The Victorian City

by Judith Flanders

  These huge enterprises didn’t just alter the appearance of the city. At a geographical level they fundamentally changed the topography of London. There had once been a hill between Half-Moon Street and Dover Street in Piccadilly, which was flattened out in the mid-1840s. The 150 yards of Oxford Street that lay between Bond Street and South Molton Street ran at ‘a rapid decline’, steep enough to trouble horses, which was similarly filled in. More ambitiously, ‘a series of quicksands, mudbanks, and old peat-bogs’ was drained from the old Grosvenor Basin behind Buckingham Palace, later to become Victoria. The land had long been considered too marshy for building, but the railways made the substantial and expensive investment worthwhile for the private Grosvenor Estate.

  But it was principally via the Metropolitan Board of Works that great swathes of London were changed from the ground up. One of its first ventures, nearly a decade in the making, was building a bridge across the Fleet Valley. This, the Holborn Viaduct, was one of the biggest engineering projects in a century of big engineering projects. In January 1864, Arthur Munby took the train between the new Charing Cross station on the day it opened (‘Temporary stairs, a temporary platform: the great building in the Strand...yet unroofed,’ he groused) and the ‘miserable makeshift station’ at London Bridge, before walking back, ‘passing on my way another tremendous excavation on each side of Ludgate Hill’.33 The Daily News bitterly reported that Holborn had been turned into ‘a waste and howling wilderness’ of hoarding, with, behind it, ‘ruin and desolation’ for 500 yards. For more than three years, Holborn, one of the busiest roads in the city, was reduced to a single lane for both traffic and pedestrians. ‘The remainder of the roadway...is in the same condition as that of so many other parts of London at the present time – a place given up to contractors, diggers, and builders, to navvies and bricklayers, to carts and wheelbarrows, to piles of materials for masonry, and huge frames of timber.’

  The coming of modernity was obtrusively visible: the construction of Holborn Viaduct, for example, reduced one of London’s busiest streets to a single lane for traffic and pedestrians for three years.

  London was taking on the lineaments of modernity before its inhabitants’ eyes, although sometimes it had been hard to discern while it was happening.

  3.

  TRAVELLING (MOSTLY) HOPEFULLY

  The technicalities of the creation of the roads, and their maintenance, were of less interest to most Londoners than how to navigate the city, and by what means. The ways to cross London evolved as rapidly as the roads had done. At the top of the tree, those with good jobs went on horseback. This required the feeding and stabling of a horse at home and also near the place of work. Only Dickens’ most prosperous characters, like the merchant prince Mr Dombey, and Carker, his second-in-command, ride to work. The playwright and journalist Edmund Yates worked for twenty-five years in the post office. As a young clerk he walked from St John’s Wood to his office behind St Paul’s: later, as he rose in the hierarchy, the combination of his increased salary, his income from playwriting, and also the fact that he was living with his mother, enabled him ‘in the summer, [to] come on horseback through the parks’. Even then, he didn’t ride all the way, paying exorbitant City livery rates. Instead he left his horse in Westminster and continued on into the City by boat.

  For centuries, the Thames had been the ‘silent highway’, the major artery into London and the principal east–west transport route from one side of London to the other. At the start of the nineteenth century, it was possible to cross the river within London at only three fixed points: by London Bridge (where a crossing in some form or another had existed since Roman times), by Blackfriars Bridge (built 1769) and by Westminster Bridge (1750). There were also two wooden bridges over the river at Battersea (1771–2) and Kew (1784–9), but both were then on the very edges of London. By the time Victoria came to the throne in 1837, five new bridges had opened – Vauxhall (1816), Waterloo (1817), Southwark (1819), Hammersmith (1827, the first suspension bridge in London) and the new London Bridge (1831, sixty yards upriver from the old location). These were later followed by Hungerford (1845), Chelsea (1851–8), Lambeth (1862), Albert and Wandsworth Bridges (both 1873) and Tower Bridge (1894), trebling the number of crossings between one end of the century and the other.

  Because of the lack of crossings at the start of the nineteenth century, about 3,000 wherries and small boats were regularly available for hire to carry passengers across the river. Even in the 1830s the shore was still lined with watermen calling out, ‘Sculls, sir! Sculls!’ In Sketches by Boz, Mr Percy Noakes, who lives in Gray’s Inn Square, plans to ‘walk leisurely to Strandlane, and have a boat to the Custom-house’, while as late as 1840, the evil Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop is rowed from where he lives at Tower Hill to his wharf on the south side of the river.

  From 1815, when the Margery, the first Thames steamer, ran from Wapping Old Stairs to Gravesend, steamers had been used for excursion travel, and to take passengers downriver. By the early 1830s, the steamers had also become commuting boats within London, ferrying passengers between the Old Swan Pier at London Bridge and Westminster Pier in the West End, stopping along the south bank of the river at the bridges as well as at some of the many private wharves, quays and river stairs in between. (One map in 1827 showed sixty-seven sets of river stairs in the nine miles between Battersea and Chelsea in the west, and the Isle of Dogs in the east.)

  Old Swan Stairs or the Old Swan Pier (the name varied; it was roughly where Cannon Street railway bridge is now) was one of the busiest landing places, the embarkation point for steamers to France and Belgium as well as the river steamers. Yet for decades it was just a rickety under-dock, reached by wooden stairs so steep they were almost ladders. Even in the 1840s, by which time it had been renamed the London Bridge Steam Wharf and had a high dock made of stone, its wooden gangway still led down to a small floating dock. Old London Bridge had been a notoriously dangerous spot on the river. The eighteen piers under the bridge, widened over the centuries to support the ageing and increasingly heavy structure, had become so large that they held back the tidal flow and created a five-foot difference in water levels between the two sides. Passengers disembarked at the Old Swan Stairs and walked the few hundred yards to Billingsgate Stairs before re-embarking, leaving the boatmen to shoot the rapids without them. After the new London Bridge opened in 1831, for many years the steamers’ routes continued to mimic the old pattern: three steamer companies ran services above-bridge, to the west of London Bridge, and two below-bridge, to the east, with the change made at the Old Swan Stairs. In Our Mutual Friend, set in the 1850s, the waterman Rogue Riderhood’s boat is run down by a ‘B’low-Bridge steamer’. Long after the new bridge removed the danger, ‘steamers...dance up and down on the waves...[and] hundreds of men, women, and children, [still] run...from one boat to another’.

  Hungerford Stairs was typical. Passengers walked down a narrow passage lined with advertisements ‘celebrat[ing] the merits of “DOWN’S HATS” and “COOPER’S MAGIC PORTRAITS”...We hurry along the bridge, with its pagoda-like piers...and turn down a flight of winding steps.’ On the floating pier, ‘The words “PAY HERE” [are]...inscribed over little wooden houses, that remind one of the retreats generally found at the end of suburban gardens’, and tickets were purchased ‘amid cries of “Now then, mum, this way for Creemorne!” “Oo’s for Ungerford?” “Any one for Lambeth or Chelsea?” and [you] have just time to set foot on the boat before it shoots through the bridge.’ In David Copperfield, Murdstone and Grinby’s wine warehouse stood in for Warren’s blacking factory, which, until it was razed for the building of Hungerford market, had been ‘the last house at the bottom of a narrow street [at Hungerford Stairs], curving down hill to the river, with some stairs at the end, where people took boat’.

  The Old Swan Stairs at London Bridge, the embarkation point for steamers to Europe, was for decades nothing more than a rickety wooden flight of stairs leading to an equally ricket
y under-dock.

  By 1837, small steamers owned by the London and Westminster Steam Boat Company shuttled between London and Westminster Bridges every day between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m., with sometimes an extension loop out to Putney in the western suburbs. Their boats, the Azalea, the Bluebell, the Rose, Camellia, Lotus and other floral tributes, departed every fifteen minutes, for journeys that lasted up to thirty minutes, depending on the number of intermediary stops. All but the smallest boats had hinged funnels, which folded back as they passed under the bridges. The boats were only about ten feet wide, with 18-horsepower engines and crews of five, and the boilers and the engines occupied most of the space. The skipper, wearing a top hat, stood on the bridge if there was one, or on the paddlebox itself. A call boy, ‘Quick of eye, sharp in mind, and distressingly loud in voice’, stood at the engine-room hatch and transmitted the skipper’s hand signals to the engineer below ‘with a shrillness which is a trifle less piercing than that of a steam-whistle’: ‘Sto-paw!’ (‘Stop her’), ‘E-saw!’ (‘Ease her’), ‘Half-a-turn astern!’ Because of this method of communication, signs everywhere on board warned, ‘Do not speak to the man at the wheel.’

  At first it looked as though the arrival of the railways from the late 1830s would destroy this new transportation system almost before it had begun, but for the next decade the competition instead drove frequency up and fares down. By the 1840s, at least one steamer ran from London and Westminster Bridges every four minutes. The river had become ‘the leading highway of personal communication between the City and the West-end’, with thirty-two trips an hour, 320 a day, carrying more than 13,000 passengers daily: this ‘silent highway is now as busy as the Strand itself ’. The London and Westminster Steam Boat Company reduced its 4d price to 2d for a return ticket between London Bridge and St Paul’s, and soon penny steamers were the norm. Competition was guided solely by price, for the boats were neither luxurious nor even pleasant. There was barely any seating and no shelter on board; in the rain passengers huddled in the lee of the wheelhouse, holding up ‘mats, boards, great coats, and umbrellas’ for protection. The boats were, in addition, ‘diminutive ungainly shelterless boats...rickety, crank little conveyances’ and ‘filthy to a degree’.

  At the same time, the number of companies proliferated. Operating above-bridge, in addition to the London and Westminster Steamboat Company, were the Iron Boat (which named its steamers for City companies: the Fishmonger, Haberdasher, Spectacle-maker), the Citizen (which used letters: Citizen A, Citizen B), and the Penny Companies. Below-bridge operators included the Diamond Funnel (the largest company, with twenty steamers, its biggest called the Sea Swallow, Gannet and Petrel; the medium-sized the Elfin and Metis; and the smallest, which were still larger than any above-bridge boats, the Nymph, Fairy, Sylph and Sybil), the Waterman (named for birds: the Penguin, Falcon, Swift, Teal) and the General Steam Navigation Company (its Eagle was known as ‘the husbands’ boat’, since it ran to the seaside resorts of Margate and Ramsgate on Fridays).

  In 1846, two halfpenny steamers, the Ant and the Bee, began to run from Adelphi Pier (between present-day Charing Cross and Waterloo Bridge) to Dyers’ Hall Wharf, west of the Swan Stairs: with no intermediary stops, and double-ended boats which had no need to turn around for the return trip, the journey time as well as the price was halved. They were, rejoiced one user, ‘cheaper than shoe-leather’. But cheapness and speed had a fatal price. A year later, the Cricket, the company’s third boat, was berthed at the Adelphi Pier with about a hundred passengers on board. Without warning ‘a sudden report’ was heard, followed immediately by a huge explosion: such was its force that pieces of the Cricket’s boiler were found 300 yards away, and tremors were felt in houses at 450 yards’ distance. Immediately ‘skiffs, wherries and boats of all kinds’ put out to rescue the passengers, who had been hurled into the river. Six died, twelve were seriously injured and many more had minor injuries. It was later revealed that the engineer had tied down the boat’s safety valves so they couldn’t cut off the build-up of steam while he went for an illicit break. When the boiler overheated, there was nothing to prevent the devastating explosion. (The engineer was convicted of manslaughter.)

  This was a shocking accident, but in the period between 1835 and 1838, when steamers were at their peak, twelve were involved in serious collisions in which forty-three people drowned: nearly one fatality a month. In Our Mutual Friend, the owner of a riverside pub hears shouting and is told, ‘It’s summut run down in the fog, ma’am...There’s ever so many people in the river...It’s a steamer,’ to which a world-weary voice replies, ‘It always IS a steamer.’ It was not just on the water itself that danger lay. The piers were built by the steamer companies, or by the owners of the private wharves, at a time when there were no building or safety regulations, nor requirements for crowd control. One pier, at Blackfriars, gave way in 1844 when a large number of people crushed onto it in order to watch a boat race. Thirty fell into the river, of whom four may have died.

  Shortly after Max Schlesinger moved to London in 1852, he already understood that ‘Among the middle classes...the omnibus stands immediately after [fresh] air, tea, and flannel, in the list of necessaries of life.’ Omnibuses by that date appeared to have always been part of the life of the city, but they were an innovation of only two decades’ standing. Until the mid-1830s, the short-stagecoach, often referred to as the short-stage, had been the main method of transportation between suburbs and centre. These coaches were similar to the stagecoaches that made longer journeys across country (see pp. 90–101), but tended to be the older, smaller and less comfortable models. By 1825, London had 418 short-stagecoaches making over a thousand journeys daily, transporting the residents of Kilburn, or Bayswater, or Paddington, to and from the centre. Dickens’ fiction teems with characters using the short-stage: in Pickwick Papers, set in the late 1820s, Mrs Bardell and her friends go from Pentonville ‘in quest of a Hampstead stage’ in order to take tea at the famous Spaniards Inn on Hampstead Heath. In David Copperfield, Agnes takes the stage from Highgate to Putney, and then from Putney to Covent Garden. In Great Expectations, Pip takes the stage to Hammersmith from Barnard’s Inn, where he was lodging in Holborn; Estella travels to Richmond by the City short-stage.

  The short-stages were notoriously unreliable. In Dickens’ very first published short story, ‘A Dinner at Poplar Walk’, Mr Minns gets into a coach ‘on the solemn assurance...that the vehicle would start in three minutes’. After a quarter of an hour, Mr Minns leans out the window and asks when they are going to start: ‘“Di-rectly, sir,” said the coachman, with his hands in his pockets, looking as much unlike a man in a hurry as possible.’ Dickens’ readers must have laughed ruefully. Twenty years earlier, Louis Simond had lamented his experience on the short-stage from Richmond to the West End: ‘We stopped more than twenty times on the road’ and it took two hours to cover seven or eight miles.

  Yet they also offered a convenient and personal service. After dinner at Mr Minns’ friend’s house, ‘as it was a very wet night’ the nine o’clock stage comes by to see if anybody wanted to go to town. This was no fictional device. In the 1820s, the driver of the short-stage for a neighbourhood such as Peckham proceeded along his route each morning, house by house, picking up his regulars, and if they were not ready he waited. (Mr Minns, not being a regular, does not get the same courtesy and the coachman drives off, saying Mr Minns can ‘run round’ and meet him at the inn.) When the coaches arrived at their destinations, passengers told the coachman whether or not he should wait for them on his return trip in the afternoon. The short-stage, starting late in the mornings and returning early to the suburbs, was of no use to working men, but suited their employers, whose office hours were much shorter; the class of passenger was reflected in the price, with many suburban journeys costing 2s.

  In 1828, a mourning-coachbuilder named George Shillibeer saw omnibuses on a visit to Paris and thought they might work in London. He shipped one over and had it running
by December, but it was the following summer before there was a regular service, which ran from Paddington Green to the Bank, pulled by three horses harnessed abreast, and carrying twenty-two passengers.34 (It was no coincidence that this first bus route was along the New Road, one of the earliest of the arteries to free itself from the turnpikes.) The buses were an immediate success: they averaged six miles an hour and the fare for the route swiftly dropped from 1s to 6d, a quarter of the cost of the short-stage. The original French three-horse buses were too wide and too clumsy for London – two could not pass each other at Temple Bar, while at St Paul’s nothing could pass a bus, not even the narrowest cab – and they were quickly replaced by smaller buses, pulled by two horses. All the buses had names: some, like the Bayswater, were known by their destinations, but most were named for the famous, or the legendary – the Nelson, for example, or the Waterloo, or the Atlas – while a few were named for their owners. The Times omnibus was owned by the newspaper, and the Bardell belonged to the Bardell omnibus company.

  Inside, there were twelve seats, with another two beside the coachman (a few models had four, but this was rare). These box seats were for favoured regulars, who tipped the driver to ensure that places were kept for them. When they arrived, depending on which seat was empty, the cad shouted ‘near side’ or ‘off side’, and the driver offered the passenger the end of a leather strap. Grasping it with one hand, and a handle on the side of the bus with the other, the passenger put his foot on the wheel and then swung himself up, using a single step halfway between the wheel and the driver’s footboard to mount the box. When the box passengers were ready to dismount, the driver banged with his whip on the board behind his head to alert the cad, who collected the fares from the passengers as they left.