London in the nineteenth century / by Sir Walter Besant.

  • Walter Besant
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: London in the nineteenth century / by Sir Walter Besant. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    20/490 page 4
    century mode of thoughts, manners, and habits extended until the reign of Queen Victoria. There is a greater gap in continuity in 1837 than in 1800. In order, there- fore, to obtain a fair value for comparison I shall first take London as it was in 1837. I have elsewhere {Fifty Years Ago, 1887) stated that in order to comprehend London as it was in 1837 we may draw a line a little above the south side of Regent’s Park, carry it westward as far as the Edgware Road and eastward as far as the Regent’s Canal, which it must then follow as far as the Regent’s Canal Docks. This line would be the northern and eastern boundary. The western boundary would be a line drawn down the lower end of the Edgware Road, Park Lane, and a line from Hyde Park Corner to Westminster Bridge. The natural boundary on the south is the river, but if we include Southwark there would be a continuity of houses covering a narrow fringe. Lambeth and Southwark were still unconnected; gardens lay between; Bermondsey was only half built over; Rotherhithe was but a single row of houses with a few back-courts along the river- bank. There were open fields beyond Stepney Green on the east, beyond the City Road on the north, and beyond Kennington on the south : the vast population of London at that time was cramped into those narrow limits. Cruchley’s map of 1835 (see end of book) represents continuous London. We may also reckon as part of London the lines of villas running out along some of the main roads. Thus between Clapham, which was a suburb of princely houses, and St. George’s Borough there were the hamlets of Newington, Kennington, and Stockwell; on either side of these suburbs were fields and gardens. These arms or lines ran out along the Bayswater Road, the Hampstead Road, the Edgware Road, the Kingsland Road, the Mile End Road, the Clapham Road, the Brixton Road, and all the other main thoroughfares. The occupants of these villas were not, as a rule, the City merchants. Some of the more wealthy had houses beside Clapham Common, or at Chiswick, or at Hackney. They drove into town in their own carriages, while their sons rode. The merchants, for the most part, occupied the squares of Bloomsbury. In the villas along the highroads were found retired tradesmen, retired officers, lodging-house keepers, maiden ladies, widows, all kinds of people not actively engaged in business or work of any kind. For those who desired to go to town every day, or any day, there was the short stage, the coach which started in the morning and returned in the evening. It is curious to look at the map and to consider the fields and gardens which in 1837 lay stretching northwards where now are miles of streets. Sixty years have done more for the expansion of London than all the centuries which went before. In 1837 the area covered by London with these arms and outlying branches was no more than 22 square miles. Sixty years later it was 120 square miles. Is there in the history of any city growth or development more remarkable than this t
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3