London defies adaptation and adjustment

Size and numbers are not necessarily bad things per se. But unhappily the size and numbers of London have alarming consequences of their own. Great cities have to grow organically, with some kind of self-adaptation to their development. But the increase of London defies adaptation and adjustment. The 70,000 new souls a year arrive before London has time to consider what she can do with them. The bricks pour down in irregular heaps, almost as if, in some cataclysm or tornado, it were raining bricks out of heaven on the earth below. The huge pall of smoke gets denser and more sulphurous, stretching out, they say, some thirty miles into the country, till Berkshire, Bycks, Herts, and Kent are beginning to be polluted by its cloud. From Charing Cross or the Royal Exchange a man has to walk some five or six miles before he can see the blessed meadows or breathe the country air. Few of us ever saw more than half of the city we live in, and some of us never saw nine-tenths of it. We all live more or less in soot and fog, in smoky, dusty, contaminated air, in which trees will no longer grow to full size, and the sulphurous vapour of which eats away the surface of stone.

Our once silver Thames

The beautiful river — our once silver Thames — is a turbid, muddy receptacle of refuse; at times indescribably nasty and unwholesome. The water we drink at times comes perilously near to be injurious to health. Our burying-places, old and new, are a perpetual anxiety and danger. Our sewers pour forth 5,500,0 tons of sewage per week, almost all of it waste- fully and dangerously discharged. An immense proportion of our working population are insufficiently housed, in cheerless, comfortless, and even unhealthy lodgings. Not a few of these are miserable dens or squalid cabins unfit for human dwelling-place sightseeing turkey. Every few years some epidemic breaks out which carries off its thousands. In some four- fifths of London the conditions of life are sadly depressing and sordid, with none of the advantages which city life affords. The amusements, such as they are, are often unworthy of us; the resources of health and recreation are too few; whilst the dangers to life, to morality, to the intelligence, are very real and ever present.

Is this monster city again to double and treble itself? its water supply to get still more precarious and defective, are its dead still more to endanger the living, its dreariness to grow vaster, and its smoke even thicker? It is a strange paradox that, whilst those who have the means are always seeking to get away from London, those who are destitute are perpetually pouring into London; whilst it is the ambition of every well-to-do Londoner to retire to freedom in the country or in the suburbs, it is the instinct of every countryman in distress to find his way up to London.