this introduction is written in prasie of the continuity of london and as a plea that, with all the lusty rebuilding going on everywhere, it will be presrved.
the city is still londinium. the roman wall-th strtches by cripplgate and london wall and immediately by the white tower tell us of Londinium, in area one of the half-dozen largest cities in the western empire, with a vast basilica, over 400ft long, and a forum close to it ad with mosaic pavements (below th bank of england for instance-), a "celebrated centre of traders", as Tacitus writes. Then the fragments at All Hallows by the Tower, as a reminder of the reduced Anglo-Saxon settlement, amid decaying ruins on so different a scale, and so to the conquest and Rufus' White Tower, one of the largest in any country and with an ovrwhelmingly powerful built-in chapel, and what is left of St Bartholomew the great, its church once extending right to the square.
St Bartholomew was an Augustinian priory and one has to visualise medieval london as surrounded with a ring of spacious monastic establishments. only th charterhouse gives still some impression of hat they were like: holy trinity aldgate, also Augustinian, southwark cathedrel once Augustinian too, benedictine nuns in bishopsgate, the cluniac Benedictines at bermondsey, the cistercians at stepney, many more monks and nuns further out, the friars closer to the centr- blackfriars, greyfriars, whitefriars, austin friars, the names alone surviving- and of course the Benedictines at westminster their abbey being the west minster.
When the abbey was being built, th tower received its double ring of curtain walling, but otherwise most of what us left us of medieval london is later, st pauls of the twelfth and thirteenth century, 585ft long, having been replaced by wren after the fire. the few remaining parish churches are in the perpendicular style. but the few fragments of town houses of the bishops and abbots, foremost the archbishop of canteburys lambeth palace are at least partly thirteenth and fourteenth century. winchester house was on the same side of the river as lambeth, ely house by holborn circus. durham and sailsbury houses of which nothing survives were south of fleet street and the strand. royal towers or castles stood along there as well: Baynards castle, the bridewell and the savoy. the guildhall got its building with th hall itself 150ft long in th first half of the fifteenth century. corsby hall once in bishopsgate and its hall now re-erectd in chelsea gives some idea of how a rich fifteenth century merchant lived, the whole composition much like that of a manor house in the country.
crosby hall dates from about 1470. at that time london may have had 40 or 50,000 inhabitants, by 1605 there were over 200,000. Elizabethan London was still a city of timber framed houses. a few in the tower and staple inn in holborn are reminders, to the west great houses of the nobility connected the city with westminster: somerset house, bedford house, burleigh house, cecil house, sailsbury house, northumberland house. some of them were proud and showy, as were now the monuments in the abbey, following after the humbler ones in the preceding century (lord hunsdon's is 36ft high) to the east stretched slums. stow writing in 1598 tells of them. the spread was such that government tried to contain london in its old boundaries-an attempt as helpless as are such attempts now: no new houses within three miles (1580) within two miles (1607) within five miles (1620) etc.
so to talk of london was no longer to talk of the city of london, and after the fire of 1666 that was even more so. for now the well to do came to prefer the safer more spacious sites of the 'west-end' to the crowded streets of the city. the pattern of the London squares began to emerge, with Inigo Jones' covent garden of the 1630s first and then with Bloomsbury square and st james' square of about 1660, and speedily many of the others. the houses were of brick-regulations against timber had followed the fire-and uniform, developments financed by the noble ground-landlords or by speculators. an example of the style in the city is in Laurence Pountney lane.
the style was initially created by Inigo Jones on th pattern of the palladio. inigo in, for instance, the banqueting house in Whitehall used and modified palladios noble classicism, with columns and pilasters and pediments over th principal windows. in th covent garden piazza its is giant pilasters he applied, his remodelling of the medieval st pauls-replaced by wrens building-culminated in a portico of columns fifty feet high. other motifs were far less pure than one might have expected, but in some of his country houses Inigo Jones established the plain brick style of the New London. t remained the accepted style, with minor modifications, right into the Regency, and it appears at Hampstead and st Twickenham as well as in th City and in the West End.
By th mid-eighteenth century it is estimated that London had a population of nearly three-quarters of a million. typical symptoms of the growth are the first by-pass road-the line of the Marylebone-Euston-Pentonville roads-begun in 1756 and st Georges circus with the streets radiating from it, laid out in yet open country in 1769. the west end now stretched through to Hyde park. apart from the brick squares and brick streets there were mansions of some of the nobility, chiefly along Piccadilly. Clarendon house and Berkeley house came first- in the 1660s-but do not remain. in fact Burlington house, now the royal academy, is the only one still extant or at least partly so. it established the Inigo Jones classicism once again. its date is 1715-6. from then palladianism ruled supreme in England, in contrast to the late baroque and rococo of the continent.
in the city the most splendid example is the mansion house by the elder Dance, as impressive internally as it is externally. the Egyptian hall (a Vitruvian term) is one of the mot impressive rooms of London. Opposite is the Bank of England, begun in 1732 as a Palladian palazzo of moderate size and enlarged chiefly by Soane in 1788-1808 with brilliant interiors, the most original ones of their date in Europe. The directors and Sir Herbert Baker swept all that away, and only th shell stands, topped by a massive but weak superstructure.
other new types of building on a large scale now became necessary, but, with the exception of st Bartholomew hospital by gibbs and th former east india company offices in leadenhall street, all outside the city: somerset house as a governmental office building, th other new hospitals, such as guy's and the th former Bethlehem and foundling hospitals, the artillery barracks at woolich, over 1,000 ft long, and also th docks. they started in 1799 and grew and spread east, right into the twentieth century. whitbreads brewery also has parts going back to 1755, and in 1801 telford designed a new london bridge, never built, which was to consist of one huge cast iron arch, 600ft long. it could have been done. cast-iron, breweries (ie beer factories), docks-we are now in the midst of the industrial revolution and its commercial concomitants.
