Major Constructions in London - 1860-1880

`In the seventh decade of the nineteenth century, London was more cut about,
more rebuilt and more extended than at any time in its previous history'.
John Summerson, `The London Building World of the Eighteen-sixties'

Stoke Newington expanded rapidly between 1860 and 1890. It is not easy to see why until one realises what an uncomfortable place the City of London became in this period. The list below shows why people ran away to the fields of Stoke Newington.

• Work done in London in that period included:-
• Main drainage. Four sewers zigzagged west to east. This took 10 years.
• Metropolitan Railway was built by cut and cover to join the main line railway stations from Paddington to Liverpool Street. The length of Marylebone Road and Euston Road and thence to the City, was dug out as a huge trench. A brick tunnel was built and the whole road filled in and re-laid.
• District Railway built (Inner Circle), Victoria Embankment with sewer and highway,
• Pimlico Railway - bridge and Victoria Station,
• The South Eastern Railway reached Charing Cross (17 bridges, 119 brick arches, an iron viaduct, destruction of a hospital, 8000 bodies removed from a cemetery, Charing Cross Railway Bridge built.
• North London Railway linked Broad St, Hampstead and Kew.
• The Midland Railway reached St Pancras. Victoria Street was still raw. Queen Victoria Street cut through the City from Blackfriars to Mansion House, holding a sewer, the District Railway, gas and water mains, in its belly.
• Holborn Viaduct bridged the Fleet Valley.
• Smithfield Market was built 1867-8 and Blackfriars Bridge in 1869.

Baron Haussman, who tore the heart out of Paris after the Commune, and rebuilt it as huge monumental avenues, could have learnt his trade in London.

As a result of all this activity, the City of London's population fell.

In 1861 the City of London had a population of113,000. By 1871 this was reduced to 76,000.

`The masters had gone to Bayswater or Kensington or perhaps Hornsey or Clapham: the clerks to Camberwell or Peckham, Stoke Newington or Highbury.’

John Summerson again

To return to Stoke Newington, the builders of Lordship Park clearly hoped to attract some of the masters. They began an impressive development in the shadow of the romantic castle of the Water Company Pumping Station. There were pillars with heraldic figures at the Green Lanes entrance. A few huge houses were built with mews behind, but the masters did not come.

Who Built All the New Houses?

The names of particular builders can be found by examining the Drainage Applications, which give the building date and often an outline plan of the house. They may too include some correspondence, but the general picture is clear.

In 1861, 10% of the male, adult, working population of London were employed `on Houses and buildings.’

Most were very small people. Michael Hunter shows in `The Victorian Villas of Hackney' that 53 builders constructed an average of under four houses each in the period 1851-1852. Few builders employed more than 10 men. The tendering system ensured that there was a great deal of work for quantity surveyors and estimators. Most of the calculations would have been done by the individual builder, but most came to nothing. Bankruptcies were common and the bankrupt reverted abruptly to being a workman again.

The reference book here seems to be 'The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists' by Robert Tressal, which has harrowing detail of the lives of small man, often talented, without capital. It is set in Hastings but the plight of the small builder has always been the same in London and everywhere else.