advocated the positive aspects of disorder)
because what ‘planning’ there was, in the form of new roads and new public
transport networks (buses, railways, trams), was designed to encourage the free
movement of individuals but discourage the movement of organised groups.
17
It distanced Londoners from the environments through which they passed.
Winter noted as much in discussing ‘why so many early Victorians came to
define the city as a circulatory system rather than a fixed place’. Medical meta-
phors alluded to the need to remove ‘arterial obstructions’. Hence the need to
regulate traffic – the first traffic signal erected experimentally, but soon aban-
doned, in Parliament Square, in , and the eventual introduction of traffic
lights in ; the appointment of traffic constables from – and an ambiv-
alence towards street furniture, like drinking troughs and urinals, which utilised
new technology in their manufacture but slowed down the flow of both horses
and pedestrians. Streets were where one ‘walked briskly’. Less purposive behav-
iour was condemned as ‘loafing’ or ‘sauntering listlessly’, or made one liable to
Richard Dennis
15
J. Winter, London’s Teeming Streets, – (London, ), p. xi.
16
S. D. Pennybacker, A Vision for London, – (London, ), p. .
17
R. Sennett, Flesh and Stone (London, ), pp. –.
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prosecution under the Vagrancy Act, whereas the same behaviour in a park
would be tolerated as ‘strolling’ or ‘promenading’.
18
While new streets, railway lines and tramways made for faster, more purpos-
ive travel, other technological improvements made travel more comfortable. But
comfort is associated with rest. Movement became a more passive, as well as a
more private experience. Silence in travel was used to protect individual privacy.
So, Sennett concluded, drawing on Forster’s Howards End (), London
became ‘a city that seems to hold together socially precisely because people don’t
connect personally’.
19
The motto of Howards End was ‘only connect’, and the
interpersonal and cross-class connections that eventually occur, which allow
Forster’s characters to discover their own identities, are the results of displace-
ments and discord in their lives, occurrences which – for Sennett – were all too
rare in Edwardian London.
Howards End perfectly captures a dispirited view of London’s Faustian devel-
opment. Margaret Schlegel contemplated the demolition of her own home to
make way for a block of ‘Babylonian’ mansion flats: ‘In the streets of the city she
noted for the first time the architecture of hurry, and heard the language of hurry
on the mouths of its inhabitants – clipped words, formless sentences, potted
expressions of approval or disgust. Month by month things were stepping live-
lier, but to what goal?’When the Schlegels eventually achieved the promised land
of Howards End, an idyllic converted farmhouse in Hertfordshire, the shadow of
the metropolis was still there: ‘“London’s creeping.” She pointed over the
meadow – over eight or nine meadows, but at the end of them was a red rust.’
20
(ii) ’
In London still lacked any semblance of city-wide government. The City
Corporation was irrelevant as far as most of London was concerned, and the
Municipal Corporations Act had passed London by, though it could be argued
that some vestries were at least as efficient as some reformed corporations else-
where in the country. More often, London historians have condemned the ves-
tries as corrupt and apathetic, dominated by petty-minded tradesmen who
resented public spending. However suspicious of such assertions, we must
acknowledge that neither elite leadership nor participatory politics was very
evident in London’s local government.
21
Worries about public health did lead to some reforms – the creation of a
Metropolitan Commission of Sewers in and, in , the Metropolitan
Board of Works (MBW), its members elected by twenty-three ancient vestries
and fifteen new district boards which combined groups of small parishes. Briggs
Modern London
18
Winter, London’s Teeming Streets, pp. , –, –.
19
Sennett, Flesh, p. .
20
E. M. Forster, Howards End (London, ; Penguin edn), pp. –, .
21
J. Davis, Reforming London (Oxford, ).
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claimed that the area governed by the MBW was determined more by the exist-
ing network of drains and sewers than by any administrative logic, though a less
romantic explanation was that it corresponded to the registrar general’s
definition of London in the census. Despite its undoubted achievements –
Bazalgette’s sewers and the associated pumping stations, the Embankment,
Charing Cross Road, Shaftesbury Avenue and the beginnings of slum clearance
and rehousing – the indirectly elected MBW, packed with vestrymen of such
lengthy experience as to constitute a veritable gerontocracy, was a poor substi-
tute for democratic, London-wide government. Rejection of the latter by a royal
commission in , which claimed a lack of sufficient common interest among
inhabitants in different parts of the built-up area, represented a triumph for the
vestries. The royal commission had, however, suggested the creation of eight
large municipalities corresponding to the eight parliamentary boroughs into
which the metropolis was then divided, but this too had been turned down on
the grounds that they would be too large for effective local government.
22
When the London County Council eventually came into being as a product
of the Local Government Act, its powers were still quite limited. It had no
control over the police, who remained under Home Office authority, or educa-
tion (which was the responsibility of the London School Board), or administra-
tion of the poor law; and it inherited the Board of Works’ boundaries, which
were now even more illogical, given the physical growth of the metropolis since
. From the beginning, therefore, almost all of London’s population growth
occurred beyond the boundaries of the new county; and from onwards,
the population of the LCC area was in decline. The LCC was established by a
Conservative central government, but at the first – now direct – elections, a
Liberal-Progressive majority was returned, which retained control until .
Lord Salisbury anticipated that the radicals would soon lose popular support, but
when this failed to occur, the Conservative-sponsored London Municipal
Society was formed to press for decentralisation of the Council’s powers to a
strengthened lower tier of municipal authorities. The result was the balancing of
the LCC by twenty-eight metropolitan boroughs, an arrangement that contin-
ued from into the s.
23
What was the effect of this arrangement on the LCC, and how far did local
populations identify with the new boroughs? According to Garside
In practice, the new structure did not diminish the power of the LCC. Indeed, it
could be argued that the LCC’s broader vision was strengthened. With the met-
ropolitan borough councils offering a focus for parochial pride, the LCC could
more easily insulate itself from local interests, projecting and developing a London-
wide base as a framework for policy and decision-making.
24
Richard Dennis
22
Briggs, Victorian Cities, p. ; D. Owen, The Government of Victorian London, –
(Cambridge, Mass., and London, ); Davis, Reforming London.
23
K. Young and P. Garside, Metropolitan London (London, ), pp. –, .
24
Garside, ‘London’, p. .
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Yet the LCC’s record does not really bear out this strategic role. The Council
eventually took control of education, trams and poor law infirmaries. By the
s, it owned bridges and tunnels across the Thames, miles of
tramway, parks, fire stations, mental hospitals, and more than ,
schools. Nevertheless, housing apart, the LCC did little to change the physical
structure of London. For example, it laid out far fewer new streets than its sup-
posedly lethargic predecessor, the Metropolitan Board of Works;
25
and the
Labour-controlled LCC after showed no interest in planning that extended
beyond its county boundaries. Wider proposals for regional planning were con-
demned by the chairman of the LCC Town Planning Committee as ‘fascist’ and
‘un-British’.
26
It is difficult to see how the LCC could plan with much vision
when it only had responsibility for the declining inner parts of a rapidly expand-
ing whole.
As for the new boroughs, there was some scepticism as to whether their res-
idents would identify with them. H. G. Wells claimed that localism was being
eroded by every new form of communication. Philip Waller observes that ‘Civic
pride in most London districts had to be contrived.’ Londoners naturally
identified with localities, not with boroughs. Yet in some cases, the construction
of local identity was remarkably successful: for example, in the socialist fiefdoms
of Poplar and Bermondsey.
27
For Wells the solution to London’s problems lay in a ‘Greater London’ that
would embrace the entire commuting population of the Home Counties. Part
of the logic underlying the creation of the LCC had been the need to equalise
rates between poor and rich districts, such that the West End would contribute
to solving the problems of the East End. Geographically, too, the problems of
poor districts were not to be solved in situ but elsewhere, in suburbs that lay
outside the County of London. In the richest parish – St James, Piccadilly
– had a rateable value per head that was nearly seven times that of the poorest
parish – Bethnal Green. To yield an equivalent income, a much higher rate in
the pound had to be levied in poor areas. East End vestries also complained that,
although they contributed on an equal basis to the MBW, most of the Board’s
expenditure was concentrated in central London. By , the gap had widened:
St Martin-in-the-Fields had a per capita valuation thirteen times that of Mile
End.
28
By then a programme of rate equalisation and fiscal integration of the
City and second-tier authorities had been implemented, but most suburbs with
Modern London
25
Porter, London, p. .
26
Garside, ‘West End’, p. .
27
Waller, Town, p. ; for Wells, see Porter, London, p. , Garside, ‘West End’, pp. –; on
Poplar, see J. Gillespie, ‘Poplarism and proletarianism: unemployment and Labour politics in
London, –’, in Feldman and Stedman Jones, eds., Metropolis, pp. –, G. Rose,
‘Locality, politics, and culture: Poplar in the s’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space,
(), –, G. Rose, ‘Imagining Poplar in the s: contested concepts of community’,
Journal of Historical Geography, (), –; on Bermondsey, see E. Lebas, ‘When every street
became a cinema: the film work of Bermondsey Borough Council’s public-health department,
–’, History Workshop Jour nal, (), –.
28
Davis, Reforming London, pp. –.
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