To view the reconstructions you will need London: The greatest city
Georgian and Victorian London
By the beginning of the 18th century, just 50 years after the Great Fire, London had once again expanded dramatically to become the largest city in Europe. The geography of the city had also changed, physically and socially. The super-rich now lived in the west, the downtrodden poor in the east.
'In the medieval city, the rich and poor lived cheek by jowl,' says author Professor Maxwell Hutchinson. 'They took it for granted that all the classes would be mixed together. But after the fire swept away all of the old London, the rich saw an opportunity to start anew. So they migrated west, and the poor left in the City tended to migrate towards the east. So this polarity started that still exists in London today, between the rich in the west and the poor in the east.'
Nicholas Barbon
The pioneer in the creation of the affluent West End of London was Nicholas Barbon. The son of a Puritan preacher, Barbon had been to university in Holland where he picked up new ideas on finance and money-making. He represented a new breed of aggressively entrepreneurial Londoners.
According to the author Patrick Dillon, 'Barbon was a money man, a financial man, a chancer, a risk-taker. At a time, in the late 17th century, when London was growing beyond imagination into the kind of city that no one had seen before, he thought about how people could make money out of rebuilding London.'
In the 1680s and '90s, Barbon bought up plots of land in the west of London, green-field sites where he built rows of neat flat-fronted houses in straight streets with open squares. In a drive to cut building costs, he pioneered a brand new housing design: the terrace – a row of separate homes that looked like one grand building. Terraces, unique to London, perfectly suited the aspirations of the capital's upwardly mobile new rich who flocked to these desirable addresses.
The merchants
By the 1720s, the West End was a playground for those with money to burn, a vast pleasure palace filled with endless diversions: glittering ballrooms, theatres, clubs and gaming tables.
'The largest growing class in London in the 18th century was the merchant class,' says historian Professor David Dabydeen. 'These were people who had made a lot of money from the trade in colonial goods, but they didn't have any class or pedigree and the aristocratic class looked down on them. So what did they do? They bought themselves into aristocratic values, building grand houses, holding great banquets, driving elaborate gilded coaches, having fantastic and lavish parties – in other words, their consumption was conspicuous.'
The City of London in the east was still the financial district. Here business was done in coffee houses where the all-male patrons indulged in fashionable stimulants – coffee, tea and tobacco. In the early 18th century, Britain was expanding to become a global power dominating the world of finance and trade in colonial goods.
'British ships were going further and further across the world,' says Patrick Dillon, 'and it was London that was at the heart of this. It was in London that the deals were being done to finance these expeditions. It was in London that the great merchants and financiers were putting together the structure of this. It was in London that the docks were expanding out to the east of the city.'
Gambling
London was a city of speculators. People won and lost fortunes on the newly formed stock market. They blew their savings on government-sponsored lotteries. They were obsessed with gambling, risk and, above all, money. The writer Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) complained:
The luxury of the age will be the ruin of the nation if not prevented. We leave trade to gain in stocks; we live above ourselves and barter our ready money for trifles.
London was a jungle of opportunities and, as ever, a magnet for those hoping to make a better life. 'You could come to London as a servant or as a poor person,' says Patrick Dillon, 'have a win at cards, get lucky with your job and make a bit of money, and the next day you'd buy yourself some fine clothes and you'd be walking down the Strand as a gentleman. And fortunes could go in the other direction as well. You could inherit a huge estate, lose it all at cards in the Covent Garden gaming clubs one day and wake up at dawn bankrupt.'
Poverty and crime
For those who failed, London was unforgiving, and they ended up in the impoverished ghettos to the east. Just a few minutes' walk away from what is now the busy shopping district of the modern West End was one of the vilest slums in London: St Giles. 'The houses at St Giles were called "rookeries" because that suggested people packed into nests,' says Professor Dabydeen. 'It was a place of the marginalised and destitute, of pickpockets, of murders, rapes, illegal gambling, cockfighting – any imaginable human depravity took place in St Giles.'
The vast gulf between rich and poor fuelled crime rates, and fear of crime obsessed the rich. Newspapers – another new phenomenon – were passed round coffee houses and regaled their readers with sensational stories about highwaymen, murderers and executions. And the focus for wealthy Londoners' anxieties about crime was St Giles. Paranoia about this wretched quarter reached fever pitch in the early 1700s, when the urban poor seized on a terrifying new vice – gin.
Gin
The gin of the 18th century bore no relation to the respectable expensive spirit of today. A Dutch import, Madam Geneva (as she was called) was cheap and lethal. 'This new drink from Holland suddenly arrived among a people who weren't used to drinking spirits,' says Patrick Dillon. 'The strongest thing they had drunk before was strong beer, and suddenly for a penny a dram they could get this fantastic new drug. Stronger than anything they'd tasted before, it would instantly get them drunk. There was a famous signboard over gin shops that said: "Drunk for a penny, dead drunk for tuppence, straw for nothing" – of course, you got the straw to crash out on once you had drunk too much.'
The government fuelled London's gin craze by removing the restrictions on distilling, and soon the city was awash with gin shops. If you couldn't afford a glass of the spirit, you could buy a gin-soaked rag. It was estimated that a quarter of the buildings in St Giles were drinking dens. Its residents were infamous for guzzling vast quantities of gin and for a few hours escaping their miserable lives.
'The real villains of this debauchery, drunkenness and destruction of human life,' says Professor Dabydeen, 'were the landowners who made tons of money by selling their corn for the purposes of gin distillation. So there was an economic stranglehold on the poor. They were encouraged to consume something that would destroy their lives – a kind of a drug, the equivalent of crack cocaine.'
According to Patrick Dillon, 'London was seen as a town spinning out of control. There was a crime wave, and gin was seen to be associated with crime and prostitution. In addition, the spread of syphilis, which was the big health scare at the time, was seen to be associated with gin because women were thought to be turning to prostitution to fund their drinking habits.
'Gin was also seen as attacking the economy. At the time, the wealth of the nation was thought to depend on how much poor people could make. If poor people, instead of working hard, were lying slumped in the doorway of a gin shop, then they weren't making anything.'
Backlash against the new drug
Gin was assumed to be a London problem, and in the 1720s, a backlash against it began, led by Christian reformers. In 1729, the government took the first official step towards clamping down on this new urban drug. The first Gin Act increased the duty paid on gin from five pence to five shillings and forced gin sellers to buy licences. But Londoners soon found a way around the rules. The law only applied to flavoured spirits, so distillers simply removed the juniper from the gin and renamed it 'Parliamentary brandy'.
By the 1730s, tales of gin-induced crime and depravity were again dominating the papers. One story in particular rekindled gin hysteria – the case of a poor woman, Judith Defor. Her child was cared for by the parish in a local workhouse. One Sunday she took the infant out for the day, strangled it and sold its clothes to buy gin.
The artist William Hogarth was so moved by the devastation wreaked by gin that he produced his most famous engraving set in the slum of St Giles: Gin Lane. 'One of the most powerful images of social degradation in all of 18th-century art is in the foreground – the drunken woman with a leg full of syphilitic sores,' says Professor Dabydeen. 'As she tries to get her snuff, her baby falls from her arms and topples to its death. It's an extraordinary image because there's an echo of a Madonna and child. And when the baby falls with its arms spread wide, it looks like an upside-down crucifixion and the woman like a drunken Mary. So it's showing how Christian values had been absolutely depraved and destroyed by this addiction to gin.'
Controlling the gin craze
Over the next 30 years, the government introduced a series of measures aimed at controlling the gin craze. First, they tried the radical step of prohibition, which simply drove gin underground. People set up illegal stills, women sold drams from underneath their skirts, and there was no let up in gin-fuelled violence. So the authorities brought in a series of acts that gradually brought distilling back within the law, and slowly raised the tax on gin.
But the gin craze only finally fizzled out because the world was changing. In the 1750s, the economic boom came to an end. The poor couldn't afford a drink that was becoming increasingly expensive. And, in the second half of the 18th century, there was a new mood of zealous social reform abroad in the capital.
'People write tracts about how to improve London,' says Patrick Dillon, 'and express shock that the greatest city in the world, the city of the world's greatest power, should be full of these terrible sights – of prostitution, of people drinking too much and lying drunk in the gutters, and all the things that parliamentarians, writers and reformers say have to be cleaned up.'
Poverty and excess would never leave London. St Giles remained a notorious slum into the 19th century, until it was finally knocked down to ease the congestion on London streets caused by the arrival of the railways.
The exploding city
A new era was dawning, and a revolution in transport would allow Londoners to escape the inner city for a new life in the suburbs.
By 1811, London had become the first city in the Western world whose population topped a million. But it was still relatively compact: a person could cross the City on foot in around two hours. However, within a century, London's physical shape would be transformed by the energy and enterprise of the Victorians. From being six miles across from east to west, Greater London would spread like a stain across south-east England until, by the early 20th century, it was a monster city 18 miles wide, spanned by the first mass transport system in the world.
'It was a megalopolis,' says writer Robert Elms. 'This massively exploding city happened because of technology, because of railways. People could get there but live further away from the centre.'
Coming of the railways
London's transformation was driven by Britain's status at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution. The first public steam railway was built by George Stephenson in 1825. Twenty-five years later, Britain had a rail network linking the entire country. The first railway in London was built in 1836.
The railways stirred the imagination of Londoners, particularly the middle classes who could afford to use them. One contemporary wrote: 'The railways are so vast and important that the useless Egyptian pyramids, all the justly vaunted remnants of old Rome's magnificence will not be able to endure comparison.'
The train even changed time itself. Before the arrival of the railways, towns in Britain had their own individual time, as the sun rises at different times across the country. According to author Christian Wolmar, 'It was when the railways came that they had to standardise time, otherwise there would have been total confusion. It was quite natural that they chose London – Greenwich Mean Time – as the standard because London was the capital of Britain and the capital of a colonial empire. So London became the standard time for both Britain and the world.'
The Necropolis train
In the space of 40 years, the great stations – Euston, King's Cross, Paddington and St Pancras – rose up across the city, temples to progress. To build the railways, great canyons were carved out in the city. Slums offered the cheapest land to build on, so the poor were ruthlessly evicted to make way for the train. 'In the case of St Pancras, they overturned one of London's oldest churchyards,' says Robert Elms. '"Dig up the dead and throw them away, it doesn't matter, we've got trains to build." And that's what was the centre of Victorian London.'
Having dug up the dead to build railways, Victorians found that the trains were contributing to the city's chronic overcrowding. More and more people were moving to London, and by the mid-1800s, the city's graveyards were overflowing. One woman complained of coming across four putrefying heads sticking out of the ground in a south London church.
But the Victorians had a solution to the acute shortage of space for London's dead. They built a railway line purely to carry coffins out of the city. Opened in 1854, the Necropolis Railway had a mortuary station in south London where grieving families brought their loved ones. Coffins and mourners were then loaded on to the Black Cat train and taken to Brookwood Cemetery, 25 miles away in the countryside.
According to Robert Elms, 'a wonderfully Victorian aspect of the Necropolis train of the dead is that it followed the hierarchies of the time. You could get first-, second- or third-class tickets on the Necropolis one-way train. If you were a first-class passenger – you were dead, but you were still first class – you would have mutes walking in front of the train, which would travel very slowly taking you on your last journey, and there'd be black flags waving. If you were a third-class passenger, the train would travel to the burial grounds as quickly as possible and you would be piled up with all the other dead paupers in the back and just dumped into an unmarked grave. Such a fantastic world view.'
Marc Brunel
London was still growing at an alarming rate, so the ingenious Victorians came up with another radical idea for solving London's acute congestion: building highways under ground. Enter a brilliant Frenchman, Marc Brunel, who came to London in 1799, destined to make a major contribution to the creation of the city's transport network. Brunel devised a scheme to ease the flow of traffic across the city, tunnelling under the Thames between Wapping on the north bank and Rotherhithe on the south, to create a road link.
To do this, he had to solve the problem of how to bore deep under the Thames. 'Marc Brunel watched a wood-boring insect going about its business,' says Professor Hutchinson, 'and he couldn't work out why the insect didn't suffocate once it had bored the hole. As a result of this observation, he invented the tunnelling shield.'
The shield was a giant iron frame that allowed 36 miners to work at once while protecting them from falling earth. Behind the miners, a team of bricklayers shored up the tunnel.
Brunel's plan was hugely ambitious and dangerous. If he didn't stay on course, he would hit quicksand below or water above. At the Thames' deepest point, the tunnel would be just 4.3m (14ft) below the river bed.
Tunnelling under the Thames
Tunnelling began in 1825. Marc Brunel was assisted by his equally brilliant son, Isambard Kingdom, who became resident engineer at the age of just 20. The Brunels predicted that the tunnel would take three years to finish, but work was painfully slow. 'It was under constant danger of flood,' says Christian Wolmar. 'The work had to stop several times, and there were great financial problems. It is a tribute to the Brunels that it ever happened, for it was considered a hopeless enterprise.'
As well as the flooding, the air under the Thames was foul and poisonous gases constantly leaked in. Marc Brunel's health suffered terribly, as did his workers'. Brunel wrote in his diary:
May 26th
I feel much debility after having been some time below. My sight is rather dim today. All complain of pain in the eyes.
May 29th
Short reported himself unable to work, afflicted like Huggins and all the others. Boyer died yesterday. A good man.
In the end, Brunel's tunnel took five times longer to complete than he had anticipated – Londoners nicknamed it 'the great bore'. The tunnel was finally completed in 1841 and was a landmark engineering achievement. However, money had run out to build the approach roads into it and the project was a financial disaster for its investors. But the tunnel did attract hordes of visitors – two million in the first year. Fairs were held in it, with entertainers and stalls selling souvenirs.
Underground railways
By the 1860s, the tunnel's novelty as a tourist attraction had worn off, and it was sold to the East London Railway for £200,000, a third of what it cost to build. The revolutionary shield was sold for scrap. Marc Brunel had died in 1849. He never lived to see his vital contribution to London's transport: today his tunnel is part of the London underground.
According to Professor Hutchinson, 'Marc Brunel's tunnelling shield paved the way for the underground system that we know today. It made deep tunnelling possible.' His idea was picked up by other engineers, and it is thanks to him that London became the first city in the world to solve its traffic problems by creating an underground railway.
The first part of the network was a shallow tunnel linking Paddington in the west to Farringdon in the east, which was opened in 1863. Passengers travelled a distance of three miles underground in a steam train. Newspapers warned their readers that they would suffocate if they went on it:
I had my first experience of Hades today. The compartment in which I sat was filled with passengers who were smoking pipes. The atmosphere was a mixture of sulphur, coal dust and foul fumes from the gas lamps above, so that by the time we reached Moorgate, I was near dead of asphyxiation and heat. I should think these underground railways must soon be discontinued for they are a menace to health.
Linking the whole of London
But despite the discomfort, the new London underground railway was a huge hit. People were so fascinated that they rode up and down the line all day. 'Right from the beginning, this little railway was amazingly successful and people absolutely flocked on to it,' says Christian Wolmar. 'It obviously filled a great need. Within a couple of years, it was making very hefty profits. Eleven million people travelled on it in the second year, which was three or four times the population of the whole of London.'
The success of the first underground train encouraged the government to approve plans for a complete underground circuit linking the whole of London. But land suitable for shallow tunnels soon ran out, so the railway companies turned to deep-hole boring using methods based on Brunel's pioneering shield.
In just 35 years, London had produced the world's first joined up under and over ground railway network. According to Christian Wolmar, 'it is a tribute to the inventiveness of the Victorians that it did come so early, that by 1863 we had an underground railway. Paris wouldn't get its railway until 1900. It was an amazing feat.'
The suburbs
By the 1900s, the tube was thrusting ever outwards with over-ground lines bursting out of the earth where the city ended. Houses sprang up along the tube line. Developers lured Londoners to move out of town with the promise of an idyllic life in the leafy suburbs. 'The suburbs were enormously attractive to middle classes,' says Professor Hutchinson, 'and the idea that the countryside, with all that had to offer – fresh air, open space, places for the children to play – was suddenly accessible to everyone. That was an entirely new concept of living, a new way of life.'
By the end of the 1930s, the population of Greater London had reached over eight million, second only to New York. In just over half a century, London had increased six times in size and was now 34 miles from east to west. One of the largest cities in the world, it was now poised on the brink of another cataclysm. The Second World War would subject London to an ordeal that threatened to bring it to its knees.
