ABSTRACT

THE rest of this book is about the newer industries, which were most important in the rapid industrialization of parts of outer London between 1918 and 1939. It has already been seen that some of the older trades discussed in Chapters 4–7 expanded greatly in the interwar years, and migrated to the Outer Ring. Furniture, clocks and precision instruments are examples. But most of the industrial growth of outer London during this period was due to industries which existed only on a very small scale, or not at all, in 1861. Examples of these industries are general engineering, electrical engineering and vehicle manufacture, each of which is discussed in detail in Chapters 9– 11. The present chapter is intended to serve as an introduction to the newer industries. It chronicles historically the physical development of the most important of the new industrial areas of London. These areas, as already shown in Chapter 3, were predominantly in the county of Middlesex. The account given here draws on two detailed investigations of industrial development in Middlesex, one published (but long out of print), the other unpublished.