London: The Biography

In other respects the pressures of commerce and property speculation have damaged Nash’s dream city beyond repair. Regent Street had been first constructed on a purely commercial basis, with the selling of prime sites along the road, but what is born in commerce dies in commerce; the famous colonnade lasted for thirty years before being removed on the grounds that business was being lost in its obscurity, while the street itself was extensively remodelled in the 1920s and 1930s. The dereliction or damage also suggests a more general truth about London, where grand and large-scale developments have rarely been successful. The finest of London’s public buildings, like the Bank of England, are somehow secret and withdrawn, as if not wishing to overstate their case. In the same way grandiose projects failed because, as Andrew Saint has observed in London World City, “any but the most pragmatic approach to planning was doomed to failure.” Once again that note of pragmatism, so intrinsic to the intellectual and social life of the capital, is struck.

The “improved” London of the early nineteenth century had acquired a momentum of its own. The National Gallery, the British Museum, the Marble Arch, Westminster Palace, the Royal College of Surgeons, the Law Courts, the screen and arch at Hyde Park Corner, the General Post Office at St. Martin’s le Grand, London University, the Inner and Middle Temples, as well as various theatres, hospitals, prisons and gentlemen’s clubs, completely changed the external aspect of London. For the first time it became a public city. The detailed drawings of George Scharf, throughout this period, provide a significant account of the work itself. A great mobile crane stands before a half-completed Marble Arch, while a man in a top hat is perched upon a wooden scaffolding making notes; a new portico is being constructed, and Scharf notes the iron rod which is being cased within brick to form a pillar; plasterers are at work, standing upon wooden stalls, while two workmen strain upon a rope to raise a beam. These are views of building sites which could have been taken in London in any period over the last six hundred years. There is always building and rebuilding. Yet Scharf emphasises the human scale of this new London, before the advent of the Victorian megalopolis. He shows citizens in small groups, or as couples, rather than crowds; people are seen talking from upstairs windows, and Scharf is very interested in particular trades and in the names of individual shops or shopkeepers. Yet he still manages, in this compendium of local and specific detail, to capture a sense of progress and renewal; there is something distinctly and distinctively inspiriting in the air of these drawings. The city had lost something of its old packed intensity but it had recaptured its sense of the marvellous. Talleyrand, arriving in London in 1830 after an interval of thirty-six years, described it as “much more beautiful,” while an American visitor believed it to be “a thousand times more beautiful.” A visiting Italian general wrote in 1834 that London “has become an exceedingly beautiful and magnificent city; it is, in short, the leading capital of the world.”

But had there been any concomitant improvement in the lives of its citizens? Some contemporaries believed that there was a true connection. Francis Place, the London radical and democratic reformer, declared that “the progress made in refinement of manners and morals seems to have gone on simultaneously with the improvement in arts, manufactures and commerce. It moved slowly at first, but has been constantly increasing in velocity … we are much better people than we were then [in the 1780s], better instructed, more sincere and kind-hearted, less gross and brutal.” This enthusiastic report may seem surprising, in the light of subsequent denunciations of the Victorian city by writers as diverse as Engels and Booth, but it cannot be dismissed. Place was very close all his life to the actual conditions of the city, and he had seen a clear diminution in mob violence, open licentiousness and the intermittent savagery of ordinary life. He was a moral as well as a social reformer, and noticed with satisfaction an abatement of observable vice and squalor.