The London Journal
Volume 24 No.1 1999
ABSTRACTS
PAUL LAXTON, The Evidence of
Richard Horwood's Maps for Residential Building in London 1799-1819
(pp. 1-22) This paper examines the ways in which Richard
Horwood's maps of London can be used to examine the pattern of residential
housebuilding in London between 1799 and 1819. It discusses the nature of
the cartographic evidence and suggests lines of research on the
relationship between population growth and movement, the supply of
residential accommodation, and the social consequences of crowding. It
compares the pattern of housebuilding derived from the cartographic
evidence with that from the census. The emphasis is on the potential and
pitfalls of the maps for an analysis of this kind.
PETER CLAUS, Languages of
Citizenship in the City of London 1848-1867 (pp. 23-37)
It is unsatisfactory to view the City of London solely through the lens
of econimic history or to focus exclusively on the Corporation as a unit
of local government. Instead, the City, politically at any rate, is
analysed as one. From this premise, questions flow regarding the changing
nature of City politics from its parochail moment at mid-century, very
much a site of participatory democracy, to the late 1860s and beyond when
it emeged as Conservatism's first parish. As the City lost its resident
population, it left the Corporation open to charges that it was no longer
useful, that it was run by a clique and that it remained unrepresentative.
The response before 1848 had been to 'encourage' wholesalers and retailers
to become Freemen of the City. After 1848, the Corporation began the
incremental introduction of rate paying as the basis of the franchise - a
measure finally introduced in full in 1867. The larger point made is that
by establishing property as the basis of citizenship those connected to
financial institutions came to have a deciseive say in the affairs of the
Corporation. Finally, it is suggested that the Corporation should not be
seen by historians as a superannuated local authority, a 'curious
survival', robbed by its fleeing population of anything but symbolic
power. On the contrary it flourished, not just as an authoritative voice
of the financial City but also as a national institution, reaching out to
a wider constituency in London and beyond.
PETER MALPASS, Continuity and
Change in Philanthropic Housing Organisations: the Octavia Hill Housing
Trust and the Guinness Trust (pp. 38-57) In the last
twenty-five years housing associations have come to play a greater part in
accommodating Londoners than in other parts of the country. In the
nineteenth century, too, various forms of philanthropic and
semi-philanthropic housing organisations were concentrated in London. This
paper is concerned with the nature of the putative links between these
Victorian housing organisations and modern housing associations. Much has
been written about housing reform in London in the nineteenth century, and
the origins of housing associations are generally seen to lie in the
Victorian period, but the existing literature tends to take for granted
the links between them rather than making them explicit. In fact very few
of today's active housing associations can trace their origins directly
back to before the First World War. Two such organisations are the Guinness
Trust and the Octavia Hill Housing Trust, each of which represents a
distinct tradition in voluntary housing. The paper draws on detailed
archive research on these two trusts to illustrate how voluntary housing
organisations survived, developed and changed in the period up to the
watershed legislation represented by the Housing Act, 1974.
KEN YOUNG, Re-reading Robson on the
Government of London (pp. 58-67) It is sixty years
since William Robson's The Government and Misgovernment of London
was published. This paper re-examines Robson's argument, noting how the
structure of the book needs to be interpreted as setting out a programme
for reforming the government of the Greater London metropolitan area. For
Robson, failure to establish a unified Greater London administration was a
fundmental weakness in the government of the city. His distinctive
contribution was to address the problem of metropolitan growth as an
administrative expert with an acute sense of the problems of
inter-governmental relations. Whilst acknowledging administrative
fragmentation, Robson nevertheless failed to appreciate the significance
of political forces that underlay this state of affairs. His
recommendations were purely administrative and lacked nay sense of the way
politics might impede or motivate such machinery. Reactions to the book
were as polarised as the text itself was polarising. The outbreak of the
Second World War halted any movement for reform. After the War, new ways
of understanding the problems of metropolitan gorwth emerged, notably
those of American scholars. However, none of this new political analysis
engaged Robson's attention, despite its direct relevance to the governance
of the metropolis.
Contents List of Vol. 24 No.
1
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