There is little agreement among commentators as to what defines
a suburb, but there is even less agreement as to the factors
that bring them about. One thing is certain: that suburban development
is a complex combination of a large number of volatile factors
that involve political economic and social structures and human
psychology. Other factors have their origin in national (or
even international), regional or local contexts.
If
we accept the definition of a suburb as a new residential development
on a greenfield site that has a physical, social, administrative
and economic relationship with another urban area, then we touch
on virtually all the key factors. They include an inability
of the urban area to physically cope with its own expansion,
the availability of a site on which development can take place
and infrastructure to link to the two. But alongside these are
more subtle factors: political policies that encourage or inhibit
development; landowners being prepared to allow the type of
development that the economy is generating, or convenient transport
at the right price. Broadly these causes fall into three categories:
demand; the role of the entrepreneur and infrastructure.
When all these are taken into account, what appears to be the
most confident and solid of development: hundreds of tons of
bricks and mortar, wood and glass and the fresh hopes of new
inhabitants, is in fact a very fragile thing indeed.
Demand
Population growth
Fundamentally suburbs are caused for a demand for housing and
this in turn may be due to an increase in population, or changes
in household structure or migrations of population. In south
London two of these factors are particularly prominent: migrations
of population and changes in household structure.
It is generally held that London’s population grew inexorably
from the late middle ages. It certainly became larger, spectacularly
so, from about half a million in 1700; one million in 1800;
in 1900, to over 6 million today. But during almost all this
period the growth was not due to a surplus of births over deaths,
but due to immigration.
Indeed such was the state of public health in working areas
of London in the 17th and 18th centuries that without immigration
the population would have declined very rapidly. It has been
estimated that for much of the 18th century London’s population
growth was sustained by an annual average immigration of about
10,000 persons. Until c. 1800 life expectancy in rural areas
was higher than in London and so arguably people came to London
to die.
Household structures
The structure of households has also changed significantly over
time. They have become greater in number, but smaller and now
fewer generations live together or near each other. Better health
care has been a key factor in the reduction of household size.
As infant mortality has fallen, so parents have not been tempted
to produce large families, and easy access to contraception
in the 20th century has also been an obvious factor.
Equally, household size has fallen as a result of the state’s
intervention to prevent overcrowding. Since Vestries had powers
to close and even demolish overcrowded and insanitary housing,
but as they had no powers to provide a better alternative the
problem was displaced, not eradicated. It was not until 1885
that local government was given powers to build better quality
replacements of their own and not until after 1889, when the
London County Council was established, that effective action
was taken.
In the 20th century, there has been a marked increase in the
total number of smaller, one or two generation households. Longer
life expectancy, greater economic prosperity and job mobility
and higher aspirations have caused this.
Work and Home
Suburbs are also a product of two important economic and social
factors: the aspiration of those that could do so to separate
their work environment from their domestic one, and as a stage
for displaying one’s position in the social pecking order.
In the 17th and 18th centuries most people’s work and home
were physically close and often in the same premises.
In the 18th century members of the commercial and professional
middle classes enviously viewed the gentry or very wealthy members
of their own class in newly built houses such as Danson
at Welling or Wricklemarsh near Blackheath
and increasingly aspired to live away from their place of work.
Shorter working hours, better transport and available land made
this possible and developments at Clapham,
Camberwell, Dulwich
and Blackheath all followed.
This started a cascade of aspiration through the labour market
and as soon as any employment practices in any one sector became
favourable then that group dislocated work and home.
During the 19th century, the south London labour market was
split in three unequal ways. There was a minority, but one which
increased towards the end of the century, with permanent work;
there were those dependent on casual work in the numerous factories
wharves and docks, and those who were casually self-employed.
In the 19th century only the first of this group could participate
in suburban development as only they had the practical opportunity
(from their work’s point of view) and the financial and time
resources to separate work and home. Classically they were the
City based clerks who lived in newly built Victorian commuter
developments such as Nunhead
and Lewisham.
In
the 20th century, it was the turn of those employed at the skilled
end of manufacturing. They were helped both by shorter hours,
more general prosperity (London’s manufacturing industry was
relatively unaffected by the depression) and a relocation of
industry from central London to new Thames side sites downriver.
By World War II occupied virtually the whole riverfront from
London Bridge to Crayford Creek was given to industry. Some
long established firms had relocated there from inner-London
such as the engineers Easton Amos and Anderson which moved from
the Grove, Southwark to Erith
and some were new high-tech enterprises such as the electrical
firm Siemens in Charlton.
This generated in influx of skilled workers searching for housing
and this was an important driver in the building of the 1930’s
private developments of much of Bexley and Eltham.
A showcase of success?
Those aspiring to or achieving suburban status are often held
up as being the most thrusting, upwardly socially mobile.
This is unfair: upward social mobility and its demonstration
is a fundamental human characteristic. All that differentiated
the group of new suburban dwellers is that they were able to
demonstrate their new status in such an emphatic way.
Separating work and home life was an important element in this,
first for the gentry, the middle classes, then the salaried
and then wage earners. It enabled men at least to live a double
life, most clearly demonstrated by Dickens’ Mr Wemkmick in Great
Expectations:
"Walworth is one place and this office is another … They must
not be confounded together. My Walworth sentiments must be
taken at Walworth; none but my official sentiments can be
taken in this office."
Wemmick, who worked in the City, did not have to travel far
in his process of transformation.
Aspiring to live away from work also became refined into an
aspiration to live in the right area, and a complex series of
causes and effects came into play as areas came and went from
favour and fashion. In general this process looked like an onion,
with each new area on the outside gaining supremacy over those
immediately inside it.
The Booth notebooks of 1897 - 1898 that informed the revision
to Life and Labour of the People in London of 1899 - 1903 provide
a very useful source. Of the north Southwark area they say "the
rich have already left, the fairly comfortable are leaving and
the poor and very poor remain and will remain until they are
evicted".
This change was as a response to the increasing industrialisation
of this area, which pushed up residential rents, caused a deterioration
of the general environment, but which relied on a pool of casual
labour.
There was a different process in action in Nunhead and Telegraph
Hill where "the tendency appears … to be markedly in
the direction of greater uniformity … the servant class tending
to move out sand the poorer classes … tending to be driven
out".
Lewisham by contrast was on the slide; from a starting point
of being comfortable with little poverty. "It is a middle class
district into which wedges of the better class working people
are gradually forcing their way. The tendency of the district
is downward socially … The poorer classes who cannot pay the
rents are being driven further afield."
Not all Victorian commentators thought that life in a new suburb
was necessarily desirable. Their reactions to suburbanisation
were every bit as strong and divided as ours. Mrs Panton strongly
advised a house a little way out of London "to sleep in fresh
air, to have a game of tennis in summer, or a friendly evening
of music, chess or games in the winter" while Walter Besant
found that suburbs: "had all the exclusiveness and class feeling
of London without the advantages of a country town".
Physical and Moral Purity
Until the 17th century suburbs had been more a place to dread
than to covet. This was largely due to their overcrowded, insanitary
and vicious nature. But from the 18th century new suburban developments
became attractive because they offered respite from these very
things. Clean air and water, freedom from the vice and squalor
of the inner city (and cheaper rents) all attracted individuals
and institutions alike.
This was as evident in the 19th century as the late 20th. Much
of late 18th century’s Camberwell’s development was due to its
plentiful supply of clean water and the fresh air of its elevated
slopes. Many of the philanthropic institutions that became established
on St George’s Fields in Southwark in the late 18th century,
such as the Bethlem Hospital and the Magdalen Hospital for Penitent
Prostitutes, moved there to escape the vice of London (and then
left the area when the infernal wen moved south to engulf them).
Equally, geographical disadvantage could limit development.
St George’s Fields in Southwark - the area inside the great
sweep of the Thames between the City and Westminster - remained
largely undeveloped until the early 19th century as it was low
lying undrained marsh. It was not until the City, as freeholder,
arranged proper drainage in the early 19th century, that pasture
and ancient strip fields gave way to bricks and mortar. Equally
Blackheath, a high too-well drained gravel plateau offered few
sources of fresh water (or those that there were conducted to
Greenwich Palace on the riverfront).
