The rise and fall of the Victorian city: lessons for contemporary urban renewal

Tristram Hunt, historian, author and broadcaster, explores the lessons that can be learned from the Victorian city.

Summary

The pioneers of Victorian Britain saw cities as places for generating ideas, with active citizenship and strong local government. They wanted to stamp their values on to the physical fabric of the city and a celebrity of the architect followed. But the emergence of modern suburbia changed cities, shifting the focus from the civic to the domestic sphere. Four million houses went up between 1918 and 1939 in the great age of suburbia. We have seen a regeneration of cities over the last 10 years, but urban sprawl is a new spectre, harming both civic life and the environment. We should take inspiration from the mid-Victorian world - design-led, public sector driven, community engaged, with outstanding civic architecture. And we should battle sprawl as the number one priority.

Introduction

When thinking about the Victorian city it is always important to remember that we were the first: the first to industrialise and the first to urbanise. This explains the interest of social commentators from across Europe , such as Engels and deTocqueville, in industrialising cities like Manchester , Liverpool and Glasgow .

It also helps us to understand the achievement of the Victorian city. The urban form of the 1820s and 1830s was truly awful. Migration, urbanisation and the absence of any basic infrastructure left the city authorities wholly unable to cope with the filth, pollution, overcrowding and disease catalogued in Dickens's nightmarish accounts of the industrialising city.

The result of these sanitary and housing conditions was a total collapse in the life chances of the inhabitants. In cities of over 100,000, life expectancy at birth dropped from 35 years in the 1820s to 29 in the 1830s. The life chances of a slum dweller in early Victorian Glasgow or Liverpool were in fact the lowest since the Black Death.

But from this inauspicious base there emerged one of the great urban civilizations of western Europe.

The new urban world

So, what did this new urban world signify in architectural and urban design terms?

The most important element to understand is the ideas and intellectual assumptions behind the development of the Victorian city. Crucial to this was the role of a new middle-class urban non-conformist elite. Methodists, Quakers and Unitarians who stood outside the Anglican mainstream they believed in wealth creation through trade as much as industry. Intellectually engaged and politically literate, they saw cities as places for generating ideas and discussion, with an active citizenship and strong local government.

Above all they regarded the city and urban life as crucial to their identity. From the Greek city states, to the Italian republics, to the German cities of the Reformation, they saw the city as an essential component of the bourgeoisie or middle class. For it was in the city that religious toleration; free trade; political self-government; critical inquiry - and all the other things they valued - had been fostered and they would be revived in the Victorian city.

And the middle classes wanted to stamp their values and authority into the fabric of the city. In the town halls, churches, city squares, museums, galleries, warehouses and factories, they did just that in Italianate architecture; Venetian Gothic; neo-Classicism - styles and iconography rich in meaning.

This combined with a celebrity of the architect. Barry, Cockerell, Chamberlain, Waterhouse, and Scott were the names which every city wanted. There was also a strong interest in the meaning of design, in debates over the political significance of Italianate vs. Gothic, which can be seen in the fights over the design of the Foreign Office and Northampton Town Hall . Design competitions generated huge interest that was reflected in the letters pages of the provincial press.

Central to this concern with the urban environment was a sense of self-government. The Victorian cities of the 1850s and 1860s really did regard themselves in the same vein as the Italian city republics of the 1400s or the Hanseatic League . Today it is hard to get a sense of the provincial autonomy in that era that produced the intense civic pride and urban rivalry that saw Birmingham Town Hall trumped by Liverpool St. George's Hall, whose glory was stolen by Bradford St. George's Hall, which was in turn trumped by Leeds Town Hall.

But this was an elite-led vision, funded and controlled by urban merchant princes. This began to shift in 1870s as a more municipal sensibility emerged, placing the city council at the heart of things - an approach rhetorically pioneered by Joseph Chamberlain in Birmingham. The focus began to move towards more municipal responsibilities such as schools, hospitals, housing and public offices, think for example of the Birmingham Council House.

But there was still a tremendous focus on pride: on the worth of the building and its social meaning…The worth of the city and its council reflected through its civic architecture and its public sphere.

Lessons for today

Can we ever return to that pioneer spirit which built Manchester Town Hall and Liverpool 's St. George's Hall? On the one hand, no. It was a specific product of its time: a moment when the forces of Protestant Nonconformity aligned with a new sense of middle-class pride which celebrated itself through an urban architecture funded by extraordinary commercial wealth. That tradition of Protestant dissent is dead in our cities, while social status is now more readily pursued through commercial sport or metropolitan ambition. The localised, civic economy - local employers; relatively cohesive urban labour markets - which underpinned much of the civic pride has gone. Moreover, I think many would be uncomfortable with returning to the vast gulf between classes which helped to fund such impressive edifices.

There has also been a collapse of confidence in and the wealth of local councils, where a relative absence of ambition has seen them become service providers rather than moulders of the public sphere.

But there are also lessons which are very much along the CABE agenda:

• the crucial importance of high-value public sector architecture - why is a new Selfridges the design leader for a revived Birmingham ?
• the central belief that the worth and value of an urban community is reflected through great civic architecture and cohesive urban planning
• the importance of public debate about style and the meaning of style
• the importance of name-value architects and engineers
• the function of architecture in developing an active civil society
• the locating of urban design within a historical framework; buildings that connect with a sense of place and tradition - even if it is invented tradition. Not everyone wants the aesthetic brutality of modernity, communities value organic links to the past made real through buildings.

The suburbs

The irony is that at the same time as this urban civilization was being erected, we saw the emergence of modern suburbia.

Suburbs have, of course, existed since Rome was a city, and London , especially, had a sophisticated suburban aesthetic since the 1700s - something ultimately codified with John Nash's Georgian developments at St. John's Wood.

But by the 1870s and 1880s something more remarkable was occurring with regards to suburbia. The economic and demographic growth of the Victorian city - combined with a growing desire on the part of the middle and lower middle class to depart the filth of the city - was seeing the erection of unprecedented numbers of houses.

'The greatest advance of the decade is shown', reported Sidney Low in 1890, 'not in the cities themselves, but in the ring of suburbs which spread into the country around them … The centre of population is shifting from the heart to the limbs. The life-blood is pouring into the long arms of bricks and mortar and cheap stucco that are feeling their way out to the Surrey moors, and the Essex flats, and the Hertfordshire copses.'

Between 1891 and 1901 the outer ring suburbs of London expanded by 45 per cent. By the end of the century, the population of Lambeth stood at almost 300,000, up from a mere 28,000 in 1800. Similarly, Camberwell boasted some 250,000 inhabitants compared to the 7,000 it began the century with - and the vast majority of that growth occurred from the 1880s onwards. The contemporary compiler of these figures thought 'the expansion of London … is in itself a fact unparalleled in the history of cities.' Of course, it was not just London . Headingley in Leeds, Bowden and Ellesmere Park near Manchester, and Ed gbaston and Handsworth outside Birmingham all experienced marked increases in population, but none of them to the same extent as the booming South East. Joseph Chamberlain - the great reforming Mayor of Birmingham - built his own suburban dreamland ('Highbury') in leafy Ed gbaston.

As now, most of this development was thrown up by commercial developers with minimal conception of a master plan. All the horror of cookie-cutter housing developments with row upon row of McMansions was there to see in the jerry-built terraces of the 1890s. 'The speculative builder descends upon green fields', reported The Times , 'cuts straight roads through them, and plants as many houses on a given space as he thinks he can let.' As CABE likes to put it, these houses were 'built for nowhere and found everywhere.'

 

'Practically, by a process of confluence, the whole of Great Britain south of the Highlands seems destined to become an urban region....As one travels through the urban region, one will traverse open, breezy, 'horsey' suburbs, smart white gates and palings everywhere, good turf, a grand-stand shining pleasantly... The old antithesis [between town and country] will indeed cease, the boundary lines will altogether disappear; it will become, indeed, merely a question of more or less population.'

 

So predicted HG Wells in 1900. A child of Bromley, he had witnessed his small Kentish village consumed by the sprawl of London and could see little prospect of such development being tamed.

But despite suburbia's uniform banality, with it went an ever greater concentration on the architecture and design of the domestic sphere. It was the public sphere which began to lose out.

Victorian civil society, the urban spirit which had made the 19th century the 'age of great cities', was being suffocated by stealth. The Athenaeums, the Mechanics Institutes, the chapels, and town halls were being exchanged for bow windows and well-bordered lawns. South London was typical. As Walter Besant lamented, 'It is a city without a municipality, without a centre, without a civic history; it has no newspapers, magazines or journals; it has no university, it has no colleges, apart from medical; it has no intellectual, artistic, scientific, musical, literary centre - unless the Crystal Palace can be considered as a centre; its residents have no local patriotism or enthusiasm … it has no theatres except of a very popular or humble kind; it has no clubs, it has no public buildings, it has no West End.'

Unfortunately, such urban planning only accelerated in the inter-war years. The low-density examples of Letchworth Garden City and Hampstead Garden Suburb became the style of choice for the aspirant middle classes spilling out along the arterial roads and overlines of Betjeman's Metroland. The kind of rich civil society which the Victorian city had fostered was exchanged for an aggressively suburban, commuter-based, domestic focused world.

The 1920s and 1930s witnessed a housing boom that irreversibly scarred the British landscape. In place of the dense cities of the Victorian era, there sprouted a mangled, sprawling suburbia. Funded first of all by the government's 'homes for heroes' campaign - and then private developers buoyed up by strong housing demand - the interwar period saw four million houses go up with 90 per cent in newly developed or existing suburbs. The British people now made their way from vibrant cities to the low-density (averaging 12 to an acre), low-rise housing springing up between train stations, along arterial and country roads, and in vast housing estates situated well outside the urban centres.

This was the great age of suburbia. And it came at a price. In England and the Octopus , conservationist William Clough-Ellis recorded the encircling tentacles of the suburb: the bungalows, the villas, the 'ribbon development.' Just as HG Wells had feared, Britain was in danger of becoming an entirely urban region with no apparent difference between town and country. 'We plant trees in the town and bungalows in the country, thus averaging England out into a dull uneventfulness whereby one place becomes much the same as any other - all incentive to exploration being thus removed as the great network of smoothed-out concrete roads is completed.'

It was no surprise that such bland, boring suburbia - of course, the context for Wind in the Willows - produced a reaction: both in the form of a rural revival, manifested in growth of country pursuits such as rambling, and most wonderfully of all, the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act establishing Greenbelts to prevent the uniform evisceration of Britain's rural-urban divide.

Conclusion

The 1947 Act did not save our Victorian cities: loss of Empire and de-industrialisation saw a collapse of our urban base. But, despite the cynics, we have seen something of a regeneration over the last 10 years in terms of population, productivity and cultural renewal. A lot of this has been design-led.

But we have a new spectre as well: the growth of urban sprawl; one of the most harmful developments to civic life as well as the natural environment. It is a supremely unsustainable mode of development driven by commercial real estate and devastating to the healthy functioning of cities and communities, which can arguably be traced back to planning policy changes in early 1980s.

I have just returned from six-month sabbatical in Arizona where the full fury of urban sprawl can be seen for concreted mile upon mile. We face similar threats here. Just think of Northampton and Milton Keynes : bleak housing estates followed by big-box warehouse developments spread around roads. There is no sense of cohesive development.

And things are only going to get worse: there were reports this weekend of a huge new development along the South Coast , sprawling from Portsmouth to Poole , which is already a pretty hideous area in terms of urban cohesion, and let's not forget the plans for Ashford, Stansted, and the Thames Gateway.

So, to conclude this sprawling talk:

Today we should take inspiration from the mid-Victorian world in terms of design-led, public sector driven, community engaged, outstanding civic architecture. And we should battle sprawl as the number one priority in order to prevent the same urban evisceration (and with it environmental depredation) which occurred in the inter-war years.

Post-lecture discussion

Q. Victorian cities recycled wealth from Empire to local hands in the cities. How can we recreate civic pride now that ownership of wealth often lies in a different place to where development is taking place?

A. This was partly an issue for Victorian cities, but yes, we do need to find ways to bring wealth creation and entrepreneurship back into our cities. However we should realise that in an era of globalisation and transferable capital, we are not operating in the same world as the Victorians.

Q. Now that regional assemblies are no more, what lessons can be learnt from the Victorians on governance?

A. The New Local Government Network is doing some interesting work on local governance. We need to re-stimulate the debate around elected mayors that has gone quiet since the debate around regional assemblies started up.

Q. It was interesting to hear about the issues of 'invented traditions' that the Victorians used to bind communities and people together. This has clear parallels with the issue of the design of housing and the use of styling cues from the past - but how old does a tradition have to be?

A. We need to be bolder about this issue and not be scared of accusations of naffness. Such historical references, which are purely stylistic, can help to create a sense of place and a connection with the past - even if it is an invented or imagined past.

Q. What were the Victorian ideas for containing sprawl and encouraging growth?

A. There was a strong body of rural nostalgics during the period who worried about the moral and social aspects of sprawl, due to a lack of access to countryside, rather than the containment of growth.

Q. It was interesting to note that the 'little boxes' that the Victorians complained about sprawling over the countryside are now valued so much and proposals to demolish the same in the north of England are meeting with opposition from the very type of people who objected to them going up in the first place. Do we think that the Wimpey boxes will be valued to the same extent in 100 years?

A. Some of the new houses that cause so much concern now are quite pretty, and no doubt someone one day with write an essay on 'the beauty of Brookside '. However, there are fundamental ecological differences between then and now, which mean that the housing built today will be unlikely to be valued so much as the Victorian terraces.

Q. The Victorians seemed to value architects much more than we do today - how do we raise perceptions of the profession and what lessons can be learnt from the Victorians in terms of increasing the power of architects within local government?

A. It shouldn't be forgotten that engineers were as famous as the architects of the period and have perhaps lost more awareness than architects. This is in part to do with more collaborative working practices, but perhaps some need to be put forward as public figures. The dominance of a few big name architects is partly a result of the fad of the celebrity, raising overall perceptions of the profession is a job for the architects. How local authorities organise themselves should really be up to them, the good news though is that since the planning bursary scheme was started the number and quality of planners looks to be going up for the first time in years.

Q. Was fashion part of the Victorian debate around style, or was it solely based on ideas of progress, power and history?

A. There was a lot of following of architectural fashion, and the similarity between public buildings in certain towns is an indicator of that. But the Victorians considered themselves to have higher ideals than merely following fashion, as was popular in the Georgian period.

Q. Was most of the Victorian housing put in place prior to the transport network, or were settlements planned around, and brought about on the back of, transport improvements?

In some instances developments were brought about by developers buying up fields at agricultural value and then waiting for the transport to go in before they developed the land at the increased value, and in other cases the transport had to be put in afterwards. However there was no comprehensive planning.

Q. It is interesting that many of the Victorian and later suburbs that were intended to be healthy because of clean air and access to parks and countryside have over the years become the land of coach potatoes and the one of the greatest threats to public health.

A. The World Health Organisation's statistics show a clear link between sprawl and poor health. Sprawl kills. The Victorians softened high density with parks to provide clean air, space and moral uplift. We need to build at high density, but also allow the city to breathe. This is also an issue to do with climate change and managing urban heat islands in summer heat waves.

About Tristram Hunt

Dr Tristram Hunt is a lecturer in history at Queen Mary, University of London . Previously, he was an associate fellow at the Centre for History and Economics, King's College, Cambridge and research fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR).

He is the author of Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City, a history of the civic, political, intellectual and religious movements that shaped our cities in the century following the Industrial Revolution

Ed ucated at Cambridge and Chicago Universities, he has worked for the Labour Party in two general election campaigns and as a government adviser. As well as authoring a number of BBC television programmes, he is a regular contributor to The Guardian, The Times and The Observer.