Love letter to a greater London – by Iain Martin

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When HG Wells moved to Woking in 1895 he and his soon to be second wife, Amy Catherine known as Jane, rented a house for 18 months and the author got to work during one of the most productive periods in his writing career. “We furnished a small resolute semi-detached villa with a minute greenhouse in the Maybury Road facing the railway line,” he wrote almost four decades later in his experimental autobiographical volumes, “where all night long the goods trains shunted and bumped and clattered – without serious effect upon our healthy slumbers.”

From there he planned, among other works, The War of the Worlds: “I wheeled about the district marking down suitable places and people for destruction by my Martians.”

In Woking, Wells found an escape from the pollution of inner London twenty three miles away and on his walks and bicycle rides he scouted the suburban and rural locations. The ancient heathland sandpit on Horsell Common outside Woking is where in the novel the first Martian cylinders land and a curious local population – fascinated and frightened by the landing – turn up to wave the white flag of peace or surrender. They and the British military attempting to surround the visitors are zapped. And so it goes on.

The unnamed narrator survives assorted near misses, dodging the aliens who feed on human blood, by moving from the commuter town Woking to Walton, then heading into London itself via Putney and finally on Primrose Hill in the capital realising the Martians have all expired (killed by lack of immunity to earth’s microbes). Humanity is saved, but only after we learn valuable lessons about hubris, the risks of progress, the power of nature and our vulnerability in the grand scheme of things.

For obvious reasons, due to Hollywood and our fixation on the mysteries of space, most of the attention The War of the Worlds still receives is down to the then pioneering notion of earth experiencing an alien invasion. Of course, there had been a few earlier attempts at telling such stories, but Wells wrote his story in the high Victorian period, when mass market publishing was selling to a highly literate population and a rapidly expanding middle class was fascinated by science and change, which is hardly surprising given the effects of the Industrial Revolution in the preceding century or so. And the storyteller is Wells, so obviously The War of the Worlds is better than anything attempted up to that point.

When looking for a source or two on Wells the AI search function on Google even told me that The War on the Worlds is the start of an “alien franchise”, on account of all the film versions and reinterpretations, which is quite the way to describe one of the best novels of the 19th century. And a good example of the way in which an AI answer is often right enough then on a defining, crucial detail just slightly off.

There is another way to view this novel, and that is as a commentary on the then new phenomenon of suburbs in general and on the coming power of the suburbs of the South East of England in particular.

When Wells moved to bustling Woking it had only been a proper town for a few decades. Before the railways arrived it had been just a cluster of houses and villages. The settlement of Old Woking with its 13th century church was almost 1,000 years old by the time Woking Common station opened in 1838 on the new line between Southampton and London, finishing initially at Nine Elms in what today is Vauxhall. The line didn’t go closer to the capital’s centre until London Waterloo was opened in 1848. A plan to take the railway lines from there all the way into the City of London came to nothing. Waterloo became the terminus.

When writing a history of the City of London ten years ago I became obsessed by the map of London and its environs and this idea of the 19th century railways punching lines out into what had been the countryside, or alternatively punching lines into the heart of the great imperial capital.

This over the course of a few decades transformed and emptied residents from the City of London, the famed square mile and traditional financial and commercial centre that was once the home of all the wholesale food markets. Whereas in the early 1800s the population of the square mile was estimated as 130,000, in a wider city of one million people, today it is home to little more than 15,000 souls, although efforts are being made to reintroduce more residential space among all the offices.

The arrival of the railways meant the use of space could shift from cramped housing to the offices needed for what was then the world’s dominant finance industry – in banking, foreign exchange, commodities, shipping and insurance. This still holds as for all we hear about Britain’s decline, the City is still near the top just behind New York, despite all those wrongheaded predictions that post-Brexit it would be left in the dust by Paris and Frankfurt.

When in the 19th century the staff of those finance houses and the attendant support network of businesses were forced out they moved out to the new houses being built on the land alongside the new railway lines, and particularly the land nearest the new stations that became especially valuable for new housing. Victorian speculators and property developers built rows of neat streets and the infrastructure required for life with schools, shopping, cricket pitches and small pavilions, new churches or village churches repurposed and hospitals.

Perhaps because there was so little central planning governing this at times chaotic process it produced at speed one of the pioneering great examples of human flourishing. A clerk in the City or an aspirational banker or insurance salesman could, all being well, afford a nice house for him and his family with a small garden and plenty of room. Electrification would later complete the process of improvement in the second Industrial Revolution.

Remember how recent this rushing in of progress was. St Margarets between Richmond and Twickenham in South West London is a good example. When Turner designed and built his cottage there, owning it between 1813 and 1826, St Margarets was a properly rural escape for the painter, with only a small group of houses near the Thames surrounded by the orchards and agricultural land for the Duke of Northumberland’s estate at Syon Park. When the railway arrived in 1876 it was transformed into commuter territory.

Chris Packham, the fanatical environmentalist, said recently of Turner’s painting of a steam engine emerging through the mist that this was the artist capturing the moment we started despoiling the planet. Nonsense, I say. Thanks to the steam train and the expansion of our cities out into suburbs, millions of people, tens of millions of our ancestors, enjoyed greater prosperity, warmth, travel and fulfilment than if they had stayed on the land.

In this irregular, imperfect but nonetheless admirable process of improvement London and the wider South East was Britain’s laboratory.

Today it is, to put it mildly, fashionable to criticise London and the South East of England, although foreigners tend to be astonished that Britons could look at something as wondrous as London, perhaps the world’s best city, and see it as a problem.

The incoming Prime Minister Andy Burnham certainly sees London as a problem, because it has too much power and Britain is too centralised, he says.

It may be true that Britain is too centralised, although as the historian Sam Rubinstein pointed out on social media recently, England settled on an administrative and political centre – London – as long ago as the 12th century. If England is more centralised than, say, Germany this is hardly surprising when you consider how recently German unification took place, that is between 1866 and 1871. This explains Germany’s regional capitals, federal model and different governing structure. Italy has its own version of the city, kingdoms and regions story too. Countries are different and they developed differently on account of their different historical circumstances.

Notice how the new PM is in classic, keen to avoid offence, Burnham-style adjusting his rhetoric or briefings on London now that he is about to become Prime Minister and will have to move to London. It is reported he will spend as little time in the capital as he can, trying to get home to the North on a Thursday evening each week. Let’s see how long that lasts, given what is going on in the world. He talks so much about the North, or a rather narrow interpretation of the North, that it would hardly be a surprise if citizens in other parts of the country start wondering if he is Prime Minister for the North or the whole country.

If I read it correctly he says that London itself is held back by the divisions and centralisation in the country. Does he mean London suffers because London and the South East pays so much tax that is transferred to the rest of the country? Transfers are what one would expect in a civilised, unified country. Does that mean London will now get to keep more of what it makes? I doubt it means that. Quite the reverse seems more likely, given the vague promises to reduce the cost of living across the country. What in practical terms does any of the vibes-based Labour commentary about the state of the country and further redistribution mean? Search me, though presumably we are all about to find out and I bet you it is expensive.

What we do know is that Greater London has a population of 9.9 million and the South East beyond its perimeter has a population of another 9.6 million. In that definition the South East doesn’t even include East England with Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk, distinct counties that are nonetheless pointed at London with their own train lines in and out. Add the Eastern counties and their 6.6 million population and Greater London and the wider South East have a population of more than 26 million, and those are the legal residents we know about.

London alone accounts for close to a quarter of the UK’s GDP, even if it contains less than a sixth of the country’s population. It is an economic powerhouse, a growth generation machine, a glamorous cultural marvel, an engine of ambition and opportunity, and still an epic financial success.

Amidst it is all manner of poverty and soul-sucking architecture alongside the beauty, of course. Indeed, the most troubled parts of London are as bleak as anything in the worst parts of other major cities.

But pitting the rest of the country against London and penalising the capital won’t do anything other than reduce the nation’s prospects for growth and sow the seeds of division.

My colleague Paul Lay, senior editor on Engelsberg Ideas and a historian of the 17th century, said recently on social media that the long story of these islands has gone into reverse: “Much of English then British history has been about bringing an end to tribes and clans. It seems the last thirty years or so has seen that instinct reversed.”

One of the defining features of the old and historically very successful British settlement was the accepted notion of London as the capital, the centre, the magnet. When this was at its height, and Britain was at it most successful, the other great cities of these isles – Newcastle, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Glasgow, Belfast, Birmingham and Bristol – didn’t atrophy or moan. They powered intellectual and scientific revolutions and demanded national political change to match the rising prosperity.

In Edinburgh, with the help of Adam Smith via Fife and Glasgow University, in the Scottish Enlightenment it is no exaggeration to say the modern economic world was created.

Little of this was done according to central planning. It was organic and messy, although it took place within the boundaries of a clear constitutional settlement with property rights and solid institutions. One of the best and most productive of those processes was what happened to London and the South East. Why we as a country would curse or dismiss this great historical inheritance is beyond me.