Condon Heart of Empire and Global City Or, how the city has reinvented itself. The European Social Forum in London is the third to be staged in one of Europe's great cities. London has been described as an imperial monster, a 'do as you please' Babylon, a polypus, a stain, a mighty carbuncle, William Cobbett's 'great wen', or Mayhew's vast 'bricken wilderness'. As David Packer argues here, it has always been considered ungovernable and a city of extremes and contrasts.' London is no longer the centre of a global colonial empire on which the 'sun never sets'. In 1900 London was the largest and richest city in the world, reaching demographic the highpoint of its and industrial expansion as late as 1938. However, from the 1960s onwards the decline of old industries, the docks and the city's population paralleled the relative decline of Britain. Yet London has a history of re-inventing itself or at least of making adjustments to radically new conditions. With the recent growth and rebirth of the City' as a global financial centre, London continues to be one of the great cities of a rapacious globalised capitalism. As a metropolitan capital and global financier, London draws in wealth along with people - labour power - from every corner of the globe. It remains an imperial centre sucking the life-blood of the planet. London; The Imperial Vampire London has always been highly cosmopolitan, from its foundation 2000 years ago by the Romans. As Roy Porter emphasises, 'the story of London begins with the "foreigner'. Londoners owe their city, so to speak, to the Italians'.? London has, moreover, always been a centre of rule and exploitation. Roman Londinium was not a mere tribal capital (civitas) but an imperial city - an implanted seat of government of the province of Britannia. Londinium contained extensive port facilities, a colossal commercial Forum and Basilica, the largest complex north of the Alps (as large as St Paul's Cathedral) and a military barracks. Medieval London. still protected by the old Roman walls enclosing the area known today as the 'City', was also a major European port and commercial locus. However. the seat of Royal government had been shifted upstream to the royal borough of Westminster. so that the monarch could maintain some independence from the power and influence of the city merchants. artisans and especially the volatile London masses. For more than three hundred years. from the late sixteenth. to the beginning of the twentieth centuries. London. together with Westminster (there are two cities at the centre of London). grew to become the largest. richest and most advanced capitalist city in the world. Medieval London was already large but during the sixteenth century it began its extraordinary expansion from approximately 50.000 to 250,000 by the end of Elizabeth reign. The destruction of the monasteries by Henry VIII had freed up vast sources of wealth, stimulating capitalism and laying the basis for the English bourgeois revolution in 1642. This unprecedented expansion was linked to Britain's acquisition of a colonial empire. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the port of London, now shifted to the Thames estuary, became the greatest entrepot in the world and, as in Roman times, a major centre of the slave trade, along with Bristol and Liverpool. By the mid-1840s London was widely recognised as the greatest city in the world. a global centre of world trade and finance.
Many of London's problems were associated with its also flooded into the city from all over Europe, most notably rapid growth and monstrous size. By 1700 London had Huguenots from France. Around 1700, according to Porter, fewer already become the largest urban conurbation in the than half the city's inhabitants were actually Londoners born and by 1800, contained nearly one million people - about the The sources of immigration shifted during the eighteenth century, as reflected its economic position as a world centre of finance in Eastern Europe came to the East End as did immigrants from The nineteenth century acknowledged London as the centre This long history of demographic replenishment has been central to world, with the possible exception of Edo (Tokyo), and bred. size of Ancient Rome at its height. Between 1800 and 1900 London's population grew from just under a million to more than 4.5 million - a veritable super-city - which capitalism and of the British Empire. However, by about 1850 Paris and New York had also passed the million mark and by 1900, with the rapid spread of capitalist industrialisation beyond the shores of Britain, there were sixteen cities with over one million people. During the twentieth century, New York became the first financial and industrial city to overtake London in size and wealth. of things, with the creation in 1884 of the Greenwich Meridian in which London put the world in its place with all the continents spreading out east and west. It was of course those quintessential products of the industrial revolution, the steamship and railway network which required the creation of a standardised national and international time. London has often been regarded as a city of consumption, rather than production - the centre of both elite and popular culture in Britain, for example, the theatre, literature, newspapers/information, fashion, commercial music and the art markets. But this image is one-sided. For several centuries London was the greatest manufacturing centre in the country with a significant export capacity. During the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century the number of industrial workers in London exceeded the whole population of Manchester. However, it was not London, but Manchester, Birmingham and Glasgow that were the main centres of the industrial revolution. Compared to the great northern industrial cities, much London industry remained small-scale, with many sectors based on cheap, sweated, often immigrant labour - this is still the case today in much of East London. The -mperial Melting Pot London is a city that has over time absorbed significant numbers of refugees and migrants, who have often experienced resentment and racism. During the Middle Ages, communities of traders and merchants - Jews, Lombards, and other Italians, and the Germans of the Baltic Hanseatic League lived and worked in the city. Religious refugees the imperial beast became hungrier. Black people began to arrive in significant numbers - a spin off from London's thriving slave trade. In the late nineteenth century, Jews fleeing racial discrimination the Empire and by 1870 there were more Irish living in London than in Dublin. But it was after the Second World War, when London and Britain as a whole required new sources of cheap labour, that immigration from the West Indies and the Indian subcontinent occurred on a large scale. Subsequently, further influxes of people from Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe occurred. London's success and its capacity to revive and remake itself under new conditions. Today, its hospitals, transport system and many of its social services rely on migrant labour. London is one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, a polyglot, multiracial city with hundreds of languages spoken. city of conflict: London's Super Rich and the London Mob London's rich were always very, very rich but its poor were among the most impoverished and degraded in the world. The centuries of capitalist and growth saw many outbreaks of class war violence - although in the long term London has remained relatively stable. During the eighteenth century there was agitation and rioting by numerous artisans and tradespeople, caused by rising food prices and creeping industrialisation. During this and especially the subsequent century, ...there was the notion that the mob would take over. Indeed with the Gordon Riots of 1780, radical activity in the age of the French Revolution, the Chartist rallies of the 1840s and the new trade unionism of the 1880s - grounded not in the industrial North but in London's docks - this was a justifiable fear... In a later age, the race riots that flared in Notting Hill in the 1950s [to which could be added the Brixton and Broad Water Farm riots in the 1980s] rekindled such anxieties.?
active support. Richard II had to assassinate Watt Tyler, - together with transport sectors also provided new employment desperation to stop the peasant army forging links with the of unemployed and casual labour. At the same time Londoners of all classes have valued their independence from the seat of government and have often been powerful enough to assert it. London has always been a difficult problem for the ruling class. Even recently, and despite all the machinations of the national British establishment, media and Labour bureaucracy, Ken Livingstone was elected mayor of London by popular acclaim. And Thatcher had had to abolish the Greater London Council (GLC) to unseat him! Many writers and commentators were both fascinated and appalled by the 'London crowd', including Frederick Engels, who was a great observer of imperial London. He was shocked by the levels of poverty and describes 'sickly' and 'half-starved children', living in an 'immense tangle of streets' and 'nameless misery'. He noted that even among the better off, 'the brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each ... is nowhere so shamelessly bare- faced ... as just here in the crowding of the great city..?' And, with a premonition of future road and tube journeys: 'each keeps to his own side of the pavement, so as not to delay the opposing streams of the crowd, while it occurs to no man to honour another with so much as a glance.' Even a thousand years before, the Norman robber baron William the Conqueror, after crushing the Saxon nobility at the battle of Hastings in 1066, did not dare to lay siege to the city, still protected behind its Roman walls. William withdrew to negotiate a settlement with its burghers, with the result that London was granted a Charter ensuring all those privileges, exemptions and powers that it had traditionally accrued to itself, in exchange for their agreement to crown him King of England. London could and sometimes did become both kingmaker and regicide. London is a highly class polarised city and therefore a very political city, and political movements such as the peasant movements of the fourteenth century or Chartism in the nineteenth century, always found their reflection and often leader of the Peasants Revolt of 1381, on Blackheath, in his London populace. No less than in Paris, the London masses, traditionally described by bourgeois historians as 'the London mob', have always been greatly feared by the British ruling classes, both feudal and capitalist. Royal castles such as the Tower of London or military barracks have always been a feature of the city landscape. Modern Londoners have extended active support and solidarity to workers' movements, such as the General Strike of 1926 and the great miners' strike of 1984-5. Unfortunately, for those of us who seek revolutionary changes, the enormous power of the working people of London, recognised by the bourgeoisie, is far less understood by the working class itself. But London's public spaces have witnessed historic confrontations, from the Chartist demonstration of 1848 on Kennington Common to the more successful Trafalgar Square riot of 1990 which helped bring down both the poll tax and its creator, Margaret Thatcher. Nearly two million people marched to Hyde Park in February 2003 to declare their opposition to the invasion of Iraq. In the late nineteenth century the London County Council (LCC) was first established. London had lacked a unified government until then, but the political representatives of the ruling class had at last understood that the free market could not solve London's huge social problems, which were dangerously explosive. Developments in public health, water supply, municipal housing, transport and a 'welfare' approach to poverty required the development of a modern interventionist state, an important lesson from Victorian history that Margaret Thatcher failed to appreciate. Social control was also high on the agenda, but the Metropolitan Police force was thought to make London too powerful and it continued to be separately controlled by the government. The GLC was founded in 1964 with fewer powers, and the current regime has even fewer. Condons Labour With its tradition of sweatshops and small-scale manufacturing as well as a large retail and service sector, London is not the centre of British trade unionism, although workers in important sectors such as transport, including railways, docks and airports, and service workers in local government and hospitals have been highly unionised. They have often engaged in important struggles, including the 'new unionism' movement of unskilled and semi- skilled workers at the end of the nineteenth century. As economic expansion gained momentum in the late eighteenth century, London became the focus of a high concentration of craft skills and established the city as the supreme manufacturer of quality wares. This led to a relatively high wage economy (for a layer of skilled male workers) which sucked thousands of people into the capital. The expanding port of London and the attendant processing industries - timber, sugar, tobacco, rum, molasses for less skilled workers. However, there was always a great pool Much female employment was generated in servicing the rich and the burgeoning middle classes. The 1841 census reveals that London employed 168,701 domestic servants, overwhelmingly women, as well as thousands of dressmakers and milliners. laundry-keepers, washers and manglers. Also, by 1859 there were approximately 80,000 prostitutes regularly working, servicing all classes, but especially the middle and upper classes. As large numbers of working class women and children of both sexes drifted in and out of prostitution, the figure may have been even higher. This made the sex industry easily the second largest employer of women in the capital. By the end of the century, alternative forms of employment for women, in factories, or as shop assistants and clerks, raised the
price of female labour, including in the traditional sectors - in domestic service, the rag trade and in the sex industry. It also tended to make women more independent and less subservient. The famous match girls' strike was indicative of this new class confidence. Increasingly the large middle class, in search of cheap, servile labour, turned to rural areas, Ireland, the wider Empire, or the European Continent. Condon: A Social View of its Urban Fabric London developed as a vast, chaotic, conurbation, made up of a multitude of local foci, originally small towns and villages, which have been swallowed up by urban sprawl. London's complex development does not conform to modern ideas of urban growth and planning, nor to the type of planning associated with older absolutist European monarchies. Centralised state planning in this tradition could still impose rigid urban schemes, epitomised by the later Haussmann boulevards that criss-cross Paris. Laissez-faire and deregulation were always more ideologically and economically in tune with the premier city of free market capitalism. The pockets of planned city that were built, only serve to emphasise the improvisation or chaos of all the rest. During the nineteenth century there was a gradual break with a past in which the poor had often lived cheek by jowl with the rich. With changes in the London economy and the development of manufacturing, the well to-do began to moveto the suburbs to escape the overcrowding, squalor and pollution of the inner city. In the early twentieth century, vast new suburbs were created, including for the professional and skilled working classes. The process continues today. London is like a great onion, with its multiple centres embedded within the different layers of development, with each layer or period of expansion architecturally distinct. Present-day London dominates the economy and demography of the whole of south east England. In the post-war period more than two million Londoners and many London businesses moved out to 'satellite' towns beyond the 'green belt,' while many villages were designated New Towns. Milton Keynes, for example, is today a substantial urban sprawl. Tens of thousands of middle class and professional workers also moved out to the more attractive small towns and villages in the Chilterns, or Kent and Sussex. 300,000 now commute into London daily. Despite the decanting of population to the New Towns, London's population during the fifties and sixties remained stable, at about 8.5 million. This was due to large-scale immigration from the ex-colonies. There was also the phenomenon of the 'gentrification' of old working-class neighbourhoods by new professional workers. However, Britain's post-war industrial decline eventually had an impact, reflected in demographic contraction from the late 1960s.° More recently, however, from approximately 1984, re-expansion of service industries and international finance has reversed this decline. Rustscript: Decline and Revival? London has long been a base for foreign financial operations. but when Thatcher abolished exchange controls in 1979 the protective barrier between the domestic and the international sectors of the ir: economy was pulled down. This enabled foreign firms to take die existing broking and jobbing houses and allowed the creatior :: highly competitive financial conglomerates. The 'Big Bang' of the 1980s consolidated London's International Stock Exchange. Ti continues today. According to Inwood, 'In 1994 London processe: $300 billion of foreign exchange each day, as much as New York and Tokyo together, and five times as much as Germany." It has been argued that the world-wide dispersal of industria! production in search of cheap labour, of which London itself. and especially its working class, has been a victim, has demander the growth of these regional 'global cities'. They are financial regulators, 'transterritorial market places' and 'command centres of the 'new global economy' - cities which have the capacity to handle the massive and rapid financial flows required by international corporations. However, the gulf between London's rich and the working classes, especially its poorest sectors, ethnic minorities. unemployed and under-employed, has never been greater - it is potentially an explosive mix. By 1994 London's unemployment rate had risen, according to the London Research Centre, to over 13 per cent, the highest in the UK, and with few prospects for the unskilled. By 1997, London possessed two-thirds of England's worst public housing, and contained a total of 230,000 dwellings unfit for human habitation. The crimerate once again increased. All this is in the context of London's Gross Domestic Product in 1993 reaching $180 billion (18 per cent of national GDP) and it has continued to grow - its economy is twice the size of Saudi Arabia, bigger than Turkey and Russia and two-thirds that of India. A visit to central London will not only reveal the presence of many expensive residential districts, but an extraordinary large numbers of big limousines. But here is the rub - they are mostly Mercedes, BMWs and Lexuses from Germany and Japan - even Rolls Royce is now owned by Mercedes. How long London can maintain a leading role in the world economy - with Frankfurt snapping at its heels, and when Britain as a whole has suffered a disastrous decline in manufacturing production - is a moot point. 1 Sec recent London histories, mosz notable: Peter Ackrond, London. The Biograph: 200!. Vintage: Stephen Intodd Mistortot London. 1998, Macmillan: Rot Porter London. A Social Hisors: 1994. Penguin. See also, Steen Filer Rasmsssen, London: The Cuigm Cin: reprinted in 1961, Pelicun Boots. 2 Rot Parat; Forces: in laund 1905. p. rri 3 Porter in Ind 1998, pp. vis-. 4 The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1574 ‹ 7845). quoted inch. house. 3001. pp. 393-41m/576.77. 5 Greater London Comicil. 1464-85 6 Renteen 106/ and 1VA7. 1.186.000, dr 13"o of as populatio mered our and wen and pull me placeed. 7/assand. 1998 p. 9019.