Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City (Tristram Hunt, 2004)

 

From the first page of this long book, where the author acknowledges over 20 people, to the last, we are aware that Hunt has read widely, and is familiar with the literature. However, that’s also part of the problem. Familiarity with the scholarship is not the only way to address the history of urban development. And quoting both sides in an argument does not establish that you are neutral. 

This book began life as a PhD thesis, although, to give credit to author Tristram Hunt, it reads much more fluently and entertainingly than a thesis. The book attempts is to pull together in one volume the growth and decline (the author’s words are “Rise and Fall”) leading to the garden city movement along with, and contrasted to, the municipal triumphs of the the big 19th century cities such as Birmingham and Glasgow. 

Where things start to go wrong, for me, is when what I call the casual historical style starts to disagree with me. The “casual historical style” is somewhere between a history monograph and a newspaper article. The author makes a statement, and provides sources to exemplify this statement. But far too  many topics are introduced with just one or two quotes by contemporaries to justify the argument. Cleverly, as a historian, Hunt can hide behind the quotes, as if to say, “Don’t complain to me, after all, I’m just quoting” – a technique which happens to be widely used by the populist right in the UK and the USA. 

Let’s look at a detailed example. Chapter Eight describes the triumph of what Hunt calls “The Municipal Gospel”, a phrase he uses as the chapter title. It’s only in a footnote midway through the chapter that he reveals that Asa Briggs, in his famous Victorian Cities, calls it the “Civic Gospel”, meaning the same thing. Chamberlain’s stunning success at buying out the municipal gas and water utilities for the common good are rightly celebrated. But abruptly, the tone changes as we move towards 1900 with “Municipal Socialism”, a switch from running the city like a corporation (under Chamberlain) to running the city like, well, a socialist ideology. The switch is cleverly characterised by Beatrice Potter rejecting Joseph Chamberlian as a suitor, and choosing instead Sidney Webb.

Beatrice’s amorous transition … can [] be read as an intellectual shift from the municipal  gospel of Chamberlain’s Birmingham to the municipal socialism of Webb and the Fabians. [Building Jerusalem, ch 8] 

Hunt is clearly less fond of socialism than of the corporatism of Chamberlain. he describes how Municipal Socialism was seen by many as a subterfuge for introducing, well, Socialism. 

Does the author remain neutral here? I’m not sure. The attack by business interests on councils is reported in quotes, but then as part of the author’s text:

The increase in municipal trading was threatening to crowd out private enterprise. Gas and water utilities had long since surrendered to the councils, but now electricity, tramway and omnibus companies were all threatened by municipal ambition. 

These are the author’s words, not a quote. Terms such as “crowd out”, “surrender” and “threaten” are emotive, and seem to me to reveal where the author’s sympathies lie, and they are not with the socialists. From our perspective in 2023, we are perhaps less concerned about bus companies threatened by municipal ambition; we have ample evidence of the result of private companies running competing  bus services. Recently I bought a one-day bus pass (“valid for all buses”) in Glasgow, only to find the number two bus I tried to catch was another operator’s number two: the competing bus companies use the same numbers, and don’t share ticketing. My all-day ticket was only valid for some of the buses. And nobody seemed too worried that there were several routes with the same number. 

But Hunt is too busy following his agenda to consider, I think, the people involved. Within one chapter we switch from private interests trying to prevent the incorporation of Birmingham, to Chamberlain implementing some of the finest municipal development of any city in the UK, then suddenly to venality and excess, including spending by councillors on cigars and champagne, as if this one example damned the entire municipal movement. 

But the narrative doesn’t stop there. A few pages further, and we are in a section called “Fleeing the City”. By page 386, “the city was decreasingly regarded as an arena to be celebrated … but instead as a  mode of existence best rejected altogether” and we move at top speed to the garden city ideal. The justification for the move out of the city comes from some appalling quotes by Social Darwinists, on the deleterious effects of city life on “Anglo-Saxons” (by which is presumably meant the indigenous city-dwellers): 

Finding himself at a disadvantage in competition with the immigrants, he goes through many stages before he is finally eliminated. Irregular labour, odd jobs, sweaters’ dens, prostitution, subsistence of charity … are only some of the struggles of the dying Londoner before he pays the debt of nature, whose laws he has no power to obey”. [p398]

Presumably the “immigrants” described here are the Jews, the Irish, and the country dwellers who move into London in search of work. Weirdly, Hunt quotes this contemporary writer without comment, as if this lurid, offensive argument, similar to some of the rabid right-wing Republican sentiment around Trump, somehow justified. In practice, many of the people who moved out of London to new towns such as Harlow and Stevenage had little choice in the matter. They didn't change their opinion about cities.  

I think this demonstrates how Hunt’s text reads well – there are always plenty of vivid quotes, and the narrative zips along – but, perhaps in an effort to includes all his reading about a vast subject, the author is  responsible for abrupt changes in tone which don’t seem to me to be justified. Perhaps for middle-class commentators, and for a present-day academic working in a library, such instant transformations might be feasible, but real lives were very different. I’m less and less convinced by the author’s rather superficial pulling together of a vast range of opinions about city life and urban planning, while maintaining what appears to be a neutral stance. He points out how central government, then as now, did everything in their power to prevent local government tackling the problems of poverty and inequality, by, for example, attempting to prevent the city of Glasgow building houses directly (and by so doing “preventing” private enterprise from its normal business) (the so-called Cross Acts, p360). Today, it is clear that private house-building companies act to maximise their profits by hoarding land rather than building on it immediately, yet councils are prevented from building any new social housing. The situation seems worse today than it was a hundred years ago. 

Yet from this text, the references to the present-day suggest that Hunt is happy with the privatised state of affairs we live under today in the United Kingdom. For me, a historical examination of the Victorian city is in many ways a stunning demonstration of what can be achieved with an effective local authority.