The Victorian City

by Judith Flanders

  The toll gates were a major traffic obstacle, but not the only one. For much of the century there were, legally, no rules for traffic in most streets. In the 1840s, buses were equipped with two straps that ran along the roof and ended in two rings hooked to the driver’s arms. When passengers wanted to get down on the left side of the road, they pulled the left strap, for the right, the right strap, and the buses veered across the roads to stop as requested. Some streets had informal traffic arrangements. The newsagents, booksellers and publishers who comprised most of the shopkeepers in Paternoster Row mailed out their new magazines and books on a set day each month – ‘Magazine Day’ – and on that day, ‘the carts and vehicles…enter the Row from the western end, and draw up with horses’ heads towards Cheapside’. Even there, from time to time a carter ‘hired for the single job, and ignorant of the etiquette…will obstinately persist in crushing his way on the contrary direction’. It was ‘etiquette’, not law, that made Paternoster Row into a one-way system one day a month. In 1852, the police first issued a notice that, because of severe traffic problems at Marble Arch, on the northeast side of Hyde Park, ‘Metropolitan stage-carriages are to keep to the left, or proper side, according to the direction in which they are going, and must set down their company on that side. No metropolitan stage-carriage, can be allowed to cross the street or road to take up or set down passengers.’ The word ‘proper’ still suggested etiquette, but the involvement of the police was new: the press carried furious debates on this intrusion into what had up to now been an entirely private matter.

  As late as 1860, traffic was still segregated in a variety of ways, different for each road, with no overarching rules. When the new Westminster Bridge opened in 1860, ‘Light vehicles are to cross the bridge each way, on the western side; omnibuses, waggons, &., on the two tramways, on the eastern side’, while the old bridge was reserved for ‘foot-passengers, saddle horses, trucks [hand-carts], &c’. There was still no separation for traffic moving in opposite directions. (It is interesting to see that riding horses were categorized with pedestrians, not with wheeled vehicles.) In 1868, a lamp was erected near Parliament Square that ‘will usually present to view a green light, which will serve to foot passengers by way of caution, and at the same time remind drivers of vehicles and equestrians that they ought at this point to slacken their speed’: a proto-traffic light. (It exploded and wounded a policeman, which put an end to that experiment for the time being; a plaque marks the spot.) The following year the police first took on the duty of directing traffic, even though the public continued to query whether they had the legal authority to enforce drivers to act in certain ways. The author of an 1871 treatise on how to improve traffic referred to the ‘rule of the road’, where vehicles were expected to stay ‘as close to the “near side” as possible’, but then went on to say that no one actually complied: traffic converged naturally on the best part of the road, the central line. In some countries, he added, it was part of the duty of the police ‘to chastise any driver they might see transgressing, or fine him’, but in England there would be ‘objections...against such power being given to the police’.

  The nature of horse transport meant that some slowdowns were inevitable. The logistics of horses and carts required endless patience. Even important streets, such as Bucklersbury in the City, were too narrow for many carts to be able to turn, and their horses had to back out after making deliveries. Railway vans, transporting goods to and from stations, weighed two tons, their loads another thirteen; brewers’ vans carried twenty-five barrels of beer weighing a total of five tons; the carts that watered the streets held tanks of water weighing just under two tons. Manoeuvring these great weights, and the large teams of horses needed to pull them, required time as well as skill, as did the ability to handle a number of animals. Brewers habitually used three enormous dray horses harnessed abreast, while other carters with heavy loads might use six harnessed in line one in front of the other. Extraordinary events required even more: in 1842, the granite for Nelson’s Column was shipped by water to Westminster and was then transported up to Trafalgar Square in a van pulled by twenty-two horses. Even when not conveying these vast loads, drivers of heavily laden carts often needed to harness an extra horse to deal with London’s many hills. Some bus and haulage companies kept additional horses at notoriously steep spots, such as Ludgate Hill, the precipitous side of the Fleet Valley. But otherwise individuals went to the aid of their fellow drivers on an ad hoc basis. A carter seeing another carter in difficulty would stop, unharness one or two of his horses and lend them to the passing stranger, who yoked up the animals to his cart, then stopped at the top of the hill to unharness them and return them to their owner, who was presumably blocking traffic while he waited. Tolls and turnpikes caused more delays – particularly where goods for sale were brought into the city, as their tolls were calculated by weight, and carts had to stop at each weighing machine.

  Road layouts were also a major cause of delays, especially as the roads themselves were narrow. Temple Bar, that divider between the West End and the City, was just over twenty feet across, while almost all carriages were more than six feet wide, and carts often much more. In other streets, centuries of building accretions did not help. Until the early 1840s, the Half-way House stood in the middle of Kensington Road, the main route into London from the west, narrowing it to two alleys on either side, while Middle Row in Holborn was just that: a double-row sixty yards long of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century houses occupying the middle of the street. (Dr Johnson was said to have lodged there briefly in 1748.) This row of shops, lawyers’ offices and pubs narrowed one of London’s busiest roads at the junction of Gray’s Inn Lane (now Gray’s Inn Road) to just ten yards. The caption to an 1820s engraving of Holborn at Middle Row reads, ‘The part here exhibited is perhaps the widest and best of the whole line of street.’ One can imagine what the rest of it looked like. Middle Row was demolished only in 1867, widening the street to nearly twenty-five yards.

  The main problem for traffic, however, was a historic one. London had developed on an east–west axis, following the river, with just three main routes: one that ran from Pall Mall via the Strand and Fleet Street to St Paul’s; one from Oxford Street along High Holborn; and the New Road (now the Euston Road). Yet none ran clear and straight. Along the Holborn route, the slum of St Giles necessitated a detour before New Oxford Street was opened at the end of the 1840s. A few hundred yards further on lay the obstacle of Middle Row, and 500 yards beyond that was the bottleneck of the Fleet Valley, whose steep slopes slowed traffic until Holborn Viaduct was built across it in 1869. The Strand had its own problems: the western end, until Trafalgar Square was developed in the 1830s, was a maze of small courts and lanes, while at its eastern end Temple Bar slowed traffic to a crawl, as did the street narrowing at Ludgate Hill. It must be remembered that these were the good, wide, east–west routes. North–south routes could not be described as bad, because they didn’t exist. Regent Street opened in sections from 1820, and the development known as the West Strand Improvements began to widen St Martin’s Lane and clear a north–south route at what would become Trafalgar Square. But otherwise there was no Charing Cross Road nor Shaftesbury Avenue (both of which had to wait until the end of the century); there was no single route through Bloomsbury, as the private estate of the Duke of Bedford was still being developed; there was no Kingsway (which was built in the twentieth century); and what is today the Aldwych was until the twentieth century a warren of medieval lanes, many housing a thriving pornography industry.

  Plans for improvements were made. And remade. And then remade again. The Fleet market was cleared away in 1826 to prepare the ground for what would ultimately become the Farringdon Road; the Fleet prison too was pulled down; but still nothing happened. A decade later only one section, from Ludgate Circus to Holborn Viaduct, had been constructed. Similarly, in 1864 the Illustrated London News mourned that, after decades of complaints, narrow little Park Lane still had
not been widened: ‘The discovery of a practicable north-west passage from Piccadilly to Paddington is an object quite as important as that north-west passage from Baffin’s Bay to Behring’s [sic] Strait...The painful strangulation of metropolitan traffic in the small neck of this unhappy street...is one of the most absurd sights that a Londoner can show to his country cousins.’25 Even the river blocked the north–south routes: the tolls on Southwark and Waterloo Bridges ensured that the three toll-free bridges – London, Blackfriars and Westminster – were permanently blocked by traffic.

  Almost any state or society occasion caused gridlock. As early as the 1820s, when the king held a drawing room – a regular event at which he received the upper classes in a quasi-social setting – carriages were routinely stuck in a solid line from Cavendish Square north of Oxford Street, all the way down St James’s to Buckingham Palace, a mile and a half away. ‘The scene was amusing enough’ to one passer-by, looking in at the open carriage windows and discovering that the elaborately dressed courtiers were ‘devouring biscuits’, having come prepared for what was then known as a ‘traffic-lock’ of several hours’ duration.

  Everyday traffic was every bit as bad. One tourist reported a lock made up of a number of display advertising vehicles (see pp. 246–7), a bus, hackney coaches, donkey carts, and a cat’s-meat man (who sold horsemeat for household pets from a handcart), whose dogs got caught up in the chaos. All was in an uproar until a policeman came along, who ‘very quietly took the pony by the head, and drew pony, gig, and gentleman high and dry upon the side-walk. He then caused our omnibus to advance to the left, and made room for a clamorous drayman to pass’, who did so with a glare at the bus and a shake of his whip. Dickens was dubious about such actions, maintaining that policemen rarely did anything except add to the confusion, ‘rush[ing] about, and seiz[ing] hold of horses’ bridles, and back[ing] them into shop-windows’.

  Worse than these situations were the locks caused by accidents, usually a fallen horse. Max Schlesinger watched the combined efforts of two policemen, ‘a posse of idle cabmen and sporting amateurs, and a couple of ragged urchins’ needed to get one horse back on its feet. Frequently the fallen horse was beyond help, and licensed slaughterhouses kept carts ready to dash out, deliver the coup de grâce and remove the animal’s body. People, too, were often badly injured, or killed, in these locks and on the streets more generally: between three and four deaths a week was average. More commonly, though, Schlesinger observed, ‘Some madcap of a boy attempts the perilous passage from one side of the street to the other; he jumps over carts, creeps under the bellies of horses, and, in spite of the manifold dangers...gains the opposite pavements.’ It took a foreigner to notice this, for hundreds of boys earned their livings by spending hours every day actually in the streets: the crossing-sweepers.

  One of Dickens’ most compelling characters is Jo, the crossing-sweeper in Bleak House, who lives in a fictional slum called Tom-all-Alone’s, which has been variously sited. An accompanying illustration shows the Wren church of St Andrew’s, Holborn (destroyed in 1941 in the Blitz); but there are suggestions in the novel itself that it might be located in the slum behind Drury Lane, or even in St Giles. These seem to be more likely, as Jo eats his breakfast on the steps of the nearby Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts26 before taking up his post at his crossing ‘among the mud and wheels, the horses, whips, and umbrellas’.

  Jo and his kind were necessary. In the rain even a major artery ‘resembled a by-street in Venice, with a canal of mud...flowing through it. And as often as [the crossing-sweeper] swept a passage, the bulwarks of mud rolled slowly over it again until they met.’ The crossing-sweepers were performing an essential service, confining the mud to the sides of the roads, clearing away the dung, the refuse and the licky mac, making a central route for people to cross. All day, every day, this was the task of the old, the infirm and the young, all coatless, hatless and barefoot. Most busy corners had a regular sweeper, who held his position as of right; he was known by sight and even by name to many who passed daily, as the mysterious Nemo in Bleak House knows Jo. Residents relied on their sweeper to run errands and do small chores, and in turn gave him cast-off clothes or food.27 There were also morning-sweepers who stood at the dirtiest sections of the main roads, sometimes half a dozen or more over a mile, to sweep for the benefit of the rows of clerks walking into work, enabling them to arrive at their offices with clean boots and trousers. By ten o’clock the morning-sweepers had dispersed, going to other jobs. Sweepers were often approved by the police, either outright – sometimes sweepers checked at the local stations before they took up a pitch – or if the local beat-constable saw a sweeper was honest and helpful, he made sure that he kept his pitch, seeing off rivals for a good corner. Some large companies paid a boy or elderly man to act as their own sweeper, both to ensure that their clerks arrived looking respectable as well as to provide the same service for their customers.

  Apart from these individuals, there were also civic attempts to keep the roads clean. A Parliamentary Select Committee in the 1840s recorded that three cartloads of ‘dirt’, almost all of it animal manure, were swept up daily between Piccadilly Circus and Oxford Circus alone – 20,000 tons of dung annually in less than half a mile. In addition to this, every day more refuse was cleared, most of which had fallen from the open carts constantly trundling by: coal dust, ash, sand, grit, vegetable matter, all ground to dust by the horses’ hooves and the carts’ iron wheels. In wet weather, it was shovelled to the sides of the roads before being loaded on to carts by scavengers employed by the parishes, with the busiest, most traffic-laden streets cleared first, before the shops opened, when traffic made the task more difficult. Dustmen also appeared on every street, ringing a bell to warn householders to close their windows as they drew near. Traditionally they wore fantail hats, which resembled American baseball caps worn backwards, with a greatly enlarged leather or cloth bill, the back flap protecting their necks and shoulders. Wearing short white jackets and, early in the century, brown breeches or, later, like Sloppy in Our Mutual Friend, red or brown cotton trousers, they carried huge wicker baskets and a ladder that allowed them to climb up the side of their carts and deposit their loads.28 (See Plate 1, where fantail, red trousers and bell are all shown.)

  There were attempts throughout the period to mechanize the street-cleaning process. In 1837, a footman named William Tayler, who lived in Marylebone, wrote in his diary: ‘saw a new machine for scrapeing the roads and streets. It’s a very long kind of how [sic]...One man draws it from one side of the street to the other, taking a whole sweep of mud with him at once...There are two wheels, so, by pressing on the handles, he can wheel the thing back everytime he goes across the street for a hoefull.’ By 1850, the streets were ‘swept every morning before sunrise, by a machine with a revolving broom which whisks the dirt into a kind of scuttle or trough’.

  With so many unpaved roads, and as many poorly paved ones, dust was as much a problem in dry weather as mud was in wet. When David Copperfield walked from the Borough, in south London, all the way to Dover, he arrived ‘From head to foot...powdered almost...white with chalk and dust’. Because all the roads surrounding London were as dusty in hot weather, when heading for the Derby, ‘Every gentleman had put on a green veil’ while the women ‘covered themselves up with net’: ‘The brims and crowns of hats were smothered with dust, as if nutmegs had been grated over them’; and without the veils the dust combined with the men’s hair-grease, turning it ‘to a kind of paint’. Street dust also spoilt the clothes of pedestrians, and could even insinuate itself indoors, damaging shopkeepers’ stock and furniture in private households.

  Water not only kept down the dust in dry weather but also helped prolong the life of macadam surfaces, so by the end of the 1820s most parishes maintained one or more water carts, filled from pumps at street corners. The pumps were over six feet high, with great spouts that swung out over the wooden water troughs on the carts.2
9 By the 1850s, the rumbling of ‘tank-like watering-carts’ marked the arrival of spring as they rolled out across the city. When the driver pressed a lever with his foot, it opened a valve in the water trough, and the water squirted out of a perforated pipe at the back of his cart as he slowly drove along, ‘playing their hundred threads of water upon a dusty roadway’.

  Streets were watered daily to keep down the dust. Here a water cart is being filled at a street pump in Bloomsbury. On the cart on the left a lever is being pulled, and the water squirts out behind.

  That is, he drove along if driving were possible. Traffic was not the only problem. For much of the century, London was one large building site. On a street-by-street basis, the creation of the infrastructure of modernity meant that the roads were constantly being dug up and relaid, sometimes for paving but more often for what we would call utilities, but then didn’t even have a name.

  Responsibility for street lighting, originally a private matter, had devolved over the centuries to the parishes and finally to the civic body. In the early 1700s, parish rates were used to pay for a tallow light to be lit in front of every tenth building between 6 p.m. and midnight, from Michaelmas to Lady Day (29 September to 25 March). But these created little more than an ambient glow, and the more prosperous called on what was, in effect, mobile lighting: linkmen who carried burning pitch torches and who, for a fee, lit the way for individual pedestrians. Even this was not ideal. By the late eighteenth century the poet and playwright John Gay expressed a common fear: