Daunton M. The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Volume 3: 1840-1950
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build in the West End, or around the edges of the City (the so-called ‘inner
industrial perimeter’where there were plenty of regularly employed artisans who
could afford two or three rooms at rents of s. to s. per room), or on slum clear-
ance sites where they could drive a hard bargain to acquire land relatively
cheaply. At the time of Booth’s survey, only . per cent of the population of
Tower Hamlets lived in philanthropic block dwellings, compared to . per cent
of the population in Westminster. Yet . per cent of people in Tower Hamlets
fell into Booth’s classes A and B (the poorest), compared to only . per cent in
Westminster. ‘Levelling up’ could only work, therefore, if the poor could be
mobile over quite long distances.
52
Not all MBW sites proved attractive to the model dwellings agencies. The
LCC inherited several cleared sites, mostly in the East End, which the MBW
had been unable to sell. One interpretation of the origin of council housing in
London is, therefore, that the LCC was forced into seeking powers to redevelop
clearance sites itself because of the reluctance of the model dwellings movement
to work in ‘difficult’ areas. Under a Progressive LCC the development of council
housing took on a more positive character and estates such as Boundary Street
in the East End, the Millbank Estate beside the then new Tate Gallery and the
Bourne Estate in Holborn included some of the most distinctive domestic archi-
tecture in the capital. But the LCC was still reluctant to build in the poorest parts
of east and south-east London, for example when required to provide replace-
ment dwellings for those demolished in the approaches to the Blackwall ()
and Rotherhithe () Tunnels, recognising that local people were too poor to
afford the rents charged for new flats under financial constraints that obliged the
council to seek some return on its housing investment. The consequence was
much higher vacancy and eviction rates on estates near the docks than in central
London.
53
As important as inner-city redevelopment was the adoption of a ‘suburban
solution’. Under Part III of the Housing Act local authorities were author-
ised to acquire green-field sites for public housing, and under a further act in
these powers were extended to include land outside their own boundaries.
By the time the Moderates ousted the Progressives from power, the LCC had
begun four ‘cottage estates’, two just inside county boundaries (Totterdown
Fields and Old Oak) and two out-county (White Hart Lane and Norbury). Each
was dependent on the provision of good public transport: for example, the
LCC’s own electric trams linked Totterdown to Westminster from . None
the less, the estates initially proved hard to let and, in practice, drew tenants from
the surrounding districts of Surrey and Middlesex as much as from inner
London. The ‘suburban solution’ was attractive in terms of development costs –
Richard Dennis
52
Ibid., –, –.
53
Wohl, Eternal Slum, pp. –; S. Beattie, A Revolution in London Housing (London, ); R.
Dennis, ‘“Hard to let” in Edwardian London’, Urban Studies, (), –.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
land at Totterdown cost £ per dwelling compared to £ on LCC estates in
central London – and because of the presumed healthiness of the urban periph-
ery, but a problem for working-class suburbanisation before the First World War
was the absence of suburban industry on any large scale. In a new wave of inter-
war council estates, suburban housing was matched by the location of new
industries, either on industrial estates, for example at Park Royal and Greenford
in west London, at Wembley (on the site of the British Empire Exhibition of
–) and in Collier’s Wood in south London, or lining new ‘arterial’ roads –
Western Avenue, the Great West Road, the North Circular Road and the
Kingston By-Pass – themselves built ahead of demand as unemployment relief
projects. The largest estate, Becontree, was close to Ford’s new works at
Dagenham; the St Helier estate, on the fringes of Sutton and Merton, was near
south London industrial estates, but also served by the southward extension of
the Northern Line to Morden in , and by a new electrified branch of the
Southern Railway which provided an all-night service to the city termini of
Blackfriars and Holborn Viaduct, making the estate popular with postal sorting
office workers and newspaper printers who worked unsocial hours.
54
Families allocated houses on out-county estates were usually an elite among
council tenants, who had already proved themselves clean, respectable and reli-
able rentpayers. But suburban local authorities feared that their presence would
raise crime rates, cause increases in local rates (to pay for new educational and
welfare facilities) and lower property values, and that they would all vote Labour
in otherwise solidly Conservative constituencies. County councils and urban
districts combined to purchase vacant land to prevent its falling into the hands
of the LCC, for example in Morden, when an extension to the St Helier estate
was threatened. Community services, shops, doctors and hospitals often took a
long time coming, prompting local residents to organise services themselves – a
classic example of local community formation in the face of crisis, as occurred,
for example, on the Watling estate in Burnt Oak.
55
Curiously, given the Moderates’ ideological opposition to suburban council
housing, all these interwar out-county estates were begun while the LCC was
Moderate/Conservative controlled. Under a Labour LCC after , policy
changed to favour inner-area redevelopment with blocks of flats, a reflection also
of central government’s changed priorities under the Greenwood Act (). It
was assumed that private house builders could look after the suburbs. LCC
housing in the s was concentrated in only a few boroughs – those which
were happy to cooperate with the LCC. Other boroughs undertook extensive
Modern London
54
Jackson, Semi-Detached London, pp. –, –; Young and Garside, Metropolitan London, pp.
–; H. Clout, ed., The Times London History Atlas (London, ), pp. –.
55
Weightman and Humphries, Making –, pp. –; R. Durant, ‘Community and asso-
ciation in a London Housing Estate’, in R. E. Pahl, ed., Readings in Urban Sociology (Oxford, ),
pp. –; A. Olechnowicz, Working-Class Housing in England between the Wars (Oxford, ).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
rehousing schemes of their own; and some Conservative-controlled boroughs
built almost no council housing but encouraged charitable societies to provide
working-class dwellings by offering sites at peppercorn rents in return for rights
to nominate tenants. For example, the Peabody and Sutton Trusts erected exten-
sive estates in west London boroughs including Kensington, Chelsea and
Fulham; while the St Pancras House Improvement Society, founded in at
the initiative of a local clergyman, was active in Somers Town (between Euston
and St Pancras Stations).
56
Overall, local authorities provided , new dwellings in Greater London
between and , but private developers erected over ,, mostly for
owner-occupation. Privately rented housing was already in decline, although
one kind of private renting that flourished was in response to the popularity of
‘mansion flats’, usually ‘moderne’ in style, marketed as efficient, labour-saving
homes for single people, newly weds and an increasing number of independent
working women. In the late nineteenth century, luxury flats were concentrated
mainly in Victoria and Kensington, though there were also some more modest
blocks in middle-class suburbs: Gissing’s model of a ‘new woman’, Beatrice
French, moved to a bachelor flat in Brixton. Until the First World War, flats were
regarded with suspicion by most Londoners, partly because they were too close
in appearance to the barrack-like block dwellings of philanthropic agencies, but
also because they were associated with a morally suspect, bohemian lifestyle.
Beatrice French’s sister accused her: ‘She lives alone in a flat, and has men to
spend every evening with her; it’s disgraceful!’ In The Whirlpool, the extravagant,
irresponsible and, significantly, childless Hugh and Sybil Carnaby took a flat in
Oxford & Cambridge Mansions (a real block, erected in – near Edgware
Road station); and in Howards End, Forster opined ‘flats house a flashy type of
person’. But by the s flats had become a less contentious part of London
life. The largest new blocks included Du Cane Court in Balham ( flats) and
Dolphin Square, Pimlico (, flats), but altogether, more than , suites
were provided in Greater London in more than , blocks.
57
There were block dwellings in a few other English cities (and tenements were
common in Scottish cities), but philanthropic and council flats and luxury apart-
ments were particularly associated with London. They were a direct conse-
quence of its size and status as capital city. Land values were too high to allow
low-density housing except on the urban fringe, but many people needed to
live centrally, both artisans and service workers providing for the needs of the
Richard Dennis
56
Young and Garside, Metropolitan London, pp. –; LCC, London Housing (London, ), pp.
–.
57
Tarn, ‘French flats’; C. Hamnett and B. Randolph, ‘The rise and fall of London’s purpose-built
blocks of privately rented flats: –’, LJ, (), –; Gissing, Jubilee, pp. , –,
; Gissing, Whirlpool, pp. –; Forster, Howards End, p. .
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leisured classes, and entertainers, politicians, bankers and stockbrokers who
required pieds à terre close to the West End, parliament or the City.
(iv)
All kinds of multi-family building also presented problems concerning the way
in which space was actually used. How were the common parts of blocks of flats
(staircases, courtyards, shared toilets and sculleries in some working-class build-
ings) to be administered? Where was the threshold between public and private
space? The spatial organisation of London was not just a static matter of where
different classes were recorded as ‘resident’, or where different land uses were
located. We must also consider how people used space, how places acquired sym-
bolic significance and how they were appropriated for use by different groups.
There is a wealth of anecdotal and autobiographical evidence on how fre-
quently Londoners moved house. Most households rented from private land-
lords. There was no security of tenure, but moving costs were minimal. Two
surveys in the s of working-class families in Westminster and St-George-in-
the-East found that per cent and per cent of families had lived in their
present home for less than a year. Yet Charles Booth observed that migration was
often circular, people ‘cling[ing] from generation to generation to one vicinity,
almost as if the set of streets which lie there were an isolated country village’. In
Battersea, for example, moves were frequent, but ‘seldom further than three
streets away, and a year or two will very probably witness the return of the exiles
to within a few doors of one of their many forsaken homes’. Almost per cent
of applicants for poor relief in St Giles had lived in the district for more than ten
years.
58
A graphic example of frequent but short-distance mobility is provided
in A Hoxton Childhood, an autobiographical account of childhood in East
London before and during the First World War. Between and the
Jasper family lived at nine different addresses, all less than a mile from father’s
‘local’ and from all but one of the places where family members worked. The
implication is that, although large numbers passed through working-class districts,
perhaps en route to suburbia, sufficient remained to develop a cohesive and ter-
ritorially restricted sense of community, a pattern confirmed by Michael Young
and Peter Willmott’s survey of family life in Bethnal Green in the s.
59
It seems likely that rates of residential mobility declined dramatically after
. When the Jasper family were forced to leave their Hoxton home in ,
Modern London
58
D. R. Green and A. G. Parton, ‘Slums and slum life in Victorian England: London and
Birmingham at mid-century’, in Gaskell, ed., Slums, pp. , –; C. Booth, Life and Labour of
the People (London, ), vol. , p. ; Labour and Life of the People (London, ), vol. , p. .
59
A. S. Jasper, A Hoxton Childhood (London, ); M. Young and P. Willmott, Family and Kinship
in East London (London, ).
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the acute housing shortage obliged them to accept the offer of a house in
Walthamstow, miles ( km) away. For those fortunate enough to have a per-
manent home, there was little prospect of moving. On one Peabody Trust estate
in central London, the tenant turnover rate in the s was less than a third of
what it had been in the s.
60
The increasing importance of council housing
and owner-occupation made for bureaucratic and financial constraints to fre-
quent mobility, but the availability of affordable public transport also meant that
families no longer needed to move whenever household members changed
workplaces.
So we can observe a lengthening in journeys to work. Among the employees
of a Savile Row tailor, fewer than per cent travelled more than miles ( km)
to work in the s and s compared with more than per cent in the
s. Of , workers at Carreras cigarette factory in Camden Town in ,
only one third lived within comfortable walking distance, another third made
the lengthy trek from east London, and nearly one eighth commuted from parts
of the Home Counties outside the London postal area. The number of journeys
per annum per Londoner by public transport increased from in to
in , with travel by bus becoming much more significant.
61
So Londoners
became familiar with wider areas of the metropolis at the same time as they
retreated out of clubs and pubs and into the private home for more of their
leisure time.
But urban space was also used more self-consciously. Chartist demonstrators
assembled on Kennington Common in south London in . An equivalent
locale for political protest north of the river was Copenhagen Fields, near King’s
Cross. Both places were effectively neutralised during the s. In
Copenhagen Fields became the site for the Metropolitan Cattle Market, while
in Kennington Common was converted into the more decorous
Kennington Park, complete with formal walks, flowerbeds, children’s play-
ground and a park keeper’s lodge that had previously been a prototype set of
model dwellings displayed at the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park. Nobody was
likely to start a revolution in these surroundings. Victoria Park in east London,
opened in , occupied another site of radical political protest. While public
meetings continued to be held in the wide open spaces of the park, they now
competed with the rational recreation offered by bandstand, bathing pool and
boating lakes.
62
Richard Dennis
60
Peabody Trust Archives, Herbrand Street Tenants’ Register.
61
D. R. Green, ‘Distance to work in Victorian London: a case study of Henry Poole, bespoke
tailors’, Business History, (), –; Clout, London History Atlas, p. ; D. R. Green, ‘The
metropolitan economy: continuity and change –’, in K. Hoggart and D. R. Green, eds.,
London (London, ), pp. –.
62
B. Elliott, ‘Victorian parks’, in M. Galinou, ed., London’s Pride:The Glorious History of the Capital’s
Gardens (London, ), pp. –; F. Sheppard, London –:The Infernal Wen (London,
), pp. , –, ; C. Poulsen, Victoria Park (London, ).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Perhaps the most critical site of contestation was Trafalgar Square, a place for
ephemeral popular celebration or demonstration, as well as of permanent icono-
graphic significance, embracing Nelson’s Column (), Landseer’s lions ()
and statues to various monarchs, admirals and generals. Following unemploy-
ment demonstrations in –, including the ‘invasion’ of Pall Mall by
‘King Mob’ and immediately preceding the following year’s ‘Bloody Sunday’
when a member of the Social Democratic Federation died after clashes between
demonstrators and police, the right of public assembly in Trafalgar Square was
withdrawn until . Waller comments that the demonstrations ‘raised the
spectre of sansculottism in clubland. Shopkeepers petitioned the authorities to
close the West End to demonstrators; and it was feared that American tourists
would shy away from new hotels like the Grand () and Metropole ().’
63
We can see here the range of different interest groups laying claim to the same
space. For working-class protestors, occupying Trafalgar Square was an act of sol-
idarity boosting their own confidence, demonstrating their own power and pub-
licising their cause through force of numbers. For local tradesmen their presence
undermined the consumer economy (much like terrorist outrages more
recently). For members of Pall Mall clubs, it was a violation of the natural order.
At times of celebration, such as Queen Victoria’s Golden and Diamond
Jubilees, Trafalgar Square was a place to be lost in the crowd, particularly
significant for women who might not normally have such freedom. Gissing’s
Samuel Barmby organised his contingent of Camberwell excursionists: ‘We can’t
be wrong in making for Trafalgar Square’, but for Nancy, there was the oppor-
tunity to get lost in crowds pressing along Pall Mall: ‘No one observed her sol-
itary state; she was one of millions walking about the streets because it was
Jubilee Day, and every moment packed her more tightly among the tramping
populace. A procession, this, greatly more significant than that of Royal person-
ages earlier in the day.’
64
The freedom of women on the city streets has attracted the attention of fem-
inist historians, initially propounding a ‘separate spheres’ argument that in a
patriarchal society women were excluded from public and commercial life and
confined to an increasingly remote, suburban domestic sphere, but more recently
qualifying that thesis by demonstrating the independence that women had
attained. By the late nineteenth century, middle-class women could take advan-
tage of more comfortable public transport to visit West End department stores.
When Selfridge’s opened in , it proclaimed itself ‘dedicated to the service
of women’ and offered attractions such as restaurants, writing, reading and rest
rooms, and hairdressers, the female equivalent of a gentleman’s club. Nor was
Modern London
63
Waller, Town, p. ; see also R. Mace, Trafalgar Square: Emblem of Empire (London, ); G.
Stedman Jones, Outcast London (Oxford, ), pp. –.
64
Gissing, Jubilee, pp. , . A useful discussion and further illustrations of street life are included
in R. Allen, The Moving Pageant (London, ).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
the West End restricted to the wealthiest women and the shopgirls who served
them. Carrie Pooter patronised the local Bon Marché in Holloway, but she also
visited Shoolbred’s in Tottenham Court Road, Liberty’s (Regent Street) and
Peter Robinson’s (Oxford Circus).
65
From the s lower-middle-class women might travel alone by bus, because
they would be under the protective gaze of a conductor. Better-off women
might summon their servants to escort them through ‘dangerous’ areas, appar-
ently oblivious that the servant, probably younger and more attractive to men,
might then have to make the return journey on her own. But women’s freedom
on the streets was still subject to the control of men:
a fashionably dressed, middle-class Victorian or Edwardian lady could spend a
pleasant afternoon shopping on Regent Street and expect to be treated by the
police and passers-by with courtesy (provided she knew not to linger too long in
front of certain shop windows), but if she remained on that fashionable street,
unescorted, after the lamps were lit, she risked insult and loss of reputation.
Women might be prosecuted for soliciting on no more evidence than that they
were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
66
Working-class street life was a good deal more boisterous. A problem of
working-class suburbanisation was the loss of this everyday sociability. In the
suburbs there were fewer street markets affording opportunities for social inter-
action as much as for economical shopping; and fewer opportunities for infor-
mal employment, such as assisting neighbours with laundry and child-minding;
and as Young and Wilmott demonstrated in their studies of family and kinship
in the s, suburbanisation reduced the likelihood of living near and making
frequent visits to parents, inlaws and siblings.
67
There were also elite spaces, occupied according to the routine of the ‘London
Season’ – riding in Hyde Park’s Rotten Row in the mornings, but driving (in a
carriage) in the late afternoon. At various times, the West End expanded to
incorporate Ascot (racing), Henley (rowing), Bisley (shooting) or, closer at hand,
Hurlingham (polo). These were semi-private gatherings, but the public could
view them at a distance: ‘pageants of splendour’. Other indoor, and therefore
more private, elite spaces reflected the increasing commodification of leisure –
Richard Dennis
65
M. Nava, ‘Modernity’s disavowal: women, the city and the department store’, in Nava and
O’Shea, eds., Modern Times, pp. –; A. Adburgham, Shopping in Style (London, ), pp.
–; Clout, London History Atlas, pp. –; for Carrie Pooter, see G. and W. Grossmith, The
Diary of a Nobody (London, ; Penguin edn), pp. , , , . See also E. Rappaport,
Shopping for Pleasure (Princeton, ).
66
Winter, London’s Teeming Streets, pp. –, –; J. R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight
(London and Chicago, ), pp. –, –; see also the discussions in E. Wilson, The Sphinx
in the City (London, ), and D. E. Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets (Ithaca, ).
67
Young and Willmott, Family and Kinship; P. Willmott and M. Young, Family and Class in a London
Suburb (London, ).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
in restaurants, gentlemen’s clubs, concentrated along Pall Mall from the s,
and concert halls such as Queen’s Hall (), which accommodated Henry
Wood’s new Promenade Concerts from until its destruction in . The
Schlegel sisters first encountered Leonard Bast when he sat next to them at a
recital in the Queen’s Hall, an indication that cultural events might extend across
class boundaries, albeit uncomfortably.
68
Until the s working-class interlopers and passing trade were excluded
from elite residential areas by more than privately erected gates. Their even-
tual dismantling perhaps reflected a democratisation of public space: ‘Notions
about public rights to the collective consumption of physical infrastructure . . .
were indeed developing in the second half of the nineteenth century.’
69
But the
rich could maintain their privacy by moving out, to remote suburbs such as
Moor Park and Virginia Water, now centred on the golf club rather than the
public square, or up, as the penthouse flat became both technologically feasible
and fashionable.
(v)
The economy of Victorian London has often been characterised as technolog-
ically backward, effectively ‘pre-industrial’ in its manufacturing, typified by an
absence of factories and a continuing preponderance of small-scale workshops.
According to the census, per cent of employers had fewer than ten
employees; only eighty firms employed more than workers. But the infer-
ence that London’s manufacturing was therefore weak, and that London’s depen-
dence on services was also a sign of weakness, is unjustified. It reflects a particular
ideology, that industry is ‘basic’ while services are ‘non-basic’ or even parasitic.
It also reflects a misconception of industry elsewhere in nineteenth-century
Britain. Steam-powered, large-scale factory production was not so dominant,
even in the textile districts.
70
An alternative interpretation of London’s economy is that, far from being par-
asitic, the growth of services was the foundation for London’s success. Between
and more than half of all new jobs in Britain were in services, one fifth
of them in London and Middlesex. The prosperity of the South-East, and the
wealth-creating effects of service industry, were indicated by the large numbers of
millionaires based in and around London, most owing their wealth to commerce
Modern London
68
L. Davidoff, The Best Circles (London, ), pp. , –, ; Forster, Howards End, pp. –.
69
P. J. Atkins, ‘How the West End was won: the struggle to remove street barriers in Victorian
London’, Journal of Historical Geography, (), .
70
Stedman Jones, Outcast London, p. ; M. J. Daunton, ‘Industry in London: revisions and
reflections’, LJ, (), –; D. R. Green, ‘The nineteenth-century metropolitan economy: a
revisionist interpretation’, LJ, (), ; P. Johnson, ‘Economic development and industrial
dynamism in Victorian London’, LJ, (), –.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
rather than industry.
71
Even if we agree with Paul Johnson that London was not
disproportionately endowed with service employment, we cannot deny that
London’s service economy was a source of strength rather than weakness.
Johnson’s own approach focuses on ‘the role of incentives, profits, informa-
tion flows, institutional structures, competition and small-scale enterprise in
London’s economic development’. He argues that there is nothing new about
the enterprise economy. It was flourishing in the s as much as the s,
based upon good communications and a fast and efficient flow of information,
so that producers, distributors, retailers and consumers could all react quickly to
changing conditions; and upon a fluidity and mobility of population that under-
mined traditional forms of social ranking and class consciousness, promoting an
individualistic, materialist culture. So the structure of industries like the East End
clothing industry – lots of small workshops and little security of employment –
was ‘a modern response to competitive pressures rather than a hangover from
pre-industrial traditions’ and ‘the workshop trades of Victorian London had
most of the attributes now identified as the key elements of post-modern indus-
trial capitalism’.
72
As final proof of success, Johnson points to relatively low rates
of unemployment and an increasingly affluent working class. Even in , in
the midst of depression, when the national unemployment rate was . per
cent, London’s rate was . per cent; and between and the level of
real wages in London more than doubled.
73
Johnson’s thesis is exemplified by the East End garment industry where, par-
ticularly in the women’s wear industry, firms remained small in order to respond
to the vagaries of fashion. No producer could be sure they would have the right
design. But if their design flopped, they could always act as subcontractors to
firms with successful designs, who would not have the capacity to meet all their
orders. The result was a pattern of many small firms, mutually interdependent
yet collectively competitive: what Alfred Marshall earlier in the century termed
an ‘industrial district’.
74
However, we should not accept so readily that London was so totally domi-
nated by small firms. The census of employers concentrated on direct
employment and ignored subcontracting, yet many subcontractors were
effectively the employees of other firms. The census was notoriously incomplete
– directory evidence suggests that there were many more firms with more than
employees than the census enumerated. What mainly distinguished London
Richard Dennis
71
C. H. Lee, ‘Regional growth and structural change in Victorian Britain’, Ec.HR, (),
–; C. H. Lee, ‘The service sector, regional specialisation and economic growth in the
Victorian economy’, Journal of Historical Geography, (), –; W. D. Rubinstein, Men of
Property (London, ).
72
Johnson, ‘Economic development’, , .
73
Green, ‘Metropolitan economy’, pp. , .
74
A. Godley, ‘Immigrant entrepreneurs and the emergence of London’s East End as an industrial
district’, LJ, (), –; A. Marshall, Industry and Trade (London, ).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
from other places was the number of masters who failed to state the size of their
workforce. Additional evidence often used to support the traditional picture,
such as Henry Mayhew’s emphasis on small masters, should also be discounted:
Mayhew concentrated on the poorest trades and ignored those characterised by
more prosperous employers and larger units of production, and he wrote at the
end of a long downturn in the economy, when many workers would have turned
in desperation to self-employment. In practice, therefore, London’s employment
structure was bi-polar, with a few large employers dominating some trades.
Johnson’s logic assumes that there was a high degree of stability in the London
economy, and that large firms developed only in conditions of instability and
inefficient market forces. On the surface, it would appear that London’s economy
was stable. The diversity of different forms of manufacturing should have meant
less dramatic boom and bust cycles compared to single-industry regions like the
North-West. Finishing trades that predominated in London were also less sus-
ceptible to wild fluctuations in demand than producer industries elsewhere.
However, David Green shows that London manufacturers were vulnerable to
downturns in trade and financial dealing. When a speculative bubble burst, as
with the collapse of Overend and Gurney in , ‘the chill was felt . . . through-
out the local economy’. For most of the nineteenth century there were marked
cyclical fluctuations in building construction, trade and numbers of bankrupt-
cies, all likely to have knock-on effects on London’s manufacturing.
75
Nor were London workers as apolitical as traditionally claimed. Large
numbers of strikes and trade disputes occurred throughout the nineteenth
century. For Stedman Jones, a lack of political or community activity on the part
of London’s working class, a preference for the pub and the music hall rather
than the trade union, was a ‘culture of consolation’;
76
for Johnson it was the indi-
vidualistic satisfaction of the affluent worker. To Green, they are both trying to
explain away an imaginary absence. Some support for his view also comes from
John Davis’analysis of radical clubs and London politics at the end of the century.
Until the s radical workingmen’s clubs continued to be highly political but,
thereafter, as the movement grew in numerical strength, so it declined politically.
As clubs moved out of rented meeting rooms in pubs and into their own club-
rooms, so they faced new financial responsibilities. They needed more members
to spend more money at the bar, and could not afford to impose political tests
on new members. Meanwhile, the political information and opinions that had
previously been dispensed through club lectures were now available through a
thriving popular press. To Davis, therefore, the changing emphasis in club activ-
ities was consistent with an evolution rather than a simple decline in labour pol-
itics. Moreover, the inner suburbs to which artisans were moving were socially
Modern London
75
Green, ‘The nineteenth-century metropolitan economy’, ; see also D. R. Green, From Artisans
to Paupers (Aldershot, ).
76
G. Stedman Jones, Languages of Class (Cambridge, ), pp. –.
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