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JULIAN BEINART: To describe the spatial history of London
in 45 minutes is impossible.
London has to be seen in the light of a number of issues.
It's the greatest open city in history.
I'm going to be interested in the spatial development
of London from about 1750 onwards, the period which
we have demarcated as being the advent of modernism.
Sit down.
London was first occupied by the Romans in 43 AD.
And they stayed in England until about 400
AD, a long period of time.
London never built great walls.
As I said in a previous class, the walls in Europe
are widest on the east and get distinctly less.
Paris rebuilt the walls a number of times, as late
as the 19th century.
But the British, separated from continental Europe,
never invested a great deal in protecting the city.
The crossing of the River Thames was towards the northeast--
that is, towards what is now the city of London,
the business and most protected original part of London.
The period post [INAUDIBLE] can be characterized
by the application of the British
of a number of contested arenas of social life
and economic life.
Already in 1838, the Chartist movement
agitated for the Democratic use of the vote.
The first labor unions were starting
to be originated in the early 19th century.
Charged labor was put out of business.
The origins of public housing--
the state never built housing for people
except if there had to be housed under poverty conditions.
Most of the cities in pre-English Europe
relied on religious powers and charity to house people.
There was no notion that the public had any responsibility
for housing the population.
So at least amongst the many innovations
that this period endorses, one would
include the major, major, major organization
of the state towards environmental improvement,
taking care of public sanitation,
the origin of welfare, state health, building bylaws,
the emergence of women's rights, the laws
against racial discrimination, and the emergence
of the first--
I would call the modern city-planning organization
with London County Council, 1889 to 1965, the most dramatic
state organization to organize the application
of spatial and social principles.
The London County Council--
one of the problems about city planning
is that you need an organization internal to the state
or to the city to maintain the quality of work.
Outside consultants are OK.
Unlike architecture, with outside consultants,
you can build a building.
City planning is a continuous process
of adjustment, management of public wealth
and private wealth.
And one of the biggest problems of working
in many parts of the world today, for me,
is to adjust the level of work in relation
to the level of the capacity of application.
There's no point in using advanced levels of spatial
control in a city which cannot maintain its application
and adjustment.
I'm just, at the moment, engaged with the city of Abu Dhabi, who
wants some help making a new strategic plan.
They want to do it without outside consultants.
They want to do it through their own internal labor force.
The real question is whether they're going to be able to.
But that's an ongoing discussion,
which I'm having with them.
London had already established an enormous number
of characteristics of a cultured and open city.
Shakespeare bought a house in London in 1613.
He paid for it through the profits
he made on theater audiences in central London.
John Locke, in 1685--
1689, perhaps-- published a paper
arguing for the separation of church and state.
It was really towards the end of the 17th century.
London has maintained itself as an open city.
2.6 million of the current population of London
are foreign-born.
That's about 30% of the population of London today
are foreign-born.
I think that's roughly equivalent to Los Angeles.
I'm not sure about Los Angeles, but forgive me.
I'm just guessing.
I should know, but I don't know a great deal.
I read from the New York Times, March the 4th, 2012, writing
about London.
Every month, some young bureaucrat
in the Chinese State Administration
of Foreign Exchange reaches out to a trader in London
and buys or sells billions worth of US treasury bonds.
London is the world's largest market for dollars.
So if you think about all the money
that's being paid by the Chinese government,
it's paid to London.
London has remained the central economic site
for a great deal of the international world.
We thought, perhaps, by looking at some
of the spatial attributes from the two major disasters,
the fire of 1666 and the plague epidemic of 1666--
no modern city has ever been struck by two major disasters
so close to one another.
The Fire of London was the greatest fire
the world had ever seen.
On the 1st of September, 1666, the wooden structures
close to the river, to the docks,
exactly the same as Chicago in the Chicago Fire
200 years later--
the mayor was apparently unimpressed
when first called to the scene.
He expostulated, pish, a woman might piss this out.
He woke up the next day to find half the world
around him destroyed.
The fire interested us less than the fact
that five days after the flames had been controlled,
a young professor of anatomy called
Christopher Wren, not yet widely known as an architect,
approached the king with a plan.
The plan took no account whatever of the medieval street
plan.
He superimposed his grandiose vision
of wide avenues radiating in straight lines
from the Royal Exchange.
On 13 September, Charles II, the king,
issued a proclamation, assuring the city that,
quote, "though every man must not
be suffered to reap whatever--" oh, I
don't want to read the quote.
Essentially, Wren assumed that you
could socialize land and change the form of a city
by imposing a new spatial pattern on it.
The king said no, in England, we respect
the ownership of private property,
even if it's of a small scale.
And I will not endorse a plan which
does not advocate the maintenance of the rights
of my citizens to land.
There was another plan by John Evelyn, which I'll show you.
Wren build an enormous amount of--
in the post-fire era, he built a number of churches.
And many of them is still there.
He, of course, built St. Paul's Cathedral.
His clients didn't like it very much.
In his latest, 1713, I think he was
begging them to pay his income.
So much for Wren.
The principle that London would not
be subject to the powers of the state
to change its spatial pattern has
been central to the maintenance of the form of London.
London doesn't have large avenues.
It has one, perhaps.
Oxford Street is the old Roman road from the east to the west.
It has no north-south road except for Regent Street, which
we'll discuss a bit later.
It is the imposition of a particular situation.
The second epidemic of London was the plague.
But before the plague, London's River Thames
had an underclass of people who made a living
out of the filth of this river.
They were people called bone pickers,
rag gatherers, pure finders, dredgermen, mudlarks,
sewer hunters, dustmen, night soil men, bunters, toshers,
shoremen.
If they had all formed themselves into a union,
this London underclass would have
been the fifth-largest agglomeration of people
in all of England.
The consequences of the river's water
being as polluted as it was was only
established through the genius of a man called John Snow.
Before that, the outbreaks of cholera
were generally assumed to be a condition of the air.
The miasmic theory of cholera was prevalent.
London's Parliament had to shut down one summer because
of the stench from the river.
But John Snow-- you must read The Ghost Map.
Has anybody read the book The Ghost Map?
Good for you.
I'm really using London as an example of the transformation
of a 19th-century city under extraordinary level
of commitment and skill.
Up till 1854, cholera was seen as a disease borne by the air.
There'd been many attempts to make
the process of draining your body a little more elegant.
A water-flushing device had been invented
in the late 16th century, who installed a functioning
version for his godmother, Queen Elizabeth.
The device didn't take on until a watchmaker called
Albert Cummings designed an improved
version of Herrington's design.
At the Great Exhibition of 1851, an estimated 827,000 visitors
used them.
After that, the seated toilet became much more common
in London.
According to one estimate, the average London household
used 160 gallons of water a day in 1850.
Thanks to the runaway success of the water closet,
they were using 244 gallons per day.
Snow transformed the world of cholera.
You have to read the book to understand the Sherlock Holmes
genius with which this man observed the situation, which
resulted in his finding that cholera was carried
by a bacillus borne by water.
All of the improvement in the seated toilet seat
simply meant that more and more feces
were being poured into cesspools because there was no sewage
system.
Imagine a city where there is no sewage system, where there
are constant outbreaks of cholera,
until one modest general practitioner in the West End
comes up with the notion that it's waterborne.
Such is the genius of British endeavor at this time.
It took only seven years.
Yeah.
The most advanced and elaborate sewage system
in the entire world was largely operational by 1865.
Joseph Bazalgette, the engineer, in six years
had constructed nearly 82 miles of sewage
using over 300 million bricks and nearly a million
cubic yards of concrete.
The main--
All the sewage flowed into the Thames,
which either remained static or flowed,
eventually, out to the sea.
Bazalgette built two in the north and one in the south.
This took all of the sewage and water, wastewater,
and pumped or used elevation to export it to the sea.
Around central London, he built two embankments, the Chelsea
and the Victoria embankment on the north and the Albert
embankment on the south.
This is one of the biggest industrial feats
in human history.
The extraordinary thing is that if you're in London
and you walk on the embankment, you don't know anything
about what it's doing.
London advertises Big Ben because you can see it.
The underground of cities is impalpable.
This is an extraordinary example of the genius, Sir Joseph
Paxton, who designed the Crystal Palace, the Gardener.
He said, we in Britain solve problems by common sense
and technology, not bombast.
I wonder what the American--
what a city like Boston would build in six years, hardly
a sewage system.
The next issue again starts with a disaster.
We want to examine the transformation of land
in central London.
We start with a story.
Alexander, the nephew of Mr. Hugh Audley,
died in the plague.
Mr. Audley was a lawyer, a great leader.
He amassed a great legendary wealth through dealings
with a court of wards, the court which apportioned
lands forfeited to the Crown when the owner couldn't
pay the fees.
Among his property rights which he accumulated
was the Manor of Ebury, which was swamps and farmsteads which
ran from the Thames River as far north as the old Roman
road to Bath, Oxford Street.
So the West End of London was a swamp.
It accrued into the hands of this family.
Through a number of generations, it passed down
to a woman called Mary Davis.
Mary Davis had needed money.
She arranged a marriage to Lord Berkeley.
These were rural establishments looking for land
in the center of the city.
Lord Berkeley-- Mary was only seven.
And their marriage arrangement was made with the Berkeley's
10-year-old son.
But there was no money.
They couldn't raise an additional 3,000 pounds.
The next marriage deal was with Sir Thomas Grosvenor
at the age of 21.
Mary-- now 12--
was married in 1677.
Mary developed mental illness, became a fanatic critic--
oh, Catholic, not a critic.
Surely some mental slip from Catholic to critic.
They're selecting a pope.
I suppose that's on my mind.
Grosvenor died in 1700.
Mary was swept off to Europe by a Roman Catholic priest
called Father Fenwick.
In Paris, Fenwick drugged her, married her
to his elder brother, Edward Fenwick.
In 1703, a court resolved Fenwick versus Grosvenor.
The court favored the Grosvenor family.
His son, Sir Richard, began to develop the states of Mayfair,
Belgravia, Pimlico.
Mary's land plus the Grosvenor's provincial estates
produced the largest fortune in British hands, only second
to the royal family.
You should really be able to answer this question.
Why are there no railway stations
on the west side of London?
I've just told you the story.
Crown, crown, crown-- you can look at your diagram.
The Grosvenor' estates-- number five,
and these are number two--
as a block of land impeded the development
of any railroad on the west.
London is encircled by railroads,
four miles by 1-and-1/2-mile box.
There's a subway line which runs along this box.
What's it called?
Who knows London?
Come on, you must know something about the greatest
city in the world.
You're studying urbanism, aren't you?
It's like me talking about a classic case of pneumonia,
and you don't know what the causes of pneumonia are.
The Circle Line.
Paddington, Euston, St. Pancras, King's Cross,
Farringdon Street--
I think that's the one--
all linked to the industrial heartland of England--
Victoria, Charing Cross, Waterloo.
All link to South Africa, and India, and the United States.
Some of these stations on here link to Europe.
There are no stations on this arc.
Now you know why.
The combination of land between the Crown and the Westminster--
Duke of Westminster is probably the highest ranking
in the British aristocracy.
The Grosvenors became the Duke of Westminster.
OK.
I made my point.
It's a battle.
It also advances the notion that the combination
of rural land and urban land is required
to produce great wealth--
at least, at this time, it was.
Raymond Williams is correct in his book The Country
and the City in making the point that it
is a combination of the two that produced
the shape of contemporary England.
The second land story deals with the fact
that the center of London consisted, to the most part,
of land occupied by aristocracy.
Large portions of land--
the Bedfords, the Duke of Bedford, for instance,
occupied large portions of land.
What emerged as a result of economic growth
was the emergence-- and Marx makes a classical reference
to the emergence of the middle class of the bourgeoisie.
It has major economic factors.
So valuable did the land become that it
had to be transformed into sales to the middle class
or the upper-middle class.
So each of these states was subdivided systematically.
Where was the first?
These subdivided estates characteristically
have a residential--
or residential in nature, have a central public, or semi-public,
or private square in the center.
And this animates the whole spatial pattern
of central London, at least most of it
to the west of Regent Street.
This is the only city in the world
which has used residential construction
to build its center.
The city was always off to the east.
This is land which was available just through the subdivision
of property.
Again, Rasmussen points out that these subdivisions generally
were little towns in themselves.
It was the manor house, which faced north.
There's sometimes more than one manor house.
The housing was generally occupied
by one family per unit, as opposed to the boulevard
house of Paris, where every floor was a separate housing
entity--
which, again, is one of the many reasons
why London is about one-third of the density of Paris.
The second has to do with the transportation system, which
we'll talk about in a minute.
Why do you think the rest of the world never followed
the British pattern of subdividing land
in a systematic way for housing?
Stupid.
Why didn't the British impose a system residential spatial
organization as interesting and as articulate
as the British did for London?
I don't know how to answer the question.
Ideas don't seem to spread all that well, good ideas.
And of course, there are many problems
with the fact that you're subdividing land only
for another class of people who can
pay the economic rent through the leasehold system
of the subdivided estates.
The extraordinary notion of using a building--
there are 151 residential squares in western London,
77 between 1800 and 1850, but starting in 1631
with one which is famous for other reasons.
Its name is Covent Garden.
Why is it called Covent Garden?
How do you know nothing about London.
You need, really, to spend some time
in London learning about how this great city got
to be put together.
Henry VIII didn't like Catholicism.
So he closed the convents.
The convent which became Covent Garden
was handed over to the Bedford family, who employed
the great British architect.
Who was the greatest British architect in the 17th century?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
JULIAN BEINART: Hmm?
Inigo Jones.
Do you know the name Inigo Jones?
You should know them if you've studied
the history of architecture.
Mind you, the history of architecture
is so badly taught that I'm not surprised that nobody
knows the name of Inigo Jones.
Inigo Jones is an interesting man in his own right.
Historians have often thought that the term
Inigo came from the fact that he was Welsh.
It turns out that recent history has found that he actually
traveled to India.
And he was probably a homosexual taken to India
by one of the aristocracy.
And the drawings of him done in India,
which make his life a little more complex, and perhaps
a little more interesting.
Anyway, he built a church, St. Martin's in the Field,
as the main component of the square.
The rest of the square was empty.
There was some residential accommodation in arcades,
which Jones designed.
But the center became a market, became the famous market
and developed into Covent Garden, which the great opera
house of Covent Garden--
I don't know if there's any connection between an opera
house and an agricultural market,
but the British seem to do these strange things.
Perhaps the market produced a number
of people who sang and became an opera company--
so history's adjacency, perhaps, produces.
What more can I say other than to look with you
at some of these subdivisions?
I've given you, in the handout on the first page--
if I remember correctly-- the landholdings.
Are they numbered?
Number five is the Grosvenor land.
And number two is the Crown.
On the diagram above that, it's got a lot of stuff on it.
It's rather complicated.
But essentially, starting in 1631, Covent Garden,
you see a slow growth of subdivisions
of these big estates.
And with the--
Sir John Summerson was called the great period
in London building, from about 1730
to 1800-and-so, the Georgian period.
It's interesting that these buildings,
these new residential armatures to the squares,
were built according to strict rules.
One of the reasons for the care for maintenance
of these subdivided estates is not only
because the land was expensive but because one of the changes
that the British land policy adopted, switching
from freehold to leasehold.
Royal land could never be sold.
Freehold land was given by the king
to a client who had served the king or queen admirably.
No resolution of that was possible
until Parliament, realizing the economic advantages
of this land and the emergence of an economic class
of private buyers, decided to pass a revision which
is called leasehold, which meant that you were allowed,
as a royal aristocrat, to subdivide your land over
long and lease it to somebody for a long period of time--
I mean, 90 years, 100 years.
Summerson, I think, argues that in order
to maintain the quality of the property,
attention had to be paid to the design of the buildings
and the quality of the maintenance.
I'm not sure about that.
So it's a bit foggy as to whether the leasehold system
doesn't automatically imply a good maintenance of property.
The diagram below, you can see number two,
which is where Buckingham Palace is now--
two stretching all the way to the river,
two stretching up to Regent's Park,
which we'll talk about in a minute,
and number five stretching roughly
from the river, very close to number two,
all the way up to Oxford Street, which is--
well, I don't know if it's exactly Oxford Street,
but in the proximity of Oxford Street.
These diagrams show the subdivision of two
of the estates.
The Matrix of Comparative Orders argument
is from an MIT thesis which argues that West London
suggests an intermediate order.
A textural order, such as Rome, Parma, Delhi, Paris,
and so on the left, and the intermediate order of West
London, and monumental orders, and the intermediate order
of another kind in Bath and so on.
You can read this and work it out yourself.
Residential squares generally had
gardens in the center space.
In first, gardens were private gardens.
You inserted in the center of the residential space
a garden, which was gated.
This was a strange idea, to insert in the public domain
a private-only use.
The British never had large gardens of their own.
So in some sense, it was a formal substitution
of a private garden into a communal private garden,
a very interesting idea.
Although, as time passed, this idea passed,
and the central squares became public.
The later ones, the 18th and 19th century ones
were public, generally.
It's an extraordinarily formal device.
So when we look at four examples of the residential squares,
you'll see the subtle ways in which all of them
try to play around with certain ideas--
the use of the road, the use of monument,
the garden, the position of the manor house, and so on.
The Mews of London were the servant quarters
of these great estates.
Do you know the word mews, M-E-W-S?
They're some of the most expensive real estate in London
today.
They were the servant quarters.
It's only the wealthy who can afford to live
in previous servant quarters.
It's another rule which you might remember.
If land becomes valuable enough, small space,
which is allocated appropriately to the workers, working class,
becomes wealthy enough to become the sole propriety
of a wealthy family.
When we talk about Paris on Thursday,
you'll see the use of the public square in Paris, the Place
Royale, for instance, at the beginning of the 17th century.
Now-- then, later, renamed the Place des Vosges--
was really the antecedent of the Covent Garden plan.
The Covent Garden plan had an empty center, which
was then occupied by a market.
The Place Royale was the house--
the residential environment surrounding the Place Royale
was for the French aristocracy and the royal court.
The French never followed the residential subdivision
of the British pattern.
And many people, including Rasmussen--
London, the unique city--
have commented on the fact that London has always
been a series of small endeavors, short vistas.
There's no Main Street in London.
There's no main avenue in London.
There's no great avenue connecting
major parts of the city, as was the principle of subdivision
or spatial organization in Paris.
In the early part of the 19th century,
the Prince Regent and a very slick architect developer
called John Nash hatched a plan.
The Crown owned Regent's Park to the north.
And there was some notion that you
might be able to connect the Crown land with the crown
land on the south.
It took the making of a new street to enable to do that.
Here, you have a beginning of the sensibility of Paris.
Louis Napoleon, who became the French King and the patron
of Baron Haussmann from 1848 to 1870,
was in London at the time.
He also spent time in Boston.
Apparently, he made a drawing of the future of London
in one of the restaurants in Boston.
Regent Street has two major qualities about it.
Number one, it was able to be the only spatial feature which
was able to be made in London despite the edict
that London property should remain in the hands of whoever
owned it unless bought.
You needed four qualities to build a new street.
You needed an individual who had the energy
to push the scheme through, a good route,
an act of Parliament, and about a million pounds.
The Prince Regent and Nash had the authority and the money
to do this.
The merchants of this street is a phenomenon in itself.
We will examine that a bit later in the class,
referring to the writings of David Friedman on this subject.
It was contrary to the principle of land division in England.
And it was possible, through the genius of Nash
and his anomalous energy--
and there's an interesting aspect to this street.
If you look between Oxford Street and Portland Place,
there is something called All Souls' Church.
Do you see it?
When you go to London, go and look at All Souls' Church.
It's a piece of architecture which
indicates a fundamental principle of urbanism.
You cannot buy the property over here or over here.
In order to make a street run straight through,
and you have to create a bypass.
You design a circus in front of the church,
a circus being a spherical space, an open space,
in front of the church to carry the flow of the road
through like this.
Do you understand the principle?
It's not a cosmic idea, but it's an idea.
There aren't many cosmic ideas in urbanism.
They're not in England.
They are small ideas.
London is, according to somebody whom I quote--
I don't remember his name or her name--
London is a city of small realities.
There's another significant feature of Regent Street.
Between 1840 and 1916, a man called
Charles Booth worked in London.
He wrote a book called Life and Labour of the People of London.
It's 12 volumes, published between 1891 and 1900.
What did Booth do?
He produced something for the first time,
which if you know something about urbanism,
would recognize immediately.
He made a map of poverty.
He made the first map showing income on a plane.
What-- Oxford Street.
Booth's map indicates that there are more poor people living
on this side of Regent Street than on this side.
So what do you use new roads for?
This is what Engels observed in Manchester.
Roads can serve the purpose of subdividing property.
Land on this side is much less valuable than on that side.
This is where, by the way, Snow did his experiments on cholera.
So we learned a number of these very little micro attributes
of urbanism, small-scale things.
Major revenues on one side, a major lack of revenue
on another side.
Regent Street is carefully modulated
as Moses's highways were in relation to land values.
You can't build a public road straight
through expensive property.
Roads can be deviated.
Sometimes they create spatial avenues of the great charm
by virtue of them twisting around.
But the basic motivation is not aesthetic, it's economic.
The other great-- have we got time?
OK.
In the required reading for this class,
there was a piece which I wrote about the instruments
of application in the 19th century.
I won't have time to go through them.
The first is the invention of the [INAUDIBLE] payment
amortized building loan.
The second is the transformation of the building union
and building guilds into a permanent building society
for the lending of money.
The third is the transformation of a pre-industrial guild
of builders into a 19th-century organization started by Thomas
Cubitt at the age of 27.
He employed a permanent, year-long labor
force as opposed to day-long laborers
provided by guild workers.
He also could assume economic risks
and forecast the value of property.
He established what is called the contracting gross.
In times of such enormous, fluctuating economy,
it's difficult for a large investor
to predict the cost of what he would have to pay
at the end of the project.
Cubitt revolutionized this by inventing the contracting gross
by saying to the queen, it doesn't matter what happens.
It's going to take 12 years to finish this project,
you have to pay $300 million pounds at the end of 12 years.
This is before--
I mean, this is in a time of economics--
well, economics is a modern science.
It only dates, probably, from about 1900.
So we have Ricardo, and Marx, and people like that, Malthus,
who weren't much help in--
but Cubitt understood that the profits he could make
by maintaining a labor force--
again, we have Marx's notion of surplus value.
By having 1,000 workers, you reap a share of the income.
And therefore, you become very wealthy--
according to Marx, anyway.
And when you are very wealthy, you
can take economic risks because you know what
you can produce at what cost.
I've mentioned the transformation from freehold
to leasehold.
The last of these policy implications
is the introduction or invention of deficit spending,
which I'll elaborate on more when we talk about Paris.
Paris was the first to assume that the right of the state
to private land was great, was large, significant only
to be exceptionally reversed by private owners.
Haussmann's property development schemes
were schemes based on the notion of deficit spending,
that the state could engage in large amounts of capital
deficit on the grounds that it was
improving the economic condition of the site.
And the site would, over time, pay back.
The fact that Haussmann's borrowings only
was paid back in 1928, some 75 years after Haussmann
spent the money, is something we'll debate
in next Thursday's class.
Let's look very quickly at the idea of the railroad.
London was the first to introduce a train system
into the compact center of a city as urbanism.
1863, the first subway ran from on the north eastwards,
from Paddington Station past all of those stations,
to the last one on the bend, Farringdon Street.
These were [INAUDIBLE] conditions.
It was only a small indentation in the Earth.
And the train ran without any ventilation,
except from the sky.
It was enormously successful.
There were millions-- it ran from 1873 to 1890
regularly at 10-minute intervals.
And I think it carried something like a million or 10
million people regularly.
In 1890, the deep, old tunnel was reintroduced largely
by an American financier, Mr. Sprague.
And that set the pattern for the building of a complete subway
system, almost complete in 1900.
I saw an estimate of what it would
cost for a contemporary city to build this, the London
Underground system.
And there's not enough money, not enough capital in the world
to pay for it.
Of course, that's an exaggeration.
There is enough capital.
But it's beyond the reach of any living city.
The British were very clever in investing in the sewage system
and in the public transportation system.
They coupled the inner circumstances,
with various colored lines, with the suburban system,
which connected to the outside, as yet relatively
unbuilt villages and towns.
There's a lot of details to be discussed around the building
of the subway systems.
There was enormous costs involved
in getting some of these stations.
For instance, one writer suggested that he took--
yeah.
The London and Birmingham railway,
from the Midlands to Lord Southampton's Euston station--
the railroad failed to persuade the bid for the estate
to allow it any further.
It took an army of 20,000 men to construct
and was probably the largest public work ever
to be undertaken in the whole history of man
with the possible exception of the Great Wall of China.
Digging this underground tunnel in order
that Euston could get to Marylebone high road
and be part of the central combination--
11 million passengers in the first year, and so on.
To leave us time to look at this,
I'm going to shorten the last part of this investigation.
Let's simply say one or two things.
From the provision of housing for the poorer
part of the population to the state
accepting some role, a major role in its care,
it was a variety of moves, largely through charity
and philanthropy.
There was the Octavia Hill system.
There was philanthropy for 5%.
Everybody assumed that philanthropy
had to provide a profit.
There was the Octavia Hill system.
There were arguments that the poor needed resuscitation
through avoiding alcohol, through temperance
associations, through teaching the Octavia Hill
system to teaching them how to behave properly,
how to save money, how to be proficient with their time--
in fact, how to be modern citizens.
The British aristocracy assumed that it
could do for Engels's Manchester just
through its own generosity, plus a 5% fee for Americans
who invested in some of these philanthropic organizations.
In 1889, the London County Council was established.
The London County Council became the first state or city
organization for the planning and maintenance of the built
city.
It was remarkable.
It employed the highest level of professional skill
that it could find, people who were
great architects like James Stirling,
others worked for the London County Council
before branching off on their own.
The standard of public housing has not been challenged.
In 1965, the London County Council
was abolished by Margaret Thatcher
and became the Greater London Council
with a different position.
But the great years of the London County Council,
a very left-wing organization--
one of the architects who worked--
I remember flying from the Far East
with this gentleman, who was a well-known architect in London,
who told me of his first week working in London County
Council, of being taken to a pub on the Friday afternoon
and asked whether he was a socialist or not.
And he had to pass the test by answering a bunch of questions.
Are there any questions about this incredibly brief survey
one of the world's great cities?
I apologize for doing it in the only way I
can think of doing it, and that's
to pick on some characteristics.
There are some very good books and London.
Landlords to London is a good book.
There are a number of others for those of you
who want to examine the thing in greater detail.
But let's discuss.
We're talking about 1824, 1830.
Engels is writing a book in Manchester.
We're talking about the Enclosure
Acts, all of the penalties imposed on the emergent working
class.
Slowly, the emergent working class
gains a foothold in the British democracy
and sets off 100 years.
And the 100 years produces all of these things--
the first railway train, underground, the first building
bylaws, rescuing and transforming
a city from a completely different environment,
in some respects, from the conditions
that Engels expressed in the condition of the working class.
There was no central state.
Well, there were many things that the Soviet revolution
offered which the British government didn't offer.
But a completely remarkable Renaissance--
and that with, as I repeat, only the killing of 11 or 13
citizens over 125 years, 123 years,
from Peterloo to Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland.
I think it's a remarkable--
it's a remarkable story for those interested in the effects
that good action and technology can take on urban form.
Here's the Roman crossing on the east towards what
became the city of London.
Here, the minimal fortifications.
The monastery's located on the outside ring,
close to the walls in case there's some crisis.
The monastery can send its people to maintain the wall.
Next.
The Fire, the devastation of the eastern part of the city.
[INAUDIBLE] plan on the top, the diagonalization
and the centralisation of the Royal Exchange.
Evelyn's scheme or [INAUDIBLE] scheme, neither of which
gained much mileage.
Next.
Five and two combined, virtually, the west of London.
This is Mary Davis, whom I spoke about.
I don't know who took this picture of her.
Next.
This is the pattern of estate subdivisions.
And see the big gap on the left?
It is the Crown Regent's Park.
And the north is the crown.
A figure ground pattern of the west of London,
indicating the black squares aerating this fabric.
And the condition of Regent's Park
is drawing the line from Regent's Park on the north
Regent Street, finding its way down
to the crown property on the west.
Next.
OK.
Here are four examples.
This is the original square, 1631.
The [INAUDIBLE] and the elevation of Inigo Jones
and the proposed arcades and surrounding of the square.
The square has a large empty center like the Place Royale.
And it's indicated in the first of these four, up on the left.
St. James Square on the right, you see the enclosed garden.
The entrances are carefully selected.
There's a monument to end the vista from two of the streets.
The Bedford square on the top right,
1773, where you get the manor house
in the center of the elevation.
Here, the street system is not so carefully
considered in relation to the design of the square.
And here, Belgrave Square, now an attempt
to break the mold of the Georgian square
by putting the manor houses outside the main elevation,
in the four corners, opening the square.
This is not a gated square.
This is now a public square, although treed, secondary manor
houses in the center of the facade.
Next.
Grosvenor Square on the right, the manor house
with the gabled facade in the center of the facade.
Next.
OK.
We could have many more illustrations
of these squares, the whole idea of being able to link the crown
property in Regent's Park systematically
through to Green Park in Buckingham Palace.
The number of intersecting roads and the degree
of the difficulty of purchasing what
was cheap land and property on either sides of the road.
Next.
This is looking up, northwards, to All Souls' Church.
What you see is that spin-wheel of an arcade
to turn you to the northwest.
Next.
Booth's map-- here is Regent Street
in the quadrant leading to Piccadilly Circus.
Look at the black and gray areas to the right of Regent Street,
and the almost totally dark red environment on the left.
It's another one of Booths mapping.
That's of pubs.
British [INAUDIBLE] gin until they stopped drinking gin
and started drinking tea are regarded as--
cited in one of the demographies of London.
It's a startling map.
It's one of the first attempts to connect social status
with built form.
Next.
A 4-by-1-and-1/2 square, Sir Joseph Paxton,
after the Crystal Palace, proposed an elevated walking
route around the 4-by-1-and-1/2-mile center
of the city.
You can see this, all the railway lines from the north,
from Paddington to King's Cross, serving
the north, industry to north, and the three stations
on the south--
Waterloo, Victoria, and Charing Cross, essentially serving.
And the British-- the subway system in the center,
moving outwards and then connecting to a suburban
railroad system, a remarkable application of public
transportation technology as early as--
prior to the 20th century.
Next.
Building the metropolitan line on the left, the upper one,
crossing the River Thames with the train on the left,
the embankment of the sewage system
and the new sewer lines on the right.
Next.
Marylebone and Euston Street being the facades
of these great railway termini.
Now, the railway termini were ambiguous in themselves.
They were urban manifestations with pronounced facades,
and hotels, and enormous formal energy expended in order
that you should penetrate this railway station--
which, after all, is just a technological feat,
just a train and a railway line, and some toilets,
and ticket booths.
It doesn't require [LAUGHS] this apparatus
in the front unless you're conscious of the city.
I like a city which pays attention
to places of public significance,
even if it there's only a toilet behind.
AUDIENCE: [LAUGHS]
JULIAN BEINART: I wish our airports
had some way of galvanizing their presence in the city.
They are little technological nightmares.
Next.
Charing Cross and St Pancras Station being built. Next.
Behind this neoclassical Victorian facade
lies the technological enterprise.
This is Birmingham on the right, which
was the largest single span at the time in the world, St
Pancras on the left.
Next.
Attempts to indulge in this internal space of the railway
station with the same grandeur that the external facade
on the street has.
Next.
Victoria Station in England, something of a market,
Munich being a taking over of the center
of the station as a market.
Next.
Victoria Station in Mumbai, designed
with the same atmospheric aesthetic impulse
to pronounce itself as a major monument in the city.
And then inside, the social consequences
of poverty displaying itself.
These two images, this and the technological center,
are interesting in themselves.
Next.
Here is another attribute of the charity world.
This is a working--
a poor man's labor workstation where people don't have work
and are just left to be fed and looked after,
what the equivalent would be today of a homeless shelter.
On the right is a new charity-inspired labor station.
Now, instead of the rough, random allocation
of people in space, everybody is now subdivided into booths.
And God is Holy and God is Right in the beams.
The technology and theology are mixed together.
If you can make a beautiful place,
God must be able to be celebrated in it.
It's making of poverty a religious artifact.
Next.
And the greatest manifestation of the technology--
the technology in the Crystal Palace
is without any pertinence in the front.
There is no attempt to make an entrance.
This is just a space for thousands
of people to come and see what the British are doing in India.
There are trees inside.
Next.
Modernism, modern inventions are portrayed.
One wants to compare this to 1893 in Chicago.
This was 1851.
50 years later, the same attempt was attempted in Chicago.
And we'll compare the two.
Next.
That's the story of London, as briefly as I can explain it.