ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the genesis of the crisis of the 1880s; and an analysis of the responses of central and local government to the crisis. It presents an assessment to which these responses constituted a 'solution' both in the short and the longer term, in the light of a reassessment of the nature of conflicts and their relationship to 'structural' imperatives of capitalist development. The chapter discusses the re-evaluation of the nature of the questions should be asking about 'urban problems'. By reassembling and reinterpreting existing scholarly research on urbanization, housing and structure of labour markets in nineteenth-century London, it presents some new light on the nature of the 'recurrent crisis' by reviewing contemporary developments in the inner city. What appeared as a contradiction between accumulation and reproduction reached crisis point in the specific conjuncture of London's 'housing crisis' in the 1880s, and the resultant conflicts were played out in the territory of Inner London.
