ABSTRACT
The chapter, focused on the development of Somers Town, a small area of London lying between what are now St Pancras and Euston Railway Stations in London, is about the synchronous contradiction between the social relations involved in different forms of building production and their visual manifestation. It shows how the early stages of building activity from the 1780s were predominantly associated with artisan production, as reflected in the form of the early streets and houses. Simultaneously, however, the town, surrounded by building activity of various kinds and itself a hive of building and building material (brick) production, became the home for wage earners, many arriving from the surrounding countryside. Side by side, intermingling and interchanging, wage earners and artisans co-existed in the same environment in which they worked and often lived, together with radicals and refugees in search of cheap accommodation. Alongside the artisan housing were built tenements, suited for housing wage earners, and the long courts of the earlier artisan housing were built over to house the growing workforce. And, while small artisan builders still took on individual plots, at the same time ever-larger contractors employing wage labour came to dominate the construction of infrastructure – the roads and pavements – and of housing tenements. The contradictions between these two forms of production are evident, first in the dramatic halt to development in the 1790s and the subsequent class – divided commodity form of the housing. And, second, they are apparent from an analysis of wages as the artisan day rate, from being higher than the hourly rate of the building wage earner in the 1780s, gradually declined to become lower.
