London (England)

D

Georgian London

London grew quickly during the Georgian age, between 1714 and the 1830s. By 1801 the population of the city and its outlying areas had passed the 1 million mark, and by 1837 was close to 2 million. London was the hub of an immense empire (in spite of losing its American colonies in the American Revolution), its wealth coming from trade with the East and West Indies. Trade and shipping were facilitated by the building of giant new docks early in the 19th century, such as the West India Dock and the London Dock in the East End, to replace the old, crowded port located between London Bridge and the Tower. Culturally, it was the age of Dr. Samuel Johnson, London’s most literary and crusty defender: “You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”

Georgian London, however, was becoming two cities, based on wealth and residence. The West End emerged as the residential and shopping center of the wealthy. Aristocrats who owned large rural estates developed them into London suburbs, using the residential square as the focal point of formally planned districts, unlike anything in older parts of London, where development was more unsystematic. Grosvenor, Bedford, Belgrave, and Russell squares were all built during the 18th and early 19th centuries.

Thousands of terraces (row houses) were built in the uniform Georgian style, many with extravagant interiors by fashionable architects such as Robert Adam and John Nash. Nash also designed palatial terraces, including Cumberland Terrace at Regent’s Park in the 1820s. The Greek Revival style of classicism, with its straight lines and columns, dominated the design of a number of public buildings built in the early 19th century, such as the British Museum, University College, and the National Gallery. Nash’s major public planning ventures included Regent Street in 1812, designed as a grand processional leading to the north, and Trafalgar Square in the 1830s, in honor of Admiral Horatio Nelson.

The other Georgian London was the East End, with its dockyards, and the islands of poverty scattered through the rest of the city. Child mortality, disease, and crime were prevalent in these areas. The desperate situation was worsened by high consumption of gin. Social violence, crime, and major demonstrations were common, especially during the early reign of George III. Notable during this period were the riots led by John Wilkes in the late 1760s, in which he called for freedom of the press and political reforms, and the Gordon Riots of 1780, headed by Protestant leader Lord George Gordon against pro-Catholic legislation. An official police force (the world’s first) was authorized by Parliament and organized by Sir Robert Peel in 1829, replacing the policing done by parish constables and private watchmen.

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E

Victorian and Edwardian London

The phenomenal population growth between 1837 and 1914 made London the world’s largest city. Between 1851 and 1901, London’s population went from 2.5 million to 6.5 million. London was Britain’s economic powerhouse and the center of a burgeoning empire. Suburban expansion of an unprecedented scale swallowed up former countryside and villages in all directions. Residential housing in the City declined as it became a commercial and financial enclave.

The railroads were key engines of change in the city. Among the earliest was the London and Birmingham, which connected the manufacturing center to London’s northern suburbs at Euston Station by the late 1830s. Eventually the inner city was ringed by lavish railway stations, such as Saint Pancras, a sort of medieval fairy-tale castle built in the 1860s. The underground railway began in the 1860s and, with electrification in the 1890s, was able to use deep tunnels to bring passengers to the heart of the city. The old London Bridge was replaced by a modern version in the 1830s, and the Tower Bridge, a marvel of modern engineering, opened in 1894, to become London’s most recognizable landmark. The large glass-and-iron Crystal Palace, built for the Great Exhibition of 1851, symbolized London’s place as the capital of the industrial age. The most spectacular public building of the age was the New Palace of Westminster, the Houses of Parliament, designed by Sir Charles Barry in 1835 and completed in 1860, which ushered in the new Gothic Revival style of the Victorian era, with its use of ornate decoration, spires, and towers.

London’s reputation for progress was matched by its image as a city of degradation and poverty. The railways slashed their way through slum districts, displacing thousands. The slums of the East End and Soho received particular attention from observers and writers. Some of the novels of Charles Dickens portrayed the human misery in graphic terms, as did Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and London Poor, based on research carried out in the 1840s and 1850s. Charles Booth’s massive 17-volume Life and Labour of the People of London, published between 1891 and 1903, helped pressure the new London County Council to take action by providing public housing and by taking over public ownership of gas, water, electricity, and transport. Efforts to solve London’s problems by building new “garden cities,” such as Letchworth in the early 1900s, were popular with reformers but did little to alleviate the situation in the metropolis as a whole. Garden cities were planned communities in gardenlike settings and included industry as well as homes so that residents would not have to commute to London on a daily basis.

F

London in the 20th Century and After

London was still the largest city in the world at the beginning of the century, but was surpassed by New York by 1920. London continued to grow, however, between the world wars, and peaked at more than 8 million people in 1951. During the interwar years there was an increased expansion to the suburbs, made possible by the extension of the underground railway and the automobile. The London County Council built council housing in both the inner city and in the suburbs, which relieved the housing shortage, and developers emphasized semidetached suburban homes. (A semidetached house is one that shares a common wall with another residence.)

German bombings during World War II, especially the Blitz between September 1940 and May 1941, devastated vast areas of London, particularly in the City and the East End. As many as 30,000 Londoners died, and another 50,000 were injured. More than 130,000 houses were destroyed. After the war, contractors tore down older buildings and put up acres of concrete-and-glass towers in places like the Barbican and around Saint Paul’s. The concrete, bunkerlike South Bank Centre was an attempt to rejuvenate the desolate area south of the river with a new cultural complex. London also experienced an influx of immigrants from the West Indies during the 1950s, and racial and class tensions flared in the late 1950s in the Notting Hill area, where many immigrants from the Caribbean had settled.

In the “swinging sixties” London had a brief fling as a center of youth culture, pop music, fashion, and film. But industry left the city, and the population declined to 7.3 million in 1971. A massive initiative took place in the 1980s to redevelop the East End’s abandoned Dockland area into a business center. This resulted in the construction of the 250-m (800-ft), stainless steel Canary Wharf Tower, the tallest building in the United Kingdom, and the Docklands Light Railway to transport people to the new Docklands. This development has only been partially successful and remains relatively isolated from other parts of London.

Socially, racial unrest occurred in the 1980s in Brixton, an area noted for its high crime, as tensions flared between white police and black residents. Central London was the site of a massive riot in 1990 after the Conservative government replaced the property tax with a community charge tax. Londoners were irate because the new tax, soon dubbed a poll tax, set a fixed amount to be paid per person rather than taxing people according to their income level. Londoners also had to endure periodic bomb attacks by the Irish Republican Army (IRA).

G

Recent Developments

Like everything else about London, its current problems are also immense. The most obvious is the growing social polarization of the rich and the poor. Recent government policies have accentuated the situation. As in other Western nations, cutting taxes enriched a growing middle class and led to a consumer boom that lasted until the financial and economic crisis of 2008. Lower taxes, however, have also meant less government spending on health, welfare, and public housing, which has weakened Britain’s welfare state. The spending cuts in the social welfare areas have accentuated class differences, and the disparity is evident when contrasting expensive new developments like the Docklands with the decaying public housing complexes that have not been properly maintained. It remains to be seen whether national and metropolitan policies will attempt to bridge the growing gap between those who did and did not benefit from the prosperity of the 1990s and early and mid-2000s.

Another issue is London’s decaying physical infrastructure. London has an aging and crumbling housing stock, more than a third of which was built before 1919, and some dwellings do not meet government standards for human habitation. London has one of the most comprehensive bus and underground systems in the world, moving millions of passengers daily, but parts of the system are old and poorly maintained, leading more people to use cars. Since London was primarily built before the automobile age, its streets cannot handle the increased traffic. The London water supply runs through 19th-century cast iron pipes, many of which leak. The pipes are gradually being replaced with plastic piping.

Unemployment remained high in London during the 1990s and 2000s. As in other Western cities, crime and poverty were escalating. Moreover, London’s world position depends heavily upon the continuing success of its financial sector, but uneasy relations between Britain and the European Union have threatened to put that in doubt, as has the financial crisis of 2008.

London has been a target for several acts of terrorism over the years. During the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, famous landmarks, government buildings, and railway stations in the city were regularly targeted by the Irish Republican Army (IRA). In July 2005 London was the target of a major terrorist attack when four bombs exploded in the central part of the city during the morning rush hour. The bombings targeted trains in the city’s underground subway system and a commuter bus. An investigation soon identified four British Muslim men as the suspected bombers. The attacks killed 56 people, including the suspected bombers, and injured about 700 others.

Although London has suffered some growing pains through its history, it has responded positively to economic challenges, and there are reasons to be optimistic about its future. Its population is increasing again. Major buildings, such as the British Museum and the Royal Opera House, have been extensively renovated. Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre has been reconstructed in Southwark, near its original location, complete with thatched roof and natural lighting, in an effort to regenerate the spirit of the city’s most creative, dramatic era. Long-term proposals for regeneration of the East End to accommodate London’s rapidly expanding population were outlined in the London Plan, a spatial development strategy for the city published in 2004. Central to the proposal was London’s bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games. The success of that bid enabled extensive redevelopment of the East End and an overhaul of the public transportation system to begin.

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