| 'A History of
London' by Stephen Inwood |
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| 'A History of
London' by Stephen Inwood |
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I was in my mid-twenties when I moved to London to do a two year stint of running a bookshop in Islington. A bunch of us shared an old Victorian three story terraced house in Stoke Newington not far from the spot where the Kray brothers are reputed to have stabbed one of their gangland rivals to death. I didn't mean to stay, but within a year I was completely hooked on London. I would have been hard put to say why I liked it - sometimes I hated it, like when the ceiling of the bathroom fell in while I was in the bath - but I knew that I was here to stay. I know now, why I like London. It's the people and the crowds I like. Stephen Inwood's massive 'A History of London' is the first book about London that really does it full justice. That's because it is really a book about the people of London. It's not about the ridiculous cockney stereotypes that were a late Victorian invention, or even the 'criminal under-class' that populates respectable Victorian mythology in earlier decades. It's about the real people of London - the journeymen, the aristocrats, the elite leaders of the craft guilds who ran the City for so long, the bankers who took over from them, and the ordinary men and women whose struggle for a living shaped so much of London's history. It is in the first part of his book that Stephen Inwood's desire to be comprehensive rather betrays him. This section - about a quarter of the book - is hard going. The fact of the matter is that we have few records about London from Roman times until the Great Plague, and those we do have are really only about the doings of the aristocracy. It is really with the English Civil War that the people of London step on to the stage of history, and this is where this book comes to life. London really is an amazing place. In its time it has defied kings, lords, parliaments, the Luftwaffe, and that most dangerous breed of all - town planners. Over the course of the centuries its main source of income has changed many times, and its ability to regenerate its income from new industries is truly awesome. In its time London has been variously an aristocratic service town, the biggest entrepot and trading centre in the world, England's major centre of light industry, the hub of the largest empire the world has known, and a world scale financial centre. Even now - two thousand years after it was founded - it is one of the three genuine 'world cities' (the other two are New York and Tokyo). But it is not just in income regeneration that London excelled. It has renewed its physical fabric many times over as well. Most of the London we know has been rebuilt since Victorian times. The bulk of inner London dates from Victorian times - most of outer London dates from as recently as the inter-war period. It is perhaps interesting to compare the 19th Century rebuilding of Paris with the Victorian rebuilding of London, since it reveals a lot about the anxieties of the respective governments. Paris was rebuilt with its now familiar wide boulevards radiating from the centre like spokes from a wheel. These had, apart from their usual purposes of transport, two important functions. The first was that they enabled the authorities to easily seal off an area in times of tension. The second was that the boulevards enable the cavalry to charge and disperse mobs before they had time to become dangerous. As a final fallback, the great boulevards allowed the final sanction - in Napoleon's words 'A whiff of grapeshot'. This reflected the not unreasonable preoccupation of the French national authorities with the Paris mob - the sans-coullottes who were the motor force of the French Revolution, the 1848 uprisings and the Paris Commune. By Victorian times the mob was not a real issue in contemporary society. The Chartist agitation of the late 1840's found only a feeble echo in London, and the rise of the mass unions (so-called 'new unionism') was still 50 years in the future. No, what disturbed London's rulers was their firm conviction that there existed in London a criminal class based in the 'rookeries' (slums) of central London. The ideology of the times forbade the use of public funds for slum development, but it was a well known, if little documented, fact that promoters of new main roads were more likely to get permission if the route of the road included the destruction of one of the notorious rookeries. Thus, almost without exception, London's main thoroughfares have kinks in them where they were diverted to wipe out a slum! Of course, since the former inhabitants weren't re-housed, all this did was to increase the overcrowding in the remaining rookeries. The problem wasn't really solved until the rise of cheap mass transit at the end of the century finally made it possible for the poorer citizens to live further than walking distance from their work. Stephen Inwood brings to this study of London an affection for Londoners completely devoid of the sycophantic saccharine that usually blights such studies. His Londoners are real people who make their own lives, confounding the assumptions of both planners and politicians alike. Well worth a read for both Londoners, and non-Londoners alike who prefer real history as opposed interminable list of historical 'facts'.
'A History of London' by Stephen Inwood As far as I can find, this book is not published in the US. However, you can order the UK edition through Amazon.co.uk and they will ship it to you. |
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