ABSTRACT
It is useful to start with a quote to illustrate the paradox contained in so many studies of nineteenth-century London – the development of the capital is often criticised; yet the end result is generally admired. The quote is from the late David Eversley commenting in 1975 on The Victorian City, edited by Dyos and Wolff (1973). He found its two volumes of readings full of the failures of London and asks incredulously:
How did it come about that something that was so frightful, apparently, as a habitation and a workplace for the mass of the people, something that smelt so offensively, and was so manifestly unjust, which was the joint product of the speculators’ greed, and the second-hand delusions of grandeur of hack architects, came to be also the symbol of solid virtue, the zenith of our national achievement, the masterpiece of civic success, against which all our modern efforts to improve the [built] environment are now judged, and found wanting?
