Architecture

The physical fabric of London remained largely Georgian until late into the century and this despite a widespread feeling that it was somehow rather ‘mean’. Victorians disliked what they thought of as its plainness and uniformity. Gower Street provides an excellent example. They tried to ameliorate this condition by using ornamentation in stucco, and tile. The only part of London, that the Victorians actually rebuilt was the City itself and that not, substantially, till after mid century.

Gower Street, east side, 1910. The Growth of Victorian London, Donald J.Olsen (1976)

What they came to admire was the large, substantial and Italianate.

City Bank, Treadneedle Street, Moseley, 1858. Timothy Summerson, The Victorian City, Images and Realities, Dyos and Wolff (1973)
The new railways stimulated the growth of grand railway hotels like that at Victoria Station.

Grosvenor Hotel,c.1865/6, at Victoria Station. The Growth of Victorian London, Donald J.Olsen (1976)
Styles changed every generation or so from post Georgian eclecticism to Italianate and Gothic. The Victorian London populated by the characters in Dickens’s novels was in reality largely Georgian, there were new highways, and railways cut through it, there were embankments and constantly shifting new styles but the substantial architectural inheritance was still largely Georgian, though the new London inhabited by people like the Veneerings in Our Mutual Friend was the early Victorian stuccoed Belgravia linking the old Regency street architecture to the new. For the most part however the first twenty years of the Victorian age saw no radical change in the previous Georgian principles, the whole of Bayswater, from Marble Arch to Notting Hill and beyond to Shepherd’s Bush, the whole of Pimlico, the whole of North Kensington, South Kensington, Brompton and Earls Court were built in a recognisably Georgian style, though the Gothic element too played an increasing part, especially in the architecture of churches and homes in the 1840s and 50s.

Belgrave Square, north side. Shepherd and Elmes, Metropolitan Improvements, f rom The Growth of Victorian London, Donald J.Olsen (1976)
Unlike other large European cities London was not constructed on a preconceived plan. It grew from the random aglomeration of villages which were gradually absorbed as the population grew and as private enterprise provided housing solutions. The consequence was that, as Percy Hunter said in 1885, ‘Architecturally, London may be said to represent chaos itself’. There were model dwellings for the working class, there were pretentious hotels, railway stations, domestic suburban Gothic. Elsewhere in the important manufacturing towns of the north like Manchester there were huge warehouses, municipal and commercial buildings, and still cheek by jowl with these buildings were the slums.

Peabody Square Model Dwellings, Blackfriars Road. London Musuem, from London 1808-1870: The Infernal Wen, Francis Sheppard (1971)

Manchester Free Trade Exchange, 1861. James Mudd, Manchester Public Libraries, from The Victorian City, Images and Realities, Dyos and Wolff (1973)