Feeling expansive
All the while, building continued apace: Chelsea, Pimlico, Bayswater, St John's Wood and Notting Hill were all developed between the 1820s and 1850s. In 1873, one reporter complained that 'the London of our youth... is becoming obliterated by another city which seems rising up through it.'
'The Cheap Trains Act of 1883 helped the working class move from grim tenement blocks to 'railway suburbs' like West Ham and Walthamstow.'
But London was spreading as well as rising. By the 1860s it had swallowed Hammersmith, Wood Green and Blackheath. Areas like Hackney, Balham and Islington were now favoured locations for office clerks and, increasingly, prosperous working class families. The Cheap Trains Act of 1883 helped the working class move from grim tenement blocks to 'railway suburbs' like West Ham and Walthamstow. This migration left only the poorest in the East End and, by 1880, it had become a hellish slum, notorious for its poverty, vice and violence (Jack the Ripper didn't help matters much).
The grinding poverty of Dickensian London was real and vicious, yet in many ways the city was improving. The tailor Francis Place claimed that, 'notwithstanding the vice, the misery and the disease which still abounds in London, its general prevalence has been greatly diminished.'
For once, London's expansion was accompanied by an evolving governance and infrastructure; London could look after itself better than ever before; it was maturing. Health scares and cholera epidemics in the 1850s paved the way for cleaner water; the Metropolis Management Act of 1855 shook up local government; and major works, such as drainage and slum clearance, were put in the hands of the Metropolitan Board of Works.
This progress, combined with the work of reformers such as Sir Robert Peel, Sir Edwin Chadwick and the Earl of Shaftesbury, resulted in new churches and schools and better law and order. Charities like the Sutton and Lewis trusts were building houses for the working class and, by the end of the century, London was dragging itself towards the introduction of municipal housing.
Public money was establishing and maintaining parks, and the success of the British Museum, coupled with the popularity and profitability of the Great Exhibition of 1851, paved the way for the national museums in South Kensington, free to all. Theatres and music halls were booming and department stores, like Harrods and Whiteleys, were separating Victorian gentility from its hard-earned cash.
By the end of the 19th century, London was a city without equal. Its role as headquarters of the British Empire gave it power and prestige; its population of millions gave it unparalleled diversity. To Disraeli, it was 'a modern Babylon', teeming with a myriad people, languages and cultures.
In this respect, it was the first global city, instantly recognisable to any Londoner today. Almost seven million people; wide streets crammed with buses and cabs; mainline and underground stations disgorging bustling commuters; weekends spent in pubs, parks, theatres and museums. In 1900, it must have appeared as if its growth, prosperity and progress would last forever. However, the planes and bombs of two world wars were soon to provide the great city with its greatest challenge yet.
Published: 2004-02-16
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