ABSTRACT
In the experience of industrialization and urban concentration Britain was the pioneer, a country whose cities granted the observer a dimension of urban scale and feeling unobtainable anywhere else, a way of living in the future, to be reported back to places following in the same path. In this transformation London held a special place. Before the Industrial Revolution it
was conspicuous for its size, its population (in 1750 11 per cent of the total population lived in London), its dominant role as a consumer centre, and the symptoms it displayed of the beginnings of a marked spatial segregation. Although the heavy industries conventionally associated with the Industrial Revolution were developed away from the capital city, its leading position hardly changed, and the overall effect of the country’s industrialization was to inflate its existing characteristics. From a population of under 1 million in 1801 it reached about 21/4 million in 1851, during which period it doubled in physical area. London was a conspicuous case of a change which, starting in Britain and western Europe, has gone on to affect almost every country across the globe. For that reason a study of where people ate and drank in the industrial city does well to concentrate on London, though with the reservation that, because of its special role as a capital city, generalizations founded on its experience may fit uneasily elsewhere.
