A Brief History of Britain 1851-2010 Read online

  Earlier, suburbia had spread in the late nineteenth century with the railways, but development then had generally not moved far from the stations. In contrast, car transport permitted less intensive development, although, in practice, this often meant more extensive estates that were otherwise as densely packed by the developers as the basic housing model permitted. As with the car, the semi expressed the desire for freedom: a freedom to escape the constraints of living in close proximity to others, as most people did, and, instead, to enjoy space. Semis were not the more individual and larger suburban villas for the wealthier members of the middle class built round Victorian cities in up-market suburbs such as London’s St John’s Wood, which continued to exist in what were now enclaves, but they reflected a similar aspiration for space and privacy. Moreover, semis captured the aspirations of millions, and offered them a decent living environment, including a garden. Stanley Baldwin’s speeches in the 1920s helped to capture suburbia for the Conservatives by emphasizing that its inhabitants were country dwellers, and hence custodians of the core English values.

  Semis were certainly far more a realization of the suburban ideal than terraced housing. In English Journey (1934), J.B. Priestley (1894–1984) wrote, alongside the old industrial and rural Englands, of the new England of suburbs and road houses: pubs built along trunk roads. In Scotland, in contrast, the cities remained more like Continental ones, as to an extent they still do, with the well-to-do living quite close to the centre and the poorest in peripheral housing schemes.

  In part, suburbia was a response to the cult of the outdoors, one mediated through, and in, the suburban garden (which greatly attracted the middle class) and the parks of new suburbs. I grew up in a ‘Parkside Drive’, built in the 1930s alongside a new suburban park taken from farmland. Suburbia, moreover, was linked to a ruralist image of England that was found across the arts. In music, it was seen in the positive response to Edward Elgar (1857–1934) and Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958), notably pieces that became iconic such as Enigma, Pomp and Circumstance and The Lark Ascending, and, in painting, in the popularity of ‘authentic’ rather than modernist works.

  Suburbia, which came into use as a pejorative noun in the 1890s, certainly reflected sameness and national standardization. Indeed, a predictability of product helped to make the new housing sell: the houses were mass-produced and had standardized parts and they looked similar, as did their garages. A degree of individuality was provided by the gardens, but they generally had similar plantings. The Garden Cities also allowed only a very narrow diversity.

  In part, the similarity of the new housing was because of the role of brick as the standard building material and the dominance of much brickmaking by the Fletton process using the Jurassic clays of the East Midlands, whose high carbon content cut the cost of firing. Feeding the new suburbia, brickmaking developed as a massive industry between Bedford and Bletchley and also near Whittlesey on the Cambridgeshire–Huntingdonshire border. Bricks, and other products for the housing market, such as prefabricated doors and windows, could be moved not only by rail, but also by the new expanding road system; and profit was made from mass-production and long-range distribution, rather than from local sources.

  Much new building was by private enterprise (rather than local councils), and often by speculative builders, such as Richard Costain (1839–1902) and John Laing (1879–1978). They were largely responsible for the plentiful supply of inexpensive houses by the mid-1920s. The ability of purchasers to borrow at low rates of interest from building societies was also important. In the mid-1920s, houses cost between £400 and £1,000. This new housing was crucial to the process by which suburban culture became increasingly defined and important within Britain, and this importance was true for both politics and social assumptions. The suburbs had fairly standard mock-Tudor parades of shops on their high streets and also enormous and lavishly decorated picture palaces – cinemas – which represented the move to the suburbs of leisure. The cinema also proved a fashionable, standardized, mechanistic and cheaper alternative to the music hall, and one that by offering the same product justified national advertising.

  Council house building was also important to the spread of suburbia, as well as providing a crucial link between housing and local politics. Treasury loans for local authority building had been available from 1866, but most local authorities had been reluctant to incur debts. From 1919, however, as a consequence of the Housing and Town Planning Act introduced by Christopher Addison (1869–1951), grants replaced loans, and council house building expanded. This expansion was designed to give bricks and mortar to the Prime Minister David Lloyd George’s (1863–1945) promise of ‘Homes fit for Heroes’ for troops returning home at the end of the First World War.

  Following many of the recommendations made in the Tudor Walters Report of 1918, the Housing and Town Planning Act of 1919 sought to provide lower-density housing for the working class. Minimum room sizes were decreed, as was the inclusion of internal bathrooms. Indeed, the public housing of the period was generally of good quality, and much of it is regarded as more desirable than a lot of 1960s public housing, not least because of its human scale.

  Rural Transformation

  While Britain urbanized, the countryside was also changing. Agriculture was hit hard by growing international competition and by the end of protectionism with the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, a move which was designed to help ensure cheap food for the increasingly urban people. Technological advances were to help provide this food in the shape of steamships, refrigerated ship holds, and the railways and barbed wire that enabled the exploitation of large areas for agriculture. As a result, grain from North America, mutton and lamb from Australasia, and beef from Argentina, all enjoyed competitive advantages over home production, and this ensured that Britain, which could not anyway feed its rapidly growing population, became even more of a food importer. Most of the imports were not from Europe. Grain from Germany, Poland and Russia was only bought in significant quantities in some years, although German sugar beet was important, while, by the end of the century, Danish bacon and eggs was the staple of the British breakfast. Nevertheless, it was products from the New World and Australasia that were crucial, all, ironically, opened up by British technology, particularly railways and steamships, and helped by British finance.

  Britain, the dominant player in the expanding and intensifying global economic order, was itself changed greatly by this new economy. The consequences moulded the shape of rural Britain and its relationship with the remainder of the country. Agriculture remained significant, especially for products such as milk and vegetables that were not convenient or economic to import, but its importance to British life and the economy diminished, while, thanks to international competition, there was a severe and sustained agricultural depression from the 1870s. Combined with new technology, such as combined reaping and mowing machines, and mechanization, as electric power and the internal combustion engine were applied in agriculture, this depression ensured falling labour demands for workers on the land. Partly as a result, only 10.4 per cent of the United Kingdom’s workforce was employed in agriculture in the 1890s, compared to 40.3 per cent in France.

  This fall contributed greatly to the migration to the cities that was such an important aspect of the population growth there. Rural counties lost population: Anglesey’s population fell from 57,000 in 1851 to 49,000 in 1931. This depression and migration are not generally appreciated today, not least due to the presentation of rural life in terms of the National Trust stately homes visited and seen as television and film settings, but they were important to the changing character of both the countryside and the country. In novels such as Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) and The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) recorded the bleaker side of country life, the sway of folklore and customs, a countryside prey to North American grain imports, and the corrosive pressure of urban values on rural ways. Casterbridge was based on Dorchester.
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  There was, however, a clear regional dimension to these changes. The cheap, readily imported, food that fed the growing workforces of the industrial north helped to lead to a sustained depression through much of the more agrarian south, a regional disparity that was to be reversed in the twentieth century. Moreover, thanks to cheaper food, industrial workers were able to spend a lower proportion of their wages on food than hitherto, thus becoming important consumers, as well as producers, of manufactured goods.

  Emigration from the countryside looked towards a feature that would have been increasingly apparent in the twentieth century to a visitor from earlier ages, its emptiness. The dense pattern of settlement across lowland Britain was transformed, with villages shrinking and farmsteads being abandoned. Moreover, the total area devoted to agriculture in Britain fell by half a million acres (202,343 hectares) between the 1870s and 1914. These changes proved the background to a series of changes in land use. Rural areas near cities and towns were increasingly suburban, with villages becoming the base for commuting by the affluent. In turn, the village poor, landless labourers without jobs, and unemployed rural craftsmen, moved abroad or to the towns. Thus, villages were now places of residence, not work. More marginal farmland was abandoned, and the leisure use of land grew greatly from the Victorian period.

  The New Elite

  This usage greatly reflected the character of British society and politics. Most of the land used for leisure, and notably so in Highland Scotland, was for shooting, stalking and fishing. It was at the disposal of very small numbers but required an appreciable workforce, for example as gamekeepers. This use of the land also reflected a shift in the self-image of much of the landed elite, as well as the change in this elite as the long-term process by which new money purchased old land and thus acquired status, speeded up with the large fortunes made from industry, commerce and finance.

  Thus, William Armstrong (1810–1900), the grandson of a Northumberland yeoman farmer and the son of a Newcastle corn merchant, who created the Elswick Ordnance Company, one of the largest engineering and armaments concerns in the world, built a mock-baronial stately home at Cragside in Northumberland and in 1894 purchased Bamburgh Castle, a great medieval royal fortress. In turn, Armstrong was at the forefront of technological application. Cragside, now owned by the National Trust, was in 1880 the first house to be properly lit by light bulbs, while Armstrong was also responsible for the hydraulic lifts that were necessary if the London underground railway system was to expand with deep stations and thus serve the spreading city and also encourage its spread.

  The purchase of old land by ‘new money’ was further encouraged by the increase of death duties in 1894 and by the dire impact of the casualties and taxation of the First World War on landed families and the resulting post-war surge in land sales; although some of this land was sold to tenant farmers. These developments provided opportunities for social change, but the key factor was socio-cultural: money saw status in terms of the old landed order and was eager to embrace fashionable rural hobbies, notably shooting. The contrast with the late twentieth century was readily apparent, because then new money tended to follow a metropolitan lifestyle and, if it bought into rural living, did not generally have much to do with the aristocracy or with aristocratic lifestyles.

  If the wealthy of 1851–1931 sought the grouse moors, the comfortably off pursued the links. Unlike Scotland where it was more socially inclusive, golfing developed greatly in England as a middle-class hobby with membership in golf clubs serving to affirm and defend status: in most cases, only men could be members and in England the clubs were overwhelmingly middle-class. Jews, moreover, were generally excluded. Cities were circled by clubs, and they also became a key feature in wealthy suburban areas. The increased use of cars encouraged the use of suburban and rural golf courses.

  Yet, the countryside was also the site of less exclusive leisure activity. Taking advantage of rail, bus and steamship excursions, and of holidays, notably bank holidays, working families saw parts of Britain as they had never done before. Much of this involved trips to the seaside resorts that rapidly developed, such as Blackpool, Ilfracombe, Rothesay, Skegness and Southend. As part of the pattern by which distinctive local characteristics were eroded, these holidays affected the places visited. Thus, the decline of the strong Methodist temperance (teetotalism) movement in Whitby in the 1930s owed much to the need to earn money from tourists who wanted alcohol.

  There was also an interest in scenic Britain. This was explored further by ramblers, cyclists and a host of organizations that sought to take townspeople into the countryside, notably the Boy Scouts, the Girl Guides and the Youth Hostelling Association. Their Britain was not that of the shoot, but there were similarities, not least a belief that quality rested in the outdoor lifestyle as did a notion of national integrity, whether seen as British, English, Scottish or Welsh.

  The outdoors was of course a contested space, to use a modern jargon that is not without value. Just as ramblers challenged the ‘closure’ of moorland for the sake of private shoots, and did so in an increasingly prominent fashion after the First World War, so cycling provided young women from the late nineteenth century with an opportunity to pursue a degree of unchaperoned independence, a prospect that filled some commentators with concern. There was also social tension, tension that affected those at the height of society. In 1888, the 3rd Earl of Sheffield (1832–1909), a Sussex landowner, received a letter including the passages:

  … my duty to let you know, as I do not think you do, or you would not have the heart to turn out an old tenant like poor Mrs Grover out of her home after such a hard struggle to maintain and bring up her family … you and your faithful steward want it all. … My knife is nice and sharp.

  The letter was signed Jack the Ripper, then at his brutal work among the prostitutes of poverty-stricken Whitechapel. In fact, nothing happened to the Earl: Mrs Grover was staying with her children after a fall, and Edward Grover, a failed butcher, admitted writing the letter. This was not, however, an isolated episode. Indeed, in 1889, the Earl wrote an open letter to the Secretary of Sussex County Cricket Club, explaining his resignation as president, in which he referred to two-and-a-half years of pestering by anonymous threats. Social deference was clearly limited, and in Oscar Wilde’s (1854–1900) play The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), the fictional Lady Bracknell, the arbiter of social status, was fearful of acts of violence in Grosvenor Square, the centre of fashionable London.

  Rural Identity and the National Problem

  Not only landowners were at risk. Changing agricultural pressures and leisure priorities had varied consequences for the animals that shared the country with humans. As yet, the impact from intensive land use and chemical fertilizers was relatively limited, but railways had significant effects on local habitats and animal routes. The motor car, moreover, had a major impact in rural Britain thanks to the damage done by asphalting roads, as well as the marked growth in road-kill. Yet, the growing interest in preserving the landscape, especially supposedly exemplary parts, had beneficial consequences for animals who lived in those areas.

  The myriad constituencies involved in pursuing rural interests indicated the extent to which agriculture and other traditional rural occupations no longer controlled the landscape, and this lack of control was rapidly followed by the development of urban interest in deciding what should happen to this landscape. The foundation of the National Trust in 1895 gave institutional form to a widespread concern about the disappearance of rural England and Wales but also to a belief that something could be done and that this did not necessarily involve action through the traditional rural order. Modern manifestations of this attitude include the hunting ban and the assertion of a ‘right to roam’.

  Although it was to come in part to be about tourism and consuming ‘heritage’, the National Trust was initially about preservation, and, as such, reflected the ruralism that was increasingly common in British attitudes. As the countrys
ide came to encapsulate national values, so there was a desire to preserve it either free from obvious human impact or as a worked environment on what was seen as a human scale. The landscape as the repository and inspiration of national history and identity, and as the key medium between past and present, became a frequently advanced concept. Much of this drive owed little to any real knowledge of the countryside but, instead, was an expression of anxiety about the nature of British society.

  Such anxiety could be seen across a range of sectors. Urban life, especially, but not only, that of the poor, was discussed in terms of irreligion, physical, mental and moral degeneracy, and the supposedly deleterious consequences of a political system in which the franchise (right to vote) was progressively expanded. Poor urban housing, sanitation and nutrition were widely blamed for what was seen as the physical weakness of much of the population, and this perception encouraged the Liberals, Labour and, also, Conservative paternalists to support measures for social welfare, notably the New Liberalism of the 1900s and 1910s. Thus, concern about the country as a physical space was related to anxieties about it as a moral sphere and political system: Britain and the British were seen as linked and under threat.