All these new industries were consumer oriented. Many of them made it easier for women to work, as the use of electric cookers, toasters and kettles spread (made by women and used by women). Dishwashers came later; I remember my mother insisting that she had to have one when she went back to work in the early 1960s. This was revolution indeed. Clothes washing followed a different trajectory, since commercial laundries had existed for some time and could be replaced by the launderette. Domestic washing machines took longer to penetrate the home. We had a top-loading paddle machine but it didn’t spin, and the mangle was a horrid contraption that was hard work and dangerous to the fingers. Even in the 1970s many women continued to use the launderette.
The earnings generated in the new industries in the 1930s made it possible for their workers to buy the new houses springing up along the suburban rail lines out to the north-west of the capital, or those served by burgeoning bus systems. In one decade, between 1921 and 1931, the outer suburbs attracted 810,000 people, and another 900,000 arrived in the following eight years as London attracted people trying to escape the depressed North, Scotland and Wales. New goods created new markets and new jobs and attracted new people. It is said that the building boom of the 1930s helped rescue London from depression. It would be truer to say that new inventions and the arrival of new firms and much foreign direct investment made the building boom possible. People bought the houses.
The war put all this on hold. Its aftermath saw resources being put into rebuilding, and into new town centres and planning. Spatial expansion was limited by Green Belts. Still, the factories continued to operate, if rather less effectively. It was only in the 1970s that they began to close. I remember the cosmetics factory along the A3 still operating in the 1960s. I visited radio factories and lamp factories in north London as late as the 1980s. None remain now. These sites are sometimes empty, but it is more likely that they have been redeveloped for housing or retail. The Hoover factory in Perivale, listed for its glorious art deco façade, is now a mixture of offices and a Tesco supermarket.
In its post-war reinvention, London recentralized. Pre-war, suburban sprawl and London County Council rehousing reduced urban density across the city. This in turn led to the Abercrombie plans, produced after the war but fundamentally based on a pre-Blitz view of London as a growth problem that needed to be stopped. People and jobs had to be moved out and ring roads were needed to move people round. Fortunately for London, Abercrombie’s most draconian visions were never accepted, since they would have involved complete clearing of many areas to provide for more ‘rational’ segregation of people and activities, as well as restrictions on the heights of buildings. He was more successful in cities such as Plymouth, completing the destruction started by bombing and ripping out the medieval street plan still more effectively. That city has not recovered. However, a mix of planning constraints, Green Belts and war weariness did manage to stop London’s growth in its tracks after at least a century of expansion. It took until the mid 1980s for it to get going again.
Or rather, it took until then for people to notice what was happening. It had become fashionable in the 1980s to talk about the economy as one of ‘market towns’. Out-of-town centres, retail hubs and office parks were all the rage, and we all travelled by car. Even though there had been two oil price crises – one of which meant that the government went as far as issuing petrol ration books (I still have mine, as well as my childhood one, which I can only just remember, for chocolate) – the car, and the personal freedom it enabled, was key. The first thing I wanted to do on my seventeenth birthday was to get behind a steering wheel. And this perception remained even while the world was actually changing. Business services has been on a pretty constant upward trend for decades, even while other activities were declining (Figure 1.1). This kind of employment is largely office work, where meetings and the need for contact with one another hold sway. It is all much easier in the city centre, and so this has been the latest shift in employment.
Figure 1.1. Employment chart showing the shift from manufacturing.
In 1971, there were more than a million jobs in manufacturing in London. The latest estimates, for 2012, show that there are fewer than 200,000 left (according to this definition). In 1971, there were around 400,000 jobs in business-to-business services. There are now about a million. We have succeeded in replacing all those jobs lost in declining manufacturing industries with many more jobs, but in different kinds of roles involving different kinds of goods and services. On the other hand, it might come as a surprise to see that the number of people working in finance and insurance has not changed much over the same period: it is still roughly 350,000.
The reinvention of work continues, both along the current trajectory and potentially into new possibilities. Chapter 2 examines this further by tracing the redevelopment of Docklands and the rise and fall of financial services. I argue that some aspects of both the rise and the fall are myths, and that they obscure the broader and much more important picture of service industries more generally, in which London is a world leader. The digital age heightens the importance of these strengths and leads to new opportunities in services, entertainment and new products. London should be well placed to exploit these opportunities if we manage to keep our nerve.
Living and localities
After all the destruction during World War II, bomb sites were still colonized by rosebay willowherb decades later; it is not surprising this plant is known as fireweed in the United States. A shortage of offices and the slow return of people to the capital meant that residential buildings in central London had temporary permission for office occupation, much of which has only expired in the last ten years or so. Over the decades, the work has moved from all those suburban factories to office blocks in the centre of the city.
Even so, London remains a low-density, suburban city (Figure 1.2). With roughly the same population and the same land area as Hong Kong, the distribution of people is completely different. Hong Kong has high-rise blocks and unpopulated hills, and dwelling densities as high as 1,250 per hectare. London has miles and miles of terraced streets, and even its employment densities are low.
Figure 1.2. City density map. (Hong Kong: © Urban Age, LSE Cities, London School of Economics and Political Science. Other five cities: © LSE Cities, London School of Economics and Political Science.)
The City of London has an employment density of around 300,000 people per square mile, and Westminster has one of around 75,000. New York’s is up to 600,000 in the midtown core; that of Paris’s central business district sits at around 90,000. London can increase this density if it wants to and still remain a city in which it is a pleasure to live.
The most densely populated residential district is Kensington and Chelsea, at 131 people per hectare, though Westminster is at similar levels if the Royal Parks are excluded. Barcelona has up to 400 dwellings per hectare, while the highest dwelling density in London is in Westminster, with 300. This is not about a failure to build high: Barcelona is not a city of tower blocks. Many of London’s post-war estates were built at lower population densities than you would find in a series of mansion blocks in Kensington. Various architects have shown that terraced housing at three to four stories can achieve greater density in more comfort than tower blocks. In other words – and perhaps surprisingly – the rows of Victorian terraces, which remain so popular, generate more density than the deeply unpopular high-rise buildings that give high density a bad name.
It is not clear whether the suburban sprawl is due to preference or plan.