In London: where her implements exact,
With which she calculates, computes, and scans,
All distance, motion, magnitude, and now
Measures an atom and now girds a world.
It is sometimes suggested that, by the end of the eighteenth century, the climate and pace of industrial development had shifted away from London to the manufacturing towns of the north. But this is to misunderstand, and certainly to underestimate, the force of practical intelligence within the capital. One of the founders of the Royal Society, Robert Hooke, was the direct inspiration behind advances in the technology of time, while Henry Maudslay’s exceedingly accurate machine tools were produced in Lambeth. In 1730 John Harrison came to London in order to develop his marine chronometer which for the first time fixed degrees of longitude. That spirit was maintained by the mechanical engineers of the nineteenth century who in the workshops of Lambeth produced the steam-hammer and the automatic spinning mule. Lambeth was, then, still a centre of transformation.
Yet in London the pursuit of knowledge was not confined to the search for technical proficiency. From his lodgings in Great Marlborough Street, after his famous voyage, Charles Darwin wrote that “It is a sorrowful but I fear too certain truth that no place is at all equal, for aiding one in Natural History pursuits, to this dirty smokey town.” After travelling around the world Darwin considered London to be the most appropriate place for his research, as if the whole of evolutionary nature could be viewed and studied there. He wrote this in 1837 and his insight was confirmed, forty-seven years later, when the prime meridian of zero degrees longitude was established upon a brass rail in Greenwich.
In true London tradition, science also was turned into theatre, with lectures and demonstrations all over the capital. The early nineteenth century in particular witnessed a great public demand for scientific knowledge; the London Institution of Moorfields, the Surrey Institution of Blackfriars Bridge, the Russell Institution in Bloomsbury and the City Philosophical Society in Dorset Street were only some of the many clubs and societies devoted to disseminating the new understanding. There were societies all over the city, founded in the 1820s and 1830s, among them Geological, Astronomical, Zoological, Medico-Botanical, Statistical, Meteorological and British Medical. In the capital there were also many inventors and theorists who were able to meet and to work together. The contributors to “Scientific London” in London World City remark that “London was a crucial instrument for forging new specialist disciplines.” It was as if new commodities were being produced and traded in this intensely heated atmosphere. Bessemer developed his steel-making process in St. Pancras, while Hiram Maxim invented the machine-gun in his Clerkenwell workshop.
The pragmatism and practicality of London science were then disseminated into its teaching. In 1826 the first university college in London was established in Bloomsbury with specifically utilitarian aims; its purpose was not to educate scholars and divines, on the model of Oxford and Cambridge, but to train engineers and doctors. It was a true London institution, its founders comprising radicals, Dissenters, Jews and utilitarians. It is not at all surprising, therefore, that it should be infused with a radical egalitarian spirit which began with the inclusion of non-Anglican students. It became a university in 1836, opening its gates to women twelve years later and from the 1850s creating evening classes for working Londoners.
The university also began to teach science as a separate discipline, and created the first Faculty of Science in 1858; there was also established a school of medicine which reached into practical areas as diverse as mathematics and comparative anatomy. It was a progressive, enquiring energy which animated all of these concerns. It has been termed the energy of empire since the vast power and resourcefulness of nineteenth-century London, at the centre of the imperial world, had somehow managed to infiltrate all aspects of its life. In the early nineteenth century statisticians, mathematicians and engineers, again according to London World City, “saw the city as a potentially universal centre of calculation whence trade and machinery would link world-wide networks of British power.” Charles Babbage, together with colleagues such as Herschel, established the Astronomical Society in 1820 during a meeting at the Freemasons’ Tavern in Great Queen Street. In his workshop Babbage created the “Difference Engine” which is the harbinger of the modern computer, and so it may be suggested that information technology itself was created in London. In the process of invention he had employed precision engineers and of course skilled workmen, so that once again the capital became the home of major technical innovation and technological progress.
London has often been apostrophised as the city of gold. It is a home of golden dragons and golden cocks, while the golden cross and golden ball on the dome of St. Paul’s have become a symbol of London’s energy. On a summer morning, when the shimmering brightness envelops the city in a haze, and all is quiet, then it might be transformed: “’Tis El Dorado-El Dorado plain, The Golden City!” It is all before you, its vistas unexplored, and becomes in the words of Wordsworth,
The great city, an emporium then Of golden expectations.
The golden city has been built out of the will and desire of a human community, and that is why in the verse of W.E. Henley it burns so brightly and why
Trafalgar Square
(The fountains’ volleying golden glaze)
Shines like an angel-market.
And as the sun descends in The Secret Agent “the very pavement under Mr. Verloc’s feet had an old-gold tinge in that diffused light … Mr. Verloc was going westward through a town without shadows in an atmosphere of powdered gold.” This is a gleam of brightness in an otherwise dark novel, and the effect is that of the alchemist creating gold out of base materials. Alchemy and science provide the seeds of light and knowledge in a dark city so that, as it seemed to Don Juan looking at London from the heights of Highgate:
each wreath of smoke
Appear’d to him but as the magic vapour
Of some alchymic furnace.
Dryden, too, had the same vision:
Methinks, already, from this chymic flame
I see a City of more precious mould …
Now deified, she from her fires does rise.
It is the magical energy of London, visible in every one of its giant transformations, like that after the Great Fire when empirical knowledge and practical genius helped to rebuild the city. This magical energy survives still.
A Fever of Building
