ABSTRACT
Between 1899 and 1905, years that marked the Progressive ascendancy at the London County Council, street reformers of the late Victorian and Edwardian era built a monument to their zeal and their aspirations, an avenue reaching for three-quarters of a mile from Holborn to the Strand. 1 Frederick Harrison took great pride in being, in 1891, the first to come forward with the proposal. He would cut a wide, straight path through what was usually referred to at the time as “congeries” of mean and squalid streets and alleyways in the slum areas around the old Clare Market; doing that would allow sunlight and the light of reason to enter and free the flow of traffic north from the Thames bridges. Harrison, the high priest of the positivist Religion of Humanity, rejoiced that an era of scientific management was dawning; its leaders would be sociologists who had “all their lives studied the Present and the Past with a view to transform them into the Future” 2 His colleagues, at Spring Gardens, including those who did not share his point of view, agreed that the project was needed. Pennethorne had drawn up plans in 1836 for a similar cross-town throughway, a proposal that the Metropolitan Board of Works had reconsidered in 1855 and the LCC in 1891, the majority concluding on these occasions that the reconstruction of so large and dense an area would be far too costly, considering that local government had few resources to draw on other than the hard-pressed ratepayer. There were others who objected to the clinical severity of the positivist aesthetic. 3 Was it not a part of the Metropolitan Ideal to bring beauty into the lives of people who had been robbed of it by the forces of unrestrained capitalist development? Did wide, straight lines express a truly democratic ideal? Was Harrison so intent on the future that he wished to obliterate all reminders of London's past?
