London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis / Edition 1 available in Paperback
London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 0300089031
- ISBN-13:
- 9780300089035
- Pub. Date:
- 03/01/2001
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0300089031
- ISBN-13:
- 9780300089035
- Pub. Date:
- 03/01/2001
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis / Edition 1
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Overview
Jonathan Schneer focuses on the diverse, contentious, contradictory personalities of London and its inhabitants, showing the many ways that the empire impinged on them. He describes how a range of citizens—from architects to zoologists, from financiers to striking dockers—helped to define and shape the imperial metropolis. He also shows how the city was influenced by people other than native-born male Anglo-Saxons. Schneer traces the attempts of some of these overlooked peoples to delineate its boundaries: four extraordinary women—two political hostesses, a journalist, and an explorer-ethnologist—as well as anti-imperialist Irish, South Asians, West Indians, and Africans living in London at this time. In a concluding chapter, Schneer examines the general election of 1900 in London, in which the ruling Conservative government successfully defended its imperialist policies. The people of London, says Schneer, made their city and continually remade and reshaped it—as they continue to do today.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300089035 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2001 |
| Series: | Yale Nota Bene |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 7.75(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
THE FACE OF IMPERIAL LONDON
In 1900 the capital city of the greatest empire in the world contained many imperial symbols, statues, shrines, and monuments. At the junction of Knightsbridge and Brompton Road there was the memorial to Field Marshall Hugh Rose, first Baron Strathnairn, conqueror of Syria and India, posed on bronze horse, wearing his Indian helmet with cascading feathers. Towering over the Thames Embankment was Cleopatra's Needle, an obelisk 68 feet high and weighing 180 tons, with two large sphinxes at its foot. There was the facade of the Colonial Office itself in Whitehall, decorated with representative human and animal figures of the five continents over which the British flag flew. London was dotted with such reminders of Britain's imperial rule.
Perhaps most striking among the city's many imperial symbols and monuments was Trafalgar Square, located at the very center of the imperial metropolis. At its front stood the massive column commemorating the great naval hero Lord Horatio Nelson. It was 176 feet high, surmounted by a 17-foot statue of the great man, and set upon a square pedestal 36 feet tall. Each side of the pedestal pictured one of Nelson's famous victories. Four great black lions, symbols of English might, ringed the memorial. In 1900 four additional statues stood in the square commemorating George IV and three imperialist generals, Sir Charles Napier, who fought the Peninsular campaign with Wellington and later helped to crush the Luddites, Sir Henry Havelock, who put down the Indian Mutiny, and Charles George "Chinese" Gordon, themartyr of Khartoum.
Art may exist for art's sake, but public art exists outside and beyond itself. It is meant to affect the public. Benjamin Wyatt consciously, if rather loosely, modeled the Waterloo Place memorial to the former commander-in-chief of the British army, the duke of York, upon the Emperor Trajan's Column in Rome, which had been erected to commemorate the moment when the Roman Empire reached its vastest extent. William Railton chose a column in the temple of Mars the Avenger in the Forum of Augustus, also in imperial Rome, as his model for Nelson's Column. By the turn of the twentieth century, with Britain engaged in a full-blown imperial war in South Africa, in a cooperative international "police action" designed to punish the Boxer rebels in China, and in brushfire wars against native insurrections in West Africa and Borneo, British architectural sculptors reflected popular passions in their art. Perhaps not surprisingly, they displayed what one scholar has termed "an unattractive Kiplingesque obsession with patriotism, health and 'masculinity.'" No public square, no park, was complete without its bronze depiction of "lusty 'outward bound' youths."
The work of British architects likewise reflected popular passions. For decades they had been consciously searching for a style that could be termed national. But the adherents of the Arts and Crafts movement, those who favored simple, natural English designs, had been overshadowed toward the end of the century by architects who preferred a grandiose and boastful, even imperial, style. In 1901, with the Boer War raging, John Belcher and Mervyn Macartney published what might be termed this movement's manifesto. "The work of the Later Renaissance [in England] may justly claim to embody and represent many of our national characteristics," the two architects began in their jointly edited and massively influential Later Renaissance Architecture in England. The style was "practical and convenient ... sturdy, masculine," "graceful" and "sober," precisely fitted to "modern requirements." It was, in short, and to quote a leading architectural historian, "a suitable basis for ... the expression of Britain's importance as the centre of a great empire."
By then not merely the Arts and Crafts movement, but Victorian Gothic architecture as a whole had given way to a revived classicism modeled on the works of Christopher Wren and John Vanbrugh. Throughout London, indeed throughout Britain and the empire, buildings constructed during the quarter century or so before 1914 reflected this political ideal, which was also an architectural style variously termed baroque classicism or English, Edwardian, or classical baroque. Significantly it became the style of choice for new government buildings in Whitehall, for example, the new War Office, designed by William Young in 1899, and the new Colonial Office, designed in the same year by John Brydon (and subsequently occupied by the Department of Local Government and the Treasury). Large businesses "soon took it up as a style that was sound and grand and associated with British prosperity," including the North Eastern Railway Company at 4 Cowley Street, Booth's gin distillers in Cowcross Street, Dewar House in the Haymarket, Lloyd's Shipping Register offices in Fenchurch Street, and a host of other insurance agencies, among them the Royal London Insurance Company; the Alliance Assurance Company, and the Pearl Assurance Company. Waring and Gillow's department store on Oxford Street was built in "as specifically English a Classical style as any jingoistic patriot would ask for." Hotels, theaters, restaurants, and even a few pubs followed suit.
The public art and architecture of London together reflected and reinforced an impression, an atmosphere, celebrating British heroism on the battlefield, British sovereignty over foreign lands, British wealth and power, in short, British imperialism. The impression was not hegemonic, for London's public art and architecture broadcast mixed messages, and in any event London residents did not all absorb the implicit lessons of the classical baroque style unthinkingly. Nevertheless it was an integral and influential presence in London life. At the same time it remained in toto largely an uncoordinated jumble of disparate monuments, department stores, hotels, public and private offices. Enormous and impressive London undoubtedly was; but the face it presented to the world did not express London's peerless status as the world's greatest imperial metropolis. There were relatively few broad, sweeping avenues and boulevards, as in Paris and Berlin, where architects had consciously celebrated the Third Empire and establishment of the second German Reich, a dearth of structures to compare with the grand buildings facing the Ringstrasse of Vienna, which had been erected to reflect "the greatness of empire," few constellations of linked squares as in St. Petersburg. Men and women who thought about such matters, including a number of important London architects as well as politicians and officials, hoped to see the construction of more such boulevards and buildings, and according to some larger plan.
In 1900, a grand scheme to widen the Strand and to create a broad avenue running north from it up to Holborn provided just such an opportunity, revealing the intersection between politics and architecture. On one level the project was an uncomplicated and much-needed civic improvement. On another level, however, it was an ambitious attempt to give the metropolis an example of the imperial face many thought it needed and deserved.
The authority which oversaw this project was the London County Council (LCC), established in 1888 to give the vast and still-growing metropolis something like coordinated government. The LCC, which replaced a moribund and corrupt Metropolitan Board of Works and whose members were directly elected, soon divided between Liberal, Radical, and socialist Progressives on the one hand and Conservative Moderates on the other. From the outset, however, a few members from both factions shared certain aspirations. They "hankered," as the architectural historian Andrew Saint puts it, "for London's transformation into the imperial capital that Britain merited."
This was not, however, a simple matter. Some wished for the construction of buildings in the style of Edwardian Baroque in order to reflect the glory of Britain and her empire. Others favored various projects of civic improvement and reform which they held to be essential in a truly imperial metropolis. On the grounds that the working class of an imperial metropolis deserved no less, these councilors advocated, for example, the widening of congested streets, the demolition of slums, the construction of public housing. But Progressives and Moderates, whether advocates of urban renewal or of a more imperial face for their city, could agree that the metropolis needed a major north—south artery, since most of its wider streets ran east—west. Here was an opportunity for them to work together.
Various schemes for cutting an avenue from the Strand to Holborn had been floated over the decades. In 1892, with Frederic Harrison as chairman of the LCC's improvements committee, a realistic plan began to emerge. Eventually it boiled down to this: the Strand itself must be widened and its buildings refronted. Then a great crescent should be constructed at the street's eastern end (the Aldwych), and running northward from it a broad avenue past Holborn connecting with Southampton Row and thus Russell Square and the Euston and King's Cross railway stations. This great new boulevard would also improve access to Waterloo Bridge to the south. Depending on one's perspective, the section between the Strand and Holborn was either "a large amount of slum property only fit to be demolished," as one commentator put it, or "an intensely interesting, if somewhat squalid, sector of the Old London," according to another. In any event, it was an area which neither the architects nor the city planners of the LCC wished to preserve.
Divided though the LCC may have been as to ultimate objectives, it swung ponderously into action. In 1898 its improvements committee, now chaired by the Liberal politician Shaw Lefevre, began purchasing property along the route of the proposed road. In March 1899, the LCC appointed a new chief architect, the former Admiralty surveyor William E. Riley, under whose direction widening of the Strand commenced. He initiated discussions with professional colleagues in the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). At his urging, the LCC announced a competition among eight leading architects for suggestions on treatment of the Strand-Aldwych facades.
The process was not uncontentious, however, because the divergent motives of the project's sponsors mirrored divergent notions among London's populace. No single definition of the imperial metropolis satisfied everybody. Ratepayers, less concerned with the face of London than with their pocketbooks, objected to the additional taxes they would have to pay to fund the project. Radicals, who believed in a more egalitarian imperial metropolis, opposed "the addition of a very large sum to the capital value of the 'property' of the London land monopolists." Socialists like the LCC councilor John Burns approached the issue of egalitarianism from another angle: "I don't want London to confine itself to a few swell boulevards. We want common sanitation to be uniform, to be relatively better in the poor street, which is the children's playground, and in the side street, which is the charwoman's promenade."
Similar objections were to dog the project until it had been completed, testimony to the enduring ambiguity of imperial London's identity. On the other hand, no consequential faction on the LCC was prepared to oppose a project which appealed to both reform-minded and imperial-minded councilors. More immediately troubling if ultimately less significant, therefore, was the LCC's inability to find eight leading architects willing to submit blueprints for the meager £150 fee that had been offered. The LCC increased the sum by £100. This gesture hardly appeased the president of RIBA, William Emerson: "For the London County Council, the most important municipal body in the world, to ... expect to obtain the best professional talent by increasing the paltry fee ... to £250 for designing over a mile of frontage [is] ... derogatory to the dignity of the profession." Another problem was that the LCC would not promise to hire the architect whose plans they eventually chose. But the council ploughed ahead anyway, the faction concerned with London's face increasingly dominant or at least vocal about its aims. As Howell Williams, one of this group pointed out to the LCC improvements committee, they were "dealing with buildings to be erected on perhaps one of the most important sites in Europe." What was constructed should reflect this fact. The committee was convinced. "The great thoroughfare ... should," it maintained when it moved the motion in favor of the project, "possess beauty and civic dignity, as some of the grand thoroughfares in certain continental cities."
Architects took the point, too, and expanded upon it. What London required, and what the Aldwych-Holborn project could provide, Emerson argued in the peroration to his presidential address to the RIBA in November 1899, was "an architecture that may enhance the glory of this great empire." Six months later, at an architectural congress, he elaborated upon this theme. British architecture would never enhance the glory of the British Empire if it were left to the vagaries of private enterprise. On the other hand, no county council had sufficient powers to control and guide it. Therefore, "there should be a responsible head [preferably a government minister] ... chosen ... for his known cultivated tastes, large Imperial ideas, and love of art, combined with practical common sense.... For the Metropolis, in which the whole empire was interested, such a controlling body should [most certainly] be a Government Ministry of Fine Arts." If his prescription was followed, Emerson argued, then "the architecture of the greatest empire the world has ever seen ... [will] not in the future suffer by comparison with that of other civilised countries."
Emerson's call for an architecture to reflect Britain's imperial grandeur did not fall upon deaf ears. Norman Shaw, perhaps the greatest and most influential British architect of the age, took it up. He had been asked to participate in the competition, had declined because he was retired, but then agreed to act as an unpaid consultant and advisor. In an article on the project which appeared in the Architectural Review, he appealed to architects to display British patriotic sentiment and to follow Emerson's injunction by including in their plans for the new road a specific structure. London as it now was cut a sorry figure among the great cities of the world, Shaw admitted: "Fancy having to show a cultivated foreigner Charing Cross Road or Shaftesbury Avenue! [where architectural and street improvements had recently taken place]. How should we feel? And what would his politeness induce him to say to these architectural achievements?" The new project, however, offered "an opportunity for a very striking arrangement." It should include a "great national monument ... not ... a thing loft. or 15ft. wide, and possibly soft. high—but a really grand architectural composition—perhaps 50 ft. wide and 70 ft. or 80 ft. high.... Nothing less would be worthy of what ought to be a superb site, in the centre of a city that claims to be one of the most important in the world."
Mervyn Macartney, one of the architects chosen to submit drawings in the competition, agreed with Shaw and Emerson. Now he asserted that because London was "the greatest and wealthiest city in the world," the project must reflect its exalted status. "Where the new street joins the great crescent [which eventually became the Aldwych], a circus should certainly be formed, with a site provided in the centre for a great national memorial (sure to be wanted some day), and on no account to be turned to any baser uses."
The discussion spilled from the pages of the professional journals into the popular press. The Daily Express made no comment upon the aims of British architecture but was sure the Aldwych-Holborn project provided an opportunity for imperialist and patriotic display. What was needed was not a single national monument as envisioned by Shaw and Macartney, but something grander, an entire "Hall of Heroes—Lest we forget."
One architect thought that London actually compared well with other great European cities. Vienna, Berlin, and Paris consisted mainly of "narrow irregular streets, in an infinitely worse sanitary condition than those of London," sniffed T. Walter Emden, president of the Society of Architects. But the majority of his colleagues disagreed. "The Boulevard de Sebastopol, the Grand Avenue des Champs-Elysées, the Boulevard Haussmann in Paris; the Boulevard Anspach and others in Brussels ... the magnificent streets and avenues of Vienna" were the models which W. Woodward of the RIBA thought British architects should follow. John Belcher agreed in the Architectural Review for April 1900. So, in the same issue of the journal, did three other prominent architects, T. G. Jackson, W. R. Lethaby, and Ernest Newton. London would never assume its rightful place as the premier imperial metropolis so long as it lacked the sweeping, broad avenues of the continental cities, Paris in particular. The proposed boulevard must be straight as a string and very broad. "I think that 100 ft, building to building, is sufficient for fine effect," Woodward opined. Shaw placed his weighty imprimatur upon this width in his article as well.
What to name the new street likewise exercised the minds of those concerned. Beachcroft, of the LCC, reminded the improvements committee that "as next year was the millenary of King Alfred, the Committee might consider the desirability of associating the name of Alfred with the new street." Others canvassed alternative names. "For our own part," wrote the editors of the Builder, "we keep to the suggestion we have already made, that the street be called 'Gordon Avenue,' in commemoration of the noblest Englishman of our time." In the end, however, the LCC dubbed the new avenue Kingsway. An acceptable compromise, it seemed at once patriotic, all-embracing, and dignified.
When finally the eight architects submitted their designs they all reflected the current fascination with Edwardian Baroque and the current political climate. "We see almost every variety of Classic or so-called Renaissance composition," remarked the Building News of November 2, 1900, which reprinted all of the designs over the course of several weeks. Shaw, who assessed the entries for the LCC, "enthused upon the English Renaissance" and chose the designs of Henry T. Hare (architect of the Oxford Town Hall), William Flockhart, and Mervyn Macartney, in that order, as the best.
The door stood open to the grandly conceived imperial metropolis of their fond imagining, or so it must have seemed to the LCC's empire-minded visionaries contemplating Hare's plans. And the crescent they caused to be built, and the road they caused to be cut, were grandly imperial to look at. "Even now, almost a century later," an urban historian muses, "the strains of Pomp and Circumstance still linger.... This connection with Edwardian imperialism gives Kingsway character.... We are reminded of past glories and long extinguished aspirations." Still the visionaries cannot have been altogether satisfied with the results of their project. The stubborn objections of Radicals and socialists who envisioned an altogether different imperial metropolis were never entirely silenced or overcome; the doubts of Moderates who objected to higher taxes and municipal spending were never completely assuaged; moreover the lack of a single directing figure with appropriate powers proved crippling to the imperialists' larger aims, as Emerson had predicted.
Consider this last difficulty first. From the beginning a congeries of property owners, builders, and architects sought to bring their interests to bear upon the project. "Commercial considerations must give way to some extent," exhorted the editors of the Builder on March 10, 1900. "This new road is the biggest affair of our time ... the undertaking behoves us to enter on it as statesmen not as hucksters," echoed the architect Halsey Ricardo. But in London in 1900, the hucksters could not be excluded. As the buildings went down along the Strand, the advertising posters went up on giant hoardings, much to the dismay of the Architectural Review, which found them (and also "the abominable lamp columns which are being erected in the centre of the new roadway") inexcusable. The squalid scene with its puffs for soaps, teas, whiskeys, hotels, and restaurants certainly did not present the face of London which LCC visionaries wished the world to see.
Meanwhile, several of the firms owning property along the Strand had developed their own plans for rebuilding, even as the eight chosen architects were drawing up theirs. The managers of the Gaiety Theatre and Restaurant, for example, employed the architect Ernest Runtz, one of the eight competitors but not one of the three finalists. Now he was told by the LCC that he must coordinate his designs with those of the winner, Henry Hare. The two men soon fell out. The Morning Post newspaper, Carr's Restaurant, and Short's Limited were other businesses whose facades along the Strand required further attention from the LCC, even though, or rather precisely because, each employed its own private architect.
Then there was the question of how best to utilize the great central area facing the Strand where the Aldwych would be. Some on the LCC wished to build a new London County Hall there. Others favored the great memorial structures broached by Shaw and Macartney. Still others wished to leave it to private enterprise. Council members dithered over this issue. In the end Australia House and India House and Africa House did locate at the Aldwych, proof positive that the LCC had finally created the atmosphere they sought—but it took more than two decades for these architectural representations of the British Empire to arrive. A similar state of affairs existed along the new avenue, Kingsway. It took five years to complete, and then, the grand aspirations of its designers notwithstanding, businessmen proved reluctant to rent sites along it. Many stood vacant until after World War I. In 1908, according to John Burns, Kingsway was merely "a rendez-vous for Covent Garden waggons, and a pest on account of gangs of betting men who seem to prosper there."
Indeed, so disappointed with the outcome of the project were a number of influential architects, politicians—including at least two past members of the LCC—and a host of other notables, that in 1903 they formed a Further Strand Improvement Committee to press their cause. Their argument was familiar by now: "As pointed out in the 'Report of the Royal Commission on London Traffic,' Paris, New York, Washington, Berlin, Brussels, Vienna, have streets finer than any that London can show. We ask—is London ... to refuse this opportunity of showing itself in reality an imperial city, a worthy Capital of a world-wide Empire?" London did so refuse. The further improvements which the committee sought would have cost more than £239,400, and this neither the city's ratepayers, nor the Moderates who opposed municipal spending, nor even those Progressives who objected to increasing the value of Strand property owners at municipal expense would approve.
In the end, what was written of Shaw in the Dictionary of National Biography might have been written with his role in the Aldwych-Holborn project in mind: "To his advice we owe some attempts to give our capital city a dignity worthy of its imperial position. But ... [his] projects for straightening out the haphazard muddle of London were mostly blocked." For if the British Empire was the most powerful the world had ever known, it yet lacked an emperor whose every vision of London could become an architect's command. Great Britain was a constitutional empire and a capitalist one.
A few years later, the national government showed that it possessed the political muscle and financial resources to accomplish what the LCC could not. Parliamentary approval had accompanied the Strand-Holborn project, but Parliament had not been the prime mover behind the scheme. Upon the death of Queen Victoria, however, Parliament commissioned a memorial to her in front of Buckingham Palace, and then a new layout of the Mall, which runs along the Upper rim of St. James Park all the way to Trafalgar Square, and finally the Admiralty Arch which links them. The architect chosen to complete this project was Aston Webb. Inevitably the style he employed was Edwardian Baroque. Thus Webb and the imperial government finally provided London with at least a portion of the imperial face the city was thought to deserve. Had it not been for the death of a revered monarch and the respectful silence of those who otherwise undoubtedly would have opposed such a project for its expense, or for its inegalitarian implications, however, London might lack this grandest and most imperial of avenues. The price for giving the face of London a thoroughly imperial cast would have been to place limits upon constitutionalism and free enterprise. That was a price few Londoners were willing to pay.
* * *
Possibly the London passerby rejected or was oblivious to the nationalist and imperialist preoccupations of public sculpture and architecture and to the messages they were meant to convey. Possibly he missed the classical allusions present at, say, Trafalgar Square, the reminders of British heroism, the justification of Britain's imperial role implicit in the various memorial statues there. Or possibly not. The P. & O., Royal Mail, Cunard, and White Star Line steamship companies all occupied offices on Cockspur Street, within a stone's throw of the square. No doubt there were standard business reasons for choosing this location. But also may there not have been the hope that customers inspired by the square's patriotic themes would be eager to visit scenes made famous by imperialist adventurers? A few steps up the Strand from Trafalgar Square, Henry Gaze and Sons, travel agents, offered, in early January 1900, a sixteen-day trip from Cairo to Khartoum to travelers wishing "to see the scenes of the Sirdar's exploits." The Sirdar was the British military commander in Egypt, the man who had avenged General Gordon.
Architecture affords the backdrop to what takes place in a city. It does not determine events, but, because it contributes to a mood or atmosphere, it can influence them. A young Londoner, moved and inspired by the statue of General Gordon in Trafalgar Square, decides finally, perhaps after months of rumination, to emigrate to South Africa. Twenty paces from him he sees South Africa House, which will furnish him with information about the colony; a dozen steps beyond are the offices of the steamship line which will take him there. His life is changed; perhaps, in a small way, history is changed.
The effect can transcend individuals. During the Boer War the return of soldiers from South Africa was carefully stage-managed, not so much by military as by political and municipal authorities. The idea was to display the heroes in such a way as to create, or to sustain, a mood of imperialist determination among a public which might begin to grow weary of war. But then the heroes must be presented in a proper setting—which means that the arrangers of such scenes believed architecture can be made to serve a political purpose, that it can, in fact, help to shape history.
A specific instance of such attempted manipulation occurred in October 1900 when the City Imperial Volunteers (CIV) returned to London from a tour of duty in South Africa, where they had seen combat. The CIV was the brainchild of the aldermen of the City of London and more particularly of the lord mayor, Sir Alfred J. Newton, Bart. Raised, equipped, and manned mainly by the great firms and companies of the city, the CIV had departed England the previous January amidst unprecedented hoopla. Their return, however, proved to be an even greater occasion.
The soldiers sailed from Cape Town for home on October 7 aboard the steamship Aurania. In London the responsible authorities began planning a grand reception for them. Its purpose was to honor the returning military men and the City firms which had funded them and also, more important, to encourage martial and patriotic spirit in the imperial metropolis. A march through the capital and ceremonies at St. Paul's Cathedral and the Guildhall would be followed by a great banquet.
The authorities thought through every detail of the event. The men would march in a certain order designed for purposes of spectacle and display: at their head, astride their chargers, the CIV commander, Col. Henry William Mackinnon, and the commander of the Home District, Gen. Sir Henry Trotter; behind them, mounted only slightly less splendidly, the CIV's cavalry division, led by a sergeant bearing a flag captured in the Orange Free State; next the field battery including Maxim guns; then the CIV cyclists; and then, numbering thirteen hundred, the infantry battalions. Behind these, in horse-drawn brakes, a spectacle clearly designed to whip at patriotic sensibilities: those of the CIV who could not march because they had been wounded.
Moreover, the authorities arranged not only for police, but also for the London Scottish, the Queen's Westminster, and the Surrey Volunteer brigades, themselves arrayed in splendid uniforms, to line the route of march in order to hold back the anticipated crowds. They would lend further picturesque, indeed patriotic, color to the scene. Finally, they scheduled various military bands to perform "Soldiers of the Queen" and other patriotic airs at way stations along the route, so that not only sight but sound itself would feed the imperialist enthusiasm of onlookers.
Equal attention was devoted to the course that the returning soldiers would follow. First of all, they would not begin their march from Waterloo station, the point of destination for all other London-bound trains from Southampton, including a smaller detachment of sailors from H.M.S. Powerful who had been feted earlier in the year although with less hullabaloo, because the route from that terminus to St. Paul's Cathderal, over the Waterloo Bridge and eastward along the Strand and Fleet Street, is relatively short and prosaic. Rather their train would come up from Southampton to Paddington railway station, the terminus for Queen Victoria's special train whenever she traveled to London from Windsor, and the railway station most associated in the public mind with loyalty and grand occasions. Then, from Paddington, the soldiers would follow almost precisely the route the queen had taken during the celebrations accompanying her Diamond Jubilee in 1897. These "arrangements ... were discussed yesterday morning at a special meeting, over which the Lord Mayor presided at the Mansion House," reported the Daily Mail. Unavailingly might an officer of the returning corps warn "there is not a man among us who would not rather forego the reception" altogether! But the politicians had much more on their minds than the finer feelings of returning soldiers.
The Aurania docked in Southampton on the evening of Saturday, October 27. On Monday morning the CIV disembarked amidst cheering throngs and filed into four great trains which carried them up to London by the circuitous route that brought them to Paddington. The caravan whirled through towns and villages decorated with patriotic flags and banners, past waving, applauding crowds. It steamed into Paddington at two minutes past noon. This was the starting point of the march through London which the men dreaded. And now the careful calculations of the event's organizers began to pay off.
When the men of the CIV filed from Paddington station into Praed Street and when down the Edgware Road, they did not take a direct route toward St Paul's by turning into Oxford Street, which, after all, is lined mainly with shops and is not conducive to the mood the authorities sought to create on this occasion, and which borders at its eastern end on Solo, an insalubrious, even raunchy district. They were also thus able to avoid marching down any portion of Charing Cross Road, whose eastern edge touched the notorious slum districts of Seven Dials. Rather, at the end of the Edgware Road they continued south, through the lofty Marble Arch, following Queen Victoria's route of three years before. But whereas the queen had turned down Constitution-hill to Buckingham Palace, in which she spent the night before continuing her progress to St. Paul's on the second day of her Diamond Jubilee celebration, the CIV marched across Hyde Park Corner and then southward toward Apsley House, an imposing mansion which had been the generous gift of a grateful nation to the duke of Wellington, the hero of a previous war. This is as noble a stretch as may be found in London, with Hyde Park on one side and the elegant Park Lane on the other, well designed to impress the onlooker with a sense of the wealth England possesses and, through Apsley House, of the nation's power, historic mission, and past military glories.
From Apsley House the backdrop to the march grew even more grand. The CIV trooped east along Piccadilly with Green Park to their right. Buckingham Palace lies immediately to the south, and here they took up the queen's route of 1897 again, for she, upon leaving Buckingham Palace after the twenty-four-hour hiatus, had turned from Constitution-hill into Piccadilly and then into St. James Street, Pall Mall, the Strand, Fleet Street, and finally Ludgate Hill on the way to St. Paul's. So did the CIV, although stopping briefly at Marlborough House, the Prince of Wales's London residence, where the heir to the throne greeted them, and then departing from the queen's route to make another detour down Whitehall to the War Office, where the secretary for war, Lord Lansdowne, the commander in chief of the army, Lord Wolsey, the adjutant-general, Sir Evelyn Wood, and Queen Victoria's third son, Prince Arthur William Patrick Albert, the duke of Connaught, greeted them. From Whitehall the column marched into Trafalgar Square, perhaps the single most vivid architectural and sculptural talisman of British power, heroism, and imperialism within the metropolis.
This itinerary had been designed to present an appropriately grand and imperial backdrop for the sunburned heroes returning from the veldt and for the members of the royal household and high military men who came to bless them. It fostered an impressive ambiance linking royalty, imperialism, the CIV, and the cheering throng in a shared, glorious endeavor. Moreover, the itinerary was eminently practical. There would have been no room for great crowds along Oxford Street or Charing Cross Road, but as the CIV paraded from Marble Arch to Hyde Park Corner, "the public stretched back among the trees a hundred deep at a time." Indeed Hyde Park, Green Park, and St. James Park could accommodate any number of people. In Trafalgar Square, a more limited space, the crush was so fierce that "accidents were frequent, and the hysterical shrieks of women mingled with the deep-throated huzzas of the crowd." Along the Strand and Fleet Street the mass grew so dense that the CIV could barely make their way. "The multitudes who poured into the streets exceeded in number the crowds that came out to celebrate her Majesty's Jubilee [of 1897]," one witness recorded in disbelief.
From Trafalgar Square the line of march followed the Strand east into Fleet Street, up Ludgate Hill, and into St. Paul's. This was a less imposing section of the metropolis. Indeed, the Strand was a mess as a result of the LCC's decision to widen and improve it; Fleet Street, rather a narrow artery, was lined with the seedy pubs and cafes frequented by journalists and printers who worked nearby. No longer surrounded by architectural reminders of British imperialism and military success, the crowds grew unruly. Did the lack of an imposing backdrop free spectators from certain feelings of constraint? At any rate, as one journalist recorded, at this stage of the march "the ambulance men were needed every few minutes.... At Ludgate-circus a serious accident occurred, and on all of the street refuges gasping patients were lying."
Why did the organizers of the occasion not choose to receive the returning soldiers at Westminster Abbey instead of St. Paul's, thus obviating the march up the Strand and Fleet Street and the scrum which followed? The answer must be not merely that St. Paul's could accommodate a larger crowd—although surely this was a consideration which had influenced the queen three years before—but also that they wished to honor the City Imperial Volunteers with a service in the City, which had created and paid for them, and to fete them at the Guildhall, also located in the heart of the City; they wanted to use architecture to underline the connection which the CIV embodied, linking the City of London with imperialism and loyalty.
But now the volunteers were approaching St. Paul's, where the lord mayor, his wife, the sheriffs of London in brilliant red coats, the Cathedral Choir in white, and "a gaudy throng of liveried servants" stood waiting. Above them towered the massive dome of St. Paul's, the very archetype of the classical baroque style. Spectacle was paramount once again. Decorum reasserted itself. The cathedral's "portals flung backward.... Out of the dusk rushed a crash of cheering, and through the cheering a clamour of bagpipes and brass. And now the white train of clergy and choir ... the Lord Mayor and his scarlet throng, and—them [the CIV].... The organ burst out and the brasses of the Royal Military School of Music made the blood tingle, and every throat took up the processional hymn, and everything together wrung tears from many eyes." The bishop of Stepney welcomed the returning warriors with a speech of Thanksgiving: "My brothers ... Welcome Home!" Sir George Martin stood out on the chancel steps, waved his baton, and "the National Anthem rolled from a thousand strong throats up into the glorious spangled roof." It is hard to imagine a scene better calculated to play upon patriotic emotions or a building better suited for the occasion.
Yet there was another such scene, at the Guildhall to which the CIV processed immediately following the service at St. Paul's. Exiting the cathedral, the soldiers forced their way through surging crowds, up Cheapside and King Street, which were lined by the Tower Hamlets, the Second London, and the London Rifle brigades. This was the very heart of the City of London, the birthplace, as it were, of the CIV. The great offices and display rooms of imperial merchant princes, their banks and insurance houses, loomed above the crowds, which were well behaved again. The soldiers entered the grand premises of the Guildhall. Portions of this building dated back to the thirteenth century, but much of it had been reconstructed after the great fire of 1666 by the greatest of all practitioners of English Renaissance architecture, Christopher Wren himself. The soldiers filed through the gallery, dominated by fourteen-foot statues of Gog and Magog, into the great hall, where, "under the shadow of the memorials erected by the City of London to Nelson and Wellington," the lord mayor, General Trotter, and Colonel Mackinnon delivered patriotic speeches. Then, "as the familiar strains of the National Anthem rose from the assembly, the lips of many a khaki-clad warrior quivered with the emotion he endeavoured to conceal."
* * *
If there is such a thing as architectural determinism, that is not what this chapter is arguing for. On the other hand, architecture can be made to serve more than one purpose. At the turn of the twentieth century some of London's municipal authorities and, it would appear, most of the country's leading architects thought that architecture meant more than the style of a building. They believed that London was the capital city of the world's greatest empire, but that its architecture did not reflect this fact. London would show the world a more imperial face if the Strand was widened, if a great monument was placed at the Aldwych, if the new road to Holborn was a hundred feet wide, named after General Gordon, and so on. For these men architecture and national identity were linked. Architecture could help to forge a national and an imperial identity.
Some LCC councilors and their allies had a rather different notion of what a truly imperial capital should be. For socialists like John Burns it meant a city which fostered the health and living standards of its inhabitants so that they might play their part in imperial affairs. He supported the Strand-Holborn improvements only when convinced that London's poor would benefit from the new north—south connection between Waterloo and King's Cross and Euston railway stations. Harold Cox, Radical secretary of the Cobden Club, M.P. for Preston, and a future London County councilor, articulated another reason for Radicals and socialists to support such projects. As he put it to a meeting demanding further Strand improvements, the workers of London had "a double interest in the beauty and the spaciousness of our public thoroughfares. Because their homes are so narrow the street is their playground, their drawing room." Councilor Frederic Harrison wished to pre-serve and enhance not merely London's street views, but the "historic associations" linked to certain sections of the city. The famous Radical was thinking of preserving not merely vistas which opened on London's great buildings like Parliament and St. Paul's Cathedral, or of, say, the view from Hyde Park corner or Marble Arch, but rather the penumbra of radical ideas which encircled humble homes, taverns, and coffeehouses where the Puritan revolutionaries and early trade unionists used to meet, and Kennington Common, where the Chartists assembled in 1848, perhaps even Farringdon Hall, where, that year, the Labour Party's founding conference had taken place. Harrison viewed the members of the LCC as "trustees of the Metropolis of the Empire," but his notion of what the Metropolis of the Empire should be like was not the same as, say, the notion of an architect like Aston Webb.
No wonder, then, that the project was not entirely successful. The broadened Strand, the Aldwych, and the Kingsway promised more in blueprint than they delivered in reality. And here looms yet another competing vision of the imperial metropolis. For the very commercial successes which helped to strengthen the sinews of British imperialism had also produced a mindset among London businessmen and ratepayers which was inimical to the rehabilitation of their city along grand and imperial lines. "We submit," wrote the members of the Further Strand Improvement Committee, "that the matter should be considered from the point of view not only of what is for the moment financially desirable, but also of what is befitting the dignity of the Capital of our Empire." Their plea fell upon deaf ears. Imperial identity and national identity were at odds in this instance, and national identity was more profound. After all, the opposition to high rates stretched back past the cheeseparing of the Liberals in the mid-nineteenth century all the way to the seventeenth century, when John Hampden refused to pay "ship money" to King Charles.
But it was not only a matter of money. It was a matter of power too. The LCC simply could not ride roughshod over the wishes of London ratepayers, even had it wanted to. It lacked the authority to push the Strand—Holborn improvement scheme to its logical conclusion. In Cape Town, Bombay, and, above all, in New Delhi, where architects and city planners suffered fewer constraints, an imperial architecture might take concrete form. Not so in the capital city of the empire, where architects and the civic authorities who commissioned them had to take the wishes and needs of private interests into account. The imperial metropolis was democratic to a degree. Although Britain could take an empire, it could not give its capital city a facelift.
And so London authorities attempted to make do with such imperial face as the capital already possessed. The lord mayor and his colleagues did so in their arrangements for celebrating the return of the CIV from South Africa. They took care to choose an itinerary and a destination which had received the royal imprimatur three years before, linking soldiers, royalty, the City, and spectators in a patriotic, empire-minded, and Christian whole. The march did not begin at Waterloo Station and end at Hyde Park, as it might have done, or in Trafalgar Square, which was a traditional destination for political marches and rallies, or in Westminster Cathedral, but rather in the City's own great place of worship where the queen had celebrated her sixty years' reign. Architecture provided the splendidly appropriate backdrop for the route and the endpoint the organizers chose. Few Londoners can have suspected that British imperialists had conscripted the very streets they walked, the very buildings they passed or entered, in an attempt to capture their hearts and minds.
Were the imperialists successful? Can spectacle permanently imprint human behavior? Did ratepayers who objected to further Strand improvements, did socialists and Radicals who questioned the need for a more imperial-looking London, cheer the returning CIV? Even when British authorities attempted to utilize such imperial face as London did possess, competing visions of the imperial metropolis arise to confuse us. Perhaps for a moment, on Monday, October 29, 1900, one meaning of imperial London was unambiguously apparent and triumphant. But the discussion sparked by the LCC's plans for the Strand and Kingsway is a reminder that the imperial metropolis was always in process of construction, that Londoners sought to shape it in different, even conflicting, ways, that they built it as much as it built them.
What People are Saying About This
A very rich and wide-ranging book. The evocation of a great city is vivid and memorable.