London History

By David Clark  

When the Romans invaded Britain in around AD 43, London did not exist nor has any evidence of any sort of town been discovered on the site where London now stands. The Romans themselves were not initially interested in building a city here – their interest was in building a bridge across the Thames  and roads to connect the coast with the Roman towns of Colchester, St. Alban’s and Lincoln…. A bridge has stood on the site of what is now London Bridge thoughout the centuries . Indeed until 1750 it was the only bridge across the Thames. The name of the river itself is believed to be derived from the Celtic Tamesa, probably meaning The Dark One!

London at this point in time then was a hub between the coast and the inland cities, much as Heathrow is a hub for air travel today. As a result of this, a ribbon development of dwellings grew around the bridge and the roads, but it was not until AD 50 that the Romans realised it’s strategic importance in terms of it’s command of the land, river and sea communications of southern Britain and built a permanent political and trading town on the north bank of the river where the ground rose above the marshes on what is now known as Ludgate Hill and Cornhill. It’s position meant that it soon developed into an important commercial centre. However within 10 years it suffered the first of it’s many fires, when Queen Boudicca reacted to the  prospect of her Norfolk kingdom falling under Roman rule by raising it to the ground. The Romans’ rapacious taxation, brutality towards native rulers, theft of land and imposition of an alien emperor worship did not win many friends. However under the governorship of Agricola in AD77,  a more seductive form of imperialism was practiced that hinged on enticement, assimilation and sound administration to display the superior advantages of Roman civilisation.

From AD 80-120  a spate of new public buildings fit for a provincial city were constructed.

The Roman name for Londinium  is believed to be taken from the Celtic Londinion but the etymology is uncertain – it has been suggested that it could be from the Celtic word for ‘wild or fierce’ or the word for ‘marsh’. Wikipedia states that “the original root Plowonida (derived from pre-celtic Old European[citation needed] 'plew' and 'nejd,' meaning something like the flowing river or the wide flowing unfordable river)” Either way, it would appear then that the name of the city is identified with the characteristics of the river – the Dark One. Even to this day Londoners refer to living ‘north of the river’ or ‘south of the river’. It both divides and unites the city.

The Romans remained in London until AD 410 but from Ad 200 it went into decline as  a major centre and when the Romans finally left, archaeological evidence suggests that London was more or less abandoned.

Occupation resumes again under the Saxons in the early 7th. Century when it once again became a trading centre. At this time, the first bishop of London was ordained but was driven out by the pagan King of Essex in AD 616 and Christianity was not re-established until 668, but by the 8th. Century it was  a major Christian city. With the rising influence of the church, the Roman skills of writing and building in stone re-appeared.

Attacks by Danish invaders in 841 and 851 resulted in Londoners moving into the safety of the old Roman walled city. However, this did not prevent the city being occupied by the Danish invaders who remained in the city for the next 15 years until the Anglo-Saxon king Alfred occupied the city. His policy of urban renewal and encouragement of trade started a process of construction, settlement and commercial expansion which turned London into a busy port and trading town by the 11th. Century. However conflict between the Danes and the Anglo- Saxons surfaced again in the early part of that century and the Danes occupied the city for about 26 years and even today there are churches in London whose names date back to this time, such as the five in the city dedicated to St. Olaf .

After the end of the Danish rule, the exiled son Edward, of the last English king, Ethelred returned to England and oocupied the throne. It was he who paid for the re-building of  a monastic church on an island where the branches of the, now buried, river Tyburn flowed into  the Thames at Westminster. Edward established Westminster as the royal residence where he could avoid the pressures and dangers of living within the walls of the city. This distinction between the commercial interests of the city in the east and the royal and ecclesiastical centre in the west was the beginning of the creation of London as a city with two distinct centres – the City and the West End- that exists today. Divided by the river north and south and, today, divided by commercial City in the east and cultural and political nature of the West End.

England had now been invaded by the Romans, the Vikings and the Saxons and in 1066 it was the turn of the Normans to mount one final invasion. When I was taught history in primary school we had to learn by rote the dates of the kings and queens of England, but by a curious irony this started with the Norman king William 1 1066 –1087, Not only did this discount all the previous Saxon and Viking kings but also anglicised Guillaume of Normandy to William. His would not be the last name to be anglicised to gain acceptance.

After William had won the battle of Hastings he marched on London but, meeting fierce resistance at Southwark, he laid waste the area surrounding London until London decided it was better to submit peacefully. Under Norman rule, London’s development was not changed dramatically. The major lasting impact of the next  3 hundred years of Norman rule was on the English language. The intermarriage between Normans and Saxons in England was paralleled by a marriage of the two languages. During this period Latin was the language of the clergy, French the language of the aristocracy and Saxon English the language of the people. Over time this resulted in an expansion of the vocabulary so that for the one word kingly, you would, in addition, later have regal from the latin and royal and sovereign from the French. To this day the use of French words and expressions in English tends to suggest sophistication ( though, that word comes from Greek!)

At the time of the Norman invasion London was a relatively small city by European standards with a population of about 15-20,000 - a quarter of what it had been in Roman times, but over the next four hundred years it would grow to over 80,000 and this in spite of the great plague of 1348 that wiped out half the population. There was considerable immigration at this time also, London’s trade was dominated by wool and many weavers from Flanders settled here. Many Jewish financiers also came over, but were allowed no legal status. They were at the mercy of the king’s protection and the king borrowed heavily from them. Anti-semitism was rife and on one occasion 300 Jews were put to death and their possessions seized. Then a large number of Jews were incarcerated and only released on a ransom of £20,000. Finally in 1290 all Jews, not only in London, but in the whole country were expelled  and their houses were confiscated. After that the Italians moved in to assume their role as financiers.

In this medieval period, the church was not only a powerful force but an extensive landowner in London. It was the habit of people to leave bequests to the church in their wills to vouchsafe passage to heaven. All the towering buildings in this period belonged to the church and the north bank of the river was a string of Ecclesiastical palaces.

 However the Church would also see it’s land and property confiscated during the reign of the Tudors, initiated by Henry VIII  when he dissolved the monasteries and severed links with Rome, so that he could divorce his wife. Properties seized from the church were given to courtiers and favourites of the king. To this day, swaithes of London are still owned by titled aristocracy, even though much was sold off in the last century. A large number of properties in the area around where Worldwork seminar is being held are owned by the Duke of Bedford on what is known as the Bedford Estate. Most of the buildings now owned by the University in this area (Bloomsbury) were built on land sold earlier in the last century by this estate. To the north of here is Regent’s Park where most of the properties are still owned by the Crown and let on 120 leases. The Duke of  Westminster owns chunks of Mayfair which form part of the Grosvenor estate. The crown, the church and the aristocracy have always taken the long term view of the future!!!

Drama in London was to flourish in the Elizabethan period and initiated the establishment of numerous theatres in London producing the plays of Marlowe, Jonson and, of course, Shakespeare himself amongst others. The famous Globe theatre that stood on the South bank of the Thames had it’s replica built at the end of the last century.

But real life was to prove more dramatic still in the 17th century. Firstly there was the start of the civil war in 1642, the execution of  king Charles 1 in 1649 and the ensuing abolition of the bishops and house of Lords, and perhaps even more irksome –the bannning of the celebration of Christmas. Yet while London initially supported the new regime, they did not welcome the puritanism that ensued and warmly greeted the arrival of Charles II in 1660. But further dramatic events were to folllow with the Great Plague of 1665 in which about one in six of the population died, equivalent to the total population of the next five largest towns in the kingdom. This was followed shortly afterwards by the Great fire of 1666 that devastated 373 acres within the city and 63 outside, left 100,000 homeless and destroyed over 13,000 houses and 84 churches.

The medieval face of London was largely removed and the wooden buildings replaced by brick and stone.

In spite of this, these were expansive times that saw the beginnings of colonialism and the European slave trade. America was first to be colonised and London’s drive for trade and wealth was the fuel behind this. Native Americans were initially conscripted into work, but the European diseases that were imported decimated the population and so instigated the slave trade from Africa where there was greater immunity to such disease. The cost of protecting their interests in America eventually counterweighted the profit to be gained and learning from this, Britain’s imperial policy later was more pragmatic, particularly in India where it began by allying itself with the moghuls in power. First and foremost was the desire for trade and profit and London was the engine, not only in financing, but also in it’s expenditure on luxury imports and in re-exporting to Europe and elsewhere.

 Anyone who has lived in London for the last 30 years will know that, amongst many other changes, two noticeable ones have been the growth of the city as a major world financial centre and the proliferation of cafés on every street. Few perhaps know that in the 18th century these two were coupled together. In the early days of banking, insurance and stockbroking, transactions took place mostly in coffee shops. Other coffee shops were notable for gatherings of artists/writers or for politicians. This informal way of doing business changed when a large group of insurance underwriters decided this wasn’t an appopriate way to do business and set up a members only club – New Lloyd’s Coffee House – in 1769, which moved into the newly built Royal Exchange a couple of years later. Nonetheless Lloyd’s insurance remained an association of individuals until the financial crisis of the early 1990’s. Stockbrokers moved from their venue of Jonathan’s Cofffee House in 1773 to a large building behind the Royal Exchange which they called the Stock Exchange. With the advent of coffee-houses, the media of the press also mushroomed with no fewer than 11 newspapers being established in London in this century. One of the last was The Times – the only one of that 11 to have survived until today.

After the religious turmoil of previous centuries, protestantism was now firmly established in London and it engendered more practical works than mere preaching and several of London’ current teaching hospitals such as Guy’s and St. Thomas’ were founded by private philanthropy at this time. In 1753 The British Museum was also founded, based largely on the donation of the collection of the physician Sir Hans Sloane. Initially the British Library was housed within the same building, but it soon became apparent that there was insufficient space and in 1827 the construction of a new building alongside was completed to house the Royal collection of books of George III donated to the nation by his son George IV.

Descriptions of London have historically fallen into two categories which could be summarised as one vast stinking sewer (and the moral opporobrium for this that was frequently placed on the poor) and a city buzzing with life and wealth and entertainment that was the privilege of the few. In the nineteenth century, though, these two parallel aspects of the city reached their apotheosis in the Great Stink of 1858, when parliament had to shut down owing to the stink resulting from the increasing levels of sewage discharged directly into the Thames. This, and the various cholera epidemics, eventually resulted in the building of the bricklined sewage tunnels and the pumps that took the sewage out of London and still service the city today. While it was ok for the stink and pollution to exist in the commercial east, it was quite another when it entered the windows of parliament itself.

The tributary rivers such as the river Fleet that fed into the Thames had in the past often been virtual sewers and no fewer than a dozen have been covered over for this reason. In their place though, in 1859 the first underground railway in the world was begun, though the river Fleet made a last ditch stand when it burst into the workings at King’s Cross. Travelling on the tube was initially known as travelling ‘in the Drain.’

The government of London in the early centuries was mostly in the hands of the city crafts Guilds, from which the Mayor and Aldermen were drawn, and the different parishes (know as vestries, since they met in the church vestries), that more or less fulfilled the functions of today’s local councils. These strong local connections which exist even to this day are probably what gave it it’s social cohesion. Obviously the monarch, and increasingly, after the 18th. Century, parliament had central power. Historically, though, it has been said that London is a ‘muddle that worked.’ In the last century this was put to it’s most extreme test in the Blitz of the second world war when it experienced the sort of destruction that it hadn’t seen since the Great Fire. By then, though it did at least have it’s own central authority – the London County Council – which was established in the later stages of the nineteenth century, The various parishes were ,at first, resistant to too much centralisation, yet realised that local ad hoc administration of London was not sufficient to manage it. Parliament also would not wish London’s government to hold too much power, yet it’s power did increase with the establishment of the Greater London Council in the 1960’s. But the age old conflict between London and the country’s central governing figure surfaced again when Mrs. Thatcher was in power and she disbanded it. In time, of course, her party abandoned her and, eventually, in the first year of the millenium the Greater London Authority was established.

It was the rapid expansion of London in the ninteteenth century and the population explosion from just under 1 million at the beginning to just over 6.5 million at the end that accounted for London’s administrative problems. To put it in perspective, this was the same as the combined population of Paris, Berlin, Vienna and St. Petersburg and one fifth of the total population of England and Wales. Those that had thought London a monster in earlier centuries could not have begun to imagine this sort of growth. Much of this growth was fuelled by the profits generated by both Britain’s domestic Industrial revolution and it’s imperial expansion for which London was the main financier. This, in turn, attracted immigration from within the Uk and abroad.The ruthless focus on trade despite it’s human cost was exemplified in the Irish famine of the 1840’s when after the failure of the potato crop from disease, the government of the day refused to sanction the halt of grain imports to the UK, so that they could be diverted to help the starving Irish. The 50,000 Irish immigrants to London in that decade were forced  to serve the hand that starved them. They were often greeted with the same anxiety and hostility by established Londoners that other ethnic groups would later encounter, but nonetheless London ultimately continues to absorb all comers. Since the collapse of the British Empire and the granting of independence to former colonies in the 1950’s and 60’s, London has received immigrants from many more countries. The expansion of the European union has resulted in the further influx of many Eastern Europeans. This process has never been and probably never will be easy and yet London as a spirit still shows an extraordinary sponge-like ability to absorb and expand. Rivers are often thought to be the feminine presence within the masculine nature of the city, but the Thames is usually referred to as Father Thames and  as a city I see the spirit of London as a mother with an ample girth and ample skirts that has an increasingly large bunch of, sometimes contentious, kids at her feet. Perhaps it is no coincidence that it’s monarchs who have reigned longest have been the Queens Elizabeth I and II and Queen Victoria.

If London were to disappear tomorrow what would remain would be the river that the Romans crossed and that snakes its way to the sea from it’s source  beyond Oxford. This is the river that has made it the centre of trade; it is the river that was once the centre of shipbuilding and around which it’s docklands thrived until their demise last century when container terminals on the coast took over their business. It is the river on which the Greenwich Observatory was built and the point at which an International conference in 1870 decided should be used as the prime meridian for time and longitude to facilitate global navigation. From that time other time zones were referred by plus or minus hours in relation to Greenwich Meantime. London today, as already mentioned, is still a hub as well as a point of reference. It houses the BBC which has always been the broadcaster with the largest section broadcasting in other languages, This city that at it’s inception was subject to invasion was itself the financier of invading fleets; this city that was an outpost of Roman imperialism was once at the centre of the world’s largest empire. What was once a river with a broad marshland has been channelled through the city and now has a barrier to protect it from the funnelling incoming high tides. Tides turn, rivers flow on.