Histories of Victorian London now come two a penny. They are the left-wing historian’s answer to biographies of Good Queen Bess. What is there new to say? We start with fog and smells and move on to disease and the working classes. We meet Charles Booth and Henry Mayhew. We chastise the rich and welcome the shift from charity to democracy. Over the Great Wen hovers the great messiah, Improvement. It brings gas, drains, electricity, Peabody homes and rights for women. The millennium arrives with Selfridges and the Underground. Then the Great War spoils everything.
Stephen Inwood is a master of the genre. He has already written an excellent potted history of the capital and now turns his attention to what he calls ‘the birth of modern London’, the three decades after 1880. These were years when London became the greatest metropolis on earth, truly the hub of empire. Just about everything went right. It was the London of Pygmalion, department stores, Gilbert and Sullivan, the architecture of ‘sweetness and light’, rich Americans and deserving poor. By the 1880s Bradshaw was keeping Sherlock Holmes on schedule. Streets were brightly lit. Suburbs were giving every home a garden and corrupt vestries were becoming boroughs and the London County Council.
Timing the birth of modern London is an inexact science. I would award the palm to the earlier Victorians, to the innovatory zeal of 1840-70, spurred by the coming of the railway and free trade. Urban historians are good at social history but less so at economic geography. It was the inrush of imperial capital that fuelled the great expansion of mid-Victorian London and instilled the confidence of the Great Exhibition and Bazalgette’s Embankments and outfall sewers.
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