BUILDING JERUSALEM: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City
by Tristram HuntWeidenfeld £25 pp448
Britain invented the industrial city. Until the early 19th century no such places as Manchester, Bradford, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool and Birmingham had blighted the earth. To read Tristram Hunt's account of the living conditions workers endured, assembled from eyewitness reports, you need a strong stomach. The filth, stench and overcrowding beggar belief. Rivers were clogged with human and industrial excrement. Chimneys belched smoke, blackening buildings and people. The din stunned. Manchester's mills, starting up at 5.30 on a Monday morning. sounded "like the boom of an Atlantic tide". The poor slept 20 to a room — men, women and children huddled together in "different degrees of nakedness". Open latrines and overflowing cesspools spread typhoid, typhus and cholera. Life expectancy at birth in Manchester in 1841 was 26.6 years. The other great cities were almost as lethal. These were the worst figures since the Black Death.
To those who profited from the misery, it seemed an excellent system. "There is no idleness among us," a factory owner boasted. The child workers came on shift at 5am, had half an hour for breakfast, half an hour for lunch and left at 6pm when the night-shift children arrived. "The wheel never stands still." Hunt's book is a history not only of how the Victorian civic authorities grappled, or failed to grapple, with these horrors, but also of the fashions and fantasies that seized them.
The most powerful was a wish to return to the Middle Ages and pretend that the industrial revolution had not happened. Elaborated by Augustus Pugin, and endorsed by the mighty John Ruskin, the gothic architectural style of the 1300s came to dominate mid-19th-century Britain. Railway stations and factories were disguised as cathedrals or monasteries. In the 40 years from 1835, 4,000 new churches were built, mostly gothic, to rectify the immorality of the urban poor. To the same end, John Keble, Edward Pusey and other young fogeys of the Oxford Movement pleaded for a return to the feasts and fasts of the medieval church. In politics, "Young England" conservatives dreamt of reviving the social harmony and "manly sports" that, they imagined, had kept medieval people happy.
The self-righteousness of the provincial middle class went along with an uncomfortable sense that metropolitan arbiters of taste wrote them off as soulless philistines and nonconformist bigots. To rebut this calumny, they set about beautifying their cities with monumental buildings, like those they had seen on foreign holidays in Greece and Italy. Banks and shop-fronts sprouted pillared porticoes, reminiscent of the Parthenon, and Liverpool's St George's Hall was fitted out with an intimidating stockade of gigantic Corinthian columns. Victorian industrialists preened themselves on closely resembling the ancient Greeks in the way they combined commercial enterprise with artistic achievement. The fact that ancient Greece was a slave-owning agricultural society was not allowed to dim this identification. The merchant princes of Renaissance Italy provided even closer parallels, since their fortunes, like those of the Victorian nouveaux riches, were founded on textiles and banking. Lorenzo de Medici was admired as an early exponent of local government, virtually indistinguishable from the city councillors of Leeds or Bradford. As the ardour for Italy spiralled, tasteful combinations of the Florentine and Venetian styles covered municipal baths and warehouses in a blaze of polychrome brickwork. After much public debate, Leeds town hall was topped with a hideous tower to resemble the "castles and palaces of Italy".
Hunt admires these buildings and regards them as splendid affirmations of the Victorian municipal spirit. In fact, of course, they were vulgar fakes — pretentious imitations, not statements of creative purpose. Compared with the buildings they aped, they could never be more than historical curiosities. Lifted from other cultures, they were not even intelligently adapted to their new settings. Colonnades that are open to the cooling breeze, and afford protection from the fierce midday sun, are seldom required in the climate of Liverpool or Manchester. Polychrome brick or stone, designed for the clean air of Venice, looks, when coated in industrial grime, like a skin disease. Hunt regrets that so many Victorian municipal buildings have been allowed to sink into decay, cheek-by-jowl with chip shops, tattoo parlours and amusement arcades. But it is no worse than they deserve.
They were shamefully expensive to build. Sanitary reformers such as Dickens's friend Edwin Chadwick pointed out how grotesque it was to squander funds on these vainglorious piles when the same money, diverted to workers' housing, could have saved thousands of lives. Hunt's section on municipal resistance to sanitary reform is one of his funniest and most tragic. As pressure from central government to improve public health mounted, local shopkeepers and small tradesmen in the industrial cities banded together to fight off any threat of an increase in the rates. They depicted themselves in their propaganda as descendants of the freedom-loving Saxons, depicted in Scott's Ivanhoe, who had stuck to their English customs, holding "folk-moots" under oak trees, in defiance of the centralising tendencies of the Norman invaders. Seen in this way, neglect of sanitary reform became a patriotic duty, and the historic trustees of Saxon self-government gloried in their battle-cry, "Dirty but Free".
The hero of Hunt's book is Joseph Chamberlain who took control of Birmingham city council in the 1870s, vowing that he would transform Birmingham into the Paris of the Midlands. His idea was to fund civic improvements through municipal ownership of the gas and water supply, and his success spurred other councils to follow. But by this time many had lost faith in cities altogether. It became clear that they were unfit to sustain human life. There was consternation when recruiters for the Boer war had to reject thousands of stunted, sickly city dwellers. Late Victorian cities still harboured pestiferous slums, likened, by those who ventured into them, to "darkest Africa". London's East End was still "a gigantic laboratory of corruption and crime". Against this background an obscure clerk, Ebenezer Howard, published his plan for "garden cities", which became reality within a few years at Letchworth and Welwyn. Although they did not develop quite as he wished, his brainwave led to the proliferation of green suburbs around all the main cities between the wars.
Hunt regards this as a disaster — a "sustained assault on the 19th-century urban tradition". It is hard to share his concern. As his book amply proves, a sustained assault was just what the 19th century urban tradition needed. Few developments in human history have caused more misery, or given such scope to stupidity, greed, callousness, pomposity and self-deception. By comparison, suburbia is innocent. It is also where most people want to live. Surveys show that a detached house with a garden, not in a city, is the commonest dream home. Such tame domesticity offends Hunt. But it seems entirely wholesome, and wisely unforgiving of the city's sinister past. However, whether you agree or disagree with Hunt is relatively unimportant. What matters is his book's prodigious range and passionate enthusiasm, and his skill in showing how ideas, however foolish, can take over minds, change landscapes and mould the future. It is a rich, nutritious read.
Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £15.99 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585
READ ON...
websites:
www.cyburbia.org/directory
Modern urban-planning portal
