Daunton M. The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Volume 3: 1840-1950
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Similarly, the art collections of prosperous Victorian businessmen were not
simple emulation of the aristocracy and gentry, but means of establishing a dis-
tinct identity. As Dianne Sachko Macleod argues, art was central to affirming a
middle-class identity. In the mid-Victorian period, narrative detail entertained
and instructed, celebrating the virtues and probity of the bourgeoisie; in the late
Victorian period, middle-class taste turned to eroto-religious subjects and
images of the countryside as an escapist fantasy or to suggest that all was still well
in a world of rapid change. Art was made available to a wider public, through
municipal galleries and reproduction by print dealers and advertisers. Simply to
interpret this taste as anti-urban and anti-industrial misses the crucial point: how
was art used to signal cultural acuity and discrimination; how could art educate
and inspire the working class and civilise rapidly growing towns?
132
These issues
are considered in Caroline Arscott’s chapter, where she analyses the related
theme of artistic representations of the city.
The development of ‘social capital’ in Victorian towns was closely related to
the nature of the urban economy. One way of reconciling the seeming tension
between individualism and associational activity is through the notion of
bounded competition. In the absence of limited liability, business activity was
highly risky with great dangers for dependants and descendants; assets needed to
be held apart from the firm to provide for old age or for widows and dependent
children, through a marriage settlement or a family trust. The trustees were male
relatives or members of the local business community and professional class – a
means of creating social connection within a competitive economic order. Funds
were often invested in the urban fabric, by lending money on mortgage or
through the ownership of houses. Further, charitable trusts held property to
provide revenue for hospitals and education. Hence trusteeship created a social
network, cutting across business competition and rivalry.
133
As Rodger and Reeder show in their chapter, the urban economy had two
poles, of fragmented, small-producer capitalism, and a larger, more concentrated,
sector. Personal reputation was crucial to the success of small businesses, with
their heavy dependence on creditworthiness resting on reputation in commer-
cial dealings and as respectable family men. ‘Social capital’ was therefore crucial
to participation in a competitive market economy. Small-scale enterprise might
well be dynamic and flexible, such as scientific instrument and watchmakers in
Clerkenwell, cutlers in Sheffield, small metal goods in Birmingham, tailoring in
the East End. Sweatshops did exist, but workshop production was not simply
anachronistic and exploitative. Rather, it offered ‘flexible specialisation’, permit-
ting a rapid response to changing markets with reasonable levels of skill and wages
for male workers, and an efficient use of capital and labour. Paul Johnson points
out that business historians usually explain the emergence of large, integrated
Martin Daunton
132
D. S. Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class (Cambridge, ).
133
Rodger, Edinburgh and the Transformation of the Nineteenth-Century City.
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firms by their ability to reduce ‘transaction costs’ – the time spent in discovering
the best source of raw materials or semi-finished goods, in monitoring quality,
enforcing contracts and finding markets. This argument could be modified to
propose that integrated firms were not needed where the urban economy oper-
ated effectively to supply these services, and costs were already low. The exter-
nal economies of the city could therefore permit the survival of small firms, such
as in the highly specialised craft districts producing furniture in Bethnal Green
or metal goods in Birmingham. Workers and masters could exchange informa-
tion in public houses or clubs, and in the daily course of business. The costs of
monitoring and enforcement were low, for workshops were clustered together
with a high degree of reciprocity and short duration of exchanges. These infor-
mal patterns could be supplemented by more formal arrangements, for joint
ownership of power plant for small producers, common marketing of finished
goods or the provision of schools of design. Problems would arise when a greater
effort of research and development was needed within firms rather than through
the external urban economy, or where more formal support was needed by
public action. In Britain, urban authorities were less successful than their
counterparts in some European cities in sustaining flexible specialisation.
134
Towns were labour markets with large externalities, as Gilbert and Southall
show in their chapter. Employers could rely on the external labour market,
drawing on a pool of skill within the town or region. Even large industrial con-
cerns followed a similar pattern to small firms. In shipbuilding, for example, spe-
cialist subcontractors supplied the shipyards, and much of the training of workers
and the terms of their employment were left to skilled unions such as the
Boilermakers or Amalgamated Society of Engineers.
135
Large cotton-spinning
firms in Oldham did not negotiate with their own workers, but joined together
in a board of conciliation to deal with unionised workers, establishing a spinning
list which set the framework for wages for all employers in the town. The agree-
ment expired at a fixed time, with upper and lower limits for variation in wages,
so limiting competition between firms at least in respect to one major cost – and
one with the potentiality for threating the stability of urban society by pitting
capital against labour.
136
In some cases, businesses developed an internal labour
market, investing in the training of workers and creating clear promotion hier-
archies. This pattern emerged in large transport and service companies, such as
railways and banks.
137
The precise way in which labour markets operated was a
major variable in the nature of cities, affecting patterns of migration, residence
Introduction
134
C. Sabel and J. Zeitlin, ‘Historical alternatives to mass production: politics, markets and technol-
ogy in nineteenth-century industrialisation’, P&P, (), –; P. Johnson, ‘Economic
development and industrial dynamism in Victorian London’, LJ, (), –; below,
pp. –.
135
Johnson, ‘Economic development’; Sabel and Zeitlin, ‘Historical alternatives’.
136
Lazonick, Competitive Advantage on the Shop Floor.
137
See M. Savage, ‘Career, mobility and class formation: British banking workers and the lower
middle class’, in A. G. Miles and D. Vincent, eds., Building European Society (Manchester, ),
pp. –.
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and demography. Casual workers were trapped in neighbourhoods by the need
for local information on work, and the need for credit; artisans had more infor-
mation about opportunities in other towns, but even they became much more
residentially stable in the later nineteenth century. As Mike Savage and Andy
Miles have argued, neighbourhoods were crucial to the formation of class in the
later Victorian city. The middle classes, and even the lower middle classes who
had lived alongside workers, moved out to suburbia and left the central city to
the working class. Levels of migration dropped, and so did population turnover
as a result of changes in the housing market after the First World War. The geo-
graphical horizons of many workers were restricted, bound by the neighbour-
hood. One measure of this phenomenon is patterns of marriage: at the end of
the nineteenth century, in per cent of working-class marriages, both the bride
and groom came from the same district, compared with per cent in middle-
class marriages. Working-class neighbourhoods matured and gained in solidar-
ity, with dense patterns of sociability through hobbies and clubs, or female bonds
of support and sharing, which were important components of the provision of
welfare. They might become part of the wider urban society and national net-
works, for friendly societies or brass bands or football teams were part of city and
national affiliations, but the experience was rather different from middle-class
families, who had ties of personal friendship and acquaintance, of education and
business, at a regional or national level.
138
The flow of young migrants into towns and cities in search of jobs, in addi-
tion to the high birth rates, meant that towns at the beginning of the period
were youthful, in comparison with the more elderly age structure at the end.
139
Whether children were able to obtain work varied between towns. In the textile
towns of the North, children were able to work from an early age; even when
compulsory education was introduced, they were still allowed to leave school
when they reached a minimum standard. In other districts, such as London, there
were fewer openings for children and many attended school as a means of filling
their time and keeping them off the streets.
140
Juvenile crime, and the attempt
to provide ‘moral’ activities for adolescents and young adults in the city, was a
serious concern. Ragged schools and orphanages, school board visitors and
truancy schools, the Scouts and Boys Brigade attempted to reform and save chil-
dren. The dangerous, corrupting influence of the city – its public houses and
music halls, its prostitutes and vice – on young men and women was countered
Martin Daunton
138
M. Savage and A. Miles, The Remaking of the British Working Class, – (London, ), pp.
–; M. Savage, ‘Urban history and social class: two paradigms’, UH, (), –; H.
MacLeod, Class and Religion in the Late Victorian City (London, ); E. Ross, ‘Survival networks
– women’s neighbourhood sharing in London before World War I’, History Workshop, (),
–; C. Chinn, They Worked All Their Lives (Manchester, ); on the strength of working-class
culture, see R. McKibbin, The Ideologies of Class (Oxford, ).
139
See below, pp. , .
140
H. Cunningham, ‘The employment and unemployment of children in England, c. –’,
P&P, (), –.
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by the Young Men’s Christian Association and Young Women’s Christian
Association.
141
The ability of women to find paid work outside the home varied between
towns, from a high level of participation in textile towns to the low levels in
mining and heavy industrial districts. As Szreter and Hardy show, the age and
rate of marriage varied between towns. Where women could find work, they
had less reason to marry early and a pregnancy would mean loss of income;
where work was less available, early marriage was more likely and childbirth did
not involve a loss of female earnings. The variation between towns in age and
rates of marriage was not simply a matter of economistic calculation, for the
labour market could affect attitudes to masculinity. The culture of the coalfields
was more dominated by men with their experience of common danger in the
hidden world of the pit, than the textile towns where men and women often
worked in the same mill. The reduction in the birth rate at the end of the nine-
teenth century depended on a changing definition of masculinity and male
restraint in reducing the frequency of sexual intercourse. Social norms changed,
from a large family indicating virility and manhood, to fecklessness and lack of
restraint. Labour markets were one important influence on these changes, but
simple economic determinism should be modified to take account of social and
cultural assumptions. Recent research has suggested that marriage and fertility
were influenced not only by occupation and class, but also by locally based com-
munities and their norms.
142
Urban labour markets also influenced patterns of welfare provision. As we
have noted, local provision of welfare by public bodies and charities remained
important. A similar point applies to self-help organisations, which varied in
their form and level of membership between towns, in part reflecting the
differences in employment. The shipbuilding districts of the Tyne, for example,
had a marked cycle of boom and slump. As a result, unions of relatively well-
paid workers provided unemployment assistance to cover periods of depression,
linked to the requirement that men did not accept work at a low wage and
undermine the union rate. Although textile districts did experience serious
slumps – above all during the cotton famine of the s – and were affected by
the trade cycle, the amplitude of fluctuations was generally less than in indus-
tries producing capital goods. Workers received reasonably steady and secure
wages, which allowed them to pay weekly contributions to friendly societies to
provide sick pay and medical treatment. The large, affiliated friendly societies
such as the Rechabites and Oddfellows started in the mill towns of Lancashire.
Introduction
141
Meller, Leisure and the Changing City, chs. and .
142
On child care patterns in two contrasting towns in Lancashire, see E. Roberts, ‘Working class
standards of living in Barrow and Lancaster, –’, Ec.HR, nd series, (), –;
on the decline of fertility, see S. Szreter, Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain, –
(Cambridge, ); and below, pp. –.
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In the coalfields, the dangers of injury and disaster led to the creation of acci-
dent funds and medical facilities, and the provision of pensions or homes for
miners forced out of the pit by accidents and age. The exact pattern varied
between coalfields, and provides a warning against any simple determinism. In
the North-East of England, welfare provision concentrated on pensions and
homes for retired miners; in South Wales, miners developed medical services
which started to provide maternal and infant welfare, and used building clubs to
become owner-occupiers. These decisions reflected different institutional struc-
tures and cultural assumptions between the two coalfields. The ‘mix’ of welfare
provision therefore differed between towns, with different priorities and patterns
of spending which influenced the life chances of residents. Of course, these pat-
terns of provision came under serious pressure during the industrial depression
and mass unemployment of the interwar period, and the newer industrial dis-
tricts of the Midlands and South did not have anything like the same level of
membership.
British cities were a complex balance between the diseconomies of pollution
and disease, and the economies of information and knowledge. The disecono-
mies needed large-scale investment in the urban infrastructure, which was pro-
vided in the later nineteenth century. The external economies of information
and knowledge, the creation of ‘social capital’, meant that Victorian cities com-
bined competition with an active associational life. As Lees suggests, social ten-
sions were less in larger towns, with their well-developed institutions to mediate
disputes.
143
However, at some point this institutional structure and web of social
connections ceased to cope, and the external economies of the city became
much less significant. Chambers of Commerce or boards of conciliation could
do very little to restructure the economy of industrial towns when their major
industry collapsed in the interwar period. And large, capital-intensive industrial
concerns placed more emphasis on internal management and research, with con-
siderably less interest in the economies of the city. The relationship between the
economy of cities and of industrial firms started to shift between the wars. But
before returning to consider the strains within the system of urban governance
and adaptability, we should note one further aspect of the economy of cities:
they were sites for consumption as well as production.
(vi) :
Charles Dickens understood London as a system of circulation, where disease
could be spread from one place or social group to another. Baudelaire had a
very different image of Paris, less as a system than as a dream of anonymity and
Martin Daunton
143
L. H. Lees, ‘The study of social conflict in English industrial towns’, UHY (), ‒.
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disconnection. These cultural responses to the two capital cities did reflect the
physical realities of streets and boulevards, whose construction was shaped by
different social and cultural assumptions. However, the contrast should not be
overdrawn. British cities were sites of consumption, and were themselves con-
sumed; they were stages where subjectivity and identity were explored. These
themes are explored by John Walton’s chapter on consumption, and by Richard
Dennis in the case of London. As Charles Lamb, the essayist, remarked ‘London
itself is a pantomime and a masquerade’, and he ‘cried with fulness of joy at the
multitudinous scenes of life in the crowded streets of ever dear London’.
144
The
increase in circulation and surveillance within cities was not all loss and control;
it also meant safety from disease and crime, a greater opportunity to consume
the city. Marshall Berman has suggested that the nineteenth-century city was a
site for experimentation, of ‘fractured subjectivity’ and the ‘mystification of
modern life’. Despite the efforts of sanitary reformers and the spread of surveil-
lance, the ‘moving chaos’ of the nineteenth-century city, with its congestion,
noise and complexity, was alive and exciting.
145
A history of the city could be written in phenomenological terms, its
onslaught on the senses of sight, sound and smell.
146
The work of the sanitary
reformers meant that cities were ‘deodorised’ by the end of the nineteenth
century. Smells are elusive, and not easily measured or categorised; as we have
seen, the sanitary reformers expressed the stench of cities by textures, touch and
sight. Odours might well have become worse – most notoriously in the ‘great
stink’ of when Disraeli was driven from the Commons, and the curtains
were soaked in chloride of lime to keep the stench of the Thames at bay.
147
Certainly, smells were more keenly perceived or less tolerated, both in the urban
environment and to the individual body. The construction of sewers and water
supplies, the improvement of roads and refuse collection, meant that cities were
cleaner. The provision of piped water and water closets in houses, the provision
of public urinals, laundries and bathhouses, meant that individual standards of
cleanliness changed. New building codes required builders to insert damp-proof
courses to prevent bricks sucking up the emanations of the soil. Air bricks and
grilles were required to permit a renewal of air in houses; and architects devised
complicated systems of drawing foul air from public buildings. Glazed tiles, lino-
leum and paintwork allowed walls and floors to be washed, and soap and scour-
ing powders were amongst the first mass advertised goods.
148
As space was redefined in British cities, the street became more a place of
transit and the home more a place for private pleasures. Nevertheless, there were
Introduction
144
Winter, London’s Teeming Streets, p. .
145
Berman, All That is Solid.
146
See S. Connor, ‘The modern auditory’, in R. Porter, ed., Rewriting the Self: Histories from the
Middle Ages to the Present (London, ), pp. –.
147
Halliday, Great Stink, pp. –.
148
On the history of smell in Paris, see A. Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant, trans. M. L. Kochan
(Leamington Spa, ).
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places to linger and stroll, to sit and spectate. Londoners lacked grand boulevards;
they, and their provincial counterparts, did have open spaces where inhabitants
could parade and observe. On the crown estate in central London, Hyde Park,
Regents Park and St James Park allowed members of Society to drive or ride,
observing and being observed, with rules for entry and acceptance.
149
Victoria
Park opened to the residents of east London in , offering the pleasures of
promenading and observing to a wider section of society, under the gaze of the
park keeper and his injunctions to keep off the grass. By , Victoria Park
received , visitors on a single day.
150
The park was designed by James
Pennethorne who also planned New Oxford Street as an artery to cut through
the slums of St Giles and relieve the flow of traffic on the Strand and Fleet Street.
In a sense, the two projects were connected: restricting the street to a neutral
space for transit was complemented by the creation of specialised spaces for rec-
reation – public parks, football stadia and cricket grounds – with defined rules
for access and use, enforced by park keepers and stewards. Reid shows the emer-
gence of a clearer definition of time for work and recreation than in the past,
when football or fairs spilled over into the streets and blurred the line between
work and leisure time. And some towns specialised in recreation. Most famous
and demotic was Blackpool where the workers of the Lancashire mill towns
spent their week of release from toil; more genteel, with their palm courts and
orchestras, were Eastbourne and Bournemouth.
151
The campaigns to preserve open spaces such as Hampstead Heath and Epping
Forest, the pressure from the Commons Preservation Society and the National
Trust, were part of a much wider consumption of the countryside by urban res-
idents, escaping on bicycles or by train and motor car to hike and visit beauty
spots. This was less a sign of a rejection of urbanism, a backward looking nostal-
gia for the countryside, than the emergence of a new form of urban consump-
tion of the countryside which was now a ‘lost domain’. Historic towns
themselves started to become centres for tourism, and the architectural ‘heritage’
a source of pride and celebration. The historic cities of York, Bath, Chester,
Edinburgh and the many market and cathedral towns were interpreted in print
and in tussles over renovation. In Bath, for example, the discovery of the Roman
baths at the end of the nineteenth century posed the question of the relationship
with its Georgian fabric, which was generally held in low esteem. What should
be destroyed in order to ‘modernise’ the city? These issues came up in an acute
form when the Georgian pump rooms were destroyed in a bombing raid in the
war: should they be rebuilt, or replaced by some more ‘useful’and ‘modern’ facil-
ity? Should new roads be driven through the city in order to cope with new
volumes of motor traffic? In these debates, the writings of urban historians
Martin Daunton
149
L. Davidoff, The Best Circles (London, ).
150
Winter, London’s Teeming Streets.
151
J. K. Walton, The English Seaside Resort (Leicester, ); Cannadine, Lords and Landlords, part
on Eastbourne.
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became important, with the early work of John Summerson on Georgian
London during the Second World War, and the emergence of conservation
societies.
152
As cities were ‘deodorised’, so they started to blaze with light. At the begin-
ning of the period, the nocturnal city posed problems for security; darkness pro-
vided a cover for vice and crime, an escape from the respectability of day time.
Night was a time to retreat into safety from the public spaces of the city, behind
closed doors. The law recognised the difference. Bailiffs could not enter the
home of debtors to seize their goods between sunset and sunrise; by contrast,
presence on the streets after dark was good reason for suspicion. The authorities
wished to control the night, tightening up closing times of public houses,
herding the homeless into night shelters and reforming the system of night
watchmen. When the Metropolitan Police was established in , one reason
was the ‘nightly indecorum and danger of the London streets’. The provision of
light was an aid to surveillance, making the city – or at least parts of it – safe at
night. The pleasures of the evening and night were democratised, extended from
those who could afford a carriage and torch bearer to penetrate the gloom, or
could attend balls and dinners in private houses glittering with candle light. The
first gas street lighting in London dates from , on a small scale; by the mid-
nineteenth century, it was commonplace on streets, in public buildings, shops,
public houses and theatres, as well as in the homes of the middle class. Until the
installation of prepayment meters in the s, gas was not found in working-
class houses, which were lit by cheap tallow candles and, at the end of the
century, paraffin lamps. The lack of cheap gas light in working-class houses was
seen as a serious problem in the s – how could workers keep themselves and
their houses clean, and would they not be tempted by bright gin palaces in con-
trast with their ‘dark and comfortless homes’?
153
By the s, gas was starting
to be replaced by electricity, at least in public buildings. Gas and electricity
extended the pleasures of music halls, gin palaces, theatres, cinemas, to a larger
number of people, and transformed city centres with advertising and window
displays. Electricity powered underground railways and tramcars from the turn
of the century, carrying people to and from the suburbs in comfort and speed,
and lighting them on their way home. Town centres were transformed into
spaces for pleasure by night, taking on a new existence as offices and factories
closed.
154
The emergence or extension of specialised shopping districts in London’s
West End and the major provincial cities connected with debates over gender
and morality. Was there a danger that the lavish new stores seduced women to
pledge their husbands’ credit on luxuries, so threatening the household
Introduction
152
Mandler, ‘Against “Englishness”’; Dellheim, Face of the Past; P. Borsay, The Image of Georgian Bath,
‒ (Oxford, ).
153
Quoted in Falkus, ‘Development of municipal trading’, .
154
J. Schlör, Nights in the Big City (London, ).
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economy? Samuel Smiles feared that women’s ‘rage for dress and finery’ rivalled
the ‘corrupt and debauched age of Louis XV’, to the ruination of husbands.
Judges were inclined to agree, arguing that men should only be responsible for
their wives spending on household necessaries. This created difficulties for the
owners of the new department stores, with their largely female clientele. In
, the owners of Whiteley’s store took Mr Sharpe, the keeper of records at
the Guildhall in the City of London, to court for the recovery of £ owed for
a sealskin coat bought by his wife. Sharpe argued that the coat was extravagant,
and the judge accepted that it could not be termed a necessity; he was absolved
from the debt. Large department stores were therefore open to attack for encour-
aging irrational consumption and de-stabilising gender relations – a case seized
upon by their small specialist competitors who could portray themselves as more
responsible. The owners of department stores countered that they offered havens
of respectability and safety rather than temptation, a sign of a healthy rather than
a pathological urban economy. Retailers needed to ‘moralise’ the city centre,
offering women rest rooms and restaurants, even reading and writing rooms,
employing door keepers and floor-walkers to maintain decorum and exclude
unsuitable customers. By the s, the department store and the shopping
streets of the city centre were widely considered to be acceptable places for
women, one of the pleasures of the late Victorian city.
155
Music halls and theatres faced a similar debate, fought between the advocates
of temperance and morality, and the desire for freedom and enjoyment. Caught
in the middle were the local authorities which licensed music halls and public
houses. They had a practical concern for public safety in case of fire or over-
crowding, and their regulations helped to determine the form of new buildings
and their layout. But these regulations could easily extend into concerns for
morality and social behaviour – or prudery and interference in harmless pleas-
ures. The result was a tussle over the number of public houses or standards of
acceptable behaviour in the music halls. The LCC, for example, employed a team
of inspectors to visit halls, noting the behaviour of the audience (especially
women) and recording risqué lyrics. In , the council refused any new appli-
cation for a music hall licence which served alcohol, and closed down the Empire
music hall on Leicester Square because of the conduct of women soliciting
members of the audience. This interference of Progressive councillors in the
pleasures of other people was not welcomed by those who wished to have a drink
on their evening of relaxation, and these issues could spill over into local elec-
tions. Although the local authorities had powers to license cinemas, the film
Martin Daunton
155
E. Rappaport, ‘“A husband and his wife’s dresses”: consumer credit and the debtor family in
England, –’, in V. De Grazia and E. Furlough, eds., The Sex of Things (Berkeley and
London, ), pp. –; and E. Rappaport, ‘“The halls of temptation”: gender, politics and
the construction of the department store in late Victorian London’, Journal of British Studies,
(), –. See Plate .
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industry did manage to free itself from local control over its films, which would
obviously cause serious difficulties for distribution. The industry successfully
argued for self-regulation by the British Board of Film Censors, which was estab-
lished in to ensure that nothing was shown to demoralise the public. The
cost of music halls and cinemas was high, and owners were concerned to encour-
age as wide an attendance as possible, so there was a degree of self-interest in
ensuring that performers and films did not overstep certain standards of accept-
ability.
156
Cities were places of contestation over morality and pleasure, between
surveillance and transgression.
(vii)
We have argued that the Victorian and Edwardian city was successful in accu-
mulating ‘social capital’, in creating the conditions for collective action to deal
with urban diseconomies and in establishing the conditions for powerful exter-
nal economies. But at some point problems did set in: urban self-confidence was
eroded, and the political, social and economic importance of cities declined.
Contributors to this volume agree on the main changes, but not on when the
change started and how far it had proceeded by .
In his account of the middle class, Trainor suggests that the elite started to dis-
tance itself from urban government compared to the remarkable degree of
involvement in the later nineteenth century, so leaving the lower middle class
and Labour to battle over scraps of urban power. In his account, the interwar
years disrupted middle-class leadership in towns. Indeed, it could even be argued
that the trend started before the First World War. By the end of the nineteenth
century, the banking system was consolidated in the hands of a number of large
concerns, so weakening the financial autonomy of the local urban economy. The
shift in the control over banks from the localities to head offices in London meant
a reduction in sensitivity to local needs, with less involvement in local social net-
works and economic regeneration. Similarly, the emergence of national legisla-
tion on health and unemployment insurance in obliged trade associations
to negotiate with the central government, marking the beginning of a shift from
local concerns for poor law provision and charity. The pressures of wartime
shortages, with controls over resources and higher levels of business taxation, led
to the formation of the first major national employers’ organisation, the
Federation of British Industry.
These trends went still further between the wars. The concern of the Treasury
to control local spending, and the fear that urban authorities were less trust-
worthy, meant the loss of a degree of local autonomy. And Neville Chamberlain
feared that the partial derating of industry in would remove any incentive
Introduction
156
On the LCC, see Pennybacker, Vision for London, pp. –.
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