The Quality Of The London Suburb

Take just one example, that smithfield. Here, on the fringes of the medieval city. Sprang up a market of livestock, a fair linked with the market, a place of execution, a priory and a hospital –vital activities all, nut ones impossible to accommodate intra muros.
By this date other London institutions needing careful management and space such as cemeteries, docks, sewage works and certain typesof factory and prison had copied the same pattern of suburbanization.
So tentacious has been the belief that the London suburbs are just a concentration of old villages that we have almost forgottenhow numerous, how powerful and often how architectural these extra-mural institutions were and are.
Today it is often assumed that architectural scale and grandeur in cities are confined to thecentre. When and why did the suburbs of these two great rivals start to differ so sharply? The answer has to do with the seventeenth century tension and collision, political and geographical, between thecity in the east and the crown in the west.
By the time of the civil war in the 1640s, the old city walls of London were an increasing irrelevance, whether for domicile or defence. Whereas otherEuropean cities kept on pushing out their administrative boundaries, built new rings of defences and kept the immediate areas beyond them clear of houses.
The clear-cut enlargement and annexation offaubourg to city that several times took place in Paris, for instance, never occurred in London.
As yet, there was no architectural style for the suburbs. Or rather, before the great fire, classicism ofthe type, we now associate with urbanity was becoming the style of the ampler suburbs. Nor did the bad reputation of the suburbs vanish along with these hansome new constructions. The piazza ofcovent garden soon degenerated into a shabby market; the centre of st james square became, according to macaulay, a receptacle for all the offal and cinders, for all the dead cats and dead dogs of...