Daunton M. The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Volume 3: 1840-1950
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homogeneous but occupationally mixed: clubs became home- rather than trade-
based. None the less, they continued to be electorally active, in sponsoring can-
didates and canvassing. Most clubs supported a radicalised Liberal party, which
slowed down the move to independent Labour politics, and when the Labour
party did eventually emerge in interwar London, it was in response to the decline
of the Liberal party nationally.
77
Geographically, two principal trends characterised the location of industry in
nineteenth-century London. A shift from West End to East End was associated
with a relative shift from made-to-measure for wealthy customers who lived
nearby to ‘slop’ manufacture for a generalised mass market of the new lower
middle class and skilled working class, with de-skilling through a finer division
of labour, and with the employment of more female labour. By mid-century an
inner industrial perimeter had emerged, stretching in a semi-circle from
Holborn and Clerkenwell, north of the City, to Bow and the Isle of Dogs in the
east, then to Deptford and Lambeth in the south. Associated with this pattern,
there were separate labour markets, with different traditions of trade union activ-
ity, to the north-west, in the East End, and south of the Thames. These divi-
sions reflected the limited mobility of labour and restricted information flows,
but later in the century, different trades attempted to establish London-wide
wage rates and conditions of employment.
78
A second geographical trend, developing later, was the beginnings of out-
movement, often to escape high rates and an increasing range of LCC controls
on the conduct of noxious trades and on workshop conditions. Many manufac-
turers sought sites outside the jurisdiction of the LCC, especially in West Ham,
Stratford and the Lea Valley which, thanks to the peculiar county boundary, were
closer to central London than many districts within the County of London.
79
If London’s nineteenth-century economy was ‘postmodern’, interwar manu-
facturing was traditionally ‘modern’. Marxist geographers like David Harvey
have explored the role of suburbanisation and the creation of mass markets as
solutions to problems of capital accumulation and a declining rate of profit. They
argue that industrial capitalism needed constantly to generate new products and
markets, partly through a ‘spatial fix’.
80
The suburbs and an associated cult of
domesticity were one kind of spatial fix, the Empire was another. Hence the
development of new Fordist and scientifically managed assembly-line factories,
Richard Dennis
77
J. Davis, ‘Radical clubs and London politics, –’, in Feldman and Stedman Jones, eds.,
Metropolis, pp. –.
78
D. R. Green, ‘A map for Mayhew’s London’, LJ, (), –; Green, ‘Metropolitan
economy’, pp. –; E. Hobsbawm, ‘The nineteenth-century London labour market’, in R.
Glass et al., eds., London (London, ), pp. –.
79
P. Hall, The Industries of London since (London, ); Marriott, ‘West Ham’.
80
D. Harvey, The Urbanization of Capital (Oxford, ), pp. –; R. A. Walker, ‘A theory of sub-
urbanization’, in M. Dear and A. J. Scott, eds., Urbanization and Urban Planning in Capitalist Society
(London, ), pp. –.
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producing consumer durables for the home market and generally more robust
items, such as buses and lorries, for the colonies. The factories themselves were
also modern architecturally, including the Hoover factory in Perivale and a
ribbon of art deco constructions such as the Firestone and Gillette buildings
lining the Great West Road. Manufacturers took advantage of cheaper electric-
ity – the creation of a Central Electricity Board () and the beginnings of a
national grid, which obviated the need for locally and expensively produced
electricity – which also benefited the potential purchasers and users of domes-
tic appliances such as vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, irons, washing machines
and radios. During the Depression, over per cent of new factories in England
and Wales were located in the London region; but while outer London had a
net gain of more than factories between and , the LCC area
suffered a net loss of nearly .
81
None the less, London’s economy depended more on consumption than pro-
duction, on retailing than manufacture. William Whiteley, who opened his first
store in Bayswater in , soon claimed to be ‘the universal provider’. In
his store was described as ‘an immense symposium of the arts and industries of
the nations and of the world’, a phrase which deliberately invited comparison
with the Great Exhibition and with more permanent exhibitions of imperial
spoils in the South Kensington museums, and which rivalled Harrods’ tele-
graphic address: ‘Everything London’. Whiteley’s moved to new purpose-built
premises in , only two years after the opening of Selfridge’s, and the inter-
war years witnessed a rash of rebuildings as overgrown drapers’ re-dressed them-
selves as modern department stores. Mass consumption was also associated with
the growth of chain stores, such as Marks and Spencer. None of these forms of
retailing was unique to London, of course, but they assumed particular
significance in the London economy as an additional incentive for consumer
tourism, from the provinces but also the world.
82
(vi)
If London was a candidate for ‘capital of the nineteenth century’, it was also –
so Londoners were constantly assured – ‘the political, moral, physical, intellec-
tual, artistic, literary, commercial and social centre of the world’. From
London was even at the centre of time: the world revolved around the
Greenwich meridian and GMT.
83
Sidney Webb appealed to imperial sentiments
Modern London
81
Green, ‘Metropolitan economy’, pp. –; Weightman and Humphries, Making –, pp.
–.
82
Olsen, Growth, pp. –; Clout, London History Atlas, pp. –; Porter, London, pp. –,
.
83
Routledge’s Guide (), quoted in A. D. King, Global Cities (London, ), p. ; Porter,
London, p. .
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to gain support for the Fabians’ London Programme (): ‘If only for the sake of
the rest of the Empire, the London masses must be organised for a campaign
against the speculators, vestry jobbers, house farmers, water sharks, market
monopolists, ground landlords, and other social parasites now feeding upon their
helplessness. Metropolitan reform has become a national, if not an imperial
question.’
84
Garside notes that conservative reformers, opposed to municipal
socialism and civic expenditure, none the less ‘remained receptive to arguments
about the need for housing reform in the interests of the Nation, the Race and
the Empire’.
85
Until the mid-nineteenth century, London’s trading connections were pre-
dominantly with Europe and North America. The first wave of dock building
anticipated more than it responded to the growth of imperial trade. By the end
of the century, as again in the s, the strength of London’s trade with the
Empire/Commonwealth reflected a resort to ‘easier’ export markets, faced with
increasing competition from the United States and Western Europe. It was prin-
cipally after that trade in the Port of London concentrated on Canada,
India, South Africa, Australasia and the Argentine. But trade with the
Commonwealth did not reach its peak until after the Second World War, when
it accounted for about half of the port’s imports and exports. The
Commonwealth Preference System, introduced in the s, maintained free
trade with the Commonwealth, still very much to the advantage of the home
country, while protective tariffs were being reimposed elsewhere. One reason for
industrial expansion in s London was that the introduction of tariffs forced
international (especially US) firms to locate manufacturing plants in Britain if
they wanted to compete in the British and Commonwealth market. So, Tony
King notes, ‘as late-nineteenth-century London had grown because of free trade
so, in the s, her economy grew because of the breakdowns in free trade’.
86
The imperial connection was expressed in numerous ways in the built envi-
ronment of London: in Whitehall, in the building of Gilbert Scott’s New
Government Offices to house the Foreign, Colonial, India and Home Offices
(–), the War Office (–), the extension to the Admiralty ()
and the raising of Admiralty Arch (); in the twentieth century in the suc-
cession of new or converted High Commission buildings in the vicinity of
Trafalgar Square – Australia House (), India House (), Canada House
(), Africa House () and South Africa House (). The profits of
investment in colonial plantations bore cultural and architectural fruit – the Tate
Gallery (–) on the profits of sugar, the Horniman Museum (–)
on tea. The need to train engineers, educators and administrators, and provide
them with a London base to which they could return, spawned the Imperial
Richard Dennis
84
Quoted in Briggs, Victorian Cities, p. .
85
Garside, ‘London’, p. .
86
King, Global Cities, p. .
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Institute () (later, Imperial College), the Royal Colonial Institute in
Whitehall () and a host of clubs and emigration agencies. The Strand
became a commercial and administrative gateway to the Empire.
87
Colonial civil servants were associated with an ‘inner colonial perimeter’ –
from St John’s Wood in the north through Bayswater to South Kensington,
matching the inner industrial perimeter to the east. Department stores such as
Whiteley’s in Bayswater and the Army & Navy in Victoria Street sold colonial
goods to Londoners and British goods to returning colonists.
Visitors from Europe and America, as well as from the Empire, found accom-
modation in some imperial hotels: the Russell (–) and the Imperial
(–) in Bloomsbury, the Ritz () on Piccadilly and the Waldorf ()
on the Aldwych, associated with the one example of a street improvement
(Kingsway) that was imperial in scale, if not in execution. London hosted a suc-
cession of international exhibitions to display the products and the technologi-
cal progress of the Empire, starting with the Great Exhibition in , where
, exhibitors from the rest of the world were more than matched by ,
from Britain and her dependencies. The former were assigned space east of the
transept whereas the products of Empire were consolidated to the west. Visitors
were exhorted ‘in going through the building, to follow as much as possible the
course of the sun’, so that they arrived at last at the United Kingdom (where,
presumably, the sun never set). Six million tickets were sold for the Great
Exhibition, while million attended the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley
in –.
88
The Empire also arrived more permanently in the form of immigrants. The
SS Empire Windrush, docking in June , delivered its cargo of Jamaicans
to be greeted by the Evening Standard’s headline: ‘Welcome Home’. But as late
as , only , West Indians, to Indians and Pakistanis, and ,
Cypriots were arriving in London each year. More transient imperial visitors
were invited to explore imperial London through guidebooks, which directed
them to the most obvious imperial sites – the Tower, St Paul’s, Westminster
Abbey, Buckingham Palace, the Mall, Trafalgar Square and (after ) the
Cenotaph. But the Empire was also manifest in suburbia, in the proliferation of
Mafeking, Ladysmith and Kimberley Streets, at Wembley, and in the Daily Mail ’s
Ideal Home Exhibition which domesticated imperial products for suburban
consumption.
89
Modern London
87
Ibid.; M. H. Port, Imperial London (New Haven and London, ); F. Driver and D. Gilbert,
‘Heart of empire? Landscape, space and performance in imperial London’, Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space, (), –.
88
C. H. Gibbs-Smith, The Great Exhibition of (London, ), pp. –.
89
S. Humphries and J. Taylor, The Making of Modern London, – (London, ), pp. –;
Driver and Gilbert, ‘Heart of empire?’; D. Gilbert, ‘“London in all its glory – or how to enjoy
London”: guidebook representations of imperial London’, Journal of Historical Geography,
(), –.
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In Niels Lund’s famous painting The Heart of the Empire (), the skyline is
dominated by St Paul’s, but the foreground is the Bank Junction, between the
Mansion House, the Bank of England and the Royal Exchange. For Joseph
Chamberlain, the City of London was ‘the clearing house of the world’, a func-
tion that can be measured first by the number of foreign and imperial banks
established there, including banks from Hong Kong (), Australia (),
New Zealand (), Canada (), as well as from Europe (s), the USA
() and Japan (). London directories recorded bankers in ,
in , of whom were classified as ‘foreign and colonial’. While private
banks declined in number and importance, London-based clearing banks
extended their operations to cover the whole country, and provincial banks
moved their headquarters to London.
90
Insurance became big business: the number of Lloyd’s underwriters increased
from to between and , when it was estimated that two-thirds
of world marine insurance was handled in the City. By , Lloyd’s member-
ship numbered ,. At the other extreme of the insurance industry, life assu-
rance for workingmen was wrested from local benefit societies by large-scale
agencies such as the Prudential, based in Holborn, which, by , had more
than million ‘industrial’ assurance policies. Membership of the Stock Exchange
also rocketed, from in to , in .
91
But the City remained a mixed business community, centred on trade rather
than financial services, and still home to manufacturing and warehouses accom-
modating physical trade in commodities. As late as , per cent of
floorspace in the City was occupied by industry, per cent by warehouses, and
(only) per cent by offices. The growth of ‘office trade’depended on new tech-
nology which facilitated the flow of business information and stimulated the
concentration of commercial activity. In London and Paris were linked by
cross-Channel cable. Fifteen years later, London was linked to New York and,
by , , telegrams per annum were passing between the two cities. The
following year Tokyo and Melbourne were joined to London telegraphically. In
the advent of wireless telegraphy extended the reach of major financial
centres, but it was not until that London and New York were in telephonic
communication. Meanwhile, within the City, information flows were improved
by the use of ticker-tape machines () and the publication of specialist
financial newspapers, including the Financial Times ().
92
Richard Dennis
90
S. Daniels, Fields of Vision (Cambridge, ), pp. –, –; Waller, Town, p. ; King, Global
Cities, p. ; R. C. Michie, The City of London (London, ), p. ; D. Kynaston, The City of
London, vol. : A World of its Own, – (London, ), p. .
91
Sheppard, London –, pp. –; Kynaston, City, , p. ; Michie, City, pp. , –,
.
92
Michie, City, pp. , ; Kynaston, City, , pp. , , ; D. Kynaston, The City of London,
vol. : Golden Years, – (London, ), p. .
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Yet the City remained an essentially conservative institution, suspicious of
new technology, especially typewriters and telephones, and of ‘new women’.
Most City businesses were small, effectively family firms. Even Baring’s had a
staff of less than in the s, when they recruited their first female
employee. The pace of life in the City may have been frenetic – ‘here everyone
seems to run rather than to walk’ – but habits were slow to change, exemplified
in the continuing uniform of ‘bobbing silk hats’ in winter, ‘straw hats’ in
summer.
93
Despite this innate conservatism, the City boomed in the growth of world
trade up until the First World War. London’s share of Britain’s physical trade was
already in decline, but office trade and the securities market boomed. Foreign
governments and companies raised loans in London to finance development at
home; and British companies based in the City ran railways, mines and planta-
tions the world over. Forster’s Henry Wilcox typified the ‘gentlemanly capital-
ist’, with homes in both the West End (in his case in ‘Ducie Street’ near Chelsea
Embankment) and the country (‘Oniton Grange’ in Shropshire), his wealth
derived from his chairmanship of the Imperial and West African Rubber
Company. After , however, the City suffered, partly in competition with
rising financial centres such as New York and partly as a consequence of the
general decline in international trade during the Depression. The value of
Britain’s overseas assets declined from £. billion (at prices) in to
£. billion in . Membership of the Stock Exchange declined below ,
by .
94
Business expansion in the nineteenth century was matched by physical recon-
struction. Of every five buildings standing in only one remained in .
New bank offices, such as the headquarters of the London and Westminster
Bank, opened in on Lothbury, facing the Bank of England, were soon over-
whelmed by speculatively built ‘stacks of office buildings’ erected by companies
such as the City Offices Company, established in . Mansion House
Chambers (), on the south side of Queen Victoria Street, itself completed
only in , provided rooms. Small businesses seeking a prestigious address
would rent no more than one or two rooms in such buildings. Gissing’s
Luckworth Crewe, engaged in the decidedly ‘modern’ business of advertising
and the promotion of tourist resorts, took three rooms in an office block in
Farringdon Street. In a City Corporation census counted , lettings in
only twenty-six buildings. Speculative developments were mostly in marginal
locations, where land values were lower, whereas company headquarters were
on high-value frontages on main thoroughfares. There were also separate dis-
tricts for different kinds of business activity, including an area associated with
Modern London
93
Kynaston, City, , pp. –, –; Kynaston, City, , p. .
94
Kynaston, City, , pp. –; Forster, Howards End, p. ; Michie, City, pp. , .
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colonial and East India goods around Mincing Lane, and a concentration of
textile warehouses and offices between Wood Street and Basinghall Street, close
to the Guildhall.
95
The City’s imperial character was also a matter of architectural style and
employee sentiment. Building styles evoked past trading empires, especially
Renaissance Venice; celebrations of imperial power such as Queen Victoria’s
Diamond Jubilee and, more spontaneously, to mark the relief of Mafeking,
colonised the City’s spaces, especially Bank Junction and the Stock Exchange.
As an imperial city, London lacked the grand boulevards and planned assem-
blages of buildings common in Paris, Vienna or St Petersburg. London resisted
the excesses of totalitarian and fascist planning that characterised Rome, Berlin
and Moscow in the s. By then, it is not entirely fanciful to think of London
as becoming an outpost of the United States. The Americanisation of suburban
industry has already been noted. It was American cinema that provided the fantasy
world for suburbanites in the s; an American department store – Selfridge’s
– and an American chain store – Woolworth’s – that revolutionised British retail-
ing; and American money that helped to occupy the open spaces left behind by
the grand imperial project of Kingsway-Aldwych, where Bush House was devel-
oped by the American, Irving T. Bush, between and . But the Empire
struck back. Intended as a trade centre, Bush House became HQ for the External
Services Division of the BBC, the still imperious if not imperial ‘World Service’.
96
(vii)
I have made no attempt in this chapter to be comprehensive. For example, I have
ignored the impact of two world wars on either the social life or the built envi-
ronment of London, nor have I spent much time on either party politics or the
mechanics of planning. Rather, I have concentrated on the scale and complex-
ity of London’s spatial structure, the implications of that structure in areas of local
government, social structure and economic change, and its relevance for every-
day life. I have spent more time on change in the West End, the City and sub-
urbia, and paid less attention to the East End,
97
and I have left numerous
Richard Dennis
95
Kynaston, City, , p. ; Kynaston, City, , p. ; I. S. Black, ‘Symbolic capital: the London
and Westminster Bank headquarters, –’, Landscape Research, (), –; R. Thorne,
‘Office building in the City of London –’ (paper to Urban History Group Colloquium,
); CMH, ‘Progress reports on “From counting-house to office: the evolution of London’s
central financial district, –”’, CMH Annual Reports (–, –); CMH, ‘Progress
report on “The growth and development of the textile marketing district of the City of London,
c. –”’, CMH Annual Report (–); Gissing, Jubilee, p. .
96
Sheppard, London, p. ; King, Global Cities, p. .
97
On the problems of applying the concept of ‘modernity’ to the East End, see J. Marriott,
‘Sensation of the abyss: the urban poor and modernity’, in Nava and O’Shea, eds., Modern Times,
pp. –.
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questions unanswered. Why was London so different from other European cap-
itals? Was it simply the absence of strong local government and the dominance
of large estates that prevented either monarchy or mayoralty from restructuring
the city in their own image? Why such enthusiasm for suburbanisation, so many
‘cottages’, so few flats?
For all the ‘progress’ of the preceding century, ‘modern London’ in was
still a world away from today’s London. In – there was one car licence for
every . households in the LCC area, the majority of Londoners rented their
homes from private landlords, and the ‘coloured’ population was estimated to
number only ,.
98
Even in the more extensive Greater London area, only
per cent of households had exclusive use of the five basic amenities (piped
water, cooking stove, kitchen sink, water closet, fixed bath); per cent lacked
any access to a fixed bath and another per cent shared access with at least one
other household.
99
As late as more than . million Greater Londoners (
per cent of the workforce) worked in manufacturing, compared to fewer than
. million by the late s. The census reckoned those ‘out of work’ in
Greater London to comprise . per cent of the ‘occupied’ population; the
Ministry of Labour’s more restricted definition estimated the unemployment
rate at per cent.
100
London was not yet ‘swinging’, ‘Docklands’ was still docks,
Covent Garden and Spitalfields were still wholesale markets, the Barbican was a
bombsite. For V. S. Pritchett in , London was ‘a heavy city’ weighed down
by past achievements and lacking in ‘Style’. But these characteristics were part
of its charm and distinctiveness; there was little sign of the pessimistic consensus
among authors that developed from the s, ‘of a capital city in terminal
decline’.
101
Nor was there any postmodern irony or space for alternative narra-
tives in the plans for post-war reconstruction or the bright optimism of the
Festival of Britain. In as in London was the very model of a modern
metropolis.
Modern London
198
R. Glass, ‘Introduction’, in Glass et al., eds., London, pp. xiii–xlii.
199
General Register Office, Census of England and Wales, : Report on Greater London and Five Other
Conurbations (HMSO, ).
100
General Register Office, Census of England and Wales, : Occupation Tables (HMSO, );
Ministry of Labour Gazette ( January ).
101
V. S. Pritchett, London Perceived (London, ), p. ; J. Coe, ‘London: the dislocated city’, in M.
Bradbury, ed., The Atlas of Literature (London, ), p. .
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·
·
Ports
W
history and the functioning of ports has attracted consid-
erable attention from geographers, economic historians and sociol-
ogists, the area of interest has tended either to focus very narrowly
on the immediate connections between land and water, such as facilities for ship-
ping or waterfront working conditions, or to be concerned with broad perspec-
tives, such as the value of trade and competitive position.
1
There has been,
metaphorically speaking, an inclination to look out to sea rather than inland, or
to allow the dock wall to define the limits of investigation. As a result, with the
exception of Martin Daunton’s study of Cardiff, ports have rarely been treated
as urban entities.
2
This is not to say that the connection between water-based activity on a shore-
line or river bank and the growth of permanent settlement has not been a very
familiar and well-worked theme. But not every landing place for cargo became
a town, still less a city. In the official returns identify foreign trade ports
in the UK. A hundred years later the oil terminals of Milford Haven, Sullom Vo
and Orkney ranked high among British ports; reminders that the nature of trade
and the state of cargo-handling technology are factors linking, or separating,
transhipment needs and populations. Furthermore, for anyone studying ports in
a maturing industrialised economy, the enhanced ability to shape the built envi-
ronment (to dredge, to put up barriers against the sea, readily to take goods into
the interior) necessarily shifts the analysis away from a concentration on natural
features towards recognition of the human contribution; ‘in the beginning the
harbour made the trade; but soon the trade began to make the harbour’.
3
1
D. Hilling, ‘Socio-economic change in the maritime quarter: the demise of sailortown’, in B. S.
Hoyle, D. A. Pinder and M. S. Husain, eds., Revitalising the Waterfront (London, ), p. .
2
M. J. Daunton, Coal Metropolis (Leicester, ).
3
W. Sargent, Ports and Hinterlands (London, ), p. .
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