Election Day in the City of London and residents like me who live in Cripplegate Ward have cast our vote. However further east, there is little electoral activity as 14 of the City’s 25 wards do not have enough candidates to run a contested election. 45 councillors will serve without being elected.
This fragile democracy is at the heart of Dwell I Never, a chronicle of the often-difficult relationship between the City of London’s residents, local authority and business community. The City of London has powers way beyond those of a typical local authority and include planning policies on tall buildings which have an impact on views across the capital; repairs on housing estates across London, stewardship of Hampstead Heath and management of both Billingsgate and Smithfield Markets, which it has recently decided to close.
The history of the City is dominated by the massive population loss which fell from 132,000 in the 1850s to 8,600 today. There is also often been a dispute over the conflicting demands of national and local government that include electoral and sanitary reform, policing and food supply. The City has often seen itself as a beleaguered body of free and honest citizens, governed democratically because small shopkeepers and tradesmen could vote as long as they became freemen of a livery company. However, by the early nineteenth century, some wards were rotten boroughs with tiny electorates. Ross explores an awkward paradox through which ‘residents of the mediaeval city were knitted into civic systems through living and working in more or less the same space’.
In the 1850s, a Parliamentary Committee learned that ‘…. businessmen who came into the City to work were generally indifferent to local matters…their sympathies and affections are at some place ten or twelve miles off; they feel no interest in the affairs of the City, so long as they can find their way to their counting houses ….’
Ross argues that, ‘…the nineteenth century City can seem to have much in common with a twentieth-century communist state…. a one-party regime whose ruling elite decided what would be good for the commonality and who venerated the notion of work and workers above all else.’
However, despite the focus on business, the City had to cope with the poor conditions experienced by many of those who lived here, including poverty, insanitary conditions, disease and high mortality rates. Indeed, Oliver Twist, written in 1838, was set in Field Lane, just to the north of Farringdon. The City responded to extreme poverty and poor conditions with slum clearance and also by building its own housing. In 1865 it completed Corporation Buildings near Farringdon, followed by Viaduct Building in Saffron Hill in 1875 which still survive as the oldest municipally funded housing in London.
After the devastation of World War II, reconstruction efforts granted the City new planning powers, particularly for clearance purposes but in 1948, the City ceased to be an independent Parliamentary constituency when it merged with Westminster, and it subsequently lost its urban planning powers under the Town and Country Planning Act 1947. Consequently, postwar planning had to be carried out with the London County Council.
The priority for post war housing was seen to be ‘men on nightshifts: printworkers, policemen and caretakers’. A major investment in municipal housing and the first commissioned by the City since its Petticoat Lane development in1885, Golden Lane Estate was opened in1957. Built for key workers, it was soon followed by the Barbican Estate designed to bring white collar workers back into the City and also to provide an electorate which might prevent the City being challenged as a non-democratic entity. In 1977 the Greater London Council voted to abolish the City as a local government unit but failed. And a Parliamentary attempt by Battersea South MP Alf (now Lord) Dubs to merge the City with Tower Hamlets in 1981 was also unsuccessful.
The tension between the conflicting roles of the City have not been resolved although resident participation on Common Council has led to what the City has called a ‘residential reset’, an attempt to listen more diligently to its residents many of whom now argue that if it wasn’t for them, the City of London would have been abolished long ago.
Ross reckons that ‘residents have provided some welcome grit in the Corporation’s sometimes narrow view of its mission and accomplishments.’ As the failure to generate full elections has demonstrated, the City is now facing a serious democratic deficit, so much so that two resolutions have been passed in residential wards seeking an independent enquiry into why this failure has occurred. The result of that enquiry should make for an excellent sequel to this fine book.
Paul Lincoln is a City guide and printmaker living in Golden Lane Estate
