Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [77]
Many of the arrival-city slums of London were built by property-development corporations and were intended to be neat suburbs for the emerging lower-middle classes, but a speculative real-estate bubble and a gross overestimation of the numbers of clerks able to buy homes meant that many became village-migrant enclaves as soon as they were built. Places like Lisson Grove, in Marylebone, or Portland Town, northwest of Regent’s Park, or North Kensington all turned straightaway into rooming-house slums. Some streets in those suburbs fell to the point of being counted among the most disreputable places in London. Campbell Road, Holloway, or Sultan Street, Camberwell, or Litcham Street, Kentish Town, all became synonyms for crime and violence, despite having been built by developers and promoted in lavish advertising campaigns.
But London also had its self-built shantytowns in the outskirts. At various points in the nineteenth century, places like Camberwell, Deptford, and Holloway were home to large squatter enclaves of very poor rural arrivals (mixed with inner-city castoffs). And, while social mobility remained a visible and concrete goal for most migrants, rural–urban migration was by no means always an ascent to better living standards. A significant number of the thousands of abandoned children who roamed the streets of London, according to the Victorian reformer Thomas Barnardo, were “victims of the family dislocation involved in mass migration to London.”19 At least half of all prostitutes at any time were born outside London. As everywhere, the move to a city almost always meant an improvement in livelihood—but one that was not without risk.
London in the latter half of the nineteenth century became famous for the wide range of public-housing schemes developed by philanthropic and government bodies. These were often admirable. But they also had little relationship to the actual needs of the people flooding into London, and they often made matters worse. First of all, there never was very much of it. By 1905, after half a century of building, London’s nine public-housing companies and trusts had managed to house only 123,000 people “or little more than the population increase of Greater London for a year and a half.”20 And the philanthropic housing tended to be located where the arrival cities weren’t: Whereas more than 8 percent of Westminster residents were housed in public-housing blocks, only about 2 percent of those in the East End were. As the geographer Richard Dennis has noted, social housing actually amplified the spatial segregation of London by class—a pattern that seemed to be repeated across Europe.21 Urban planning, in London as in Paris, had little effect on the success of the arrival city.
ARRIVAL WHERE?
The first great wave of rural-to-urban migration was not anticipated, comprehended, or managed by any government; in fact, by the time its 125-year course had run, it had overwhelmed and destroyed a great many governments and created a number of new ones, just as the final wave of migration is doing today.
The European arrival city remains a source of great controversy. Was it a perfect engine of advancement, a “land of boundless opportunity,” as the Victorian booster Samuel Smiles wrote, where men of “no particular class nor rank” can “come alike from colleges, workshops and farmhouses—from the huts of