Daunton M. The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Volume 3: 1840-1950
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have slowed down the decline a little (and certainly played a valuable part in the
life of the new housing estates like Becontree, or North Hull) but some inno-
vations ultimately made things worse. Thus, the association of the churches with
youth organisations, especially the most popular, the Boy Scouts (from ),
made them seem less relevant to adult men, just as the ‘muscular Christianity’ of
the nineteenth century was put in the shade by ‘the bonnet brigade’ in the twen-
tieth. In interwar Merseyside the Anglican female:male ratio at public worship
was :, and in Wallsend-on-Tyne reached :. Furthermore, the rec-
reational facilities offered by the churches began to pall against the plethora of
offerings with no strings attached which could be increasingly afforded even by
some of the poorest people after . Increasing inability to recruit from outside
the faithful led to a new inwardness and ‘emphasis upon the appeal of belong-
ing’ rather than reaching out to the unconverted, making a vicious circle which
encouraged further decline. Symptomatically, whereas the crude adult church
attendance rate in York, was . per cent in , by it had nearly halved,
and by it stood at only per cent; in High Wycombe, in Buckinghamshire,
the rate was only . per cent. However, to put this in the perspective of other
voluntary movements, it was still double the percentage of the population of
Birmingham which belonged to sports clubs in the previous year.
88
Moreover, institutional secularisation and declining church attendance rates
did not necessarily carry implications for personal beliefs. The shallowness of the
attendance test had been pointed out as long ago as by the perceptive dis-
trict nurse, Margaret Loane; it was, she argued, ‘a confusion of formal outward
signs and inward spiritual graces’. Her experience of the urban poor was that
most believed in a just and benevolent God who would recognise the essential
goodness in people and reward it in Heaven, the hope of which was ‘the only
thing that made life tolerable to them both in its bitterest moments and in its
long-drawn-out-struggles against weakness, poverty, ill-health, and sin’. This
kind of belief was described as part of a ‘diffusive Christianity’ in , and his-
torians are now rightly paying it more attention. It accepted that the Bible had
worthwhile teachings, especially for children, and the Christian ethic of ‘doing
the best you can and doing nobody any harm’, but was uninterested in denom-
inational dogmas and rejected the idea of Hell. Interestingly, Mass-Observation’s
study of a semi-suburban London borough (‘Metrop’) in independently
reported very similar findings, showing considerable continuity from the later
nineteenth century: about three-quarters of Mass-Observation’s sample claimed
Douglas A. Reid
88
Young, Becontree and Dagenham,pp., –, –, –, –, , –, –, cf. –;
Harrison, ‘The decline of Methodism in Kingston upon Hull’, pp. –; Cox, The English
Churches in a Secular Society, pp. –; Green, Religion in the Age of Decline, pp. –, , –;
Jones, ed., Merseyside, , pp. ‒; Mess, Industrial Tyneside, pp. , ; McLeod, Religion and
Society in England, pp. –; Gill, The Myth of the Empty Church, pp. –; Currie, Gilbert and
Horsley, Churches and Church-Goers, pp. –, ; Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure,
pp. –, –; Sutcliffe and Smith, History of Birmingham, pp. , n. .
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to believe in God, although only one in ten went to church at all regularly. Few
thought much about religion, though they wanted it taught in schools, but when
they did it meant ‘little more than being kind and neighbourly, doing good when
opportunity arises’. While there was considerable anti-clericalism based on the
class differences between clergy and people there was also regard for ‘saintly’
individual clergymen, and overt hostility to God and religion was rarer; however,
both City missionary reports and subsequent oral history interviews do some-
times reveal a bitter rejection of an apparently uncaring deity.
89
One of the most suggestive indications of a basic or residual religiosity was
the reliance on the churches to sanctify life’s crucial turning points, although
there were often several layers of meaning invested in the rites of passage. In the
s two-thirds of all English infants were baptised, and more than two-thirds
of all marriages were religiously solemnised, as were virtually all funerals.
Thereafter the trend was downwards but only slowly. Although there were mar-
ginal groups such as nineteenth-century common lodging house dwellers for
whom marriage was rare, among the majority of the domiciled poor it was the
norm, and women particularly insisted that it should be solemnised in a church,
thereby gaining access to both respectability and Divine blessing at an auspicious
time in their lives. Superstitions regarding the power of the clergyman to inter-
cede against malign fate also played their part in such rituals, as illustrated by the
idea that the ‘churching’ ceremony for postpartum mothers would guard against
an immediate subsequent pregnancy, or against a miscarriage – or with regard to
‘Watch Night’ services, the provision of which was sometimes forced upon
unwilling clergy by rowdy East Enders in the s. There was also a certain
instrumentalism, such as the expectation of benefits from attendance at that late
nineteenth-century urban paradox, the Harvest Festival: ‘cadging’ was deeply
deplored by the consciously self-respecting but it was an inevitable feature of
extremely poor districts in London, Liverpool and elsewhere, and still evident
in ‘Metrop’ in .
90
Playing and praying
89
M. Loane, The Queen’s Poor: Life as they Find it in Town and Country (London, ; edn),
pp. , –; McLeod, Class and Religion, pp. –; Cox, The English Churches in a Secular Society,
p. ; Ainsworth, ‘Religion in the working class community’, esp. –; McLeod, ‘New per-
spectives on Victorian working-class religion’, –, –; Lewis, Lighten their Darkness, p. ;
Mass-Observation, Puzzled People:A Study in Popular Attitudes to Religion, Ethics,Progress and Politics
in a London Borough (London, ), pp. , , –, , –, , .
90
Loane, The Queen’s Poor,pp., , –; Currie, Gilbert and Horsley, Churches and Church-Goers,
pp. –, –; Brown, Social History of Religion in Scotland,p.; McLeod, Class and Religion,
pp. ‒, –; McKibbin, Classes and Cultures,pp.–; Humphries, Hooligans or Rebels?,
pp. –; McLeod, ‘New perspectives on Victorian working-class religion’, ; Booth, Life and
Labour of the People in London, rd series, , p. ;Cox,The English Churches in a Secular Society,
pp. –, –, ‒; Lewis, Lighten their Darkness,pp.–; Ross, Love and Toil,pp.–; John
Kent, ‘Feelings and festivals: an interpretation of some working-class religious attitudes’, in Dyos
and Wolff, eds., TheVictorian City, , pp. –; Williams, ‘Urban popular religion’, pp. , ;
Walker, ‘Religious changes in Liverpool’, ; McLeod, Piety and Poverty,pp.–, ; Green,
Religion in the Age of Decline,pp.–, –; Mass-Observation, Puzzled People,pp., .
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
(ix)
Despite the common assumption that the world wars had a devastating effect on
religious adherence, the later s represented no particular landmark in
Christian belief or church attendance. Mass-Observation concluded that few lost
their faith directly, and some had theirs strengthened. And although the disrup-
tion caused by the war reduced church memberships they had recovered by .
Thereafter the moderate rate of decline of - was resumed down to ,
although in Scotland, where memberships had held up longer, they did begin to
fall significantly in the s. Many urban churches had suffered bomb damage,
but this resulted in the unexpected bonus of financial compensation, enhancing
their ability to meet the challenge of the outlying estates after the war.
Nevertheless, it was a poignant moment in the history of urban nonconformity
when Manchester’s vast Union Chapel – ‘the Nonconformist Cathedral of
Lancashire’ – was demolished in , providing a mid-twentieth-century
symbol of the fading vitality of the nineteenth-century religious institutional
inheritance. By contrast, the late s represented the zenith of many trends in
the history of leisure since : cinema reached its highest ever attendance, as
did football and dog racing. There was a new ‘hunger for pleasure’ in the after-
math of war, with high purchasing power, continued rationing, few consumer
durables available and greater time to seek it.
91
There were as we have seen many links between urban and rural cultures, even
though it is easier to pin down a distinctively urban culture in relation to leisure,
primarily because of the commercial basis of so much modern recreational
culture and because commerce gravitated towards the biggest markets.
Concentration and diversity, attractivity and repulsion were keynotes of the
urban culture of modern Britain – a culture symbolised physically in pubs, parks,
picture halls and sports stadia, but also in spires, towers and humble mission halls.
Contrary to dystopian visions of an atomised alienated metropolis many of the
institutions of both religion and leisure affirmed the values of sociability and
humanity, even if their aims and their trajectories were contrary (and the insti-
tutions themselves occasionally contradicted these values). If churches only
attracted a tenth of the population to formal worship that was not negligible,
and religion retained its capacity to contribute to community identities, whether
on suburban church parades or Whit Walks, or on the terraces at Ibrox and
Parkhead. And, in the s the beginning of mass immigration from the
Empire was soon to demonstrate that capacity once again, this time with many
Douglas A. Reid
91
Mass-Observation, Puzzled People, pp. –; Currie, Gilbert and Horsley, Churches and Church-
Goers, pp. –, –; Sutcliffe and Smith, History of Birmingham, pp. –; Baptist Quarterly,
(–), –, cited in Hastings, A History of English Christianity, p. ; Zweig, Labour, Life
and Poverty, pp. –; Fishwick, English Football and Society, pp. –; Browning and Sorrell,
‘Cinemas and cinema-going’, , –, .
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of the descendants of the ‘heathens’ the foreign missionary movement had
attempted to evangelise in the nineteenth century. However, the decline of insti-
tutionalised Christianity was matched by the rise of leisure institutions to which
many gave their energies and loyalties and from which they constructed, par-
tially or substantially, secular social identities, for example as cinema goers, music
lovers or sports fans. Thus one important aspect of the history of nineteenth-
and twentieth-century towns and cities is that ordinary people achieved or
received a massively expanded realm of choice about how to develop their
humanity outside the necessity of making a living. There were, of course, still
substantial constraints imposed by working and living conditions, as well as
gender expectations, and much still to escape from, yet it is richly symbolic that
in the fun-fair at Battersea turned out to be perhaps the most popular aspect
of that icon of modernity the Festival of Britain.
92
Playing and praying
92
Eric Hopkins, The Rise and Decline of the English Working Classes – (London, ), p. ;
Becky Conekin, ‘“Here is the modern world itself ”: the Festival of Britain’s representations of
the future’, in B. Conekin, Frank Mort and Chris Waters, eds., Moments of Modernity:Reconstructing
Britain – (London, ), pp. –.
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Images
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·
·
The representation of the city in the visual arts
(i) :
A
’ to the city in the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies have to be understood in terms of social and political issues and
debates. The prospect of ever-increasing urban populations, particularly
in the metropolis and industrial centres of the North, elicited mixed feelings in
contemporary commentary. For some the growth of cities was evidence of the
prosperity and strength of the national or local community. The densely packed
population represented unparalleled human resources, offering skills, industri-
ousness and simple energy to push forward the manufacturing and trading enter-
prises that underpinned expansion. The pace and scale of construction of
transport and other infrastructural facilities, industrial and commercial premises,
residential and administrative buildings and centres for worship and the arts were
a source of pride and wonder to those commentators who saw the modern city
in a positive light. The modern city could be celebrated as a unique source of
invention and harmony, in which the collective energy and intelligence of a
democracy came into play. For others pride and wonder gave way to feelings of
disquiet. Awe could tip over into terror if the massed population appeared
uncontrollable or the environment seemed so huge and complex that the indi-
vidual was dwarfed or lost. Lack of planning and sanitation became key policy
issues as the conditions of slum dwellers were investigated. The city was regu-
larly associated with vice and its smoke and dirt were connected with immoral-
ity and crime as well as disease. At an extreme the poorest elements of the urban
population could be seen as degenerate and a threat to the breeding stock of the
nation, undermining its military ambitions and international prowess. These
I would like to thank Juliet Hacking, Matthew Plampin and Sibylle Beck for editorial assistance
and help with obtaining photographs and permissions.
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different responses have been well documented.
1
A writer such as Robert
Vaughan could make the case for cities with passion and clarity in in The
Age of Great Cities. However, positions were not always so clearly polarised. In
day-to-day discussions concerning specifics – whether the treatment of paupers,
the launching of a provincial newspaper or the demolition of a group of old
houses – assumptions came into play concerning the ethical status of the city, the
tendency of urban development for good or ill and the disposition of the urban
working class. We might say that depictions of the good and bad city fed into
the rhetoric of modern politics and social comment. Political contests in which
interests and status were at stake were fought out using the loaded terms of urban
analysis but not necessarily in a coherent or consistent manner. Most often we
see an eclectic mix of registers of response to the city in which enthusiastic
excitement is allied to fear and disgust, or utopian visions of a controlled envi-
ronment are mingled with unease at potential disruption.
The aesthetic is a key component of this discourse. Cities and city dwellers
are not just good or bad they are beautiful, sublime, picturesque, quaint, hideous
or beyond the limits of representation. The promise or threat of the city is
couched in aesthetic terms whenever the experience of inhabiting the urban
environment is summoned up. This complicates the task of surveying the visual
imagery associated with the modern city, since the aesthetic might be said to be
brought into play (at least) twice: once in terms of the picture itself (the visual
format and effects of the image under consideration) and secondly in terms of
the ethical/aesthetic registers of the city as it figures more generally, for instance
in the realm of social policy. The two instances can only be separated artificially
and there is, of course, considerable debate about the relationship of what is, at
its crudest, text and context. None the less there is a point to be made about the
way that, from the nineteenth century, the topic of the city is always saturated
with aesthetic assumptions in a way that is perhaps only paralleled by discourses
concerning the human body. Indeed, some of the most fascinating and sur-
charged visions of the city result from an identification of the (aestheticised) city
with the (aestheticised) body when the city is seen in terms of the gender dis-
tinctions and the erotic potential of the human body.
2
A third instance can also be drawn out. In architectural and town planning
terms the city was subject to aesthetic criteria. Prestige developments were
expected to display grandeur, logic and harmony of effect. The question of archi-
tectural aesthetics was closely entwined with moral categories in the nineteenth
Caroline Arscott
1
B. I. Coleman, The Idea of the City in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London, ); A. Lees, Cities
Perceived (Manchester, ).
2
See C. Gallagher, ‘The body versus the social body in the works of Thomas Malthus and Henry
Mayhew’, in C. Gallagher and T. Laqueur, eds., The Making of the Modern Body (Berkeley, ),
pp. –; and E. Grosz, ‘Bodies-cities’, in B. Colomina, ed., Sexuality and Space (Princeton, N.J.,
), pp. –.
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century; all the more so once John Ruskin’s work on the relationship between
style and political and moral vigour became widely known. The choice between
a classical façade and gothic form became a vexed question. A beautiful vista or
a fine building could figure prominently in an engraved or painted scene and lend
the represented cityscape the aesthetic merits and ethical connotations of the
environment or building. Or else an image could alter, cancel or marginalise the
architectural components of the urban fabric. Once again we see that picture-
makers had to negotiate a complex relationship with moralised aesthetics, here
literally ‘built in’ to the city.
3
The Victorian and Edwardian periods display a gradual transformation of atti-
tudes to the city. The balance between celebration and despair could be said to
shift decisively by the s to a fairly bleak vision of urban alienation. The early
period, up to , is characterised by marked confidence in the achievements
of urban development, despite pockets of strident criticism of city life. In the
later s and s there was growing middle-class awareness of social prob-
lems in Britain and a fashion for social reportage developed. Concern about slum
conditions and urban deprivation coexisted with faith in the efficacy of evangel-
ical efforts or state intervention to improve affairs. There was an increasing
emphasis on the punitive aspects of state intervention in the s. From the
s into the pre-war period in the twentieth century gloom and anxiety about
the state of urban life was offset by the emergence of utopian schemes for pater-
nalistic or state-managed urban development.
I will be considering a range of visual material produced in the Victorian and
Edwardian period. Many of my examples take aspects of London for their
subject, some depict other urban areas such as Glasgow or Wigan. In a broad
survey there is some justification in drawing mainly on London examples, since
London was the centre of the British art world. I have been looking at this
material in terms of attitudes to urban existence in the broadest possible terms,
where the city is a concept that goes beyond the specifics of one or other place.
4
(ii) :
How then were the Victorian streets pictured? As cities grew in extent and
density, it became necessary to map the developments in various ways. Every map
defines an area, explicitly or otherwise, by centring, orientation, categorical
The representation of the city in the visual arts
3
See G. P. Landow, The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin (Princeton, N.J., ), and M.
Wheeler, ed., Ruskin and Environment (Manchester, ).
4
For an examination of the idea of the city in relation to specific locales see C. Arscott and G.
Pollock, with J. Wolff, ‘The partial view: the visual representation of the early nineteenth-century
city’ (on topographical views of Leeds and Manchester), in J. Wolff and J. Seed, eds., The Culture
of Capital (Manchester, ), pp. –; and C. Arscott, ‘Victorian development and images of
the past’ (on lithographic views of Wakefield), in C. Shaw and M. Chase, eds., The Imagined Past:
History and Nostalgia (Manchester, ), pp. –.
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