Why do London's Victorian Roads Feel a Bit... Off?
Welcome to your Friday newsletter for paying subscribers (with a generous teaser for everyone else).
As I walk around central London, I find that some main roads entice me while other repel. If I stop to think about this, then it usually comes down to one thing: did the Victorians build it? For today’s newsletter, I thought I’d look into my prejudice against 19th century roads like New Oxford Street and Shaftesbury Avenue. Why do they feel just a little bit off?
That’s for the main article. First, the History Radar of upcoming London history events.
History Radar
🧑🏻⚕️💊 NURSING HISTORY: Flying Nightingales is a new display at the Florence Nightingale Museum, open from 12 May. It tells the stories of the ordinary women, trained in the nursing style of Florence Nightingale, who were thrust into the arena of war during D-Day, and features personal testimonies and objects. It’s included in standard entry to the museum, which is always worth a visit.
🚂🏛 VICTORIAN LONDON: Watercolours, prints and documents dug out from the London Metropolitan Archives are on show in Lost Victorian City: A London Disappeared, a free exhibition which shows us what London looked like in Victorian times. The 17th century Oxford Arms coaching inn, and the Crystal Palace settling into its Sydenham home are depicted in photos. Runs 13 May to Feb 2025.
👸🏻👑 NINE DAY QUEEN: Theatre show The Nine Day Queen is the story of a 15 year old, who spends nine days sitting alongside her friend who was attacked and put into a coma. While there, she hallucinates the ghost of Lady Jane Grey, learning about the power of sisterhood in the face of adversity. Takes place at Barons Court Theatre from 14 to 19 May.
🪴🌺 RHS History: On 14 May, ahead of the Chelsea Flower Show, the Royal Horticultural Society offers a free 15-minute talk covering five facts about the world-famous gardening event, via a selection of historic and modern objects from its collections.
✒️🐕 DICKENS' PETS: From 15 May until next year, the Charles Dickens Museum in Bloomsbury explores the author's animal-loving side with new exhibition Faithful Companions. The house was a regular menagerie, home to dogs, ravens, goldfinches, cats and other creatures, whose stories are told through letters, photo albums and illustrations.
🍸🚶🏼GIN TOUR: On 16 May, The Museum of London Docklands offers a Gin Tour around the West End, telling the story of the 18th century Gin Craze and its impact on Londoners. Wander from the Dominion Theatre through the former slums of St Giles, Seven Dials, Bow Street and Drury Lane to a 16th century pub in Holborn, hearing about Hogarth’s Gin Lane, Covent Garden’s prostitutes and the 1814 Great Beer Flood as you go.
🪚🩸BLOODIED VICTORIANS: Also on 16 May,The Old Operating Theatre near London Bridge stays open for a Bloodied Victorians Museum Late. Explore the museum after hours with a glass of wine or special themed cocktail, and experience a demonstration in the operating theatre, based on a real-life leg amputation that took place there in 1824.
🛶🤴🏻 TUDOR PULL: On 19 May, head for the banks of the Thames to watch the Royal Waterman's Tudor Pull, a rowing event taking place between Hampton Court Palace and the Tower of London. It's a ceremonial event, with the flotilla presented to the Tower's Governor in a short ceremony on arrival.
📕📗 NEW BOOKS: A couple of new titles from the ever reliable Amerbley Publishing are out this month. A Short Guide to Roman London by Andrew Tibbs, and Terror and Magnificence: The London Churches of Nicholas Hawksmoor, by David Meara. (Affiliate links to Bookshop.org, which supports local bookshops.)
💈🛒 STOKE NEWINGTON: And I have to give a shout-out to the ever-resourceful Amir Dotan of the Stoke Newington History site, who’s put together a free ebook about the area. The History of Every Shop on Stoke Newington High Street offers just that, presenting the name of every known business at every address in a series of mock blue plaques. It’s a stupendous work of compilation and analysis.
Why do London’s Victorian Roads Feel a Bit… Off?
“I was in Holborn Circus the other day — you know, the junction where the statue of Prince Albert tips his hat towards the City — and I thought, something feels a bit off about this place.”
So admitted my lunch companion, a fellow London explorer, last week.
I know what he means. The spot has never sat comfortably with me either. It has a buzz, thanks to the convergence of six roads, but it’s off by a semitone. Ancient roads abound: High Holborn, Fetter Lane, Hatton Garden, Ely Place… but their historical quality is absent from this junction. It feels like a non-place, a bit of London that is somehow artificial or grafted on. Why is that?
I think I know the culprits. It’s the Victorians. Almost every road in central London built during their custodianship makes me want to shuffle on somewhere else. It’s not that these places are ugly or unattractive… they just feel less liveable.
The vehicular hydra of Holborn Circus is a good taster. The Victorians took the ancient junction of Hatton Garden and Holborn, and replumbed Fetter Lane (as New Fetter Lane) to meet it. Then they smashed through the diagonal Charterhouse Street to hook up Smithfield. Meanwhile, the mighty Holborn Viaduct was constructed to the east. It followed a similar trajectory to the old Holborn Bridge, but with more attitude and altitude. The viaduct’s cast-iron brawn could span the Fleet valley without the slightest dip, removing a gradient that had dismayed horses since the time of Caesar.
All this was marvellous for cross-city traffic, but something was lost. A streetscape that had grown organically over hundreds of years, was obliterated in a heart beat. Most roads in London, and elsewhere, are built on virgin land, ever further out from the initial centre. But the Victorians, more than anyone before or since, were happy to pilot a steamroller through the centre of town1. Let’s look a bit closer...
“The expedient way from A to B is that which smites the rookery.”
Popular 19th century town-planners’ saying, which I may have just made up.
It’s easy to spot a 19th century road because, well, the name often gives it away. Victoria Street in Westminster and Queen Victoria Street in the City are the two most obvious examples. Meanwhile, King William Street and Kingsway honour Victoria’s immediate predecessor and successor. These days, we name parks and tube lines after our monarchs; back then, it was all about the roads.
19th century streets also stand out on a map because they tend to barrel straight through neighbourhoods, with little regard for the historic street plan. Actually, that’s not quite right. Their designers paid great attention to the street plans, then worked out the best way to flatten the local slum housing. The Victorians seldom built a road that didn’t also turf out poor people.
Hence, New Oxford Street drove a convenient through-route from Holborn to Oxford Street in the 1840s, but it also broke up the notorious slums, or rookeries, of St Giles. Victoria Street, which opened in 1851, deleted some 3,000 tenements on the edge of the “Devil’s Acre”. Charterhouse Street erased some of the Saffron Hill and Chick Street slums where Charles Dickens had set Fagin’s lair in Oliver Twist. And so on, and so on.
These schemes did not, of course, eradicate the crushing poverty of the slums, they merely squeezed it like toothpaste into neighbouring areas. Many unlucky souls who’d fled the road-building in St Giles resettled a few streets to the south… only to be moved on again a generation later when Shaftesbury Avenue was cut through the area.
