London: The Biography

Nevertheless by the sixteenth century such diverse extramural areas as Wapping and Holborn, Mile End and Bermondsey, began to manifest all the signs of burgeoning population, trade and housing. The author of Londinopolis wrote, in 1657, that “’tis true that the suburbs of London are much broader than the body of the city, which make some compare her to a Jesuit’s hat whose brims are far larger than the block.” In the same period the Spanish ambassador remarked, “I believe there will be no City left shortly, for it will all have run out of the gates to the suburbs.” Yet the process was as inevitable as it was inexorable. London could no more cease growing than a lava flow can stop its irruption.

But the process was complex and unpredictable. London did not extend itself ever outwards in all directions, like some blocked-in mass perpetually extending its perimeter; it spiralled out in various directions, making use of existing roads or trade routes and testing the capacity of various villages or parishes to sustain its weight. The south of Stepney, for example, seemed like a “city by the river,” one of the earliest industrial suburbs, but to its north still “this Parish has the face of the country.” London moved organically, in other words, always finding the right ecology in which it might exist and flourish. Spitalfields expanded fivefold in less than sixty years, and the derivation of these fields of spittle might have been taken from the fluffy white excreta of the spider continually expanding its web.

Yet of course this natural glut of buildings and of people provoked sensations of disgust or dismay. It seemed to threaten the identity of the city itself. On a technical level the authorities could no longer supervise trade, or working practices, or prices; in a less palpable sense the guardians of law and of authority were gradually losing control. That loss of power induced anxiety. So, for example, Charles I blamed mob riots in Whitehall upon “the meane and unrulie people of the suburbs,” and the suburbs themselves have been described in Stephen Inwood’s A History of London as “a nether world of dung heaps, stinking trades, bloodsports, gallows, low taverns, prostitutes, foreigners, thieves, the poor and the mob.”

Yet for a while it still seemed possible to escape from the blight of the city. By the end of the eighteenth century there were in Peckham “many handsome houses … most of which are the country seats of wealthy citizens of London.” In Kentish Town “the air being exceedingly wholesome, many of the citizens have built houses; and such whose circumstances will not admit of that expense, take ready furnished lodgings for the summer.” In Fulham, also, were “many good buildings belonging to the gentry and citizens of London.” The process here was not one of confused inchoate growth, but one of deliberate colonisation of the surrounding countryside. Villages such as Clapton and Hampstead and Dulwich became, in the nomenclature of a later period, “suburban villages.”

As early as 1658, beside Newington Green, terraced houses appeared on the model of London terraces. Thirty years later Kensington Square was similarly laid out, while according to Chris Miele in Suburban London, “making no apparent concession to the rural character of the place.” By some strange alchemy the city had reassembled itself in a distant spot, as a silent token of that which was to come. By a similar process suburban estates emerged in previously rural areas, closely modelled upon the estates which had already been constructed in the western quarters of London; Kensington New Town, Hans Town and Camden Town were cities in miniature, laid down at convenient and profitable sites beside the main roads. The suburbs, like the rest of London, were established upon the principles of commercial gain.