The Victorian City Read online

  It took time before Nash’s great creation was appreciated, much less admired. In the 1820s, an American tourist thought that ‘Never, perhaps, was there so much bad taste displayed’ as in Regent Street: ‘everyone’ agreed the buildings were ‘preposterous’. Henry Vizetelly, the journalist and publisher, remembered the verses that had gone around in his childhood, when Nash’s white stucco-fronted buildings were still startlingly new:

  Augustus at Rome was for building renowned,

  And of marble he left what of brick he had found.

  But is not our Nash, too, a very great master? –

  He finds us all brick and he leaves us all plaster!

  Yet only a decade later, Regent Street was proclaimed ‘one of the great routes’ of the world, with ‘an air of great magnificence’.

  The discussion over access to Regent’s Park was the first of the century, and it set in motion what in 1833 became a Parliamentary Select Committee, inquiring ‘into the means of providing Open Spaces in the vicinity of populous towns as public walks and Places of Exercise’. North of Regent’s Park, the open land at Primrose Hill was under threat from developers; the Select Committee recommended that fifty-eight acres be acquired for public recreation, to become the only public green space between Regent’s Park and the East End. There was one park in Lambeth, south of the river, apart from Kennington Common, which was still unenclosed; north of the Thames the committee recommended that Copenhagen Fields be purchased (it later became Hackney Downs). But change came about slowly. It was not until 1846 that Victoria Park was created: the first royal park established specifically for the public. Kennington Common was finally enclosed in 1852; Battersea Fields was purchased in 1846, although it was nearly a decade before the park opened, and Finsbury Park had to wait until 1857.

  Having access to parks for recreation was seen as desirable for all. Victoria Park, in the East End, was, unusually, designed for the working classes as well as in part by them: they had had some say in what facilities would be on offer, ensuring that a bathing pond was provided so that working men could cool off on their way home from work. In the more westerly, more fashionable parks, different provisions were made. The prosperous liked a ride or a carriage drive on this stylish route: slowly along Regent Street to see who was out; then up to the zoo, before heading for Hyde Park, where ‘they join the press of carriages and riders crowding in hundreds about Kensington Gardens’. For those who kept neither horses nor carriages, walking in parks and green spaces was a regular feature of a happy bourgeois life. Leonard Wyon, engraver to the Royal Mint, recorded in his diary his quiet suburban life’s many variations on this theme: ‘walked through Regents Park to town’, ‘Walked for sometime…in Ladbroke Square Gardens’, ‘a short walk on the Kensall [sic] Green in the evening’, ‘walk to Hampstead Fields’. For many like Wyon, Sundays in the parks were enlivened by bands playing, and the numbers of those who went to listen are astonishing: on one Sunday in September 1855, 48,841 people were counted in Kensington Gardens, even though a heavy rain shower had stopped the performance; the previous week it had been 60,000. At the last concert of the summer season in 1856 in Regent’s Park, 200,000 were said to have attended.

  In the first decades of the century, the emphasis had been on ceremonial spaces. A subsidiary project, however, beginning as the humbly named ‘West Strand Improvements’, unexpectedly created a new focus to London altogether, eclipsing St Paul’s as the ceremonial and mapping centre point of the city: Trafalgar Square. Before the railway arrived, Charing Cross had for centuries been the entry to Whitehall and thus to court and government, marked by a sculpture of Charles I on horseback.83 Nash’s original 1812 report had expressed the hope that, one day, ‘Every length of street would be terminated by a façade of beautiful architecture.’ ‘To add to the beauty of the approach from Westminster’, he suggested that either ‘a Square or Crescent…might be built round the Equestrian Statue’, to give ‘a magnificent and beautiful termination of the street from Westminster’.

  Initially, only modest changes were outlined. The King’s Mews, the stable that served the royal household, had been on the site in some form for five centuries (Chaucer had once been employed there as a clerk of the works). It sprawled massively, from Charing Cross up to the south side of Leicester Square. Other buildings occupying the site included the Golden Cross Hotel, the coaching inn from which Mr Pickwick set out on his adventures; a workhouse, a barracks and a cemetery.84 In addition, fronting a narrow and rather squalid lane, lay the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields and, behind it, a desperate warren of courts and lanes. The entire south side of the Strand was taken up by Northumberland House, the great Tudor palace belonging to the Duke of Northumberland, its gardens extending all the way to the river. Over its entrance was one of the landmarks of the city, a lion with its tail stiffly raised to the breeze, like ‘the pigtail of an old sailor’. (When Northumberland House was demolished in 1874, the lion was moved to Syon House in Chiswick, where it lurks over the back elevation, a sad comedown from the days when an entire city passed beneath its gaze.) North of what is now the Admiralty building lay shops and exhibition spaces, a chapel and several large private houses, including Gun House, named for the two cannon, trophies from the battle of Salamanca, that sat on the front lawn.

  By 1800, most of the leases were due to expire, and the king was planning a new stables in Pimlico; like the Regent Street development, it appeared the perfect opportunity for some civic improvements. The earliest plans sought to widen the Strand here, to create ‘a more convenient communication between East and West ends of town’. But Nash never thought small, and he hoped to create ‘a large splendid quadrangle…the West side of which would be formed by the College of Physicians and the Union Club House; the East side would correspond with that already existing; namely the grand portico of St. Martin’s Church; and on the Northern side a new line of buildings would be erected’. He was of the view that a building to house the Royal Academy might sit nicely in the centre of the square, but others wanted an open piazza.

  Northumberland House, the last great Jacobean palace in London, filled the south side of the Strand until its demolition in 1874. The lion over the entrance was one of the city’s landmarks long before Nelson’s Column was erected almost directly opposite.

  While this was being discussed, in 1826 the southernmost section of St Martin’s Lane, which ran down to Northumberland House, was demolished, opening up space in front of the church.85 The graveyard was moved out of the district, and a new street, named Duncannon (after the soon-to-be Chief Commissioner of the Office of Woods, Forests, Land Revenues, Works and Public Buildings), was pushed through at an angle between St Martin’s Lane and the Strand. This had the effect of clearing a small section of the larger slum, as well as creating an exit route for carriages. At the same time, a new road, Pall Mall East, was built to give a vista from Pall Mall to St Martin-in-the-Fields.

  Three years later, the houses all along the north side of the Strand, from Charing Cross to Exeter Change, together with a gallery of shops and a menagerie, were razed, while the south side of the Strand remained a jumble of old buildings. That area (under what is now the Savoy hotel, Shell-Mex House and the surrounding buildings) had once been the grounds of a palace, then successively a charitable hospital under Henry VII, a barracks and, finally, a prison for deserters. It was hedged around with coal wharves and a few private houses, all blighted by a curious legal anomaly. In the thirteenth century, the Duchy of Lancaster had been made an independent Palatinate. As a result the landowner, the Duke of Lancaster, rather than the British government, was the ruler of this little patch, where the laws of the United Kingdom did not apply. This created an ‘Alsatia’ (after Alsace, that ambiguous borderland ruled alternately by France and Germany), a refuge for criminals who could not be arrested because British law had no remit there.86 In 1816, the hospital, long closed, was demolished, leaving as its only trace a ‘triple flight of steps (Savoy-steps)’
down to the river, and its chapel, which burnt down in 1864. Between the Savoy and the Temple Gardens stood what David Copperfield referred to as ‘an old Roman bath…in which I have had many a cold plunge’.87

  As the north side of the Strand was being ‘improved’, Nash was demolishing the King’s Mews and some ‘vile houses’ near by in order to create a vista up Whitehall to what was agreed would become the National Gallery’s new home (at the time it was still located in the founder-donor’s house in Pall Mall). Nash proposed a design for that building, but was passed over in favour of the architect William Wilkins, who had already built the University Club House on the north-west corner of what was to be Trafalgar Square. His National Gallery was finished in 1838, to much derision at the time and ever since. It was not helped by a thrifty piece of governmental recycling, which forced Wilkins to reuse the columns from the recently demolished Carlton House. The front elevation of the Gallery, however, is seen from a low viewpoint, as the south side of Trafalgar Square drops away quite sharply, while the vantage point for viewing Carlton House was from rising ground. Wilkins had planned to raise the south side of the square, but Charles Barry, who completed the work after Wilkins’ death, failed to incorporate this part of his scheme.88

  Although by 1835 it had been agreed that the new square was to be named ‘Trafalgar’ in commemoration of the 1805 naval victory, it was not until 1837 that it was agreed that this was the right place for the ‘Nelson Testimonial’, and even then no one could decide what form the tribute was to take. The Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel headed a committee to look at the proposals: one suggested a ninety-foot trident; another had Nelson balanced on a thirty-foot-high globe, surrounded by the figures of Fame, Neptune, Victory and Britannia. Another presented the idea of a cenotaph, with Nelson’s gaze fixed on three mermaids who, in the words of two contemporary historians, were ‘apparently playing water-polo’. The vast scale of the square made any statue based on human proportions virtually invisible,89 while a larger monument would block the view up Whitehall. So the tall thin colonnade by William Railton, an architect who was otherwise best known for designing vicarages, was chosen – and immediately decried: the column was too small for the statue, according to some; columns were to hold up buildings, not manikins, claimed others; it destroyed the vista, and so on. Even Nelson’s bicorne hat was condemned: the public, it was said, had an image of the man ‘as most frequently we see him [in engravings], bare-headed’.

  Today Nelson’s hat is his most characteristic feature, in part because head coverings have now vanished so completely that those of other times are more noticeable. It is difficult to bear in mind the importance of hats as not only markers of class and income, but also as indicators of respectability. Sala commented that ‘every’ man throughout the history of the world ‘must, necessarily and habitually, wear some kind of covering to his head’. Postmen wore hats, small children wore hats, field labourers and market gardeners wore hats, cricketers, skaters – all sportsmen – wore hats. It was, self-evidently, impossible to go outdoors without one. When Jonas Chuzzlewit slips out of the house in Martin Chuzzlewit, in order to commit murder, ‘he had purposely left his own [hat] up-stairs’: if his hat was in the house, it indicated he must be too – alibi by hat. Those in professional occupations wore pot hats, as did clerks and all those with pretensions to middle-class status. Even doctors’ delivery boys wore battered hand-me-down pot hats: ‘the nap rusty, the band a mournful strip of tarnished lace; but still a Hat’, which ‘stamps him as being associated, in however slender a manner, with a learned profession’. Cloth caps were for labourers, for costers and for boys. One journalist in the 1880s, watching some men being released from prison, observed ‘A big bullet-headed fellow’ lurking until a friend in the crowd threw him a cap, which he carefully put on before he acknowledged his waiting family. Artisans wore caps made out of paper, which they folded themselves and so could easily replace as they became dirty. Dickens frequently passes social comments by indicating the condition of a cap. In Martin Chuzzlewit, a drunken, violent artisan wears a ‘tarnished’ paper cap, revealing his character, as he hasn’t even bothered to make himself a clean one.

  Work in Trafalgar Square continued for decades. The fountains were installed in the 1840s, after artesian wells were bored in Hemmings Row (now Orange Street, behind the National Gallery), which supplied the fountains themselves, as well as the Houses of Parliament, the government offices, Buckingham Palace and St James’s Palace. (By the following decade the fountains had become, according to one novel, the street urchins’ bathing spot, despite a ‘film of soot and grease floating on the surface of the water’.) In 1843, the statue of Nelson, seventeen feet high, arrived at Charing Cross, and 100,000 people were said to have come to have a look at it before it was installed on its pedestal. Ten years later, however, the reliefs around the base of the column had still not been completed and, with the fiftieth anniversary of Nelson’s death on the horizon, the newspapers were scathing. Had they but known, ten years later Landseer’s lions would not be in position either, with the Commissioner of Public Works forced to admit ‘he was sorry to say that he could not tell what Sir Edwin Landseer was about’.

  Finally, in January 1867, Arthur Munby, walking past, ‘saw the first pair of Landseer’s lions…One of them had arrived yesterday, & was already in its place: the other had just come…Both were cased all over in white Calico, tightly wrapt; through which their proportions showed visibly grand and massive.’ That was about as much of an arrival ceremony as they received. Everyone was so tired of the subject that the only people who gathered there for the unveiling were Lord John Manners, as Commissioner of Works, Landseer himself, Baron Marochetti, who had cast the sculptures, and a few unnamed ‘other gentlemen’. Manners twitched the covers off, the sculptures were inspected and that was that.

  While the reality – the physical construction – had become a boring, endless story, the idea of Trafalgar Square now epitomized London, and the Nelson Column epitomized the square. When the playwright Dion Boucicault wanted to create a single image to stand for ‘London’ in The Streets of London, it was Trafalgar Square he chose: ‘with its lighted lamps, its Nelson Column, its gleaming windows of Northumberland House’. This great street space had become part of everyone’s outdoor sitting room.

  One of the most popular ways to spend one’s leisure hours was in a tea garden attached to a pub or tavern. In the 1830s, Dickens described the many tea gardens spread across London, and their mostly lower-middle-class customers: ‘Gentlemen, in alarming waistcoats, and steel watch-guards, promenading about, three abreast…[and] ladies, with great, long, white pocket-handkerchiefs like small table-cloths, in their hands, chasing one another on the grass’. They drank ginger beer and tea, ate winkles and shrimps, and had a fine time. The Eagle pub on the City Road offered ‘beautifully gravelled and planted’ walks, outdoor wooden ‘refreshment-boxes’, or booths, and was brightly lit in the evenings for dancing to ‘a Moorish band playing at one end of the gardens – and an opposition military band playing away at the other’. Highbury Barn could even boast that customers danced on a ‘crystal platform’. In Little Dorrit, Old Nandy, the workhouse resident, dreams that when his ship comes in he will ‘take a noble lodging’ in a tea garden for his entire family, living happily ‘all the rest of their lives, attended on by the waiter’.

  Similar social groups patronized public houses in what had recently been outlying villages but were soon reached first by the short-stage, later by omnibuses or railway for weekend outings. Mrs Bardell – Mr Pickwick’s landlady, who lives in Goswell Road, in Islington – goes on jaunts to Hampstead Heath; Hornsey Wood was another favourite place for a walk, for picnics, or a visit to a pub or an eel-pie house. Those with access to ‘vans, coaches, carts, &c., &c.’ might go to Epping ‘and enjoy their beer and long pipes at High Beech or the Roebuck’ pubs. By mid-century, ‘The vehicular movement is prodigious…Four-wheelers, out for the day, abound. Here
it is the comfortable tradesman who has been drudging all week…who on Sunday…takes his wife and children to Hampton Court or Beulah Spa’. It might equally be ‘the greengrocer’ who ‘drives his Missus out in the spring cart which during the week…fetch[ed] the homely cabbage…from Covent Garden Market’, while ‘A group of clerks hires a dog-cart to drive down to Staines’.90 With more visitors being transported by rail, the Old Welsh Harp in Hendon, on the Brent Reservoir, became accessible to day-trippers and was renovated in 1856, complete with the gardens, dancing and concerts that were now expected, plus fishing, pigeon shooting and more countrified pastimes. Such was its customer base that the Midland Railway found it economically sensible to open a nearby station, also named the Welsh Harp, for the area’s main attraction.