LONDON

London is located in southeast Britain, inland from the North Sea at a point where the Thames River could be bridged. Founded by the Romans in the first century c.e. as a trading center, London provided easy communications by water and land, and it quickly became an important marketplace. London's fortunes have always been linked to empire, first that of the Romans, and much later, that of the British crown. Connected by sea to colonies in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the South Pacific, it is the most international of Britain's cities, leading a worldwide exchange of goods, people, and information. A spiderweb of turnpikes, canals, and, after 1840, railroads made London the kingdom's central place. In 1800, London was Britain's biggest city, its most important port, its political and cultural capital, and its largest manufacturing center. To quote the novelist Henry James (1843–1916), "for the real London-lover the mere immensity of the place is a large part of its savour." Its dominance of Great Britain, combined with the political and economic importance of the United Kingdom, made London the most influential city in the world during the nineteenth century.

population growth and expansion

Between 1800 and 1900, Greater London's population rose from over 1,000,000 to 6,600,000; by 1900, one of every five people in England and Wales lived in the capital. Early in the century, growth rates reached 20 percent per decade, an explosive pace of increase by any standard. By 1810, London had become the world's largest city, outstripping the Japanese capital of Edo. Inhabitants found it impossible to know all London's different neighborhoods and districts.

London's rapid expansion was all the more remarkable because of the capital's high death rates. In the eighteenth century, the capital served as "the national reservoir of infections." People, especially infants, died from smallpox, fever, measles, and consumption at a higher rate than those living in rural areas or smaller towns; Londoners born in the first half of the eighteenth century had an average life expectancy of only thirty-five years. But after 1750, improved nutrition and cleanliness, as well as inoculation against smallpox, led to slow declines in mortality, and the trend continued. Births approximately balanced deaths in the metropolis by 1800, and outnumbered them after 1810. In later decades, advances in sanitation and water cleanliness cut the death rate still more. Even without major advances in medical care, improvements in living conditions in the capital made it no longer a deathtrap for its residents.

Much of London's growth, however, came through migration. Thousands of young people walked or rode into the metropolis every year, most coming from the south and east of England, although the capital attracted northerners, Scots, and Welsh, too. Almost 50,000 Irish came to London during the 1840s, the decade of the Potato Famine. London attracted aristocrats and actors, bricklayers and beggars. Foreign sailors jumped ship in the port; Irish arrived to work as servants or dock laborers. Merchants from around the world settled in London to trade. Because many passed through too quickly to be counted in any statistical record, the total number of immigrants and emigrants to the capital is unknown. But between 1851 and 1861, around 286,000 new residents arrived and remained long enough to be counted in a census, representing about 10 percent of the metropolitan population. Because migrants tend to follow kin or neighbors, London sheltered a string of migrant communities of British, as well as foreign, origin. Irish enclaves grew up in the East End, in Central London, and in Bermondsey. Italians congregated in Holborn, and the French in Soho. When East European Jews flocked to London in the late nineteenth century, most settled in Whitechapel, in the East End. In 1891, over 3 percent of the London population was foreign born, and an additional 3 percent came from Scotland or Ireland.

But the outflow was high too. Between 1851 and 1861, over 100,000 people born in London left to settle in other parts of England and Wales; tens of thousands of others moved from the capital overseas. Some people lived in London seasonally; others came for a few years to study or to work before marriage. The flow of people in and out of the metropolis never ceased, making London residence something shared by a substantial proportion of the British population.

This rapidly growing population needed housing. By 1800, the rush to build for newcomers had already produced suburbs of largely middle-class residents. Businessmen commuted daily from villas on the outskirts of the city to offices in the center. Aristocratic landlords worked with developers to cover their estates with terrace housing. Thomas Cubitt (1788–1855), the greatest builder of the Victorian period, worked with the Duke of Westminster to lay out Belgravia and Pimlico. Royal land converted into public parks encouraged development of the West End, London's most fashionable address.

Changes in transportation made possible the rush from the center, which by century's end included workers as well as the middle class. Horse-drawn stage coaches, omnibuses, and, later, trolleys brought thousands into town daily. By the 1870s, routes crossed London north to south and east to

west. The railways provided a second mode of intra-London travel after the major railway lines completed their London stations. During the second half of the nineteenth century, companies built new approach lines into the metropolis and new bridges to bring trains into central London stations. Adding the tracks, however, meant subtracting scandalous amounts of workers' housing, for which few replacements were built. Over 100,000 people found themselves displaced by railway construction in London during the second half of the century, and many could not afford to relocate into outer areas. The fever to expand the metropolis came at a high cost.

London's growth outran the capital's ability to cope with added numbers. Foul air, tainted water, stinking refuse heaps, and legions of street-people shocked respectable visitors. In 1819, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) wrote "Hell is a city much like London." It took much of the second half of the century to clean up the mess. Sir John Simon (1816–1904), Medical Officer of Health for the City of London, attacked cesspits and substandard housing. He succeeded in increasing water supplies, combatting dirt and stinks. By the mid-1850s, all metropolitan districts had hired similar medical officers to improve local sanitation. They inspected lodging houses, quarantined the contagious, and tried to close down sources of pollution. Slowly local government cleaned up the capital.

london's economy

During the period when the British economy industrialized, London kept its position as the country's largest manufacturing center. Although not a conventional factory town, the capital housed the country's largest stock of highly skilled workers. They produced luxury goods for the elite, staples for the metropolitan population, and industrial goods linked to the port and its trade. Artisans, who had been the core of the old regime economy, kept their importance in many crafts, giving London a competitive edge in fields as diverse as printing, watchmaking, tailoring, and hat making. Luxury goods—silk textiles, fine clothing, silver products—poured from London workshops. If London was a vast department store, the river was its service entrance, where thousands spent their days loading and unloading to meet deadlines.

London had an enormous service sector. The capital needed office workers, clerks, and administrators, and it attracted increasing numbers of professionals. The metropolis remained the world's financial and trading capital until the 1940s, when New York took over that primary position. The central players in the London economy were not the manufacturers, but the "gentlemanly capitalists"—directors of the East India Company or bankers such as Alexander Baring (1774–1848) and Nathan Meyer Rothschild (1777–1836). Commerce and trade outranked the city's contribution to British industrial production. The special quality of the metropolitan economy is most easily seen by measuring the capital's contribution to national employment. In 1851, when workers in the capital accounted for only 13.7 percent of the employed population of England and Wales, Londoners dominated the banking industry (41 percent), the professions (27 percent), and government service (27 percent).

Women's trades differed significantly from those of their male relatives. For the most part, females produced clothing—dresses, hats, shirts, and shoes—or small home-produced goods. Excluded from apprenticeships and the guilds, women worked in skilled occupations alongside their husbands or made simple goods in their homes for middlemen who paid starvation wages. The most common women's job in the capital was that of domestic servant, which gave women room, board, and a tiny wage in return for unregulated hours of household drudgery. Those few with a secondary education could become teachers or governesses. Not until late in the century did many administrative or clerical positions become open to women.

Manufacturers in the metropolis had to confront rising costs and competition from northern British firms, as well as European and North American rivals. London was a high wage, high rent site in which to produce goods. Moreover, technological changes favored mass production, which required more space, always at a premium in central London. To cut costs, some firms moved farther out; others left London for provincial cities. Between 1870 and 1914, the London economy experienced steady economic decline. Clothing and furniture manufacturers coped by lowering wages and quality, pushing production of cheap and shoddy goods into workers' homes, thereby eliminating the expense of rent, heat, and light.

The Second Industrial Revolution, built on electricity and internal combustion engines, helped the London manufacturing economy to modernize in the late nineteenth century. London's comparative advantage in skilled labor and ready consumers encouraged entrepreneurs to locate in the southeast, and the new technology provided power. Electrified, underground railway lines reached far outside central London to offer commuters easy access to the center at low cost. Electric trams, which were cheap, fast, and large, supplanted horse-drawn omnibuses. With better transport services, the effective metropolitan area exploded again in size. The capital became "Greater London," stretching northward into the Lea Valley, westward through the county of Middlesex, and beyond Greenwich to the east. In rapidly growing outer regions, new firms producing cars, tools, and chemicals multiplied. The southeast became a national center for electrical and general engineering. Linked by road, canal, and sea to the rest of the country and the empire, a London location again made sense for the savvy entrepreneur. By 1914, London and the southeast had again become the most prosperous, progressive region of Great Britain.

society

London had a social geography that paralleled its physical divisions. As the city grew, more and more of the middle classes, who could afford to commute to work and who preferred privacy to over-crowded central districts, left central and eastern parishes for western areas or the suburbs. The fashionable West End was launched by a spectacularly successful town planning scheme paid for by the central government. In the eighteenth century, George III (r. 1760–1820) traded royal lands in West London for cash, and the Commissioners of Woods and Forests, encouraged by George IV (r. 1820–1830), decided to support building in the area by improving access and adding greenery. John Nash (1752–1835), a government architect, produced the grand design, which resulted in an elegant north-south street, a park, a canal, as well as Trafalgar Square and Buckingham Palace. Built around 1820, Regent Street blocked access to the west from the slums of Soho and gave fashionable London a place to shop. Speculative builders, recognizing a growing demand for upscale housing, rushed to develop vacant land to the west.

Meanwhile, the East End became an industrial area and disproportionately the residence of the poor. Immigrants and people practicing nasty trades crowded into crumbling houses on mean streets. After surveying the population of the East End in the late 1880s, Charles Booth (1840–1916), ship owner and sociologist, decided that 35 percent had incomes either on the poverty line or so low that "decent life is not imaginable." Districts to the east of the Tower of London had the highest death rates and the worst housing in London. Smells from tanneries and noise from street vendors drove out the genteel, leaving behind workers who needed to be close to their jobs. Slaughterhouses shared space with railway tunnels and tumble-down tenements. Many contemporaries compared eastern districts to the unknown territories of the British Empire and their inhabitants to "savages." Such comments reflected the increasing social distance of rich and poor, as distance bred fear and condemnation. Contemporaries identified the East End with crime and prostitution. The century's most famous murders, the stabbing deaths by Jack the Ripper, took place in Whitechapel in 1888. During the nineteenth century, the contrast between slum and suburb had moral connotations, in addition to economic ones.

Crime, however, could not be confined to the East End. Streetwalkers and burglars could be found in every London district. Pickpockets frequented West End theaters and the railway stations. Riverside areas sheltered smugglers, river pirates, and mudlarks—thieving children who stole from ships. Londoners feared that the city sheltered a "criminal class," or a criminal subculture whose members shunned honest work in favor of preying upon the unwary. Criminals were those who would not work, and they needed to be punished.

Early in the nineteenth century, London had many criminals but no organized police force out-side the City and the Thames River. For the most part, people were supposed to protect themselves. By prescribing the death penalty for over two hundred offenses, the criminal code was designed to frighten people into good behavior, but the chances of being caught were slim. The establishment of the Metropolitan Police Force in 1829 proved a turning point. Uniformed, trained constables began to patrol the streets. One central authority took responsibility for keeping order within the capital, and crime rates decreased. Initially resented as a threat to local liberties, the force provided a model for modern policing that was copied quickly throughout Britain.

metropolitan culture

London houses the largest collection of museums, theaters, clubs, and societies in the United Kingdom. The British government established the British Museum in the 1750s. Archaeological expeditions around the empire added to its vast store of

artifacts, which included the Parthenon statuary brought back by Lord Elgin (1766–1841) from Greece in 1801. Trafalgar Square became another center of cultural pilgrimage with the building of the National Gallery of Art in 1837 and the National Portrait Gallery in 1856. Profits from the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 financed new centers for study of British art and science. Opening in 1857, the South Kensington Museum eventually split into the Victoria and Albert Museum for applied art and the Science Museum. In order to bring contemporary art to workers, Samuel Augustus Barnett (1844–1913) and his wife Henrietta founded the East End Gallery in Whitechapel, which opened in 1901. As British wealth increased, so did the impulse to collect and to display the results to people of all ranks and social statuses.

Intellectuals, scientists, and the highly skilled congregated in London, and they became more highly organized and vocal during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The crown chartered a variety of scientific societies, starting with the Royal Society in 1662. By the mid-nineteenth century, groups of specialists such as the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Geological Society, and the Royal Statistical Society abounded in the capital. As medicine and law became more highly professionalized, new societies such as the Royal College of Surgeons, the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries, and the Law Society brought

added respectability and visibility to their members. A London association, chartered by the government and provided with rules of admission and conduct, became a rite of passage for aspiring professionals.

To challenge the Anglican monopoly of university education, radical intellectuals founded University College, London in 1827. No religious barriers to entry were erected, and the curriculum concentrated on modern subjects largely ignored by Oxford and Cambridge. It joined with the Anglican King's College to form the University of London in 1837—male-only until it opened examinations to women in 1878. The University expanded to include Bedford and Royal Holloway Colleges for women. Institutions like the London School of Economics, organized by Fabian socialists in 1895, made the capital a center of training in the social sciences. Art, music, and drama schools flourished in London, as well.

London was also the center of the British entertainment world. Royal licenses dating from the 1660s restricted theatrical productions to two great playhouses, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, but they had many unlicensed competitors. By the time the industry was opened to all comers in 1843, several dozen theaters operated all over the capital. In the second half of the nineteenth century, entrepreneurs built new theaters and music halls for audiences of all social classes and ages. The East End had "penny gaffes" where melodrama flourished. Regulation remained, however, in the person of the Lord Chamberlain, who retained the right to block productions and institutions "in the interest of good manners, decorum, or the public peace." His censorious gaze ended performances of Oscar Wilde's Salome in 1892.

For less formal entertainment, Londoners walked to pleasure gardens, where they saw open air shows and fireworks in tree-lined, suburban settings. In central London, song and supper rooms developed into music halls where patrons drank and listened to the rock stars of the time. From the 1820s, Regent's Park in London hosted a zoo and a diorama of the city as seen from the top of St. Paul's Cathedral. Sporting enthusiasts could attend wrestling matches or cockfights, until the latter were banned in 1849. Spectator sports drew large crowds to cheer and to bet on favorites. Boxing and cricket were popular in the late eighteenth century, and by 1900 this list expanded to include soccer and rugby. The best show of all proved to be the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, visited by six million people who came to look at Indian crafts, French art, and British manufactured goods.

London fostered a culture of consumption, fed by changes in marketing. New technologies transformed stores into seductive places. Drapers' stores used bright lights and huge plate glass windows to lure customers inside. In 1863, William Whiteley (1831–1907) built the country's first department store in the West End, and it soon spawned even more successful imitators. Oxford Street became a shoppers' Mecca, particularly after 1909, when Selfridges' palace of merchandise drew thousands to gaze at its decorations and to lunch in its fashionable dining rooms. Central London encouraged many forms of consumption. Thousands of coffeehouses, cookshops, street vendors, and chophouses proved that fast food was not a modern invention. To provide high-status men with meeting places, social clubs where members could drink and dine, unencumbered by wives, multiplied in the West End. By the 1860s, middle-class women founded clubs of their own to ease female expeditions around the town.

Much of London's cultural life was divided according to social status and gender. High culture was less open to poorer Londoners than popular culture was to the affluent. Museums limited weekend hours, restricting workers' access, and respectable clothing was necessary for entry into London parks. Men dominated London's public spaces, risky places for unchaperoned middle-class women, who were expected to stay at home. By the 1880s, however, the rules loosened, as expanded urban opportunities for women coincided with their increasing demands for access.

governance

Not until 1889 did London have an effective structure of government. What became officially "London" in the late nineteenth century combined a jumble of local authorities, conflicting jurisdictions, and rival centers of power. The metropolis grew from three centers: (1) the City of London, a square mile of territory north of the river; (2) Westminster, the seat of court and Parliament; and (3) Southwark on the south bank of the Thames. Rudimentary county institutions ruled in parts of Middlesex, Kent, and Surrey, while parish vestries controlled Hammersmith, Chelsea, Paddington, Marylebone, St. Pancras, and much of Westminster. The City of London had a particularly complicated and arcane set of institutions. A Lord Mayor and two Sheriffs were elected annually, but policies were set by the Court of Aldermen, the Court of Common Council, the Court of Common Hall, and the Court of Wardmote, which operated alongside eighty-nine craft guilds or companies, whose members became "freemen" and therefore voters in the City. While the City operated as a democracy for males with property, real power lay in the hands of the Aldermen, a group of rich, elderly merchants appointed for life. City officials had also amassed power far beyond the ancient walls of the town. They governed the river Thames, as well as the Port of London, local markets, and prisons. In the crowd of metropolitan administrators, the City stood out as a giant among dwarfs.

In 1800, a crazy-quilt of tiny units and over-lapping jurisdictions offered services to inhabitants. Turnpike trusts ran the main roads, while sewer commissioners looked after the drains. The Bow Street Magistrates' Court and its small staff of detectives attempted to control crime. Around two hundred parishes independently subsidized the poor within their boundaries, and paved, lit, and cleaned streets. In addition, Parliament authorized hundreds of local improvement trusts. Nine different trusts looked after the lighting of the Lambeth parish alone. With little coordination other than that provided by the market, London institutions and voters ignored their neighbors and guarded their own turf.

Reform came piecemeal throughout the nineteenth century. A string of cholera epidemics paved the way for the Metropolitan Board of Works,

founded in 1855 to build sewers and new streets. Elected by the City Corporation and parish vestries, the Board managed to centralize control of waste management, street improvements, and parks while leaving the ancient, archaic structures of local government intact. By the 1880s, demonstrators on the streets and reformers in Parliament called for its replacement.

The Local Government Act of 1888 established the London County Council (LCC), which had jurisdiction over 117 square miles. Only a minority (about one in ten Londoners) could vote for the new council, but property-owning women were included in the electorate. They chose a central council and twenty-nine borough councils, who ran the metropolis until 1965, when the LCC expanded into the Greater London Council and was responsible for an even larger territory. Under the leadership of the Liberals and Radical Progressives who controlled the group until 1907, the LCC launched an ambitious program of social reform. It took responsibility for fire service, housing, and trolley transport; it launched steamboat service on the Thames. After 1904, the LCC managed state-funded primary and secondary education, while moving London teachers onto the municipal payroll. By 1914, the LCC was London's largest employer. Its staff built schools and monitored midwives, music halls, and lodging houses. Influenced by Fabian socialists, the council erected large, publicly owned housing estates for workers on the outskirts of the city. These model

estates provided workers with far better sanitation—indoor plumbing and bathrooms, for example—in a relatively drab, restricted social setting. Municipal collectivism made its mark in London during the two decades before World War I, when activist politicians had the votes to "expand the sphere of the civic." London government shifted from retrograde to reforming at the end of the nineteenth century.

By the outbreak of World War I, London had become a "modern" city with effective government, well-functioning infrastructures, and a booming cultural life. Although the region had reestablished its economic hegemony, social inequalities remained deep and unresolved.

See alsoCities and Towns; Great Britain; Paris.

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