London: The Biography

Out of that conflict, too, emerged dynamic movement and a fresh sense of purpose. By 1939 the population of Greater London had risen to 8,600,000; it was the largest level it had ever attained, and is perhaps ever likely to attain. One in five of the British population had become a Londoner. The city had expanded in every sense, with new dual carriageway roads and radial highway schemes which reached out to Cheshunt and Hatfield, Chertsey and Staines. Just as it grew outwards, so its interior fabric was renewed. New banks and office blocks arose in the city, while the Bank of England itself was rebuilt. A new Lambeth Bridge was being constructed. With new initiatives in education and welfare, as well as schemes for the redevelopment of housing and of parks, the London County Council sustained the momentum of the city’s development. H.P. Clunn, writing The Face of London in 1932, suggested that “the new London is rising, with irresistible energy, on time-honoured sites.” It was not the first, nor the last, period of restoration; London is perpetually old, but always new. It was an appropriate sign of renovation, however, that in the autumn of 1931 the most significant public and commercial buildings of the capital were for the first time illuminated by floodlighting.

Its novel brightness attracted powerful forces; the process of what has often been called “metropolitan centralisation” attracted politicians, trade unionists and broadcasters; thus the BBC, ensconced in the heart of London, also became the “voice of the nation.” The film and newspaper industries, together with the myriad advertising companies, migrated to the metropolis, in the process helping to spread images and visions of the capital throughout the entire country. Industry, too, was part of this mass migration. The authors of the County of London Plan noted that many commercial leaders were attracted by “the sight of numerous flourishing factories and the general air of prosperity associated with Greater London.” Once more London had reverted to type and become Cockaigne or the city of gold.

The 1930s have in particular been anatomised as the age of anxiety, when economic depression, unemployment and the prospect of another world war materially affected the general disposition of the city. Yet the historians and reporters bring their own preoccupations to the subject; London is large enough, and heterogeneous enough, to reflect any mood or topic. It can hold, or encompass, anything; in that sense it must remain fundamentally unknowable.

J.B. Priestley, for example, saw evidence of a giant transition. He described a new urban culture, growing up all around him, as one “of arterial and by-pass roads, of filling stations and factories that look like exhibition buildings, of giant cinemas and dance halls and cafes, bungalows with tiny garages, cocktail bars, Woolworths, motor coaches, wireless.” The familiar London sensation, of everything growing too large, once more emerged. It was reported in 1932 that Dagenham, for example, had within ten years increased its population by 879 per cent. In 1921 it had been a small village, complete with cottages and fields of corn; within a decade 20,000 houses had been erected to sustain a working-class population. George Orwell had mentioned Dagenham in his account of a new city where the citizens inhabit “vast new wildernesses of glass and brick,” where “the same kind of life … is being lived at different levels, in labour-saving flats or council houses, along the concrete roads.” He was describing the same reality as Priestley, with “miles of semi-detached bungalows, all with their little garages, their wireless sets.” They were both reacting to the single most important change in London life within the last 150 years. They were talking about the suburbs.

After the Great War

One of many posters from the London Underground-this one dates from 1929-extolling the virtues of suburbia or “Metroland.” The retreat into suburbia in fact marked the greatest change in London’s topography since the estates of the eighteenth century.

CHAPTER 75. Suburban Dreams

The suburbs are as old as the city itself; they were once the spillings and scourings of the city, unhappy and insalubrious. The “subarbes” contained precisely that which had been banished from the town- the “stink” industries, brothels, leper hospitals, theatres-so that the area beyond the walls was in some way deemed threatening or lawless. It was neither city nor country; it represented London’s abandoned trail across the earth.