This article covers the history of the English city of London through the early 20th century, from 1900 to the outbreak of World War II in 1939. London entered the 20th century at the height of its influence as the capital of the largest empire in history, but the new century was to bring many challenges. London was the largest city in the world from about 1825 until it was overtaken by New York City in 1925.
Edwardian London
The years between Queen Victoria's death in 1901 and the start of the First World War in 1914 were years of growth and general prosperity, though the extreme inequalities which had characterized Victorian London continued. By 1900 one out of five Britons lived in London, with the population of roughly 5 million in 1900 rising to over 7 million by 1911.
Edwardian London was not without conflict, characterized principally by the burgeoning Women's Suffrage movement. The city became the epicenter for the nationwide suffrage movement spearheaded by Emmeline Pankhurst and her Women's Social and Political Union, which moved its headquarters from Manchester to London in 1906 so it could better exert pressure on the nation's political leaders. With 34 of its national 90 branch offices based in London, the capital was the largest base of support for the W.S.P.U. in the UK. Protests and demonstrations intensified during these years, reaching a peak between 1912 and 1914 as the movement militarized. Hyde Park hosted two major suffragette rallies in 1908 and 1913, the former counting over 250,000 attendees. London was the site of seminal events in the movement, including Black Friday, when a suffragette march from Caxton Hall to the Palace of Westminster dissolved into conflicts with the police, leading to 115 arrests, 2 deaths, and widespread allegations of sexual assault inflicted upon the female protesters.*
Architecture and building
Architecturally there was much rebuilding in Central London during the Edwardian years in the prevalent styles of Beaux-Arts and Edwardian Baroque. Much of the construction was delayed by the Great War between 1914 and 1918, and completed in the 1920s. Major government buildings erected during this time were County Hall (1911–22), the seat of the London County Council, the War Office (1906), and the Port of London Authority Building (1912–1922). The decrepit buildings of John Nash's Regent Street, originally constructed in the 1820s and encompassing a large swathe of the West End between Regent's Park in the north and Waterloo Place near St. James's Park in the south, were rebuilt entirely between 1905 and 1927. The simple Regency buildings of the Nash period were replaced with grand new commercial buildings faced in Portland stone lining Regent Street, Oxford Circus, and Regent's Quadrant, transforming the appearance of the West End. The Mall was re-envisioned as a grand parade route for state pageantry, which involved the building of Admiralty Arch (1911), the re-facing of Buckingham Palace (1911–1912), and the erection of the Victoria Memorial (1911).
In Holborn, a large swathe of the slum area known as Clare Market was demolished to make way for Kingsway (1905), a grand 100 ft. wide boulevard with an underground tramway tunnel that stretches from The Strand north to High Holborn and Southampton Row. Aldwych, the crescent-shaped road connecting Kingsway with the Strand, was lined with new theatres, hotels and diplomatic commissions like Australia House (built between 1913 and 1918).
Transport
The Edwardian period witnessed a major expansion of the London Underground fueled by the advent of electrification, deep-level tunneling via the tunneling shield, and investment from the United States and other sources. Four new deep-level lines opened between 1900 and 1907, as well as extensions and electrifications of the older lines from the previous century. The Central London Railway (Central Line) was the first to open in the 20th century, on 30 July 1900. At first it ran between Bank in the City of London and Shepherd's Bush, but in 1908 it was extended westwards to White City in time for the Franco-British Exhibition and the 1908 Summer Olympics. The Metropolitan Railway and the District Railway were extended to the west reaching Ruislip and Uxbridge in 1904. The electrification of the formerly steam-operated MR and DR began in 1905. 1906 saw the opening of the Baker Street and Waterloo Railway (now the Bakerloo line) in March, originally running between Lambeth North and Baker Street, and the Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway (now the Piccadilly line) in December, running between Hammersmith and Finsbury Park. In 1907, the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway (CCE&HR) was opened, running between Charing Cross and terminating in North London via Camden Town at Archway and Golders Green.Report of the opening – (registration required).Glinert, 2012; p.353-356 Fifty of the Edwardian era stations were designed by Leslie Green and are distinctive for their semi-circular windows, glazed tile facades in oxblood red, and green-tiled ticket halls.
The three underground lines which opened between 1906 and 1907 were owned by the Underground Electric Railways Company of London (UERL), which would move to expand and consolidate by gradually acquiring not only underground competitors, but the major bus and tramway companies. Only London's oldest line, the Metropolitan Railway, along with its subsidiaries, and the Waterloo & City line remained outside the control of the UERL by 1913. This competition between the UERL and its remaining competitors did not prevent them from entering into a joint marketing agreement in 1908 which united the entire network for the first time as the "Underground" in publicity, signage, maps, and through coordinated fares.
Urban poverty Round About a Pound a Week, a report by the Fabian Society of an intervention between 1909 and 1913, describes the lives of the "respectable poor"; one in five children died in their first year, and hunger, illness, and colds were the norm. A 1909 report of the Poor Law Commission found that one-third of the East End's 900,000 strong population lived in conditions of extreme poverty. The report also detailed the squalor of conditions in these areas, with an average of 25 houses sharing every one lavatory and fresh-water tap between them. One response to a dire lack of sanitation in London's poorest areas was the provision of communal washhouses for bathing and clothes-washing; an average of 60,000 people each week used the 50 such bathhouses which existed across the city in 1910.
The publication of the third edition of Charles Booth's monumental 17-volume Life and Labour of the People of London gave further insight into the conditions of London's poorest. Throughout the first four decades of the twentieth century, the London County Council continued a program of slum clearance and the building of "model dwellings" in the poorest areas like Spitalfields, Whitechapel and Bethnal Green. While sanitation and living conditions improved, the percentage of London's population living in poverty was estimated at 8.7% in the late-1920s, rising to about 10% in 1934 as the Great Depression took its toll.
Poor Londoners were condemned to live in densely populated, unsanitary and polluted slums while the middle-classes could move to the expanding suburbs for fresh-air and space. Such conditions made those born and raised in London's slums noticeably unhealthy, weak, and malnourished in appearance. Recruitment drives for the Boer War of 1899–1902 revealed that 7 in 9 working-class Londoners were unfit for service. In his 1903 book on conditions in the East End, The People of the Abyss, the American author Jack London wrote of the poor Londoner that:
World War I
During World War I, London experienced its first bombing raids, carried out by German zeppelin airships and later by aeroplanes. On 31 May 1915 the first aerial bombing raid on London was carried out by a zeppelin, which dropped high explosives over the East End and the docks, killing seven people. There were a further ten airship raids over London during 1915 and 1916 and a further one in 1917.
By 1917, British success at shooting down airships persuaded the German military to instead use aeroplanes to attack London. The first attack by bombers occurred in May 1916 when a single plane attacked the East End. By May 1917 a squadron of Gotha biplanes was assembled. On 13 June 1917 the largest World War I air raid on London was carried out, resulting in about 160 deaths. In this raid fourteen Gotha bombers bombed numerous targets in the City and the East End, including the Fenchurch Street/Aldgate area, Royal Albert Dock, Liverpool Street Station and Upper North Street School in Poplar. Eighteen children were killed at the school, causing public outrage. Further raids followed during 1917 and 1918. However, by May 1918 British air defences had improved sufficiently to start inflicting heavy German losses, and this persuaded Germany to call the raids off.
These air raids killed around 670 people, injured 1,960 and caused great terror among London's population, though of far greater impact was the number of Londoners who were killed in combat: about 124,000 young men never returned from the war.
The largest explosion in London's history, the Silvertown explosion, occurred during World War I. A munitions factory containing 50 tons of TNT exploded, killing 73 and injuring 400.
1920s Interwar Expansion The early 20th century, especially during the interwar years of the 1920s and 1930s, saw the geographical extent of London's urban area grew faster than at any point before or since. Most of the development was of suburban expansion into the neighbouring counties of Essex, Hertfordshire, Kent, Middlesex and Surrey. A preference for lower density suburban housing, typically semi-detached, by Londoners seeking a more "rural" lifestyle, superseded Londoners' old predilection for terraced houses. The rapid expansion of London during this period swallowed up large swathes of countryside. Fears over the loss of countryside led eventually to the introduction of the Metropolitan Green Belt, restricting urban growth.
This meant that London outgrew the boundaries of the County of London, which led to calls by the London County Council for the creation of a single Greater London authority covering the entire urban area, although this was rejected by the Royal Commission on London Government in 1921.
The population of London's urban area reached its all-time peak of about 8.6 million in 1939. All of this growth occurred outside of the boundaries of the County of London; the population of which actually fell during the interwar years from 4.5 to 4 million.
Large numbers of Jewish immigrants fleeing from Nazi Germany, settled in London during the 1930s, mostly in the West End.
High rise housing The fierce debates over high-rise housing that took place after 1945 were presaged by an acrimonious debate in the 1920s and 1930s. It pitted enthusiastic advocates and angry critics of multistorey flats for social housing. On the political left, there was firm opposition to what was denounced as 'barracks for the working classes'. Reformers on the right called for multi-story solutions to overcrowding and high rents. One result were attempts to compromise by developing new solutions to urban living, focused especially on slum clearance and redevelopment schemes. The compromises generally sought to replace inhospitable slums with high-rise blocks served by lifts. In the Metropolitan Borough of Stepney they included John Scurr House (built 1936–1937), Riverside Mansions (1925–1928) and the Limehouse Fields project (1925 but never built).Simon Pepper and Peter Richmond, "Stepney and the Politics of High-Rise Housing: Limehouse Fields to John Scurr House, 1925–1937." London Journal 34.1 (2009): 33–54.
Architecture and Building