ABSTRACT
The colours of London are grey and brown the grey of sky and river, the brown of the brick. The brown bricks are as characteristic of and exclusive to London and its hinterland as bright red brick is distinctive of the West Midlands or white brick of the Eastern Counties. If London was the most heterogeneous of English cities, it still drew a large part of its population from a relatively small area of the country. There remained one section of the London population sharing both working-class localism and the middle-class taste for organisations: the class of petty capitalists who, because of their stake in a particular area, were those most strongly tied to their own districts of London. Working men who were respectable in the moral sense were thus in an ambivalent position, for they could not be respectable in the social sense.
