The Five Catastrophes That Made London - Professor Dr Simon Thurley

well good evening ladies and gentlemen I've asked for the air conditioning to be turned down cold because my theory is is it's much harder to go to sleep if you're cold so we'll see we'll see whether it works well I'm looking forward to this evening very much and have been enjoying putting together this lecture my lectures have starts this evening with a premise and the premise that I think many of you who've been to my previous lectures will have heard me talk about before which is that London's history is unique it is the way London has developed is very different from other European cities and its history has created a place that has been exceptionally successful over an extremely long time it's a city which has a unique visual identity and I want to tonight reflect on these two points the facts that the city's been incredibly successful and that it looks different from other cities and the way I'm going to do it is through five moments in our history five moments of catastrophe and each of these catastrophes produced extraordinarily positive developments that fundamentally shaped London's future and gave it I think a unique advantage now I want you each silently in your heads to think what my five catastrophes are now I think it's I suspect everybody we'll get to it and turn them are very obvious a third one I think it's a bit harder to get and I think anyone who gets five is doing great also just just check him off in your mind and we'll see at the end whether anyone got them all right there isn't a price there's just the satisfaction of knowing well of course the hundreds of years London was just another European city rather a small one in fact much smaller than Paris it was not particularly notable or it was not particularly economically successful but suddenly around 1650 London's economy took off and within a century London became Europe's largest city and a hundred years after that London was the richest city in the world and I think probably the undisputed global capital and the tipping point in this extraordinary process the moment that London changed from being a city to being the city came about between 1530 and 1630 and that is where I want to start this evening some of you who heard me talking about the big sweep of English history will remember this graph because in the 1530s and the population of England started to grow again so this is in the Middle Ages here's the black death population crashes stagnates for hundreds of years in the 1530s the population starts going up and this is important and because while the national population expanded the population of London grew twice as fast and what you see here is a very good graph that shows all the sort of major cities in London in Europe if what Constantinople the largest city in Europe Paris Naples Amsterdam Madrid etc and here you have London this extraordinary rapid growth in its population again from the early Tudor period up here to about 1750 London's exceptional growth was not due to increased fertility but due to migration because from the 1650s around 10,000 people a year or coming into London to make it their home now historians argue and sometimes vociferous Lee as to whether this migration was push in other words where the people were pushed out of the countryside into London or whether it's Paul whether people were attracted to come to London to make their fortune well as always with these historical and conundrums it was a bit of both but as today London was a honeypot because of its wealth and in the 17th century that wealth was based on the export of woollen cloth when Henry the eighth's came to the throne London was exporting about 43 percent of England's finished cloth by his death in 1547 London was exporting 86 percent of the country's cloth production and the tax take from this export was as large as the tax take from all the other towns in England combined and in the 15th century the main trading place for London merchants was in Lombard Street not far from here and it was out in the open in 1531 Antwerp rebuilt its bourse demonstrating the enormous benefits of a purpose-built indoor trading centre although Henry the eighth's wanted to follow suit wanted to build a boss in London it wasn't in fact until 1564 when the great Sir Thomas Gresham founder of this College and London's wealthiest merchant offered to build one at his own expense I'm sure that Gresham wanted this to be called the Gresham exchange but unfortunately at the opening Queen Elizabeth offered very generously to give it her royal title and obviously Gresham couldn't really refuse so this building the Royal Exchange contained a pantheon of the kings and queens in England here they were statues of them sitting in these niches and this Royal Exchange was in every way a royal structure symbol at the joint interest that the corporation of London the merchants and the crown had in London's rapidly rising prosperity the profits of trade were huge and coincided with the first of the five massive historic changes to the physical structure of London I want to mention tonight the first change was the suppression of the monasteries and here you see Antonius van den vin de gardez panorama from the thames and you can just see a few of the monasteries dotted around in the city now it really is impossible today to understand how cataclysmic and how chance how traumatic the suppression of the monasteries was obviously this was the complete erosion of a belief system the erosion of a way of life a world picture but it was also physically devastating for the city 23 major royal houses were suppressed and sold most were simply demolished for their building materials and the value of land on which they stood the whole topography of the city of land London was transformed in a period of less than five years now this map that I'm showing you here shows you the locations of the principal religious houses in 1530 and you can see what an extraordinary amount of City but also the immediate environs of the city was made up of monastic land but this map tells a very partial story because the true picture has to take into account as well as the monastic precincts the religious houses the huge amount of secular property that was owned by the monasteries over 100 monasteries owned buildings and land in the city and for example st. Mary's spittle and Sint Mary Clark and well both up here owned property in 60 parishes in the city of London in fact I think on the eve of the Reformation around 60% of the city of London of the area inside the walls was owned by religious institutions 60% this of course colored the whole London property market for the church wasn't an aggressive nor was it a progressive landlord and when all the church land holdings came onto the market at one time this meant a change in landlord thousands and thousands of tenants in the city many of the big monastic sites were brought by aristocrats and many of them converted them into their own houses some of the urban rental properties were bought by rich merchants who plowed the profits of their wool trade into real estate and these merchants who bought houses and in today's parlance for buy-to-let took a much more commercial attitude than the church ever had investing in their new properties and rebuilding them to push up yields by raising rents and here you see some very typical property just around the corner from here commercially built by merchants to make money out of their investments so what was the effect of all of this in the long term well the dissolution came at just the point when London's population was growing fast the expansion and diversification of the property market increased capacity for residential for commercial and for industrial development and a really important aspect of this was the ability of the aristocracy to buy into the London property market from around 30 aristocrats living in London at the start of Elizabeth's reign though around 90 living there during by the Civil War along the Strand developed a whole string of huge aristocratic mansions the former residences of bishops and Abbot's and his John norden's map of London City of London's over here Westminster's over here here the Strand and along here these words you can can't smudge Lisi are the words identifying the great aristocratic town houses chock-a-block along the Strand largest and most magnificent of these of course was Northumberland house you see here on the corner of what is now Northumberland Avenue now the reason why so many aristocrats came to London almost all of them occupying former church property was because of the rejuvenated royal court under the Tudors no longer were aristocrats fighting each other and some of the time fighting the crown with their private armies as they'd been doing during the Wars of the Roses now they wanted to be in London close to the court which was the route to power and advancement so the availability of church land made it much easier for the nobility to establish themselves in the city and the effect of these 90 aristocratic families on London's economy was absolutely enormous these people and in particular their wives and their families wanted to go shopping and from the late Elizabethan period shopping became the underpinning dynamic producer of wealth in the capital here's the Royal Exchange we saw it a few moments ago this included two floors of kiosks above the arcades selling luxury goods shoes watches silk gloves ribbons and many more things - these little kiosks measured only five foot by seven and a half feet but each one could generate enormous profits for their tenants in 1609 Robert Cecil Earl of Salisbury Queen Elizabeth's chief minister a prime minister if you like commissioned a rival Emporium on the Strand amidst the houses of the Ariston aristocracy like the Royal Exchange it had a streetside arcade which you see here and the buffett there were a hundred shops on two levels these buildings the Royal Exchange and this one which is called the great British exchange were a whole new concept in shopping elite customers weren't forced to walk on the dirty streets but could browse in comfort and relative privacy the upper floors of the new exchange and you see a plan of it down here it's very very small recreated a long gallery and fashionable shop and shoppers could now parade up and down as they bought their house shoes fans and goodness knows what else so the royal court the wool trade shopping immigration and the sale of church assets redrew the economic and physical map of London after 1530 and the combination of these factors was unique to London in no other city in Christendom was political power and commerce so centralized in one city when it was this city it was this shopping mecca that was in 1666 destroyed by the second great physical change to hit London of the 400 they were just one of the many juicy photograph paintings of the fire they've been great if there had been photography but sadly not and here is a map just showing the 488 acres of the inside of the city 373 of them destroyed by the great fire that's 83% of the ground area 40 an extra 63 acres here were destroyed destroyed in the western suburbs well this apparent catastrophe was and some of you who have heard me say this before in reality one of the best things that ever happened to London because like the dissolution of the monasteries it allowed the city to completely reinvent itself for a second time the most important really long-term effect of the Great Fire was to depopulate the square mile in 1550 most Londoners lived in the square mile by 1700 most lenders lived outside it of the 13,500 houses burnt in the great fire only around 4,000 were rebuilt just think of that for a moment thirteen and a half thousand destroyed 4,000 rebuilt vast vast difference and many of the ones that were rebuilt the speculative developers found very hard to let because even after the fire the city was crowded and polluted living there was expensive and vexatious and downright hard work as a disproportionate number of people had to serve on the top heavy governance of 26 wards 242 precincts and over 100 parishes incredibly cumbersome top-heavy government governance well in 1667 charles ii had specified that new houses had to be built of brick and he specified the height and type of building that rebuilt in any specific location his King's Bench walk which shows very nicely what were described in 1670 67 as houses of a larger sort this was the first comprehensive government intervention in the planning of London have been many others before but this was a completely comprehensive scheme for the rebuilding of the city stimulated entirely by the effects of the fire and a scheme that had a huge impact on the appearance not only the capital but in due course on the whole country la the new houses constructed after 1666 were not an invention of the 1660s they had in fact been being built since the 1630s but the huge demand the building after the fire meant that they became the ubiquitous face of the city now some historians have argued that this was somehow the birth of classical architecture in London but I don't see this myself this was a native homegrown solution to modernizing the sort of houses that were lived in by thousands of people before the fire most of the early terraces and I'm not showing you early terraces here I'll explain what this is in a second were in fact timber-framed and the neat brick exteriors that you see in the stratum like that were a non structural decorative skin over a structural timber frame these houses were built by a generation of get-rich-quick speculative builders who built as quickly as they could using a kit of prefabricated materials the houses were stylistically minimalist because they could be built cheaply and sold cheaply this was the birth of the quintessential English Terrace a housing type that went to go on and dominate our towns and cities well into the 20th century and here you see Gower Street in Bloomsbury a very very typical site and throughout England and you can see how incredibly minimalist this stylus and it's really really plain just though the windows the simplest door cases simplest cornice 20th century minaret minimalism has got nothing on what was invented in terms of the terrace so the great fire enabled a new start a new type of mass housing and handsome paved streets populated with modern churches and public buildings there was a new Royal Exchange a new cathedral a rebuilt guild hall London now was cleaner more modern more uniform than any city in Europe than Paris for instance and it remains so until the night mid 19th century when the great rebuilding of the 19th center of nineteenth-century cities took place it's very very easy when you go to Paris now to think that it's much regular a much more regular City than London but of course in the 17th century it was the opposite way round but most importantly London's suburban growth from the great fire until after the first world war was absolutely continuous now we have to remember just just remember this that in 1931 London was still five times larger than Calcutta which was then the largest city in the British Empire London was absolutely enormous speculators developed parts of London with terraced houses in exactly the same way as they had done in the 1660s and unlike continental cities where there were no blocks of flats after 1900 the worse and blocks of flats but basically it was a city of of terraces and and latterly some detached houses there were no great state-sponsored rebuilding schemes just continuous relentless commercial development spreading London further and further and further out and as London outgrew the walls of the city and elegant streets and squares spread out west and workers housing spread out east became the problem of connectivity one that wasn't solved by the barge or the horse but by steam power and the construction of the railways did more to alter the cityscape and change the lives of the inhabitants of London than either of my first two catastrophes the suppression of the monasteries or the great fire in September 1830 the world's first intercity passenger railway opened the business running between Manchester and Liverpool here is the terminus in Manchester it already possessed the characteristics of most of the railway system that was to come afterwards the capacity to move high volumes of people and goods long distances on fixed routes at speed and speed of course was a phenomenon that terrified the early users many believed that they would be brain damaged or unborn babies would be deformed by going at 30 miles an hour of course they weren't but what speeds did was annihilate distance by 1852 no town of any size in England was more than a day's journey from the capital during the 40 years that followed 1830 the core of Britain's railway network was built and by 1871 it covered fifteen thousand seven hundred and thirty six miles about 66 percent of what British Rail was operating essentially later had already been built by 1871 investment came in waves 1830 to 1840 1845 to 1847 1862 to 65 but by 1870 the railway companies in Britain had invested 530 million pounds in land track buildings and rolling stock and they operated an entirely new business model they were not the traditional family firm that still characterized most enterprises but these were public joint-stock companies with a limited liability and dispersed ownership and a separate managerial destructor structure what we would recognize as a plc today like the canals before them they relied on individual acts of Parliament to authorize land purchase and construction at the height of Railway mania when investors were tell using money into the railway companies and engineers were working round the clock on bigger and more ambitious proposals the effects on central London were drastic to say the least at one point in 1840 no fewer the 19 lines were proposed to terminate in central London with their terminal and here you can see central London the Inns of Court and here you see these and these huge railway stations that were proposed to penetrate right into the heart of the West End and the city these proposals would have sliced London up into small pieces of land with islands of old building stranded by massive new viaducts and cuttings it was decided in the face of these draconian proposals that the normal select committee procedure that would have scrutinized each separate railway proposal had to be replaced by something that looked at London in a more strategic sense and so a Royal Commission was set up that would consider the merits and the demerits of what these railway companies were proposing their dilemma the dilemma of this Royal Commission was this if the railways were allowed to do what they wanted to do represented on the screen here the destruction would be colossal hundreds of thousands of poor people would be displaced and they thought that rather than these poor people being moved out to the suburbs which actually would have been too expensive for them to buy houses in they would simply reoccupy the remaining Villain buildings in the centre of the city increasing overcrowding and intensifying the slums but on the other hand if the railways weren't allowed into the centre and were to be stuck on the periphery as the companies claimed the streets of London would soon be gridlocked by people moving goods around well this Royal Commission which reported in 1846 in the end banned stations being built south of the Euston Road or north of the river and thereby keeping the termini outside the central districts and this you can see the effect of it the Euston Road and the north is a barrier and the river in the south no termini in central London and this is why London amongst European cities was extremely unusual because in almost every other city in London there is one main railway station usually called terminus or terminal or something but in London when Marylebone station opened in 1899 it was the 15th London terminus to be built only Paris was unusual - with ate almost every other European city went for a single station well the eventual solution to a very unsatisfactory situation which this Royal Commission had created whereby if he wanted to travel from the north of the South you had to get off south of the river you had to cross the river you had to cross London on a cab and then get onto a railway and go north was to try and link these peripheral term RI by underground railways and so the Metropolitan Railway from Paddington to Farringdon which opened in 1863 started a transformation in urban travel though at first it stole custom from Road carriers it managed actually to expand the market and it was soon carrying 9 million passengers so up to 1859 the only railway terminus in the City of London was at Fenchurch Street all the others stopped south of the river or outside the square mile but between 1859 and 1867 the railways penetrated into the heart of residential and commercial London the reason that Parliament dropped its opposition to this was the massive success of the Metropolitan Railway so for new term and I came over the river to into the city at blood Gate Hill and Cannon Street while from the North came Broad Street the corporation of London but in Parliament to stop the development because it was literally tearing the city apart but despite this approval was given for two more bridges and a station at Blackfriars linking north and south London and finally a really massive new commuter terminus at Liverpool Street now I don't have a precise figure for the extent of the destruction caused by railway and construction in the square mile but we should have no doubt that it was colossal perhaps affecting as much as 25 percent of the city underground railways in the nineteenth century as you see as you saw on this slide here were cut and cover and the Metropolitan line and later the modern Circle Line took a trench a hundred feet wide to build so you can imagine these great slaves of destruction cut through the city many other lines such as Broad Street were built upon V adapts to cross roads and to provide commercial storage space bolon many of you will remember as I do the viaduct that went across Lud great circus ins blocked out the viewers at Paul's Cathedral which you see there the cost of all this was of course huge so big that no one really could afford to buy land in the richest residential areas of the West End and it was only with the deep tunneled central lines that the tube finally reached Mayfair but quite apart from the public and commercial buildings that were destroyed railway construction displaced at least a hundred and twenty thousand people their homes were demolished and replaced by railway lines and I absolutely love this is very very famous this is Gustave doré raised view and you see here the way that the railway arches and the bio ducts cut through this the workers housing the workers all squeezed in and gives a wonderful impression of the the the impact of the railways of course the railways transformed London doubled tripled or quadrupled land values wherever they went the nature of land use at the term and I changed they are captured warehouses and offices they displaced houses and shops and in their hinterland they bought sidings coal yards and gas works you see you've got to remember that before the arrival of passengers railways had basically been designed to transport coal and the first railways such as the Stockton and Darlington railway of 824 1825 were built to solve the problem of moving coal around and here you see the Stockton and Darlington railway these are the coal trucks and here are peoples of hitching a lift in coal trucks and this was why they were built and so the real prize for the commercial railway operators were it was to bring coal into London in the 1840s 3 million tons of coal were brought into London Docks by coastal shipping the railways took the docks head-on and by 1856 the railways were supplying nearly 30 percent of the Capitals coal and by 1867 they were supplying more than half and most of this came in through the Great North Northern Railway into the Kings Cross Goods yard and here you see his wonderful and great aerial picture saying train King's Cross at Kings Cross and pancreas and the vast area here to the north which was covered by Goods yards to mainly deal with the coal 59 acres in fact one of the largest railway Goods yards in Britain and when it opened in 1852 the most impressive facility of its kind in the world here and at all the main Goods yards there was huge provision for stabling horses because of course when the trains disgorged their goods there was no other way for distributing the goods other than by horsepower whether the goods were going to go in a cart or were going to go on a canal and so these railway Goods yards had vast stables industrial staples in 1893 the London railway companies alone had stables for twenty eight thousand horses these are the wonderful mint stables in Paddington which is still partially there these would double deckers stables to make the most of the land value they were designed for six hundred horses so the railways reshaped the city and its surroundings like nothing before it by 1870 the railways were delivering two hundred thousand people into the heart of the city every day men and women who stuffed the merchants offices the banks the insurance companies that generated the city's wealth between the 1840s and the 1870s these institutions transformed the city with a firework display of architectural 30 was a team incredibly destructive development led to the fundamental changes in creating the the Commerce of the city before the square mile before the railways the square mile had been largely made up of residential scale Georgian buildings it was now transformed and because of the coming of the railways eighty percent of the buildings standing in the city in 1855 were demolished and replaced by 1900 so in 50 years because of the massive commercial development enabled by all these people coming into the city eighty percent of the city was completely replaced the population of London as a consequence fell from one hundred and twenty nine thousand in 1852 only twenty-six thousand in 1900 the charge for new buildings was led by the insurance companies eager to use their offices to infuse their businesses with a sense of confidence solidity and endurance the earliest in the city is the Atlas Insurance office just around the corner from here I'm still standing in Cheapside built in 1838 a smooth essay in classicism but by the 1860s the insurance companies look to their headquarters to convey very different messages this is a message about solidity about tradition about reassurance by the 1860s the architecture of these insurance offices were basically an extension of their advertising budget here is the royal insurance company headquarters a company started in Liverpool constructing a huge flamboyant building in Lombard Street in 1857 banks also started to move from sober and domestic premises to Italianate offices similar similar to those occupied by the insurance company and so here you've got the headquarters of the national provincial Bank which of course eventually morphed into the NatWest bank on Bishopsgate you can see the NatWest tower behind it this is the best of the 19th century banks built in 1860 four to five to replace an 18th century mansion built in 1750 from which the bank was conducting its business up until that point this new building proclaimed the bank as a National rather than just as a provincial success and you can see that in many ways it's architecture was aping the architecture of the Bank of England itself with these huge giant Corinthian plasters on its front it was very much this Victorian and Edwardian commercial city that was subjected to the forth of my destructive forces the Blitz during the war its was possible for a city like Sheffield to deceive the German bombers and don't to divert their deadly payload away from the city center but London still the largest city on the planet was an unmissable 12 mile wide target between September 1940 and May 1941 it was subjected to the most devastating aerial bombardment during the first three months every night on average a hundred and sixty bombers dropped 200 tons of high explosive and 1882 canisters of incendiaries on the city on October the 15th there were 410 Raiders dropping 538 tons of explosive in the first six weeks of bombing a quarter of a million were made homeless and on the 29th of December 1940 there was the Second Great Fire of London in one night 64,000 incendiary bombs rained down on London igniting a massive swathe of building from some poles to Islington in the city of London a hundred and sixty-four after four hundred and sixty acres a building were destroyed that's to say 36% of the area the Blitz like its destructive predecessors the suppression the great fire the railways redrew the economic and architectural rules of the city more than half its industrial and warehouse buildings were destroyed and by 1947 forty percent on its industrial workers had left and more to follow over the following decade industry had in fact been leaving the city before the war but the Blitz resulted in a massive shift in the city's economy away from industry to trade and commerce the context of post-war rebuilding was like that of 1666 state intervention and control which at first held back we construction but in the early 1950s after the Conservatives liberalized the property market a property boom was unleashed across London which resulted in the construction of 24 million square feet of office space in just eight years by 1962 there was a hundred and fourteen million square feet of office space in London twice what there had been in 1938 just as the London of the 1660s and 1670s had been built by speculators building cheap fast and minimally so was the office estate of the nineteen fifties history repeated itself almost exactly so what was the attitude of the corporation of London to this massive building boom their consultants for the city restoration were the architects Charles Holden and the planner William Hallford they said and I quote it would not be wise to adopt a new aesthetic and a new scale for building in the City of London until the old one has been definitively lost or outmoded the 17th century scale should be preserved and sent Paul's Cathedral the noblest in the country should remain architectural II as in other ways the chief building well this was a fine ambition but in practice it was impossible to achieve in the first years after the war until around 1955 most office buildings in the city were built of Portland stone with stripped backed classical details very much in the vein of the 1930s this was the initial ambition to take up the historical roots of the city as the foundation for reconstruction here's Bracken house very good example fact the best example of this generation of buildings but everyone here will probably be familiar with the recently demolished number one new change much more typical of the quality if not the scale of office buildings built in the fifties however in 1953 to 1958 buckless brie house was constructed the first building in the city in a modernist style but presbury house demonstrated the buildings with an exposed frame and glass and precast panels could be built much more cheaply and much faster and therefore much more profitably than those like this that were built in a classical style so in 1955 at fountain house and Fenchurch Street the developer switch styles and introduced the first american-style tower and podium and the first block with an all glass curtain wall so here's he the podium and he see the block on top and you see these curtain walls here all made of glass and these sorts of blocks went on to dominate the city during the 1960s and the 1970s the corporation of London was also a major developer in this vein determined not to make the same mistake as they thought was made in 1916 67 the corporation spent 13 million pounds buying up a hundred and 15 acres of bomb sites round sand Paul's Cathedral the Barbican and fetter Lane corporations commercial buildings included six almost identical eighteen storey tower blocks in London wall as the commercial zone of the Barbican development and of course we are sitting underneath the only surviving one of those bastian house when you go out there you'll see that one but it was originally as you can see from this view down London wall just one of a number I said the corporation spent 13 million pounds buying up the land they actually spent thirty 1 million pounds buying up the land just for that record the problem with city office building in this period is that it was at best of middling quality and it was not built to last only bracken house has been listed out of the scores of new city office buildings erected between 1945 and 1980 in the city of London in the West End a small number of buildings from the same period have been listed Center Point which is currently being converted into residential accommodation The Economist group building the Milbank Tower New Zealand house just off Trafalgar Square but this isn't to say that the corporation didn't make a contribution to post-war architecture because of course it commissioned the Barbican Centre one of the largest and most spectacular pieces of state-sponsored architectural patronage in English history but essentially I think there was a failure of design in the city in the post-war period a failure that partially explains my next image this map ladies and gentlemen was given to me by the recently retired city planning officer Peter Rees and it shows in red and in orange the area of the City of London redeveloped between 1985 and 2005 every one of those blobs there is a redeveloped site in the 18 in the 1980s and 1990s if you compare this with the map showing redevelopment between 1945 and 1985 you will see that barely a single corner of the City of London remains undeveloped twice since the Second World War well Leon Trotsky said that war was the locomotive of history and there is a huge truth in this war catastrophe revolutions push societies push economies push cultures on five years of the suppression of the monasteries for days of the Great Fire of London eight years of railway construction and 57 days of the Blitz accelerated changes in London that had been inherent and had allowed the city to reinvent itself afterwards never let anyone tell you that history has held this city back you only need to look at that development map again to see the city see that the city has been almost entirely reinvented over the last 25 years this city has been driven by Cataclysm by sharp destructive physical change but change that has allowed it to renew itself and change that has given it a crucial economic advantage at each turn out of disaster the money inventiveness and creativeness of the city has thrown up buildings of interest and sometimes of great distinction and this is a very important point because the quality of the cities and built environment is the bellwether it's sim sim belies 'as the cultural health and vibrancy of the metropolis great civilizations build great architecture and create great art it's no coincidence that Elizabethan London in its great period of expansion was home to Shakespeare and the Southbank theatres buildings unique in Europe showing plays recognized the world round as amongst the greatest ever written and out of the Great Fire of course came Ren and Hook and his companions who created the greatest single corpus of religious buildings and the incredible skyline of London invented in the 20 or 30 years after the Great Fire I could go on but I'm not going to my point is very simple one that the quality of our built environment depends on cultural confidence which in itself is generated by economic success economic success is reliant on attracting people to live and work in centers of economic activity and we know that people are attracted to places where the environment is beautiful so there is a virtuous circle but hold on he said five catastrophes I've only spoken about four now who honestly got all five who got who got four who got three yeah quite a few people got three that's good well ladies and gentlemen I've got some bad news for you this evening because we are now living through the fifth catastrophe this is a catastrophic housing crisis a crisis that means today 40,000 households are homeless or in temporary accommodation and a further 220,000 living in overcrowded conditions a crisis that will see the minimum deposit to buy a house rise in London to a hundred thousand pounds by 2020 and here you see a graph showing the rise in house price house prices over the last few years a crisis that could mean that by 2040 the only people who could afford to buy a house in London is a banker did you know that if the price of food had risen that exactly the same rate as house prices over the last 30 years your supermarket chicken would cost you 47 pounds your jar of coffee would cost you 20 pounds private rents in London rose by an average of 750 pounds a year in 2012 alone and on top of this population growth is expected to add a further eight hundred and fifty thousand houses in the capital by 2031 now the carrot the causes of this that ongoing catastrophe are very complicated we've got absolutely no time tonight to go into it all even if I were qualified talk about it but a basic fact is that before the Second World War private developers were regularly building 300,000 houses a year in the 1950s and in the 1960s we were still building more than 300,000 houses a year nearly half of them were being built by local authorities by being by the councils but in the last few years we have been building fewer than a hundred thousand a year in London we need to build 33,000 new houses a year but only 25,000 were completed in 2011 and this is not enough to keep up with new demand let alone to deal with the backlog so we have a problem and we have a problem that has huge absolutely huge architectural consequences which no one really has got to grips with yet where are we going to put hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of new homes and what are they going to look like you have may have read that over 320 tower blocks taller than 20 storeys are currently being planned for London 70 of them which you see on this map here are currently under construction let me introduce you to stratosphere in Stratford get it and to one the elephant in elephant and castle and almost up now 199 Westminster Bridge Road these ladies and gentlemen are the face of London in the future so each time through history a huge crisis has led to changes that have made London stronger better and more successful from the pain has genuinely history shows us come game but what of this housing crisis the catastrophe in waiting for the 21st century one that will probably make it impossible for my seven-year-old twins to buy a house in London in 20 years time if the response to this carefully thought-out will the radical fundamental change to the appearance and character of London be for the better or for the worse will we emerge stronger in the global economy or will we emerge weaker well of course we don't yet know but you probably will all have your opinions so what I suggest is that we reconvene in 2026 and see what's happened thank you very much

Channel: Gresham College

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Keywords: built environment, environment, housing, Post-war, English Reformation, london, Church, properties, Aristocracy, developers, Landlords, Square Mile, Residential, Rail, Railways, Train stations, city, London City, Blitz, world war 2, London Great Fire, rebuilding, gresham, gresham talk, gresham lecture, Built Environment lecture, Built Environment talk, Dr Simon Thurley, Professor Dr Simon Thurley, Built Environment Professor, gresham built environment

Id: 1ZrzY0R_yz8

Length: 53min 59sec (3239 seconds)

Published: Wed May 25 2016

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Professor Dr Simon Thurley identifies the five events that shaped London’s landscape as we know it today.

London is the most dynamic old world city on the planet – renewal has been at the heart of its success. Disaster has never been courted, but when it has come it has provided the platform for advances that have been at first sight architectural but with hindsight economic and social.