London by A.N. Wilson

Author:A.N. Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
ISBN: 9780307426659
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2009-03-29T04:00:00+00:00

The Victorians made much of the cult of home and for that reason needed refuges from it. The simple chophouses and coffeehouses of a previous age survived. But restaurants became popular, ranging from the very grand, such as the Café Royal in Regent Street (opened in 1865) to the more bohemian, such as Kettner’s in Soho. (Both, at the time of writing, are still extant.)

Some of the restaurants, such as Spiers or Pond’s Criterion at Piccadilly Circus, were huge. It was now possible for women to eat out, alone, or accompanied by other women, or with their husbands. As well as theaters, there was another attraction luring the inhabitants of the suburbs into the centers: department stores. These expanded and grew during the 1880s and 1890s, from William Whiteley’s (founded 1863), the Civil Service Stores (1865), and the Army and Navy Stores (1871). Smallish drapers, such as Swan and Edgar (1812), Dickins and Jones (1837) (they started as Dickins and Smith in 1790), and Marshall and Snelgrove (1837) grew to match their rivals. Harrods, a small grocery shop that had originated in the East End, moved to Knightsbridge and became an institution, providing services such as a lending library, a bank, and an undertaker’s. As the artist Osbert Lancaster observed, “All my female relatives had their own favourites, where some of them had been honoured customers for more than half a century, and their arrival was greeted by frenzied bowing on the part of the frock-coated shopwalkers. . . . For my Great-aunt Bessie the Army and Navy Stores fulfilled all the functions of her husband’s club” (All Done from Memory, p. 35).

The men’s clubs flourished as never before. Social climbing was such a universal form of exercise in the late nineteenth century that there could not be enough establishments priding themselves on being exclusively for gentlemen. Just as the public schools with pretensions to grandeur, such as Eton and Harrow, spawned hundreds of imitators for those lower down the social scale, so White’s and Brooks’s had a host of imitators, some for army officers, some for civil servants, some for the self-consciously raffish or bohemian. They were all ways of defining the persona of those who applied for membership, and they were all ways of escaping home.

Home need no longer be a house in the ever growing suburbs. Just as work could now be in a purpose-built office block (erected in all likelihood on the site of some lovely Georgian terrace or Wren church), home could be in a flat. Francophobia made the English slow to copy the Parisian zest for flat life, but its economic practicality and its offer of privacy were both tempting. In the mid-1850s, three-quarters of Londoners were huddled together cheek by jowl in lodging houses of one description or another. By the end, this number had been much reduced and Londoners were beginning the standoffish existence which is now their norm, with their own multiplicity of dwellings with their own front doors.

By the end

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