London: The Biography

It was unnatural in other respects. The advent of electric light in the 1890s-its first interior use occurred, in 1887, in the premises of Lloyds Bank along Lombard Street-inevitably meant that natural light was no longer necessary to work indoors. So arrived those great waves of City workers who indeed might have been dwelling beneath the sea; they came to work in the darkness of a winter morning, and departed in the evening without once seeing the sun. So London helped to instigate one of the great disasters for the human spirit. In addition the use of new building technologies, particularly those of reinforced concrete and steel, and the introduction of passenger lifts, led inexorably to the erection of ever higher buildings. By that strange symbiotic process which has always marked the development of London, the expansion of the available space was matched only by the increase of the number of people ready to inhabit it. It has been estimated that the working population of the city numbered 200,000 in 1871, but 364,000 in 1911. Charles Pooter, of “The Laurels,” Brickfield Terrace, Holloway, is a fictional variant of one of the thousands of clerks who comprised what one guidebook terms “a very city of clerks.” “My boy, as a result of twenty-one years’ industry and strict attention to the interests of my superiors in office, I have been rewarded with promotion and a rise in salary of £100.” The fact that the Grossmiths’ comic creation has endured in public affection for more than a hundred years is testimony, perhaps, to the instinctive accuracy of their account; the ordinariness of Pooter’s life was seen as emblematic of the new type of urban, or suburban man. In his loyalty, and in his naïveté, he was the kind of citizen whom London needed in order to sustain itself.

But it was not only a city of clerks. London had become the workplace of the new “professions,” as engineers and accountants and architects and lawyers moved ineluctably towards the city of empire. In turn these affluent “consumers” created a market for new “department stores” and new restaurants; there arose a revived and more salubrious “West End” of theatres under such actor-managers as Irving and Beerbohm Tree. There were also more refined delights. The parks, the museums and the galleries of mid-Victorian London were discovered by a new and more mobile population of relatively affluent citizens. There were better libraries, and a plethora of distinguished or specialised exhibitions to satisfy a new urban taste for instruction compounded by enjoyment. It was also the city of Fabians, and of the “new woman”; it was the home of the fin-de-siècle, most readily associated in the public mind with the spectacular London career of Oscar Wilde.

But the old city never went away. In the 1880s approximately four hundred people of both sexes used to sleep in Trafalgar Square among the fountains and the pigeons. As H.P. Clunn noted in The Face of London (1932), “only about one-third of these people had any regular calling or occupation, and the rest simply lived from day to day as best they could from childhood, and could hardly explain how they had managed to exist for so long.” In any one year of that decade approximately “twenty-five thousand people were charged with being drunk and disorderly in the streets,” in part because the public houses were allowed to remain open all night; perhaps the strain of being the richest and most powerful city in the world had some effect upon the citizens themselves. It was a city of contrast. Until the late 1870s, Leicester Square was littered with “tin pots, kettles, old clothes, cast-off shoes, dead cats and dogs.”

The streets were filled with the ceaseless and incessant stream of horse-drawn, motor-driven and steam-propelled traffic; the average speed of the hansoms and the growlers and the vans and the “bumpers” or buses remained approximately twelve miles per hour. Old women squatted in the streets selling herbs, apples, matches and sandwiches. There was a floating population of ragged barefoot children who slept in alleys or beneath bridges. There were costermongers with their carts selling anything from coals to flowers, fish to muffins, tea to crockery. There were also epidemics of surprising speed and savagery which passed through the floating urban population. But somehow, perhaps only with the benefit of hindsight, the lives and roles of the poor seem diminished within the immensity and complexity of late nineteenth-century London; their voices are heard less easily amid the incessant traffic, and their struggles are lost among the army of clerks and “professions” and the whole multiplying population of the city.