Building the Victorian City: Splendour and Squalour - Professor Simon Thurley

Gresham College presents building the Victorian City splendor and squalor by simon thule CBE well good evening ladies and gentlemen and very pleased to start this year with the continuation of the odyssey that i've been on for a couple of years now and i know there are some people in the audience who stuck with me through thick and thin telling the story of english architecture as a got on chronologically I felt more and more exposed when you're talking about the anglo-saxons you put a good chance of no more than your audience but when you're talking about the Victorian City it becomes decidedly nerve-racking and that's where I've actually reached today and this is in fact the second of two lectures that I've given about the Victorians and next time we move into the 20th century for those of you who've been with me since the fifth century you might think it's about time well what are the 17th century had been very much characterised by the enormous and very rapid growth of London in the 18th century urban growth was much more evenly spread across England of course London continued to grow but the number and the size of provincial towns increased also in 1801 the government commissioned the first official census and it found that eight point three million people lived in England which was a 25% increase since 1750 by 1831 the population was thirteen point 1 million and so England's population was in fact increasing at a rate 50 percent faster than any other European country and one third of England's population lived in towns and this is a great phenomenon really of the of the 19th century this vast growth in the size of provincial towns between 1800 and 1841 Sheffield doubled in size Bradford grew by 10% Leeds tripled in size from 50,000 in 1800 to a hundred and 50,000 by the middle of the century and Manchester went up in the same period from 95,000 to 350,000 and I think what's so incredibly impressive about England posed to the rest of the continent is that England managed to feed this urban expansion because by 1800 each English farm worker produced enough food to feed to workers in manufacturing and services London and of course the northern manufacturing towns sucked in the excess rural labour who didn't need to be employed in the countryside anymore creating of course new jobs and in these new businesses an imperative gradually developed to introduce machines not because there was a shortage of people because there wasn't but because employing the people was expensive the wages of labourers in England was significantly higher than wages of other European countries London laborers wages were the equivalent of 14 grams of silver a day while in Amsterdam the wage was the equivalent of 9 grams of silver and if you were unfortunate enough to be a labourer in Vienna it was only 2 grams of silver so it was very expensive to employ labor in England and that is why the imperative developed to build machines to replace people well in these lectures I have continually stressed the role of towns and their inhabitants in architectural innovation and change and in the 19th century the architecture of English towns was again transformed market halls who Bath's dispensaries libraries Sunday schools chapels asylums work houses cemeteries hospitals bazaars arcades theaters these are all new building types and they came to dominate the urban landscape the tastes of wealthy town dwellers and their independence and their distinctiveness should not be seen I think as a sort of watered-down version of aristocratic tastes these people had money and lots of it merchants finances and professionals all had substantial disposable income some of which was invested in the national debt but much of it was put into Turnpike's into bridges and canals and after 1814 into public utilities particularly gas yet these people who had all this money and promoted new buildings were much less interested in their physical environment than their predecessors their predecessors of course built towns like baths like Cheltenham and the ordered squares of the West End of London but the new and expanding towns of the north of England were very introverted places very private places where the wealthy lived in detached villas not in sweeping terraces and crescents workers had houses built for them completely willy-nilly with no thought to a grander plan and this I think really genuinely was an aesthetic indifference and it was partially due I think to the prevalence of evangelicalism amongst the wealthy in provincial towns because all they sell of a war interested in architecture most of them thought that spiritual things were much more important and what buildings look like was of a relatively minor concern in fact I think you can characterise the interests of this new provincial society as being much less frivolous than the society that created a town like Bath the assembly and the theater which dominated life and bath was replaced and by the after the Napoleonic Wars and in the period immediately before by the reading-room the library and the chapel in fact a new enthusiasm for learning societies swept the country in 1749 that had only been 450 of these societies but by 1799 the 1100 paleontology geology natural history chemistry political economy were just few a few of the subjects covered by these learning societies and many of the societies built themselves premises for their meetings and collections this wonderful building here was constructed by the Scarborough philosophical Society it's a museum it's built in 1828 to nine by the designs of Yorkshire architect and a museum aficionado a man called RH sharp and the upper part here was a reading room and this very top area was in fact a museum that showed rounders wall for the first time a chronological development of fossils and these societies were very popular all over the country particularly Lit literary and philosophical societies this is that lit and film as they were known in newcastle upon tyne with this very impressive clubhouse that was built which contained a large library built again by a local architect a man called John Green and constructed in 1822 but of course towns were primarily places of economic exchange a role that became increasingly important with the development of Agriculture and of manufacturing in the countryside while agricultural produce was still sold in town center marketplaces the markets for wholesale agricultural produce moved first into private rooms in pubs and then into corn exchanges and hundreds of these corn exchanges were built in market towns from the 1820s right up until the end of the century in these exchanges grain was sold to wholesale dealers by means of a sample by a grower who had brought his sample in a little bag I'll give you an example of a nice one with a large one this was built in Bishop's Stortford in 1828 by a consortium of local businessman it's by a very good architect called Lewis brill me and as you can see it's got a big portico big Greek portico facing the high street inside there was space for 65 dealers and selling their corn and over-the-door which unfortunately is blocked by a column here was a statue of Ceres the goddess of of grain and these sort of allegorical references were very common on these buildings because they didn't only express the the need to provide places to trade they expressed Civic economic aspiration retail trade really hugely expanded the south of England after the Napoleonic Wars there was one shot for every 30 to 40 people that's something like double the number of shops that exists today these shops were increasingly outlets for finished goods whereas in the past they had been frumps for workshops at the rear and one very important consequence of this was the gradual adoption by shops of glass windows by about 1750 all the shops on the City of London's principal thoroughfare Cheapside just around the corner were all glazed and after hanging signs were ban in 1762 because people kept on bashing their heads on them they were running passes it on their horse and people had their names painted on a freeze or fascia above the windows some of you may know this shop in Haymarket is the oldest shop in London and here you can see these these big glass windows to show goods and no hanging sign but a fascia here where you can write the name of the shop obviously this is a completely repulsive shop called fancy that which sells tourist knickknacks no one ever goes in there but everyone likes the outside and I mean no Londoner ever goes in there obviously but as well as these shops which were actually quite small-scale much larger establishments began to be built not only in London but in all the provincial centres and it was these bigger shops that led the way in fixed prices and an assistance on cash payments because these shops here you'd be able to haggle and you could buy things on credit but this was a whole new concept in retail in retail that a price was written on the goods and you paid for it then and there and this completely demystified shopping for a whole new generation of middle-class clients many of these were owned by their proprietors here is a wonderful book shop which was opened in Finsbury square in 1789 James lacking Tain's bookshop the temple of the muses it was designed by George dance the City of London architect and who made use of cast-iron columns to support the the floors which are groaning with a mr. lacking Tain's books but many other emporia were built by speculators and space was rented to traders and by an 1830 almost all large towns had a bazaar a large Emporium home to lots of traders selling a variety of goods and make most of them they liked like em lacking Tain's bookshop they use new technology iron and glass to as show off the goods the most famous Bazaar was in London and it was called the Pantheon it was built on Oxford Street designed by Sidney smirk and it was built in 1834 and here it is in 1845 huge Great Hall one hundred and sixteen foot long covered by a glazed barrel vault and provided with all sorts of conveniences including a special discreet room where ladies could wait for their carriage to pick them up an alternative model for these speculative shots was to build an arcade covered shopping street containing a whole range of individual shops again the faint most famous not the biggest or the earliest is the Burlington Park arcade in Piccadilly which you'll all be familiar with with designed by Samuel we're opened in 1818 72 shops originally each 2 storeys high selling right from the beginning and jewelry and what were described as fancy articles of fashionable demand well while shops for the wealthy were transformed into these ordered and elegant Emporia an ornament to the streets I think in which they stood the traditional town market was still an open cry chaotic exchange and after the Napoleonic Wars this more fastidious society that I've been describing this more serious minded society looked askance at the sort of petty crime the disorder the filth and the chaos of traditional town markets and the pragmatic solution that was adopted by Town Council's was to rehouse markets in a single large building under the control of the local authorities the best surviving of these and they crop up all over the country is again in London and is of course a Covent Garden Market designed by Charles Fowler master of market design and an expert in the use of cast iron and this at the time and of course it still is a building of genius rationalizing all the incredibly complex interactions that take place in a fruit and vegetable market giving the growers the buyers the wholesalers the retailers defined zones under a single roof and as I'm sure you all know it's defined by these tremendous and arcades here tasks and columns and on the corner with these pavilions which were from the start designed to be coffee shops where weather where the market traders and others could relax and also from the start these upper terraces here designed for the wealthier clients up to rate raised themselves amongst the above the hoi polloi to make the transactions they needed to make and so as we enter the Victorian period English towns were more serious were socially more ordered more private places than their Georgian predecessors but they had a much lessened sense of theater in in public space but these places were also for the first time much more professionally designed because all the people I've been talking about in my previous lectures who designed buildings were either talented gentlemen or they were aspiring craftsmen but after 1750 as the size and complexity of buildings grew and the spectrum of materials and technologies diversified the people who designed buildings had to be of a different sort and three distinct strands begin to emerge the architect the engineer and the contractor and it was in fact the engineers who were the first to turn their discipline into a proper profession founding their own institution in 1818 it was the expansion of the canal network and the building of the dots that had created a completely you discipline and in 1763 the term civil engineer first appeared in a London directory and just as a diversion my brother who is an engineer always tells a joke against himself that apparently you look in that the directory London telephone directory for the work for engineer and it says see under boring and I dare think is true but it's a nice joke but these people had an incredible public reputation there was no way they were thought of as boring in the 19th century these were heroes and after 1793 when Britain went to war with France their achievements were glamorized the two most famous engineers of their day John Rennie who you see here and Thomas Telford were both buried in Westminster Abbey they had hero status well it took quite a lot longer for the architectural profession to develop in the 18th century the notion of a architect as a design genius mediating between builder and client was for most practitioners a long long way off architects eaters John Nash and Robert Adam were also speculators this is a Delfy speculation on on the Strand as some of these building still suggests exists and you can go down John Adams Street named after Robert Adams brother and designed by Robert Adam but also as a speculation to make his fortune various attempts have been made from the 1770s to create a club for architects but it was only in 1834 when the Institute of British Architects was formed ready to give a distinct definition to architects as opposed to a surveyors or engineers and then the third area were was the building contractor and various types of building contract had existed since the Middle Ages but the Napoleonic Wars had driven a new type of contract that was pioneered by the government this was a contract in a hole a fixed-price contract with a sink building builder to build a cannon tire construction in private practice the Theatre Royal Drury Lane designed by Benjamin Wyatt in 1811 was perhaps the first major private builder building to be built by gross contract in the modern way and in fact the Covent Garden Market was also built by gross contract in 1828 Henry Liam sons were the contractors who just took a single price and built the whole market and the largest building contractors people like the cubit family did a complete cradle-to-grave sir service they provided their own architects and offered what today we would call a design and build service most famously the cubits are building for Queen Victoria their house at Osborne on the Isle of Wight entirely done by a building contractor not involving an architect at all so the rise of these professions and the rise of the building contractor was symptomatic of what was very much seen as at the time as an increased commercialization of architecture noted by I think by dismay by many people like John Soane really regretted it and domestic building speculation really tore on on the back of this and after the Napoleonic Wars this is a necessary introduction to return to the business of the cities which is what I really want to talk about today and I really want to talk about the industrial base that allowed the cities and to grow because before 1830 the English economy economy was what we call an organic one energy was derived from muscle from wind and from water power and crucially from burning timber and timber was really the national staple totally essential for everything for building construction for shipping dust reproduction and crucially the domestic heating and cooking and it was this latter useless heating and cooking in private houses that provided the biggest challenge for the cities because as for instance London grew seemingly out of control it became absolutely essential to free it from its dependence on firewood it simply became impossible to get enough wood into London to keep everybody's fires burning which is why a coal production became so important and in 1700 England's coal production was already five times that of the whole of the rest of the world combined think of that five times and the furnace in which all this coal was built burnt was London now the reason it was able to be burned was because of the invention of the coal burning great now of course to burn coal you need to raise it up you need to get a draught otherwise you just get sulfurous fumes filling the room and you all choke to death this is a fireplace built in the 1620s in Charterhouse just over there and this grate here is one of the earliest surviving dateable coal burning and grates and it was the perfection of the grate and a chimney with enough draw to get themself result of a room that enabled at London to switch from burning wood to burning coal and the huge building boom stimulated by the great fire of london allowed all new houses to have chimneys and fireplaces that could burn coal so this use of coal as well as ameliorating a terrible energy crisis that existed in london stimulated advances in mining technology because demand from london continued to grow and the most important spin-off of this mining development was the invention in a 1712 of the Newcomen steam engine which was invented to water out of mines so they could go deeper by 1800 there were two and a half thousand steam engines in Britain in France there was 70 the nuclear man engines and I show you one here at Elsa core and in the last surviving nuclear engine to advert to advance and represented a huge leap forward in power indeed by 1760 the additional energy that coal production had released into the English economy was the equivalent to planting an additional 15 million acres of trees so that is what coal did enable the economy to take off and it was the harnessing of the rotary power of steam engines like this that created a new type of City and Manchester was the first of these cities it became the center of the cotton industry having as many as perhaps 60 cotton mills by 1815 they initially gathered there because of their position on the canal system which I talked about in my last lecture but the mills there were fundamentally different from the mills that were in the countryside powered by water these were tall they were close packed they were canalside they were urban they were steam powered the first Manchester mill to be entirely powered by steam was built in 1790 and as you can see from this this water color they were tall with closely packed windows all of a sized chimneys the chimneys at the top creating large open-plan floors very light so that the the mill workers could see what was going on these mills were built in an coats and you see here and some of the mills that still survived an coats and it's mills represent a decisive shift in British manufacturing and in British urbanism these very large-scale enterprises you can see how big these mills were needed to be in urban areas where labor materials and capital were available and that is why from 1800 a new type of dense dirty and busy urban landscape developed this is a marvelous painting done in 1884 showing leads but of course Manchester and Birmingham also became dominated by gigantic factories and became surrounded by the grim housing of their employees so as in n coats as the factories sucked in more workers a housing crisis emerged the area had a population of 11,000 in 1801 only 30 years later it had a population of 31,000 and what was very different about the urban mill owners of the early Victorian period they didn't provide accommodation for their ordinary employees as had happened into the eighteenth-century mills in the countryside and so it was left to building speculators to provide and this is a plan of a bit of an Coates now you're talking in a little bit more detail a moment about these houses but you can see how the houses are packed in and incredibly tightly brought up on by speculators who are buying land as close as possible to the factories packing in houses as many as possible to rent to the workers who are in the factories and here are some of the houses that survived in an copse none of the early houses survived these are ones that were built in fact in the 1890s and a much better sturdier and houses so what was the solution that these speculators adopted well the solution in the early part of the 19th century was to build the - back house now this is a plan of some back-to-back houses in Birmingham Shaun probably most of you here are aware - back-to-back houses but I will just explain they're not really built in terraces they're built in courts so each of these little squares as a house and the principal about the house was that three of its walls were shared with other houses because it makes them very cheap to build because the spine wall here and could contain flus or sometimes these walls here would contain the flus and each house you know you could you could build many lists fewer bricks most of them were two up and two down or three up and three down and these courts here contained the pretties and and sometimes that the communal bake houses so the houses are whilst being to a degree self-contained contain this very large communal area which involved everybody sharing everybody sharing the privies showing the yards and often sharing the cooking areas and these are the back-to-back houses that have been and superbly rescued by the National Trust in Birmingham and you can see here it oops in a bit more in a bit more detail and how these houses worked and you in you came here you went up your stairs to the room above so just one one room there and one above and here is the yard here are the privies and here are some communal areas for washing and some communal areas for cooking and this yard here is shared by all these houses and in in the block and were thousands hundreds of thousands of backed back houses built in England in the early part of the nineteenth century in Leeds alone there were nearly 30,000 back-to-back houses what I'm just going to quickly read you now is a description of of some back-to-back houses in Westminster and here in London in the 1880s like this is a quote okay although there is a sewer the houses are not drained into it but intercept AHL's in the surrounding premises the rooms are crowned with occupants irrespective of number age or sex and most horribly dirty as is also the scanty furniture and many of the houses are very dilapidated and without a semblance of ventilation the systems or water butts are never in capital letters cleaned out front kitchens without any areas at all are used as dwellings the houses are let and under let two three four times deep and the privies are so filthily dirty on floors and seats as to prohibit their natural use and at the south end of the street are large premises filled with cows on the basement and upper floors from which the stench at times is unendurable none of the houses are provided with ash bins and such are the filthy habits of the inhabitants that the street would be impassable but for the daily cleaning of it by the scavengers sounds a bit overblown but tragically it was not and it is perhaps just worth mentioning this issue about the cows because I said right at the beginning that these cities filled up not through the growth of population within the cities but because of people coming in from the countryside and as people came in from the countryside they brought cows and pigs with them and there was a massive dairy industry in the centre of these towns with an cows who were kept knee-deep in their in their own excrement producing milk for the roundabout inhabitants and pigs also and kept in the in the buildings and adjacent to them so this extraordinary and loosener bay the countryside coming into the town with the immigrants and the way these people lived well of course em today we give the name um slum to these types of dwelling and slums were always very discreet areas of cities you could draw a red line around this slum started and it stopped and of course they contained a discreet underclass and such places really persisted in England for more than a century but of course health and welfare campaigners were determined to deal with the problem and some fundamental changes began to be wrought from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards and the first big thing that happened to get away from this desperate situation was that workers housing began to become much more self-contained instead of sharing pretties sharing yards and even kitchens houses began to be built as individual units the public space these and courts the back of the back-to-backs completely disappeared and they lost their sort of semi-private character and houses were now determinedly built on rows where light and air could get in and people began to create an air of private Dennis domesticity behind doors and walls and it was impossible to live a private life here and what happened as people had these more individualistic houses is life for the working classes became much more private and one of the big things the big changes was this this determination by the authorities to encourage ventilation and you can imagine there was no ventilation here an enclosed yard and there's one window here one window above and there was it was a very strong belief that you needed through ventilation in these houses to blow out contagion so here is a shot of these in one of these alleyways terribly congested very very tight she's looking quite clean there but not looking particularly nice you know light got in there either how narrow and this is these are these alleyways here I mean you know the lack of light was very serious issue too and here is one of Gustav Dora's wonderful engravings showing a London slum in the mid nineteenth century but this is what I wanted to show you this is a shot of Leeds at the turn of the century and this is Leeds moving away from those courts which are very very characteristic of the early workers housing two streets where an air could blow blow through and these actually are still backed backs still being built and in by the First World War there were still tens of thousands of back-to-backs and Leeds they'd been made illegal in many other cities long perform impressive a Liverpool leading band long before and here is a Pennine town this is a place called nelson in in Pennine Lancashire it's a bit of Nelson called Whitefield it is I think probably the most complete Victorian town scape in the Pennines dates from between about 1860 and 1890 and this is the reformed type of housing for workers these groups these are these are the cotton mills up here here's the canal sneaking around to obviously to bring in the coal and take out other things here's the church built by the by the estate and these are housed a row upon row of houses built by speculators but they are whole houses they're not back-to-backs and there is a train yard at the back and a little passageway between the two yards there and I'll talk about that in a few moments to allow them to be serviced so great determination to create light but the creation of an entirely new private world for working people so as the first thing that happened this creation of a private world the second thing that happened was a transformation wrought by science and technology that changed and working life and two things in particular made a huge and difference and the first of those was gasps because before the availability of domestic gas heating cooking and hot water were all supplied in these working-class houses by coal burning ranges and these a cast iron ranges have become widely available right the way through this social spectrum from the 1820s and even the poorest houses and had these little machines but with some big advantages to cold a disadvantages to coal burning ranges they were very dirty and they required constant attention you have to be there the whole time but most inconveniently they were always all you couldn't sort of just switch them off and switch them on they were always on and so for instance during the summer in the hot summer in a tiny room you had this cold burning range blasting out and heat and so the arrival of piped gas to people's homes enabled a new type of cleaner more efficient gas range to be installed now obviously this is a posh person not a working person we don't have a picture we don't as far as I know at pictures of these early gas ranges and working-class housing but here is one in a middle-class house a gas powered and range now it's all very well getting gas to these houses but until you could find a way to sell it particularly to to poor people it was no use but in the 1890s in Liverpool someone invented the prepayment gas slot meter some of you will remember these and I certainly had one when I was a student in digs here and we put a sheath whose electric meter you put a coin and you turn the thing and they were invented in the 1890s and what this allowed was gas to be purchased by even the poorest homes in London the speed the South metropolitan gas company had only installed four hundred and thirty-nine of these slot slot meters in 1892 but only six years later it had installed 80,000 so suddenly gas took over in these working-class homes and transformed erb the ability to be able to live in them that was the first technological advance the second Great Leap Forward was piped water and obviously this transformed a lot of things but most importantly it transformed domestic sanitation because at first in these very densely packed places which I have shown you and described to you there were only two ways of disposing of sewage the first was a cesspool which is basically a hole full of excrement no other way of describing it and this was emptied when it overflowed pretty horrible job but it would have eventually been emptied or the other way of getting rid of it was a midden which is basically a hole in the ground in which you dumped your coal ashes on top of the excrement which then absorbed the liquid and it sort of all compacted into some solid lump which also later on and could be and dug out but of course both of these meant that human excrement was left in these courts which I've described to you for long periods of time and spreading obviously horrible disease gradually both types of way of getting rid of sewage involved buckets and in fact a vicar from the north of England the Reverend Henry wool painted a very clever and closeted in 1860 which enabled you to and load your ashes into the top of there and when you'd finished in there you pull the lever and Asha's dumped into the top of the dollop tin to the top of the bucket until eventually it filled up and then you could take the bucket away and in fact what happened I'm just going to go back now a few slides what happened in towns like Nelson was that you had your privy with your ash pit bucket in a little house at the back of your yard and at the back of there there was a little like a little hatch which at night you would put your bucket full of ash into and someone would come along and like this in a wagon and would empty your bucket out of your little privy to they're taken away and put it on vegetables as as manure obviously the ash closet was better than a liquid system but the transformation for everybody was when piped water was available to flush the sewage away and within places with plenty of water these came in quickly places i Liverpool the Liverpool corporation paid for sewers to come in at quite an early date so we have a gradual change by the First World War I think relating to a transformation in the life of working people but this domestication the the increasing sense of domestic isolation and privacy took place in middle-class houses too because the terrace which was so favored before the 1820s became replaced by villas or semi-detached houses here's a nice early pair of Victorian villas the Victorians didn't want to middle-class Victorians didn't want to live in terraces they wanted to live and in semi-detached villas or in detached villas and that's a late Victorian one in Brighton so a fundamental change in the way people live becoming more and more private more and more domestic well so far I have been concentrating on the domestic and public space in a Victorian city but and the last little bit of my lecture this evening I wanted to talk about the commercial part of Victorian cities the public and commercial part and the most important building in considering this is the Bank of England this is a banking the First Bank of England completed in 1734 which was totally fundamental to Britain's ability to prosecute war in the in the 18th century because it was the Bank of England that managed the national debt administered the national debt and by 1790 over 300 Clark's worked in the Bank of England in the later 18th century thanks to the Wars of the Austrian succession and the Seven Years War the national debt increased enormously in fact by 88 million pounds and Sir Robert Taylor who was the architect of the bank and started to expand it and of all his extensions and the bank was extended enormous Lee the most important building was this the great domed brokers exchange the Rotundo and it was effectively the world's first Stock Exchange and in this room government papers securities were publicly traded just the same way that tangible commodities like like a coffee and rubber were traded the Royal Exchange here people were trading in government debt sounds very familiar doesn't it these days and of course Taylor's inspiration was the pantheon one of Rome's most imitated buildings and these sort of rotunda's were found everywhere but this is a rotonda built right at the heart of the British establishment and externally the bank made a huge impact in the centre of the city this great impregnable and steel screen wall and to keep people out and of course it's just opposite the mansion house and it gobbled up land they had to buy up um taverns and drinking houses and it was in taverns and drinking houses where up to that point business had been transacted and so what the Bank of England started to do for the first time in the city was create a new world of professionalized finance conducted in purpose-built offices well the Bank of England continued to grow the national debt trebled during the Napoleonic Wars standing at five hundred and thirty four million pounds by the time the Battle of Waterloo was built and the new architect for the bank was Sir John Soane who created the extraordinary if had the the greatest of his buildings and one of the greatest buildings of the nineteenth century in England and here you see the Tivoli corner you still see an echo of it in the bank today part of the extraordinary exterior of the building and unfortunately the interiors were destroyed and in the 1920s but this is one of sones astonishing interiors one of the one of the broking rooms and the old dividend office designed in 1818 and photographed in the 1920s soon regarded the Bank of England to be his greatest achievement and there was this wonderful drawing done of it water colored a Levitch a huge thing you see it's the same museum showing the bank as he completed it as a Roman ruin of course it was never looked like this but it's a sort of cutaway to show the extraordinary amount of buildings extraordinary complexity of the institution in 1844 Peale and his bank charter act gave SIL power to the Bank of England to issue currency and this led to over in a 30-year period to London being established as the world's pre-eminent financial center this concentration in London of expertise of knowledge money attracted merchants bankers brokers agents from all over the world but the way that London was able to become the world center was thanks to another invention and this was the invention of the first commercial Telegraph system which was developed by Sir William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone and installed in the Great Western Railway from in Paddington in 1839 a way of communicating down a wire over a distance it was actually an American Samuel Morse who invented the language for electronic messaging that became sort of standard code for communication but the invention of the Telegraph and then a few years later the perfection of the technology of laying underwater cables which led to the first transatlantic cable being laid successfully in 1866 what it meant was that by 1872 and London was in almost instant contact with every continent on the planet putting London at the center of a global financial communication network and this is why London extraordinarily managed large percentages of trade in commodities like coffee and rubber that it didn't produce and it didn't even consume very much of so the architectural effect of this extraordinary success in the city were huge but it was stimulated by a couple of important things the first was the burning down of the old Royal Exchange I've mentioned in previous lectures and the creation of the new Royal Exchange which kind of sets the set the the bar for the grandeur of new and commercial buildings but the second thing was the city's determination to improve at the streets of London a whole lot of new streets were were built this is Queen Victoria Street photographed in 1905 but built as a new Street in 1866 271 Cannon Street another new Street and of course these opened up new plots for businesses to build on and you can see these wonderful Victorian and commercial buildings lining these new strengths but the the charge for new commercial buildings in the central London was led by the insurance industry the first big insurance building in fact wasn't built in the city it was built in the West End this is the county fire office built in Piccadilly Circus in 1829 but very quickly the center of the city was taken over by big insurance buildings here is one of the earliest still standing it's bombed during the war the old Atlas insurance office designed in 1838 most of these buildings were were based on the architecture of the West End clubs well of course their directors felt very at home so here you have Charles Berry's Reform club built in the 1830s but also as the travelers Club on pell-mell and these set the architectural style for these early insurance buildings in the city and actually across England they were reassuringly businesslike they conferred I think some of the prestige of the the club's on there more and commercial these more commercial buildings the Queen's Assurance building in Gresham Street is one of the earlier ones you can see this these three stories here very much that's a later thing added on top very much like the club's in the East End and then eventually along came a Liverpudlian insurance company who spoiled it all by being over-the-top and flamboyant as Liverpudlians and wanted to be and here you can see and trades a rather poor and print offense slightly to focus my pictures taken see something that broke away from this very austere type of building and opened up a whole new chapter in commercial building in the city where buildings rivaled each other to be more and more and splendid the banks family funnily enough came along later the charge was led by the insurance companies most banks in the early Victorian period we're in domestic house it's his bank on Fleet Street still they're only within living memory and the whole family actually used to live and in the top part of this Bank but the banks very much took off where the insurance companies left one of the best Victorian ones surviving in the city the national provincial Bank and Bishopsgate incredible structure made the Bank of England look dowdy and it's established very firmly in the eyes and minds of the city that banks were national institutions not just a provincial ones well of course I'd welt mainly on on London partly because I'm speaking in London and these buildings will be very familiar to you but I think it's very important to recognize that although London became the most important center of commercial exchange in the world the stylistic trends that I have chronicled in London flowed also in the great provincial cities which had a very successful commercial centres - in Manchester as in London the warehouses of the merchants were built in this Italian Palazzo style and for the Manchester traders this was perhaps very suitable because they actually saw themselves as latter-day Gonzaga's or latter-day Medicis the first Palazzo style ware house was built in Manchester in 1839 and this styled soon transformed the rather cramped and dingy city that Manchester was into a very handsome very cosmopolitan space this is one on on Charlotte Street built in the late 1850s but just as in London the early buildings which were am sober trying to demonstrate the solidity and the reliability of their owners changed into a more florid style the same thing happened in my Chester these buildings get get very big and they get very grand this is the colossal s and J watt warehouse on Portland Street built in the late 1850s still sort of based largely on an Italian Palazzo but straining to be a sort of mega structure and advertising the success of the business that took place within it now of course and I know this because I've been doing gresham lectures for long enough and when I stop talking people say what about town halls what about bars what about this well I only had 50 minutes and what I ventured what I tried to do is to try and make my story coherent and I tried to make and at least one big point about what was distinctive about the English city in the 19th century I chose splendor and squalor as the title of my lecture and of course these are important contrasting ideas there can important contrasting areas of towns and they are important contrasting types of buildings and they are of course fundamental to understanding the city but the big change that I really want to emphasize tonight because it links in very much with what I've been talking about in previous lectures was the change from the public city the ordered City the open city the permeable city like places like bath Shelton Amanda the West End to the private city the closed city the introverted City the domestic city there was a totally different appreciation of space how it was used and who it belongs to it was a City for a different type of people a society that was more serious minded was more religious was more focused on business it was in fact a society that was essentially created by the wars against France of 1793 to 1815 and it was war that was going to change society again because my next lecture will deal very specifically with the architectural impact of the First World War and I very much hope that you will be able to join me on the 14th November to enter the 20th century for all information please visit www.gfi.com/webmonitor

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 55,611

Keywords: Architecture, English Architecture, Architectural History, English Heritage, Heritage, Victorian Architecture, Victorian, Victorian History, Town Hall, English town hall, Red brick, Victorian Building, Victorian Heritage, Simon Thurley, Thurley, Chief Executive, Gresham College, Gresham, Heritage lecture, Heritage talk, English Heritage lecture, English Heritage talk, Architecture lecture, Architecture talk, Architectural History lecture, Architectural history talk

Id: eJ2djqrdyj8

Length: 56min 9sec (3369 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 24 2012