London: The Biography

It is the magical energy of London, visible in every one of its giant transformations, like that after the Great Fire when empirical knowledge and practical genius helped to rebuild the city. This magical energy survives still.

A Fever of Building

A drawing by George Scharf which illustrates the building of Carlton House

Terrace in the early 1830s, part of Nash’s original grand design to embellish

London. Note that the workmen are wearing hats.

CHAPTER 55

London Will Soon Be Next Door to Us

From the middle of the eighteenth century London expanded in a fitful and almost feverish manner according to a cycle of profit and profiteering. The metaphor of fever was taken up by Henry Kett who, in 1787, suggested that “The contagion of the building influenza … has extended its virulence to the country where it rages with unabating violence … The metropolis is manifestly the centre of the disease … Mansions daily arise upon the marshes of Lambeth, the roads of Kensington, and the hills of Hampstead … The chain of buildings so closely unites the country with the town that the distinction is lost between Cheapside and St. George’s Fields. This idea struck the mind of a child, who lived at Clapham, with so much force, that he observed, ‘If they go on building at such a rate, London will soon be next door to us.’” By the time he grew to be a man, his words had come to pass.

The “hills of Hampstead” were in part threatened by the “New Road” from Paddington to Islington, upon which work began in 1756; it acted as a bypass, avoiding the congerie of narrow and unpaved roads which led to the centre of the city, and for a while was considered to be a northern perimeter road, acting as a barrier between the city and the country-or, rather, between the city and the assortment of brick-fields, tea gardens, orchard gardens, cow-yards, tenter-grounds, allotments and sodden marsh-like fields which were always a feature of the land immediately surrounding the capital. But then the city, almost in a bound, travelled to its other side with the erection of Somers Town and Pentonville, Camden Town and Kentish Town. The new road became a road within, rather than outside, the city; and as such it remains.

The “marshes of Lambeth” were invaded by a more deliberate act of policy, designed to increase the speed of business within the city and to open up the capital to its outer regions. Until 1750 only London Bridge acted as a conduit between the northern and southern areas of the Thames; the river itself was at the centre of all traffic. But the construction of Westminster Bridge over a period of twelve years entirely changed the relationship between the northern and southern sections; instead of being isolated and apart, almost like different countries sharing the same border, they became interrelated. A new road was built from the bridge into Lambeth for some half a mile, where it then touched existing roads which were in turn extended and widened in order to create a free-flowing route “for promoting the intercourse and commerce” between both parts of the city. In the process both Kent and Surrey became so accessible that much open country disappeared beneath streets and squares.

The experiment was so profitable that four other bridges followed at Blackfriars, Vauxhall, Waterloo and Southwark. London Bridge itself was stripped of its houses and shops in order to render it suitable for the faster movement of a new age. Everyone was going faster. Everything was going faster. The city was growing faster, too, and the traffic within its bounds was moving ever more rapidly, starting a momentum which has never stopped. By the latter half of the eighteenth century the evidence of London’s commercial power, and future imperial status, was already present. It was about to burst its bounds completely, and become the first metropolis of the world. So almost by instinct the old boundaries and gateways were destroyed; in a symbolic act of relinquishment, London prepared for its future.