Building the Vanished City: Conservationism in Turn-of-the-Century London

Demolitions in late-nineteenth-century London were interpreted by topographers and antiquarians, and these interpretations found expression in the works of the municipal government. The demolition and rebuilding of the city over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries coincided with a growing interest in London's vanishing material heritage, an interest that by the end of the century gave rise to groups devoted to recording traces of the disappearing city. The texts of this recording project enabled London's government to assert its authority and give order to a city cluttered with buildings--to modernize London as an city. ********** In June 1899 The Art Workers Guild of London performed a masque at Guildhall that celebrated the transformation of London from a soiled creature of shreds and patches into a new and monumental city for the next century. (1) Essential to London's imminent greatness was its wealth untold, its rich historic garment that placed London among the major cities of the past, such as Thebes, Athens, Rome, and Byzantium. the end of the nineteenth century, however, London had lost her looks: By creatures fell London was tormented and made mean, and her rich historic garment was torn and old. In order for London to take its rightful place among cities of the past and it had to be renewed--it had to be become a modern historic city. For Frederic Harrison, an active proponent of urban redevelopment in London, (2) such a renovation would be achieved through the demolition of the poisonous, and parts of the city, and the preservation of the sacred and (427). What Harrison presents as a clear and certain distinction between the and the merely old, however, was very much in question in the debates concerning redevelopment in late-Victorian London. Opponents of redevelopment argued that many of the old and crumbling buildings at stake in improvement schemes were as worthy of preservation as Tudor palaces and Wren churches. William Strudwick's photograph (ca. 1872; see Figure I) illustrates how such crumbling parts of the city could be revaluated as historic: the photograph depicts an City house as part of the clutter of London, surrounded by rubble, timber, and waste, and seemingly next-in-line for its due demolition. However, the photograph's caption--Pope's House--identifies the building as the home of a canonical poet, gives the house a value that transforms the picture of buildings into a glimpse of imminent catastrophe, and instructs us to appreciate the loss. This picture and its caption suggest that literary associations make for history, that buildings are invaluable, and that such buildings (in the words of Harrison) should be taken out of the arbitrary disposal of the present, out of the fluctuating political, economic, and social contexts that reduced these buildings to mundane and disposable property (449). However, this picture illustrates another way such buildings were revaluated: the inimitable, irreplaceable quality of such buildings was also signified through their demolition and implied absence--through their vanishing rather than their preservation as historic sites. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] This paper examines how published images and texts such as that of Strudwick's Pope's House functioned in debates surrounding urban conservation and redevelopment in turn-of-the-century London. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the wide-scale razing and rebuilding of central districts of London were viewed as solutions to the city's social and economic problems: in demolishing built-up areas of London, slums and traffic congestion would be replaced by healthy business, shopping, and residential areas serviced by transportation systems) The Pope's House photograph, reprinted in 1903 as part of an article on London demolitions, is one of innumerable records of London published in the late Victorian period by architects, preservationists, antiquarians, artists, and topographers who described the areas under redevelopment as vanished or disappearing London; they presented their own essays, photographs, histories, and drawings as testaments to a built environment going, if not already gone. …