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Survey of London: Whitechapel: 2 vols. The Survey has now turned its attention to perhaps London's most notorious parish, Whitechapel. Guillery suggests that immigration from overseas has shaped Whitechapel more and for longer than any other part of London, and he is surely right (10). [Extracted from the article]

By the outbreak of the Second World War, anxieties over the great size of London and its assumed destructive impact on the rest of the nation had reached a crisis point. The metropolitan economic boom that followed swiftly on the end of the First World War led to an extraordinary growth of population and industry in the capital, especially in the 1930s. By the end of that decade one in five of the people of England and Wales was a Londoner, living somewhere within the boundaries of Greater London, as defined by the Metropolitan Police District. For many public policy-makers, this growth was not just draining the rest of the nation of its talent; it was directly causing disinvestment in the Distressed Areas of Northern England, Wales and Scotland. It was Neville Chamberlain, long a critic of London's overgrowth and a convinced advocate of satellite towns and garden cities, who laid the national policy basis for at last solving the London problem with the Barlow Commission on the Distribution of the Industrial Population, reporting in 1940. In alliance with the town and country planning movement, with the nation's most famous planner-architect Patrick Abercrombie, and with a consensus of opinion that was especially strong on the centre-left of national and London politics, a planning framework was established for the post-war capital in two ambitious plans for the County of London and for the Greater London area. The war, with its assertion of a new national unity embracing the notion of planning in all walks of life but especially in the reconstruction of the bombed cities, produced a receptive climate to planning interventions in the future of London. But there were unintended consequences. It is arguable that the London Plans of 1943–44, and the Government planning policy of 1946 that followed their lead, would help produce nearly forty years of metropolitan decline that only began to end in the second half of the 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

War and its aftermath have affected in important ways the history of London and its people over the past three centuries. Patterns are distorted because of the predominance of war in London’s eighteenth century, its relative insignificance for much of the nineteenth century, and then its shattering impact during the two great wars of the twentieth century. Even so, some patterns are discernible: the relative economic buoyancy of wartime full employment and the resulting slump when war ends; a hastening of immigration as continental disruption brings refugees to London; metropolitan xenophobia as enemies are demonised; interruptions of the building cycle, leading to the temporary disruption of London’s growth or renewal, followed by a burst of development soon after. In all of this, the conjuncture of events, the politics of the time and the precise nature of the wars involved, all mark the uniqueness of each event, while recognising that wars produce shockwaves for London and its people whenever they occur. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article outlines the relationship between London and the First World War. The metropolitan dimension of total war is an emerging field of research at the intersection of military history and urban studies. The article (and special issue) aims to set out an agenda for historians of war/the city. While it is true that what happened at the ‘home front’ generally occurred in the capital city too, the London experience of the Great War was in many respects distinctive. The nerve centre of both the national and imperial war effort, the metropolis was the site of heightened anticipation, dense experience and concentrated commemoration. For London, the First World War proved an accelerator and incubator of socio-cultural change. Even so, London's stability vis-à-vis other imperial capitals was remarkable. The true impact of the war and its legacy can only be gauged by contrasting it with the state of London around 1914. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The impact of the First World War on London has long been unduly overshadowed by the war that came after. In fact, the years 1914–1918 proved transformative for the future direction of both London and the Londoners. The unprecedented employment prospects of the war years revolutionized the working lives and living standards of the London poor. The metropolis expanded to accommodate new industrial areas that formed the nucleus of London's suburban development in the interwar years. As part of that, the war ensured that the economic fortunes of West London would be tied to the aeroplane, quickly adapted for civilian uses once hostilities ceased. This wartime capital, which depended so heavily on women's labour to oil the machinery of government and of munitions manufacture, would never lose its dependence on women in the new industries that emerged from the economy of total war. And the experience of London's workers during the war began a tendency that altered for generations their political alignment; the Labour Party in London continues to reap the harvest sown during the First World War. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Albert Smith was one of the best-known men in Europe in the 1850s. His exploits as an alpine explorer, and his long-running shows in Piccadilly based on his 'conquest' of Mont Blanc, provided one of the great entertainments of Victorian London. But in the decade before, his reputation was based on his writings as a miscellaneous journalist and novelist. His four novels of London life date from the 1840s. They are highly autobiographical, taking scenes and characters from Smith's varied experiences as a London schoolboy, as a medical student and practitioner, as a showman, as a Grub-Street writer, and as author and arranger for the stage. They are overlayed, too, by Smith's chirpy optimism, more attuned to London's brighter side in the 'hungry Forties' than contemporaries like Dickens, Jerrold and Thackeray, all of whom he knew well. Smith provides fresh insights into the vulgar aspirational world of lower middle-class London. And he has a distinct political tone of voice — a Tory democrat who abhorred snobbery, poked fun at artistic pretensions, and defended the suburbs, while despising the poor for their 'love of dirt' and attacking those 'writers with a purpose' who agitated for reform. This paper introduces the reader to Albert Smith and his fiction and the London they inhabit and describe. And it suggests that Smith throws fresh light on metropolitan life and manners in a decade that we thought we knew well from other hands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]