The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London by Judith Flanders
Authors: Judith Flanders
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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 Streetin 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’ atLondon Bridge, before walking back, ‘passing on my way another tremendous excavation on each side of Ludgate Hill’. 33 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.’
The coming of modernity was obtrusively visible: the construction of Holborn Viaduct, for example, reduced one of London’s busiest streets to a single lane for traffic and pedestrians for three years.
London was taking on the lineaments of modernity before its inhabitants’ eyes, although sometimes it had been hard to discern while it was happening.
3.
TRAVELLING (MOSTLY) HOPEFULLY
The technicalities of the creation of the roads, and their maintenance, were of less interest to most Londoners than how to navigate the city, and by what means. The ways to cross London evolved as rapidly as the roads had done. At the top of the tree, those with good jobs went on horseback. This required the feeding and stabling of a horse at home and also near the place of work. Only Dickens’ most prosperous characters, like the merchant prince Mr Dombey, and Carker, his second-in-command, ride to work. The playwright and journalist Edmund Yates worked for twenty-five years in
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 Streetin 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’ atLondon Bridge, before walking back, ‘passing on my way another tremendous excavation on each side of Ludgate Hill’. 33 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.’
The coming of modernity was obtrusively visible: the construction of Holborn Viaduct, for example, reduced one of London’s busiest streets to a single lane for traffic and pedestrians for three years.
London was taking on the lineaments of modernity before its inhabitants’ eyes, although sometimes it had been hard to discern while it was happening.
3.
TRAVELLING (MOSTLY) HOPEFULLY
The technicalities of the creation of the roads, and their maintenance, were of less interest to most Londoners than how to navigate the city, and by what means. The ways to cross London evolved as rapidly as the roads had done. At the top of the tree, those with good jobs went on horseback. This required the feeding and stabling of a horse at home and also near the place of work. Only Dickens’ most prosperous characters, like the merchant prince Mr Dombey, and Carker, his second-in-command, ride to work. The playwright and journalist Edmund Yates worked for twenty-five years in
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