London: The Biography

This happy fiction could not be sustained for long, however, with the emergence of mass transport expediting the greatest exodus in London’s history. Soon the pattern became clear, with the more prosperous citizens moving further out to more extensive grounds and eminences even as they were being displaced by new arrivals. The phenomenon is as old, and as new, as the city itself. Charles Manby Smith in The Little World of London, observed the progress over the 1820s to 1850s of one fictional street, which he named Strawberry Street, in suburban Islington. It was two or three years in building, with “a double row of two-storied dwellings,” and at first “clung with considerable tenacity to rural associations and characteristics” in order to avoid “being swallowed up in Babylon’s bosom.” It was genteel, the abode of professional gentlemen and their families, “clerks, managers, and responsible persons employed in the city.” But then it began to change. “The professional ladies and gentlemen moved by degrees further north, and their places were supplied by a new class-by tradesmen’s clerks, by foremen, and overseers of workshops” who worked all hours and who “let lodgings to help pay the rent.” Soon enough “long ranks of cottages, not twenty feet apart, sprang up like mushrooms in the waste ground on the eastern side. They were inhabited as soon as built.” A saw-mill was erected in the vicinity, and in the street itself there appeared a variety of shops; a carpenter, a joiner, a greengrocer joined the older residents so that “in a couple of years … the whole street on both sides of the way, with the exception of a very few houses, was transformed into a third-rate business street.” The saw-mill itself prospered and “gathered round it a host of industrial processors.” Beer-shops and public houses and coffee shops emerged, alongside workshops and work-yards. So within thirty years the street had been transformed “from the abode of quiet and ease-loving competence to that of the toiling and struggling mass.”

There was another characteristic urban process, too, with development along the lines of the main roads followed by a consolidation of the areas between the thoroughfares so that, as The Builder of 1885 put it, “the growth of the solid nucleus, with but few interstices left open, has been nothing less than prodigious.” By the 1850s the city began to lose its population to areas such as Canonbury to the north, and Walworth to the south. The advent of cheap “workmen’s fares” meant that areas close to a railway station could be quickly inhabited; thus there emerged “working-class” suburbs such as Tottenham and East Ham. The drift was gathering pace and by the 1860s the clerk and the shopkeeper desired nothing but a little villa “out of town.” An observer perched on top of Primrose Hill, in 1862, noted that “the metropolis has thrown out its arms and embraced us, not yet with a stifling clutch, but with ominous closeness.” The metaphors here suggest some alien threat or invasion, and of course they represent a familiar if unimaginative attitude towards London. The city’s expansion over the countryside was noisy, noxious and destructive. Yet it could equally be argued that the city brought energy and activity to those areas which it covered, and that in the creation of suburbia it fashioned a new kind of life. It brought prosperity and, for those who settled on the new estates, a kind of contentment.

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, therefore, there was endless building activity in all the environs of London. “Let as fast as built” was one slogan, yet it would be a mistake to characterise all suburbs as examples of shoddy architecture or improvised planning. The informal St. John’s Wood Estate and those of Wimbledon Common or Hampstead Garden Suburb, for example, were quite distinct from the working-class terraces of Walthamstow or Barking. The rows of small houses that comprised Agar Town differed from the more genteel avenues of Brixton. The Eton College Estate, covering the district known as Chalk Farm, was very different from the Seven Sisters Estate. Dreary Islington was not the same as leafy Crouch End. H.G. Wells reacted with dismay to the suburbia of Bromley, where he had grown up, and denounced its “jerry built unalterable houses” as well as the “planlessness of which all of us who had to live in London were the victims.” Yet only a decade after the young Wells was unhappily ensconced in Bromley, the young W.B. Yeats was enjoying the relatively sylvan delights of Bedford Park. Both were London suburbs.