The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London (40 page)

At the time, London’s garden squares were an urban oddity, following the European tradition of a public space in a city centre, usually containing a church or civic buildings, but miniaturizing it and making it private. Even as the squares were being built, there was uncertainty as to their purpose, or indeed whether they even had a purpose. In 1819,
Leigh’s New Picture of London
opined, ‘they add so essentially to the healthful and pleasing appearance of so many parts of London’. By 1839, the same book had changed its mind: now the squares were valued for their history and ‘peculiar beauty’. It is too easy to forget that not only were these squares created without a single overriding aim, but that there is an inevitable gap between how we see them and how they were viewed by their contemporaries. One contemporary garden historian suggests the squares of Bloomsbury are linked both by their ground-landlord (the Bedford Estate) and by colour, via their trees, visible from one square the next. So they are, in the present day. But at the time, as engravings show, the trees, newly planted, were completely invisible over the rooftops: the secret green spaces we know today are the unplanned by-product of nearly two centuries of growth.

While the idea of squares was taken up across the city, they were created by a wide range of builders and therefore in a wide range of styles. Great swathes of land were owned by wealthy landlords and either were developed directly in a unified style, or were leased out in parcels to be developed by builders, who either created entire districts themselves or subcontracted to smaller companies. The landowners were, in effect, in the building business,
sometimes contracting out the work to the great builders of the day, as the Bedford Estate did in Bloomsbury from the late 1770s to about 1840, hiring first James Burton, then Thomas Cubitt to build to their own specifications, dictating street plans, building type, density and even the details of the façades, developing a series of squares on Georgian grid patterns, ‘all comely, and some elegant, but all modern and middle class’.

As this guidebook quote suggests, the uniformity produced by these estates gave various neighbourhoods different socio-economic profiles, while leading contemporary observers to impose on them almost human characteristics. One book outlined its own readings. The West End squares were ‘fashionable’, so much was obvious, but the northern ones were ‘genteel’: a nice distinction. Holborn and Oxford Street on the south side were ‘obsolete and antiquated spots’, while on the north side Portman Square was considered ‘as imposing’ as that pinnacle of Mayfair-dom, Grosvenor Square. Moving down in the world were ‘the respectable and genteel squares’ in Bloomsbury and north of Oxford Street. After these come the City squares, ‘old and desolate’, which could be compared with the ‘obsolete, or “used up” old Squares…which have mostly passed from fashionable residences into mere quadrangles, full of shops, or hotels, or exhibitions, or chambers’, referring to Soho, Leicester and Golden Squares, Lincoln’s Inn and Covent Garden. Finally, almost shame-facedly, came ‘the pretentious
parvenu
-like suburban squares’ in Chelsea, Kensington, Islington, Stepney and south of the river, neatly describing a ring around central London.

A closer examination shows that none of the squares was all, or only, one thing. Leicester Square was for most of the century a byword for raffishness, for slightly dodgy goings-on, or just for disrepair. In 1860, a conman at the Thames Police Court was referred to as ‘a Leicester-square adventurer’. No evidence was presented to indicate that this was where he lived or operated; the term simply defined his shady activities. In
Bleak House
, when Dickens placed Mr George’s shooting gallery (a place where men went to practise target shooting) in ‘that curious region lying about the Haymarket and Leicester Square’, he was giving his readers a hint that perhaps Mr George was not what he seemed. It has been suggested that the shooting gallery was in Panton Square (on the west side of Leicester Square, demolished in 1868).
The streets around Panton and Leicester Squares certainly are mentioned more than regularly in the memoirs of that erotomaniac ‘Walter’ as a site of brothels and accommodation houses. In 1853, an attempt was made to blackmail Gladstone simply for being seen here, talking to a woman alone on the streets. But at the beginning of the century, Leicester Square was mostly made up of private houses set around their own enclosed garden. The land was owned by one family, who leased it out to developers, and only slowly did it stop being residential: the house of the painter Joshua Reynolds, on the west side, became a bookseller’s auction rooms; the house Hogarth had lived in on the opposite side became the Sabloniere Hotel. Savile House, long vacated by nobility, was turned into Lever’s Museum, containing, among other items, Miss Linwood’s Gallery of Needlework Pictures, in which famous works of art were reproduced in embroidery. The square became ‘unlike the other squares of London’, filled with ‘hotels with foreign names’, with ‘Polish exiles, Italian supernumeraries of the opera, French figurantes of the inferior grades, German musicians, teachers and translators of languages, and keepers of low gaming-houses’. Then in 1865 a gas explosion destroyed all the buildings along one side of the square. Instead of being an opportunity for a fresh start, the decaying ruins and rubble were simply left. To add insult to injury, pranksters topped the statue of George I in the middle of the square with a dunce’s cap before painting red spots all over his horse.

Even the great aristocratic redoubts of Belgrave and Berkeley Squares, routinely presented as solely the homes of the gentry and the moneyed, were not homogeneous. An 1844 guidebook stated flatly that Belgrave Square was entirely made up of detached villas, surrounded by gardens, even as its own engravings show a solid row of terraces all along the north and west sides (the south and west sides may have been occcupied by villas, but the engravings claimed to show the most exclusive housing). Neither mentioned in the guidebook nor revealed in the engravings was the fact that Belgrave Square was also the location of the Pantechnicon, ‘a vast establishment, uniting a bazaar, exhibition-rooms, wine-stores, and carriage-repository’, as well as a huge storage facility for furniture. Berkeley Square did indeed house some of the richest and the most aristocratic families in the country, but it was
also the site of a row of shops, a hotel and Gunter’s, a confectioner and caterer to the upper classes. In season the square was filled with delivery vans and carts, with ‘thousands of white paper parcels’ coming and going to the sounds of ‘clatterings of china and glass, [and] cross porters swearing under their great trays’.

These squares – which were less unified architectural objects and more mixed environments in permanent flux – are useful reminders when studying the development of Regent’s Park, for it too was a private commercial development by a landowning estate, in this case the Crown. ‘The main object of the Crown, I conceive it to be,’ wrote John Nash, the Prince Regent’s architect, was ‘the improvement of their own Estate.’ Just as with the squares on the Bedford Estate in Bloomsbury, or the Grosvenor Estate in Belgravia, the main aim of the Regent’s Park development was not to create a green oasis for public use, nor an area of beauty, but to maximize the landowner’s revenue.

Most of the land in Marylebone had been leased out to farmers, market gardeners and other smallholders. As the leases expired in 1811, John Fordyce, the Crown surveyor, presented a plan to entice the prosperous classes to the area by creating, in a single scheme, a modern infrastructure. It would include churches, shops, sewers, lighting and, most important, a major thoroughfare to connect the residents to the sites of government and consumption in the West End. Regent Street was to run from the home of the Prince Regent – Carlton House, set at the end of what is now Lower Regent Street, between Pall Mall and the Mall – up to what was to become the new pleasure and recreation ground of Regent’s Park, where the prince was to have a rustic summer pavilion surrounded by his friends’ villas in a
rus in urbe
setting.

John Nash modified the original Georgian grid-plan by adding two circuses (in effect, round squares), plus crescents and avenues, to create a more countrified feel. Fordyce had imagined Regent Street as a straight line, ploughed through the slum and working-class districts that were Soho, but Nash moved the street eastwards, edging it around the slum in Swallow Street, neatly creating a border between the homes of the upper classes and the ‘meaner’, working-class districts. Piccadilly Circus and the beautiful
swoop of Regent Street were the creation of social rather than aesthetic engineering. Within these constraints, Nash planned the street itself as one cohesive piece of architecture, giving the Quadrant, the swoop, a columned, arcaded walkway on both sides, lit from above by long skylights, to create an area for prosperous loungers and window-shoppers. Where Regent Street and Portland Place meet, before the straight run up to the Park, there is a kink in the road, caused by the refusal of a landowner to sell. Nash solved the problem by creating the little round All Soul’s Church, its shape echoing his two circuses – the Regent’s Circus (today’s Piccadilly Circus) and Oxford Circus – along the new street.

Marylebone Gardens was then redeveloped into Regent’s Park. From the beginning, the Crown’s plan – to create a countrified retreat for the Prince Regent’s aristocratic friends, with middle-class housing in terraces surrounding the park – caused outrage. In Parliament, Lord Brougham denounced the Crown for ‘trenching on the comfort of the poor for the accommodation of the rich’. Both Nash and the Surveyor General of the Crown Lands were shareholders in the company that was constructing the Regent’s Canal, and both parties stood to make a profit from the enclosure of land to which the public had previously had access. Popular disgust forced the Crown to throw open 510 acres of land to the public, rather than constructing houses on it to be sold for its own profit. After peace with France was declared in 1815, a slump in the market led to the number of houses planned in the park diminishing from forty to twenty-six, then to eight, while the number of terraces around the park similarly dwindled; the prince’s pavilion was never even begun, and one of the two barracks planned was replaced by a zoo.
⁸²
At the same time plans for the great ceremonial route at the south end of Regent Street began to go awry. Nash had expected the full-stop there
to be Carlton House, with the spire of St Margaret’s and Westminster Hall in the distance: royal, ecclesiastical and governmental power seen in a single glance. But in 1820 the Prince Regent became George IV and moved to Buckingham Palace, previously the residence of Queen Charlotte, the wife of George II, who had died in 1818, the year before her husband. Carlton House was demolished and Nash created on its site Carlton Gardens and Carlton House Terrace, and, from these streets a set of stairs leading down to the Mall and to St James’s Park.

It took time before Nash’s great creation was appreciated, much less admired. In the 1820s, an American tourist thought that ‘Never, perhaps, was there so much bad taste displayed’ as in Regent Street: ‘everyone’ agreed the buildings were ‘preposterous’. Henry Vizetelly, the journalist and publisher, remembered the verses that had gone around in his childhood, when Nash’s white stucco-fronted buildings were still startlingly new:

Augustus at Rome was for building renowned,

And of marble he left what of brick he had found.

But is not our Nash, too, a very great master? –

He finds us all brick and he leaves us all plaster!

Yet only a decade later, Regent Street was proclaimed ‘one of the great routes’ of the world, with ‘an air of great magnificence’.

The discussion over access to Regent’s Park was the first of the century, and it set in motion what in 1833 became a Parliamentary Select Committee, inquiring ‘into the means of providing Open Spaces in the vicinity of populous towns as public walks and Places of Exercise’. North of Regent’s Park, the open land at Primrose Hill was under threat from developers; the Select Committee recommended that fifty-eight acres be acquired for public recreation, to become the only public green space between Regent’s
Park and the East End. There was one park in Lambeth, south of the river, apart from Kennington Common, which was still unenclosed; north of the Thames the committee recommended that Copenhagen Fields be purchased (it later became Hackney Downs). But change came about slowly. It was not until 1846 that Victoria Park was created: the first royal park established specifically for the public. Kennington Common was finally enclosed in 1852; Battersea Fields was purchased in 1846, although it was nearly a decade before the park opened, and Finsbury Park had to wait until 1857.

Having access to parks for recreation was seen as desirable for all. Victoria Park, in the East End, was, unusually, designed for the working classes as well as in part by them: they had had some say in what facilities would be on offer, ensuring that a bathing pond was provided so that working men could cool off on their way home from work. In the more westerly, more fashionable parks, different provisions were made. The prosperous liked a ride or a carriage drive on this stylish route: slowly along Regent Street to see who was out; then up to the zoo, before heading for Hyde Park, where ‘they join the press of carriages and riders crowding in hundreds about Kensington Gardens’. For those who kept neither horses nor carriages, walking in parks and green spaces was a regular feature of a happy bourgeois life. Leonard Wyon, engraver to the Royal Mint, recorded in his diary his quiet suburban life’s many variations on this theme: ‘walked through Regents Park to town’, ‘Walked for sometime…in Ladbroke Square Gardens’, ‘a short walk on the Kensall [sic] Green in the evening’, ‘walk to Hampstead Fields’. For many like Wyon, Sundays in the parks were enlivened by bands playing, and the numbers of those who went to listen are astonishing: on one Sunday in September 1855, 48,841 people were counted in Kensington Gardens, even though a heavy rain shower had stopped the performance; the previous week it had been 60,000. At the last concert of the summer season in 1856 in Regent’s Park, 200,000 were said to have attended.