London: The Biography

by Peter Ackroyd

  The new “satellite towns,” such as Stevenage and Harlow and Basildon, became part of an historical process which was also too powerful-too instinctive-to be “reversed.” London has always grown by taking over adjacent towns or villages and cradling them in its embrace. It has been a feature of its development since the eleventh century. And so it overtook the newly created towns.

  So powerful is the historical imperative that Patrick Abercrombie and his colleagues were instinctively creating just the same patterns of habitation as the seventeenth-century builders of Bloomsbury and Covent Garden. The “new towns” ineluctably became as much part of London as their predecessors; instead of restricting the size of the city, the postwar planners immeasurably expanded it until the whole south-eastern area became “London.” The Outer Metropolitan Area represented the latest manifestation of urban life, characterised by endless movement. But that was always the condition of London. Whenever the opportunity and location are offered, it replicates its identity. It is a blind force in that sense, not susceptible to the blandishments of planners or politicians-except, as we have seen, when they offer further prospects of growth.

  The Green Belt did not then act as a barrier or inhibitor of urban life; in certain respects it simply became a large open space fortuitously situated within the outer Metropolitan Region. But it did have one effect, in checking the physical development of the inner city and its immediate suburbs which had to leap over the greenness in order to continue their ineluctable life. Yet as part of this phenomenon there was also a curious sense in which the city recoiled upon itself. It fed back into itself. Deprived of any room for immediate local extension, it began to re-explore its own patterns and possibilities. The construction of the great Inner London estates, the resurgence of interest in restoring old dwellings, the process of “gentrification,” the growth of “loft” living, the whole emphasis upon renewal, are the direct consequences of the Green Belt which forced London and Londoners to look inwards rather than outwards.

  The imperatives of London’s history had one further consequence. The postwar planners had also envisaged a great network of orbital and ring roads, with much the same intent and significance as the wide avenues proposed for London by Wren and Evelyn after the Great Fire. But, like the earlier designs, they came to nothing; they were defeated by political pressure, economic constraints, and vehement local opposition. London, almost alone of English cities, has withstood the edicts of rational planners and “highway management”; it was part of its ability successfully to frustrate any general or grandiose plan. General structural change did not, and could not, occur. The city has preserved its character ever since the first Tudor proclamations concerning “town planning” were ignored.

  Yet this was not generally understood at the time and, in London, the 1960s were particularly charged with forgetfulness. The American weekly Time proclaimed on its front cover “LONDON-THE SWINGING CITY.” Its affluence was visible enough; real earnings had risen by approximately 70 per cent in the twenty years since the war, and the high birth rate in the first years of peace certainly gave the impression of a city dominated by youth. The fact that National Service had been abolished in 1960 itself represented a literal and emblematic lifting of restrictions upon young males in particular. So music, and fashion, returned on an unprecedented scale. One designer, Mary Quant, has suggested that she wished to create clothes that “were much more for life-much more for real people, much more for being young and alive in.” So there was an efflorescence of boutiques in well-defined areas of London; Carnaby Street became the centre for young men who wore Mod fashions, with the familiar London emphasis upon what was “new” or “in the news,” while the King’s Road in Chelsea became the destination for young women who wished to be trendy. Music, too, emanated from London with groups such as the Who, the Kinks, the Small Faces and the Rolling Stones, many of their members having come from London art schools and colleges. Those groups from outside the city, like the Beatles, necessarily migrated to it. Designers had also caught the prevailing mood. Terence Conran recollected that “I’d always believed that well-designed things should be available to the whole population, that it shouldn’t be an elitist thing. And I think this coincided with a lot of people who’d had further education coming through who were discontented with the way things were.” So broader access to higher education played its part in what Conran called “the atmosphere of discontentment.” It was discontent, primarily, with the postwar world of hierarchy and repression but also with the perceived shabbiness and dreariness of London. It was a way of lightening the surroundings. The actual nature and identity of the city were no longer of any consequence. For a few years instead it became the “style capital” where music and fashion attracted the ancillary industries of magazine publishing, photography, advertising, modelling, broadcasting and film-making to create a bright new city.

  But of course “Swinging London” was not “new” at all. The city’s familiar instincts had never ceased their operation. The commercial imperative of the city’s life, for example, had identified a “market” among the newly resurgent youth which could be in turn exploited by intelligent entrepreneurs. The commercial infrastructure of the music business, for example, was already in place. In all areas of this teenage revolt, in fact, the youths themselves were exploited by a vast commercial project. It was a thoroughly London undertaking. The phenomenon of the 1960s was essentially theatrical and artificial in nature, too; like so many London displays, it glided over the fundamental underlying life in the capital. To see the decade clearly it is important to see it steadily, and as a whole, encompassing all of its realities.

  It is significant, for example, that the age of the boutique and the discothèque was also the age of the tower block, of public vandalism, and of increased crime. They are not unconnected. Of the tower blocks of the 1960s, much has been written. They had become the resort of planners and architects motivated by aesthetic, as well as social, reasons. They seemed to offer the vision of a new kind of city; many Georgian and Victorian terraces were razed by the civic authorities to make way for an experiment in urban living in which a new kind of vertical community might be forged. The popularity of the tower blocks-some four hundred were erected in London during the late 1960s-was also animated by economic principles. They were standardised, and therefore could be quickly and cheaply assembled. There were so many people on housing lists, or living in parts of the “inner city” which were deemed unfit for human habitation, that the “high-rise estates” seemed at the time to be the only efficient and affordable means of translating citizens from relative squalor into relative comfort.

  It was the age of the property developer when great fortunes could be made, trading off development land to the LCC for permission to build on sensitive sites. Their names were legion-Centrepoint, London Wall, Euston Centre, Elephant and Castle, all of London seemed to have been changed out of scale and out of recognition. It was a form of vandalism in which the government and civic authorities were happy to acquiesce. Vast swathes of London disappeared in the process-Printing House Square, Caledonian Market, St. Luke’s Hospital, parts of Piccadilly, stretches of the City, were all demolished in order to make way for what became known as “comprehensive redevelopment.” What it represented was a deliberate act of erasure, an act of forgetting, not so dissimilar in spirit to the mood and ambience of the “Swinging Sixties” elsewhere in London. It was as if time, and London’s history, had for all practical purposes ceased to exist. In pursuit of profit, and instant gratification, the past had become a foreign country.

  Three examples from the 1960s may suffice. Londonderry House in Park Lane was dismantled, in 1962, to make way for the London Hilton; the Georgian streets of the Packington Estate in Islington were demolished in 1966 to make room for a council estate; in 1963 the great Euston Arch, the portico of Euston Station, was pulled down as part of a scheme of “modernisation.” Just as the excitement of the “trendy” had animated
the worlds of music and fashion, so the same denial or rejection of the past determined architectural and civic planning. “Swinging London” was all of a piece, and much of the swinging was done by the implements of the demolition teams.

  London has always been an ugly city. It is part of its identity. It has always been rebuilt, and demolished, and vandalised. That, too, is part of its history. The ancient creed-“Cursed be he that removeth old landmarks”-has never been observed in the city. In fact one of the characteristics of London planners and builders, over the centuries, has been the recklessness with which they have destroyed the city’s past. There were even songs on the subject from previous centuries:

  O! London won’t be London long

  For ’twill all be pulled down

  And I shall sing a funeral song …

  It might have been sung by Victoria Station, or Knightsbridge, or St. Giles Circus, in the 1960s.

  The haunts we revelled in today

  We lose tomorrow morning,

  As one by one are swept away

  In turn without a warning …

  In the 1260s all the old “ruinated” work of past ages was swept away in the entire redevelopment of Bridge Ward. In the 1760s the medieval gates of the city walls were demolished on the grounds that they “obstructed the free current of air”; in the same decade of “improvement,” houses were demolished to make way for new streets in no fewer than eleven wards. It was the greatest single change in London since the Great Fire a hundred years before. Then in 1860 the Union of Benefices Act expedited the destruction of fourteen city churches, some of them erected by Wren after that Fire. The 1860s were in fact the great period of destruction when, in the words of Gavin Stamp in The Changing Metropolis, “half of London was being rebuilt … the city must have been a nightmare of dust, mud, scaffolding and confusion.” Queen Victoria Street and the Holborn Viaduct were being constructed, causing massive destruction to the oldest parts of London, while the various railway networks were defacing the cityscape with tracks and stations; the London Chatham amp; Dover Railway passed across Ludgate Hill, for example, and obscured the view of St. Paul’s Cathedral. This disfigurement of the cathedral was once more the charge levelled against property developers of the 1960s, so it would seem that there is no pause in the destruction of London.

  It can be no more than coincidence that these great waves of vandalism occurred in the 60s of each century, unless you were to believe that some theory of cyclical recurrence can be applied to the city’s development. In that case we might expect the 2060s to mark the destruction of much twentieth-century building.

  Other aspects of the 1960s seem, in retrospect, aligned to each other. There was an extraordinary and indeed unprecedented rise in crime, which tripled in the twelve years after 1955 and showed no signs of diminution in the late 1960s. The culture of instant gratification, and of youthful power, must have played a large part in inciting less affluent youths to theft and house-breaking. But the tower blocks, and the property speculators, and the garish fashions, all contributed to a mood of implicit or explicit aggression. “Controls” had been removed from office-building and from planning applications, but controls had also been removed from all aspects of London’s existence. The later waves of youthful protest, from the “hippies” and “flower children” of the late 1960s to the “punks” of the 1970s, manifested only confusion and anxiety in a highly unsettled urban society.

  The civic existence of London, like some Behemoth below the water, continued ineluctably to expand. In 1965 the Greater London Council, comprising thirty-two boroughs and some 610 square miles of territory, was established; as has always been the case with London’s government it represented a political compromise and a division of powers between different levels of urban government. The confusion can be exemplified, perhaps, in the decision that the GLC should be responsible for “metropolitan roads,” the Ministry of Transport for “trunk” roads and the boroughs for “local” roads. Yet confusion is, perhaps, the wrong word for the fundamental condition of London’s administration. The competing road authorities were remarkably similar to the competing vestries and parishes and metropolitan authorities which in the early decades of the nineteenth century were responsible for lighting and sanitation. London has always been a muddle; that is, perhaps, why it has survived. The GLC, however, was given responsibility for a new “Development Plan” for London including the distribution of population, employment, transport and redevelopment in the continuing delusion that the city could somehow be made to serve the will of civil servants, politicians and planners. Even at the time of its inception, however, the Greater London Council was not great enough to control or supervise the expansion of a city which, in terms of planning for population and employment, now took in the entire south-east of England. Its administrative area was already anachronistic, and its planning purposeless. It could not have been otherwise.

  But something else was happening, over which no one had any control. Trade was being lost. Manufacturing industries moved out, or closed down; unemployment rose very quickly. The most important transition occurred upon the river where in quick succession London’s docks were deemed redundant and irrelevant. They were no longer large enough to handle the new container ships and, in any case, trade with the Commonwealth was rapidly decreasing. The East India Dock ceased activity in 1967, followed by St. Katherine’s Dock and London Dock two years later. The Surrey Commercial Docks were closed in 1970, and there were further closures until the banks of the Thames were bare and empty, with echoing warehouses and waste ground the only visible remnant of what had once been one of the city’s glories. The Queenhithe Dock, which had a continuous history since the time of Saxon London, was destroyed in the spring of 1971 to make way for a luxury hotel. In a sense it epitomises the movement of London, where one trade must give way to another. But the wasteland of the dockside area, once the centre and principle of the city’s commerce, was in a larger sense an emblem of London in the 1970s.

  The 1960s have been described by some commentators as a time of “innocence” (although their levels of crime and vandalism may serve to alter that impression), but whatever “innocence” still existed fell away in the succeeding decade when all the old problems of London reasserted themselves. An economic boom in the late 1960s was followed by a bust in the mid-1970s. London lost its vivacity, and much of its energy. The sudden decay of trade and commerce, in a city devoted to them, provoked considerable dismay and anxiety. For a while it seemed that its life was being stopped. This in turn led to concern among those who administered the city. London was sick, and needed a fresh access of life and trade.

  The long experiment with high-rise tower blocks, on borough housing estates, came to an end; it had been effectively destroyed by a structural accident at Ronan Point in 1968, in which several people were killed, but the spirit of the time-and indeed the spirit of London-turned against it. The emphasis would now rest upon “high-density” and “low-rise” estates which would, in a sense, attempt to reproduce the atmosphere of the old terraced streets. At the same time measures were introduced to revive the central areas of London with schemes designed to protect the environment and expedite public transport. In particular the policy of demolishing Victorian or Georgian housing was reversed, and grants were instead made available for “improvements” in older and more dilapidated dwellings. The city, once more, was being comforted and consolidated rather than destroyed. There ensued a process of what became known as “gentrification” when generally middle-class and professional couples moved into run-down houses or areas in order to refurbish and renew them. Islington and Spitalfields were two previously “deprived” areas which benefited from this change of ownership and direction. The Green Belt turned the city in upon itself. The edges of Greater London were now so distant that Londoners began to reclaim those parts of the city closer to home. The city was solidifying; perhaps it was about to realise its potential.

  At a time of recessi
on, and falling expectations, there were also fears that it might become the terrain of social conflict. It became the task of administration, therefore, to preserve and heal the fragile city; thus, in the late 1970s, the Greater London Council funded new community projects, with the emphasis resting upon the vulnerable or the marginal; ethnic and sexual minorities, in particular, were afforded assistance. Here was an affirmation of London’s democratic and egalitarian instincts, but it was also a necessary remedy for difficult times. The real needs of the city, having been ignored or exploited for some years, were being met. It is significant, too, that in the period of improvement grants and gentrification the conservation of London became a matter of great and growing public concern. A scheme for the “Motorway Box” around London was dropped; proposals to refit Covent Garden, in accordance with principles of traffic flow and pedestrian decks, were abandoned after strenuous local opposition. By the mid-1970s there were some 250 “conservation areas” located in all parts of the city, testifying to a new awareness of London’s textural fabric and social history. Hostilities against the city had finally come to an end. The abolition of the Greater London Council in 1986 left it without a unified authority, but it did not seem to notice; in effect London resumed its ancient life, with the separate boroughs affirming distinct and different identities. The city, in the process, acquired its old momentum. The election of a mayor, and assembly, for London will not materially affect its nature or direction. It does not respond to policy committees or to centralised planning. It would be easier to control the elements themselves.