The Five Catastrophes That Made London Transcript
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The Five Catastrophes That Made London Transcript Date: Wednesday, 11 May 2016 - 6:00PM Location: Museum of London 11 May 2016 The Five Catastrophes That Made London Professor Simon Thurley Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My lecture starts this evening with a premise, and it is a premise that I think many of you who have been to my previous lectures will have heard me talk about before, which is that London’s history is unique. The way London has developed is very different from other European cities, and its history has created a place that has been exceptionally successful over an extremely long time. It is a city which has a unique visual identity. I want to, tonight, reflect on these two points: the fact that the city has been incredibly successful; and that it looks different from other cities. The way I am going to do it is through five moments in our history, five moments of catastrophe, and each of these catastrophes produced extraordinarily positive developments that fundamentally shaped London’s future and gave it, I think, a unique advantage. I want you now silently in your head to think what my five catastrophes are. I suspect you will get two of them – two of them are very obvious. A third one I think is probably a bit obvious. The fourth one is a bit harder to get, and if you get five then you are doing very well. So, just check them off in your mind and we will see at the end if you got them all right. There is not a prize; there is just the satisfaction of knowing. For hundreds of years, London was just another European city, rather a small one in fact, much smaller than Paris. It was not particularly notable and it was not particularly economically successful, but suddenly, around 1650, London’s economy took off, and within a century, London became Europe’s largest city, and a hundred years after that, London was the richest city in the world, and I think probably the undisputed global capital. The tipping point in this extraordinary process, the moment that London changed from being a city to being the city came about between 1530 and 1630, and that is where I want to start this evening. Some of you who have heard me talking about the big sweep of English history will remember this graph because, in the 1530s, the population of England started to grow again. So, this is the Middle Ages, here is the Black Death, population crashes, stagnates for hundreds of years, and in the 1530s, the population starts going up, and this is important because, while the national population expanded, the population of London grew twice as fast, and what you see here is a very good graph that shows all the sort of major cities in Europe. You have got Constantinople, the largest city in Europe, Paris, Naples, Amsterdam, Madrid, etc. and here you have London, this extraordinary, rapid growth in its population, again, from the early Tudor period up here to about 1750. London’s exceptional growth was not due to increased fertility but due to migration because, from the 1650s, around 10,000 people a year were coming into London to make it their home. Historians argue, sometimes vociferously, as to whether this migration was push, in other words, whether people were pushed out of the countryside into London, or whether people were attracted to come to London to make their fortune. Well, as always with these historical conundrums, it was a bit of both, but as today, London was a honeypot because of its wealth and, in the 17th Century, that wealth was based on the export of woollen cloth. When Henry VIII came to the throne, London was exporting about 43% of England’s finished cloth; by his death in 1547, London was exporting 86% of the country’s cloth production, and the tax-take from this export was as large as the tax-take from all the other towns in England combined. In the 15th Century, the main trading place for London merchants was in Lombard Street and it was out in the open. In 1531, Antwerp rebuilt its Bourse, demonstrating the enormous benefits of a purpose-built indoor trading centre. Although Henry VIII wanted to follow suit, wanted to build a Bourse in London, it was not in fact until 1564 when the great Sir Thomas Gresham, founder of this College and London’s wealthiest merchant, offered to build one at his own expense. I am sure that Gresham wanted this to be called the Gresham Exchange, but unfortunately, at the opening, Queen Elizabeth offered, very generously, to give it her royal title, and obviously Gresham could not really refuse. So, this building, the Royal Exchange, contained a pantheon of the kings and queens in England – here they were, statues of them sitting in these niches, and this Royal Exchange was, in every way, a royal structure, symbol of the joint interest that the Corporation of London, the merchants, and the Crown had in London’s rapidly rising prosperity. The profits of trade were huge and coincided with the first of the five massive historic changes to the physical structure of London that I want to mention tonight. The first change was the suppression of the monasteries, and here you see Anthonis van den Wijngaerde’s panorama from the Thames, and you can just see a few of the monasteries dotted around in the city. Now, it really is impossible today to understand how cataclysmic and how traumatic the suppression of the monasteries was. Obviously, this was the complete erosion of a belief system, the erosion of a way of life, a world picture, but it was also physically devastating for the city. Twenty-three major royal houses were suppressed and sold. Most were simply demolished for their building materials and the value of land on which they stood. The whole topography of the City of London was transformed in a period of less than five years. This map that I am showing you here shows you the locations of the principal religious houses in 1530, and you can see what an extraordinary amount of the city but also the immediate environs of the city was made up of monastic land, but this map tells a very partial story because the true picture has to take into account, as well as the monastic precincts, the religious houses, the huge amount of secular property that was owned by the monasteries. Over 100 monasteries owned buildings and land in the city, and, for example, St Mary Spital and St Mary Clerkenwell, both up here, owned property in 60 parishes in the City of London. In fact, I think on the eve of the Reformation, around 60% of the City of London, of the area inside the walls, was owned by religious institutions – 60%. This of course coloured the whole London property market, for the Church was not an aggressive nor was it a progressive landlord, and when all the Church landholdings came onto the market at one time, this meant a change in landlord for thousands and thousands of tenants in the City. Many of the big monastic sites were bought by aristocrats and many of them converted them into their own houses. Some of the urban rental properties were bought by rich merchants, who ploughed the profits of their wool trade into real estate, and these merchants who bought houses, in today’s parlance, for buy-to-let, took a much more commercial attitude than the Church ever had, investing in their new properties and rebuilding them to push up yields by raising rents, and here, you see some very typical property just round the corner from here, commercially built by merchants to make money out of their investments. So what was the effect of all of this in the long term? Well, the Dissolution came at just the point when London’s population was growing fast. The expansion and diversification of the property market increased capacity for residential, for commercial and for industrial development, and a really important aspect of this was the ability of the aristocracy to buy into the London property market. From around 30 aristocrats living in London at the start of Elizabeth’s reign, there were around 90 living there by the Civil War. Along the Strand developed a whole string of huge aristocratic mansions, the former residences of bishops and abbots. Here is John Norden’s map of London: City of London is over here, Westminster is over here, here is the Strand, and along here, these words you can’t see are the words identifying the great aristocratic townhouses, chock-a-block along the Strand. The largest and most magnificent of these of course was Northumberland House which you see here, on the corner of what is now Northumberland Avenue. The reason why so many aristocrats came to London, almost all of them occupying former church property, was because of the rejuvenated Royal Court under the Tudors. No longer were aristocrats fighting each other, and some of the time fighting the Crown, with their private armies, as they had been doing during the Wars of the Roses. They wanted to be in London, close to the Court, which was the route to power and advancement, so the availability of Church land made it much easier for the nobility to establish themselves in the City, and the effect of these 90 aristocratic families on London’s economy was absolutely enormous.