Olsen ascribes most of the pleasures of London, the built environment, to the work of the Victorians. In so doing, he spends much time defending the suburbs, particularly the richer ones with varied architecture. He often makes the argument that anything still as enjoyable as the Victorian suburbs were and are is in itself good.
Oddly, on the way, he made their Victorian inhabitants seem less and less charming. The social and aesthetic argument he returns to again and again is that the Victorian taste is individualist, for variety and specificity and self-expression, and that the changes in experience that a suburb-and-city life provides on a daily schedule are wonderful.
But most of the houses built were really very like each other, by his own admission, and although he argues that that was 'only' to save money, he admits that they were popular. The Victorian impulse to make things distinct also wanted to put them in a hierarchy of value, especially anything involving class, and the suburbs practically invented class segregation:
Why England, for centuries one of the freest and most open of European societies, should have become by the twentieth century the one most obsessed by class is a question to which no satisfactory answer has yet been given. Whether or not the social geography of Victorian London helped to further that obsession, it certainly reflected it.
And, on inspection, most of the evidence that individual expression was the goal of architecture is from builders' and architects' professional journals. Obviously they gained profit and professional status by making this claim. It seems to me that the inhabitant only wanted the new style when it had been approved; a great many of the nonprofessional statements are not about style, but about how important it is to keep anyone poor from living near anyone richer, even if the poor are decent and their housing isn't being replaced.
Really, compared to shoving everyone below you on the social ladder further down, attempts to climb up after the rich look benign.
Classification, family sentiment, and a combined envy and scorn of the French turn up as often as individualism. All were concerned in the insistence on houses instead of flats. In a flat, one might—even a lady might—pass someone of a different station on the stairs. Nor did they allow Panopticon oversight of one's servants. Olsen quotes Builder, vol. xxxiv (1876) p.291:
The most important of these [objections to living in flats] is perhaps the manner in which the servants of all the families inhabiting the same house are lodged together in the upper or mansard story, with a separate entrance from the street, and thus entirely apart from all supervision from their employers except when actually on duty.¹
All the rooms, numerous even if they had to be tiny, provided each member of the family room for self-development, or maybe presented a hierarchy of power and privacy and propriety. I can believe it depended on the family as much as the architecture. I still like the fact that Oliver Sacks' large Edwardian childhood house had two piano rooms, so people could practise in clashing musical styles. Still, I'm not convinced that it was an innately good impulse, or even usually a benign one.
One essential suburban quality, repellent to its detractors, cherished by its inhabitants, is that of make-believe, the denial of the economic basis of its existence, the exclusion of other classes and of any sort of manufacture, the relegation of essential trades to segregated back streets. ... The most successful suburb was the one that possessed the highest concentration of anti-urban qualities: solitude, dulness, uniformity, social homogeneity, barely adequate public transportation, the proximity of similar neighborhoods - remoteness, both physical and psychological, from what is mistakenly regarded as the Real World.
Mmmm. Condemned out of his own mouth again, I think. If the city depended on the suburb the way the suburb did on the city, or if I thought the image of the perfect, pretty, moral life were not used to transfer actual power from the poor to the rich, then it would not matter what was Real. But the Victorian suburbanization depended, as ours does, on always selling people the outside ring, which gets more depressing and cheaper specifically because suburbs leapfrog past it. What it liked it destroyed. Some neighborhoods and ex-towns were luckier or better planned, but on the whole it's still beggar-thy-neighbor.
I wish I were more familiar with London, the author assumes it. I was amused by his explaining that the Victorians thought of railways what 1970s Londoners thought of motorways (although, of course, the Victorians thought of roads with horses and bicycles on them, and the 1970s had seen both rail and autos.) Apparently the thing about traffic is that no successful city has ever built its way out of it (so we might as well walk).
Other subjects: the wide variety of intentions and results from the noble and foundational estates, which kept ownership of the property and could (didn't always) control what was on it, through 99-year building leases and 21-year repairing ones. The poor are always with the argument, though they don't say much nor is much said about them. They finally escaped the slums when the railways were ?required? to provide workingmen's fares - at 5.30 AM the trains into town were cheaper than for the 9 AM office commuters. Not clear whether this was for the benefit of the poor, or because there couldn't otherwise be any workers living in reach of London's massive needs. All sorts of private enterprise for infrastructure, sometimes possible because of the huge contiguous estates, very frequently bankrupt before finishing.
¹ Heaven forfend.
ISBN: 0 14 055182 4
So wrote clew in Cities. , History (19th c.). | TrackBack