The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London (7 page)

Wooden road-surfacing seemed to solve many of the more mundane problems. Blocks were dowelled together in factories and then assembled on site like parquet, which made them quick to lay and ensured a uniform quality. The surfaces were grooved, which in dry weather gave the horses
a good grip, but the main selling point of wood was that it muffled the noise of the hooves and the wheels. Residents and businesses in busy parts of the city clamoured to have their streets resurfaced in wood, and parts of Holborn, Regent Street and Oxford Street were all wood paved by the early 1840s: ‘The shopkeepers state that they can now hear and speak to their customers,’ even, some noted in wonder, when their windows were open.

Road surfacing in 1838 and 1842:
top
, the men are paving a road with granite setts;
above
, wooden paving is being assembled on site.

Within a year, doubts were widespread. The blocks degenerated with fatal speed: three years was the average. By 1843, the City magistrates had already asked for a police report on the number of accidents on one stretch of wooden road in the City, and discovered that nineteen horses had fallen there in four days. Frost also made wooden roads impassable for horses, and furthermore wood could not be used at all on hilly streets. By 1846, wood pavements were being replaced by granite across London; even Cheapside, where the shopkeepers and residents had petitioned to have wood put down just four years earlier, had had to be resurfaced. Soon only a few locations where noise abatement was essential were still wood paved: outside the Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey, and a few churches and public buildings. (Nevertheless, there was a revival in wood paving post-1870, with the surface surviving on some roads into the twentieth century.)

While many locals complained about the roads, visitors were generally impressed. In the early 1830s, a New Yorker thought the London streets were ‘incomparably superior’ to those of Paris, ‘being broad, dry, clean, and extremely well paved’. The guidebooks proudly echoed this, one stating flatly that ‘All the streets in London are paved with great regularity.’ The London of tourists and guidebooks, however, bore little relation to most of the metropolis. New Oxford Street, the continuation of Oxford Street that had been driven through the slum of St Giles to create a major artery between the West End and Holborn, was opened to traffic in 1846; yet it was not until 1849 that it ‘is [now] being paved’. If a main road could be considered finished three years before it was paved, the slums, the small courts, alleys and passageways of the poor districts were certainly not paved ‘with great regularity’, or even paved at all.

In 1848, Hector Gavin, surgeon to the Bethnal Green Workhouse and a lecturer in public hygiene, drew up an alley-by-alley record of the sanitary
failings of Bethnal Green. He listed 397 streets in the parish, of which 40 per cent were paved: a long way from ‘all’. This was true of the more prosperous districts too, not only of the slums. One middle-class writer lived ‘on the western outskirts’ of London, ‘where they were building on what had been still largely pleasant fields’ around mid-century. Five minutes from his house was a new road connecting two main roads where both roads and pavements were ‘of coarse gravel’, that is, unpaved. This type of half-built suburban development was common. In Anthony Trollope’s 1860 novel,
Castle Richmond
, he describes ‘a street of small new tenements, built, as yet, only on one side of the way, with the pavement only one third finished, and the stones in the road as yet unbroken and untrodden. Of such streets there are thousands now round London…in every suburb.’

Trollope uses ‘pavement’ to mean the road, not the area designated for pedestrians. By the time he was writing, the segregation of the two areas was complete, but it was a relatively recent innovation. In 1800, a memoirist recalled how in the previous century ‘the broad flagging on each side of the streets was not universally adopted, and stone posts were in fashion to prevent the annoyance of the carriages.’ Within a decade Louis Simond, freshly arrived from America, noticed ‘The elevated pavement on each side of the streets full of walkers’, keeping them ‘out of the reach of carriages’, the phrasing suggesting that the idea was new to him. The reports of other visitors agree that at this early stage segregated spaces for pedestrians may have been unusual even in London. In 1824, the American clergyman Nathaniel Wheaton described coaches pulling up ‘in the throng of foot passengers’, the drivers giving warning to pedestrians by an ‘accustomed
heigh!
in a tone so sharp, as to put the most heedless on their guard’. Even in 1835 a guidebook still felt the need to explain to its readers that streets were ‘divided into a carriage-way and a foot-path…finished with a kirb [sic] raised a few inches above the carriage-way’. Separate provision for pedestrians arrived fully only with macadam. Earlier paving methods had created kennels, or gutters, down the centre of each street, leaving the dry areas on either side to be used by all. Macadam roads were impermeable, and were therefore built with a camber from the centre for the rainwater to run off into gutters on either side, creating, inadvertently, borders that
divided those mounted from those on foot. The terminology was not yet set, however: ‘pavement’ frequently meant the road, that is, the paved area, while ‘footpath’ indicated the flagstoned section given over to pedestrians. Dickens used ‘pavement’ to mean sometimes one, sometimes the other, throughout his life.

By mid-century, the intensity of traffic had made pedestrian areas necessary in the busiest streets. These were demarcated by posts, or, as one visitor understood them, ‘a circle of upright cannon, where a person can take refuge’. Max Schlesinger gave them a more modern name, visualizing them as ‘an island of the streets’. The watery metaphor appealed to many: a visitor from Salem, Massachusetts, compared the view from the top of a bus along Fleet Street or the Strand to ‘the breaking up of one of our great rivers in the spring by some sudden flood…here moving in a swift torrent, there circling in some rapid eddy, and presenting only a picture of indescribable confusion, and yet all hastening on, with a steady and certain progress’.

At the beginning of the century, the land on the northern edge of the city, still mostly tenanted by market gardeners, was eyed by its owner, the Crown, as ripe for redevelopment. In order to make this viable it was essential, wrote John Fordyce, the Crown surveyor, to build a road to connect the new suburb with the fashionable West End. ‘Distance is best computed by time,’ he advised, ‘and if means could be found to lessen the time of going from Marybone [sic] to the Houses of Parliament, the value of the ground for building would be thereby proportionately increased.’ In London distance was more a matter of traffic than of horsepower, for the city’s streets were unbearably congested. In
Little Dorrit
, set in the 1820s, Mr Dorrit’s coachman travels from the City to the West End not in a direct line – which would have taken him along Fleet Street and the Strand, two of the most heavily used streets in London – but instead by crossing the river at London Bridge, driving along the south bank to Waterloo, and recrossing the river: the trip is nearly double the distance, but still faster.

Many factors contributed to the traffic problem. From 1830 to 1850, the population of London grew by nearly 1 million. The number of stagecoaches increased by 50 per cent, while the number of hackney carriages more than doubled. The arrival of the railways from the 1840s further increased road
usage, as goods, instead of being manufactured and sold in one place, now underwent different manufacturing stages in different locations, being transported by rail but beginning and ending their journeys by cart. One of the biggest – and most intractable – causes of traffic obstructions was an official one: the toll gates. In the eighteenth century, many of Britain’s main roads had been built by groups of businessmen who advanced the capital to build the roads; in return for their investment, they were permitted by Parliament to levy tolls on all road users. The main arteries in and out of London that Dickens knew as a young man were all toll roads, with turnpike gates blocking access to the west in Knightsbridge, at Hyde Park Corner; in Kensington, at the corner of the Earls Court Road; at Marble Arch, at Oxford Street; and in Notting Hill (the toll was the ‘Gate’ in Notting Hill Gate, just as it was the ‘bar’ in Temple Bar). On the northern side of the city there was one at King’s Cross; on the eastern side, at the City Road near Old Street, and at Shoreditch, in the Commercial Road. On the south side of London there were three turnpike gates in the Old Kent Road; another at the Obelisk at the Surrey Theatre, where Lambeth Road and St George’s Road meet; with another at Kennington Church, then Kennington Gate.

These toll gates were substantial blockages. The one at Old Brompton, by the Gloucester Road, consisted of a ‘house-shed on one side of the road, a pillar on the other’, with a heavy pole running between them. In the 1820s, the Oxford Street turnpike, then still known as the Tyburn turnpike, was sited on the corner of Oxford Street and the Edgware Road where the gallows stood until 1783, at what is now the north-east corner of Hyde Park.
²³
At right angles to the Tyburn gate was another one that closed off the Edgware Road, and one man operated both, standing in the centre between the two, dressed in a white apron ‘with pockets in the front of it, one for halfpence and one for tickets’.
²⁴

The ticket was important. One payment gave each vehicle access through that gate for twenty-four hours (except for vehicles carrying goods for sale, in which case every individual load required a fresh toll to be paid). As midnight struck, the next day’s ticket came into operation, and everyone had to pay again. The keepers slept in little lodges built beside each bar and were always on duty, required to rise at shouts of ‘Gate, gate!’ Many couldn’t be bothered and left the bar open all night. Others kept late-night travellers, who had already paid that day, waiting at the gate until midnight, so that they could be charged again, the toll keeper skimming off some of the day’s proceeds. This was so common that one man at least took his revenge. He paid again, then walked his horse up and down the road near by until he judged the keeper had gone back to sleep. At this point he returned, shouting ‘Gate!’ to rouse the keeper, before showing his new ticket. Then he idled up and down on the other side of the gate once more, before returning to rouse the keeper. This procedure was repeated again and again until the keeper admitted defeat and returned the money.

From the 1830s, turnstiles began to be fitted with clockwork mechanisms, inaccessible to the keepers, recording how many times the gate was lifted. (According to Dickens, the machine had been invented by the prop-master of the Drury Lane theatre.) Other toll keepers, long after the mechanisms were the norm, continued to cheat somehow. One told Dickens in the 1850s that, when poor people asked to cross but didn’t have the requisite penny, ‘If they are really tired and poor we give ’em [a penny ourselves] and let ’em through. Other people will leave things – pocket handkerchiefs mostly. I
have
taken cravats and gloves, pocket knives, toothpicks, studs, shirt pins, rings (generally from young men, early in the morning), but handkerchiefs is the general thing.’ It is unclear whether the goods were left as a pledge against returning with the penny, or whether this was an informal system of pawning: the men who had lost all their money gambling handed over their handkerchiefs, which the
toll keepers then pawned, paying the penny toll from the proceeds and keeping the rest themselves.

If there were annoyances and delays in passing through just one gate, the system became cumbersome and ferociously expensive when undertaking a drive of any distance:

A man…starts from Bishopsgate Street for Kilburn. The day is cold and rainy…H e has to pull up in the middle of the street in Shoreditch, and pay a toll; – he means to return, therefore he takes a ticket, letter A. On reaching Shoreditch Church, he turns into the Curtain-road, pulls up again, drags off his wet glove with his teeth, his other hand being fully occupied in holding up the reins and the whip; pays again; gets another ticket, number 482; drags on his glove; buttons up his coats, and rattles away into Old-Street-road; another gate, more pulling and poking, and unbuttoning and squeezing. He pays, and takes another ticket, letter L…he reaches Goswell-Street-road; here he performs all the ceremonies…a fourth time, and gets a fourth ticket, 732, which is to clear him through the gates in the New-road, as far as the bottom of Pentonville; – arrived there, he performs one more of the same evolutions, and procures a fifth ticket, letter X, which…is to carry him clear to the Paddingtonroad…[He] reaches Paddington Gate, where he pays afresh, and obtains a ticket, 691, with which he proceeds swimmingly until stopped again at Kilburn…where he pays, for the seventh time, and where he obtains a seventh ticket, letter G.