Social and Spatial Politics in the Construction of Regent Street

London’s Regent Street, constructed in the 1810s and 1820s, was at the center of the large-scale metropolitan improvements carried out by the Crown in the pre-Victorian era. But while the boulevard and its creative genius, John Nash, have been alternately celebrated and reviled, scholars have paid little attention to the actual building of the street and the fate of those whose property was compulsorily acquired by the Crown. This essay looks at the struggle between the Crown and its bureaucrats and the mostly plebeian residents of the neighborhoods around Swallow Street, Piccadilly, and St. James’s Market and examines how these Londoners thought about the relationship between space and status, about the political and social—as well as financial—value of property, and about the nature of London’s spaces. The Crown believed in the abstract, exchangeable, and easily valued character of its freehold property. But dispossessed tenants and leaseholders insisted that the valuation of their neighborhoods—carried out by bureaucrats, architects, solicitors, and in some cases, Westminster juries—also take into account the customary use of London’s streets, markets and alleys, and the inherent value that everyday use gave these spaces. Although Nash succeeded in building his boulevard, the great and unanticipated cost of the project suggests that inhabitants’ promotion of local knowledge and local geographies was not merely subversive but was given credence (and assigned material value) over and against the rational and bureaucratic vision of John Nash and Crown bureaucrats.