A WORKING CITY
London does more than many capitals: it combines a centre of national and local government with a financial centre, a port, and a vast retail and entertainment hub. Goods were imported and exported from Roman times, and work grew up around related trades. For most of its history London has been pre-eminently an international port: within living memory many of its jobs were still connected with the river, the realm of dockers, stevedores, lightermen, warehousemen, shipbuilders and seafarers.
In addition, the streets of the city of London and many of its old buildings reflect its trading origins in the profusion of drapers, fishmongers, ironmongers, butchers, bookbinders, cordwainers, candlemakers, tailors, carpenters. Before the industrial revolution, London was a city of buyers and sellers, of workers in the ‘trades’. Nevertheless, the artisans were highly protective of their trades and employed apprentices who usually lived in the masters’ houses for long years until they had learned the skills. From the English Revolution the artisans and more especially their apprentices played a prominent role in London organization and politics. Time and again, carpenters, shoemakers and tailors took the lead in political organization. Francis Place, the great figure of the eighteenth-century reform movement, was a tailor in the Charing Cross Road. Thomas Hardy, one of the founders of Chartism, was a boot-maker in Piccadilly. The Spitalfields silk-weavers and their apprentices ‘had long been noted for their anti-authoritarian turbulence’.6
The Industrial Revolution and the subsequent development of an industrial working class took place for the most part away from London. But while the workshop of the world developed outside the capital, its goods had to be traded on an unprecedented scale. These goods helped to create the financial wealth of London, to expand its port and to give impetus to the railway building which so transformed London’s geography. London was a huge importer city, gathering in from the empire an increasing array of goods. The port offered a particularly dramatic spectacle. The young Friedrich Engels wrote in the 1840s:
I know nothing more imposing than the view which the Thames offers during the ascent from the sea to London Bridge. The masses of buildings, the wharves on both sides, especially from Woolwich upwards, the countless ships along both shores, crowding ever closer and closer together, until, at last, only a narrow passage remains in the middle of the river, a passage through which hundreds of steamers shoot by one another; all this is so vast, so impressive, that a man cannot collect himself, but is lost in the marvel of England’s greatness before he sets foot upon English soil.7
By 1880, as the author of early tourist guides, Fritz Baedeker, said: ‘Nothing will convey to the stranger a better idea of the vast activity and stupendous wealth of London than a visit to the warehouses, filled to overflowing with interminable stores of every kind of foreign and colonial products.’8
London’s port was a cradle of radicalism and dissent. The vast number of jobs created on and around the river, the centrality of the docks to commercial life, and the huge mixture of races and cultures which came to London on ships from across the world, all contributed to a consciousness formed by living in the city itself. The East End of London, formed out of the docks and their industrial hinterland, peopled by immigrants both from within the rest of Britain and from China, Russia, Germany and Ireland, has a special place in that history. Time after time the Tower Hamlets such as Limehouse and Stepney feature in the history of London: the Levellers organized here in Wapping, the biggest strike waves in London were here, Communist and left-wing MPs were elected here. The river was the boundary of other radical areas: Southwark and Lambeth to the south, and further upstream Battersea, a notorious site of industrial radicalism.
While London workplaces were often small, they could still be organized. The London tailors struck in 1889, linking up West Enders with their East End counterparts. The dock strikes of 1889 and 1911 brought together workers from different firms and across trades. The bus workers of the 1930s organized across the whole city’s workforce, as do the tube workers in the twenty-first century. The gas workers unionized the big gas employers throughout the East End and westwards to areas such as Battersea in 1889. The newspaper printers organized in and around Fleet Street – this concentrated handful of streets contained as many printing works and as much machinery as factories in many industrial towns.
Out of this organization came ideas of collective change to achieve greater social and political equality. The early shoots of ideas about equality for all, audacious notions of free love, and protests against property first surfaced in the English Revolution. William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Blake returned to them during the French Revolution, and the ideas of utopianism took hold in London in the 1820s and 30s. It was only late in the nineteenth century, in the early 1880s, that socialism was properly reborn. While the socialists played a big part in free-speech agitation against the police and in organizing the unemployed, the real success of socialists and radicals came with the fight for the new unions. All the major strikes centrally involved political figures – the radical journalist Annie Besant in the match girls’ strike which began the strike wave in Bow in 1888, John Burns, Will Thorne and Tom Mann in the dockers’ action, Eleanor Marx with the gas workers and other major disputes of 1889. The battle for the new unions in 1888–89 was much stronger and more powerful in London than anywhere else in the country. The strikes of the unskilled London workers in those years wrote a new page of working-class history, and their organization led to the establishment of the two main general workers’ unions, which today are the GMB and Unite. A sign of the success of the movement was the election of the Scottish socialist Keir Hardie as MP for West Ham. John Burns was also elected for Battersea in 1892.
Women have become an increasingly visible part of left-wing, working-class politics in London. Even at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, the importance of London for the ‘new woman’ – educated, self-reliant and emancipated – was becoming clear. The big city gave young women the space and freedom to develop away from family or the confines of village or small-town life. This privilege was initially felt only by middle-class women, but increasingly at least some working-class women who were branching into white-collar work gained some of this benefit. Single women benefited from London’s public spaces – not just shopping streets, parks and gardens, libraries and public halls, but public transport, especially the Underground, which gave women opportunities for social interaction unknown by previous generations. Women trained as typists, schoolteachers and clerks. Women today are a growing part of the London working class; it is impossible to study the working class without seeing women.
What the working class looks like today is very different and London probably has the most varied working class in terms of race and nationality of anywhere in the world. The generations of Afro-Caribbeans and Asians who played such a big part in building unions in transport, health and the manufacturing industries such as Ford have been joined by militants from across the world – and most of the overt barriers to entering certain trades have broken down (although invisible and institutional barriers still remain). Successive generations have asserted their right to live and work in Britain and to be treated equally; in a sense, the riots of 1981 marked the young black working class demanding an end to racism and to be accepted as part of society. While divisions of race, nationality and gender remain real and can sometimes be exacerbated, the common experience of class in London is a powerful countervailing factor.
THE MOB AND THE POLITICS OF THE CITY
London’s mob, a term for the mass crowd which assembles in London over a wide variety of issues, was capable of laying siege to Parliament, demonstrating, rioting and attacking the rich. The mob was also a means of communication where news and information seem to spread like wildfire. The term ‘mob’ comes from the Latin term mobile vulgus, coined in the eighteenth century to describe the labouring poor. Peter Linebaugh has suggested that it could be translated as ‘movement’, which has less pejorative overtones and places it in the context of protest.9 The campaign in the mid eighteenth century in support of John Wilkes and his attempts to be re-elected as an MP, while king and Parliament did their best to stop him, saw repeated mobilization of the mob, their cry being ‘Wilkes and Liberty’. There was a complex relationship between the mob and sections of the upper and