Living in the Past: The Remaking of London

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The Remaking of London

T he imperial capital of London dominated Britain and astonished the visitor. Equal in population to Paris with 400,000 inhabitants in 1650, London grew to 900,000 by 1800, while second-place Paris had 600,000. And as London grew, its citizens created a new urban landscape and style of living.

In 1666 the Great Fire of London destroyed about 80 percent of the old, predominantly wooden central city. Reconstruction proceeded quickly, with brick structures made mandatory to prevent fires. As London rebuilt and kept growing, noble landowners sought to increase their incomes by setting up residential developments on their estates west of the city. A landowner would lay out a square with streets and building lots and lease the lots to speculative builders who put up fine houses for sale or rent. Soho Square, first laid out in the 1670s and shown below as it appeared in 1731, was fairly typical. The spacious square with its gated park is surrounded by three-story row houses on deep, narrow lots. Set in the country but close to the city, a square like Soho was a kind of elegant village with restrictive building codes that catered to aristocrats, officials, and successful professionals who were served by the artisans and shopkeepers living in side streets. The elegant new area, known as the West End, contrasted sharply with the shoddy rentals and makeshift shacks of laborers and sailors in the mushrooming East End, which artists rarely painted. Residential segregation by income level increased substantially in eighteenth-century London and became a key feature of the modern city.

As the suburban villages grew and gradually merged, the West End increasingly attracted the well-to-do from all over England. Rural landowners and provincial notables came for the social season from October to May. The picture at bottom right of Bloomsbury Square in 1787 and the original country mansion of the enterprising noble developer provides a glimpse into this wellborn culture.

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London Before the Great Fire.
(Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
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Soho Square, 1731.
(From Stow’s Survey of London, by Sutton Nicholls [fl. 1700–1740]/Private Collection/The Stapleton Collection/Bridgeman Images)
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Bloomsbury Square, 1787.
(By Edward Dayes [1763–1804]/Private Collection/© Look and Learn/Peter Jackson Collection/Bridgeman Images)

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

  1. Examining the picture shown at left, how would you characterize London before the Great Fire?
  2. Compare the paintings of Soho and Bloomsbury Squares. How are they complementary? Why did the artist choose to include a milkmaid and her cows in the illustration of Bloomsbury Square?