The overall aim of this project was to set family groups and family and individual demographic behaviour in seventeenth and early eighteenth century London within their physical and, especially, housing environments. It involved record linkage between individuals and their families appearing in a variety of documentary sources, as well as a large body of property histories previously assembled at the Centre for Metropolitan History.
During this project two of the three main data resources utilised in subsequent research were created: family reconstitutions of Cheapside and Clerkenwell. See also the project webpages at the Centre for Metropolitan History. Types of Cheapside inhabitants enumerated for taxation in , comparing their overall proportion to the proportion among them also found in parish registers. This project investigated the extent to which environmental factors including housing and the social characteristics of individual, family and locality determined the disease and mortality profile of the pre-industrial city.
By creating a detailed GIS of our sample areas we were able to map mortality at the level of streets and even individual houses. This project focussed on the demographic and economic development of London's eastern suburb of Aldgate between c. In London had one gin-shop for every seventy-five inhabitants. During the s the English consumed 7 million gallons of gin, as opposed to 1 million gallons during the s, when it was heavily taxed.
London epitomized the process of social stratification which took place in Great Britain. As the city grew in size, the poor became increasingly crowded into the filthy slums in the eastern part of the city while the merchant and the professional classes and the gentry established themselves in the fashionable suburbs in the west. The Gordon Riots of , for example, which Charles Dickens made the focus of Barnaby Rudge were ostensibly motivated by anti-Catholic sentiment , but were a manifestation of the deep hostility which the poor felt for the wealthy.
Homes were attacked, looted, and burned, Newgate and Fleet Prisons were attacked and their prisoners released, and troops were required to restore order. By one tenth of the population of England resided in London, and it was the undisputed cultural, economic, religious, educational, and political center of the nation. Population growth continued unabated through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century.
By the time Dickens died in the population of London was well over 3,,, and the spread of the prosperous middle classes into suburban areas surrounding the city proper was well underway. Less than a century later, the population of metropolitan London would be over 8,, London was, of course, also Britain's artistic and literary capital. For centuries, with its publishers, newspapers, journals and weeklies, Coffee-Houses , taverns, and literary salons, the city played an important and frequently crucial role in the life, development, and work of virtually every English literary figure of any significance.
Hogarth and Rowlandson portrayed it in their work as the great eighteenth-century authors did in theirs. London lies at the center of the lives of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton.
Many British authors were either born there, as Blake or Lamb were; made their reputations there, as Swift , Pope , Johnson , Boswell, Carlyle , Dickens, and Kipling did; or died there, as Thomson would.
But London was a city, too, as Swift , Blake, Dickens, Morris , and Thomson all tell us, of warehouses, docks, factories , prisons, palaces and slums, of beggars, labourers, shopkeepers, and bankers.
Nothing here is natural: everything is transformed, violently changed, from the earth and man himself, to the very light and air. But the hugeness of this accumulation of man-made things takes off the attention from this deformity and this artifice; in default of a wholesome and noble beauty, there is life, teeming and grandiose. For a more detailed demographic account see A Population History of London.
If in London was composed of a series of contiguous communities spread along the Thames, each of which was within easy reach of open fields, by the s London had begun to escape the magnetic attraction of the river and to make ever-deeper inroads into rural Middlesex and Surrey. A clear pattern of neo-classical squares came to dominate the landscape, with their consistent, stuccoed facades, and regulated, privatised green spaces.
Using a pattern of development in which aristocratic landowners leased sites for short periods to speculative builders, retaining substantial control over the buildings erected, the West End became the location of some of the most elaborate and sophisticated urban architecture in Europe. A new design for domestic living was created, with a subterranean "area" below street level; separate entrances for servants, services, and the family; and separate rooms for entertaining, withdrawing and sleeping, arranged upwards through a vertiginous series of stories.
By every major aristocratic and gentry family in the country maintained a house in the West End, no longer so much to be near the Court, but to participate in the increasingly important London Season.
Built to the highest standards, the centre of both governance and aristocratic sociability, the West End cemented its central role in national life during these decades. At the same time the City gradually became more focussed on its international financial role. Rebuilt after the great fire, late seventeenth-century taste remained powerfully stamped on the physical environment of the City. But, while it retained its exposed brick and Queen Ann architecture, it added new financial institutions to its more traditional function as a warehousing centre for international trade.
The City retained its disorderly neighbourhoods, lively markets and open sewers, but admixed this cacophony of life with an increasingly wealthy and self-confident financial elite, housed in the classical architecture of Georgian buildings. To the East, the port grew in ever greater importance; attracting more and more ships, requiring ever more labour.
The disorderly neighbourhoods east of the Tower, of Whitechapel and Rosemary Lane, grew street by street, but always retained a varied set of communities brought to London by world trade. Prior to the enclosure of the docks at the end of the eighteenth century, the chaotic quays and docks of the riverside continued to provide the infrastructure of trade, creating both a fertile space for disputes over work-place perquisites, and opportunities for theft that ensured the East End and the port in particular figure frequently in the Proceedings.
Throughout London and urban Middlesex, this period also witnessed the creation of a remarkable number of new churches. Perhaps a third of the population was directly involved in manufacturing, and the capital formed the centre of many trades perhaps most notably the silk industries. The numbers of medical and legal professionals, in particular, grew strongly from the last quarter of the seventeenth century through the s when the number of professionals began to level off.
Employed in an ever growing number of hospitals and institutions, in the plethora of courts both civil and criminal and in the army and navy, by around there were perhaps 15, men employed in the law, medicine, the church and the military; while during the same period around one in nine Londoners kept a shop; and a further ten percent worked in the transport sector. For the increasing role of lawyers in the Proceedings , see Trial Procedures. This employment and economic pattern, however, was substantially skewed both in terms of gender and class.
Female employment, for instance, was largely restricted to a small number of occupations, of which domestic service was overwhelmingly dominant, with perhaps half of all employed women working in service in this period compared to perhaps five percent of men.
Beyond this, women were largely restricted to needlework and laundry, and the large numbers of unskilled and poorly paid employments associated with street selling and casual labour.
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