LONDON.

In the summer of 1914, as Europe prepared to tear itself apart, it was clear that the future of London was not the smallest stake at play in the struggle for continental and imperial supremacy. London was the largest city the world had ever seen: at 7.16 million people, its population outnumbered Berlin, Paris, St. Petersburg, and Moscow combined. It was the world's busiest port, one of its greatest manufacturing districts, and its richest consumer market. Most important of all, the square mile of the City of London was the world's banker, determining the price of international commodities, arranging credit for most of the world's merchants, and accommodating the debts—even printing the banknotes—of many governments across the globe. All that would change, should war rearrange the shape of empires and the power of nations to the detriment of Britain and its capital.

HYPERTROPHY AND STRANGULATION: 1914–1939

World War I did indeed change London. During the four years of war most alterations seemed for the worse. Pubs closed longer, beer was watered, the streets were blacked out, and nightlife shut down. Bombing by zeppelins and Gotha biplanes killed some six hundred Londoners from the summer of 1917 to November 1918. The return home of London's German minority, its largest, and of some French, Italians, and Russians narrowed the capital's cosmopolitan appeal. A virtual halt on slum clearance and nonmilitary construction meant that London's housing problem, the city's biggest social demerit, deteriorated even further. The deaths and maiming of tens of thousands of Londoners in battles in Flanders and elsewhere brought agony to every street.

But the hidden effects proved larger in the long run, and these were greatly more positive. A huge wartime rise in working-class incomes accompanied full employment, with masses of women brought into the workforce for the first time. This stoked demand for better housing and higher living standards. New industrial areas for war production, notably in west London at Park Royal, expanded the capital's manufacturing capacity to meet the demand for modern goods. And the dislocation of German and French banking in the turmoil of war provided further opportunities for the City, a big factor in the continuing prosperity of London's middle classes during the war and after.

This twin effect of pent-up demand in all classes, especially within a great sector of the population historically submerged in under-consumption, and enhanced industrial capacity on the edge of the metropolis fueled one of the great London phenomena of the twentieth century: its enormous suburban expansion between the two world wars. From 1924 to 1939, London doubled in size on the ground, covering a built-up area some thirty-four miles across. Around 860,000 houses were built in these years. In 1934, the most frantic of all, 1,500 were being run up every week. And, following the lead of Park Royal, by far the fastest growth was on London's western edge, where new semidetached suburbs at Wembley, Neasden, Hayes, and elsewhere were connected to London by improved rail links above and below ground, and by a spreading network of motor buses. This was the biggest land-grab in London's—indeed, Britain's—history.

With new houses came more and more Londoners. Not all these, though, were new to the city. Much of new London was occupied by middle-class movers from inner London, tempted out by electric railways and the tube (London's underground rail system), by mortgages as cheap as inner-city rents, and by the delights of suburban life with a garden, and neighbors just like themselves. Many others were of the upper working class, moving out to council estates (most noticeably, a new town of ninety thousand at Becontree in Essex) and to the cheaper zones of owner-occupation, such as Bexley in southeast London. But many suburbanites were newcomers to London. And other newcomers filled some of the spaces in inner London that older-established Londoners now found so irksome. London's outer ring housed almost 900,000 more people in 1939 than just eight years before, nearly as many as if the people of Birmingham, Britain's second-largest city, had marched lock and stock to the capital. In that year, London's population reached 8.62 million, a number unlikely ever to be surpassed. Londoners made up more than one in five of the people of England and Wales. And that was a proportion also never likely to be bettered.

This overwhelming expansion of London and Londoners was largely built on the ferocious enterprise of metropolitan manufacturing industry. London had been the original home of new industries even in 1914, especially electrical commodities, motorcars, and airplanes. The wartime industrial growth-points secured much of the new factory building of the interwar years for the capital. Between 1932 and 1937, 83 percent of the nation's net increase of new factories employing twenty-five or more persons were built in London. Many employed predominantly young women—fifteen thousand of them at the Gramophone Company (later EMI) at Hayes—revolutionizing the prospects and aspirations of the London working class in the process. Here the new world of radios, gramophone records, film, cosmetics, artificial fabrics, plastics, convenience foods, and everything to do with sport were not only made but found their readiest market.

Against the grain of catastrophic slump in most of the older industrial areas of Britain, London was the beacon leading the country out of depression. Metropolitan fortunes seemed to triumph independently of the nation's. Small wonder that most planners and politicians saw provincial decline and the hypergrowth of London as two sides of the same coin. By the end of the 1930s, there was a virtual consensus among those who thought about such matters. London was a "national menace." Its growth had not just to be stopped but put into reverse.

THE REMAKING OF LONDON: 1940–1989

Indeed London's growth was put into reverse. Not by planners or government, but by the second period of total war to descend on the city in a generation. This time the negative outcomes overwhelmed the positive, and not only in the short term. First were the casualties. No true figure can ever be known, but officials put the civilian death toll of all the various periods of "the Blitz" from September 1940 to March 1945—prolonged night bombing, daylight raids, V1 buzz bombs and the terrible V2 rockets—at 29,890. Second was the damage to London's fabric. This was immense. The City lost a third of its floor space in a single night, 29–30 December 1940. Some 166,000 London houses—containing probably three times as many dwellings—were utterly destroyed or damaged beyond repair. Whole districts in east London were razed to the ground. The port was so heavily damaged that some parts never worked again. But out of all this destruction, and despite some well-founded fears for morale, the spirit of the Londoners and their city proved a symbol of heroic resistance to Free Europe and the world.

Indomitable it may have been, but London would never be the same again. Industrially, the battering received by inner London cleared out many factories and workshops from districts already uncongenially crowded. The port recovered its prewar trade for a time, but wartime developments would eventually make goods handling on the upper Thames obsolete in a generation. Redevelopment of the City, its land values the highest in Europe, encouraged the revolution in tall buildings that interwar London, with the sole exception of London University's Senate House, had fought hard to avoid. It would be on architects' drawing boards of the late 1940s that London's lukewarm flirtation with skyscrapers would first find expression.

Even grander schemes were afoot. Prewar orthodoxy over the damaging hypergrowth of London dominated thinking about how the city should be reconstructed after the peace. In 1943–1944, visionary plans were produced by men such as Patrick Abercrombie who believed that emptying London of people and jobs would solve not just metropolitan problems but the nation's too. Once industry and population had been moved out to a ring of New Towns, what was left would be redeveloped where possible and "zoned" for specialist functions—residential here, commercial there, industrial somewhere else. And traffic, the second of London's great social and economic demerits, would be steered away from the center in a series of giant ring roads.

In the event the plans proved too visionary by far. Imposing order on London was not only impracticable and prohibitively expensive but also, finally, undesired by Londoners who valued the chaotic variety of their city. Comprehensive redevelopment of some parts of the East End was attempted, but in general rebuilding was piecemeal and the most destructive of the ring roads was never built. Some of the planners' objectives were achieved, but usually without their intervention. The 1940s and 1950s were bleak decades in London, its fabric war-scarred, its housing crisis worse than before the war, a juvenile crime wave made more dangerous by the ready availability of ex-service handguns. Londoners left when they could. And industry had moved out too, finding no niche in areas redeveloped predominantly for housing. By 1961 the population was below eight million, lower than it had been for more than thirty years.

There were two other key players in the momentous changes of the first two postwar decades. The destruction of the City had deprived London of much-needed office space. Although backstreet industry might be leaving the metropolis, office jobs were increasing daily. The City had more than maintained its share of European and some worldwide financial services, and international business increasingly sought London headquarters. Capitalizing on this demand, the developer of office towers would be one of the great hate-figures of the postwar metropolis. Towers were built all over central London, not just the City. The notorious Centre Point, designed by Sir Richard Seifert for developer Harry Hyams at the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, stayed empty for ten years after completion in 1967. It came to symbolize the quintessence of wasteful finance capitalism at Londoners' expense.

If the developers were one force, then a reinvigorated London government was the other. Remodeled in 1964 to cover virtually the whole of the built-up area, it comprised a strategic authority in the Greater London Council (GLC), and thirty-two new all-purpose London boroughs. The old City Corporation was left untouched. The changes went a long way to put right the fractured and outdated arrangements inherited from the Victorians. Reinvigorated government proved destructive for old London. The 1960s and 1970s saw widespread clearance of working-class areas for new housing in giant council estates. Much of the Victorian housing that was destroyed could have been saved, and much of the systems-built tower-blocks and high-density estates that replaced it proved unfit for their purpose within a generation.

REMAKING THE LONDONER: 1948–1989

These were great changes in the fabric of London, and more were to come. But they were as nothing compared to the change wrought in the Londoner. Up to 1948, for 150 years or more, black people had been rarities in London. During the nineteenth century there had been a steady rise in European migration to London, especially among eastern European Jews, who represented one of the most vibrant and influential of London's minorities in the twentieth century. In 1914, around 4 percent of the population of inner London was foreign born, the vast majority Europeans by birth. In 1951, the figure had crept up to some one in twenty, many of them Poles dislocated from their homeland by war and repression. Few were warmly welcomed. Among many working-class Londoners and others, xenophobia and a mistrust of foreigners, especially those with black skins, were not often openly expressed but were deeply felt nonetheless.

So Londoners could not have been more ill-prepared for what began on 22 June 1948 with the docking at Tilbury, London's downriver port, of the SS Empire Windrush carrying five hundred mainly Jamaican migrants. There had been harbingers of the West Indian diaspora—with London as a prime destination—both during the war and immediately after. But the huge publicity given to the Windrush brought the realities of postwar migration home to Londoners as nothing had before. As thousands followed—there were said to be 100,000 West Indians in London by 1961—resentment battled with notions of fair play. London's housing problem and a resurgence of marginal fascist movements in east London gave resentment something to bite on. In the summer of 1958, London's only genuine race riot of the century broke out in Notting Hill, a desperately rundown area of inner west London. There were some serious assaults and cries of "lynch him," but it all petered out after a few days. And it was noticeable how some white Londoners of all classes had rallied to the cause of the black newcomers.

There were no further race riots, but dangerous times were to come. The free-and-easy camaraderie of the English-speaking West Indians generally made them more acceptable to indigenous Londoners than more "foreign" migrants from India and Pakistan who entered from the mid-1950s on. And the forced migration of Asians from East Africa after 1960, reaching crisis levels in 1967–1968, provoked demonstrations in favor of repatriation. From 1968 through the 1970s, racially motivated assaults—and a dozen or so murders—put the success or failure of multicultural London on a knife-edge. Or perhaps just appeared to do so, for in the end, weight of numbers and the diversity of communities made harmony, even at a respectful distance, a practical necessity. There was also, especially between Afro-Caribbeans and whites, a considerable amount of intermarriage. No one could conceivably have forecast that as a future for Londoners in 1948.

Perhaps the key decade in building toleration in London was the 1960s, despite the great difficulties experienced from 1968 and despite the bleak reaction of the decade that followed. A contributory factor was the rediscovery of inner London by the young aspiring middle classes, often sharing it with black migrants, in a reversal of the trend to suburbanization between the wars. The sociologist Ruth Glass called this phenomenon "gentrification" in 1964, and the name happily stuck. Areas of north London, especially Hampstead, Camden Town, and Islington—districts apparently marked only for the bulldozer—found champions in middle-class newcomers who saw much to be admired in Victorian streets and houses and much to be deplored in what was put up in their stead. There were some notable campaigns against council-led destruction spilling into the 1970s, most famously of all in Covent Garden, a district scheduled largely for total reconstruction but almost entirely saved—though saved for whom would be an open question. By 1974, the battle to stem the destruction of Victorian London had largely been won.

The decade of the 1960s was significant in other ways, too, most famously in the cultural revolution that saw London as a national, and for a time international, crucible. "London: The Swinging City" was how Time magazine in April 1966 described a phenomenon that had already been attracting European attention for at least two years before. With roots in café-based rock music, flavored by elements of the new culture imported from the West Indies, and with a host of brilliant talent most especially in the London fashion industry, "Swinging London" captured the world's imagination from about 1963 to 1972. Its centers were Carnaby Street and the rest of Soho, where London's sex industry had increasingly concentrated, and Chelsea, a riverside district west of the central area, where art and fashion had long felt at home. Newly gentrifying districts played their part too. In these years, some barriers were permanently broken down—sexual, political, racial (up to a point), and most notably class. Working-class footballers, rock singers, photographers, hairdressers, actors, and fashion models were iconic figures happily accepted into the worlds of the super-rich of old or new varieties. They would be so for the rest of the century and beyond.

The 1960s' wheels were greased by relative prosperity and full employment. Few at the time saw the troubles facing London that would work their way right through the troubled decades of the 1970s and 1980s. For the London economy entered a period of massive restructuring that World War II and its aftermath had begun. There was a collapse of manufacturing, especially in the well-established London metal trades. Some old connections between industry and locality—such as Fleet Street and the printing industry—disappeared altogether. There were 1.43 million manufacturing jobs in London in 1961, just 435,000 in 1989. From 1966 to 1981, the docks upriver from Tilbury closed one after another as large container ships, and roll-on roll-off truck freight, could no longer be accommodated in London's narrow waterway and congested roads. Fears of London's hypergrowth meant that office jobs were being relocated from the capital as a matter of official policy as late as 1978. In all, London lost some 30 percent of its jobs in the thirty years or so following 1962.

The 1970s and 1980s were bleak in other ways too. Some fierce trade union struggles, notably involving low-paid Asian migrants in west London in 1977 and high-paid print workers in the East End in 1986–1987, brought with them civil strife on a large scale. The Irish Republican Army, an old enemy of Londoners, waged two fierce bombing campaigns in 1973–1976 and 1978–1982, setting 252 bombs and killing fifty-six people; the civil war within Islam chose London as its battleground periodically during these years, too. Even more significantly, sore feelings between young black and Asian migrants and the Metropolitan Police, run by the home secretary and not by London government, erupted into fierce pitched battles. Whites joined in, but against the police and not against black Londoners. The worst civil unrest of the period was at Brixton, inner southwest London, 10–12 April 1981, and at Broadwater Farm, a giant council estate in Tottenham, north London, where a popular community policeman, Keith Blakelock, was hacked to death in October 1985. Feelings between black people and a London police force unable to expunge racism from its ranks would be troubled again, but never as bad as they were in the early 1980s.

As if this were not enough, an oppositional tendency took root in much of London government, radical socialism allying itself with militant public sector trade unionism. Numerous battles within the GLC, led by a Labour Party left-winger called Ken Livingstone, led to the government of Margaret Thatcher abolishing that strategic arm of London government altogether in April 1986. This seemed to epitomize London's doldrums. Here was a city whose economy was in crisis, its people periodically at war with each other, now bereft of a voice to manage its own affairs. Unsurprisingly, Londoners voted with their feet. In 1983 it was estimated that London's population slumped to 6.77 million, nearly 2 million fewer than in 1939.

LONDON AND THE LONDONER REMADE: 1990–2004

Things could have gotten worse, but they did not. Embedded in the London economy's bad news were some green shoots of optimism. Heathrow Airport, long the busiest in the world, had to some extent made up for job losses caused by the closure of the port. Its huge employment area was based on tourism, an industry that had its ups and downs in London but that in the long term moved from strength to strength. New tourist attractions seemed to be added to the city every year, notably Sam Wanamaker's Globe Theatre and the Tate Modern Gallery, both on the south bank. Closely associated with tourism was London's great depth in cultural industries, especially all varieties of music, heritage, theater, art, animation, and to some extent film. London fashion, too, never suffered severe setbacks after the 1960s, and the garment industry was one element of metropolitan manufacturing that stood up well to restructuring. Most of all, London's financial services were so buoyant that they spilled out of the City eastward to fill a new "Manhattan on Thames" in the Isle of Dogs, where Canary Wharf Tower added an elegant new spire to the skyline. This was all a much narrower base on which to build a city's economy than London had previously enjoyed, and several commentators highlighted the risks of an economy so heavily mortgaged to the stability of world finances. But by 2004, London had done well for almost a decade, certainly since 1997. It no longer lagged behind national unemployment figures and its people were in general more prosperous than at any time in history.

A consequence of prosperity was universally high property prices, a serious matter when owner-occupation had become the largest single form of housing tenure. The effects were seen all over London. Redevelopment opportunities in the City, on the south bank of the Thames, and in the docklands saw a self-confident resurrection of the skyscraper, many exploiting views of the river that had for so long been undervalued as a metropolitan asset. And London's residential areas changed character in a chameleon fashion that left older established Londoners breathless. Notting Hill, one of the worst districts of the 1950s, had become one of the "best" in the 1990s; and Hoxton, said to be the leading criminal quarter of London in 1914, had become a sought-after location for artists' lofts and smart bistros by 2004. There were numerous other examples. In all these places, the transformation was never quite complete. Each had a mixture, sometimes an uneasy one, of rich newcomers and poor locals and migrants.

Such a complex mix was typical of multicultural London. By 2004, it was perhaps the largest assemblage of diverse ethnicities anywhere in the world. Some significant parts, such as the boroughs of Brent (northwest London) and Newham (in the east), had nonwhite majority populations in 2001. In another, Hackney, schoolchildren spoke more than one hundred different home languages. Indeed, every part of the world's peoples found a home, to a greater or lesser extent, in London. It was also, many thought, the world's best instance of a harmonious multiculturalism, with flagship events such as the Notting Hill Carnival every August attracting one million visitors, and with miraculously little communal antagonism. Some old hatreds simmered beneath the surface, and there were still isolated assaults, even killings, but in general peaceable mutual respect set the London tone; this was despite migration remaining highly mobile, with new groups in the 1990s and thereafter arriving in some numbers from the former Yugoslavia, from Poland and the former Soviet Union, from Somalia, from Iraq and Kurdistan.

There was more good news for Londoners when the first government of Tony Blair restored some elements of democratic control, providing for an elected mayor and a Greater London Assembly. These gained powers over transport, economic development, some planning, and—remarkably—the Metropolitan Police. The first mayor elected in May 2001 did not use all these new resources wisely. This was that same Livingstone whose struggle with Thatcher had led to the disabling of London government in the first place, now fallen out with his party and standing as an independent. But he bravely pushed through a traffic congestion charge for central London, the first on such a scale anywhere in the world. It was a qualified success and Livingstone, now reconciled with the Labour Party, was reelected for a second term in 2004.

A robust economy, a brighter city more tuned to the pursuit of pleasure than ever before, a smarter fabric constantly modernizing, a new governmental settlement more in tune with the needs of its people: all this was a more positive outcome for London than could reasonably have been forecast at any time since 1940. Not surprisingly, the population had risen again, to 7.19 million by 2001, possibly an undercount of the true figure. Not surprisingly, too, in 2004 old fears were resurrected of London's growth, seen once more as a negative force within the nation. That surely missed the point. All the evidence of the twentieth century indicated that when metropolitan consumption and innovation were powerful, the nation benefited too. And now there was more at stake than just the nation. London was, indeed, less British than at any time for a thousand years. For London, unique in Europe and only rivaled by New York, was a true world city. In fifty years it had become a multinational city-state. Of the world, it now belonged to the world and its people.

See alsoBlitzkrieg; Housing; Immigration and Internal Migration; Thatcher, Margaret; United Kingdom .

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Jerry White