by Simon Heffer
CHAPTER 17
THE WAY WE LIVE NOW: THE CREATION OF THE VICTORIAN CITY
I
SOME OF THE challenges presented by the growth of British towns and cities in the mid-nineteenth century were beyond the scope of philanthropists, however generous, and charities, however well organised, to tackle. Matters such as sanitation, public health and the development of infrastructure required a strategic treatment, either by local authorities (which did not exist in anything like their present form until 1888) or, more usually, direction and intervention from central government. A glance at the population statistics illustrates the problem. In 1801 the population of London was 958,863. By 1881 it was 4,776,861, the city having burst at the seams into Essex, Kent, Surrey and Middlesex. Manchester had 75,281 inhabitants in 1801; by 1851 it was 303,382 and by 1881 over half a million. Leeds went from 100,000 in 1801 to 430,000 in 1881, Liverpool from 90,000 to 650,000 and Birmingham from 95,000 to 530,000. These cities needed hospitals, sewerage systems, road and rail links, vast amounts of housing and, in the end, graveyards (cremation was illegal until 1884).
There was a particularly fast expansion of cities in the two decades after the Great Exhibition during a period of economic growth unparalleled in British history, which was ended suddenly by the economic downturn of 1873. Britain at this point truly was the workshop of the world; competition from Europe, notably Germany, and from America, had yet to challenge the supremacy of British goods. Other domestic factors helped: the repeal of the Corn Laws, the extinction of Chartist unrest and the effects of the dramatic spread of the railway network. Although at the Great Exhibition the British won fewer prizes per exhibit than the French, the event inspired British manufacturers and businessmen, and boosted domestic industry. Lyon Playfair wrote to Colonel Grey on 4 June 1852 to report that one potter had told him how ‘the nine months subsequent to the Exhibition had done more to advance the Ceramic Art than the ten previous years’ and that the practical outcome of this was £2 million in exports.1 The same improvements were widely reported, and led to a trickling down of prosperity through society. It was even reflected in the Speech from the Throne on 11 November 1852 at the opening of Parliament, when the Queen said: ‘It gives me Pleasure, by the Blessing of Providence, to congratulate you on the generally improved Condition of the Country, and especially of the Industrious Classes.’2
The demand for labour in industrial centres remained strong for the next couple of decades, attracting more migrants from agricultural districts. The work these migrants did fuelled the building that drove the physical expansion of cities. By 1860 the average per capita income in Britain was £32 12s a year. In Germany, by comparison, it was only £13 6s. British gross national income was estimated to be £523.3 million in 1851. By 1871 it was £916.6 million.3 Between 1846–50 and 1871–5 money made from exporting rose by 229 per cent.4 It was a measure, though, of the strength of the economy in the 1850s and 1860s that even the fast-depopulating countryside became more prosperous. The railways enabled farmers to find more and better markets for their produce, and to transport them more cheaply and easily; and the growing industrial and urban population constituted the main, and fastest-growing, market. By 1881, over 70 per cent of the population would be urban. The value of labour, and what it could produce, was being maximised: the country could earn more from manufactured goods than from agricultural produce.
Expansion of towns was driven not just by houses and places of employment, whether factories or offices, but by all the other trappings of civilised living: shops, parks, concert halls, theatres, museums and libraries. The example of Albertopolis was copied around Britain, often financed by local acts of philanthropy. Local charities gradually built new hospitals for these expanded towns, such as George Gilbert Scott’s magnificent infirmary at Leeds, opened in 1869. Prosperity brought with it an expectation that communities would ensure there was some sort of provision to care for people from cradle to grave.
British cities were transformed by the influx of money between the 1850s and the 1870s, and greater ease of communication, notably London. With the spread of education many in the working class became lower-middle class, moving from manual into clerical work. Suburbs grew to house them, and the phenomenon of the commuter was born. It was a time of often incomprehensible change. Despite the social improvement of a substantial proportion of the people, what William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, would call ‘the submerged tenth’ was still trapped in poverty, beyond the reach of the ladders of social mobility, living in benighted slums, prone to lethal disease, and in or near criminality. Like all periods of rapid transition, it was an age of extremes. The one consolation that society had was that the poor were an ever-diminishing proportion of the population. In 1849 figures showed that 18.9 per cent of the population was in receipt of either indoor or outdoor relief. By 1877 it was 8.7 per cent.5 However, the demands that growing numbers in all classes made on infrastructure were becoming enormous. The State would have no choice, if chaos were to be avoided, but to change the whole political culture and intervene to regulate the various mechanisms needed to cope with rapid urbanisation and the expansion of the population.
II
Utilitarians had a strong interest in matters of public health. This was partly because of the drain on the economy of dealing with the consequences of poor sanitation, and partly because of a wish to maximise what the twenty-first century calls ‘human resources’. Principal among the sanitary reformers of the age was Edwin Chadwick, a Benthamite and criminal barrister who, in 1832, had been offered a place on the Commission of Enquiry into the Poor Law. This gave him a lifelong interest in the conditions of the indigent. As well as being close to Bentham, who left him a lock of his hair, a ring and much of his library of law books, he was a friend of Mill, and partly of his cast of mind. He had helped draft the first Factory Act of 1833, and the Poor Law report of 1834. Chadwick’s biographer admits that the Poor Law system that sprang from the report was ‘blind and cruel and bitterly unpopular’.6 Chadwick himself had seen his proposed system as creating the basic conditions for capitalism: he had also envisaged the workhouses as places of education, refuge and recuperation, not of humiliation and oppression. The Benthamite belief in the perfectibility of society through the exercise of enlightened self-interest caused Chadwick to be committed to education as a means to enlightenment. He saw education as the way to prevent pauper children becoming pauper adults, or criminals. He also thought the Poor Law Board would oversee free movement of labour, but it did nothing of the sort. Therefore Chadwick, one of the system’s progenitors, became one of its bitterest critics.
This, and his growing unpopularity with politicians who resented being told by an official where they had made important mistakes, marginalised him on the Poor Law Commission, and caused him to take a greater interest in public health. In 1837 he had urged the establishment of a register for epidemic diseases. He argued that money spent by local Poor Law unions to remove stinking refuse and empty stagnant pools would pay dividends eventually by avoiding the higher costs of treating the casualties of cholera and typhoid, and the economic damage done by such outbreaks. Malaria was also a problem in the London slums, and fever was bred by the proximity of slaughterhouses and other polluting businesses near the source of water – though all ‘experts’ believed diseases such as cholera and typhoid were not waterborne, but acquired by exposure to ‘the miasma’. Chadwick was alarmed by what he discovered from the statistics of poverty. He investigated 27,000 cases of pauperism and found that 14,000 had become paupers because of catching fever. Of those, 13,000 had died. As well as the human cost, the economic cost of disease was vast.
When Chadwick began to disseminate facts about how bad things were he was accused of exaggeration: one aristocrat, Lord Normanby, was taken to Bethnal Green by a colleague of Chadwick’s to see for himself and, far from finding things exaggerated, realised the description of the horrors did not go far enough.7 On 19 August 1839 Bish
op Blomfield moved in the House of Lords that a formal inquiry be held into the causes of disease among the labouring classes: two days later Lord John Russell asked the Poor Law Commissioners to launch such an inquiry. The result was Chadwick’s Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population. The inquiry coincided with the economic depression with which the Poor Law, never mind the conception of public health, simply could not cope. A quarter of Carlisle’s population were near death from starvation by 1842. Consumption of provisions in Manchester had fallen by a third between 1836 and 1842. Only 100 people out of 9,000 were in work in Accrington, and families would live for days on boiled nettles. The Poor Rate in Sheffield rose from £142 a quarter in 1836 to £4,253 a quarter in 1842. The contingent effect of this new wave of extreme poverty on health was predictably savage.
By the end of 1841 he had finished his report, the last draft revised for him by Mill, who told him: ‘I do not find a single erroneous or questionable position in it, while there is the strength and largeness of practical views which are characteristic of all you do.’8 Chadwick, who had once believed that the root of all evil was the poor state of individual dwelling houses, now argued that external sanitation and drainage were the keys to improvement. It required not just mains drainage, but a constant, high-pressure water supply. These proposals upset the government and the Poor Law Commission. Therefore, as a compromise, the report was published under Chadwick’s own name. As his biographer points out, this not only ensured his name was linked for ever with sanitary reform. It also alerted the British to the fact that, in the new, industrialised world of pollution and growing population, they lived on a dungheap.
Chadwick argued that, just as Britain led the world in industry, so it did in engineering, giving it the means to construct a perfect sanitary system. It was urgent to do this, because the decade from 1831 to 1841 recorded an increase in the average death rates in Leeds, Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester and Liverpool from 20.69 per thousand to 30.8 per thousand.9 The huge growth of these towns in the first forty years of the nineteenth century had exceeded any administrative or sanitary improvements that would have allowed a strict regime of public health. London, for example, had grown from 958,000 people in 1801 to 1,948,000 in 1841. Water supplies, and the means to dispose of industrial and domestic refuse, were utterly inadequate. Nor were there statutory authorities to manage the problem. Mills had dammed rivers, making them stagnant, and pumped refuse into them, making them like open sewers. Houses had no drains and inadequate ventilation, and in urban areas human excrement would overflow into streets and courts from inadequate cesspools. Water often came from public standpipes whose supply would be contaminated by the lack of sewerage; one lavatory would be shared between thirty houses, which were being built to the lowest specification. To make matters worse, houses for single families ended up accommodating up to a dozen.
Chadwick recommended administrative reform to ensure regulations for housing, industry and waste disposal were devised and enforced. Having consulted engineers, he wanted a system of sewers for urban areas with water of a velocity that would bear away the waste to distant outlets. This would be driven by the key to Chadwick’s reforms: hydraulic power. This required a constant supply of water: as Chadwick later said, ‘the establishment of the economy and the efficiency of the constant supply will, when fully considered, be found to be a great work – the completion of what I venture to call the venous and arterial system of towns.’10 What had troubled him most was what to do with the sewage: because ideally there would be an unpolluted river from which the water would come through the taps and into the water closets, and out again into the sewerage system. He decided that this ‘liquid manure’ should be directed to flow on to outlying fields, where it would encourage the growth of crops. To oversee and regulate this, Chadwick recommended a local drainage authority, and a district medical officer. The Poor Law Act 1847 established better parliamentary control of workhouses in the light of serious criticism of the inhumanity of these institutions, notably their treatment of the sick. Eventually, the Vaccination Acts of 1853 and 1867 made the vaccination of children against certain diseases compulsory.
III
The massive growth of London required new amenities, notably parks. In 1850 Lord Seymour, who had taken over the Office of Woods and Forests, received deputations from the people of Finsbury asking for a park there. He hesitated for a year, then consulted the Treasury, which advised him to make a survey. By the time he had made one, a speculative builder had bought some of the land required, and offered to do a deal with the government – which was refused. The Treasury had in any case declined to commit money until surveys and inquiries were complete. Seymour came to favour the scheme, with the government buying land to sell to builders to fund the park. He told Gladstone this ‘desirable object’ would cost £60,000.11 Other English towns and cities followed suit in the 1850s, with local industrialists (such as Titus Salt) often providing substantial sums to buy land that would be earmarked for recreation.
In 1844, as the East End of London expanded, the government set aside 262 acres in Bethnal Green for what became Victoria Park, 179 acres of which had already been in public ownership and administered by the Commissioners of Woods and Forests. The rest would be compulsorily purchased, though the existing landlords, sensing the value of their property, were demanding a high price. The more cities expanded, the more the need for open spaces – for ventilation as much as for recreation – became pressing, but the demands of speculative builders and the growing middle classes meant that green land close to the centre of cities – especially London – was vulnerable to development. A classic example of central government coming to the aid of local was seen in the 1866 Metropolitan Commons Act, which empowered local authorities within the Metropolitan Police District to use the rates to maintain and preserve open spaces. It was the first of a series of Acts passed until 1878, which enabled the preservation of, for example, Clapham Common; a separate Wormwood Scrubs Act secured that stretch of common land in north-west London for the use of its local inhabitants. A similar Act enabled authorities outside London to buy land for parks, though this could cause controversy. The Liverpool Corporation paid £250,000 in 1867 to buy 375 acres from the Earl of Sefton to form the park that still bears his name, because of the urgent need for an open space near the ever-more crowded city. The price caused outrage, even though it was in part defrayed by the building of large villas on the park’s perimeter for the quality of the city.
Another equally visible legacy of the Victorians in most British cities are the great suburban cemeteries. By 1845 Parliament was forced to consider an aspect of public health that was being aggravated by the enormous growth of towns: the question of burying the dead. The tradition of doing so within the confines of old towns, in existing churchyards, was becoming unfeasible. Reformers wanted larger cemeteries outside towns, something the government opposed on the grounds of popular sentiment. A committee of medical experts appointed by the Commons recommended ending interments in large towns, and spoke of the ‘shocking practices prevalent in the graveyards of the Metropolis’.12 Typhus, the committee said, had become common because of the ‘putrid miasma’ and ‘effluvia’ seeping through the soil of overcrowded burial grounds because of shallow graves.13 This was also a problem in provincial towns that had had population booms: North and South Shields, Sunderland, Coventry, Chester and York. London was the worst, though. Chadwick had written a report detailing how a court near Drury Lane was a ‘mass of corruption’, and how at Rotherhithe ‘the interments were so numerous that the half-decomposed organic matter was often thrown up to make way for fresh graves, exposing sights disgusting, and emitting foul effluvia’.14 He also reported that even the burials of the well-to-do under the flagstones of churches, and in good coffins, were problematical: ‘Sooner or later every corpse buried in the vault of a church spreads the products of decomposition through the air which is breathed, as readily as if it had never been en
closed.’ A leading campaigner for new cemeteries, William MacKinnon, the MP for Lymington and chairman of a select committee on the question, had spoken of his incomprehension at the claim that people were ‘still desirous to continue the custom of interring the dead in the midst of the living’, for none of his inquiries had revealed any such demand.15
Mackinnon read a letter from George Brace, the Principal of St Clement’s Inn in London, that outlined an even worse problem than shallow graves: inadequately constructed crypts and vaults. Brace told of an infants’ school separated only by a timber floor ‘the rafters of which are not even protected with lath and plaster’ from a cellar in which, between 1823 and 1840, had been deposited more than 10,000 corpses, ‘not one-fiftieth part of which could have been crammed into it in separate coffins, had not a common sewer contiguous to the cellar afforded facility for removal of the old, as new supplies arrived.’16 The letter continued:
In the cellar there are now human remains, and the stench which at times issues through the floor is so intolerable as to render it absolutely necessary that the windows in the lantern roof should be kept open. During the summer months a peculiar insect makes its appearance; and in the adjoining very narrow thoroughfare, called St. Clement’s Lane, densely inhabited by the poor, I need scarcely inform you, that fever, cholera, and other diseases, have prevailed to a frightful extent. Over the masses of putrefaction to which I have alluded, are children varying in number from one to two hundred, huddled together for hours at a time, and at night the children are succeeded by persons, who continue dancing over the dead till three and four o’clock in the morning. A band of music is in attendance during the whole night, and cards are played in a room adjoining this chapel-charnel house.
