density if it wants to and still remain a city in which it is a pleasure to live.
The most densely populated residential district is Kensington and Chelsea, at 131 people per hectare, though Westminster is at similar levels if the Royal Parks are excluded. Barcelona has up to 400 dwellings per hectare, while the highest dwelling density in London is in Westminster, with 300. This is not about a failure to build high: Barcelona is not a city of tower blocks. Many of London’s post-war estates were built at lower population densities than you would find in a series of mansion blocks in Kensington. Various architects have shown that terraced housing at three to four stories can achieve greater density in more comfort than tower blocks. In other words – and perhaps surprisingly – the rows of Victorian terraces, which remain so popular, generate more density than the deeply unpopular high-rise buildings that give high density a bad name.
It is not clear whether the suburban sprawl is due to preference or plan. Planners themselves argued for low-density housing when slums were cleared – as low as twelve houses per acre (30 per hectare) – providing semi-detached houses with gardens to promote healthy living away from overcrowded slums. It would have been cheaper to build terraces, and it is not at all clear why this did not happen. Probably they were not considered ‘modern’, even if people would have liked them. Solid mansion blocks of flats are popular and, in the right location, now extremely expensive.
However, the built environment is slow to change. Neither Christopher Wren nor Patrick Abercrombie succeeded completely in their grand plans to change the geography of London after conflagrations. Wren managed Regent Street but no other major boulevards, while Abercrombie’s ring roads were never completed either, although the Archway road proposal dragged on for a generation.
Although the built environment changes little, the character of the different parts of London and the identity of their inhabitants have changed substantially. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Charles Booth undertook a mammoth survey of life and labour in London. He rated every part of the city. Thus, the parish of All Saints in Knightsbridge beside Hyde Park is rated yellow – ‘upper middle and upper classes, wealthy’ – in some parts and red – ‘middle class, well to do’ – in others. We would probably rate it similarly today, though perhaps more coyly. Booth’s bottom rating is black – ‘lowest class, vicious, semi-criminal’. This category is given to some locations in the parish of All Hallows in Bow, for example. I doubt that Experian or CACI, who provide detailed categorization of locations for consumer companies, would use such terms. But we know that many of these parts of London remain poor and deprived.
Some places have changed dramatically, though. Spitalfields is an area marked firmly black by Booth. It does not feel vicious and semi-criminal now, with its galleries, boutiques and clubs. On the other hand, it is a stone’s throw from Brick Lane, which seems to have been much more industrial when Booth was working, and is now a centre for Bangladeshi food and restaurants, having hosted a whole series of immigrant communities. Spitalfields was a centre of weaving, especially silk, in the seventeenth century when Huguenot refugees settled there. The large windows needed by weavers are still apparent in some of the streets. More recently, Jewish refugees arrived here, and then, post-war, those from the Indian subcontinent.
Waves of immigration are nothing new, and new arrivals tend to start out in poorer places, close to their point of entry. Once they begin to do better, they usually move to better locations with larger, nicer houses. And then the next wave arrives. There has been some speculation about whether this upward movement has halted, but it may rather be that settlement takes time. Somali populations, for example, have existed in London for generations, based around seafaring and living near the docks. More recent influxes have resulted from the civil war but have gravitated to the same areas, though there is also a community to the west in Ealing. Some of these clusters are hard to understand or predict. The centre of Korean London life is in New Malden, near Kingston, but how this was seeded no one seems to know.
An alternative example is Notting Hill. In the 1960s and 1970s this was an area where unscrupulous landlords forced out tenants who had protected rights, to replace them with West Indian immigrants who struggled otherwise to find housing and who could be charged more for smaller flats. One such landlord, Peter Rachman, gave his name to this activity, although his notoriety was more to do with his mistresses, Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies, and their involvement in the Profumo affair than with his business activities.
Thus, Notting Hill went downhill and became crowded, underprovided with services and poor. It also generated a carnival to reflect its new ethnic identity. However, although the carnival still takes place, the ethnic mix is utterly different. Notting Hill has gentrified. Its proximity to White City, for the BBC (at least until 2013 when the BBC moved back into Portland Place in London), and its ease of access to central London, plus the potential for refurbishing large houses back from multiple-occupation, created the potential for gentrification. So Notting Hill, poor but respectable in Charles Booth’s day, has gone both downhill and uphill since then. I think we would now have to characterize it as wealthy.
London is, therefore, not a stable city: people move and groups move, much as the West Indians disappeared from Notting Hill, although to where I don’t know. It is also a city of suburbs; it is a typical conceit that we should welcome Henry James’s description of London as a city of villages. It would be truer, but less romantic, to say it is a city of suburbs. Nowhere better illustrates this history than Croydon. Once a village, it is now well and truly within London, and has suffered the vicissitudes of successive waves of development, of planning and of replanning. In Chapter 3, I look at the future of living in London with reference to this quintessential suburb.
Getting about
The West Indians who moved out of Notting Hill are almost certainly travelling further across the city now than they did then, though they probably do not spend any longer travelling than before. Transport is the glue that holds any city together, along with drains and fuel. No city can survive if its citizens keep dying of bad water, nor if they cannot keep their homes warm and lit. And a city is about moving about. It is salutary to remember that Shanks’s pony – walking – remained a primary method of transport in the city until very recently. Read Samuel Pepys’s diary and you will find him often walking out to Greenwich to investigate the ships being built before walking home again. Read Trollope’s nineteenth-century novels about London and you will find that people walk everywhere, down to the Houses of Parliament, back to Mayfair, and then off again to the City. And of course there was very little option. Roads were narrow and crowded, coaches would be slow. The horse was the only alternative to one’s feet.
The horse created its own problems. Like many girls in my time, I cried over the death of Ginger in Black Beauty, worked to death in the shafts of a hansom cab. Horses had to be stabled, manure carted, feed and water provided; they are powerful but not simple animals. The horse limited the size of the city. So too did disease. In the medieval period the lure of the city was strong, because the rewards were high. But so were the risks, and the city needed continuous replenishment from the country because death rates were so high. By the twentieth century better drains reduced these risks, though in fact the source of cholera was not understood until late in the nineteenth century. Fortunately, dealing with the stink of bad water dealt with the water quality, even though it was the stink that was thought to be the problem. It is extraordinary that between Roman times and our own so little thought was given to the very basic issue of effluent and drains.
The city was transformed not only by drains but also by the combination of rail, buses and electricity. Horse-drawn bus services made commuting possible even before the dawn of the train. Omnibuses – for all – first brought workers from Paddington to the City from 1829. George Shillibeer’s buses gave clerks and smaller merchants the opportunity to live further away from the city, improve their quality of life and enlarge the space they could afford. No change there then.
By 1900, Shillibeer’s successor, the London General Omnibus Company,
