Urbanities

Tristram Hunt, Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 2004; 432 pp.; £25; ISBN 0-297-60767-7. Cities of Ideas: Civil Society and Urban Governance in Britain, 1800–2000. Essays in honour of David Reeder, ed. Robert Colls and Richard Rodger, Ashgate, Aldershot and Burlington VT, 2004; 329 pp.; £55; ISBN 0-7546-0650-3

These are timely books. The arrival of my copies happened to coincide with the forced suspension of the Chief Constable of Humberside at the heavy hand of David Blunkett and against the better judgment of the local police authority – authority in name only, it seemed. And every day questions of the balance of local and central power relations were being asked but never resolved. So the government forces through obligatory postal voting in some regions of England in local and European elections, despite practical objections on the ground: all in the name of increasing participation in the democratic process. So the government resurrects capping where council-tax rises are above what it considers proper: all in the name of protecting the interests of local citizens. So the government forces through the merger of education and social services for children, irrespective of the views of authorities or the professionals involved. Think-tanks and opinion-formers bandy about the term ‘New Localism’ in recognition that Whitehall and Westminster can't run everything: but the agenda appears to leave little room for local patriotism or self-action, coming down to new means by which government can everywhere get its own way.

Tristram Hunt engages directly with all this. In a lengthy epilogue he laments the passing of local power to Westminster, a rot he spies setting in even in the Edwardian years, but quickening successively with Attlee, Thatcher and Blair. In laying before us with great skill and wide reading some of the huge achievements of Victorian urban enterprise he points to a past from which the present has much to learn, but only if national democracy is prepared to give up the notion that it's responsible for everything and allow local people to make mistakes or go in different directions. And there is much that celebrates this past in Cities of Ideas, the collection of essays honouring the distinguished urban and educational historian David Reeder. Both books gain confidence from their involvement with non-metropolitan urban Britain. London was notorious in the nineteenth century for its maladministration and its missed opportunities, and although it features in both books the real city triumphs take place elsewhere.

The Reeder essays are designed for a scholarly audience (and are presented and priced accordingly) but Hunt is self-consciously after the intelligent general reader. He succeeds so well, I think, because he never dumbs down. He doesn't compromise his task of presenting complex ideas and cross-connections while striving for clarity and elegance of expression. And his success is evidenced by the respectful welcome accorded to Hunt and his book by local-government leaders, who see in it at once a vindication and a call to arms. It's all helped by book production of a high standard, especially in choice of illustrations, some in colour. But doesn't anyone copy-edit any more? How can publishers let through slips like ‘envious reputation’ for enviable; ‘the technical education of the working man to enable them to pursue his professional calling’; the new word ‘&uarrow’ that mysteriously crops up twice; ‘William Morris's Clarion’ (it was Robert Blatchford's); disinterest when uninterested is intended, or fêted for fetid?

As well as different audiences, Building Jerusalem and Cities of Ideas, though sharing much of time and place, have different preoccupations. Hunt's is with ideas, first, and then with the way in which those ideas were translated into the built environment. So his heroes are visionaries and architects on the one hand, and on the other the rich bourgeoisie who responded with building commissions, either as individuals or collectively through the local governments they so firmly ruled. This is most definitely urban history from above. We read Frederick Engels and James Kay on Manchester, Charles Dickens on Preston, Thomas Carlyle on Edinburgh without learning much about how these places were experienced and shaped by the workers and trades people, fresh migrants from rural Britain most, who made the bulk of their populations. Hunt allows Mayhew to give us precious glimpses into the London slums – ‘listless lives of the casual poor’, as Hunt puts it – but what we get here is less class struggle than the crash and clatter of warring ideas.

And it's a valuable and fascinating story, very well told. The inexhaustible eclecticism of the age parades in front of us in all its motley and meretricious glory. The age of chivalry and Walter Scott; the adoption by Pugin and others of gothic as a true ‘national’ English style, with all its uncomfortable pre-reformation resonance; John Ruskin and medieval Venice; Florentine renaissance architecture and town planning, specially valued as a product of mercantilism and of men just like the merchants of Leeds and Birmingham and Liverpool; Hellenism and cities made immortal through their devotion to art and beauty: all these seized the imagination of the Victorian urban bourgeoisie one after another – sometimes all together.

Those were days when to have an idea was to act on it. So we see competing theories working their way through stone and brick and mortar for the glorification of the places where rich men made their money. This was a gilding of the temple where the money-changers and the factory sweaters and the men who made fortunes by buying cheap and selling dear were not swept out but given pride of place. Town halls, art galleries, chapels and cathedrals, prisons and courthouses, universities and schools of design, halls of science and athenaeums, libraries and reading rooms took on the garb of every architectural style known to the previous millennium. Occasionally, in some opium-eating exuberance, several came together in the same central plaza, even the same building. Many were subject to fierce criticism from adherents of the opposing school of idealists and their favoured architects. But each, as Hunt feelingly describes, was the product and the progenitor of civic pride. And this was city pride based on the self-confidence of a relatively new, and staggeringly prosperous, urban middle class shouting its arrival to its neighbours, to the nation and to the world.

The city was a reflection of their virtue, of their contribution to society and political preponderance. If the image of the middle classes was to be refashioned, then the image of the city also needed to change. The middle class symbolized the city and the city the middle class.¹

It is not too much to say that the Victorian urban middle classes are the heroes of Building Jerusalem, and the biographies of individuals, especially Joseph Chamberlain in Birmingham, who were capable of translating ideas into action on the ground, get an appropriate airing. The dark side of the Victorian city – slums, pollution, deadly working practices, the oppression of the poor law – is not passed by entirely but it is not made to seem as much the product of the middle classes in action as were civic improvements. More could be made here, I think, of the fractures within the middle classes and the conflicting interests of small and big bourgeoisies; and more, too, of the effects of civic improvement on the plebeian and proletarian majorities. There were losers in every scheme of architectural aggrandisement, but their side of the balance sheet remains a blank, except in Hunt's account of London where the effects have been most studied.

These aspects of class relations within the Victorian city get more attention in Cities of Ideas. And it's not surprising given David Reeder's interests. His essay with H. J. Dyos, ‘Slums and Suburbs’, is intelligently recalled at the very outset of this new collection. It was published in that wonderful monument to 1960s and early-seventies transatlantic historical scholarship, The Victorian City: Images and Realities (1973),² and it showed how middle-class investment in the suburbs helped divert resources from inner London, consigning the centre to slum living while creating new suburban slums along the way. Here were exposed the ill effects of middle-class self-interest, the rotting fabric lurking behind the grand stucco porticos as it were.

Well, there's little of this contradiction in Hunt, where the cities arrive as ready-made dragons for middle-class intellectuals and practical men to tilt at, if not slay. And in doing so I think he makes his heroes bigger than perhaps in real life they were. It isn't just ‘today’ that ‘central and local government cower in fear of being accused of “wasting” taxpayers’ money’ on great civic schemes. And although it may well be ‘one of the most enduring popular memories of the Victorian age’ that ‘the British got on and built things that worked’, it really is only half true at best. Vacillation, failure of nerve, endless delay, thwarted vision, and cheapskate penny-pinching beset almost every public building project in London from around 1836 on, with the virtually sole exception (as far as I can think) of the first Crystal Palace in Hyde Park. Maybe London was uniquely difficult, but again some of Hunt's provincial case-studies indicate it was not. Setting up Victorian civic leadership in this way can also lead to an unduly sour optic on our own times. So Victorian ‘technological self-confidence and unhampered vision’, indicative of ‘a society enjoying a ready relationship with science, engineering and progress’, now ‘appears irreversibly to have broken down in twenty-first-century Britain.’ That's a false dichotomy, involving exaggeration on both sides.³

That is not, though, to understate the achievements of civic enterprise in Victorian Britain which Hunt justly celebrates. They were real enough. And they – at least those which escaped the ravages of war, post-war planning and brutalist design – rank high among the most valued elements of city living today. That, of course, has long been recognized. The sparkling side of the Victorian legacy in London was noted by Donald Olsen nearly thirty years ago as ‘perhaps the most precious part of the present-day Londoner's inheritance’. There was rather less to celebrate in modern London then than now but that remains still a judgement that not many would quarrel with.⁴ But one part of the Victorian legacy which Hunt undervalues, I think, but which played a big part in Olsen's thinking, was the Victorian suburb, in London (at least) the biggest Victorian artefact of all. Not just undervalues. For Hunt demonizes the suburb as the very antithesis of civic virtue.

The most iniquitous consequence of suburban life was its assault on the public ethos of the city. The individualism, the domesticity along with the obsessive emphasis on privacy were anathema to the ethos of Victorian civic life. As Donald Olsen has remarked, the flight to the suburbs involved the conscious rejection of the rest of society beyond the immediate family; the most satisfactory suburb was that which gave the maximum of privacy and the minimum of outside distraction. The civic pride which drove William Roscoe to found the Liverpool Royal Institution, inspired the conversazione of the Manchester Athenaeum, or encouraged the brightest and best to offer themselves as candidates for Birmingham City or London County Council [LCC] was quietly abandoned for mowing the lawn and a bit of tinkering in the garden shed. The great achievements of the Victorian civic spirit were progressively undermined by a string of outwardly innocuous green suburbs.⁵

Just what is it about the poor bloody suburbs, foothills of the urban landscape, that rouses this venom? It's less the suburb I think than the suburbans. Olsen is kind to the suburbs’ built form, at least up to about 1870, but scathing of the ideas that seemed to draw people to move to them. Historians have inherited the prejudices of generations. From the earliest days, certainly from the 1840s when most suburbs still had a ‘smart’ feel to them, the people who moved out from the city to live there attracted sneers and gibes. They were looked down upon as snobs – in the Thackerayan sense of people getting above their station – and their mannerisms were mocked by snobs – in the modern sense of despising those of a perceived lower social rank. It is no accident that Ebenezer Howard, City shopkeeper's son and City clerk and theorist of the Garden City movement, is the unlikely villain of Hunt's piece. This was the petty bourgeois taint, a great slander on perhaps the most adventurous and creative of all classes in Britain, and either way snobbery was at the heart of it. So it remains.

But can the suburbs truly be cast as the worm in the bud in the way in which Hunt suggests? Let's look a little more closely at his claim here. It is worth asking, first, just which suburbs he's referring to. The passage comes in a chapter titled ‘London: the Whited Sepulchre of Empire’, and he's writing mainly of the final twenty years or so of the nineteenth century, tipping over into the twentieth. Hunt rightly notes the lack of civic pride for which London was notorious and cites the attempts of the LCC to establish something like the city virtues that smaller British cities had been able to construct. But of course the LCC was elected most of all by suburbans living in suburbs less than fifty years old at Victoria's death: some, like Battersea, Camberwell, Fulham, Hammersmith, Lewisham and Wandsworth, were scarcely older than a generation. So not much evidence of undermining here. And in some of the later nineteenth-century suburbs, civic pride was notable for its presence. It was not London pride, I agree. But the sheer size and complexity of the metropolis had made that a delicate flower since before the great suburbs had ever been thought of. It was, though, capable of a fierce and productive local patriotism. Like at Croydon in the south, whose Corporation owned the water and electricity supplies, electric trams, public libraries, parks, baths ‘and one of the finest piles of municipal buildings in the country’; at Ealing in the west, about which David Reeder once wrote sympathetically, where its active citizens were justly proud of their Victoria Hall for public assemblies, their swimming baths, their cottage and isolation hospitals and much more; at West Ham and East Ham in the east, with their tramways, great public buildings, iron bridges, electricity-generating stations and a great deal else; and in the north, Tottenham with its grand town hall, baths, fire station, museum, libraries and polytechnic (the first in Middlesex), some of them built despite ratepayer fury at muddle, recklessness and extravagance. These are sample cases only. Each, and more, has its contemporary local history which lovingly or critically charts civic enterprise independent from London, though with an unavoidable eye on what London is up to.⁶

The fact is that we don't know enough, or care enough, about the history of the suburbs to make the sort of judgement to which Hunt has leapt. They have not been worth our regard. And why? Because historians have been snobs too.⁷

Yet, as Hunt also points out, the suburbs would never have been built had not suburbans in their hundreds of thousands wanted to live there. They were no developers’ confidence trick on the public – though there were many frauds and scandals about them. They were no bureaucratic or political manipulation of the public will – though Conservative governments in particular chose to extol their virtues. They were what people wanted. And, despite a century and a half of ridicule and scorn, they are what very many continue to aspire to, and with a reasonable prospect of attaining their desires.

That reasonable prospect derives from another tendency that Hunt acknowledges and which is at the heart – more so than a single misunderstood manifestation, the suburb – of ‘the fall of the Victorian city’. It is nothing less than the rise of a democracy that has swelled beyond measure the ranks of the British middle classes. The Victorian suburbs were perhaps the first sign of that trend, hopelessly optimistic though they were about the size of the black-coated classes at the time. In London, a whole new city was constructed for a class that did not, as yet, exist. Or rather, a clustering of classes, for the suburbs were never homogeneous in intention, form or content. But since Victoria's time, especially I think since the very end of the 1920s, that clustering has grown larger and larger. It has nothing to do with the ownership of the means of production and exchange. It has little to do with older notions of class or newer perceptions of the disabilities of ethnicity. But it has much to do with the bulge in income distribution around a median encompassing skilled workers, uniformed workers, office workers, bureaucrats, lower professionals and petty entrepreneurs. And it has even more to do with a common culture that enables all of these groupings to be described and to describe themselves as the middle classes.

It is an alliance that has changed Britain, and Britain's cities, beyond recognition. It is this that has produced the suburbanization of the city from centre to periphery. Even gentrifiers are suburbans now, bringing aspirations of privacy and individualism and domesticity and financial gain into the heart of the city and finding suburbs to gentrify in turn. And the elements of this new bourgeois democracy that have proved so inimical to Victorian civic virtues are an abhorrence of deference and paternalism; espousal of individual consumption not only in the home but in transport – the car receives too little attention in Hunt's description of the fall of the Victorian city; and, at the same time, ready acceptance of a common culture in which everyone shares – television, sport, retail, fashion – that tends to the homogenization of urban living and the elimination of traditional differences. These trends are, on the face of it, irreversible. Who would resurrect paternalism, even if the opposite at its worst borders on disrespect for everything and everyone, sometimes even of self ? Who could reverse the flow of individual consumption based on the nuclear household? Who could clip the wings of monopoly capitalism in retail or anything else?

In some ways, though, it's possible to argue that the suburb has come out of this crucible in better shape than many other parts of the city, despite that city-centre renaissance in recent years which Hunt rightly points up. In general, and despite a deterioration in the suburbs’ relative position in the 1980s and '90s, the London suburbs have less poverty, less unemployment, lower standardized mortality ratios, lower hospital-admission ratios and limiting long-term illness, less homelessness and overcrowding, and fewer incidents of violent crime per head of population than the inner districts. Not surprisingly, the limited information available suggests that the suburbs would be considered more ‘liveable’ than the inner cities, and that ‘life satisfaction and trust in other people’ would be higher there too.⁸ There are no doubt many reasons for these disparities. And we need more information on all this – and more history – if the suburbans are now in their turn to be rescued from the ‘enormous condescension’ of historians and others.⁹

Hunt ends with his proposals to re-energize urban local government. I agree with almost everything he says, apart from the implicit assumption that somehow the suburbs are an enemy that has to be fought or bypassed. But no city governance can afford to ignore the needs of the suburbs or the people who live there. And as the inter-war suburbs – many of them not well-built – increasingly show their age, the redevelopment demands of the periphery will begin to press on city resources everywhere.

In rethinking the governance arrangements for urban Britain in the way Hunt proposes there will be more than one approach to revitalization. At least one emerges from Cities of Ideas. In ‘David Reeder's essay, “Alternative System”: the School Boards in the 1890s’, the late Brian Simon laments the demise of directly-elected school boards in 1902 and their replacement by local education authorities (LEAs) – city, county and county borough councils. Not everyone would agree with him on this, and of course the future of LEAs (if they have one at all) is now much talked about. But it is interesting to see the London School Board recently resurrected in a pamphlet by John Reid as a potential model for an element of New Localism that would bypass traditional all-purpose local authorities.¹⁰

I hope that Simon's piece becomes a vehicle for debate rather than a new orthodoxy. And it's a debate to which both these excellent books have much to contribute.