The founding of the Colonial Society

In 1801, London had a population of 1,000,000 people, approximately the size of the population of Merseyside or the Providence, Rhode Island, of today. By the 1871 census, the population had grown to nearly 4,000,000 – London was as big as today’s Manchester or Washington, DC. Many of the new arrivals lived in the suburbs, but of course they did not stay there by day, when central London had to accommodate them. ¹ In the 1860s, inner London had more dust, noise, and reconstruction than at any other time in the nineteenth century; stations, rail lines, business premises, and central places of all sorts were built on the ruins of Georgian London, which had been a city of narrow private houses with small floors, unsuited to large organizations. ² Until 1876, even the Colonial Office occupied two thin and quite inadequate old houses in Downing Street. Indeed, the building had been condemned years before. ³ It leaked, and the accounts office could not house a safe – which people were afraid would bring the building down. ⁴ Yet there was nowhere in London for the Colonial Office to move to.