Modern London

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521417075.004

3 - Modern London

from Part I - Circulation

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008

Richard Dennis

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Martin Daunton

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Martin Daunton: Affiliation:
University of Cambridge

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It is difficult to speak adequately or justly of London. It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent. You can draw up a tremendous list of reasons why it should be insupportable …But …for one who takes it as I take it, London is on the whole the most possible form of life …It is the biggest aggregation of human life – the most complete compendium of the world. The human race is better represented there than anywhere else, and if you learn to know your London you learn a great many things.

Henry James, 18811

Distilling the essence of modern London into a chapter, one cannot help but be selective. I will focus on just four, interrelated aspects of London’s history: government, social geography, economy and Empire. It is clearly impossible to understand London without examining the ‘problem’ of London’s government: the relationship between central government, the Corporation of the City, London-wide authorities such as the Metropolitan Board of Works and its successor, the London County Council, and lower-tier authorities, initially parish vestries and district boards and, subse-quently, metropolitan borough councils. But making sense of debates about appropriate forms of metropolitan government demands a sensitivity to London’s changing social geography: a nineteenth-century contrast between poor East End and rich West End, subsumed in a twentieth-century contrast between working-class inner and middle-class outer London. Of course there are numerous qualifications to be made to this caricature, to take account of working-class suburbanisation, the survival of an elite West End and, more recently, a sporadic gentrification of inner London, and a City that shifted from mixed residential to almost exclusively non-residential in its pattern of land use.

Keywords

cultural pluralism London's local government British Empire city's economy social geography Victorian London modern London

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge Urban History of Britain , pp. 95 - 132

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521417075.004 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2001

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