Characteristics of the City

• Metropolis – A large, densely populated city of a country or state,

often the capital of the region

• Urbanisation – Development of a city or town

Industrialisation and the Rise of the Motrdern
City in England
• Industrialisation changed the form of urbanisation in the modern period.
• However, even as late as the 1850s, many decades after the beginning of
the industrial revolution, most Western countries were largely rural.
• The early industrial cities of Britain such as Leeds and Manchester attracted
large numbers of migrants to the textile mills set up in the late eighteenth
century.
• In 1851, more than three-quarters of the adults living in Manchester were
migrants from rural areas.
• Now let us look at London. By 1750, one out of every nine people of E
England and Wales lived in London. It was a colossal (extremely large or
great.)city with a population of about 675,000.
• Over the nineteenth century, London continued to expand. Its population
multiplied fourfold in the 70 years between 1810 and 1880, increasing from
1 million to about 4 million.
• The city of London was a powerful magnet for migrant populations,
even though it did not have large factories.
• ‘Nineteenth century London,’ says the historian Gareth Stedman
Jones, ‘was a city of clerks and shopkeepers, of small masters and
skilled artisans, of a growing number of semi skilled and sweated
outworkers, of soldiers and servants, of casual labourers, street
sellers, and beggars.’
• Apart from the London dockyards, five major types of industries
employed large numbers: clothing and footwear, wood and furniture,
metals and engineering, printing and stationery, and precision
products such as surgical instruments, watches, and objects of
precious metal.
• During the First World War (1914-18) London began manufacturing
motor cars and electrical goods, and the number of large factories
increased until they accounted for nearly one-third of all jobs in the
city.
Marginal Groups
• As London grew, crime flourished. We are told that 20,000 criminals
were living in London in the 1870s. We know a great deal about
criminal activities in this period, for crime became an object of
widespread concern.
• The police were worried about law and order, philanthropists were
anxious about public morality, and industrialists wanted a hard-
working and orderly labour force. So the population of criminals was
counted, their activities were watched, and their ways of life were
investigated.
• In an attempt to discipline the population, the authorities imposed high
penalties for crime and offered work to those who were considered the
‘deserving poor’.
• Factories employed large numbers of women in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries. With technological developments, women
gradually lost their industrial jobs, and were forced to work within
households.
• The 1861 census recorded a quarter of a million domestic servants in
London, of whom the vast majority were women, many of them recent
migrants.
• A large number of women used their homes to increase family income by
taking in lodgers or through such activities as tailoring, washing or
matchbox making.
• However, there was a change once again in the twentieth century. As
women got employment in wartime industries and offices, they withdrew
from domestic service.
• Large number of children were pushed into low-paid work, often by
their parents.
• ’It was only after the passage of the Compulsory Elementary
Education Act in 1870, and the factory acts beginning from 1902, that
children were kept out of industrial work.

The marginal groups:

(i) Many listed as 'criminals' in fact were poor people who lived by
stealing lead from roofs, food from shops, lumps of coal, and clothes
drying on hedges.
(ii) (ii) With technological developments, women gradually lost their
industrial jobs and were forced to work within the households.
Activity
Imagine that you are a newspaper reporter writing a piece on the
changes you see in London in 1811.
What problems are you likely to write about? Who would have gained
from the changes?
Housing
• Older cities like London changed dramatically when people began
pouring in after the Industrial Revolution.
• Factory or workshop owners did not house the migrant workers.
• Instead, individual landowners put up cheap, and usually unsafe,
tenements (Run-down and often overcrowded apartment house,
especially in a poor section of a large city)for the new arrivals.
• Although poverty was not unknown in the countryside, it was more
concentrated and starkly visible in the city.
• For a while the better-off city dwellers continued to demand that
slums simply be cleared away.
• But gradually a larger and larger number of people began to
recognise the need for housing for the poor.
• What were the reasons for this increasing concern?
• First, the vast mass of one-room houses occupied by the poor were
seen as a serious threat to public health: they were overcrowded,
badly ventilated, and lacked sanitation.
• Second, there were worries about fire hazards created by poor
housing.
• Third, there was a widespread fear of social disorder, especially after
the Russian Revolution in 1917. Workers’ mass housing schemes
were planned to prevent the London poor from turning rebellious.
Activity
• In many cities of India today, there are moves to clear away the slums
where poor people live. Discuss whether or not it is the responsibility
of the government to make arrangements for houses for these
people.
Cleaning London
A variety of steps were taken to clean up London.
• Attempts were made to decongest (relieve the congestion of
)localities, green the open spaces, reduce pollution and landscape the
city.
• Large blocks of apartments were built, akin to those in Berlin and
New York – cities which had similar housing problems.
• Rent control was introduced in Britain during the First World War to
ease the impact of a severe housing shortage.
• The congestion in the nineteenth-century industrial city also led to a
yearning for clean country air.
• Many wealthy residents of London were able to afford a holiday
home in the countryside.
• Demands were made for new ‘lungs’ for the city, and some attempts were
made to bridge the difference between city and countryside through such
ideas as the Green Belt around London.
• Architect and planner Ebenezer Howard developed the principle of the
Garden City, a pleasant space full of plants and trees, where people would
both live and work. He believed this would also produce better-quality
citizens.
• Following Howard’s ideas Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker designed the
garden city of New Earswick. There were common garden spaces, beautiful
views, and great attention to detail.
• In the end, only well-off workers could afford these houses.
• Between the two World Wars (1919-39) the responsibility for housing the
working classes was accepted by the British state, and a million houses,
most of them single-family cottages, were built by local authorities.
• Meanwhile, the city had extended beyond the range where people could
walk to work, and the development of suburbs made new forms of mass
transport absolutely necessary.
Activity
• Imagine you are investigating the conditions in which the London
poor lived. Write a note discussing all the dangers to public health
which were created by these conditions.
Transport in the city
• The London underground railway partially solved the housing crisis
by carrying large masses of people to and from the city.
• The very first section of the Underground in the world opened on 10
January 1863 between Paddington and Farrington Street in London.
On that day 10,000 passengers were carried, with trains running
every ten minutes.
• By 1880 the expanded train service was carrying 40 million
passengers a year. At first people were afraid to travel underground.
-Lack of oxygen, smoking pipes. The atmosphere was a mixture of
sulphur, coal dust and foul fumes from the gas lamps above, heat
Social change
• In the eighteenth century, the family had been a unit of production and
consumption as well as of political decision-making.
• The function and the shape of the family were completely transformed by life in
the industrial city.
• Ties between members of households loosened, and among the working class
the institution of marriage tended to break down.
• Women of the upper and middle classes in Britain, on the other hand, faced
increasingly higher levels of isolation, although their lives were made easier by
domestic maids who cooked, cleaned and cared for young children on low wages.
• Women who worked for wages had some control over their lives, particularly
among the lower social classes.
• However, many social reformers felt that the family as an institution had broken
down, and needed to be saved or reconstructed by pushing these women back
into the home.
Leisure
• For wealthy British, there had long been an annual ‘London Season’.
• Several cultural events, such as the opera, the theatre and classical
music performances were organised for an elite group of 300-400
families in the late eighteenth century.
• Meanwhile, working classes met in pubs to have a drink, exchange
news and sometimes also to organise for political action.
Politics
• In the severe winter of 1886, when outdoor work came to a standstill, the London
poor exploded in a riot, demanding relief from the terrible conditions of poverty.
• Alarmed shopkeepers closed down their establishments, fearing the 10,000-
strong crowd that was marching from Deptford to London.
• The marchers had to be dispersed by the police. A similar riot occurred in late
1887; this time, it was brutally suppressed by the police in what came to be
known as the Bloody Sunday of November 1887.
• Two years later, thousands of London’s dockworkers went on strike and marched
through the city.
• According to one writer, ‘thousands of the strikers had marched through the city
without a pocket being picked or a window being broken …’ The 12-day strike was
called to gain recognition for the dockworkers’ union. From these examples you
can see that large masses of people could be drawn into political causes in the
city. A large city population was thus both a threat and an opportunity. State
authorities went to great lengths to reduce the possibility of rebellion and
enhance urban aesthetics, as the example of Paris shows.
Haussmanisation of Paris
• Haussmanisation of Paris refers to the re-building of Paris by Baron
Haussmann in the mid-eighteenth century. When Louis Napoleon III
came to power, he appointed Haussmann as the chief architect of the
new city.
• He laid out new streets, straight sidewalks, boulevards and open
avenues, and planted full-grown trees