ABSTRACT
The title of this book, London’s Turning, refers to the ambition to shift the unequal balance of London’s development from the generally afuent west to the relatively deprived east of the city and its region. The history of this imbalance is in part a consequence of London’s physical geography which has become overlain with socio-economic and cultural distinctions. To the east of the City of London, the River Thames soon becomes wide and hard to cross – there is only one overland crossing east of Tower Bridge to this day, though one has long been projected and may before long be built. The river ows through at land which used to be marshy and susceptible to ood; this ood plain offers few vistas and panoramas of the kind which have always attracted the settlements of the better-off, except long views of the river itself. The prevailing wind, and of course the river’s ow, is from the west, thus the east got the worst of the city’s dirt, in its various forms – noxious industries, waste products, smells, polluted water – while those who could avoid these hazards stayed upstream. Of course modern technology, and indeed deindustrialisation, has made many of these original geographical disadvantages irrelevant today. But their effects live on, east and west, in the quality and texture of the built environment, in the types and locations of enterprises, and in the more intangible but nevertheless inuential factors of social and cultural capital, in the capacities of the population to compete with those of other zones of the city for well-paid and satisfying work.
