The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London (10 page)

This particular incident did not occur in isolation: street construction elsewhere was an ongoing process. From the very earliest part of the century, when Regent Street was created to connect St James’s Park with the new Regent’s Park a mile and a half to the north (see pp. 264–6), new roads, road widening and ‘improvements’ in general were part of the never-ending shape-shifting that London was prone to. The new centre of London, Trafalgar Square, was itself constructed out of a site of mews, stables, a workhouse and an inn. Trafalgar Square and Regent Street were both the fruit of great municipal plans. Far more of London was constructed, designed, reconstructed and redesigned by private individuals, whether large landowners or small contractors. Because so much building was private, the construction process might be especially quick, or it might drag on for decades, speeding up as money became available and the possibility of profitable returns increased, or slowing down when hard times hit. In Bloomsbury, Gordon Square took three decades to complete, while Fitzroy Square, begun in the eighteenth century, was nearly five decades in construction.

For the first half of the century, road widening was planned by major landlords, or was something local businesses and residents agreed on together and then carried out. In one example of many, in 1850 the residents and shopkeepers around Chancery Lane felt so strongly that widening the north end of the street would improve their lives and businesses that they were willing to pay for it themselves. Several benchers (senior members) from Gray’s Inn offered to contribute, as did Pickford’s moving company, ‘whose great traffic was seriously impeded by the present confined thoroughfares’. Within two weeks, discussions had been held with the parish paving board, and approval had been received for a house to be purchased and knocked down at the Holborn end of the street.

Other projects were the responsibility of the civic authorities, whether the Corporation of the City of London, or the Commissioner for Woods and Forests (the Crown Estate, used as a loose synonym for the government). London Bridge had stood in one form or another since 1209, but half a millennium later it was not just replaced by a new structure, but re-sited upriver, and nine streets, a Wren church and 318 houses were razed to build the new approach street to the bridge. Other demolitions were managed on a parish-by-parish basis, as when in 1842 it was decided that seven large warehouses that projected into Upper Thames Street, narrowing the carriageway by about twenty feet and producing a bottleneck where two carriages could not pass, needed to be demolished. Some similar projects never came to pass because various parishes were at odds. The plans for widening Piccadilly were endlessly postponed because of arguments between the parishes of St Martin-in-the-Fields and St George’s Hanover Square as to who was to pay for the upkeep.

By mid-century this patchwork planning was no longer viable. ‘The Wants of London’, said the
Illustrated London
News, were fourfold: London lacked sewers and drains; it lacked sufficient river crossings; it lacked sufficient major thoroughfares for traffic; and, most importantly, it lacked a unifying plan to achieve all that was needed. In 1855, Parliament created the Metropolitan Board of Works to deal with building or widening, paving and maintaining the streets. The Metropolitan Board of Works was also in charge of rationalizing the numbering and naming of streets. In the first
decades of the century, many buildings were unnumbered, and even streets were often unnamed except to locals. Addresses were descriptive: ‘opposite the King’s Head Public House in a Street leading out of Winfell Street being the first turning from the Black Hell Flash House there’ or ‘at a Potatoe Warehouse next door to a Barley Sugar Shop about 30 Houses from the beginning of Cow Cross [Street]’. Dickens described how in the 1820s he had walked from the blacking factory to his lodgings next to the Marshalsea via ‘that turning in the Blackfriars-road which has Rowland Hill’s chapel on one side, and the likeness of a golden dog licking a golden pot over a shop door on the other’. What today sounds like a piece of descriptive writing was the contemporary way of giving an address. By the 1850s, although all the streets were named, the names were rarely indicated on signs. In 1853, the parish of St Mary’s, Islington, was commended for painting a street name on every corner: ‘a course which would be a great accommodation to strangers, if generally adopted’.

Even if the name of the street was known, that was not always a help. In 1853, London had twenty-five Albert and twenty-five Victoria Streets, thirty-seven King and twenty-seven Queen Streets, twenty-two Princes, seventeen Dukes, thirty-four Yorks and twenty-three Gloucesters – and that was without counting the similarly named Places, Roads, Squares, Courts, Alleys or Mews, or even the many synonyms that designated squalid backcourts: Rents, Rows, Gardens, Places, Buildings, Lanes, Yards and Walks. One parish alone had half a dozen George Streets. Once the Metropolitan Board of Works got into its stride, orders were given for parishes to rename duplicates, or even merge many small sections of a single stretch of a road, each of which had had its own name. Charlotte Street, Plumtree Street and one side of Bedford Square were subsumed into Bloomsbury Street; Maiden Lane, Talbot Road, York Road and ‘several terraces, villas, and places’ all became Brecknock Road. Thirty-six street names were lost to create the East India Road, while ‘The name of Victoria-road being so numerous...the Metropolitan Board of Works proposes to abolish...the one at Pimlico, and to call the whole line of thoroughfare, from Buckingham Palace to Ebury Bridge, Pimlico-road.’ As these roads were renamed, a wholesale renumbering of the buildings also took place.

London was, to many, a great map that mapped out the impossibility of mapping. There had been many maps of the city, but it was only at this time of renaming that the first official map of London was produced. That was precipitated not by the Metropolitan Board of Works’ desire for regimentation, but by a cholera epidemic. In 1848, the need to improve the sanitation of London was no longer a matter for debate (for more on sanitation, see pp. 194–6; on cholera, pp. 216–8), but the most basic element, the knowledge of the locations of the sewers, was entirely lacking, and so the army was called in to map out all the city streets for planning purposes. Today the ‘ordnance’ in the Ordnance Survey maps has become detached from its meaning, but it was the army’s ordnance division, the sappers and miners of the engineering corps, who covered Westminster Abbey with scaffolding, from which they surveyed London in a radius of twelve miles around St Paul’s, at twelve inches to the mile. The results were published in 1850, in an unhelpful 847 sheets, reinforcing the sense of London’s mammoth unknowability.

The size of the city impressed itself on its residents – Byron thought it ‘A mighty mass of brick, and smoke, and shipping...as wide as eye / Could reach’. But far more did the size impose itself on strangers. A visitor from Philadelphia, not itself a small town, walked to the West End from St Paul’s in 1852. By the time he reached the relative quiet of Pall Mall, he was, he wrote, ‘tired of omnibuses, and hacks, and drays, and cabriolets...without number, and the ceaseless din and interminable crowd, that kept increasing as we went’, for ‘No matter where [a man] goes, or how far he walks, he cannot get beyond the crowd.’ In this he was one of many. In the decade following, a visitor from Russia spent a week in London, a city he thought was ‘as immense as the sea’, feeling dazed and overwhelmed by ‘the screeching and howling of machines...that seeming disorder...that polluted Thames; that air saturated with coal dust; those magnificent public gardens and parks; those dreadful sections of the city like Whitechapel, with its half-naked, savage, and hungry population’ – a surprisingly restrained description, perhaps, from Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Many others, repulsed by the city’s great size and consequent anonymity, equated it with alienation. The German poet Heinrich Heine, in 1827,
found himself on Waterloo Bridge, so ‘sick in spirit that the hot drops sprang forcibly out of my eyes. They fell down into the Thames...which has already swallowed up such floods of human tears without giving them a thought.’ Certainly the essayist Thomas de Quincey would have understood: ‘No man ever was left to himself for the first time in the streets...of London, but he must have been saddened and mortified, perhaps terrified, by the sense of desertion, and utter loneliness, which belongs to his situation. No loneliness can be like that which weighs upon the heart in the centre of faces never-ending, without voice or utterance for him; eyes innumerable...and hurrying figures of men weaving to and fro...seeming like a mask of maniacs, or oftentimes, like a pageant of phantoms.’

Dickens saw the unknowability of London differently. For much of his life he was excited by it, and one of his earliest eulogists, the political commentator Walter Bagehot, got to the core of that excitement: the size and variety, and therefore the scope, were ‘advantageous to Mr. Dickens’s genius. His memory is full of instances of old buildings and curious people...He describes London like a special correspondent for posterity.’ This was what his contemporaries saw as they looked around a city that was expanding in speeded-up motion, even if they couldn’t report, or write, like Dickens. The old sat cheek-by-jowl with the new; yet around the corner, something that had stood for hundreds of years had vanished overnight. By the 1840s, vast civic construction was a routine sight. In that decade alone, 1,652 new streets were constructed, covering 200 miles. In 1869, the Metropolitan Board of Works announced proudly that it had approved an average of 100 new streets a year since its formation, but the number was accelerating: 202 new streets had been approved in the previous twelve months. Queen Victoria Street had been created, ploughing through smaller neighbourhoods; Cannon Street, Farringdon Street, Garrick Street, New Oxford Street and Clerkenwell Road were all being built. The consequent loss of variety and individuality can be seen in one small area of Westminster. A hive of government buildings – the Foreign, India, Home and Colonial Offices, erected from 1873 – stand on what was once a warren of tiny streets. Bridge Street, underneath the Treasury, originally contained Ginger’s Family Hotel and Denton’s Hotel, as well as a pub. King Street,
once running between Downing Street and Great George Street, had a baker, a bootmaker, a cheesemonger and the Britannia Coffee-room. Until 1839, Downing Street was the home of ‘A dirty public-house [and]...a row of third-rate lodging houses’, as well as the prime minister.

The greatest changes, however, were driven by the arrival of the railways. In 1836, London’s first station opened at Spa Road, not far from London Bridge, with a line running to Deptford. By 1837, trains ran from Chalk Farm to Harrow, Watford and Boxmoor; and the following year the line was extended to Euston station, the second railway station to be built in London.
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This development had personal resonance for Dickens. He had lived near by as a child, and now Wellington House Academy in Hampstead Road, the school he had attended after leaving the blacking factory, was obliterated: ‘the Railway had cut it up root and branch. A great trunk-line had swallowed the play-ground, [and] sliced away the schoolroom.’ The fictional upheaval in
Dombey and Son
was even greater, as Staggs’s Gardens stood in for the very real Somers Town neighbourhood that had been eaten up by the London–Birmingham line: ‘Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up...Everywhere were bridges that led nowhere; thoroughfares that were wholly impassable; Babel towers of chimneys, wanting half their height; temporary wooden houses and enclosures, in the most unlikely situations; carcases of ragged tenements, and fragments of unfinished walls and arches, and piles of scaffolding, and wildernesses of bricks, and giant forms of cranes, and tripods straddling above nothing.’ This fictional construction work accurately represented the reality, indicated by the startling statistic that by the 1860s more than 10 per cent of the adult male population of London was employed in the building trade.

These huge enterprises didn’t just alter the appearance of the city. At a geographical level they fundamentally changed the topography of London. There had once been a hill between Half-Moon Street and Dover Street
in Piccadilly, which was flattened out in the mid-1840s. The 150 yards of Oxford Street that lay between Bond Street and South Molton Street ran at ‘a rapid decline’, steep enough to trouble horses, which was similarly filled in. More ambitiously, ‘a series of quicksands, mudbanks, and old peat-bogs’ was drained from the old Grosvenor Basin behind Buckingham Palace, later to become Victoria. The land had long been considered too marshy for building, but the railways made the substantial and expensive investment worthwhile for the private Grosvenor Estate.

But it was principally via the Metropolitan Board of Works that great swathes of London were changed from the ground up. One of its first ventures, nearly a decade in the making, was building a bridge across the Fleet Valley. This, the Holborn Viaduct, was one of the biggest engineering projects in a century of big engineering projects. In January 1864, Arthur Munby took the train between the new Charing Cross station on the day it opened (‘Temporary stairs, a temporary platform: the great building in the Strand...yet unroofed,’ he groused) and the ‘miserable makeshift station’ at
London Bridge, before walking back, ‘passing on my way another tremendous excavation on each side of Ludgate Hill’.
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The
Daily News
bitterly reported that Holborn had been turned into ‘a waste and howling wilderness’ of hoarding, with, behind it, ‘ruin and desolation’ for 500 yards. For more than three years, Holborn, one of the busiest roads in the city, was reduced to a single lane for both traffic and pedestrians. ‘The remainder of the roadway...is in the same condition as that of so many other parts of London at the present time – a place given up to contractors, diggers, and builders, to navvies and bricklayers, to carts and wheelbarrows, to piles of materials for masonry, and huge frames of timber.’