Leisure and the Changing City 1870 - 1914 (Routledge Revivals)

Helen Meller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135018733
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios regionales

By the late nineteenth century, the city had become the dominant social environment of Britain, with the majority of the population living in large cities, often with over 100, 000 inhabitants. The central concern of this book, first published in 1976, is to assess how successful the late Victorians were in creating a stimulating social environment whilst these developing cities were being transformed into modern industrial and commercial centres. Using Bristol as a case study, Helen Meller analyses the new relationships brought about by mass urbanisation, between city and citizen, environment and society. The book considers a variety of important features of the Victorian city, in particular the development of the main cultural institutions, the provision of leisure facilities by voluntary societies and the expansion of activities such as music, sport and commercial entertainment. Comparative examples are drawn from other cities, which illustrate the common social and cultural values of an urbanised nation. This is a very interesting title, of great relevance to students and academics of town planning, Victorian society, and the history and development of the modern city.

I

INTRODUCTION

One of the most remarkable social changes in nineteenth-century Britain was the congregation of the majority of the population into large cities. Such a development was unprecedented, though other areas of Europe and the USA were undergoing a similar transformation by the end of the century.¹ No one doubted that the Industrial Revolution had brought material advantages, however unevenly distributed. But had urbanization brought parallel social and cultural riches to those now forced to live in cities? In the new relationships brought by mass urbanization, between city and citizen, environment and society, there was a need to create new living patterns, as a means of collective social stability and as a means of promoting individual fulfilment. Traditional customs and mores became eroded, and the challenge for the late Victorians was to replace them with the assets of city life, freedom of choice, mobility and a wider range of social and cultural experiences.

I THE ‘MODERN’ CITY

The proportion between the rural and town population of a country [wrote one American observer of these processes²] is an important fact in its interior economy and condition. It determines, in a great degree, its capacity for manufactures, the extent of its commerce and the amount of its wealth. The growth of cities commonly marks the progress of intelligence and the arts, measures the sum of social enjoyment, and always implies excessive mental activity, which is sometimes healthy and useful, sometimes distempered and pernicious.

In England, the point of no return was reached in 1851, when the census revealed that the population was equally divided between town dwellers and country dwellers. Each subsequent census showed an increase in the proportion of urban dwellers: 61.8 per cent in 1871, 72.05 per cent in 1891, and 80 per cent in 1911, with the large towns of more than 100,000 population taking a dominant share of that increase.

This development of large cities, however, was not only a matter of scale. There were also qualitative changes which, in toto, were transforming city life. These changes have been described as the process of modernization and, in the period 1870 to 1914, they were speeded up so that all large cities were becoming ‘modern’ cities. The historical forces generating this transformation have been summed up by Professor Handlin.³ He suggests that ‘modern’ cities sprang ‘from three profound and interrelated changes in the society external to them – the development of the centralized national state, the transformation of the economy … and the technological destruction of distance.’⁴ The prototype of such a city was London in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the nineteenth century, however, when the first group of provincial towns (Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham and Bristol) reached and surpassed the 100,000 mark in population; and in the mid-century years, when the second group (led by Sheffield, Wolverhampton, Newcastle upon Tyne, Bradford, Salford and Stoke on Trent) did the same, these interrelated factors gained greater strength in transforming them into ‘modern’ cities.

In many ways, the two decades of the 1860s and ’70s marked a transitional stage in this trend. For instance, the significance of the first factor, the ‘centralized national state’ in relation to cities in the nineteenth century, lay largely in administration. The evolution of a new relationship between central and local government was a long drawn-out process, interspersed with elements of economic theory, social experience, and much social prejudice. But in the late 1860s and early ’70s an attempt was made to clarify the relationship and put it on a business footing. Basic elements in this activity concerned the Poor Law, public health, housing, education and town improvements. There was a cluster of government reforms, indicating new levels of responsibility and contact, particularly the Sanitary Commission of 1869–71 and the setting up of the Local Government Board, the 1870 Education Act and the codification of public health legislation in the 1875 Act. The Torrens and Cross Acts of 1868 and 1875 initiated a new response to slums and the era of by-law housing, even if they were not generally applied and their results were to be seen largely in a few striking examples. However, the greater regulation of housing, road improvements, cleaning, paving and lighting of streets, policing, provision of water and sewage disposal, and refuse collecting had, in aggregate, a considerable impact on the physical environment of the ‘modern’ city.⁵

The second factor, the transformation of the economy, was also at a formative stage in the 1860s and ’70s, in its impact on the physical shape of the city. It was not only that the changes brought by the Industrial Revolution were now being more extensively implemented than before; from the 1870s, wider economic forces were increasingly transforming land use in the centres of large cities. By then, Britain and the British economy had become the central pivot in the extending activities of a world multilateral economy.⁶ The physical impact of such a development was felt first in London, the world’s financial and commercial centre, in the ports and the cities engaged in major export trades. But the growing flow of imports and exports and the increasing sophistication of commercial activity had repercussions which were experienced by all large provincial centres.

Central areas were mainly cleared of residential building and manufacturing activities, and the space left was quickly utilized for offices and warehousing for commercial enterprises and related services. Factors such as the increase of food imports contributed significantly to a revolution in wholesale and retailing methods, with the establishment of centrally controlled nationwide networks. Two new retailing techniques, the chain store and the department store, were both developed in the late Victorian period.⁷ They became part of a new pattern of relationships between city and citizens, the latter now largely banished to the residential and industrial suburbs. The centre became on the one hand, the working environment for mainly white-collar workers, on the other, the source of services such as shops and amusements. The total exile of citizens from central areas was not complete, as pockets of residential buildings did remain, situated either between the centre and outer suburbs, or trapped by physical barriers such as railway lines.⁸ These tended, especially on the east side of cities, to be slums, created by soaring land values and the inability of lower income groups to pay higher rents or to move to the suburbs.

Suburbs, of course, were a crucial feature of the ‘modern’ city and their development was related, not only to economic growth, but also to technological advances in transport. This introduces the third ‘profound change’, the technological destruction of distance, to have a dramatic impact on the city. The main-line railway system had been completed, more or less, by the 1860s. It had had considerable impact on many cities as lines were thrust through to the centre, destroying areas of slum housing and encouraging extensive road improvements for better access to the station. But transformations in local transport were to have even more far-reaching effects on everyday life.⁹ The suburban train and tram, introduced largely in the 1870s, made a clear division between work-place and residence available to the majority of the population. The establishment of shopping and entertainment services in the centre depended on better local transport. The technological destruction of distance made people more mobile within the city and also away from it. Seaside towns, spas and holiday resorts began to grow enormously from the 1860s, fed by new supplies of tourists on holiday trains.¹⁰

All cities of 100,000 or more inhabitants were profoundly affected by these developments in the half century before the First World War. Since these cities were also absorbing a greater proportion of population growth than small towns and rural counties, the experiences of modernization must have been similar for a large proportion of the population. This is not to say that all large cities were similar. Lewis Mumford’s universal ‘Coketown’ has been attacked by Professor Asa Briggs for reasons which are supremely valid.¹¹ Each town or city is a complex organism with variations in economic and social structure, social institutions and traditions; and it is these very differences which are crucial to an understanding of historical development. But city boundaries are not city walls. The impact of the modern industrial city, the reaction of its inhabitants to life in the city, to the search for happiness, are universal themes which those in Britain, and other industrialized, urbanized nations, had to explore.

II LEISURE AND THE CITY

The study of leisure activities provides a unique insight into the responses made to the challenge of social development in the city. The concept of leisure, however, is not an easy one to handle. Leisure is not simply an adjunct to work. As Elias and Dunning point out:

The pleasurable satisfaction provided by leisure activities tends to be treated as an end – to the end of giving relief from the strain of work and of improving man’s capacity for it. However, if one asks, primarily, what the function of leisure is for work, the possibility of discovering what its function is for men tends to be obscured.¹²

This latter possibility is the one most relevant to a study of social development, or the ‘civilizing’ process. Since the function of leisure for society at large was undergoing rapid transformation in the late Victorian period, deliberate attempts were made to redefine its function. The creation of an urban civilization which would meet the full emotional, intellectual and recreational demands of a nation, could only be the product of conscious, deliberate thought.

In the 1860s and ’70s realization of this fact was becoming far more widely experienced as the numbers now living in cities grew. Few would have disagreed with W. S. Jevons, writing in the Contemporary Review of 1878: ‘As society becomes more complex and the forms of human society multiply, so must multiply also the points at which careful legislation and continuous social effort are required to prevent abuse, and to secure the best utilization of resources.’¹³ The potential of life in a ‘modern’ city could not be realized without effort. But the direction of that effort has sometimes obscured the nature of the ‘civilizing’ process. Instead of social development in new circumstances implying a higher level of potential experience for everyone, what was sometimes more evident was the considerable pressure exerted on the masses to make them accept their lot.

Such an emphasis highlights the political element present in any conscious and deliberate attempt to initiate social change. In the year of revolutions, 1848, in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels rage against all those working for social adaptability;

the economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organizers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole and corner reformers of every imaginable kind … [who] want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom.

This middle-class effort to control the direction of social change can be ‘summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois for the benefit of the working class.’

But regardless of who wielded the political power, it remained a vital fact that a modern, industrialized, urban society had to evolve new social conditions within which to operate. Marx’s ‘modern social conditions’ were in a constant state of development. Eric Lampard writes: ‘Urbanization itself may be regarded as the organizational component of a population’s achieved capacity for adaptation.’¹⁴ By this he means two things. The ability of the community to adapt itself to changing economic circumstances and to continue increasing its economic wealth; and second, the ability to evolve a new social order able to understand and exploit the latest economic and technological developments to the fullest social as well as economic advantage. Given the economic, social and political inequalities of mid-Victorian society, vested interests were bound to try and shape the evolution of the new social order to their own advantage. But social change in the ‘modern’ city was not so easy to control. The assets of city life, the greater freedom, mobility and social aggregation of large numbers, militated against any simple, easily controllable pattern of development.

III CIVILIZATION AND SOCIAL CITIZENSHIP

In fact, even amongst those with a similar class background, there was little unanimity on the pattern that future social development should take. Civilization was a theme with a wide variety of possible interpretations. Could it be defined by contrasting rural life and values with city life and civilization? Or did it refer to the formal view of cultural experiences, the pursuit of the liberal and visual arts? Or was it a far more pragmatic and pervasive influence altering social relationships and behaviour in a never-ending process of social change? These were questions without answers. But one thing was clear, in the historical context of mass urbanization, what happened in each large city was more than a matter of local concern, it was part of the national response to the challenge of civilization.

The central and significant fact about the city [wrote Geddes and Branford], is that it functions as the specialized organ of social transmission. It accumulates and embodies the heritage of larger units, national, racial, religious, human. On the one side is the individuality of the city – the sign manual of its regional life and record. On the other side are the marks of the civilization, in which each city is a particular element.¹⁵

The use of leisure and the provision of facilities for leisure and pleasure thus gained a new significance from the mid-century years. The provision of cultural facilities devoted to the formal concept of Liberal Culture, for instance, sometimes became the spearhead of an attempt to salvage the reputation of the city. Many contemporaries considered that the modern city had destroyed the traditional values of English society. Pugin, Ruskin and William Morris were riding the crest of an anti-urban wave in their championship of medieval buildings and medieval towns in harmony with the countryside and rural life.¹⁶ The affluent middle classes built their suburbs with extravagant amounts of land for each house as if they were really in the countryside, or at worst, some country town.¹⁷ The cardinal sins of the modern city were the total ugliness of its environment and the destruction of a sense of community, that nub of nineteenth-century social thinking, because of the enormous numbers of citizens now segregated in different residential suburbs according to economic status. As Disraeli wrote in Sybil: ‘There is no community in England: there is aggregation, but aggregation under circumstances which make it rather a dissociating than a uniting principle.’¹⁸

Ideas on what constituted fellowship, neighbourliness and a sense of community, supplemented by idealized conceptions of the past were important for shaping ideas on what to do to i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• PREFACE
• 1 INTRODUCTION
• 2 BRISTOL IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY
• 3 THE CITY AND ITS CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS
• 4 BRISTOL’S LEADING CITIZENS – A GOVERNING ELITE?
• 5 MUNICIPAL FACILITIES FOR LEISURE AND PLEASURE
• 6 THE ‘CIVILIZING MISSION’ TO THE POOR
• 7 SOCIO-RELIGIOUS PROVISIONS FOR LEISURE 1890–1914
• 8 URBANIZATION AND LEISURE – THE SECULAR CULTURE OF CITY AND SUBURB
• 9 SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT AND THE CITY
• ABBREVIATIONS
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX