London's Characteristics (PDF)

Characteristics of the City Metropolis – A large, densely populated city of a country or state, often the capital of the region Urbanisation – Development of a city or town Industrialisation and the Rise of the Modern City in England Industrialisation changed the form of urbanisation in th...

Characteristics of the City Metropolis – A large, densely populated city of a country or state, often the capital of the region Urbanisation – Development of a city or town Industrialisation and the Rise of the Modern City in England Industrialisation changed the form of urbanisation in the modern period. However, even as late as the 1850s, many decades after the beginning of the industrial revolution, most Western countries were largely rural. The early industrial cities of Britain such as Leeds and Manchester attracted large numbers of migrants to the textile mills set up in the late eighteenth century. In 1851, more than three-quarters of the adults living in Manchester were migrants from rural areas. Now let us look at London. By 1750, one out of every nine people of England and Wales lived in London. It was a colossal (extremely large or great.)city with a population of about 675,000. Over the nineteenth century, London continued to expand. Its population multiplied fourfold in the 70 years between 1810 and 1880, increasing from 1 million to about 4 million.  The city of London was a powerful magnet for migrant populations, even though it did not have large factories. ‘Nineteenth century London,’ says the historian Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘was a city of clerks and shopkeepers, of small masters and skilled artisans, of a growing number of semi skilled and sweated outworkers, of soldiers and servants, of casual labourers, street sellers, and beggars.’ Apart from the London dockyards, five major types of industries employed large numbers: clothing and footwear, wood and furniture, metals and engineering, printing and stationery, and precision products such as surgical instruments, watches, and objects of precious metal. During the First World War (1914-18) London began manufacturing motor cars and electrical goods, and the number of large factories increased until they accounted for nearly one-third of all jobs in the city. Marginal Groups As London grew, crime flourished. We are told that 20,000 criminals were living in London in the 1870s. We know a great deal about criminal activities in this period, for crime became an object of widespread concern. The police were worried about law and order, philanthropists were anxious about public morality, and industrialists wanted a hard-working and orderly labour force. So the population of criminals was counted, their activities were watched, and their ways of life were investigated.  In an attempt to discipline the population, the authorities imposed high penalties for crime and offered work to those who were considered the ‘deserving poor’. Factories employed large numbers of women in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. With technological developments, women gradually lost their industrial jobs, and were forced to work within households. The 1861 census recorded a quarter of a million domestic servants in London, of whom the vast majority were women, many of them recent migrants. A large number of women used their homes to increase family income by taking in lodgers or through such activities as tailoring, washing or matchbox making. However, there was a change once again in the twentieth century. As women got employment in wartime industries and offices, they withdrew from domestic service.  Large number of children were pushed into low-paid work, often by their parents. ’It was only after the passage of the Compulsory Elementary Education Act in 1870, and the factory acts beginning from 1902, that children were kept out of industrial work. The marginal groups: (i) Many listed as 'criminals' in fact were poor people who lived by stealing lead from roofs, food from shops, lumps of coal, and clothes drying on hedges. (ii) (ii) With technological developments, women gradually lost their industrial jobs and were forced to work within the households. Activity Imagine that you are a newspaper reporter writing a piece on the changes you see in London in 1811. What problems are you likely to write about? Who would have gained from the changes? Housing Older cities like London changed dramatically when people began pouring in after the Industrial Revolution. Factory or workshop owners did not house the migrant workers. Instead, individual landowners put up cheap, and usually unsafe, tenements (Run-down and often overcrowded apartment house, especially in a poor section of a large city)for the new arrivals. Although poverty was not unknown in the countryside, it was more concentrated and starkly visible in the city.  For a while the better-off city dwellers continued to demand that slums simply be cleared away. But gradually a larger and larger number of people began to recognise the need for housing for the poor. What were the reasons for this increasing concern? First, the vast mass of one-room houses occupied by the poor were seen as a serious threat to public health: they were overcrowded, badly ventilated, and lacked sanitation. Second, there were worries about fire hazards created by poor housing. Third, there was a widespread fear of social disorder, especially after the Russian Revolution in 1917. Workers’ mass housing schemes were planned to prevent the London poor from turning rebellious. Activity In many cities of India today, there are moves to clear away the slums where poor people live. Discuss whether or not it is the responsibility of the government to make arrangements for houses for these people. Cleaning London A variety of steps were taken to clean up London. Attempts were made to decongest (relieve the congestion of )localities, green the open spaces, reduce pollution and landscape the city. Large blocks of apartments were built, akin to those in Berlin and New York – cities which had similar housing problems. Rent control was introduced in Britain during the First World War to ease the impact of a severe housing shortage. The congestion in the nineteenth-century industrial city also led to a yearning for clean country air. Many wealthy residents of London were able to afford a holiday home in the countryside.  Demands were made for new ‘lungs’ for the city, and some attempts were made to bridge the difference between city and countryside through such ideas as the Green Belt around London. Architect and planner Ebenezer Howard developed the principle of the Garden City, a pleasant space full of plants and trees, where people would both live and work. He believed this would also produce better- quality citizens. Following Howard’s ideas Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker designed the garden city of New Earswick. There were common garden spaces, beautiful views, and great attention to detail. In the end, only well-off workers could afford these houses. Between the two World Wars (1919-39) the responsibility for housing the working classes was accepted by the British state, and a million houses, most of them single-family cottages, were built by local authorities. Meanwhile, the city had extended beyond the range where people could walk to work, and the development of suburbs made new forms of mass transport absolutely necessary. Activity Imagine you are investigating the conditions in which the London poor lived. Write a note discussing all the dangers to public health which were created by these conditions. Transport in the city The London underground railway partially solved the housing crisis by carrying large masses of people to and from the city. The very first section of the Underground in the world opened on 10 January 1863 between Paddington and Farrington Street in London. On that day 10,000 passengers were carried, with trains running every ten minutes. By 1880 the expanded train service was carrying 40 million passengers a year. At first people were afraid to travel underground. -Lack of oxygen, smoking pipes. The atmosphere was a Social change In the eighteenth century, the family had been a unit of production and consumption as well as of political decision- making. The function and the shape of the family were completely transformed by life in the industrial city. Ties between members of households loosened, and among the working class the institution of marriage tended to break down. Women of the upper and middle classes in Britain, on the other hand, faced increasingly higher levels of isolation, although their lives were made easier by domestic maids who cooked, cleaned and cared for young children on low wages. Women who worked for wages had some control over their lives, particularly among the lower social classes. However, many social reformers felt that the family as an Leisure For wealthy British, there had long been an annual ‘London Season’. Several cultural events, such as the opera, the theatre and classical music performances were organised for an elite group of 300-400 families in the late eighteenth century. Meanwhile, working classes met in pubs to have a drink, exchange news and sometimes also to organise for political action. Politics In the severe winter of 1886, when outdoor work came to a standstill, the London poor exploded in a riot, demanding relief from the terrible conditions of poverty. Alarmed shopkeepers closed down their establishments, fearing the 10,000-strong crowd that was marching from Deptford to London. The marchers had to be dispersed by the police. A similar riot occurred in late 1887; this time, it was brutally suppressed by the police in what came to be known as the Bloody Sunday of November 1887. Two years later, thousands of London’s dockworkers went on strike and marched through the city. According to one writer, ‘thousands of the strikers had marched through the city without a pocket being picked or a window being broken …’ The 12-day strike was called to gain recognition for the dockworkers’ union. From these examples you can see that large masses of people could be drawn into political causes in the city. A large city population was thus both a threat and an opportunity. State authorities went to great lengths to reduce the possibility of rebellion and enhance urban aesthetics, as the example of Paris shows. Haussmanisation of Paris Haussmanisation of Paris refers to the re-building of Paris by Baron Haussmann in the mid-eighteenth century. When Louis Napoleon III came to power, he appointed Haussmann as the chief architect of the new city. He laid out new streets, straight sidewalks, boulevards and open avenues, and planted full-grown trees