[peaceful sounds] Haaaahhh!!! If you're walking around London, especially
somewhere like Bloomsbury or Mayfair, there's one thing that's inescapable: railings.
You find railings absolutely everywhere. You find them in front of all the little Victorian houses
so that you don't fall down the servant stairs, you find them around the parks
in the middle of the squares, sometimes they're even historically
listed like these ones in Claremont Square in Islington. And even when they're not,
they make the place feel Victorian and fancy. Today I'm going to make my teenage self
cringe and talk about how fascinating London's railings are. Our text for
today is Matthew Ingleby's "Bloomsbury: Beyond The Establishment", which
has a whole chapter on railings and is where I first found a lot of the
sources that I'm going to show you. [Ominous music with clanking sounds, like
someone's running a stick along railings] Welcome to my beautiful garden! The two places best known for their
railings, Bloomsbury and Mayfair, have a lot in common. Both of them were originally
considered countryside outside London, and have only been built on in the last few hundred years.
Most buildings in both places are still 18th and 19th century. And they're both owned by dukes.
Seriously, almost the whole of Bloomsbury is owned by the Duke of Bedford and Mayfair by the
Duke of Westminster. How did they get to own so much land? How can you replicate their success?
In the words of the previous Duke of Westminster, "Make sure you have an ancestor who is a
very close friend of William the Conqueror." Big swathes of both places got built all at
once as basically an early modern housing estate. The dukes were like, "How can I make the
most money out of my swamp?" and the answer was, "Build loads of identical rows of
houses." What the answer is not, though, is, "Sell the land off for a profit
now that you've improved it." Instead, if you buy a house on the Duke of Bedford or the
Duke of Westminster's land, you buy the house but not the land the house is sitting on. You have
what's called a "leasehold". No one who lives in these houses owns the land their house is
built on. Instead, they've bought a long lease to the property and the landowner gets ultimate
control over what gets built there. That's why even though the people who live in these houses
are sometimes very wealthy and could easily afford to remodel their entire house to their liking,
the houses all look exactly the same- because they haven't changed since they were built.
When Bloomsbury and Mayfair are being built, they don't build rows of endless terraces like
you see in working-class districts. Instead, they build squares of houses with an open space
in the centre. Gardeners like Humphrey Repton are brought in to bring green space into London- which
is quite a novel concept for the 18th century, and a modern one- and what you end up with is
gardens like the one here at Bedford Square. They have railings around the outside and the gates
are locked. If you want to get in, you need a key, and if you want a key, you have to lease one
of the houses around here. Nice and simple. Now, imagine that it's the 18th century, and
you don't live in one of these houses but in a working-class terrace two streets down, or
you're a servant in one of these houses and so you don't have the key, or your landlord
is subletting one of these houses to you but hasn't given you the key. Before the late 19th
century, it's actually really hard to find any kind of public space in London, especially green
space. If you look at street maps from the period, it's just rows and rows of houses with no space
reserved for parks. Parks don't make money. Even the big ones, like Green Park, St James's Park,
and Hyde Park- they're all closed off with big brick walls 10 ft high around them and only open
to keyholders. You cannot get into a park without paying. So what do you do if you want to meet a
gentleman friend? If you're a kid and you want to play outdoors? If you don't have public
spaces where you're allowed to congregate it actually has free speech implications, because
where are you supposed to hold a protest? So you end up doing that stuff in the middle
of the road, and nobody likes that. In 1866, the Reform League, who were protesting for
working-class men to have the right to vote, were stopped from holding their meeting in Hyde
Park and so they tore the railings down to get in. And then someone drew this cartoon of sad
policeman standing around the railings' grave??? And of course, an even more famous group of
protesters uses railings in a very different way: the suffragettes. Suffragettes are really famous
for chaining themselves to railings these days, although it wasn't what they were known
for at the time. Maybe as a society we're not really ready to talk about how many of
these women went window smashing. In 1908, members of the Women's Freedom League go into the
House of Commons and sit in the Ladies' Gallery. The public gallery used to be split into men's
and ladies sections, and the ladies section had this big grille across the front that made made
it really hard to hear what was going on. The Women's Freedom League start dropping leaflets
over the railing demanding the right to vote, and when the sergeant-at-arms goes up to
kick them out, he finds that they've chained themselves to the grille, and they have
to wrench it off the wall to get them out. When you do this to railings outside, it
has the same effect as protesters who glue themselves to the road today. It makes it harder
for police or security guards to drag you off, so you can keep speaking for longer and get more
attention on your cause. So, people who are hoping for big changes in society notice the railings. In
the 1890 book News from Nowhere by William Morris, the narrator wakes up one day in an actual
socialist utopia London, and he notices that when he walks past the British Museum,
which has massive railings around the front, that the building looks the same from the outside
except that the railings are gone. That's exactly what happens in real life during World War II
when all that tasty iron is needed for the war effort to make bombs and tanks and planes. Whoever
at Pathe had the idea to send a cameraman out to capture the railings being removed, I could
kiss you! What a great historical source! Oh, these guys should really
have welding masks. You know you can get lung cancer from welding fumes- oh. Never mind. Without the railings, the squares are open
to the public for the first time. The writer George Orwell, who is living and working around
Bloomsbury during the war, says that "many more green spaces were now open to the public, and you
could stay in the parks till all hours instead of being hounded out by grim-faced keepers".
As the war draws to a close, people start to ask whether they're going to be reinstated or
left open. People have sacrificed an awful lot in the war. Even if they've not personally been
sent to a war zone, they've been bombed, they've lost family members and friends, they might have
had their kids evacuated away from them, and have lived under strict rationing rules for years. Now
the war's over, people want to know that they did all this for a reason- that society is going to
be better after the war than it was before it. Remember, what was before the war was the Great
Depression, so people weren't anxious to go back to business as usual. But these days, almost all
the squares have had their railings reinstated. So what? You want to let people trample around
in your garden? You want to abolish all private property? You want to let people share your
toothbrush? As one writer to George Orwell puts it, "Are the squares to which you refer public
or private properties? If private, I suggest that your comments in plain language advocate nothing
less than theft and should be classed as such." Let me show you. Welcome to Russell Square! [optimistic music] So this one is open to the public. Now,
the Duke still owns it- don't worry, no one took his land away- but he made
a deal with the council- don't worry, the deal was voluntary, no one made him do this. The deal is that he opens it up to the
public, and in return the council pays for the upkeep. So they're the ones that take
the bins out and do the gardening and pick up the litter. And look how much more pleasure is
got out of this square! School groups can come and sit and eat their lunches here when
they're on the way to the British Museum; workers can come and eat their lunches here;
students can have parties; dogs get walked; kids play ball games; tired people can sit
down for five minutes; people can meet and have ideas and socialize and pass those ideas
on and make plans. They even have a cafe here. The worst thing about key gardens is that they're
not even a good substitute for private gardens, right You're still sharing them with everybody
else in your square, so it's not like you can sunbathe topless or hang your washing out. They're
often surrounded by big trees and high hedges, so you probably can't keep an eye
on your kid from the window while they play in the square. And in Bedford Square,
you're not even allowed to walk your dog or have a ball game in the garden that you pay for! Are
the people who live in Russell Square having a garden taken away from them? No- they never had a
private garden in the first place. They can still do all the things that they could do before in
here, except now, everybody gets to enjoy it. The cost is spread out over a much wider group
of people, so rather than just the people around the square paying for the upkeep through their
leases, now everyone in the borough pays for it through their council tax. Because it's open
to the public, people take more pride in it, so they don't chuck their rubbish over the fence
like they do in the private key gardens. And local businesses actually want to sponsor insect hotels
and lamp posts here, because they might get seen. There's a group of volunteers called the Friends
of Russell Square that do a lot of the planting, and that's not something you find in the
private key gardens. And there are dogs here! Isn't this better? Isn't this better? Vast: If giving the land of England
back to the people of England is theft, I'm quite happy to call it theft. In
his zeal to defend private property, my correspondent does not stop to consider how
the so-called owners of the land got hold of it. They simply seized it by force, afterwards
hiring lawyers to provide them with title deeds. It is desirable that people should own their own
dwelling houses, and it probably desirable that a farmer should own as much land as he can
actually farm. But the ground landlord in a town area has no function. He causes rents
to be higher, he makes town planning more difficult, and he excludes children from green
spaces. That is literally all that he does, except to draw his income. For three years or
so, the squares lay open and their sacred turf was trodden by the feet of working-class
children, a sight to make dividend drawers gnash their false teeth. If that is theft, all
I can say is, so much the better for theft.
