The Victorian Era

Victorian London

Article · Cities & Entertainment · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

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Victorian London was the largest city the world had ever seen, the capital of the British Empire, and the commercial, financial, and cultural centre of the world economy for the greater part of the nineteenth century. Its population rose from about 950,000 in 1800 to over 6.5 million in 1901, and its built-up area extended over 700 square miles of the Home Counties. The story of the city is set out in How big was Victorian London?, in How did London’s population grow?, and in the related pages of this section.

The Shape of the City

Victorian London was not one city but several, drawn together by slow growth and governed by a patchwork of overlapping authorities. At the centre, the City of London, the ancient square mile within the Roman and medieval walls, was the financial and legal core; its resident population fell from about 130,000 in 1800 to under 27,000 in 1901, as offices and warehouses displaced dwelling houses. Around the City stretched the great east and west expansions: the West End of Mayfair, Belgravia, and Kensington, the centre of fashion and government; the East End of Whitechapel, Bethnal Green, and Stepney, the centre of trade, manufacturing, and poverty; and the southern suburbs of Southwark, Lambeth, and Camberwell, which grew rapidly as the railway bridges and the new tramways brought them within reach of the City.

The County of London was created by the Local Government Act of 1888 and came into existence in 1889, replacing the old Metropolitan Board of Works (1855) with the London County Council. The new county covered 117 square miles, took in the whole of the built-up area of central London, and held a population of about 4.5 million in 1901. Beyond the county, the outer suburbs of the Metropolitan Police District — Willesden, Walthamstow, Croydon, and the rest — were governed by their own local boards and vestries, and the new London County Council had only a limited jurisdiction outside its boundaries.

Government and the Police

The governance of London was famously chaotic. The City of London Corporation governed the square mile, the boards of guardians ran the poor law unions, the vestries and district boards ran the rest of the metropolis, and a host of ad hoc boards and commissions dealt with sewers, paving, lighting, and improvements. The Metropolitan Board of Works, established in 1855 under the leadership of the engineer Joseph Bazalgette, was the first body with jurisdiction over the whole of the metropolis, and Bazalgette’s work on the London sewerage (1859–75) was its principal achievement. The London County Council, established in 1889, took over its responsibilities and was the first elected government of London as a whole.

The Metropolitan Police had been established by Sir Robert Peel in 1829, and by the 1880s it was the largest uniformed force in the world. Its headquarters at Scotland Yard on the Thames Embankment housed the Criminal Investigation Department, established in 1842. The City of London Police, a separate small force, looked after the square mile; and the Thames River Police, founded in 1798, watched the river.

The Great Buildings

The Victorian period rebuilt the centre of London with a series of great public buildings. The Palace of Westminster, designed by Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin after the fire of 1834, was completed in stages through the 1850s and 1860s; Westminster Abbey, next door, remained the church of the coronation and the burial place of the great. The Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand (George Edmund Street, opened 1882) housed the new Supreme Court of Judicature, the principal civil court in the country. The new Public Offices at Whitehall (built in stages from the 1850s) brought the government together on the bank of the Thames.

Outside the centre, the great railway termini were among the most spectacular buildings of the age. St Pancras (George Gilbert Scott and W.H. Barlow, 1868–76), King’s Cross (Lewis Cubitt, 1852), Paddington (Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Matthew Digby Wyatt, 1854), Victoria (Charles J. Phipps, 1860), Liverpool Street, and Waterloo were built to handle the new mass passenger traffic, and their train sheds were a new architecture of iron and glass. The Tower Bridge (Horace Jones and John Wolfe Barry, opened 1894) carried the road traffic across the Pool of London, and the London School Board offices (T.E. Collcutt, 1882), the Natural History Museum (Alfred Waterhouse, 1881), the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Gallery (William Wilkins, 1838, extended in the 1870s), and the Royal Albert Hall (Captain Francis Fowke, 1871) were the great buildings of the new London.

The Docks and the River

The Port of London was the largest port in the world for most of the Victorian period. The older docks — the West India, the East India, the London, the St Katharine, and the South West India — lined the Isle of Dogs and the Pool of London; the Royal Albert Dock (1880) and the King George V Dock (1921) were added in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. Tobacco, tea, sugar, and rubber were stored in their warehouses, and the East India Dock Road, the Commercial Road, and the Isle of Dogs were busy with shipping, merchants, and dockers.

The Thames itself was rebuilt in the period. Bazalgette’s Victoria Embankment, opened in stages from 1864, ran along the north bank from Blackfriars to Westminster; the Chelsea Embankment, opened in 1874, ran along the south from Chelsea to Battersea Bridge. The new bridges at Blackfriars, at Westminster (rebuilt 1862), at Charing Cross (rebuilt 1864), at Battersea, at Hammersmith, and at Tower brought the suburbs into the centre.

The Social Geography

The Victorian city was sharply divided by class. The wealthy lived in the West End and the new western suburbs — Mayfair, Belgravia, Kensington, Bayswater, Notting Hill — in the great terraced and detached houses of the new fashion. The middle classes lived in the south and the west, in Clapham, Camberwell, Brixton, Dulwich, and Lewisham, and in the outer suburbs that the new railways had opened up. The working classes lived in the East End, the riverside parishes, and the inner south — in the courts and cellars of Whitechapel, St Giles, and Southwark, and in the terraces of the new industrial suburbs.

The divisions of the city are examined in What was Jack the Ripper’s London like?, in the great sanitary crisis of What was the Great Stink of London?, and in the building of the new sewerage at How was the London sewer system built?. The social life of the city is described in What was a Victorian pub like?, in What were Victorian music halls?, and in How did the seaside become popular?.