A New Civilization? London Surveyed 1928-1940s

Fig. 1.

Sketch map showing Greater London, the County of London and the New Survey area. Frontispiece, The New Survey of London Life and Labour, vol. 3, London 1932. Outer thick line: Greater London boundary; Inner thick line: County of London boundary; Shaded portion: New Survey area; Circles: radii of 5, 10 and 15 miles from Charing Cross. Scale roughly 4 miles to 1 inch.

Anxious Histories

London . . . how it takes up private life and carries it on, without any effort.

Virginia Woolf, Diary, 1924.¹

If London goes on swelling much more, it will become completely intolerable, developing as it does a kind of city intelligence which is antisocial.

Aneurin Bevan, House of Commons 1935.²

London's expansion in the 1930s restructured the economic geography of the south-east corner of Britain and with it people's lives and futures. With a population of 8.65 million and still growing Greater London in 1937 stretched for a fifteen or twenty-mile radius from Charing Cross, an almost continuous conurbation (the word came into widespread use in the thirties) of 603 square miles which ate up agricultural land and swallowed small villages and towns, its population swelling not from more births (the birthrate fell in the interwar years) but from migration. London was described as both 'menacing and dangerous' by the Barlow Commission on the Geographical Distribution of the Industrial Population (1940): their violent and vampiric metaphors for the city – hacking, chopping, sucking – emphasized its annihilating advance.³

Ten years earlier London's growth had been seen as neither ominous nor dangerous. In the late nineteen-twenties a vision of the metropolis as a vital economic force, risen from the ashes of the Great War and governed by a progressive political authority which extended outward to empire and inward to an educated, democratic population was imposed over London's rambling development by the New Survey of London Life and Labour (1928–1935, hereafter NSL). The NSL, product of the London School of Economics, follow-up to Charles Booth's pioneering study forty years before, discovered higher incomes, a shorter working day, improved health and literacy. Above all poverty in the Eastern Survey had been reduced by two-thirds.⁴ Londoners were readers, gardeners, 'listeners-in'; they were musicians and dancers especially the Jewish community; acting was a ' "hobby" for all classes' so was gambling – women and men went to the dog-tracks just to place a bet; they attended adult-education classes, acquired 'the habit of travel' (the 'great leveller') and went to the cinema at least once a week at prices so cheap it kept the cost of all entertainments low. All these 'forces at work are combining to shift the main centre of interest of a worker's life more and more from his daily work to his daily leisure', the NSL ventured. Housing and communities beyond the county boundary reached by motor-bus and car on new arterial roads were evidence of a 'new civilisation' in which education, libraries, parks, playing-fields and open spaces formed the basis of the Londoner's 'self-culture'.⁵

In the late thirties, the NSL's optimism forgotten, new horrors entered a public mind gripped by the spectre of entire regions of Britain in chronic decline. Greater London's expansion threatened Britain's health and well-being, it was sucking the economic and human lifeblood out of the nation. The effects of the concentration of political and cultural power, the glaring imbalance of wealth and poverty in London were 'immeasurable' on the quality of everyday life, the economic well-being and physical health of all four nations. People and industries herded into vast conurbations, of which London was the most powerful, rendered Britain – a 'small island' – vulnerable to attack. Entire populations might be wiped out by enemy bombs in a future war because of the crowding of industry and housing close to the capital's centres of finance, commerce and government, a concentration of people and power as unnecessary as it was unwise, argued the Barlow Report.⁶ The Barlow...