The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London Read Online Free PDF

shops, lawyers’ offices and pubs narrowed one of London’s busiest roads at the junction of Gray’s Inn Lane (now Gray’s Inn Road) to just ten yards. The caption to an 1820s engraving of Holborn at Middle Row reads, ‘The part here exhibited is perhaps the widest and best of the whole line of street.’ One can imagine what the rest of it looked like. Middle Row was demolished only in 1867, widening the street to nearly twenty-five yards.
    The main problem for traffic, however, was a historic one. London had developed on an east–west axis, following the river, with just three main routes: one that ran from Pall Mall via the Strand and Fleet Street to St Paul’s; one from Oxford Street along High Holborn; and the New Road (now the Euston Road). Yet none ran clear and straight. Along the Holborn route, the slum of St Giles necessitated a detour before New Oxford Street was opened at the end of the 1840s. A few hundred yards further on lay the obstacle of Middle Row, and 500 yards beyond that was the bottleneck of the Fleet Valley, whose steep slopes slowed traffic until Holborn Viaduct was built across it in 1869. The Strand had its own problems: the western end, until Trafalgar Square was developed in the 1830s, was a maze of small courts and lanes, while at its eastern end Temple Bar slowed traffic to a crawl, as did the street narrowing at Ludgate Hill. It must be remembered that these were the good, wide, east–west routes. North–south routes could not be described as bad, because they didn’t exist. Regent Street opened in sections from 1820, and the development known as the West Strand Improvements began to widen St Martin’s Lane and clear a north–south route at what would become Trafalgar Square. But otherwise there was no Charing Cross Road nor Shaftesbury Avenue (both of which had to wait until the end of the century); there was no single route through Bloomsbury, as the private estate of the Duke of Bedford was still being developed; there was no Kingsway (which was built in the twentieth century); and what is today the Aldwych was until the twentieth century a warren of medieval lanes, many housing a thriving pornography industry.
    Plans for improvements were made. And remade. And then remade again. The Fleet market was cleared away in 1826 to prepare the ground for what would ultimately become the Farringdon Road; the Fleet prison too was pulled down; but still nothing happened. A decade later only one section, from Ludgate Circus to Holborn Viaduct, had been constructed. Similarly, in 1864 the Illustrated London News mourned that, after decades of complaints, narrow little Park Lane still had not been widened: ‘The discovery of a practicable north-west passage from Piccadilly to Paddington is an object quite as important as that north-west passage from Baffin’s Bay to Behring’s [sic] Strait...The painful strangulation of metropolitantraffic in the small neck of this unhappy street...is one of the most absurd sights that a Londoner can show to his country cousins.’ 25 Even the river blocked the north–south routes: the tolls on Southwark and Waterloo Bridges ensured that the three toll-free bridges – London, Blackfriars and Westminster – were permanently blocked by traffic.
    Almost any state or society occasion caused gridlock. As early as the 1820s, when the king held a drawing room – a regular event at which he received the upper classes in a quasi-social setting – carriages were routinely stuck in a solid line from Cavendish Square north of Oxford Street, all the way down St James’s to Buckingham Palace, a mile and a half away. ‘The scene was amusing enough’ to one passer-by, looking in at the open carriage windows and discovering that the elaborately dressed courtiers were ‘devouring biscuits’, having come prepared for what was then known as a ‘traffic-lock’ of several hours’ duration.
    Everyday traffic was every bit as bad. One tourist reported a lock made up of