A Brief History Of Change

Contributing Writer, historian Gillian Tindall, has written many books about London, including ‘The Fields Beneath’ which first appeared in 1977 and is regarded as a classic of urban writing.

Clerkenwell before the railway came through

Every generation believes they are perched on the frontier of time, leaving the safety of known things for an uncharted future. ‘The good days’ or even ‘the bad old days’ are reassuring to contemplate because we know how things turned out. There is also a broad assumption that, apart from times of war or plague, life continued much the same for centuries, with no modern conveniences and with everyone knowing their allotted place in society.

Yet this notion of the past is as deceptively simple as a distant view of green hills. Examined more closely, past centuries are a saga of continual evolution – only the speed of it varies.

Older people get used to younger people saying ‘You must have seen a lot of changes round here?’ or guessing what Londoners felt/behaved/thought/assumed/took for granted in the distant and quaint decades of the forties or fifties, before pop-stars or skyscrapers or the internet, when money was measured out as four-and-ninepence or half-a-crown. I observe them politely disbelieving me when I try to tell them that – actually – the changes that those of my age have seen in our lifetimes are minor compared with the constant, rolling transformation experienced by someone living in London one hundred years earlier.

Imagine you were born in 1838, the first year of Queen Victoria’s reign. This was also the year in which the first railway in London, all three-and-three-quarter miles of it, began running on a new viaduct from the future London Bridge Station towards Greenwich. England was still a land of roads, gravelled or muddy, of horseback riders, of coaches, coaching inns and stabling, and the huge numbers of people this trade employed.

In London there was no public transport beyond a few recently invented horse buses. From anywhere in the capital you could walk into the countryside within an hour or less. Whitechapel and Bethnal Green were getting built up, but Stepney and Bow were still rural. Camden Town had rows of terraced houses though Kentish Town, half a mile to the north, was a country high road sprinkled with cottages and pubs, and fields behind on both sides. Hampstead was a distant separate village. Kensington High St was beginning to be well-populated, but Chelsea and Earls Court were market gardens and pastures. So was all the land north of Paddington station. As for South London, beyond Southwark and a bit of ribbon development along main roads, it did not exist.

Yet before you had even reached middle age this green and pleasant land would be transformed, like a dystopian nightmare, into sooty, fog-darkened, heavily-populated inner city. Grazing cows and timbered taverns with tree-shaded yards became a faded memory. Many of these, rebuilt in urban style, retained their country names, but the cows were moved into sheds behind narrow terrace houses. Instead, milk was arriving on overnight trains at one of London’s half-dozen main railway stations. Meanwhile the occupants of the terraces, mile after mile of them expanding London’s population several times over, were less likely to walk to work than to take the Metropolitan Line which opened in 1864 or the District Line that proliferated from it. Horse buses were everywhere now and, after 1860, they were joined by trams, horse-drawn still but on rails. These in turn were replaced around 1900 by electric trams and the deep Underground was constructed. Even then our Londoner born in 1838 would only be in their early sixties.

Enough change for one lifetime, you might think? Far more was to come. By the eighteen-nineties entirely new ‘horseless carriages’ were seen in the streets, as the petrol-driven internal combustion engine arrived. Twenty years later, when our ageing Londoner reached the end of their life, the horse buses were only a memory, stables were disappearing and streets were dominated by cars.

All this is just building and transport! What else had come and gone in the preceding eighty years? The rapid postal service, following the expansion of the railways, had transformed communications, and from the middle of the century telegrams became a reality. By the early nineteen-hundreds grand houses and the larger City offices all had a telephone. It was a far cry from the centuries-old culture of the messenger on horseback. Typewriters, accompanied by lady typists, had appeared in offices by then. They were not only early signs of what became a feminist revolution, they resigned to history a five-hundred-year-old tradition of clerks writing by hand.

By 1909, clerks could collect a tiny Old Age Pension. Massive social progress had taken place since Victoria came to the throne. The poor were no longer left to live or die – soup kitchens, dispensaries, free hospitals and a mass of other charities abounded. So did cheap newspapers and universal literacy. Rather than sending your children out to become sweep chimneys or beg, you were obliged to send them to one of the free schools that had been built in every district of London. There were a great many policeman, and it was generally agreed that the so-called ‘Heart of the Empire’ – by now the world’s largest city – was far more orderly than in the bad old days that few could remember any more. It was populated by huge numbers of Londoner in suits and bowler hats whose immediate forebears had been farm labourers or servants but had climbed the ladder to become middle class. Let no one kid themselves that ‘social mobility’ is a recent invention.

How do we assess change from 1938 to the present day by comparison? I leave readers to write that chapter themselves. What is clear is that less and less, in recent decades, have we believed change, growth, development, expansion are necessarily good things. Now there is wariness, a fear of London’s fragile financial supremacy, a growing unease in recognising this planet’s resources are finite and a sense that in past ways of life may lie the solutions we seek in vain today.

Have I seen big change in London since my post-war childhood, you ask? No, I have not. Elsewhere, yes, countrywide and worldwide, but in the capital – in relation to the rapid change of the past – not that much, all told. But I do ask myself and wonder, for how much longer?

London Bridge

In Westminster

Bridgefoot, Southwark

Butcher’s Row, Strand

Waterloo Bridge Rd

River Fleet at St Pancras

Illustrations from Walter Thornbury’s London Old & New courtesy Bishopsgate Institute  

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