A small, lonely island surrounded by a rough grey sea. An entity apart from its European neighbours. Such is the image of Britain that appears to emerge from the mists of time. Yet the sea did not isolate Britain, but rather provided an open highway for successive groups of settlers from Continental Europe. So although Britain has been free of invasion for almost one thousand years, its earliest history is actually far richer and more varied than latter-day observers might imagine. The country was shaped over the centuries by different peoples who reached its shores from afar. Each brought customs and practices that were woven into the intricate tapestry of national identity. That same core of what we think of as essentially British is in fact the fruit of a long tradition of overlapping historical experiences and cultures. Viewed from this perspective, today's multiethnic society is really a continuation of a long tradition of permeability by foreign influence.
The name Britain, indicating present-day England, Scotland and Wales, is derived from the Roman name Britannia, which in turn derived from the ancient Celtic. Until around 4000 years before Christ, Britain was inhabited by nomadic tribes who moved across the country in their quest for food supplies. Later, in the period now known as the Neolithic or New Stone Age, these peoples began to settle, building themselves proper houses, farming the land and raising livestock. For their rituals they also erected huge standing stones, as well as revering the dead by constructing chambered tombs.
Located in the northern-most part of the British Isles, Scotland is a country of purplish, heather-clad mountains, green lowlands and fresh-water lakes, or Lochs, as they are called locally. Populated by proud and bellicose tribes that successfully opposed any attempt at invasion during the early centuries of Britain's history, Scotland was only unified with England in 1707. Edinburgh, the capital, was soon to vie with London for cultural importance, providing the Europe of Enlightenment with a rigorous school of thought that was to produce great physicians and philosophers. The present-day Scots, who have developed their own form of local government, their own educational system and a differing legal system based on civil law, are down-to-earth, practical people not given to wasting words or time. Although the discovery of oil in the bed of the North Sea, off the eastern coast of Scotland, has brought the country new wealth and industry, the two world-famous Scottish products are whisky and textiles. These latter include not only the colourful tartan cloths from which kilts are made, but also many of the tweeds that have become synonymous with British sartorial style.
The early Celtic kings of Scotland included Macbeth, who killed his predecessor Duncan I to obtain the throne in 1040. This true tale of blood and ambition was dramatised by Shakespeare and set to music by Verdi.
The Edinburgh Festival held each year in August and September is one of Britain's foremost cultural events, featuring a vast range of music, theatre and art.
The Scottish tartans, or woollen cloths woven in specific chequered patterns, are actually individual to Scottish clans, or kinship groups. No Scot belonging to one clan would ever wear the tartan of another.
The principality of Wales occupies a large projection of land on the west coast of the United Kingdom. Its capital is Cardiff. Once renowned for its coal and steel industries, today Wales relies largely on government-sponsored ventures in high-technology as well as its traditional vocation for sheep farming. Thanks to the high annual rainfall, the hilly landscape is green and misty, providing ideal conditions for some of Britain's most beautiful gardens. The country also boasts a number of magnificent early castles that were built during the 12th and 13th centuries, when King Edward I of England established authority over Wales. This provoked a number of nationalist uprisings against English dominion, of which the most notable were led by Owen Glendower in 1400-1402. Glendower is still something of a hero for the Welsh, who are proud of their language and traditions and view the English with considerable diffidence. Since 1966, Plaid Cymru, the Welsh National Party, has been represented in British Parliament in Westminster. After years of being repressed or discouraged, the Welsh language now enjoys equal status with English in all legal and administrative affairs. There is also a Welsh language television channel as well as numerous schools using both languages in their educational programmes.
The current Prince of Wales is Prince Charles, the oldest son of Queen Elizabeth II. The first Prince of Wales was Edward I's son, whose investiture took place in 1301.
Of all the extant Celtic languages, Cymraeg, or Welsh, enjoys the most vibrant literary scene, which continues a tradition in epic poetry dating back to the 6th century.
The Welsh are a highly musical people, traditionally renowned for their choral singing. The Welsh National Opera based in Cardiff is one of the most acclaimed opera companies in Great Britain.
Stonehenge is a mysterious prehistoric sanctuary near Amesbury, in southern England. It originally consisted of a circle of 30 upright stones, their tops linked by lintelstones to form a continuous circle about 30 metres across. Within the circle was a horseshoe arrangement of five trilithons (two uprights plus a lintel, set as five separate entities), and a so-called 'altar stone': an upright pillar at the open end of the horseshoe, facing the direction of the rising sun. In use around 3100-1100 BC, Stonehenge was constructed in three phases: c. 2800 BC, a low bank and ditch of earth about 110 metres in diameter; c. 2100 BC, a double ring of 80 pillars of South Wales bluestone, apparently dismantled before completion; and c. 2000 BC, the surviving monument. The alignment on the midsummer sunrise/midwinter sunset suggests that prehistoric man used it for seasonal festivals or as an observatory.
The immense monoliths used for the second stage of Stonehenge were dragged across the open chalk down of the Salsibury Plain from the mountains of Wales. They were probably shipped across the Bristol Channel and up the river Avon on rafts, then hauled to the site on tree trunks serving as rollers.
Silbury Hill is a 40-metre-high artificial mound erected around 2660 BC, during the Bronze Age. Located not far from other prehistoric sites near Avebury in southern England, it is probably Europe's largest barrow dating back to this period. Barrows are long mounds covering or containing a chambered tomb, and for a long time this is what Silbury Hill was thought to be. However, excavation by tunnelling in 1776, 1849 and 1968-70 revealed no traces of a burial chamber, so the mound remains archaeologically enigmatic.
The Celtic tribes with their Druidic culture that spread from central Europe to Britain some time around 400 BC imbued the country with a lasting linguistic and artistic heritage. Today's Gaelic language, still spoken in Ireland and Scotland, and the Welsh language so passionately defended in Wales, are direct descendedants of the Celtic tongue.
The Celtic language spoken in Scotland is actually a development of the Irish Gaelic, which was brought to Scotland by immigrants from the 6th century. Chiefly spoken in the north-west mainland, Scots Gaelic, or Erse as it is sometimes called, is the official regional language of the Western Isles. However, a standard written language did not develop until the Bible translation of 1801. Currently spoken by about 80,000 people, it is now the subject of an enthusiastic revivalist movement. The Celtic language spoken in Wales has equal status with English in all legal and administrative affairs. Visitors to Wales are usually surprised to see road signs in both languages. Yet Welsh is a language that also has a lively literary heritage that embraces the prose tales of the Mabinogion, preserved in medieval manuscripts recording an oral tradition that is many centuries older.
A Celtic monk called Gildas who is considered one of Britain's earliest historians wrote that the Celts were 'completely ignorant of the practice of war'. This is not altogether true because their fighting men were armed with iron swords and daggers, and their chieftains drove two-wheeled war chariots which were buried with them. The Celts built fortified hill forts with turf and stone ramparts, and from these raided nearby settlements and carried of prisoners as slaves. However, the Celts were not essentially a bellicose people, preferring hunting to war and largely devoting their energies to farming and husbandry.
Although the Romans did not conquer Britain until 43 AD, the influence of their mighty empire became evident earlier in the first appearance of coinage and in certain forms of political and social organisation. By transferring much of the burden of administration onto locals and absorbing influential Britons into its own hierarchy, the conquerors soon Romanised England, though they were rebuffed to the north by the Picts and the Scots.
By the time Britain had reached a stage of development that made it suitable for incorporation in the Roman empire it was already involved in a certain degree of trading activity. Through contacts with Rome, this soon increased to include the import of metal goods, wine and olive oil. As the conquest of Britain proceeded, London was rebuilt and many other large towns were founded. Most of them were organised on the Romans' favourite grid-like plan which is recognisable in the layout of the centres of Chichester (Noviomagus) and Gloucester (Glevum). In the north was York, then known as Eboracum, where the 9th Legion was stationed. On the northern borders of the Welsh Marches was Chester (Deva), where the 20th Legion had its headquarters. Other cities were developed on the sites of old British settlements. These included Lincoln (Lindum), St Albans (Verulamium) and Silchester (Calleva), where the remains of the Roman walls are still to be seen. Other towns were developed as spas. The most famous of these is Bath (Aquae Sulis), whose Roman baths and temple came to light when the city was rebuilt during its 18th century heyday. A major network of well-built roads was gradually added to link up all these centres. The Roman villa also introduced new standards of housing, comfort and decoration. The palatial residence at Fishbourne shows how pleasantly the well-to-do could live under Roman rule. Its attractively furnished and decorated rooms were heated by flues running beneath the mosaic-patterned floors, and the dining rooms were equipped with glass dishes and bowls, silver plates, knives and spoons, oil lamps and candlesticks. There were pens and ink-wells for writing letters, and dice and counters for playing games.
The Roman cities of the highest rank were called coloniae. The first British coloniae were Colchester (Camulodunum) in 49 AD, Lincoln (Lindum) at the end of the first century AD and Gloucester (Glevum) in 96-8 AD.
The Roman city of rank below the colonia was the Municipium, governed by a council and four annual magistrates. These latter could acquire Roman citizenship at the end of their term of office.
Roman citizenship, at first rare in the provinces, gave its holders the right to marry and trade under Roman law, protection from summary beating or execution, and right of appeal to the emperor. In 212 the Emperor Caracalla granted citizenship to all free inhabitants of the empire.
Mosaics first appeared in Britain in the first century AD. Used to decorate towns and villas, they were signs of great prosperity. At the outset they were laid by immigrant craftsmen, but by the 3rd and 4th centuries local mosaic production had begun at Cirencester (Orpheus motifs) and later in Dorset (Christian iconography).
The Roman army was more coherently structured than its Celtic counterpart and its campaigns were carefully planned. At the beginning of each season, troops were gathered together from their winter quarters, supplies were collected and intelligence obtained from merchants and travellers. The army would then march out to confront the enemy by day, and at night protect itself behind temporary fortifications consisting of a rampart and ditch surrounding the entire force. Each winter the army retired into winter quarters, and it could take several campaigns to defeat the enemy. The aim of the campaign was to defeat him in battle or so cow him that he would be forced to plead for peace. Once defeated, hostages were taken so that the enemy was obliged to acquiesce and weapons could be confiscated.
The Roman military campaign camps consisted of leather tents pitched in neat rows: small tents for groups of eight soldiers; larger ones for the officers.
The main fighting units of the Roman army were the legions, composed of Roman citizens serving 25 years. Each comprised 10 cohorts of 6 centuries (80 men), including 120 cavalry, for a total of around 5000 men.
The legionaries were a heavily armoured, highly-disciplined infantry. In peacetime they were sometimes employed in activities such as public building, road construction and mining.
The position of the northern frontier in Roman Britain changed several times during the first two centuries AD. The only way to prevent or pre-empt aggression from the north was to erect a linear barrier set with watch-towers and fortlets. To this end, during the 120s Hadrian's Wall was built across the neck of Britain, from the Solway Firth to the River Tyne. Less than twenty years after its inception, however, it was abandoned in favour of the reoccupation of southern Scotland and the construction of a new barrier, the Antonine Wall. This frontier only lasted twenty years, and in 163 was abandoned. Thereafter Hadrian's Wall was recommissioned and remained the frontier until the end of Roman Britain. By the 4th century, the principal northern enemies of Roman Britain were the Picts, a coalition of tribes from the central and eastern highlands of Scotland. The Pictish kingdom, whose craftsmen produced finely carved commemorative stones, ultimately overran Hadrian's Wall and outlived the Roman occupation.
Hadrian's Wall is 117 kilometres long and 4.5 metres high. It had a forward defensive ditch measuring 8.5 metres across and 3 metres in depth. It featured 16 forts, 80 milecastles and numerous signal turrets.
The Antonine Wall was begun in 142 AD at the behest of Emperor Antoninus Pius. Constructed in turf on a foundation of cobbles, it ran from the Forth estuary to the Clyde. The original plan was for 6 forts on the Wall, and fortlets every mile.
In 407 AD, troubles elsewhere in the Empire forced the Romans to withdraw their garrison troops, so that military occupation came to an end, leaving Britain prey to the Germanic invaders. These were the Anglo-Saxon peoples whose invasion of the island was valiantly opposed by King Arthur, the Romanised Celtic Christian whose deeds have become legendary. Despite the efforts of Arthur and his Knights, the Anglo-Saxon tribes settled in much of Britain, eventually unifying the various kingdoms into a single realm: England, or the land of the Angles, whose language was the early version of what people in Great Britain still speak today.
King Arthur is a half-legendary figure who is represented as uniting the British tribes against the pagan invaders (5th-6th centuries AD) and as the champion of Christianity. In fact, his existence as a historical figure is doubtful, since he is claimed as a prince in five areas: Brittany, Cornwall, Wales, Cumberland and the lowlands of Scotland. His story passed into literature and became interwoven with many legends, including those of the Round Table and the Holy Grail. The stories were developed by French writers, and Lancelot, Percival and the Grail were added. The final medieval compilation of these stories is the prose romance Morte D'Arthur written by the English author Thomas Malory around 1470. This tale of the exploits of Arthur's knights of the Round Table and the quest for the Holy Grail is the source from which most later retellings are derived.
There are 2 versions of how Arthur obtained his sword Excalibur. According to one account, he was given it by the Lady of the Lake, whereas in the other he acquired the sword by pulling it from a stone, thus proving he was the rightful king.
In the 6th and 7th centuries, the most highly prized arts among all the peoples in the British Isles were those of the bards, or poets, and the goldsmiths. Although much of the fine decorative work in precious metals was lost when such items were melted down to create other artefacts, at least some of the sword pommels, pendants and brooches have survived. Unfortunately nothing of the oral poetry of the same period has survived, unless there are echoes of it in poems like Beowulf, a tale of fictional heroic deeds in a historical setting believed by most scholars to have been written in the 8th century. This is the only example of vernacular heroic verse to have come down to us in manuscript form from the Anglo-Saxon or early Germanic worlds. The books that first came to the British Isles concerned the new Christian religion, and finely illustrated books were mainly for Christian worship. However, one of the original contributions of the early Anglo-Saxons was the development of insular miniscule, a fluent and legible handwriting which could be written more quickly than the formal capital and majuscule letters of late Antiquity.
Britain was converted to Christianity around the year 597, when the Anglo-Saxon sovereigns began drawing inspiration for their own structure of government from the Biblical Book of Kings. In fact when in 1066 Britain was invaded by the Norman peoples of northern France, the conquerors found that their predecessors had built up an advanced system of government and a rich economy. The time was ripe for further development.
It was a Father of the Church, Pope Gregory the Great (c. 540-604), who appointed Augustine, the prior of a Benedictine monastery at Rome, to lead forty monks to Britain with the aim of converting the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity. In 597 Augustine arrived in Kent, where he was kindly received by King Aethelbert, whose wife was a Christian. Aethelbert's own conversion and baptism greatly contributed to the success of Augustine's mission, paving the way for the expansion of missionary activity in the south. Augstine was made Bishop of the English in 597, and established his church at Canterbury. However, his efforts to extend his authority over the native British Church were less successful. In fact Christianity had already taken root in the Celtic domains of Ireland, Scotland and Wales. It was initially established in Ireland by St Patrick in the 5th century, spreading to northern Britain in the 6th century. By 563 St Columba had founded his monastery on the island of Iona. The Welsh saints also converted much of their country during the 5th and 6th centuries, and the Welsh Church did not submit to the authority of Rome until 768. There was a resurgence of paganism after Aethelbert's death, and many pagan beliefs were preserved in folk medicine and superstition despite efforts to eradicate them.
In the early Middle Ages, society in Britain was probably dominated by a military aristocracy. The Anglo-Saxon heroic epic Beowulf, composed between 675 and 875, tells of a class of young warrior noblemen who are normally described as eorlas ("earls"). They are feasted by their lord the king in his hall, and are endowed by him with magnificent treasures, especially sophisticated and expensive weapons. Ultimately they are also given land of their own. In return, they are pledged to follow their lord into battle to the point of death, and if necessary to avenge his slaying as they would that of their own kinsmen. Since Anglo-Saxon law was based on a carefully graded hierarchy of social status, different amounts of monetary compensation were established for the death of men from different classes. This was called wergeld ("man-money"). The violent death of a freeman called for 200 shillings' compensation (five milch-cows in Ireland), whereas that of a nobleman, his superior, was 600 or 1200 shillings. Slaves had no wergeld in their own right. It was to the kin that the sums which defined a man's status were paid in the event of his being killed, and the kin were obliged to seek vengeance if they were not paid. In societies without police, the prospect of kin-vengeance and the possibility of buying it off with compensation was what preserved social peace.
The Sutton Hoo treasure: excavated in 1939, a group of 16 burial mounds near Woodbridge in Suffolk revealed a 27-metre-long ship with a wooden burial chamber containing silver plate, gold jewellery, coins, weapons and domestic equipment. Now kept at the British Museum, this treasure is the most important archaeological discovery from Anglo-Saxon England.
The Norman victory at Hastings on October 14, 1066 was a singularly influential event. It not only initiated the rule of a line of Norman kings, but also entailed the replacement of most of the previous English aristocracy by men whose origins were in Normandy and other parts of northern France. Moreover, the advent of the Normans also revolutionised warfare in Britain. The battle of Hastings was the victory of a heavily-armed cavalry over a dismounted force which fought on foot. Though the Bayeux Tapestry suggests that the English and Norman troops had similar arms and equipment, in fact the Normans were the most sophisticated warriors of their time in Europe. They experimented with couched lances and adapted their stirrups and saddles so that the mounted knight became an effective instrument of war.
During the early centuries of the new millennium the face of Britain changed dramatically. Lasting change calls for solid foundations, and this is what William the Conqueror and his followers gradually managed to implant during the decades that followed their invasion of 1066.
Though the invaders were initially feared and hated, an early chronicler soon recognised that the Normans breathed new life into religious standards, which everywhere in England had been declining. Now you may see in every village, town and city, churches and monasteries rising in a new style of architecture.
However, imposing buildings were not the only manifestations of the new power structure. By the end of the eleventh century a system of land tenantship had been established involving the payment of taxes or knightly service in exchange for the charter.
At the top of the feudal scale were the King's tenant barons and the heads of religious houses. At the bottom were the freeholders or serfs who paid for their respective shares of land by serving their master and working in his fields for stipulated periods.
One hundred years after the Norman conquest of 1066, the economy of Britain was undergoing rapid expansion. Between 1100 and 1300 the population is believed to have increased from about two million to about five million in England alone. This growth went hand in hand with an enormous increase in farming that involved the destruction of forests, fens and marshlands. Astounding as it may seem, more land was farmed in England during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries than at any other time of its history, except during the World Wars of the twentieth century.
The most evident manifestations of Norman power were fortifications of a new type, ranging from the King's own White Tower of London to the many mottes and enclosures which can still be traced on the English countryside. However, the Church was also to benefit from the Norman conquest. Frequent ecclesiastical council meetings were held under the presidency of the Archbishop of Canterbury, so that the Church was able to regain its sense of central direction. Bishoprics were reorganised, relations between Canterbury and York clarified, celibacy was enforced and monasteries received new inmates and endowments. Under William's successors, government also became increasingly specialised and centralised. The Treasury, or Exchequer, had already been established at Winchester, but by the 12th century had adopted more sound accounting methods. Its control was in the hands of a small group of officials, already termed 'barons of the Exchequer', whose principal role was the conduct of government. There was also great expansion in the scope of royal justice, with a proliferation of itinerant and local justices under the supervision of the Exchequer staff. Thus the predominant trend of the Norman period was the increasingly close connection between central and local institutions. This was achieved through self-regulating administrative mechanisms, cross-referenced record keeping, a division of functions which obliged officials to work in unison and routine procedures authorised in precisely formulated writs.
Common Law evolved under Henry II (1154-89) to cover the whole country. The system was based on individual cases rather than prescriptive codes. New procedures were devised for civil property cases in what became known as Petty Assizes.
A Court of Common Pleas was set up with justices who were appointed to hear cases in which the king was not a party; this moved permanently to Westminster after 1215. The judges in Common Pleas evolved into a professional class of justices.
The Magna Carta, drawn up in 1215, was a Charter of liberties containing 61 clauses guaranteeing the privileges of the Church, defining the feudal obligations between kings and barons, limiting royal rights, particularly in forests, preventing abuses of administrative power, making law courts generally open to free men, and providing for a standing committee of 25 men to act as guardians of the law and receivers of complaints against the king.
The medieval economy of Britain was based on agriculture, and technical ability and productivity were low. Moreover, the only way to maintain the fertility of the soil was to leave a portion of the cultivated area fallow every year and to use as much animal manure as possible. In order to produce enough to supply the small urban and industrial sector of the economy, a delicate balance had to be achieved between arable and pasture. Cereal production was based on wheat, barley oats and some rye; however, if too much land was used for cereals, a fall would come about in the number of livestock that could be kept. This explains why cultivated areas expanded so enormously during the 12th and 13th centuries. However, it is doubtful whether food production kept pace with demand. Between 1180 and 1220 there was rapid price inflation in England, and during the course of the 13th century prices more than trebled. The agricultural estates, or Manors, came under a lordship and were usually divided into demesne lands, which came under the lord's direct control, and customary land, worked by the lord's tenants in return for rents and services. The demesnes were either farmed to produce food for consumption and market, or leased out for cash income. Work was done by paid estate labourers, skilled hired labour and tenants owing labour services to their lord. The 13th and 14th centuries thus saw the birth and growth of skilled estate management and the emergence of sophisticated written records.
In Scotland, a statute of 1214 compelled landholders to cultivate more land, either by plough or spade. During this period the earliest treatises on agricultural organization and methods were written.
A well-run manor in the late 14th century could achieve an average yield per acre of bushels of wheat, 26 of barley, and 22 of oats. Today a farmer would expect to get at least four times as much from the same amount of land, using far less labour.
Between 1198 and 1453, some 2800 grants of market were made; urban markets were held more frequently and could provide a wider range of local and imported goods.
Around 40 percent of manorial tenants had to live off 10 to 15 acres of land, or less. With low productivity and compulsory payments to their lord, they teetered on the edge of subsistence.
Wood was essential for ship-building, the importance of which increased with the expansion of woollen exports. Because of the massive clearing of forested lands for farming, there was considerable wastage followed by shortage. In the middle of the 14th century, the construction of Windsor Castle involved cutting down an entire forest. Three thousand and four oak trees were felled. Ten years later, more wood was required, so down went a further 940 oaks in the woods of Combe Park and Pamber, bringing the total to 3944 trees. Though at first other demesne forests were protected as royal hunting grounds, when successive sovereigns found they were short of money, they thought nothing of raising income by cutting down forests. The progressive destruction of forests brought about high timber prices which eventually forced England to import wood from Scandinavia. It also had to seek an alternative fuel for kilns and furnaces. This ultimately led to burning charcoal and sea coal, which in its turn introduced the problem of air pollution. London, in fact, was the first city in the world to suffer from this most modern of ills.
By 1307 the air smelt so bad that royal decree was issued in the London districts of Southwark, Wapping and East Smithfield forbidding the use of sea coal by lime-burners.
The great land-owners were the aristocracy and the Church, who soon realised that there were rich profits to be made from producing grain for the home market and wool for export to Flanders. As their incomes rose, they spent lavishly on building and luxury goods. Many new towns were created by charters from the Crown or a lay or ecclesiastical lord. Salisbury was founded in this way, and the ports of Hull, Lynn and Boston were developed as the wool exports expanded.
In 1363 a sumptuary law was passed which prescribed the appropriate quality of clothing for every grade in society. Clearly the more extravagant fashions of the period were threatening sartorial conventions believed by Parliament to be essential for the maintenance of the traditional hierarchy. It was not a class system that determined social status, but birth, the practice of arms and the possession of heraldic arms and landed wealth. The idea of an aristocratic Θlite was still not far developed by around 1300, and all landowners whose income allowed them to support the status of knighthood shared in the nobility of the earls and barons. By the mid-15th century, however, only the peers of parliament were universally regarded as noble. The Knights thus fell to the status of mere gentry, albeit to its upper ranks. Many a reversal of fortunes came about in the second half of the 14th century, when the Black Death enormously reduced the population of England. This in turn brought about a decline in the rental values on which landowners depended for their incomes. Since this took place when standards of living were visibly rising, very few families managed to sustain the burden of noble status in the 15th century.
Homage was the ceremony establishing the relationship between lord and man. The lord, standing, took in his hands the clasped hands of the kneeling man, who acknowledged his dependence.
The invasion of Britain by the bubonic plague in 1348 was probably the chief medical event of medieval times. It caused the death of one third or even half of the population.
Until the second half of the 13th century, the textile industry of western Europe was centred in Flanders. Flemish merchants would come to England each year to buy the best available raw wool. However, economic and agricultural change soon made English wool a rare and more expensive commodity. Moreover, by the end of the 13th century the export of raw wool was being discouraged by taxation, so that English weavers could enjoy advantages denied to their Flemish counterparts. Many out-of-work Flemish weavers emigrated to England, where technical improvements in the equipment used meant that more cloth could be produced with no increase in labour. By the 15th century cloth was England's greatest export, bringing considerable wealth to merchants. English cloth reached markets in Scandinavia, north Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and France.
At the start of the 14th century, England exported 35,000 sacks of wool per year; at the end of the same century this had fallen to 19,000, and fifty years later to 8000. Inversely, cloth exports rose from around 4000 units in 1347-1348 to 16,000 in the 1360s and 54,000 at the end of the 15th century.
The unit of measurement for textile exports was the broadcloth, measuring 24 yards by 11/2 or 2 yards. A broadcloth required 26 different processes carried out by specialised workers. Thus there was considerable division of labour as far back as the 14th century.
It was during this period that Italian bankers, especially Florentines, began to exert an influence over the English wool market. To obtain control over the precious raw material they introduced modern banking and accountancy methods, including letters of credit payable abroad to travellers, the clergy and merchants, nonnegotiable letters of exchange, and double entry bookkeeping. The Frescobaldi family thus had the power to obtain a royal concession for the exploitation of the mines in Devon. Other families, such as the Bardi and the Peruzzi, had settled in England to manage the papal revenues. They were thus in a position to lend the royal Treasury large sums of money at good interest rates. Moreover, they could buy up the entire wool output of the Cistercian monasteries one or two years in advance of shearing, thus elbowing out their Flemish rivals who did not have the same available capital.
Lombard street in the City of London is named after the Italian bankers who settled there from Lombardy in the 13th century. It is still a banking centre.
The secular lords focused on fortifying their existing seats and building massive new castles that could contain an entire military garrison. Unlike their forebears, they used stone rather than wood, and in so doing consolidated their hold on the land. Most castles followed the principle of a central keep, but another variant was the shell-keep in which the stronghold was contained within a stout defensive circular wall.
The concentric castle made its appearance during the last decades of the 13th century. This consisted of one or more rings of fortification around the nucleus of a central keep. Water often played an important defensive role in castle design. The moats which surrounded early castles and manor houses were wide ditches filled with water that could only by crossed by means of a wooden drawbridge. In case of danger or aggression, such bridges could be raised by a system of chains and windlasses located in an upper chamber in the gatehouse. However, more settled conditions accompanied the waning of the Middle Ages, such that there was less need for defence and a greater demand for comfort. In Tudor times, some of the medieval castles were converted into more elegant homes, though many were later destroyed in the Civil War of the 1640s. Only in Scotland, where the tower house prevailed, did the castle continue to serve its essential defensive purpose until well into the 17th century.
During the late Middle Ages, construction labourers were usually recruited from the vicinity of the new building, whereas master masons, stone-cutters and carvers would travel from one site to the next, and indeed from one country to the next, taking decorative themes and building techniques with them. As early as the late 12th century there were Sicilian-trained artists at work in Winchester, and there was considerable continental inspiration in English military architecture, particularly in the north Welsh castles of Edward I (1278-1307). One of the most frequent decorative and artistic motifs to be found in castle and palace architecture was chivalry. The term refers to the institution of knighthood and the qualities that it idealised, such as bravery, courtesy, honesty and readiness to help the weak. In 1348, when jousting, pageantry, lavish entertainment and courtly chivalric behaviour preoccupied the aristocracy, Edward III's Windsor was to become the home of his innovatory Order of the Garter. Influenced by the tales of King Arthur, Edward elected 26 members to his Order and adopted the blue garter as its symbol. The Order stood for the mutual commitment of the king and his knights to search for justice and fame through valorous deeds. Membership was soon regarded as a great honour, and Garter symbolism would thus have been prominent in buildings of the time.
Some potential influences were more readily received than others: when Eleanor of Castile came to London to marry the future Edward I in 1255, her dowry included a number of tapestries and carpets which were judged by the citizens of London to be a ridiculous display of luxury.
Wood continued to be used for the highly decorative timber-trussed roofs that were the product of the ingenuity of medieval carpenters. This construction technique allowed a hitherto inconceivably wide span and had the strength to carry heavy loads without any internal support. Because this meant that wide open spaces could be achieved without recourse to lines of pillars, hammer-beam roofs were often used for the sort of halls that were fast becoming the ideal venues for nascent institutions such as the guilds and the 'innsφ of the students of law. Many were also erected by wealthy merchants as a suitable premises for conducting business and diplomatic entertaining. In such cases the exposed beams and rafters would have been carved, painted and even gilded to enhance their effect. The foremost early exponents of this technique were the mason *P*Henry Yvele, considered London's first architect, and the carpenter Hugh Herland. The magnificent oak hammer-beam roof they devised for Westminster Hall between 1394 and 1401 was as revolutionary to carpentry as the earlier pointed arch had been to masonry. Thereafter successive craftsmen devised subtle structural variations such as the king-post and the crown-post roof. Many specimens of timber-trussed roofs have survived in parish churches as well as secular buildings.
The hammer-beam is a horizontal wooden beam projecting from the top of the supporting wall which bears the weight of the roof rafters through arched braces. The hammer-post is the vertical timber at the inside end of the hammer-beam which supports a purlin.
The immensely powerful Church was also built lavishly in this period to display and defend its own might. The abbeys that date back to the Middle Ages were originally monastic complexes, many of which were ruthlessly destroyed between 1536 and 1540 by Henry VIII. The King who had six wives accused the monasteries of laxity, but really saw them as a source of revenue for financing his wars with France and Scotland. Some of the abbeys escaped destruction, and a number were later turned into country houses.
During the 12th and 13th centuries, the structure of the clergy was just as complex and hierarchical as that of lay society. First of all, it comprised two main divisions: on the one hand, those who lived by a monastic or similar "rule", or the monks and friars; and on the other hand, the secular clergy who did not live by such a rule, or the parish and chantry priests, chaplains, clerks in administrative jobs and university teachers. Among the secular clergy there were huge inequalities of wealth: Thomas Arundel, who was Bishop of Ely from 1374 to 1388, spent more than ú1000 a year on his household of about eighty persons, whereas many parish priests and stipendiary chaplains in his diocese would have had to make do on ú5 a year or less. Many of the higher clergy, that is the abbots, bishops and archbishops, were in a position to be liberal with fees and livery. The Black Friars of the Dominican order reached England in 1221, devoting themselves to scholarly study and a rational defence of the Christian faith. They were thus attracted to the universities, becoming a powerful force in their organisation. The Franciscan order, known as Friars Minor or Grey Friars, arrived in England two years later and spread rapidly during the following decades, establishing friaries in towns and gaining patronage from the wealthy urban classes. However, as their own wealth and office increased, their original vows of poverty and humility wore thin and attracted criticism. Moreover, there was growing anti-papal feeling which culminated in the Crown's decision to tax the clergy without papal permission. This was followed by the formation of a heretical movement that focused on the authority of the Scriptures, denied the papacy's temporal claims and even produced a vernacular Bible. By the late 15th century, the English Church had thus already acquired considerable independence.
In late medieval England, pious patrons were more inclined to found collegiate churches served by secular clergy than traditional monastic houses. Collegiate churches often had attached grammar schools or alms houses; education and lay piety were closely linked.
The Lollards were the most important religious dissenters of late medieval England; they were mostly artisans, especially textile workers, though some knights had Lollard sympathies as well. Parliament's response to Lollardy was the statute De Heretico Comburendo of 1401. It forbade unlicensed preaching and condemned heretics to burning at the stake after conviction in Church courts. It was repealed in 1559.
Henry VIII (1491-1547) was King of England from 1509 to 1547. The second son of Henry VII, soon after his accession he married Catherine of Aragon, his brother Arthur's widow. With the exception of Mary, their children died in infancy, so from 1527 Henry determined to divorce Catherine. His Lord Chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey, was ineffective in obtaining a divorce for him and was replaced by Thomas More in 1529. After 1532 Henry broke with the Catholic church, marrying Anne Boleyn privately in 1533. The following year it was enacted that his marriage to Catherine was invalid and that the King was the sole head of the Church of England. To humble the clergy and accumulate new revenues, Henry then proceeded to dissolve the monasteries, a policy that resulted in the destruction of great works of art and architecture. In 1536 Catherine died, and Anne Boleyn was executed for infidelity. Henry then married Jane Seymour, who died leaving a son, to become Edward VI. In 1540 Anne of Cleves became his fourth wife, in the hope of attaching the Protestant interest of Germany, but dislike of her appearance caused him to divorce her speedily. He then married Catherine Howard (1540), but charged her with infidelity and had her executed two years later. In 1543 he was married for the sixth and last time to Catherine Parr, who outlived him. In the 1540s he returned to war with France and Scotland, imposing great financial strain on England.
In 1512 Henry introduced a parliamentary tax based on the assessment of an individual's wealth in landed income or goods. Created to finance his early wars, it yielded ú170,000 between 1513 and 1516.
To pay for the renewed attacks on France, in 1525 Wolsey introduced the 'Amicable Grant', an extra-parliamentary levy of up to one sixth of lay goods and one third of clerical possessions. It was so unpopular that Henry VIII himself halted it.
The Chantry Acts of 1545 and 1547 empowered the king to confiscate all charities, whether chantries, hospitals, guilds or colleges, claiming Henry would make better use of their wealth. The Crown received over ú6000,000 when chantry lands passed into lay hands.
Today, England does not boast of one single great medieval church treasury such as those of Continental Europe. Even before the dissolution of the monasteries, jewels and plate represented the accumulated capital of laity and church alike, and as such were permanently at risk. William Rufus, the son of William the Conqueror, imposed such crippling levies on the church that there was little alternative to melting down liturgical plate. Thus time and again the great works of the goldsmith's art must have been destroyed for purely economic reasons. And the art of the blacksmith hardly met with a better fate, since iron could always be used again for firearms. Yet casting techniques were clearly well developed by Norman times, using sand or clay moulds. Close similarities between the rare metal items that have survived and decorative motifs found in illuminated manuscripts of the period suggest that there may have been quite a lot of technical overlap between various artistic specialisations.
In 1401 a great emerald, the glory of St Cuthbert's shrine at Durham, was valued together with five rings and silver chains at ú3336.13s.4d. Not surprisingly, the stone was the principal object of the onslaught on the shrine in 1537.
In the brutal assault on St Swithun's shrine at Winchester in 1538, the royal agents took most of one long night to rip off the sheets of precious metal: nearly 2000 marks of silver.
The magnificent cathedrals that arose after the Norman Conquest met with a happier fate than the mediaeval abbeys and many can still be visited today. Constructed over several centuries, these mighty buildings reflect various changes in architecture over a long period. Some exemplify particular styles such as Durham, Rochester and the interiors of Gloucester and Ely which are strikingly Norman. Salisbury ranks as the purest expression of the Early English style, whereas Exeter and York Minster are fine examples of the Decorated Gothic style. Canterbury Cathedral shows how the builders of the fifteenth century replaced solid walls with soaring windows held together by vertical divisions from which the Perpendicular style derives its name.
Whereas the round-arched tunnel vault typical of Norman architecture presses down on the whole of the walls on which it rests, the pointed arch of Gothic architecture enabled the designer to achieve more vertical and hence safer constructions. In addition, he could also build vaults over oblong instead of square bays, thereby distributing the weight of the vault over a greater area and securing the stability of the building. Moreover, the oblong Gothic vault was constructed with ribs to strengthen the groins, and this too was technically advantageous. A tunnel-vault or a Romanesque groin-vault needed a wooden centring underneath its whole length and width to build it up. By contrast, in the case of rib-vaults, a centring was erected that was simply strong enough to support the transverse arches and diagonal ribs until their mortar had set. Clearly this contributed to a considerable saving in timber as well as time. Certainly the austere simplicity of the Early English architecture with its unadorned vaults, narrow lancet windows and thin ribs of masonry was in remarkable contrast to the massive squatness of Norman building. In fact the impression of lightness it conjured up was an aesthetic as much as a material achievement.
Masons and designers then discovered that there was nothing to stop them increasing the number of ribs in a vault for decorative rather than structural purposes; by the same token, windows became more elaborate as the tracery was shaped into fanciful and complex forms. The combination of these features constitutes the core of what is known as the Decorated Gothic style of the late 13th and 14th centuries. The Perpendicular style that gradually succeeded it was the fruit of the growing technological ingenuity of the masons who were able increasingly to dispense with solid walls for the sake of vast expanses of glass held in place by the vertical divisions from which the style derives its name. Unlike its predecessors, which bore witness to the influence of French architecture, the Perpendicular style was essentially a native English product. In due course, the great monuments in this style such as the nave of Canterbury Cathedral were to attract expert attention on the Continent. In fact elements of the English Perpendicular were later to reappear as far afield as Bohemia, Portugal and Spain.
The term 'Gothic' was first applied by Renaissance observers to the architecture of the Middle Ages in a pejorative sense to suggest that the style derived from the barbarian Gothis who had sacked Rome in 410 AD.
The term 'Romanesque' designates the style of European architecture prevalent from the 9th to the 12th century, characterised by rounded arches, massive vaulting and thick walls. In contrast, the term 'Norman' is used to refer to the variety of Romanesque architecture that was introduced from Normandy into England from the Norman conquest until about 1200.
The role of the creative master craftsmen who designed the French and English cathedrals changed during the 13th century. Individual self-confidence grew, personality came to be appreciated, and the names of these new architects were recorded for posterity.
Master-masons such as the Frenchman, William of Sens, architect of the choir of Canterbury Cathedral, were equally skilled in masonry and engineering work. Many of them travelled widely, noting interesting features encountered on their journeys and thus keeping abreast of fashion. To safeguard their professional interests, these itinerant masons of the Middle Ages founded guilds. Latter-day freemasonry derives from such distant roots.
When Henry III was building Westminster, he encouraged his master-masons to sub-contract out some of the lesser tasks at a pre-established price. This system made it harder for the accountant to fiddle the books, and also discouraged absenteeism.
Medieval building workers in England would take as much as 2 weeks off at Christmas, a week at Easter, a few days at Pentecost, and a good number of Saints' feast days. The average working week was 5 days, with 12 hours work per day in summer and 83/4 in the winter. Summer salaries were differentiated from winter ones.
The technique of producing coloured glass by adding metallic oxides to the molten material is extremely ancient, though it would not appear to have reached England until the late 7th century. However, the stained glass associated with the spectacular windows of the great Gothic cathedrals is a product of the 12th to 15th centuries. These magnificent compositions of colour and light were created by assembling small pieces of stained glass in a malleable and watertight nexus of lead cames set in a larger framework. The scenes portrayed were usually illustrations of Bible stories, so the impact of such creations on a largely illiterate congregation must have been enormous. Not only did they create an astounding visual effect, but they also embodied a recognisable moral and didactic message. Much stained glass was also made for medieval parish churches. However, untold quantities of stained glass were destroyed during the 16th and 17th centuries, and the newly built churches of the period tended to prefer bright interiors lit by windows of clear glass. Although French craftsmen were pre-eminent in glass-painting early in the 12th century, within the space of fifty or so years the fame of English glass-painting, like that of manuscript illumination, had spread to the Continent.
Window glass was known in Roman times and was reintroduced into England in the 7th century. Before that window openings would have been covered by linen hangings or pierced transenna.
Coloured glass was sometimes salvaged from an earlier building, cut down to size and assembled elsewhere. This was the case with the intensely coloured clerestory windows at York Minster.
There is no better way to take in the particular glory of late-Gothic architecture than by hearing early church music played and sung within its hallowed vaults. By the late 15th century, the English composers had developed an extremely florid style of their own, seldom writing in fewer than five or six parts, sometimes more, in an intricate counterpoint of rhythms which has indeed been aptly compared with the equally idiosyncratic Perpendicular style of English architecture. Both expressed the late medieval trend towards the adornment of devotion by the most elaborate and decorative forms of art and craft. Sixty years later, during the reign of Elizabeth I, the powerful Catholic minority in England included the greatest English composer of the age, William Byrd, and possibly his pupil, Thomas Morley. The motets and psalms written by these composers and the anthems composed by their younger contemporaries, especially Orlando Gibbons, are the finest flowers of Anglican church music in its greatest period. To this day the British have proved to be particularly fine interpreters of this largely choral tradition. To listen to such skilled interweaving of colour, sound and light in surroundings that express similar contents and proportions in visual terms is to share in a unique synaesthetic experience.
The greatest English composer of the early Renaissance in music was John Dunstable (c. 1385-1453), who also achieved a reputation as a mathematician and astrologer. His greatest musical contribution to posterity are his songs and anthems.
William Byrd, (c. 1543-1623), one of the foremost of early English musicians, is best known for his settings of the Anglican service and his three masses.
Thomas Morley (1557-1602), the most influential composer of the English madrigal school; he also wrote a large amount of polyphonic sacred music as well as a music textbook.
Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625), English composer renowned for his madrigals, was an organist at the Chapel Royal from 1604 and was appointed organist of Westminster Abbey in 1623.
Great artists are their country's most effective diplomats. None more so than William Shakespeare, whose plays have been translated and are performed throughout the world. The Elizabethan age in which he lived was one of remarkable artistic wealth as well as impressive diplomatic and maritime enterprise. Shakespeare's portrayal of England, and indeed of Scotland, provides us with an image of historical events in all their specificity as well as focusing on the timeless drama of the human passions. Moreover, his use of language continues to enchant the ear of successive generations and shape the English that they speak. That so little should be known about the life of an artist who is perhaps the most famous Englishman of all time is one of life's little ironies; one that the poet himself might have enjoyed.
William Shakespeare was born in 1564, six years after Queen Elizabeth I came to the throne, heralding a period known as the English Renaissance. His birthplace was the Warwickshire town of Stratford-upon-Avon. He was the oldest of seven children, and his family was moderately well-to-do, as the house they lived in goes to show. In fact his father John was a glove merchant, whereas his mother, Mary Arden, came from independent farming stock.
Elizabeth I (1533-1603) the daughter of Henry VIII and his second wife, Anne Boleyn, was born in the royal palace at Greenwich, just outside London. She came to the throne in 1558, and at the age of 25 already had a formidable personality. She was highly intelligent, well-read and familiar with French, Spanish and Italian as well as Latin and Greek. Yet she was also susceptible to the most outlandish flattery. In foreign policy she steered a skilful course with the two leading Catholic powers of her time, France and Spain. She made peace with Scotland and France and repelled Spanish attempts at invasion by sinking the 'invincible armada' sent over by Philip of Spain. In 1587, the continuing threat of Catholic plots led her to sign the death warrant of her cousin Mary Queen of Scots, who had been directly involved in conspiracies hatched by English Catholics. Elizabeth I chose men of exceptional talent as her ministers and councillors, and her court was a busy hive of genius where intellectual gifts and gallantry were more highly prized than elevated birth. Her reign was one in which musicians, artists and men of letters found encouragement, and adventurers and discoverers could thrive. Despite her great beauty and numerous suitors, Elizabeth I never married, and was thus known as 'The Virgin Queen'.
Born in 1552, the poet Edmund Spenser was one of Shakespeare's great literary contemporaries. The first three books of his major work, The Faerie Queene, were dedicated to Queen Elizabeth. Indeed, "the most excellent and glorious person of our sovereign... the most royal Queen or Empress..., the most virtuous and beautiful Lady" was the inspiration for this and many other works of the period. Spenser died in 1599, leaving The Faerie Queene unfinished.
To
The most high, mightie and magnificent
Empress,
Renowned for pietie, vertue, and all gratious government,
Queen Elizabeth took a personal interest in music, and encouraged concerts, songs and dancing at her court besides welcoming musical entertainment on her royal progresses. The following song written by John Bennett may have been given its first performance in the Queen's presence, perhaps at some noble entertainment.
The culture of Elizabethan England was strangely hybrid. In painting, the Renaissance form of the portrait was retained, but Renaissance 'realism' was abandoned in favour of a neo-Gothic stiffness in which the sitter became an image, encased in clothes and bedecked with jewels. The most extreme form of these secular icons was the portraits of Queen Elizabeth herself, which had by decree to adhere to an accepted likeness and could never reveal signs of ageing. In architecture, classical detail was blended with fairy-tale gothic forms. Ground-plans were often E- or H-shaped, and the symmetrical facades were often embellished with decorative motifs of northern European provenance. In literature, the common trend was to treat chivalric romance in Italianate verse: the ideal of knighthood was easily adapted to an age of religious wars. So all in all, these were times of marked juxtaposition, of violent contrasts that actually permeated language, making it remarkably rich and dramatic.
Between the early 1500s and the early 1600s, the cost of living in England rose by around 350 percent. The rise in food prices outpaced that of wages or industrial prices, allowing shrewd landowners and merchants to make large profits which they spent lavishly on land, housing, furnishings or plate. Smallholders could also hold their own if they were self-sufficient for food; and those who weren't often turned to secondary employments such as nail-making and stocking knitting. Cloth continued to be England's largest export, but the economy also thrived thanks to leather crafts and pottery. Moreover, the Weald of Kent and Sussex became major rural industrial areas for ironworking and glassmaking, whereas coal-mining developed rapidly in the north, in South Wales and in Scotland. The Crown also encouraged skilled continental immigrants to settle in England and put to good use their expertise in cannon and gunpowder manufacture as well as the production of sailcloth, drinking glasses and other items that reduced dependence on imports. Export horizons were widening fast, with cloth exporters seeking markets in Russia and the Baltic, southern Europe and Turkey. In return they sought supplies of wine, Asian silks and spices, and American tobacco and sugar. The African slave trade began in the 1560s, largely to serve the lucrative markets of Spanish America, and the East India Company was granted a royal charter in 1600 allowing it exclusive trade in and around the Indian Ocean.
England's expanding commercial horizons owed much to men like Sir Walter Raleigh, the famous adventurer and explorer. Born around 1552, he became a favourite of Elizabeth I, embarking on voyages of exploration to North America in 1584-87 and South America in 1595. However, he fell from grace under James I, was imprisoned for many years, and was finally executed in 1618. Raleigh was also a fine poet, and in The Lie reveals a disenchanted understanding of human nature:
During the 16th century dress became another way of exhibiting conspicuous consumption. Gone were the sober gowns of the men of the late 15th century, and the loose flowing dresses of the women. Instead fashionable men donned padded doublets, or close-fitting jackets with or without sleeves, traditionally worn with hose, or stockings. Though simple in shape, such garments could be richly worked to display wealth. In 1588 the Earl of Leicester left 7 doublets and 2 cloaks worth ú545. As for women, to heighten their grandeur and emphasise their distance from any practical pursuits, they opted for skirts enlarged from beneath by framed hoops called farthingales. Both men and women embellished their attire with starched elaborate collars, jewellery, lace and embroidery.
Education during the Elizabethan period was the prerogative of the gentry, since peasants and farm labourers learnt all they needed to know from the changing seasons, the sky and the land. Formal teaching in the grammar schools was closely related to the Church, largely catering to those destined to take up an ecclesiastical career. However, 'reformed' religion had already introduced church services in English rather than in Latin, and essentially called for greater literacy on the part of its adherents. Thus the gentry, who had hitherto been apprenticed in other great households, began to undergo a more formalised education in schools and universities. In fact the period saw a great expansion within the existing English and Scottish universities, with new colleges being founded to strengthen Protestantism in both Oxford and Cambridge. An increasing number of the gentry not intending a Church career spent time at the universities after around 1550. One third of the English Members of Parliament were university men in 1563, whereas by 1593 over half of them were university educated .
The statesman, philosopher and essayist Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was one of the most lucid minds of his day. In his theoretical writings, his stress on experimentation and inductive methods gave strong impetus to subsequent scientific investigation. He wrote the Advancement of Learning in 1605. This passage from it (V.11) deal with 'Errors of Learned Men which Hinder the Progress and Credit of Learning':
But the greatest error... is the mistaking or misplacing of the last or furthest end of knowledge. For men have entered into a desire of learning and knowledge, sometimes upon a natural curiosity and inquisitive appetite; sometimes to entertain their minds with variety and delight; sometimes for ornament and reputation; and sometimes to enable them to victory of wit and contradiction; and most times for lucre and profession; and seldom sincerely to give a true account of their gift for reason, to the benefit and use of men...; But this is that which will indeed dignify and exalt knowledge, if contemplation and action may be more nearly and straitly conjoined and united together than they have been...
During Shakespeare's youth and early adulthood, considerable innovations were made in farming and rural life. The marshes of East Anglia were drained by means of a complex system of ditches and small canals which removed water to the rivers, sometimes with the help of wind-pumps. Elsewhere, valleys were artificially enriched by introducing silt, and new crops such as carrots and rape, a European herb from the mustard family, could be cultivated on a larger scale. Small-scale land-owners or tenant farmers were called yeomen. If their land was worth ú2 per year, they had the right to vote for Parliament and also often served as jurors, constables and churchwardens. As time went on, consolidated land-holdings were created by enclosing what had once been communal land with hedges or ditches. This tended to leave the rural poor without sufficient means for sustenance, and by the same token provided a labour force for the nascent cottage industries. In fact cottage industries were a predominant feature of early modern production. Whole families would be involved in such forms of home-manufacture to produce shoes, pots, leather goods or cloth.
A common method of house construction in late medieval, Tudor and Jacobean times was timber-framing, whereby the building was supported by a framework of timber. Often built on a solid foundation of stone or brick, the timber framework was jointed together according to a standard plan. Usually the timbers were prefabricated at the carpenter's workshop and reassembled on site. A bulk of timber laid horizontally on the foundation provided all the various studs, posts, wall-plates and braces with the necessary stability. Houses built in this way could thus be jacked up and moved on rollers, or dismantled and rebuilt. The filling between the timbers could be lath and plaster, wattle and daub (in other words branches covered with mud or clay) or brick. Upper storeys were jettied out in an overhang, thus providing extra space without incurring an increase in ground tax. Highly decorative effects were often achieved by carving the exposed timbers. However, when supplies of timber began to diminish and brick manufacture began to improve, timber-framing slowly declined.
In the country in Shakespeare's day timber-framed houses were usually set in small gardens. Various books on gardening were available, including the Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, a practical, down-to-earth guide in rhymed couplets published in 1573:
In March and April, from morning to night,
In sowing and setting, good housewives delight;
To have in a garden, or other like plot,
To trim up their house, and to furnish their pot...
Thatching has been a traditional type of roof covering since Saxon times at least, and in recent years has been enjoying a quiet revival. In Shakespeare's day it was extremely common both in town and country. Bundles of reeds or straw, known as yealms, are laid and fastened to the roof in several layers so that water cannot penetrate the thatch. A generous overhang ensures that any rain falls well clear of the house. Quite elaborate patterns can be created by a skilled thatcher, especially along the ridge of the roof where it is possible to create figures similar to those found in topiary. The best quality thatch is made of reed from Norfolk or Somerset.
Around 1591, when he was about twenty-seven, Shakespeare left his young family in Stratford and moved to London to become an actor. The city had recently become the European capital for finance and trade, and over the previous sixty years its population had grown from around 50,000 to 220,000. Although, as the Venetian Ambassador recorded, there were "many large palaces making a very fine show", the city was also overcrowded with unsanitary tenements and unpaved streets that served as open sewers. Hardly surprisingly, outbursts of plague were frequent. Indeed, in 1592, one year after the young Shakespeare's arrival in the capital, all the London theatres were closed in an effort to contain the spread of the disease. During this two-year period he wrote his poems Venus and Adonis and the Rape of Lucrece, as well as some of the earlier sonnets, which began to circulate around 1598.
Towards the end of the 1500s many of the greater medieval towns began to decline. City tax assessments were high, and there were too few rich merchants to pay them. At the same time, however, rural industries turned villages into new towns. Throughout the period, London was a rule unto itself, growing rapidly until it was second only to Paris among west European cities. In Henry VIII's reign 2.5 percent of the English population lived in London, but by 1650 the population had grown to 400,000, some 7 percent of the national total. When an Englishman reached Persia in 1568 he found that the Shah's courtiers had heard of London, but not of England. Although the growth of London stimulated trade and industry, Queen Elizabeth I and her successor King James I both feared that the flow of new immigrants would lead to overcrowding, riot and disease. However, the measures they took to stem the growth had little practical effect. Although poverty was indeed rife, the capital had also become a centre for finance and trade. No building better symbolised this new Rome than the Royal Exchange, built in 1566-70 as a meeting-place for London financiers and merchants.
During the first age of the Renaissance in England, it was the great households that dominated the arts, providing patronage and posts and determining the status of both art and artists. Thus unlike Italy and the Netherlands, where the artist was a professional among professionals, in England he occupied a decidedly dependent position. The master-builder built and maintained accommodation for the great household; the writer, painter and musician amused its members in peace and prepared propaganda for them in war.
One of the most common forms of musical entertainment in private household entertainments of the period was the madrigal, a musical setting of poetry for 4 to 6 voices. Madrigals were highly emotional, ranging from the melancholic to the zestful. The Silver Swan was written by Orlando Gibbons, who found patronage at Greenwich Palace during the early years of the 1600s.
England, and London in particular, suffered outbursts of bubonic plague in 1603, 1625 and again, with more dire effects, in 1665-66, when around 70,000 to 100,000 people died. Although the initial carrier was the black rat, the spread of the disease was probably due to infected fleas passing from one human body to another.
Daniel Defoe actually wrote his Journal of the Plague Year in 1722. Although it is a fictional reconstruction, it is based on true accounts:
I say they had to dig several pits in another ground, when the distemper began to spread in our parish, and especially when the dead-carts began to go about, which was not, in our parish, till the beginning of August. Into these pits they had put perhaps fifty or sixty bodies each; then they made larger holes wherein they buried all that the cart brought in a week, which, by the middle to the end of August, came to from 200 to 400 a week. ...But now, at the beginning of September, the plague raging in a dreadful manner...people that were infected and near their end, and delirious also, would run to those pits, wrapt in blankets or rugs, and throw themselves in...
In medieval English poetry, the poems are usually either short lyrics intended to be sung, or long poems intended to be recited or read over more than one evening. In the 16th century, the sung lyric develops to keep pace with the development of music. In addition, a new kind of poem develops. This is the sonnet, a poem of concentrated reflection, lyric in length, but not for singing. Its archetype in both manner and structure is the Italian sonnet. Yet Shakespeare in his sonnets wrestles with the conventions of idealised love that were typical of the Italian sonnet, achieving a new form of expression in which natural love is interwoven with its idealised counterpart.
Shakespeare probably started writing for the stage in the late 1580s, when substantial changes were beginning to take place in theatrical organisation. Theatrical entertainment had hitherto consisted of private bands of actors performing religious plays, whereas in the second half of Elizabeth's reign commercial theatrical companies were founded and purpose-built theatres were erected. When in 1594 the plague subsided and theatres were opened again, Shakespeare became a leading member of the company called the Lord Chamberlain's Players. They developed into London's foremost company, occupying the Globe Theatre from 1599 and changing their name to the King's Men when James I came to the throne in 1603.
Nothing is known for certain regarding Shakespeare's beginnings as a writer, nor when or in what capacity he entered the theatre. However, it is generally held that by 1595 he had already written the bulk of his early works. It seems that he initially confined himself to remodelling plays already in existence. Pericles, his first drama, is a case in point, as are Titus Adronicus, The Taming of the Shrew and The Comedy of Errors. It was not until 1590 or 1591 that his first original play, Love's Labours Lost, appeared. Moreover, this early period also saw productions of the ambitious historical trilogy known as Henry VI parts one, two and three, and its sequel Richard III.
Shakespeare's Globe Theatre was on the south side of the Thames, in the area known as Southwark. The district also comprised a prison attached to Winchester House, residence of the Bishops of Winchester. During the 16th century, Protestant and Catholic prisoners of conscience were detained in this jail. The surrounding area was London's red-light district, coming under the jurisdiction of the bishop rather than the less accommodating City of London. Thus Shakespeare would have found plenty of inspiration for low-life scenes and language in the immediate surroundings of his theatre. Like all theatres of the period, the Globe was built of wood and was only half covered, so plays had to be cancelled in bad weather. The Globe Theatre is now being reconstructed just east of its original site. The nearby Globe Museum illustrates the history of both the Globe and the Rose Theatres, where Shakespeare also acted.
Shakespeare devoted much of the middle period of his creative life to comedy. The most famous of these works are A Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelfth Night, which both appeared around 1600. Part of the delight of A Midsummer Night's Dream is the way the author mixes the fantastical world and language of Oberon, the King of the Fairies, with the rough, earthy speech and ways of the players brought in to provide the Duke of Athens with theatrical entertainment. The main plots of both this work and Twelfth Night involve unrecognised or unrequited love, around which Shakespeare weaves other tales of human foibles.
The words of Oberon, King of the Fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream, conjure up a magical world in delicate rhyming couplets:
I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows,
Where ox-lips and the nodding violet grows;
Quite over-canopied with lush woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine:
There sleeps Titania, some time of the night,
Lull'd in these flowers with dances and delight;
And there the snake throws her enamell'd skin,
Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in...
By contrast, when Bottom the weaver rallies his mates before the performance of their play, the prose is appropriately down-to-earth:
Get your apparel together; good strings to your beards, new ribbons to your pumps; meet presently at the Palace; every man look o'er his part; ... In any case, let Thisby have clean linen; and let not him, that plays the lion, pare his nails, for they shall hang out for the lion's claws. And most, dear actors, eat no onions, nor garlick, for we are to utter sweet breath...
The way grand people lived changed considerably around the beginning of the 17th century. In the Middle Ages, manorial lords used to impose their power by travelling from one estate to the next, taking much of their household with them. By Shakespeare's day, however, the wealthy still travelled, but with only a few companions and without carrying all their most treasured possessions with them. Thus their houses remained furnished all the time, and most of the old forms of furniture became obsolete. Tapestries and folding chairs retained their importance as status symbols, but no longer had any practical value. Instead, rooms were furnished with massive items that no one would ever dream of moving: huge beds, elaborate buffets, the writing-cabinet on a stand, the draw-table. Although later in the century such furnishings became more delicate and graceful, such change had more to do with aesthetics and notions of comfort than with any practical considerations. There was plenty of new building during this period, and since defence was no longer a major preoccupation, windows became larger and interiors better lit. The early-17th century nobleman or successful merchant would turn for his new residence to a mason or a carpenter, since architects at the time were practically unheard of in England. However, this gradually began to change, under the influence of French architects, who introduced the idea of a co-ordinated interior. Thereafter an architect would provide the ground-plan and elevations of the facades, while asking the various contractors for suitable designs for the features they were to provide: for example, the plasterer who was to do the ceiling, the mason who was to create the chimneypiece, and the paviour or joiner who had to lay the floor. However, the final appearance of any important 17th century room depended largely on the contribution made by the upholsterer, who provided all the hangings (for walls, beds, windows, etc.) as well as coverings for seat-furniture, tables and floors. Given the architectural shell, a great upholsterer could unaided provide a complete scheme of interior decoration. It was therefore he who governed fashion in this field.
Late in the 16th century Shakespeare again turned to tragedy. Julius Caesar was performed in 1599, and in 1602 Hamlet was entered in the register of the Stationer's Company, the body that controlled all printed publications. Two years later Othello received its first performance, though the play was not published until 1622. Then in 1605 King Lear appeared in its earliest version, followed the next year by Macbeth. In all these works Shakespeare managed to analyse and illustrate the passions that determine man's destiny: jealousy, greed, the thirst for power, excessive pride. In so doing he not only created dramas of great insight, but also some superbly moving blank verse, much of which has shaped our later perception and use of the English language.
The Royal Shakespeare Company was set up as a theatre company in the 1960s with the primary objective of putting on regular productions of Shakespeare's plays. It has a long summer season in Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare's birthplace, as well as a London home at the Barbican Centre. Such performances, especially those in Stratford, reveal to what extent Shakespeare is indeed a living legend. English actors have the rare skill of blending their own personalities with the character of the part they are interpreting, bringing new insight to every nuance of human nature and thereby also revealing the depth and relevance of words penned long ago.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a number of inter-related circumstances contributed to making a relatively small country into a major world power. England who had, up to that point, vied with the Dutch for commercial and naval supremacy, made an alliance with its erstwhile rival in order to foil French aims at expansion elsewhere in the Mediterranean.
The ensuing War of the Spanish Succession gave England the chance to flex her maritime muscles. This led to primacy in trade, and the strength to defend trade routes. Commerce itself was also changing. As the poor migrated towards the mines and manufacturing centres, productive output increased, thus calling for new and cheaper sources of raw materials and fresh markets overseas. Great Britain, as she had now become was able to supply the growing export markets with textiles, raw materials and newer manufactures from the output of foundries to weapons, tools, and households goods. Britain began building her empire abroad, while at home it provided the capital required for major architectural achievements, fine gardens and transport, in particular railways. In fact mobility became a driving force in industry. Further impetus was added by the rise of a well-to-do middle class anxious to forget the smell of factory smoke and attain gentility.
In Britain, what remained of the ancient collective economy of the village was swept away between 1760 and 1830 by the Enclosure Acts that destroyed the old "open field" system of farming and provided for effective drainage, crop rotation and hedging. Such policies favoured the richer, more extensive landowners, but left the rural poor without common land for grazing. They were thus forced to migrate towards the coal-mines, iron-works and cities, where nascent industry offered ill-paid jobs. This brought about a dramatic rise in the non-agricultural population, which in its turn meant that farming was increasingly geared to feeding the new recruits to towns and industry and to providing a mechanism for the accumulation of capital to be used in the more modern sectors of the economy. There were about 5,500,000 people in England and Wales at the end of the 17th century. By 1800, this had risen to nearly nine million, of which one million in London alone. The British capital was then the biggest city in the world.
The new map of nascent industrial Britain was shaped by the presence in the vicinity of plentiful supplies of coal and iron, combined with access to facilities for transporting materials and goods by water. The coalfields were most plentiful around Glasgow in Scotland, Newcastle in the north, the industrial Midlands stretching from the Yorkshire and Lancashire towns of Leeds, Bradford and Bolton down to Coalbrookdale, Birmingham and Coventry, and in South Wales, especially Swansea and Merthyr. The extractive industries were only the base of the local economy, however, which depended for its expansion on a wide range of manufacturing skills. Thus much of the countryside was covered with a strung-out web of iron-working villages, market towns next door to collieries, heaths and wastes gradually and very slowly being covered by the cottages of nailers and other people carrying industrial occupations in rural surroundings.
Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881), born in London of Italian-Jewish parentage, made an early name for himself as a novelist. However, he also became a statesman, leading the 'Young England' movement that espoused anti-industrial values. He served twice as prime minister, piloting the 1867 Reform Bill through the Commons. The following passage is taken from Sybil; or, the Two Nations, written in 1845:
The situation of the rural town of Marney was one of the most delightful easily to be imagined. In a spreading dale, contiguous to the margin of a clear and lively stream, surrounded by meadows and gardens, and backed by lofty hills, undulating and richly wooded, the traveller on the opposite heights of the dale would often stop to admire the merry prospect that recalled to him the traditional epithet of his country.
Beautiful illusion! For behind that laughing landscape, penury and disease fed upon the vitals of a miserable population.
The contrast between the interior of the town and its external aspect was as striking as it was full of pain. With the exception of a small agricultural market town, some sombre mansions, a dingy inn, and a petty bourse, Marney mainly consisted of a variety of narrow and crowded lanes formed by cottages built of rubble, or unhewn stone without cement, and... looking as if they could scarcely hold together... Before the doors of these dwellings... ran open drains full of animal and vegetable refuse, decomposing into disease...
In the 18th century the unit of account in England was the pound sterling. From the time of Queen Elizabeth this had been identified with a fixed quantity of silver. However, the fact that silver bullion was worth more than the face value of silver coinage encouraged people to engage in the illegal practice of melting down coins to make a quick profit when selling bullion. There was thus a chronic shortage of coinage for paying wages and buying raw materials. This dearth of money had important social effects. Early in the century Manchester linen drapers and Rochdale clothiers who provided raw material and yarn to country manufacturers had to make payment in cloth. Moreover, some enterprising industrialists took to manufacturing their own token coins. However, a greater role was played by currency in other forms. The creation of the National Debt at the end of the 17th century introduced securities bearing more or less fixed rates of interest. Some of these, including exchequer bills, navy bills and lottery tickets, could be used to settle accounts between individuals. However, in 1720 Britain was hit by a financial crisis arising out of speculation generated by Parliament's approval of the South Sea Company's proposal to take over the National Debt. When the South Sea Bubble burst, many investors were ruined. Other forms of investment were provided by well-to-do goldsmiths equipped with safes and strong rooms who would give receipts for moneys lodged with them. Such notes passed from hand to hand, subject only to endorsement, thus effectively working as cheques. By the mid-1700s, several private banks had been established and were growing in number. Some specialised in business with the aristocracy, the gentry and well-to-do lawyers, to whom they made loans on mortgages or bonds. Others concentrated on loans to members of the Stock Exchange and discounting bills for traders and manufacturers. However, banking was slow to develop in Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire, the most rapidly growing region of manufacture. This was because the needs of local commerce were met by promissory notes and the bills of exchange, drawn by one manufacturer or trader on another.
The social critic and essayist Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) was born in Scotland, studied at Edinburgh University and later moved to London. He wrote articles for the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia and became absorbed in German literature, especially the works of Goethe. In 1848 he wrote Past and Present, which contains outspoken criticism of the new shapers of Britain's social and industrial reality:
The Working Aristocracy; Mill-owners, Manufacturers, Commanders of Working Men: alas, against them also much shall be brought in accusation; much - and the frees Trade in Corn, total abolition of Tariffs, and uttermost 'Increase of Manufactures' and 'Prosperity of Commerce', will permanently mend no jot of it. The Working Aristocracy must strike into a new path; must understand that money alone is not the representative either of man's success in the world, or of man's duties to man; and reform their own selves from top to bottom, if they wish England reformed. England will not be habitable long, unreformed.
Founded in 1600, by the 18th century the East India Company practically monopolised the British export trade. The Orientals could provide silk, calico and cotton, and were willing to take useful metals, such as copper, lead, tin, iron and steel. In fact a considerable part of the exports of the Company consisted of these. However, the greatest demand was for precious metals, especially silver. By supplying this latter commodity, the East India Company was repeatedly criticised for draining England of its currency. The defence it made was that by exporting silver it was able to bring back a large volume of goods that found a ready market on the Continent, thus bringing England more bullion than was being sent out. Whether or not this was the case is difficult to establish. However, with its large merchant fleet and colonial possessions, Britain did its best to become what a contemporary commentator called 'the common depositum, magazine, or storehouse for Europe and America, so that the medium profit might be made to centre here'. The trading ships unloaded their English cargoes in India, then carried raw cotton, pepper, ivory, sandalwood and opium from there to the Hong merchants of Canton, and from these took tea in exchange.
One of the most dramatic and significant features of British society in the early 19th century was the growth of its towns. Between 1821 and 1831 the population of England and Wales increased by 16 percent, whereas the population of Manchester grew by 45 percent, that of Leeds by 47 percent, Sheffield and Birmingham by 40 percent and Bradford by 65 percent. At the beginning of the century there were only 15 towns in England and Wales with more than 20,000 inhabitants; by 1851 there were 63. The young people who migrated to the towns often contracted early marriages and produced a string of children. Such rapid growth put enormous pressures on living space. Migrants crammed into the existing housing stock vacated by wealthier townspeople moving to more salubrious areas. Speculators built a certain amount of new housing, but the quality was poor. The crowded inner urban areas were polluted by smoke and other industrial effluent, devoid of adequate paving, drainage and water supply, and totally lacking in anything akin to schools, shops or open space for recreation. Hardly surprisingly, outbreaks of infectious disease swept through the slum areas. The worst of these were the four cholera epidemics between 1831 and 1866 which accounted for the death of around 140,000 people.
The novelist Mrs. Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (1810-1865) was born in London, but moved to Manchester when she married. Her children all died in infancy, and she started writing as a distraction from her sorrow, advocating, through her novels, the need for social reconciliation and a better understanding between employers and workers. Charles Dickens was a great admirer of her work. In Mary Barton, written in 1848, she paints a dramatic picture of living conditions among the Manchester poor:
Berry Street was unpaved: and down the middle a gutter forced its way, every now and then forming pools in the holes with which the street abounded... As they passed, women from their doors tossed household slops of every description into the gutter...They got to some steps leading down to a small area, where a person standing would have his head about one foot below the level of the street, and might, without the least motion of his body, touch the window of the cellar and the damp muddy wall right opposite...It was very dark inside. The window panes of many of them were broken and stuffed with rags... on going into the cellar inhabited by Davenport, the smell was so foetid as almost to knock the two men down. Quickly recovering themselves, they began to penetrate the thick darkness of the place, and to see three of four little children rolling on the damp, nay wet brick floor, through which the stagnant, filthy moisture of the street oozed up...
Commerce in early modern Britain centred around London, though the ports of Liverpool, Bristol and Glasgow were rapidly growing. Business was largely based on slave-trade and colonial products such as sugar, tea, tobacco and cotton. However, it was cotton that was to have the most far-reaching effects on the future shape of Britain's economy and other parts of the world. Every ounce of the raw materials had to be imported from afar, and the products were largely sold abroad. Moreover, cotton was the first crop to be industrialized. The new factory systems centred around Manchester, which multiplied tenfold in size between 1760 and 1830. Initially the factories only housed the then-recently improved spinning wheels, which were later driven by steam power. Although a power-loom had also been invented in the 1780s, it was not until the 1820s that mechanisation began to make the manual weavers of the earlier cottage industries redundant. As industrialisation grew in other parts of the world, Britain catered to an increasing demand for capital goods such as iron, steel and coal. By the 1840s, wealth had increased beyond all measure, but so had indigence and misery. The following decades saw the enactment of various reforms aimed at improving the lot of the poor.
Although the first official imports of tea reached London in 1657, it was not until the East India Company started shipping tea back to England as a commodity in 1668 that fashionable people began to adopt the new beverage. Twenty-one pounds of that original consignment of 134 pounds of best Java tea were presented to the Queen, and with a royal patron the custom was bound to catch on. Tea began to pour into England in regular and increasing amounts, and as it trickled down through the various levels of society, the accoutrements necessary for its preparation also began to multiply: wooden tea caddies or chests in which the precious leaves were stored under lock and key, fine porcelain or silver cups, bowls, saucers and pots, cheaper wares in pewter for impecunious imbibers. Tea was to transform social and trading habits. Import duties were so high at 119 percent that a great deal of tea drunk in England was smuggled into the country. When duties were lowered to 12 percent in 1784, within the space of a year the amount that entered for home consumption rose from 4,962,000 to 16,307,000 pounds. Tea merchants such as the house of Twinings were established, and specialised grocers were proud to cater to the needs of the wealthier London families. As tea filtered down to the working classes, however, it gained a number of critics. One radical politician and journalist calculated that daily tea-breaks were wasting the nation 30 working days per capita a year. Moreover, the beverage was considered by many to be pernicious to health. At the bottom end of the social ladder this was probably true. The sort of tea usually drunk by the working classes had little to do with the green leaves imported from the East. Instead it was often a vile concoction of hedgerow sweepings and copper filings put together by unscrupulous backroom purveyors and dealers. No wonder the wretched drinkers found their health declining as they sipped their way through indigence.
The claims for the beneficial properties of tea made by tea auction posters in the 18th century were taken seriously by many future imbibers:
Those very nations famous for Antiquity, Knowledge and Wisdom do freely sell it among themselves for twice its weight in silver. It has proven beneficial to Headache, Stone, Gravel, Dropsy, Scurvy, Sleepiness, Loss of Memory, Looseness or Gripping of the Guts, Heavy Dreams and Collick proceeding from Wind. Taken with Virgin's Honey instead of sugar, tea cleanses the Kidneys and Uterus and with Milk and Water it prevents consumption: if you are of corpulent body it ensures good Appetite, and if you have had a surfeit it is just the thing to give you a gentle vomit...
During the 1700s, textile production remained the major British manufacturing interest. The output of woollen goods was increasingly geared towards the European market for new draperies. Linen was widely produced in Lancashire, as well as being the major manufacture and domestic export of Scotland and Ireland. However, in Lancashire cotton was gradually taking over as the main textile product. Indeed, during the reign of George III (1760-1820), the great inventions, the new methods, and problems pertaining to labour recruitment and capital were pioneered in textiles, particularly cotton. Thus England was paradoxically rising to economic predominance by manipulating a foreign raw material and increasingly distributing the finished product in the shape of cotton textiles to all areas of the globe. This was very much a reversal of her industrial beginnings. By 1820, instead of buying up Indian calico for import to Britain, the British agency houses in Calcutta were largely trading in raw cotton, indigo and opium. Control of Indian resources thus helped the British to balance their trade with the whole of East Asia. This was clearly at the expense of Indian textile production, which had practically collapsed by the 1820s. British textile manufacturers and merchants thus found fresh markets for their own products in Asia.
Industrial change in the late 18th and early 19th centuries involved a profound shift from the technology of wood, wind and water to that of carboniferous materials. By 1850, 3 million horses would have been needed to provide energy equal to that made available by steam power. This revolution involved agriculture as well as factories. Whereas in 1750 most farm tools were made locally by carpenters, smiths, ploughwrights and the farmers themselves, by 1800 farm equipment was increasingly being manufactured in factories. The very notion of agriculture as an industry was certainly an expression of this transformation. Moreover, the spread of railways speeded up deliveries of farm produce and obviated the need for cattle-driving to urban markets. The applications of the new source of power were endless. In 1851, with the help of steam pumps, a 1,900-acre marshy area of Norfolk was drained so quickly that a fenman was said to have been left stranded in his boat. Power driven devices also greatly aided mining, especially boring and shaft-sinking. The output of the British ironworks also increased dramatically thanks to the use of steam-hammers and rolling machinery. Yet the huge increase in coal output necessary to sustain the increased production of power and of industrial products did not in itself depend so much on machinery as on an increased labour force. The number of collieries rose by three between the 1790s and the 1840s, when bigger and deeper mines began to be exploited.
The writer and social reformer Samuel Smiles (1812-1904) was born and educated in Scotland, later settling in Leeds to work as a surgeon. However, he soon left medicine for journalism, writing a widely-circulated guide to self-improvement entitled Self-Help in 1859. The following description of technological innovation is taken from his Life of George Stephenson, published in 1857:
As promised by the engineer, a single line was ready by that day; and the 'Rocket', with a carriage full of directors, engineers and their friends, passed over the entire length of Chat Moss, and also along the greater part of the road between Liverpool and Manchester. The coal traffic had already been commenced at different parts of the railway;... It was soon found that the performances of the 'Rocket' on the day of completion were greatly within the scope of her powers. Thus, in June 1830, a trial trip was made between Liverpool and Manchester and back... A great concourse of people assembled to witness the spectacle. The train consisted of two carriages filled with about forty persons, and seven wagons laden with stores - in all about thirty-nine tons. The 'Rocket' drew the train from Liverpool to Manchester in two hours and one minute, and performed the return journey in an hour and a half. The speed of the train over Chat Moss was at the rate of about twenty-seven miles an hour.
Certain large employers in some of the smaller factory towns provided housing and other facilities for their workers. And a few exceptional entrepreneurs such as Robert Owen at New Lanark and Titus Salt at Saltaire actually developed complete industrial communities. By and large, however, most larger towns and cities grew in an unplanned muddle. Utter poverty inevitably gave rise to infectious disease, and it was this that really spurred on the 19th century reformers. Improvements in municipal government, together with the rapid growth of charitable institutions, helped to focus attention on the worst areas of neglect. The Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 reformed and standardised borough councils, obliging them to control borough property and provide an adequate police force, street lighting and market facilities by raising rates to defray the costs. Then in 1848 the Public Health Act contributed to a huge drive to pave streets, build sewers, provide better water supplies and demolish unsanitary housing. Prior to this the factory movement had fought to prevent the employment of children under the age of 9 and to limit the working day of those under 11 to 9 hours. Moreover, in 1833 slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire. Philanthropic bodies arose in great number to address the task of educating and improving the urban poor. These included domestic missions, visiting societies, voluntary and Sunday schools, sanitary associations and so on. By the 1870s, British towns had become healthier places to live in, although slum housing and the extreme poverty of the inner cities remained a major social problem.
Charlotte Brontδ (1816-1855) belonged to a family of English writers that also comprised Emily Jane, Anne and their brother Patrick Branwell. Their best-known works are Emily's Wuthering Heights and Charlotte's Jane Eyre, both of which were published in 1847. The following description of Charity School is taken from Charlotte Brontδ's Jane Eyre:
I passed from compartment to compartment, from passage to passage, of a large and irregular building; till, emerging from the total and somewhat dreary silence pervading that portion of the house we had traversed, we came upon the hum of many voices and presently entered a wide, long room; with great deal tables, two at each end, on each of which burnt a pair of candles, and seated all round on benches, a congregation of girls of every age, from nine or ten to twenty... Discipline prevailed... Ranged on benches down the sides of the room, the eighty girls sat motionless and erect: a quaint assemblage they appeared, all with plain locks combed from their faces, not a curl visible; in brown dresses, made high and surrounded by a narrow tucker about the throat, with little pockets of holland tied in front of their frocks, and destined to serve the purpose of a work-bag: all too wearing woollen stockings and country-made shoes fastened with brass buckles. About twenty of those clad in this costume were full-grown girls, or rather young women: it suited them ill, and gave an air of oddity even to the prettiest.
Improvements in transport were the most significant revolution within Britain's industrial revolution of the eighteenth century. However, it was developments in coal-mining that stimulated the beginnings of the transport revolution. Colliery wagons were in use early in the century, with horses drawing coal to the riverside. Some of the wagonways demanded the construction of huge arches, bridges and embankments. In the early 1800s, stationary steam-engines were brought into operation for winding up sets of wagons from collieries below. And by 1825, George Stephenson's locomotive engine was drawing coal- and passenger-wagons on the Stockton to Darlington Railway. By 1875, nearly five hundred million passengers were being transported by railway every year. Yet 'railway mania' itself was preceded by the development of a widespread canal network. This was pioneered by the Duke of Bridgewater, whose waterway between his coalmines at Worsley and Manchester was opened in 1761. Before the end of the century there was not a large town in England that was more than fifteen miles from a canal.
Industrialisation radically changed the landscape of Britain, provoking phenomena that would now go by the name of pollution. In fact the blaze of furnaces against a night sky became a popular subject for many artists of the period. When Victoria came to the throne in 1837, the industrial Midlands had already earned themselves the name of the Black Country. It consisted of ugly buildings, smoky new towns, and mazes of roads and canals with railways soon to come. A report written in 1843 described an "interminable village" where the traveller would "never be out of sight of numerous two-storied houses...for the most part not arranged in continuous streets but interspersed with blazing furnaces, heaps of burning coal in process of coking, piles of ironstone calcining, forges, pit-banks, and engine-chimneys; the country being intersected with canals and the small remaining patches of the surface soil occupied with irregular fields of grass or corn, intermingled with heaps of refuse of mines or slag from the blast furnaces...". Around the Lancashire cotton towns the landscape consisted of bare hills and chimneys, and in Manchester itself the air was thick with smoke. The same area was also devoted to glass and chemical manufacture, and by 1830 smoke carrying 'noxious vapours' from the alkali works had blackened the surrounding countryside and killed the hedgerows. Even London had its share of problems. Until well into the 18th century, vile effluent was discharged raw into the Thames, thus contributing to the shockingly unsanitary conditions of the city. Journalists had described the river as "a sewer with a tide in it". Major outbreaks of cholera were the most obvious results of the complete neglect of the basic necessities of urban sanitation. Things got so bad that during the 'Great Stink' of 1858 the sitting of Parliament could continue only with the aid of sheets soaked in chloride of lime hung over the windows to combat the stench.
The great English novelist Charles Dickens (1812-1870) gained wide acclaim for his memorable characters and his vivid portrayals of the social evils of Victorian England. In 1836 he published the first number of the Pickwick Papers, which established his position as a writer. This was followed in 1838 by Oliver Twist, the first of his 'reforming' novels. Among his later books are A Tale of Two Cities , published in 1859, and Great Expectations which appeared in 1861. The following excerpt is taken from Hard Times, written in 1854:
It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red of the smoke and ashes allowed it; but, as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.
The idea of passenger transport by railway came about in an utterly haphazard way. The owners of railways originally laid for goods transport were prepared to let anybody willing to pay the toll use their lines with his own carriages. One was opened in 1805, chiefly for carrying stone and lime from Merstham in Surrey via Croydon to Wandsworth on the outskirts of London. Nearly 200 miles of such railways began working between 1800 and 1820. The famous Stockton to Darlington railway was projected with similar intentions. Passenger vehicles were converted stage-coaches drawn by horses, though traction by steam-engine was gradually introduced. On a single-track railway provided with sidings at roughly quarter mile intervals and no signalling system, it can be imagined that this mass of uncoordinated traffic soon led to confusion. Conventions were worked out as to who should go back if vehicles or trains met between sidings, but eventually the company had to take over the entire operation. Those who invested in railways originally expected to draw their greatest gains from the carriage of coal and merchandise. They had no idea that such transport would soon create its own passenger traffic. When the Liverpool-Manchester line was extended four miles along the coast in 1830 to create a new coal-carrying sea-port, there was one farmhouse on the spot. Ten years later, 6000 people lived there in what had become the town of Middlesborough. By 1835 passenger traffic accounted for 53 percent of total receipts . The Liverpool-Manchester line demonstrated all the basic principles of railway technology and organisation. It also showed that railways paid: by 1833 share values had more than doubled. The rest of the country followed, somewhat cautiously at first, and then with the enthusiasm that led to the railway boom. By 1850 Britain was covered by a 6000-mile network of railway track.
The British novelist William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) was a regular contributor to Fraser's Magazine and to Punch. His best-known novels are Vanity Fair (1847-48) and Pendennis (1848). Published as part of James's Diary in Punch, August 1845, the following passage wittily describes the career of a lucky speculator:
Considerable sensation has been excited in the upper and lower circles in the West End, by a startling piece of good fortune which has befallen James Plush, Esq., lately footman in a respected family in Berkeley Square.
One day last week, Mr. James waited upon his master, who is a banker in the City; and after a little blushing and hesitation, said he had saved a little money in service, was anxious to retire, and to invest his savings to advantage.
His master (we believe we may mention, without offending delicacy, the well-known name of Sir George Flimsy, of the house of Flimsy, Diddler and Flash) smilingly asked Mr. James what was the amount of his savings, wondering considerably how, out of an income of thirty guineas, Mr. Plush could have managed to lay by anything.
Mr. Plush, with some hesitation, said he had been speculating in railroads, and stated his winnings to have been thirty thousand pounds. He had commenced his speculations with twenty, borrowed from a fellow-servant. He had dated his letters from the house in Berkeley Square, and humbly begged pardon of his master for not having instructed the Railway Secretaries who answered his applications to apply at the area-bell.
Sir George, who was at breakfast, instantly rose, and shook Mr. P by the hand; Lady Flimsy begged him to be seated, and partake of the breakfast which he had laid on the table and has subsequently invited him to her grand dΘjeuner at Richmond, where it was observed that Miss Emily Flimsy, her beautiful and accomplished seventh daughter, paid the lucky gentleman marked attention.
During the 18th century, the wealthy completed their education with the grand tour, especially through France and Italy. However, in the course of the late 1700s and early 1800s, holiday resorts in England itself began to attract increasing numbers of people. Initially such places, especially the seaside resorts, were the prerogative of the rich. But as industry more sharply differentiated work from leisure and as transport facilities grew, the patronage of holiday resorts began to extend down the social scale. By the mid-1800s, the railways had transformed what had begun as elegant watering places into day-trip resorts. In fact the 1851 Census commented on the expansion of seaside towns such as Brighton, Ramsgate, Margate, Lytham and Blackpool. Real earnings had been increasing for the past quarter of a century, and with the introduction of Bank Holidays in 1871 the time was ripe for transforming such places into sites of mass recreation. The commercialisation of the seaside was thus under way, bringing with its entertainments in the shape of minstrel quartets, pierrot troupes and piers.
The novelist Jane Austen (1775-1817), noted for her domestic novels of manners, chose as her settings the confines of middle-class provincial society. Her skill at drawing characters and situations with delicate irony is evident in the following excerpt from Pride and Prejudice, written when she was just twenty-one, and revised for publication in 1813. Clearly Brighton conjured up images of considerable moral ambiguity to the likes of sensible Elizabeth Bennet:
"If one could but go to Brighton!" observed Mrs Bennet.
"Oh yes! - If one could but go to Brighton! But papa is so disagreeable."
"A little sea-bathing would set me up for ever."
"And my aunt Philips said it would do me a great deal of good," added Kitty.
Such were the kind of lamentations resounding perpetually through Longbourn House. Elizabeth tried to be diverted by them; but all sense of pleasure was lost in shame; ...this invitation was far so from exciting in her the same feelings as in her mother and Lydia, that she considered it as the death-warrant of all possibility of common sense for the latter; and detestable as such a step must make her were it known, she could not help secretly advising her father not to let her go. She represented to him all the improprieties of Lydia's general behaviour, the little advantage she could derive from the friendship of such a woman as Mrs Forster, and the probability of her being yet more imprudent with such a companion at Brighton, where the temptations must be greater than at home.
During the 18th century, canals provided the essential link between the relatively underdeveloped area of Cornwall and the busy Potteries of the northern Midlands. China clay could thus be transported from the westernmost tip of southern England to the Staffordshire chinaworks. The farsighted Josiah Wedgwood, who is said to have 'elevated pottery manufacture from a matter of guesswork and procedure by rule of thumb to a matter of scientific method and calculation,' made his own works almost independent of local supplies of raw materials. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the Grand Trunk Canal which linked the Potteries with the Mersey in the North, the Midlands and London, and his Etruria works were served directly by barges laden with china clay and coal. The introduction of plaster of Paris moulds in 1745 considerably improved casting methods, ovens became larger and provided more even temperatures for firing, and enamelling and transfer printing were used for decoration. Wedgwood also had the acumen and vision to avoid competing with other potters through price reductions and instead to encourage quality and fashion. 'Fashion is infinitely superior to Merit in many respects' was one of his business aphorisms.
British architecture during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was both a product and an expression of the new industrial age. During the reigns of George II and his grandson George III, architects familiar with the glories of the Italian Renaissance designed splendid neoclassical city developments. John Nash's "Grand Design" near Regent's Park in London is a prime example, as is John Wood's achievement at the fashionable spa town of Bath. This period also saw the construction of fine houses in the grand Palladian style, such as Robert Adam's London designs at Kenwood House and Osterley Park, or his stunning accomplishment at Hopetoun in Scotland. However, there were also increasing numbers of imposing new public buildings that expressed the civic pride of the builders of the country's new wealth.
From 1714 through to 1830, the consecutive reigns of George I to George IV correspond very closely to the fashion for Classical architecture in Britain. The term 'Georgian' is thus used to indicate the chief attributes of Classicism, namely order, proportion, restraint, purity and elegance. In a society which believed it had discovered the universal rules of taste in the works of the ancient Greeks and Romans, uniformity deliberately prevailed over originality. Despite this builders of the period did occasionally experiment with the Gothic and Rococo styles and with chinoiserie. Yet generally speaking the Georgian style is noted for its homogeneity, by contrast to the ensuing eclecticism of the Victorian age. Apart from the boom in Classical urbanism which transformed every major town and city, the Georgian era also witnessed a prolific building of country houses.
Spa towns such as Bath, Buxton and Brighton became fashionable resorts in the 18th century, though the properties of their healing waters had been appreciated by the discerning few since much earlier times. Brighton began to attract the hypochondriacs of London when an enterprising doctor discovered that sea water might cure hydrophobia and many other ills caused by too much gin, too much food and an excess of cold air. Sea bathing was no pleasure since it was recommended at dawn and as late as November. Decorum was preserved by having ladies and gentlemen swimming in different parts of the beach. Drinking the sea water was also held to be beneficial. It could be taken mixed with milk 'to remove the loathing, sickness and thirst with which sea water, taken pure, is always attended'. By the time the Prince Regent and his court arrived in the late 1780s Brighton had become an important spa, offering springs called 'stromboli' and Turkish baths called 'shampoos'. There is something a little ambiguous about these terms, and in fact spas got a bad name for themselves as dens of licentious behaviour. Indeed, by the early 1700s Bath itself had become the 'resort of the sound as well as of the sick and a place that helps the indolent and the gay to commit that worst of murders - to kill time', as the writer Daniel Defoe declared. However, when 'Beau' Nash was appointed Master of Ceremonies at Bath, he cracked down on beggars and hooligans, made sure that the streets were safe at night, founded a hospital for the cure of rheumatic disease and in 1706 opened the first Pump Room where people could meet 'in civilised company'. A little later the architect John Wood began turning medieval Bath into an superbly elegant Georgian town. Soon everybody who was anybody came to Bath for the 'season', as much for the social encounters it promised as for the beneficial effects of taking the mineral-rich waters.
The model for all those wishing to make their mark on society through ostentatious consumption must have been Chiswick House in London, built between 1723 and 1729. Lord Burlington, its owner and creator, was a keen amateur architect, and one of the foremost promoters of Palladianism in England. The centrepiece of Chiswick House is a lofty octagonal space lit by semicircular windows beneath the dome. Four doors invite the visitor to explore the series of stately rooms which unfold like compartments in a carefully devised cabinet of delights. Largely designed by William Kent, the interiors centre around the Domed Saloon, where all paths meet. Symmetrically placed stone benches would have allowed guests to sit and indulge in some enlightened discourse on aesthetic matters before resuming their meanderings through the galleries. At Chiswick House there are practically no concessions to domesticity, for it was never a residence as such. Burlington designed it uniquely for parade and display, for hosting receptions and for the exposition of works of art. It is thus an extremely refined example of the desire to project an image that was to obsess increasing numbers of people over the next one hundred years. But whereas Burlington with his aristocratic origins and his considerable learning was well placed to create a work of considerable beauty, many of his later emulators had only recently made their money and hoped through buying and improving property to establish their gentility. These latter came in for considerable mockery in the hands of some of the late 18th and early 19th century novelists.
In Our Mutual Friend, published in 1864-65, the great Victorian novelist Charles Dickens showed up the foibles and pretensions of his newly affluent countrymen with delightful irony and humour. The description of the Veneerings' interiors is a classic study of nouveau riche ostentation and the somewhat breathless search for gentility that it embodied:
Mr. and Mrs. Veneering were bran-new people in a bran-new quarter of London. Everything about the Veneerings was spick and span new. All their furniture was new, all their friends were new, all their servants were new, their plate was new, their carriage was new, their harness was new, their horses were new, their pictures were new, they themselves were new, they were as newly married as was lawfully compatible with their having a bran-new baby, and if they had set up a great-grandfather, he would have come home in matting from the Pantechnicon, without a scratch upon him, French-polished to the crown of his head.
For, in the Veneering establishment, from the hall-chairs with the new coat of arms, to the grand pianoforte with the new action, and up-stairs again to the new fire-escape, all things were in a state of high varnish and polish. And what was observable in the furniture, was observable in the Veneerings - the surface smelt a little too much of the workshop and was a trifle sticky.
The achievement of the Adam brothers, John (1720-92), Robert (1728-92) and James (1732-94), may be measured by the fact that their name conjures up a style which remains a landmark in the history of design. However, the real genius behind the Adam Style was Robert, who had spent four years in Italy and believed that the austere formality practised by the Palladian school was a flat and insipid rendering of ancient artistry. He thus resolved to bring about 'a revolution in the whole system of this useful and elegant art' by introducing a 'beautiful variety of light mouldings, gracefully formed, delicately enriched, and arranged with propriety and skill'. The style also embraced a bold use of colour and motifs such as festoons, urns and chimeras. Each project was conceived as a total design in which ceilings, walls, fireplaces and furniture should all be co-ordinated. During the 1760s and 1770s the Adam Style was the epitome of fashion and extremely influential. Many country houses and town mansions were accordingly remodelled. However, fashion is fickle, and towards the end of the century the writer Horace Walpole dismissed the designs of Robert Adam as 'gingerbread and snippets of embroidery'.
The need to secure supplies of raw materials and markets for the new manufactured goods spurred Britain to control imperial and commercial sea routes. Naval ascendancy was established at the Battle of the Nile in 1798 and seven years later at the Battle of Trafalgar, when the French fleet was again soundly defeated. To inhibit the creation of any strong continental coalition, Britain opposed Napoleon from 1793 to 1815. Yet, when opportune, the British could also fight alongside the French. Their joint efforts in the Crimean War between 1854 and 1856 were aimed at preventing Russian expansion into the Mediterranean and protecting trade routes to the East. Queen Victoria, who came to the throne in 1837, showed her subjects what the Empire meant for them. With her husband, Prince Albert, she promoted the Great Exhibition of 1851 with its 100,000 objects from all over the world. Held in London's Hyde Park in the purpose-built Crystal Palace, it attracted over six million visitors.
Egypt during this period became a centre of imperialist rivalry. Napoleon's conquest of the area had introduced Western ideas, methods and techniques. When the French withdrew, the Egyptian leader Mohammed Ali set out to establish an efficient and Westernising despotism with foreign technical aid, most of it French. One of the major projects undertaken was the building of a 160 kilometre artificial waterway designed by the French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps to link the Mediterranean and the Red seas. The Suez Canal was completed in 1869, and since it favoured steam at the expense of sail, it stimulated the provision of coal-bunkering facilities that gradually spread world-wide. By providing a far swifter trading route through to India, the Suez Canal indirectly encouraged the British to step up their investments in Egypt and their interest in Egyptian affairs. So when the first nationalist movement in the Islamic world began to stir the air of Egypt and anti-European feelings came to the fore, an Anglo-French alliance was struck to avert any threat to the Canal. In its turn this led to unilateral British occupation of Egypt in 1882.
Prince Albert was born in 1819, the son of Ernest, duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. In 1840 he married his cousin, Queen Victoria, who adored him. However, as a foreign Prince Consort his position was a delicate one. Yet he was respected for his political advice and for his dedication to the arts, the sciences and the living conditions of the working class. The profits of the Great Exhibition so keenly promoted by Prince Albert were largely invested in a collection of buildings in the area of South Kensington in London, a true repository of Victorian taste. These include the sumptuous Gothic Albert Memorial, the Italianate amphitheatre of the Royal Albert Hall and the Victoria & Albert Museum. When Prince Albert died of typhoid in 1861, the heart-broken Queen Victoria practically withdrew from public life for fifteen years.
Queen Victoria adored her husband, Prince Albert, and was immensely proud of his triumph at the Great Exhibition of 1851. The following extract from her Journal for that year reveals the sovereign, the woman and the event:
May I [1851]. This day is one of the greatest and most glorious days of our lives, with which to my pride and joy, the name of my dearly beloved Albert is for ever associated! It is a day which makes my heart swell with thankfulness. We began the day with tenderest greetings and congratulations on the birth of our dear little Arthur. He was brought in at breakfast and looked beautiful with blue ribbon on his frock...
The Park presented a wonderful spectacle, crowds streaming through it, - carriages and troops passing, quite like the Coronation, and for me, the same anxiety. The day was bright and all bustle and excitement. At half past eleven the whole procession in 9 State carriage was set in motion... The Green Park and Hyde Park were one mass of densely crowded human beings... A little rain fell, just as we started, but before we neared the Crystal Palace, the sun shone and gleamed upon the gigantic edifice, upon which the flags of every nation were flying... The sight as we came to the centre ... facing the beautiful crystal fountain was magic and impressive. The tremendous cheering, the joy expressed in every face, the vastness of the building, with all its decoration and exhibits, the sound of the organ and my beloved husband, the creator of this peace festival 'uniting the industry and art of all nations of the earth', all this was indeed moving, and a day to live for ever. God bless my dearest Albert, and my dear Country, which has shown itself so great today.
The Great Exhibition of 1851 was so successful as a trade fair that it spawned several schemes of a similar nature, both in Britain and abroad. It also heralded considerable expansion in wholesaling as well as a transformation in retailing. Daily and weekly markets continued to be held and were particularly important for agricultural produce and perishable foodstuffs. However, alongside such traditional methods there were new forms of retailing catering particularly to the middle classes and the well-to-do. Shopkeeping also underwent change. Some built up their businesses by engaging in wholesaling as well. Others prospered on the basis of 'small profits and quick returns' by developing display and advertising and by refusing to give credit. However, the increase in purchasing power of the urban working class and the growing standardisation of products also led to other developments in the early 1800s. One of the foremost was the establishment of co-operative societies to provide better-off sections of the working class with cheap sound articles and unadulterated food. Once these societies were operating several branches in an integrated system of wholesaling and retailing, they were able to benefit from price reductions from bulk orders. The lesson was soon learnt by the pioneers of Britain's chain stores. Thomas Lipton, for instance, began with a single shop in Glasgow in 1872 and by the end of the century had 245 branches across the country selling his pre-packed, standardised brand products. By acquiring sources of supply, he and others like him were able to market products more cheaply. Apart from foodstuffs, chain stores traded in mass-produced footwear, chemist's goods, ready-made clothing, books and stationery.
Joseph Paxton's design for the Crystal Palace was significant for its use of standardised prefabricated elements. The building was 1,848 foot long and 456 foot across at its widest point. Paxton had been a gardener rather than an engineer, and for the previous twenty years had been designing greenhouses on a large scale. The novelty of his plan for the Great Exhibition building lay not only in its conception but in its implementation. It could not have been erected even fifty years earlier. Interchangeable parts had to be employed, and these were products of the machine-tool industry. Moreover, plate glass had to be available in huge quantities. Prefabrication was essential and the method of building was modular. Moreover, it was machines which turned out the sash-bars and gutters and laid on the paint. The structure relied for lateral stability entirely on the rigid connection between vertical iron columns and horizontal beams. Brunel, the great engineer and inventor, hoped that the Exhibition building might become the most important exhibit in the Exhibition. Yet there were many influential men of taste who were totally opposed to the possibility of a new architecture based on such methods and materials. William Morris, the critic and designer, disliked plate glass because it let in too much light and dismissed modern engineering as 'a horrible and restless nightmare'. He went to the Great Exhibition but refused to go round and look at the exhibits, declaring it all 'wonderfully ugly'. As for John Ruskin, the historian of architecture, the writer and the educator, he refused to believe that iron was a suitable material for construction. He described the new railway stations that used the same technology as 'alien to architecture', comparable with rat-holes and wasps' nests. In Britain the 'new architecture' was not destined to get off the ground for a long time. In America, however, it developed into the skyscrapers based on the steel frame.
Located right in the centre of London, Hyde Park assures thousands of Londoners their daily breath of fresh air, offering peace and quiet to anyone exhausted by the rush of the city. First open to the public during the reign of James I, the Park now covers 630 acres where people can ride, jog, stroll or lie around at leisure. It's a good place to take a sandwich and a book for a quiet read at lunchtime. But given its size and location, it has also proved to be an ideal venue for pop concerts. Up at the north-east end, near Marble Arch, is Speakers' Corner, where anyone can get up and have his or her say. There's no guaranteed audience, of course.
The Victorians would not have been particularly impressed by the sheer numbers who flock to the pop concerts held in Hyde Park. After all, the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations held there in 1851 attracted over six million visitors. Moreover, the park housed them and the products in the specially constructed Crystal Palace, an audacious structure in iron and glass designed by Joseph Paxton.
It's one of life's little ironies that the Londoners who enjoy feeding the squirrels and the fowl in Hyde Park should actually owe this privilege to King Henry VIII. The sixteenth century sovereign reserved vast areas of the country around what was then the main nucleus of London for another of his favourite pastimes: hunting.
Imagine setting out on an early spring morning and emerging from the noise and rush of traffic to find yourself surrounded by an immense sea of crocuses: over one and a half million of them reaching up to the cautious sun. Throughout the year at Kew Gardens there are natural wonders to take your breath away: quiet carpets of bluebells and proud rhododendrons and azaleas in May and June, an enchanting rose garden from July to September, every imaginable tone of green, brown, russet, red and yellow as autumn gives way to winter. And this is only part of the constantly changing picture at the world's premier botanical institution. The 300 acre grounds also contain a number of highly individual glasshouses on such a large scale that they themselves are a source of amazement: for instance, the Palm House built between 1844 and 1848 to contain plants now rare or even extinct in their native habitats, the Temperate House of the same period, and the modern Princess of Wales Conservatory with its ten different environmental zones in which Kew's unrivalled collection of tropical herbaceous plants are cultivated and displayed.
In the year 2085 the experts at Kew will exhume a glass globe buried in the Princess of Wales Conservatory in 1985 by the great naturalist, Sir David Attenborough. This 'Seeds of the Future' capsule, prepared under the auspices of the World Wildlife Fund Plants Campaign, contains seeds of basic food crops and endangered species, many of which may have disappeared from the wild by the time the capsule is exhumed. The operation emphasises the importance of plant collection not only for reference, but also as a bank of genetic resources for conservation purposes.
Both the Palm House and the Temperate House were designed by the great Regency architect Decimus Burton. This was the Victorian 'age of iron' as these structures reveal. For the Palm House, Burton proposed heavy cast iron arches. However, the ironfounder suggested replacing these with a wrought iron 'deck beam' of the sort used in ship building to span greater widths of unsupported space. The house has been compared to the upturned hull of a graceful liner ever since.
After 130 years of exposure to the elements, the Palm House was in dire need of restoration. This massive operation began in 1985 and involved clearing the house of plants for the first time in its history. The oldest port plant in the world, Encephalartos altensteinii, was the most difficult to transport, requiring the construction of a special scaffold support. As the Palm House is the most important surviving nineteenth century glass and iron structure in the world, proper conservation meant replacing like with like. So ductile iron was used for castings, though the main arches were strengthened with mild steel and stainless steel was used for the ten miles of glazing bars. Many original parts of the building were re-instated in the refurbished house. It was officially re-opened by HRH The Queen Mother in November 1990.
King George III was a keen patron of horticulture, and over 7000 varieties and species were introduced into England for cultivation during his reign. It was normal practice for ships taking out agricultural crops to the newly established colonies to bring back a collection of local flora for private gardens and nurseries, including the King's gardens at Kew. All sorts of boxes and containers were devised for this purpose*, but almost one thousand plants were lost for every one that survived the hazardous journey by ship. Sir Joseph Banks, the naturalist who accompanied Captain Cook on his voyage round the world in the 1770s, was both President of the Royal Society and effective head of Kew Gardens. He counselled captains "against all temptations of idleness or liquor", because "one day or even an hour's negligence may destroy all the trees and plants which may have been collected".
"The great cabin was appropriated for the preservation of plants, and extended as far forward as after the hatchway. It had two large sky-lights, and on each side three scuttles for air, and was fitted with a false floor cut full of holes to contain the garden pots, in which the plants were to be brought home. The deck was covered with lead, and at the foremost corners of the cabin were fixed pipes to carry off the water that drained from the plants, into tubs below to save it for future use". Quoted from William Blight, Captain of the Bounty on its 1787 mission to collect breadfruit in the Pacific and transport them to the West Indies where it was hoped they could be grown as cheap food for the local slave labour.
You'll find worlds within worlds, or rather kingdoms within kingdoms at Regent's Park. These ample confines of a garden devised for human leisure and pleasure also contain the famous London Zoo in which the particular realms of individual animal species have been carefully reproduced. In recent years the future of the Zoo has sometimes seemed unsure. However, today even animal rights activists will admit that the housing and recreation facilities created for the creatures at Regent's Park are admirable, indeed enviable. Not all Her Majesty's subjects can say the same.
Regent's Park also offers visitors the delights of a boating lake with many varieties of water birds. Moreover, it comprises a haven of changing colour and scent in the shape of the Queen Mary's Gardens and certainly the city's finest rose garden.
During the summer, the Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park hosts performances of some of Shakespeare's airier creations, such as the Comedy of Errors, As You Like It, or A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Regent's Park and the houses surrounding it are largely the product of a grandiose scheme devised by John Nash between 1812 and 1827. Nash envisaged Regent's Park not as a pleasure ground but as a natural setting for 40 to 50 exquisite villas so designed that "each should appear to possess the whole of the Park". In fact only a few of them were built, and Nash's main achievement is the succession of noble terraces in the vicinity. He originally intended the houses along Regent's Street itself to be embellished with "balustrades over colonnades" so that the "Nobility and Gentry... could walk about and amuse themselves every day of the week, instead of being frequently confined to their houses by rain". Things do not always turn out according to plan, and the said colonnade was demolished in 1848 because it had become a convenient resort for ladies of ill-fame.
Animals from far-away shores have been major and lucrative attractions since well before the days of the London Zoo. They have included human freaks, tame bears which often danced, monkeys, even tigers and other wild animals. In August 1684 a contemporary chronicler recorded the astounding arrival of "the strange beast called the Rynnoceros" which "more resembled a huge enormous Swine, than any other Beast among us". And this was saying quite a lot for a man who lived in the age when Bedlam, the asylum for the insane at Bishopsgate, was a major entertainment centre that attracted countless spectators.
Located to the north of the city centre, the 8 square kilometres of Hampstead Heath allow Londoners to feel that they are in the countryside. Uncluttered by the haphazard buildings and statues that embellish the central London parks, the Heath is actually the product of a number of different estates and grounds. It thus embraces a variety of landscapes, from woods, meadows and hills to ponds and lakes, some of which are suitable for bathing and fishing. The ample open spaces are also particularly well suited to kite-flying. On the three holiday weekends of Easter, late spring and late summer, the southern part of the Heath is taken over by a popular funfair. Bordering the western side of Hampstead Heath is a charming garden featuring a pergola walkway best seen in summer, when many of the plants are in bloom. Known as The Hill, it was created by the Edwardian soap manufacturer and patron of the arts, Lord Leverhulme, and was originally the grounds of his house; it is now a hospital.
The concept of the funfair is a relatively modern one. Indeed, the eighteenth-century attitude towards popular amusements was almost exactly the opposite of the modern one. It was assumed that they were necessarily connected with drinking to excess, and that they led to breaches of the peace and many social evils. In fact magistrates long did their best to put down not only gaming-houses, bull-baitings and cock-fighting, but fairs, interludes, public shows and minor theatres. In the words of a contemporary report: "(T)o the said plays and interludes great numbers of mean, idle, and disorderly people do commonly resort, and after the performance is over from thence go to the bawdy houses or to other houses of ill-fame... greatly to the corruption of the morals of his majesty's subjects and the breach of the peace".
The population of Elizabethan London grew at an alarming rate. With a five-fold increase in the space of fifty years, by the early 1600s the subject of urban spread was hotly debated in Parliament. The measures ordained were largely ineffectual, however. In fact the preservation of vast open spaces like Hampstead Heath owes more to Henry VIII's declaration of exclusive hunting rights than to any of the Elizabethan bans on new construction.
Although Richmond Park is not in central London, it is easily reached by underground and bus. On fine days, walkers can enjoy sharing the extensive heathland and wooded areas with apparently undaunted deer. In late spring, the highlight of the Park is the Isabella Plantation, which boasts a spectacular display of rhododendrons. Not far away are the Pen Ponds, where optimistic anglers cast their lines. Model boats have a special reserve of their own on Adam's Pond.
Richmond Gate, in the north-west corner of the Park, was designed in 1798 by Lancelot Brown, a landscape gardener who earned himself the nickname 'Capability' Brown from his habit of saying that a place had 'capabilities'. His designs favoured an imitation of nature, in contrast with the formal continental style. He was also responsible for landscaping the gardens at Blenheim Palace, Kew and Warwick Castle.
Near the north-west tip of the Park is Henry VIII Mound, where in 1536 the king, then staying in Richmond Palace, awaited the signal that his second wife had been executed. This was the ill-fated Anne Boleyn, who had failed to revive her husband's flagging passions even after producing a daughter, the future Queen Elizabeth I. Eleven days after thus disposing of his second wife, Henry VIII married for the third time. Charles I, when he was Prince of Wales in 1637, built a wall thirteen kilometres round to enclose the royal park as a hunting ground. The deer who graze among the chestnuts, birches and oaks are no longer hunted, though they are still discreetly culled.
This is one of London's true delights: an enchanting smaller park that is more wooded and intimate than the large royal parks to its east. It was opened in 1952 on what remained of the grounds of Holland House, once land had been sold off for building development in the late nineteenth century. The remains of the house have since been turned into a youth hostel, while the outhouses host exhibition space in the orangery and ice house and a pleasant restaurant in what used to be the Garden Ballroom. The trend towards a symmetrical layout was a typical feature of Jacobean architecture. To get an idea of the large-scale of the original Holland House of 1607, one may imagine the medieval dining hall being turned into a vestibule and the east wing (now the youth hostel) being a grandiose hall centred in the faτade. Despite its relatively small size, Holland Park has an abundance of wildlife, including peacocks. There is also an open-air theatre for opera, plays and dance, as well as a Japanese garden created in 1991 for the London Festival of Japan.
During its heyday in the nineteenth century, Holland House was a noted centre of social and political intrigue. Statesmen such as Lord Palmerston, British Premier and keen advocate of the Crimean War, used to meet here with the likes of the poet, Lord Byron, always keen to be in the right place at the right time.
To get an idea of the scale of Holland House as it was originally in 1607, imagine the extant east wing (now the youth hostel) as part of a symmetrical design featuring a hall in the middle of the facade, entred by a central door. Thus the medieval dining hall had in fact been turned into a vestibule. This trend towards a symmetrical layout was a typical feature of Jacobean architecture.
Over the years Portobello Market has gained such widespread international fame that it has lent its name to innumerable pale imitations elsewhere around the globe. Street trading began here back in 1837. Today the daily market is largely devoted to fruit and vegetables. If you go there towards the end of the day you can get boxes of produce very cheaply. However, what attracts huge numbers of people on Saturdays are the stalls selling antiques, jewellery, souvenirs and collectibles.
One particular trait of this area is that the market stallholders and the taxi-drivers speak in the cockney dialect, the typical parlance of Londonφs East Enders. Developed in earlier times by the London poor, cockney slang was meant to deter the authorities from discovering the illegal goings-on of the locals. With its own vocabulary and pronunciation, at times it can be virtually impenetrable to the ear of a visitor.
Centuries before our age of invasive advertising, it was up to the merchants, vendors and pedlars of great cities to cry their wares to attract custom. These cries were so numerous and varied that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries some of them were set to music by highly respected composers. The outcome is a delightful mixture of functional folk music and convivial polyphony.
Covent Garden Market is living proof of the fact that Londoners prefer to rehabilitate old structures than to face the shock of the new. The vast area in which the city's greengrocers once purchased their fresh produce now contains an array of small shops selling designer clothes, books, arts, crafts, decorative items and antiques. There are cafΘs with tables outside offering a fine view of the surroundings, and plenty of good eating places in the vicinity. Street entertainment is a tradition of the area: in fact the portico of St Paul's Church was used for Punch and Judy shows back in the seventeenth century. Today there is a great variety to choose from: jugglers, actors, clowns, acrobats and musicians enliven the square and make even the dullest day seem bright.
The covered central market was designed by Charles Fowler in 1833 for fruit and vegetable wholesalers. The glass and iron roof was typical of the Victorian age, anticipating not only the giant railway termini, but also the glass houses at Kew Gardens and the Crystal Palace that was specially erected for the Great Exhibition of 1851.
The original name for this area was 'Convent Garden'. In fact its development came about as a result of Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries between 1536 and 1540. The 'Convent Garden' was part of the estate that had fallen to the Russell family, whose descendant, the fourth Earl of Bedford, obtained a licence to build as many 'houses and buildings fit for the habitations of gentlemen and men of ability' as he should think proper. It was at Covent Garden in 1631 that the notion of a coherent urban plan made its first appearance in London. The man responsible for this was Inigo Jones, the first of the great English architects. He had studied landscape painting in Italy, and from Venice introduced the Palladian style to England. In his designs for the Church of St Paul in Covent Garden, he added an imposing portico in the Tuscan style to the fa┴ade overlooking the Piazza. Since the entrance to the church is by the opposite west end, this amounts to an architectural charade: a mere front that relates more to the open space of the square than to the structure of the building itself. This shift away from the function of an individual building towards the exigencies of townscape was a revolutionary leap forward in London's urban development.
The casual sale of fruit, flowers and vegetables in Covent Garden was put on a commercial footing in 1671, when a licence for a proper market was obtained. The sudden arrival of hordes of raucous countryfolk with their produce clearly did not appeal to the aristocratic residents of the square, who started to move west, thus contributing to a gradual process of social stratification by area, with the wealthy clustering in exclusive settlements in the West End, while the East End became the repository of the less well endowed. This process gained further impetus from the growing aristocratic snobbery directed against tradesmen in general.
This popular Sunday morning market spreads out from Middlesex Street as far east as Brick Lane with its rows of aromatic Bengali food shops. The area has long been a centre for the clothing trade, with a latter-day specialisation in leather goods. There are also numerous stalls trading in watches, cheap jewellery and toys. Petticoat Lane market has a bustling energy of its own, having withstood various attempts to close it down. Many of the innumerable snack bars in the area sell traditional Jewish food, such as salt beef sandwiches and bagels with smoked salmon.
Petticoat Lane got its name long ago from the clothing trade that has been active in the area since the sixteenth century. However, in Queen Victoria's prudish times so direct a reference to women's intimate apparel was thought to be indecent, and the name of the road was changed to Middlesex Street. However, people continued to call the market by its traditional name: Petticoat Lane it had always been and Petticoat Lane it was going to remain, regardless of nineteenth century sensibilities.
Over the centuries, the people and institutions that did not wish to come under the City's jurisdiction or were not welcome there, tended to settle just to the north of the City walls. Initially they consisted of religious orders, dissenters, the earliest theatres and the French Huguenots of the 17th century. Then in the 19th and 20th centuries the area also provided refuge for other immigrants from Europe, and later from Bengal, who established workshops and small factories and brought with them their ethnic restaurants and places of worship.
Little shops filled with ceramics, jewellery and paintings surround a bandstand in Gabriel's Warf, where jazz groups sometimes play in the summer. Around the courtyard there are also stalls selling ethnic clothing, handmade jewellery and pottery. And under nearby Waterloo Bridge is a book market with titles old and new for all tastes. This pleasant riverside enclave with its splendid views of the city is the product of some energetic manoeuvring on the part of the local residents association that bought the site in 1984 and built co-operative housing around the wharf.
This was once an industrial riverside area filled with warehouses for storing products shipped up the Thames. When the railways made their incursion into the City from the south, commerce and industry gained new impetus. However, not all Victorians relished the pollution and noise it brought. A writer of the 1880s described the view from Waterloo Bridge in almost apocalyptic terms: "huge wide-opened jaws of those two Behemoths, the Cannon Street and Charing Cross railway stations... they belch forth puffing trains as the breath of their nostrils, gorging and disgorging incessantly those human atoms whose movement is the life of the city".
This area was named after the famous victory at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, when Napoleon was finally defeated and the French Wars were brought to en end. The allied forces who beat the French were led by the Duke of Wellington, owner of Apsley House, London's most prestigious private residence. In 1822 a Statue of Achilles was erected in Hyde Park in honour of the Duke of Wellington.
This market on the south side of London Bridge is where antique dealers cull and trade much of their merchandise. It only operates on Friday mornings, and real finds go quickly. Though the best bargains will be gone by the time most tourists get there, there's plenty of scope for browsers before the market closes in the early afternoon. Nearby there are various antique shops that are open all week. The most interesting are situated in a row of old warehouses on Tower Bridge Road. They are piled high with furniture and bric-a-brac of varied vintage and price.
During the 18th century, disposing of private collections of 'curiosities' became a thriving business. The clockmaker and inventor Christopher Pinchbeck not only sold his own inventions, but also dealt in the general materials of museums and exhibitions as a broker and commission merchant. He devoted two rooms of his house to his saleable collections, and charged a 5 percent sales commission. When his unsold stock was sold at Christie's in 1784, it contained, among other categories of art objects, 916 'bijoux curieux', 94 pictures, 41 porcelains, and 24 prints.
The Southwark district just south of London Bridge was once a popular venue for the pursuit of illicit pleasures because it was beyond the jurisdiction of the City authorities. Prostitution thrived in houses facing the river, and theatres and beer gardens were established here in the late 16th century. Shakespeare's company was based at the Globe Theatre, and also played at the Rose. It was the influence of continental collectors and their 'cabinets' of natural and mechanical wonders that fired the British taste for collecting in the late seventeenth century. An advertisement published in 1700 reveals that one early device for selling rarities to collectors was a combination raffle and sale "of a great variety of rarities" disguised as a social occasion and embellished with "a concert of music by the best performers". In 1710 a German visitor to London described "an extremely elegant cabinet of coins" and "a superabundance of statues" collected by a city cutler, whose prices, however, he considered "monstrous".
What most strikes the visitor on entering St Paul's Cathedral is the luminous spaciousness of the interior, its clear sense of order and balance. The cathedral authorities insisted on the nave, transepts and choir being arranged in the shape of a cross, as they were in medieval cathedrals. Yet the architect, Christopher Wren, managed to imbue his design with classical vision despite the conservative floor plan. The overall impression is one of majesty and Baroque splendour: truly a worthy setting for the many great ceremonial events that have taken place here. These include the funeral of Winston Churchill in 1965 and the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer in 1981. Second in height only to that of St Peter's in Rome, the Dome of St Paul's is 110 metres high and is surmounted by a lantern that weighs a massive 850 tonnes. This mighty crown is also visible from inside the building through the oculus, or circular opening, above the monochrome frescoes painted by Sir James Thornhill, the leading architectural painter of Wren's time. Below these paintings is a circular porticoed loggia called the Whispering Gallery, whose unusual acoustics cause even the merest whisper to echo around the dome.
On show in the crypt of St Paul's is the Great Model, showing Christopher Wren's original design for the new Cathedral. It was carved in 1672, but was rejected by the conservative cathedral authorities as being too revolutionary. A comparison of the original plan with the existing edifice shows how the architect had to bow to current tastes yet nevertheless managed to preserve the grandeur of his initial concept.
St Paul's was actually founded in the year 604 AD. This can be seen as recognition of the renewed importance of the walled city of Londinium following the long decline of the post Roman years. However, the focus of Christianity in Britain was certainly in Canterbury, where Augustine had established the bishopric.
One of Britain's greatest architects of all time was Sir Christopher Wren. Born in 1632, he was a professor of astronomy at Oxford University, and in 1666 co-founded the prestigious scientific association known as the Royal Society. After the Great Fire of London of 1666, he drew designs for rebuilding the whole city. Although this grandiose plan was never implemented, in 1669 he did design the new St Paul's and many other of the capital's churches and public buildings, including the Royal Exchange, the Greenwich Observatory and Kensington Palace. He is buried in St Paul's.
In his church designs Christopher Wren opted for a revolutionary interior layout with a square centralised plan "fitted for auditories", as he himself declared, "with Pews and Galleries" so that all could "hear distinctly, and see the Preacher". He added huge windows to admit as much light as possible, thus creating a luminous upper half in contrast to the dark wood of the wainscoting and the high box-pews which contained the congregation. These are buildings in which divinity is still present, but without the deliberate mystery of earlier ages.
The towers on the main west front were not in Wren's original plan. He added them in 1707, when he was 75 years old, predisposing them both to be embellished with clocks.
The magnificent edifice of Hampton Court arises among wonderfully varied and extensive gardens in an outlying area to the south-west of central London. As an historic royal palace, it bears witness to all the kings and queens of England from Henry VIII to the present day. From the outside, the palace is a harmonious blend of Tudor and English Baroque architecture. The interiors are decorated with furniture, old masters and tapestries from the Royal Collection.
Cardinal Wolsey, powerful Archbishop of York to Henry VIII, began building Hampton Court in 1514 as a riverside country residence for himself. In 1525 he suspected that he was slipping from royal favour, and offered the palace to the King in the vain hope of redressing matters. Henry considerably extended and rebuilt the residence, adding the magnificently decorated King's Staircase leading to the royal apartments.
Thomas Wolsey accrued enormous power during the reign of Henry VIII by being simultaneously a cardinal, Archbishop of York and chancellor. However, when he failed to persuade the Pope to allow his sovereign to divorce his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, Wolsey fell from royal favour. He died in 1530 on his way to face trial for treason.
The Pond Garden down on the south side near the Thames is a sunken water garden that was part of Henry VIII's elaborate designs. Another Tudor garden feature is the Maze, far over on the north side.
By Henry VIII's day, political stability was such that the castle no longer needed to be a fortress. It was thus transmuted into a palace. The gatehouse, towers and battlements of Hampton Court all bear witness to this transformation. They have no serious defensive function and are instead embellished with various ornamental features. This is the case with Anne Boleyn's Gateway at the entrance to the Clock Court. The Astronomical Clock itself was built for Henry VIII in 1540.
King William and his wife Mary moved to Hampton Court in 1689, hiring Christopher Wren to design various extensions. These included the buildings around the Fountain Court and the somewhat restrained East Front that acts as the focal point of the majestic Long Water, a geometrical system of man-made lakes running parallel to the Thames from the Fountain Garden.
The inspiration for the Hampton Court gardens as they are today dates back to the late 1600s and is largely due to Christopher Wren, who designed a vast formal Baroque landscape, with radiating avenues of majestic limes and many collections of exotic plants.
The imposing medieval architecture of Westminster Abbey has for centuries impressed visitors to London. However, the building also occupies a unique place in the British national consciousness because it is the resting place of the country's monarchs and the setting for great pageants such as coronations. Some of the tombs are strikingly plain, while others are richly decorated. Moreover, the aisles and transepts also house a great number of monuments to some of Britain's greatest public figures, from politicians to poets.
The greatest of London's medieval monuments, Westminster Abbey is a highly complex building constructed over a period of 300 years. It was begun in 1245 at the behest of the most prolific of royal builders, Henry III. The first part of the work to be accomplished was the east end, which followed the French tradition of the polygonal apse with ambulatory and radiating chapels. During the sixteenth century a pre-existing chapel was demolished to make way for the spectacular Henry VII Chapel, whose fan vaults are a typical feature of the Tudor style.
Sculpture was one of the great artistic legacies of the Church in the Middle Ages. Unfortunately much of it did not survive Henry VIII's deliberate vandalism in dissolving the monasteries in the late 1540s. However, since Westminster Abbey was both a monastic complex and the royal coronation church, it was spared that destructive onslaught. As a result, it contains the finest collection of medieval sculpture in London. A typical feature of such works is the idealisation of the human figure.
All royal coronations have taken place in Westminster Abbey since 1066. The last occupant of the Coronation Chair, visible in St Edward's Chapel, was the present monarch, Elizabeth II. She was crowned in 1953, and it was the first time that television was able to relay the magnificent event and its sumptuous setting to a wider audience.
Although Westminster Abbey was begun in 1245, the nave was largely completed from 1375 onwards under the direction of Henry Yvele, the first architect of renown to have substantially shaped the face of London. It was usual for the builders of the Middle Ages to add variations of their own design to existing structures with little concern for overall effect. So the fact that Yvele assiduously followed the proportions laid down over 130 earlier makes him the first London architect to respect the scale and harmony of the inherited fabric and to design in sympathy with it.
The south transept of Westminster Abbey houses what it known as "Poets' Corner": a large number of memorials to famous literary giants such as Shakespeare and Dickens.
The official London residence of Her Majesty the Queen at Buckingham Palace is surely the most famous of all royal palaces in Britain. It was commissioned by George IV, a somewhat dissipated, extravagant king, but nevertheless a great patron of the arts. He chose the famous Regency architect John Nash to design his 600-room residence. However, it was not finished until long after the sovereign's death in 1830. In fact the palace remained unused until Queen Victoria's succession in 1837. Moreover, the familiar east faτade was actually only added in 1913.
Since Buckingham Palace doubles as the office and the home of the British monarchy and is also used to host banquets for visiting heads of state, it provides employment for about 300 people. These include the officers of the Royal Household, who organise the Queen's official affairs, and a large team of domestic staff, about 50 of whom have rooms in the palace.
One of the most colourful and impressive ceremonies to be seen in London is the Changing of the Guard, which takes place every day in the Palace forecourt. In their dazzling red uniforms the members of the Old Guard hand over their duties to the New Guard to the rhythm of martial music and shouted commands. The Guard consists of three officers and 40 men when the Queen is in residence. When she is away the men are reduced to 31, but the spectacle remains highly memorable all the same.
During the Edwardian era, when London's self-confidence and metropolitan aspirations were at their highest, it was felt that improvements were needed in the approach to Buckingham Palace from Trafalgar Square. The task was entrusted to Sir Ashton Webb, who had designed the new front section of the Victoria & Albert Museum between 1899 and 1901. He added the Admiralty Arch of 1908-1909 to provide a ceremonial entrance to the Mall, and in 1913 completed his scheme with the new faτade for Buckingham Palace: a dignified if somewhat predictable neo-classical composition.
The Royal Mews were designed by John Nash to accommodate the horses and coaches used by the Royal Family on state occasions. They now also house some of the Palace staff as well as the Rolls-Royce limousines from which members of the Royal Family greet bystanders on official outings. However, the star exhibit is certainly the gold state coach built for George III in 1761 and the Irish state coach bought by Queen Victoria for the State Opening of Parliament.
John Nash, the Regency architect and city planner, was born in London in 1752 and died in 1835. His country house designs brought him to the attention of the Prince of Wales, and between 1811 and 1825 he was engaged to plan the layout of the new Regent's Park. He converted the original Buckingham House into Buckingham Palace, designed the Marble Arch which originally stood in front of it, laid out Trafalgar Square and St James's Park and rebuilt Brighton Pavilion in the oriental style.
Although the British Parliament has met on this site since the year 1512, the imposing Gothic building in which the two parliamentary Houses convene today is actually a product of Victorian stylistic revival. In 1834 most of the original Westminster Palace was destroyed by fire. However, the medieval Westminster Hall survived, and it was imperative that the new design should harmonise with this and the adjacent Westminster Abbey. The chosen designs by Charles Barry took their inspiration from the Perpendicular Gothic of the Henry VII Chapel. However, much of their impact is undoubtedly due to the brilliant Gothic detailing by Augustus Pugin, the man who was to provide the inspirational leadership in the forthcoming campaign for Gothic Revival.
The famous four-faced clock-tower that rises 106 metres above the Houses of Parliament is generally known as Big Ben. It takes its name from the huge 14-tonne bell that was hung there in 1858. The clock is the largest in Britain, its hollow copper minute-hand measuring 4.25 metres in length. It has kept exact time for the nation more or less continuously since 1859, when it was first set in motion. The resonant chimes have become a symbol of Britain all over the world and are broadcast daily on BBC radio.
The British Parliament comprises two Houses, called the Lords and the Commons. The Commons is made up of elected Members of Parliament (MPs) of different political parties. The party with the most MPs forms the Government, and its leader becomes the Prime Minister. MPs from other parties make up the Opposition. The House of Lords is made up of Peers of the Realm, many of whom inherit their titles. All legislation is first formulated in the Commons, then debated in both Houses before becoming Law. Although debate in the Commons can become quite heated, it is impartially chaired by an MP designated as Speaker.
The State Opening of Parliament when the Queen opens the annual parliamentary session in the House of Lords usually takes place in November. On this occasion she delivers a speech from the throne of the House of Lords outlining the Government's plans. The event itself is not open to the general public, though it is televised. However, the huge royal procession that moves from Buckingham Palace to Westminster is a magnificent sight. The Queen travels in the highly ornate Irish State Coach drawn by four horses.
Born in London in 1795, the architect Sir Charles Barry travelled on the Continent and in the Middle East before returning to England, where he was entrusted with the design of the Reform Club (1837) and the new Houses of Parliament (1840-70). Following his death in 1860, this latter building was completed by his son Edward Middleton Barry, architect of the Royal Opera House. Another son, Sir John Wolfe-Barry, was engineer of Tower Bridge.
Augustus Welby Pugin was born in London in 1812 and died in 1852. Trained in architecture by his father, he worked with Charles Barry, designing a large part of the decorations and sculpture for the new Houses of Parliament. His designs and publications, especially Contrasts (1836), did much to revive Gothic architecture in England and paved the way for the Arts and Crafts movement.
The advent of the Renaissance style in the 16th and 17th centuries brought about the eclipse of the native Gothic of the Middle Ages with its characteristic pointed arches. However, after two hundred years of Georgian architecture and Neo-Classical order, 19th century purveyors of taste were beginning to show renewed interest in their country's indigenous stylist heritage. This gave rise to the Gothic Revival of the Victorian age. One of the main exponents of this trend was Augustus Welby Pugin, renowned for the decorations of the Houses of Parliament and a number of churches. However, the style was also used for town halls, university buildings, railways stations (including St Pancras in London) and monuments such as the Albert Memorial.
London's crowning achievement in the field of metropolitan engineering is Tower Bridge, the late-Victorian watergate to the world. Opened in 1894, this symbol of London features pinnacled towers and a linking catwalk which support the mechanism for raising the roadway when large ships have to pass through. When raised, the bridge is 40 metres high and 60 metres wide. In its heyday it was opened five times a day. Originally powered by steam, the lifting machinery for raising the roadway was only electrified in 1976.
There are nearly 300 steps leading to the top of the towers and the catwalk, which is now open to the public and affords a magnificent view along the river.
When John Wolfe-Barry and the architect Sir Horace Jones were awarded the Tower Bridge commission, it was stipulated that they should adopt the Gothic style so that the new structure would fit in with the antiquity of the Tower. What resulted was a typically Victorian creation in which the roles of architecture and engineering were utterly confused. Tower Bridge is really a cladding of medieval stone imagery over a steel frame containing what was the most advanced system of hydraulic power ever seen.
Not all contemporaries were favourably impressed by the new bridge, as the following comment in The Builder of 1894 reveals: "What strikes one at present is that the whole structure is the most monstrous and preposterous architectural sham that we have ever known of, and is in that sense a discredit to the generation which has erected it. Far better would it have been to have built simply the naked steelwork, and let the construction show what it really is; the effect, if somewhat bare-looking, would have been at least honest, and we should have been relieved from the spectacle of many thousands spent on what is not the bridge at all, what is no part of the structure - but an elaborate and costly make-believe".
The Tower of London elicited fear in British subjects for much of its 900-year history. For those guilty of offending the monarch were held within its dank walls, and many failed to survive the ordeal. The public executions on Tower Hill provided a final solution for many prisoners, though some, including two of Henry VIII's six wives, were allowed a quieter demise at Tower Green within the walls.
The Crown Jewels visible inside the Tower comprise the regalia of crowns, sceptres, orbs and swords used at coronations and other state occasions. Many of them were made in 1661 for the coronation of Charles II. However, the Queen wears the Imperial State Crown for ceremonial events such as the Opening of Parliament. It was made in 1837 for the coronation of the 18-year-old Queen Victoria.
The Martin Tower now houses a daunting collection of instruments of torture used to extract confessions from prisoners. These included the rack for stretching the body, and the 'scavenger's daughter' for compressing it. After a session on either of these, many of those charged for their religious or political beliefs may have preferred the prospect of the executioner's axe and block, also on show here. It was Charles II who first made the Tower of London a tourist attraction. During the second half of the 1600s the collection of armour and the Crown Jewels were made visible to the public.
By the time of the Norman Conquest of Britain in 1066, towns were still very small by modern standards. Yet they were growing, and London, which was by far the largest, may have had as many as 20,000 inhabitants. Clearly, the new rulers of the land needed to secure their recently gained kingdom against attack from home or abroad, and this they did by building fortifications which also comprised chambers and banquet halls. These were the first royal residences. One such construction is King William the Conqueror's own White Tower.
The Royal Armouries at the Tower can boast the nation's largest and most important collection of arms and armour. Shortly after his succession to the throne in 1509, Henry VIII ordered the Tower arsenal to be re-equipped with the latest weapons and armour. Since then the collection has grown as other weapons and booty from Britain's imperial conquests were added. Among the highlights of the collection are two suits of armour made for Henry VIII in 1520 and 1540. In twenty years he evidently put on a lot of weight
This extraordinary building was designed by Post-Modernist architect Richard Rogers in 1986. Although the marked use of stainless steel and external piping may recall his designs for the Pompidou Centre in Paris, Lloyd's is a far more elegant building. It is particularly worth seeing at night, when floodlighting brings out a subtle play of colours as well as shapes.
Post-Modern architecture came about in Britain in the 1980s as a reaction against the bleak shapes of Modernism, the term used for the starkly functional post-war architecture that culminated in Brutalism. Of all the post-modern architects, Richard Rogers is the one who has most successfully emphasised structural features in his designs, brilliantly reconciling such technical features with visual elegance.
Prince Charles, the heir to the British throne, takes an active interest in subjects pertaining to the quality of modern life, and he has been outspokenly critical of much of London's recent architecture, advocating instead a return to classical styles. To this end he has actually set up an Academy of Architecture aimed at cultivating the classical aesthetic.
Lloyd's was founded in the late 17th century and takes its name from the coffee house in Tower Street where anyone wishing to insure a ship or its cargo could seek out individuals willing to 'underwrite the risk', or pay for any losses sustained to the items insured. By the early 1700s, Lloyd's became a private club, with its members owning and controlling operations. Then in 1871 the Lloyd's Act was passed, setting a legal framework on its activities. To this day it is still the world's main insurers, issuing policies on everything from oil tankers to pianists' hands.
The South Bank Centre grew up around an area of wharves and factories damaged by bombing in World War II. When in 1951 it was decided to celebrate the centenary of The Great Exhibition, the site was chosen for the Royal Festival Hall, the only remaining Festival building. Since then London's main arts centre has been created around it. Although the massive use of reinforced concrete typical of the Brutalist architecture of the period still has many vocal critics, the Centre itself provides an impressive national showplace for theatre, music, film and the visual arts.
The Royal National Theatre just the other side of Waterloo Bridge was designed by one of Britain's foremost contemporary architects, Denys Lasdun. When it opened in 1976 it became the home of the National Theatre formed in 1962 under the direction of Laurence Olivier, Britain's leading 20th century actor. The complex comprises the open-staged Olivier, the proscenium-staged Lyttelton and the small, flexible Cottesloe, thus providing venues for a wide range of theatrical styles and genres. However, it also functions as a lively and pleasant social centre where you can enjoy a drink with friends before the play begins, wander around the many free art exhibitions or browse through the theatre bookshop.
The Royal Festival Hall was the first major public building to go up in post-war London. Its ample auditorium is ideal for major orchestral and choral works. The London Philharmonic Orchestra is resident here, and the Royal Philharmonic, the Philharmonia and the BBC Symphony Orchestras are regular visitors. The complex also comprises two smaller venues: the Queen Elizabeth Hall, where smaller concerts are staged, and the adjoining Purcell Room, whose more intimate scale makes it perfect for chamber music.
The South Bank Arts Complex also provides delights for movie buffs. The National Film Theatre and the Museum of the Moving Image are both located here. The National Film Theatre holds regular screenings of rare and restored films and footage from the National Film Archive.
Much of London was flattened by bombs in World War II. This offered post-war planners the opportunity to redevelop much of the city. However, the chance for imaginative rebuilding was missed, and much of what went up in the 1950s and 1960s was oppressively stark in its use of massive elements in reinforced concrete. This movement earned itself the name of Brutalism, and has not been well viewed by successive generations.
Don't be put off by the unprepossessing exteriors of the Hayward Gallery. For all its Brutalist grimness (accentuated on rainy days), it actually hosts some magnificent exhibitions ranging from early art to modern movements and the work of contemporary British artists.
This area, one of the most historic in London, was severely damaged by bombs in World War II. The ensuing wasteland gave 1960s planners the chance to devise a large residential, commercial and arts complex that took twenty years to build. As well as two theatres and a concert hall, the Barbican includes one of London's largest art galleries, a convention and exhibition hall and a library. It also houses the Guildhall School of Music.
The Royal Shakespeare Company has its London base in the Barbican Centre. Although the company focuses on the Shakespeare repertoire, it also puts on productions of some classic Greek tragedies, gems of the Restoration theatre and some exciting modern works. Apart from the magnificent Barbican Theatre, the complex also offers smaller performances on the more intimate stage of The Pit.
The word 'barbican' actually means a tower or other fortification on the approach to a castle or town, especially one at a gate or drawbridge. Visitors to the Barbican Centre sometimes feel that the name itself must have influenced the architects: despite signposts, arrows and yellow lines, it can be frustratingly difficult to access. Visitors are advised to plan their arrival twenty minutes ahead of schedule so that they can negotiate the right entrance.
The Barbican Concert Hall is the permanent home of one of Britain's foremost orchestras, the London Symphony Orchestra. The LSO, as it is called, largely concentrates on the work of one composer each season. The English National Opera also make regular appearances here, and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra has a spring season.
In 1257, Henry III "caused the wall of this City, which was sore decayed and destitute of towers, to be repaired in more seemly wise than before". Good examples of these bastions have been preserved, especially in the garden between the Barbican Centre and the Museum of London.
The Museum of London is located on the southern edge of the Barbican. Opened in 1976, it provides a lively account of London life from prehistoric times to the present. Its reconstructed interiors and street scenes are particularly effective. However, it also has interesting displays of artefacts found in archaeological digs. The working model of the Great Fire of 1666 gives a graphic idea of that tremendous conflagration and its effects for contemporary residents and future planners alike.
The Royal Opera House at Covent Garden is the home of the Royal Opera and the Royal Ballet Companies. With its opulent red, white and gold interiors, it conjures up an image of considerable glamour. Although tickets are expensive and the cheaper ones tend to sell out well in advance, opera buffs can usually obtain standing passes right up to the time of the performance. Operas are performed in the original language, with English translations in surtitles above the stage. Some productions are also relayed on giant screens set up in the piazza for the benefit of a huge non-paying audience. The Royal Opera House, like many others of its kind, tends to coproduce with foreign opera houses, thereby sharing the enormous costs incurred by this genre of entertainment. Visiting opera and ballet companies also perform here.
The site of a fine opera house next to a busy produce market provided inspiration for George Bernard Shaw, one of Britain's greatest turn-of-the-century playwrights. The outcome was Pygmalion, written in 1913, which in its turn gave rise to the musical My Fair Lady in 1956 and to the film of the same name made in 1964.
Despite its imposing Classical aspect, the Royal Opera House is actually a Victorian construction that was built in 1858 on designs by E.M. Barry, son of the architect of the Houses of Parliament. His stylistic choice is certainly keeping with the tradition of European opera houses, many of which were built nearly a century earlier. However, it may also be a reflection of the fact that the site was previously occupied by two other theatres, both of them destroyed by fire. The first was the original Theatre Royal of 1732, one of the two venues in London where drama could legally be staged.
The splendidly flamboyant Coliseum is London's largest theatre and well worth a visit for its largely unaltered Edwardian interiors. Today it is the home of the English National Opera, whose musical standards are extremely high. The company trains its own singers for its productions and they rehearse in the setting where they will perform. Nearly all productions are in English, and many of them are quite adventurous. Seats are cheaper here than they are at the Royal Opera House and the audiences tend to be younger and often more genuinely interested in opera than their Covent Garden counterparts.
This venue started out as a Music Hall cum Variety Theatre. The London County Council granted building permission for a 762-seat structure, but by the time the architect and impresario had finished, there was seating for over 3000, with a 23 metre revolving stage which included three independent turntables within its expanse. The programme for the opening on Christmas Eve 1904 announced that it combined "the social advantages of the refined and elegant surroundings of a Club; the comfort and attractiveness of a CafΘ, besides being the Theatre de Luxe of London and the pleasantest family resort imaginable".
Edwardian is the name given to the opulent and bombastic architectural style that flourished during the reign of Edward VII and beyond until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. It comprised a host of commercial and public buildings as well as residential mansion blocks and buildings devoted to leisure and entertainment. The characteristically monumental Baroque idiom was sometimes enlivened by innovative use of materials such as terracotta and glazed tiles.
Although the Royal Albert Hall is used for all sorts of gatherings, from boxing matches to major business conferences, it is best known for the Promenade Concerts, or Proms, that take place here from mid-July to mid-September. Organised by the BBC, the season features the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra as well as visiting orchestras from elsewhere in Britain and abroad. The 'Last Night of the Proms' has become a popular national institution, with tickets selling out weeks ahead. It involves much audience participation and flag-waving, with a stirring rendering of the traditional Land of Hope and Glory at the end of the performance.
Completed in 1871, this huge concert hall was modelled on Italian amphitheatres and was originally intended as a Hall of Arts and Science. When in 1868 Queen Victoria laid the foundation stone, she changed its name to the Albert Hall in memory of her husband, Prince Albert, who had died of typhoid seven years earlier. It was the profits that arose from the Great Exhibition of 1851 that provided the capital necessary for this building and others of the same period in the area of South Kensington sometimes referred to as 'Albertopolis'.
The Tate Gallery houses an extensive range of British works from the 16th to the 20th centuries as well as London's foremost international modern art collection. Thirty rooms on the ground floor contain most of the collection. The display, which is chronological and terminates in the works of contemporary British and foreign artists, is changed yearly to emphasise different aspects of the collection. Formal portraits dominate the sections devoted to the 16th and 17th centuries, whereas illustrative paintings and some fine 'conversation pieces' are typical of the output of 18th century British artists such as William Hogarth. There are also many fine examples of the 'Grand Style' pursued by Joshua Reynolds and his rival Thomas Gainsborough. The 19th century section is dominated by the visionary paintings of William Blake and magnificent landscapes by J.M.W Turner and John Constable. Early 20th century French and German art is well represented, and the contemporary section features works by Francis Bacon, Anthony Caro and David Hockney, among many others.
Like many such institutions, the Tate Gallery owes its being to the munificence of a wealthy benefactor. In the 1890s, Sir Henry Tate, who had made his millions in sugar, wished to leave his collection of sixty-five paintings by British artists to the nation. The works were valued at ú79,000, and Tate contributed an additional ú80,000 to the cost of the building, with the intention of starting a 'National Gallery of British Art'. Tate employed his own favourite architect, Sidney R.J. Smith, who also built the public libraries which the millionaire had donated in Lambeth and Balham. The architect's Corinthian Classical style features a thrusting main portico that does little to hide the general weakness of proportion and detailing. The gallery was opened in August 1897.
When J.M.W. Turner died in 1851 he left his works to the nation on the condition that they remained together. From 1910 a suite of rooms at the Tate was devoted to some of the oil paintings, but it was not until the Clore Gallery was opened in 1987 that the entire bequest, including thousands of studies, was made readily available to the public. The extension was designed by James Stirling, one of Britain's foremost contemporary architects. It is a design of considerable character, yet the way it relates to the main building is remarkably harmonious.
With over 2,200 paintings, most of them on permanent display, the National Gallery is London's leading art museum. It boasts a magnificent collection of Italian Renaissance paintings, including works by Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, Piero della Francesca, Mantegna and Bellini. However, the superb Dutch collection is also a must: apart from many fine works by Vermeer and the Dutch landscape artists, there are two whole rooms devoted to Rembrandt. British landscapists and portraitists such as Gainsborough and Reynolds are also well represented, as are the French Impressionists. The sheer size of the National Gallery is such that it requires several visits, each devoted to a particular period or school.
The Sainsbury Wing is the extension to the left side of the National Gallery. Financed by the Sainsbury grocery family whose supermarkets are widespread throughout the country, it was opened in 1991 to house a fine collection of early Renaissance art. The building itself unleashed some heated debates: the original designs were described by Prince Charles as "a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved friend". The final building, by the American architect Robert Venturi, is clearly something of a compromise, and for this reason has also met with considerable criticism, albeit from a different lobby. The building also contains a Micro Gallery which provides illustrated information and floorplans of the collection from a computerised database.
London was the last major European capital to acquire a governmentally sponsored art collection. Vienna had had one since 1781, and Paris since 1793. Various influential London painters began to press for a public gallery early in the 1800s, and when the Austrian government decided to pay a twenty-five-year-old war debt, the funds suddenly became available. This was in 1823, and soon after a private collection of Old Masters came on the market. Those original 38 pictures were purchased and housed in various cramped venues until 1838, when the Neo-Classical edifice facing Trafalgar Square was ready. That year visitors numbered just under 400,000; seven years later attendance had almost doubled; and by 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition, numbers had risen to 1,109,346.
Commonly known as the V&A, this museum houses one of the world's widest collections of fine and applied arts. The layout of the galleries on the four different floor levels is based on a bipartite division: on the one hand, art and design; and on the other, materials and techniques. Visitors can thus choose between admiring whole collections of particular art forms, such as tapestries, glass or porcelain, or obtaining an overall idea of the art and design of a particular period or place. For instance, the 37 galleries devoted to furniture and interior design comprise some fully furnished interiors that give a vivid idea of social life in a given milieu. There is also a Dress Collection that illustrates fashion from around 1600 to the present by displaying fully dressed figures complete with accessories. The Museum's collection of Indian art is the most extensive of its kind outside India. Many of the exhibits derive from British imperial rule in India. They include paintings, textiles, weapons, jewellery, metalwork and glass.
The Henry Cole Wing situated on the northwest side of the V&A contains the museum's collection of paintings, drawings, prints and photographs. These include some fine English portrait miniatures, European paintings between 1500 and 1900, and the largest collection of paintings and drawings by John Constable. The Print Room is open to the public for study of the museum's collection of over half a million water-colours and prints.
The V&A opened in London in 1852 as the Museum of Manufactures, later renamed the Museum of Ornamental Art. Items bought from the Great Exhibition of 1851 formed the core of the original display. In 1899, when Queen Victoria laid the foundation stone of the present building, she requested that it be renamed the Victoria and Albert to honour the memory of her late husband, Prince Albert.
The Earth and the various forms of life it nurtures are magnificently explained in the Natural History Museum. Moreover, issues such as the evolution of our planet and ecology are addressed using the latest interactive techniques alongside traditional displays. Apart from the splendid shows of animal, insect and plant life, one of the more recent attractions is the new Dinosaur Exhibition featuring life-size robotic models of creatures such as the killer Deinonychus.
The Natural History Museum with its striking use of round arches was designed by Alfred Waterhouse, who faced the whole of the front fade with terracotta. This was an innovative application of a traditional material, because terracotta is not only washable and acid-resistant, but also economical enough to bring spectacular relief work within the allotted budget. The splendid grey-blue and light brown facade is alive with naturalistic statuary, and terracotta decorations were also used inside the building, where the main hall provided the most exciting exhibition space to be seen anywhere in the year 1881, when the museum was opened.
During the early 19th century, entrepreneurs with a bent for science made handsome profits from the growing public interest in the origins of the natural world. A certain Albert Koch dazzled American and then European audiences with what he called a 'Tetracaulodon missourium' composed of the bones of several distinct animals. He was more interested in dramatic effect than scientific accuracy, adding upside down tusks to the head of what was basically a Mastodon to produce the effect of fearsome horns. Koch actually managed to sell his 'creature' to the British Museum, whose experts at once reassembled it in a more scientific pattern, deleting the gratuitous ribs and vertebrae and putting the tusks where they belonged. The reconstructed skeleton is now part of the Natural History Museum's collection of fossil mammals.
If you are interested in medicine or meteorology, if you yearn to find out about motors and machines, if space and flight have always fascinated you, then you'll find a day at the Science Museum particularly rewarding. There are exciting interactive displays which enable you to take part in the scientific enquiry of your choice. And down in the basement is a Children's Gallery with plenty of working demonstrations.
Popular interest in flight has long drawn visitors to London's showplaces. In 1786 a hopeful aeronaut exhibited his own prototype at the Pantheon, a successful exhibition venue. The machine was shaped like a fish, with a gondola suspended from it "triumphal in form and magnificent beyond description in appearance". However, its forward motion was to be supplied by four eagles which the aspiring inventor had "so trained, as in their flight for the purpose of guiding the machine, to be perfectly subservient to his pleasure". This remarkable vehicle was actually given a chance to prove itself. Before a crowd of ten thousand gathered at Ranelagh the would-be pilot "mounted his seat with eagles harnessed, and made an effort to ascend". He went up about eight feet, dropped to the ground, and that was that.
The erection of the Science Museum between 1913 and 1916 marked the last chapter of the spate of public building that came to an end with the First World War. The somewhat predictable Classical style of the edifice was to become typical of British public architecture during the post-war decades.
The British Museum houses an extraordinarily rich treasure spanning two million years of world history and civilisation. It is essentially the national museum of archaeology and ethnology. There are large sections on prehistoric and Roman Britain, on Ancient Greece and Rome, on Oriental art and on Ancient Egypt. Apart from Egyptian sculptures, mummies and jewellery, this latter section also boasts the famous Rosetta Stone, which provided the key to the Egyptian hieroglyphs. Another important attraction are the beautiful 7th century illuminated gospels produced on the island of Lindisfarne off the northeast coast of England, the cradle of Christianity in Britain during the 7th century. In 1881 the Museum's natural history collection was moved to the new Natural History Museum. The British Library, once part of the same complex, is also gradually moving elsewhere; however, the vast domed Reading Room where Karl Marx, Mahatma Gandhi and George Bernard Shaw pursued their studies is still actively there.
The architect of the British Museum achieved a robust monumentality despite his somewhat pedestrian interpretation of the Classical Greek temple. Sir Robert Smirke was one of the foremost exponents of the Greek Revivalist movement and he is best remembered for his designs for the British Museum, commenced in 1823.
Founded in 1755, the British Museum is the one of the earliest institutions of its kind in Europe. The initial nucleus of the collection comprises the artefacts carefully brought together by Sir Hans Sloane, who divided his long life between the practice of medicine and the enlargement and care of his museum. In 1742 it was moved from his home to nine spacious rooms in Cheyne Walk. Here 79,575 objects were assembled, including around 32,000 medals and coins and 12,506 "vegetables, as seeds, gums, woods, roots, etc." in addition to the contents of an enormous herbarium. Like modern museums, Sloane's was for use as well as mere display. It was a working institution to which other scientists as well as interested amateurs were freely admitted. As one contented contemporary remarked: "Very friendly, and seemed to take delight in showing his things".
Built between 1901 and 1905, Harrods in Brompton Road, Knightsbridge, is the queen of London department stores. Its 300 elegant departments cover fashions for all ages, furniture, haberdashery, china, glass, kitchenware, electronics, perfumery and much more besides. Some of the interiors are particularly impressive: the famous Meat Hall, for instance, in a dashing Arts and Crafts style of great charm.
Harvey Nichols is also located in Knightsbridge, not far from Harrods. Much patronised by Londoners themselves, it specialixes in high fashion. However, its recently opened Food Hall on the top floor is a worthwhile experience in its own right. Here you can find the best products of national and international gastronomy, and indeed on occasions take part in tastings that will tempt the pocket no less than the palate.
When it opened in 1909, Selfridges was the most grandiose of the London department stores. Located in one of the city's most popular shopping areas, Selfridges has always provided a wide range of high quality products with a less elitist aura to them. This was probably a deliberate commercial policy on the part of its founder, Gordon Selfridge, who brought in an American architect to design the fine Neo-Classical facade, and another to design the steel-frame structure inside the building. The store sells the usual range of designer labels, but also has an impressive display of household items and bed-linen.
Liberty is as much the name of a style as it is of a store. In fact the mock-Tudor edifice in Regent's Street was built in 1925 to house the collection of oriental silks that Arthur Lasenby Liberty had been selling to the likes of John Ruskin and other artists since the 1870s. However, the stylistic connotation comes from the designs made specially for Liberty by William Morris and other members of the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th and early 20th century. The shop has maintained strong links with both that period and the East: on the basement there is an Oriental Bazaar, and on the top floor, a rich collection of period Art Nouveau and Arts and Crafts furniture.
Fortnum and Mason's has such a magnificent grocery department on the ground floor that you are unlikely to want to venture beyond it. Unless, that is, you choose to meet a friend for breakfast or afternoon tea in its charmingly old-fashioned tea-rooms. If you want to take home the best of something British - a stilton cheese, a packet of tea, some breakfast marmelade - go to Fortnum's. With its splendidly imposing and quaint aisles you will get as much enjoyment out of shopping as the recipient of your gift.
Most people in Britain on any given day will be wearing something from Marks and Spencer, the quality chain store with over 680 outlets throughout the country and abroad. It only sells products bearing its own brand label, and since suppliers are very carefully vetted, this is guarantee of quality. The same is true for the produce in the food department, where a vast range of upmarket convenience foods are to be found. There are several branches of M and S, as it is nicknamed, in central London though the ones at either end of Oxford Street are particularly well stocked.
In keeping with its founder's original vocation as a draper, John Lewis in Oxford Street and its Sloane Square partner Peter Jones are particularly strong on fabrics, haberdashery and household items.
London is one of the world's great centres for shopping, offering an enormous choice of both specialised retail outlets and huge department stores where a good range of many commodities can be found under the same roof. Until the early 1900s, most Londoners did their shopping in little shops that specialised in one type of goods. In fact London's major department stores are largely products of the early 1900s. During those same years, a number of the fashionable West End shops were also refurbished using excellent materials and solid craftsmanship in a staid design that has come to be synonymous with the English style.
The London district with the greatest concentration of exclusive shops is certainly Knightsbridge, where you will find not only the world-famous Harrods and Harvey Nichols department stores but also a whole range of smaller stores selling designer-wear. For those whole feel more at home in the hustle and bustle of a High Street, perennially crowded Oxford Street offers major branches of large national or international chains as well as smaller shops selling clothes and tourist souvenirs. If this proves too much of a good thing, seek refuge in nearby Piccadilly and Bond Street, which are lined with specialised shops that are far more select and thus also more expensive. Charing Cross Road is a haven (albeit a noisy one) for book-lovers, including those interested in antiquarian books. During the 1960s and 1970s King's Road was the centre for avant-garde fashion. It is still popular with West London shoppers, but the coolest part of London for today's youth is now Camden High Street.
For the ultimate in fine tailoring, treat yourself to something made specially for you by Gieves and Hawkes on Savile Row; for footwear fit for a queen, John Lobb in St James's Street (the Royal Family's shoe-maker); for traditional tartan clothing, cashmere and Shetland sweaters, make for the Knightsbridge branch of The Scotch House; for traditional country attire, as well as fishing tackle and shooting equipment, you can't do better than Farlows in the Royal Opera Arcade at Piccadilly; for the other end of the sartorial spectrum, you'll find plenty of over-the-top fashions at Browns in South Molton Street.
For a choice of over 300 different types of cheeses, let yourself be drawn into Paxton and Whitefield in Jermyn Street; however, if your sweet tooth prevails, then let Charbonnel et Walker, purveyors of the finest hand-made chocolates, be your undoing; by which time you may be ready to wash it all down with a cup of tea: the quintessential English drink:. In which case, head for the Tea House in Neal Street near Covent Garden. the selection includes some interesting fruit and herb teas.
The Left-Handed Shop in Soho's Brewer Street supplies a whole range of everyday objects, from scissors to corkscrews and kitchen implements, made especially for left-handed users; tobacco pipes of every imaginable shape and size are to be found at Astleys in the Piccadilly Arcade; among the many wonders of the Covent Garden Piazza is the Candle Shop, where you can find candles for all occasions and seasons as well as candle holders and candle-making equipment.
Ever since the Romans founded the city of Londinium nearly 2000 years ago, the River Thames has continued to play an essential role in London's history. The name Thames derives from the old Celtic word for river, teme, variants of which are found in many British place names. It was the inroad used by the Viking invaders of the 8th and 9th centuries, it nurtured the founding of the Royal Navy in Tudor times, and it provided a transport route for much of Britain's trade until well into the 1950s. Since then the changing scale of maritime commerce has moved the big ships elsewhere and, thanks to some farsighted redevelopment, the Thames has become a splendid leisure amenity. Not only have riverside walks, marinas, restaurants, cafΘs and markets gradually replaced the wharves and warehouses of an earlier era, but the Thames and its cruise boats afford visitors the best and most pleasant way of seeing many of London's sights.
A 50 kilometre stretch of the Thames is covered by passenger boat services. These cruises vary in length from thirty minutes to four hours. From Westminster Pier in central London, you can go all the way upriver to Hampton Court, or downriver as far as the imposing Thames Barrier, a major feat of engineering aimed at pre-empting the disastrous floods that from time to time assailed London and the area around the estuary.
While taking a sightseeing trip by boat, it is hard to imagine that the Thames was once little more than an open sewer. Until well into the last century, vile effluent was discharged raw into the river, thus contributing to the shockingly unsanitary conditions of Victorian London. Journalists had described the river as "a sewer with a tide in it". Things got so bad during the 'Great Stink' of 1858 that the sitting of Parliament could continue only with the aid of sheets soaked in chloride of lime hung over the windows to combat the stench.
Completed in 1984, the Thames Barrier measures 520 metres across and features ten gates that, when necessary, can fend off excessive flows of water by pivoting up well-above any recorded flood levels. It seldom has to be raised more than once or twice a year.
One of the most popular Thames cruise destinations is Greenwich, which lies on the eastern border of London. With its museums, palaces, book and antique shops and markets, the area offers plenty to see. The name 'Greenwich' is familiar to people all over the globe on account of the term 'Greenwich Mean Time'. This refers to the convention established in 1884 according to which Greenwich Mean Time became the basis of time measurement for most of the world. In fact the meridian (0 longitude) that divides the earth's eastern and western hemispheres passes right through Greenwich. There is a marker to this effect at the Old Royal Observatory in Greenwich Park, an ample garden that once belonged to a royal palace and is still owned by the queen. From the hilltop in Greenwich Park you get a fine view of the river and, on clear days, most of London.
Access to Greenwich from the river provides visitors with an unexpected architectural perspective. Christopher Wren divided his plan for the Royal Naval College into two distinct but symmetrical halves so that the Queen's House behind it would maintain its river view. Wren's bold project went up on the site previously occupied by a royal palace where Henry VIII and his daughters Mary I and Elizabeth I were born and lived.
The National Maritime Museum at Greenwich is a fitting tribute to a seafaring nation. Exhibits range from the earliest coracles made of wood and leather to models of all kinds of vessels, from Elizabethan galleons to modern cargo ships and cruise liners. There are also sections illustrating the rise of maritime trade and the expansion of the empire as well as voyages of discovery.
The Queen's House at Greenwich with its sumptuous Royal Apartments was designed for the wife of King Charles I by Inigo Jones, the first of the great English architects who became surveyor-general of the royal buildings in 1615. Jones, who had studied landscape painting in Italy and the Palladian villas near Venice, introduced the Renaissance style to England and was able to provide the French princessHenrietta Maria with a residence of great elegance and refinement.
The 50-storey Canada Tower at Canary Warf dominates London's eastern skyline. The soaring 250 metre construction designed by the US architect Cesar Pelli is Europe's tallest office building. Canary Warf itself is London's most ambitious commercial development. Opened in 1991, it occupies what was once the East India Dock. The whole area became abandoned and run down between the 1960s and the 1980s, when the London docks were closed down and trade moved to the modern container port down river at Tilbury. The complete Canary Warf project envisages 21 office buildings as well as shops and leisure facilities.
During the 19th century, the London Docks bore physical witness to the international trade based on the British Empire's control of a quarter of the land surface of the globe. As one contemporary guidebook declared, "nothing will convey to the stranger a better idea of the vast activity and stupendous wealth of London than a visit to the warehouses, filled to overflowing with interminable stores of every kind of foreign and colonial productsε. Butler's Warf was one of the many Victorian warehouses that once crowded the riverfront. The building has now been converted into apartments.
Gabriel's Warf was once an industrial riverside area fillled with warehouses for storing products shipped up the Thames. When the railways made their incursion into the City from the south, commerce and industry gained new impetus. Now the area is filled with little shops selling ceramics, jewellery and paintings. There is a bandstand where jazz groups sometimes play in the summer. And there are plenty of places for simply sitting and letting time and the Thames go quietly by.
The World War II cruiser HMS Belfast has been a floating naval museum since 1971. Part of it has been recreated to give an idea of what the ship and life on board were like in 1943 when it took part in the sinking of the German cruiser Scharnhorst.
London's crowning achievement in the field of metropolitan engineering is Tower Bridge, the late-Victorian watergate to the world. Opened in 1894, this symbol of London features pinnacled towers and a linking catwalk which support the mechanism for raising the roadway when large ships have to pass through. When raised, the bridge is 40 metres high and 60 metres wide. In its heyday it was opened five times a day. Originally powered by steam, the lifting machinery for raising the roadway was only electrified in 1976. Not all contemporaries were favourably impressed by the new bridge, as the following comment in The Builder of 1894 reveals: "What strikes one at present is that the whole structure is the most monstrous and preposterous architectural sham that we have ever known of, and is in that sense a discredit to the generation which has erected it. Far better would it have been to have built simply the naked steelwork, and let the construction show what it really is; the effect, if somewhat bare-looking, would have been at least honest, and we should have been relieved from the spectacle of many thousands spent on what is not the bridge at all, what is no part of the structure - but an elaborate and costly make-believe".
Rising up austerely against the skyline, the Tower of London elicited fear in British subjects for much of its 900-year history. For those guilty of offending the monarch were held within its dank walls, and many failed to survive the ordeal. The public executions on Tower Hill provided a final solution for many prisoners, though some, including two of Henry VIII's six wives, were allowed a quieter demise at Tower Green within the walls.
London Bridge was originally the essential link between Southwark and the City of London. The original structure was made of wood, and was replaced in the 12th century by a 19-arch stone bridge bearing shops and houses. The bridge itself was one of the few major buildings to survive the Great Fire of 1666, though many of the houses on it were burned down. In 1831 a new 5-arch bridge was erected, becoming the access point for London's first railway in 1836. However, the typically Victorian structure was dismantled in 1968 and sold to Lake Havasu City in Arizona. The new London Bridge was built in 1971.
Under Waterloo Bridge there is a book market with titles old and new for all tastes. From atop the Bridge you get a magnificent view downriver towards the City, with the dome of St Paul's cathedral standing out proudly against the skyline.
Located diagonally opposite the Houses of Parliament, County Hall used to house the old London County Council. The imposing edifice was begun in 1912 but not completed until 1958. However, the County Hall had a short practical life for so grand a construction, for in 1986 the London-wide authority counil was abolished and its powers redistributed. Since then the building has remained empty, awaiting feasible conversion projects. The best views of the curved, colonnaded central section of the building are to be had from the river.
The attractive Albert Bridge was built between 1871 and 1873 to provide a link between the Chelsea Embankment and the increasingly popular Battersea Park which was opened in 1853.
Richmond Park, just to the west of central London, is a haven of lush green countryside where the waterfowl nest and deer roam in the heathland, and they peacefully co-existing with any humans that might happen to pass through. In 1637, when he was Prince of Wales, Charles I built a wall thirteen kilometres round to enclose the royal park as a hunting ground. Since then gentlemen of taste and means have chosen to build themselves elegant residences overlooking the water at Richmond and Twickenham.
It takes about 3 hours to reach Hampton Court by boat starting from Westminster Pier. The magnificent royal residence arises among wonderfully varied and extensive gardens and waterways. In fact Hampton Court bears witness to all the kings and queens of England from Henry VIII to the present day. From the outside, the palace is a harmonious blend of Tudor and English Baroque architecture. The interiors are decorated with furniture, old masters and tapestries from the Royal Collection.
Cardinal Wolsey, powerful Archbishop of York to Henry VIII, began building Hampton Court in 1514 as a riverside country residence for himself. In 1525 he suspected that he was slipping from royal favour, and offered the palace to the King in the vain hope of redressing matters. Henry considerably extended and rebuilt the residence, adding the magnificently decorated King's Staircase leading to the royal apartments.
The inspiration for the Hampton Court gardens as they are today dates back to the late 1600s and is largely due to Christopher Wren, who designed a vast formal Baroque landscape, with radiating avenues of majestic limes and many collections of exotic plants. However, the Pond Garden down on the south side near the Thames is a sunken water garden that was part of Henry VIII's elaborate designs. Another Tudor garden feature is the Maze, far over on the north side.
Visitors to Britain often have a somewhat distorted image of British education because of the outstanding fame of certain of the country's educational institutions. Prestigious seats of learning like Oxford and Cambridge, or Θlite colleges such as Eton and Harrow, in fact account for only a fraction of the nation's access to knowledge. With a state school system that has come in for a lot of criticism in recent years and increasing unemployment levels even among those with university degrees, the real picture is both more complex and less enviable than outsiders might at first imagine. Yet certain institutions, despite spending cuts and staff reductions, continue to offer people a wide range of possibilities for learning and pleasure. Foremost among these are the Colleges of Further Education, where people of any age can "go back to school" and learn just about anything, as well as the magnificent network of lending libraries spread across the whole country.
The vast majority of the population in Great Britain enjoys free education in what are known as 'state schools'. In fact the expression is a misnomer in the UK, because the state does not run schools and the basic structure of primary and secondary education is provided by schools that are funded by a local education authority. Nonetheless, the term is widely used to differentiate such schools from the famous fee-paying independent schools that are confusingly known as public schools. Although only a minority of people in Britain are educated in such private schools, in the past the percentage of public-school educated men and women in positions of power and responsibility has been disproportionately high. This has had more to do with self-defence and -promotion on the part of the privileged few than with the quality of the education actually received. As Britain becomes an increasingly multiethnic society, such differences are gradually being ironed out.
There is compulsory education in Britain from the age of 5 to 16. During the first half of the 20th century, for most people the secondary stage of this took place in one of three different types of state school. Since only one of these provided access to higher education, it was eventually seen that the existing system tended to channel children and their futures at an excessively early age, thereby denying future academic and professional achievement to late-developers. With the introduction of the comprehensive schools in the 1960s and 1970s, such differences were gradually eclipsed by a system that theoretically offered all pupils the same start in school life. At present pupils sit exams for a General Certificate of Secondary Education at around the age of 16. Candidates for higher education then specialise in three or so subjects for two years before facing more exams called 'A levels'. A further process of selection determines who will obtain a place at university.
In 1988 England and Wales introduced a national curriculum consisting of three 'core' subjects (English, maths and science) and seven 'foundation' subjects (art, geography, history, music, physical education, technology and, in secondary schools only, a modern language). It is recognised that variation in practices may need to be introduced, to take account of different situations. For example, in Wales, Welsh is a core subject in Welsh-speaking areas and a foundation subject in non-Welsh speaking areas.
Britain's most famous public school is Eton College, founded by King Henry VII in 1440. Old Etonians have been occupying positions of authority in British life for the past two centuries at least. Another well-known seat of private secondary education is Harrow, founded in 1571, whose former pupils include the poet Byron and Sir Winston Churchill. During the 19th century a number of new public schools were founded to provide the government of Britain and her colonies with a well-disciplined social Θlite able to transmit high-minded Victorian ideals to distant outposts of the empire. In relatively recent years, many of these all-male schools have gone co-educational. By the same token, the girls' public schools, though less prominent, have also opened up their gates to admit students of the other sex. Such Θlitist schools have attracted continuing social criticism over the years, and also witnessed the financial decline of their traditional catchment areas such as the clergy and the country gentry. They have thus offered publicly-funded places to outstanding students from less privileged backgrounds and enormously improved their performance in the sciences and academic standards in general.
The English spoken by British people tends to differ in accent and pronunciation according to the geographical region of provenance.Television and radio have inevitably contributed to the evolution of a standard spoken English that is largely free of regional inflections. This is usually referred to as 'BBC English'. However, there is also another form of spoken English that reveals no geographical origins but rather a social and class category. Sometimes called 'Queen's English' or 'Oxford English', this still tends to be the way of speaking for those who attended private schools. This 'public-school accent' essentially denotes membership of the upper-middle classes, an immediately recognisable Θlite whose social fortress has been considerably dismantled in recent years as the class-structures of British society have grown more complex and less rigid.
For those wishing to pursue a course of studies after compulsory education, Britain offers two basic alternatives. One is vocationally orientated and comes under the heading of Further Education. The colleges belonging to this category offer courses and training in a whole range of subjects and skills, and include the Adult Education centres where people of any age can learn just about anything, from languages to upholstery. The other category is Higher Education, which encompasses the universities and the Colleges of Advanced Technology that were transformed into technological universities. Access to higher education is limited, and places are awarded on the basis of secondary school exam results, other assessments and sometimes an interview.
The most famous British universities are Oxford and Cambridge. Oxford is the oldest, having its origins in the informal groups of masters and students who used to gather in Oxford in the 12th century. The closure of the University of Paris to Englishmen in 1167 accelerated Oxford's development into a universitas. The University today embraces a number of prestigious institutions such as the Bodleian Library, the Ashmolean Museum and the Sheldonian Theatre. Cambridge University was founded in 1284, and further colleges were set up when the Pope formally recognised Cambridge as an universitas in 1318. Prestigious university institutions include the Fitzwilliam Museum, the Cavendish Laboratory of experimental physics and the Cambridge University Press, which was founded in 1534.
Open University is an institution established in the UK in 1969 to enable mature students without qualifications to study to degree level without regular attendance. Open University teaching is based on a mixture of correspondence courses, TV and radio lectures and demonstrations, personal tuition organised on a regional basis, and summer schools. Throughout the university system, the number of mature students has increased massively in the past decade, and now numbers around 237,000, which is about 14.5 percent of students. They are older people whose academic potential was unrecognised in the pre-Comprehensive secondary school system, married women taking the opportunity to increase their qualifications after the independence of their children, and increasingly, the redundant seeking a fresh start.
During the 1950s, educationalists in Britain began to feel uneasy about the social exclusiveness of the universities. A third of children born to higher professional parents went on to higher education, whereas only one percent of children of semi- and unskilled workers did. Moreover, the percentage of young British people going to university was much lower than elsewhere in Europe or America. Local Education Authorities were thus obliged to finance any student accepted at university, and several new institutions were granted charters as universities. These, along with those founded in the late 19th century, are known as red-brick universities. In spite of these expansive trends, however, working-class participation has not increased as much as was originally hoped. Students in higher education have quadrupled over the past thirty years and now number over a million. Yet the proportion entering from the manual working class has scarcely risen from around 3.1 percent.
Music plays an important role in people's education in Britain, with many students learning one or more instruments as part of their school curriculum. Schools often have their own orchestras, choirs and chamber music groups, and even later in adult life there is plenty of amateur music to take part in. Visitors to Britain are often surprised to discover that almost all the splendid choruses that perform in concerts and make recordings are actually highly trained amateur groups, only some of whose members may be professional musicians such as teachers.
The most renowned music conservatories in Britain are the Royal College of Music, the Royal Academy of Music and the Guildhall School of Music in London, the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester and the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow. However in recent times the Leeds College of Music has made a name for itself as a centre for aspiring jazz musicians. Moreover, Manchester has a famous junior conservatory, Chethams, where budding young musicians of particular promise can concentrate on music while completing their secondary education.
Britain is happily endowed with an impressively widespread and well-run network of lending libraries which make a substantial contribution to on-going education and entertainment. Even small towns and villages have their libraries, and will obtain loans on special request from larger structures when the occasion arises. Such public libraries act as a meeting point and information exchange for the surrounding community. Naturally, the major city libraries are now also equipped with multimedia facilities. Public libraries provide tranquillity as well as ample reading space at desks and in comfortable chairs; they also allow members to take out books on loan for a number of weeks.
The first lending libraries sprang up around 1727, and about the same time the first Circulating Library was set up in Scotland. Moreover, many of the libraries collected by scholars and noblemen were united in the British Museum in 1754. Numerous grandiose new library buildings went up during the Victorian era, when industrial growth made reading an essential prerequisite for anyone who wanted to 'better his position'. In those days there was a literate population of about six million. However, reading matter was not cheap. Three-volume novels were the most popular literary form, and these sold for half a guinea per volume; even daily newspapers cost 41/2d. To a skilled artisan on a clerk, these were luxuries. Libraries were thus the answer. A further solution was provided by the custom of publishing novels in monthly instalments that could be inexpensively published in literary magazines. Many of the works of Charles Dickens were published in this way.
Like most people in the busy Western world, the British tend to say that the working week allows them little time or energy for recreation. Yet British society has gone a long way since the early years of the 20th century when the majority of the population worked at least a sixty hour week. Today many Britons have finished work by 5:30 or 6: 00 pm and have long evenings as well as a whole weekend to devote to their favourite pastimes. If television does not get the better of them, there is a flourishing and remarkably inventive leisure industry to cater to their tastes and requirements.
One of the most popular and least demanding ways of spending free time in Britain is a visit to the local 'pub.' Such public houses are establishments licenced to sell alcoholic drinks. Pub-goers usually have their favourite haunts where they can meet friends and relax over a glass of beer. Pubs thus play a role similar to that of cafΘs in Continental Europe. Many of them now serve food as well, and some also host concerts from time to time. The common image of the pub is of a quaint building in the country, dating from Tudor times. Certainly their names are often of great antiquity and historical interest, yet there are now many different forms of pub and true 'traditional' ones are becoming rarer.
Though pubs nowadays sell a wide range of drinks, including alcohol-free beverages, wine and spirits, there is no doubt that the British national tipple is Beer. Popular since Egyptian times, beer is actually an umbrella term covering a wide range of drinks brewed from ale, or malted barley flavoured with hops. The most common kinds are bitter, brewed with more hops and a lighter malt than are used for mild, a light beer known as lager which matures over a long time at a low temperature, and stout or porter which are types of dark ale produced from the brewing of roasted malt.
The quintessential alcoholic drink in Scotland is Whisky, a spirit distilled from fermented grain such as barley, rye or wheat. Whisky distillers in Scotland insist that the purity of the Highland water accounts for much of the finesse of their products. Whiskies can be single malt, the fruit of a single distillate, or a blend of several batches, often from several different distilleries.
The British are keen sportsmen from an early age, since most schools in Britain are equipped with games fields and tennis courts so that tender muscles no less than tender minds can be shaped by team spirit. The foremost popular sport is undoubtedly football. However, rugby is also widely followed, especially among the Welsh and the Scots. During the summer tennis becomes the main spectator sport as the Wimbledon tournament is relayed throughout the country by television. The soft pit-pat of tennis balls is also to be heard from the myriad suburban and city courts that make tennis a relatively accessible pastime. Yet the most peculiarly British summer sport is surely cricket, a game with such drawn-out playing times that it appears to belong to a bygone age when endless leisure was the privilege of the few.
The ancient Greeks, Chinese, Egyptians and Romans all played a form of football. In the early 19th century it became an organized game in Britain, and was played in most universities and public schools. Standard rules were drawn up at Cambridge University in 1848, and in 1863 the football Association was formed. The first FA Cup was played in 1872. Football, or soccer as it is widely called, grew dramatically as an organized, seasonal spectacle after the Football Association accepted professionalism in 1885. By the 1930s, there was hardly a middling-sized town in the country that did not have its own professional league club.
Wimbledon is the most famous of all lawn-tennis championships, drawing crowds from all over the world. However, few of those who tuck happily into the traditional Wimbledon dish of strawberries and cream while waiting for the next match to begin realize that the racket and ball game they are about to watch has roots in the distant past. Although the modern version of the game was invented towards the end of the 19th century, it actually derived from a similar game played in a walled court as far back as the 11th century.
Rugby is a game that originated at Rugby School in 1823 when a player picked up the ball and ran with it during a football match. Rugby is played with an oval ball on a rectangular playing area. Rugby Union, the amateur form of Rugby football, has fifteen players on each side; 'tries' are scored by 'touching down' the ball beyond the goal-line or by kicking goals from penalties. The Rugby Football Union was formed in 1871 and has its headquarters at Twickenham, Middlesex. Rugby League is the professional form of the game. It was founded in England in 1895 when a dispute about pay caused northern clubs to break away from the parent organization. The number of players was reduced from 15 to 13 in 1906, and the scrum now plays a less important role as rule changes have made the game more open and fast-moving.
Cricket is one of those games that appear incomprehensible to those unfamiliar with Britain and her colonies. It is a bat-and-ball game of 11-a-side. A wicket consisting of three stumps surmounted by a pair of bails is placed at each end of a grassy pitch 20 metres in length. Each team takes it in turn to bat and bowl. The aim of the batting team is to defend the two wickets while trying to score as many runs as possible before being dismissed. One of the two batsmen on the field will try to hit the ball bowled at him by the other side sufficiently far away to allow him to run to the other wicket, thereby exchanging ends with his partner and scoring a single run. If the ball reaches the boundary line unfielded, it scores four runs; if it reaches the boundary without touching the ground, six runs. A batsman is out if he is 'bowled' (the ball from the bowler knocks his wicket down), 'caught' (the batsman hits the ball so that it is caught by a fielder without bouncing), 'stumped' (the wicket-keeper knocks the wicket down with the ball while the batsman is outside his 'safe ground'), 'run out' (the wicket towards which the batsman is running is knocked down before the batsman reaches the safe ground) or 'lbw' (leg-before-wicket: the batsman's body obstructs the ball's path to the wicket).
A similar game was played in the mid-16th century, but the first known county match was in 1719.
The British devote a lot of their free time to their favourite domestic animals, especially their dogs. Indeed, it has been said that more affection is expressed between dog-owners and their charges than between husbands and wives. Taking the dog for a walk is a daily exercise for body and soul that probably beats religion for popularity. Even in London the Parks and gardens are full of happy strollers and their canine friends. However, the British also reserve a particular place in their hearts for horses. There are active pony-clubs where young people can learn to ride throughout the country, and quiet country walks on horseback are as popular as the more widely publicized racing or fox-hunting.
The Crufts Dog Show held annually in London is one of the world's foremost showcases for dog-breeders and their charges. Begun in 1886 , the event has done much to help improve standards of dog breeding.
Greyhound racing has been a popular sport in Britain since the early years of this century. It takes place on an enclosed circular or oval track, round which dogs are lured to run by a mechanical hare. These creatures, originally bred in ancient times for hunting hares, foxes and deer, can exceed speeds of 60 mph.
A favourite pastime of the well-to-do British is pheasant shooting, which involves a rewarding man-to-dog relationship. Scotland is particularly renowned for its grouse shooting, with a season that runs from August 12th to December 10th. It is curious to see how fashions travel: the sturdy Scottish tweeds that were originally used for making the sort of loose jackets often worn on shoots are now considered acceptable attire by urban intellectuals around the world.
Though much opposed by the Animal Rights organizations, fox-hunting continues to be a beloved pastime of the British upper classes. Lasting from November to April, it began as a sport in the late 17th century. Famous hunts include the Quorn, the Cottesmore and the Belvoir, all in the Shire counties in the East Midlands. Each hunt is controlled by a master of hounds, and the hounds are controlled by the huntsman. Foxhounds are similar in shape and colour to the beagle, but slightly larger.
Horse racing was popularized in England in the 12th century, and many monarchs have supported the sport, which has thereby become known as 'the sport of kings'. The first recorded meeting at England's oldest course, Chester, was in February 1540. Nowadays racing comes in two categories: flat racing and national hunt racing. The latter involve hurdles such as fences and ditches and can be anything up to 6.5 kilometres in length. The most famous and popular meeting of this sort is the Grand National, first held in 1836. It is now held at Aintree, where the 7-kilometre course comprises 31 difficult fences. As for flat racing, by far the most stunning annual event is the Royal Ascot meeting begun by Queen Anne in 1711. It provides the fortunate latter-day enthusiasts with the opportunity for displaying a wide range of sartorial inventions, especially hats, which are de rigueur at Ascot.
The foremost British pastime is gardening. Horticulture for the British is a way of life, an abiding passion, an escape from the mundane, a practical philosophy that bridges every social and economic divide. This is nothing new. As far back as the early 1600s, a keen horticulturalist was to avow: "I never had any other desire so strong ... as that I might be master at last of a small house and large garden... and there dedicate the remainder of my life only to the culture of them, and the study of nature." Today a huge percentage of the British population follows gardening programs on television and radio, attends lectures organized by the Royal Horticultural Society, visits the myriad gardens listed as being open to the public and flocks to flower shows all over the country. Because of the British predilection for individual family houses rather than apartment blocks, many homes have at least a vegetable patch or a scrap of lawn of their own. So the great national leisure activity is both a practical exercise and a witting appreciation of one of man's nobler creations.
The great annual event for British flower-lovers is the Chelsea Flower Show in London: a veritable ocean of colour and scent that attracts thousands of visitors from all over the country. Keen gardeners also take part in their local flower shows, competing with both prize vegetables and flowering plants. Ample space is reserved for award-winners in the local press.
The Royal Horticultural Society was founded in 1804 'for the improvement of horticulture'. It received its Royal Charter in 1809. The RHS maintains an experimental garden at Wisley in Surrey and publishes a number of scholarly works, including periodical magazines, that are read avidly by a vast lay public.
British gardening enthusiasts visit not only the famous historic gardens of the great houses of England, Scotland and Wales, but also specialised nurseries where they can admire and dream about exotic or rare plant species even if they have nowhere suitable of their own to place them. At Nuthurst in West Sussex, for instance, there is a farm specialising in architectural plants, including evergreen trees and shrubs with big, spiky and frondy leaves, many of them extremely rare. Then in Wales, Bodnant Garden Nursery is famous for its rhododendrons, azaleas, magnolias and camelias. For those interested in unusual herbs, there are specialized nurseries near Reading in Berkshire and near Selby in North Yorkshire. As for the National Collection of Nymphaea, or water lilies, it is to be found at Stapeley Water Gardens near Nantwich in Cheshire, the largest water garden centre in the world.
William I the Conqueror (1027-1087) was the first Norman king of England. As the illegitimate son of Duke Robert of Normandy, he succeeded to the Duchy of Normandy himself in 1035. Edward the Confessor, who had also been brought up in Normandy, probably designated William as future King of England when he visited the country in 1051. When Harold Godwinson, despite an apparent oath to uphold William's claims, took the throne as Harold II, William invaded England with the support of the papacy, defeated and killed Harold at the Battle of Hastings, and was crowned king on Christmas Day 1066. He then consolidated his position by pursuing a policy of military conquest backed up by aristocratic colonisation, so that in time the leaders of the Anglo-Saxon society were replaced by a new ruling class of Normans, Bretons and Flemings who were closely tied to William by feudal bonds.
Henry III (1207-1272) was King of England from 1216, when he succeeded John, but he did not assume royal power until 1227. His subservience to the papacy, his promotion of foreign favourites, his ineffectual government elicited domestic dissent culminating in the Barons' War and Henry's imprisonment. He was restored to the throne after the royalist victory at Evesham in 1265.
Henry VIII (1491-1547) was King of England from 1509 to 1547. The second son of Henry VII, soon after his accession he married Catherine of Aragon. With the exception of Mary, their children died in infancy, so from 1527 Henry determined to divorce Catherine. His Lord Chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey, was ineffective in obtaining a divorce for him and was replaced by Thomas More in 1529. After 1532 Henry broke with the Catholic church, marrying Anne Boleyn privately in 1533. The following year it was enacted that his marriage to Catherine was invalid and that the King was the sole head of the Church of England. To humble the clergy and accumulate new revenues, Henry then proceeded to dissolve the monasteries. In 1536 Catherine died, and Anne Boleyn was executed for infidelity. Henry then married Jane Seymour, who died leaving a son, who became Edward VI. In 1540 Anne of Cleves became his fourth wife, but dislike of her appearance caused him to divorce her speedily. He then married Catherine Howard (1540), but charged her with infidelity and had her executed two years later. In 1543 he married for the sixth and last time to Catherine Parr, who outlived him. In the 1540s he returned to war with France and Scotland.
Mary I (1516-1558) was the daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. She was Queen of England and Ireland from 1553 to 1558. A devout Catholic, during the reign of her half-brother Edward, she lived in retirement, refusing to conform to the new religion. Once she had secured the throne, she proceeded cautiously, repealing anti-Catholic legislation and reviving Catholic practices with the ultimate aim of restoring papal supremacy. Her marriage to Philip of Spain in 1554 was unpopular and caused rebellion and plotting. It also led to an expensive and unpopular war with France culminating in the loss of Calais in 1558. Though her direct responsibility was unproven, she was also believed to be behind the merciless persecution of some 300 Protestants, which earned her the name 'Bloody Mary'. She died broken by childlessness, sickness, grief at her husband's departure from England and the loss of Calais to the French, England's last toehold on the Continent.
Elizabeth I (1533-1603) the daughter of Henry VIII and his second wife, Anne Boleyn, was born in the royal palace at Greenwich. She came to the throne in 1558. She was highly intelligent, well-read and familiar with French, Spanish and Italian as well as Latin and Greek. In foreign policy she steered a skilful course with the two leading Catholic powers of her time, France and Spain. She made peace with Scotland and France and repelled Spanish attempts at invasion by sinking the 'invincible armada' sent over by Philip of Spain. In 1587, the continuing threat of Catholic plots led her to sign the death warrant of her cousin Mary Queen of Scots, who had been directly involved in conspiracies hatched by English Catholics. Elizabeth I chose men of exceptional talent as her ministers and councillors, and her court was a busy hive of genius. Her reign was one in which musicians, artists and men of letters found encouragement, and adventurers and discoverers could thrive. Elizabeth I never married, and was thus known as 'The Virgin Queen'.
Mary Queen of Scots (1542-1587). Also known as Mary Stuart, she was the daughter of James V. She was sent to France in 1548 and married the dauphin Francis II in 1558. Two years later she was widowed and returned, a Catholic and pro-French, to a Protestant Scotland, where she married her cousin Lord Darnley in 1565, bearing him a son who was to become James I of England. After Darnley's murder in 1567, her marriage to the Earl of Bothwell turned opinion against her, and she was forced to surrender to Protestant lords. She was later imprisoned in England. Elizabeth I, her cousin, was reluctant to bring her to trial for conspiracy, but when her complicity in a Catholic plot was proven, she agreed to sign the death warrant. Mary was executed at Fotheringhay castle in 1587.
James I (1566-1625) was the first Stuart king of England, ascending the throne in 1603 at the behest of the childless Queen Elizabeth I. As the son of Mary Queen of Scots, he also occupied the Scottish throne from 1567 to 1625. As King of England (1603-1625), he was initially well received, but soon turned people against him by insisting on the ancient doctrine of divine right, whereby he saw himself as God's lieutenant on earth who could dispose of Parliament as he felt fit. Described by a contemporary as 'the wisest fool in Christendom', he was learned, pedantic and dogmatic.
Charles I (1600-1649) was the second son of James I and became King of England, Scotland and Ireland in 1625. He was a studious rather than an intelligent man, understanding books better than people. He chose the French princess Henrietta Maria as his wife, and this act greatly upset the nation because the marriage articles permitted her the free exercise of the Catholic religion. Three parliaments were summoned and dissolved in the first four years of his reign. Then for eleven years he ruled without one, until 1640 when a rebellious Scottish army marched into England and he was forced to call another Parliament. It was a tumultuous relationship that culminated in a proposal for the transfer of military command from the Crown to Parliament and other measures that would have curtailed royal power. For Charles this was intolerable, and having alienated much of the realm, in 1642 he entered into the Civil War. The Royalists were eventually overcome and the King was captured and tried at Westminster. His dignified refusal to plead was interpreted as a confession of guilt and he was beheaded at Whitehall on January 30, 1649.
Charles II (1630-1685), the son of Charles I, sided with his father in the Civil War and was then forced into exile. On his father's execution (1649), he assumed the title of King of England, Scotland and Ireland, and was crowned at Scone in 1651. After another bout of forced exile, he was finally summoned back to England as king in 1660, when the return of the monarchy was met with great rejoicing. It was Charles II's interest in scientific matters that promoted the foundation of the Royal Society wherein groups of scientists and philosophers could discuss the 'Advancement of Natural Science'. Moreover, during his reign the Royal Hospital was founded at Chelsea in London, new construction was begun at Greenwich, London theatres were reopened and enjoyed royal patronage, and Hyde Park and Green Park were dubbed royal. The King himself was not a devout man. Yet when in 1685 he died leaving no legitimate heir, religious differences were destined to come to a head.
James II (1633-1701), the second son of Charles I, became King of England and Scotland from 1685. He became a Catholic in 1671, which led to attempts to exclude him from the succession. These culminated in the invitation made to the Protestant William of Orange to take the throne in 1688. James fled to France, led an unsuccessful rising in Ireland in 1690 and thereafter returned to exile in France.
The great-grandson of James I of England, George I (1660-1727) was also Elector of Hanover in Germany, where he was born. He was proclaimed King of Great Britain and Ireland in 1714, yet took little part in government, continuing to spend as much time as possible in his native country. So little interest did he show in his new realm that he never even bothered to learn English.
William III (1650-1702) became King of Great Britain in 1688. He was the grandson of Charles I and was Stadtholder of the Netherlands, like his father William II of Orange. He was offered the English throne by the parliamentary opposition to James II. He invaded England in 1688 and in 1689 became joint sovereign with his wife Mary (1662-1694), the daughter of James, Duke of York. He spent much of his reign campaigning, first in Ireland where he defeated James II, then against the French in Flanders.
George II (1683-1760) succeeded his father George I to the throne of Great Britain and Ireland in 1727. Though born in Germany, he involved himself more in the government of his country than his father had. His victory at Dettingen in 1743, in the War of the Austrian Succession, was the last battle commanded by a British King. He was a keen patron of music and the arts.
Born in London, George III (1738-1820) succeeded his grandfather George II to the throne of Great Britain and Ireland in 1760. He supported his ministers in a hard-line towards the American colonies, and opposed Catholic emancipation and other reforms. However, as time went by he began to suffer from attacks of porphyria, with bouts of insanity that so incapacitated him that by 1811 power was handed over to his son the Prince Regent, later George IV.
George IV (1762-1830) was King of Great Britain from 1820, when he succeeded his father George III, for whom he had acted as regent from 1811 to 1820 during the latter's insanity. He was idle, extravagant and selfish, yet he was also well-read, a generous and discerning patron of the arts and 'devilish entertaining', as one contemporary avowed. There was scarcely a notable artist or writer of his time that George IV did not encourage and support. In fact the exuberant neo-classical style of architecture that developed in the early 1800s was named Regency after him. He was also a considerable patron of the sciences, acting as President of the Royal Institution.
Victoria (1819-1901) was the grand-daughter of George III. She became Queen of the United Kingdom in 1837 at the age of 18, and three years later married her cousin Albert of Saxe-Coburg whom she adored and by whom she had nine children. Taught the art of statecraft by her first prime minister, Lord Lembourne, she had a clear grasp of constitutional principles and the scope of her own prerogative, demanding to be informed on all government matters, especially foreign affairs. She took a close interest in the Crimean War (1854-56), but retired from public affairs almost entirely following the premature death of Albert in 1861. However, her popularity recovered thereafter as she appeared in public more frequently. She was proclaimed Empress of India in 1876. Her long reign was enthusiastically celebrated in the Golden Jubilee of 1887 and the Diamond Jubilee of 1897.
Edward VII (1841-1910) was King of Great Britain and Ireland from 1901. As Prince of Wales, he was a prominent social figure, but his mother Queen Victoria considered him too frivolous to take part in political life. In 1860 he made the first tour of Canada and the USA ever undertaken by a British prince.
Elizabeth II (1926 - ) has been Queen of Great Britain and Northern Ireland since 1952. In 1947 she married her third cousin, Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh. They have four children: Prince Charles, Princess Anne, Prince Andrew and Prince Edward.
Charles Prince of Wales (1948 - ) is the eldest son of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. He is heir apparent to the British throne and was given the title of Prince of Wales in 1958. He was married to Lady Diana Frances Spencer and has two sons, Prince William and Prince Henry.
There has been a monarchy in Britain since the Celtic tribes that gave the country its name settled in the south-east of the island during the first century BC. Initially there were several small kingdoms, which were drawn together under central government in the late ninth century by the learned and wise King Alfred, the first great statesman to emerge clearly from the mists of early English history. When the Scottish and the English crowns were united in the year 1603 under King James I of England, the official name for England, Scotland, Wales and the adjacent islands became Great Britain. Over the centuries, the British royal families have been related through marriage to the royal houses of other European countries. The present sovereign, Queen Elizabeth II, is a direct descendent of Queen Victoria, who ruled during the height of the British Empire in the late nineteenth century. Queen Victoria, who married her German cousin Prince Albert, Duke of Saxony, had nine children, and Queen Elizabeth II's husband, Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, is also descended from one of them. For many decades now the Royal Family has played no direct political role, which could explain why reasons of state have not heavily shaped the marriages of the younger members of the royal family. Perhaps this is why such unions have proved more fragile than those of their parents. Yet even recently royal weddings have become occasions for magnificent shows of pageantry. The different members of the Royal Family carry out a great variety of official engagements. Some of these, like the ceremony for the opening of the Houses of Parliament, pertain to the structures of government, whereas others concern royal patronage of the arts and charity. Although the British public may be disconcerted by the widely publicised antics of the younger generation of Royals, expressions of republican sentiments are surprisingly rare, especially when the multi-ethnic reality of British society is borne in mind. This is partly realism: if there wasn't a sovereign there would have to be a president, and who says that politicians are better than monarchs? But it also reveals an enduring degree of pride and affection.
There are plenty of houses and castles throughout Britain that can claim some glimmer of royal fame: places where this king or that queen spent a night or two on the way to somewhere else. However, a far richer image of royal tastes and prerogatives can be gained by visiting those residences in which different sovereigns were actually 'at home'. The ones chosen for this itinerary cover a time-span of nearly a thousand years.
By the time of the Norman Conquest of Britain in 1066, towns were still very small by modern standards. Yet they were growing, and London, which was by far the largest, may have had as many as 20,000 inhabitants. Clearly, the new rulers of the land needed to secure their recently gained kingdom against attack from home or abroad, and this they did by building fortifications which also comprised chambers and banqueting halls. These were the first royal residences. One such construction is King William the Conqueror's own White Tower of London.
Begun around 1078, some twelve years after the Norman Conquest, the White Tower is the most enduring and obvious symbol of the Norman occupying power in London. Much of the stone was imported from Caen in Normandy to give dignity as well as strength to the great edifice, which was originally kept whitewashed to intensify its overwhelming effect. Rising 30 metres high, the mighty Tower must have completely dominated the lowly buildings of late-Saxon London.
The external appearance of the Tower was modified in the early eighteenth century, when the narrow Norman windows were replaced by the wider classical ones that can be seen today. However, inside the building the authentic character of Norman architecture is still visible in the Chapel of St John with its heavy round arches and robust circular pillars.
Another magnificent edifice founded by William I is Windsor Castle, situated on the Thames due west of London, on the edge of Windsor Great Park, formerly a royal hunting ground. It is perhaps the largest fortress of its kind in the world and is by far the oldest royal residence still in regular use. The process of converting Windsor from a fortress into a palace began in the sixteenth century, and it contains magnificent State Apartments as well as the Gallery housing works of art from the Royal Collection. The castle was severely damaged by fire in 1992.
Sovereigns are by definition at home throughout their realms. Yet when it comes to choosing a spot for eternal rest, many of them prefer the relative intimacy of their own residences. Beneath the Albert Memorial Chapel at Windsor Castle lie the mortal remains of George III, George IV, and William IV. In the Home Park adjoining the castle is the Royal Mausoleum where Queen Victoria and Prince Albert are buried.
The British royal family adopted the name Windsor in 1917. This unequivocally English name resulted from a Declaration by George V, a member of the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. It was felt that a Germanic surname for the British monarchy was inappropriate during a war against Germany.
The official London residence of Her Majesty the Queen at Buckingham Palace is surely the most famous of all royal palaces in Britain. It was commissioned by George IV, a somewhat dissipated, extravagant king, but nevertheless a great patron of the arts. He chose the famous Regency architect John Nash to design his 600-room residence. However, it was not finished until long after the sovereign's death in 1830. In fact the palace remained unused until Queen Victoria's accession in 1837. Moreover, the familiar east faτade was actually only added in 1913.
Since Buckingham Palace doubles as the office and the home of the British monarchy and is also used to host banquets for visiting heads of state, it provides employment for about 300 people. These include the officers of the Royal Household, who organise the Queen's official affairs, and a large team of domestic staff, about 50 of whom have rooms in the palace.
The Royal Mews were designed by John Nash to accommodate the horses and coaches used by the Royal Family on state occasions. They now also house some of the Palace staff as well as the Rolls-Royce limousines from which members of the Royal Family greet bystanders on official outings. However, the star exhibit is certainly the gold state coach built for George III in 1761 and the Irish state coach bought by Queen Victoria for the State Opening of Parliament.
The Queen's House at Greenwich with its sumptuous Royal Apartments can be reached by taking a delightful boat-trip down the Thames. It was designed for the wife of King Charles I by Inigo Jones, the first of the great English architects who became surveyor-general of the royal buildings in 1615. Jones, who had studied landscape painting in Italy and the Palladian villas near Venice, introduced the Renaissance style to England and was able to provide the French princess Henrietta Maria with a residence of great elegance and refinement.
This classical villa must have seemed most strange to contemporary Englishmen. Apart from the curious fact that it was designed as two separate halves joined by a bridge, its lack of external ornamentation would have been in marked contrast to the theatrical facades then in vogue. Indeed, the elegant double staircase on the north side and the charming loggia on the piano nobile must have appeared almost incomprehensible to those unfamiliar with Palladian architecture. The interior is based on the same simple geometry, the entrance hall being a perfect 12 metre cube framed by a carved wooden gallery. The square floor contains a magnificent circular pattern of black-and-white marble.
The Queens House at Greenwich has recently been restored and furnished as it would have been in the late 17th century, with brightly coloured wall hangings and fabrics. It is now the centrepiece of the National Maritime Museum, to which it has been joined by a colonnade.
Queen Elizabeth's official royal residence in Scotland is the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh. It was built in the 1500s, but was largely reconstructed a century later. The ridge, known as the Royal Mile, that slopes downward from Edinburgh Castle, comes to a majestic conclusion at Holyroodhouse, where Palace and Castle stand against the spectacular backdrop of Salisbury Crag. Founded on the site of a 12th century abbey, Holyroodhouse did not originally denote a friendly disposition towards the English crown. It was built by James IV, who became King of Scotland in 1488. He actually invaded England in 1513, but was defeated and killed along with many other Scots at the Battle of Flodden in Northumberland. The palace also has associations with Mary Queen of Scots and Bonnie Prince Charlie, the grandson of James II who in 1745 won the support of the Scottish Highlanders and tried unsuccessfully to invade England.
The original Holyrood edifice was an abbey founded under royal patronage during the 12th century. Since hospitality was always an important part of the charitable role of any religious community, successive generations of the Scottish monarchy are likely to have stayed within the abbey quite frequently, especially in view of the fact the Holyrood lay within easy reach of both their castle at Edinburgh and their favourite hunting grounds. As one of the largest buildings in the vicinity of Edinburgh, it also provided an occasional meeting place for the councils of the realm. The abbey became an especially favoured royal residence from the early 15th century. To accommodate the growing needs of the royal household, the abbey's main guest houses must have had to be enlarged on a number of occasions. The first stages of the process leading to the great quadrangular palace we see today date back to the early 16th century, when James IV of Scotland, the king who was later to lose his life invading England, wished to provide a residence of fitting splendour for himself and his English queen, Margaret Tudor. A few decades later Mary Queen of Scots was also to have close associations with the palace.
Holyrood became the official royal residence in Scotland in 1660, when the English monarchy was restored by Charles II, and extensive building was carried out during the following years. Two centuries were to go by before another monarch showed consistent interest in the palace. This was Queen Victoria, who developed a great love of Scotland. Under her aegis improvements were carried out inside the building and much was done to enhance its immediate setting. The forecourt was given a more seemly appearance in the 1860s by reconstructing the stables in a simple style. Moreover, in 1854 formal provision was made for regular public access to parts of the palace. For all the building and decorating, however, Holyrood remained essentially a stopping-off place on the way to Balmoral, albeit one of which Queen Victoria was very fond. In fact it was only during the reign of George V and Queen Mary (1910-1936) that Holyrood became a much-loved family home. Under the Queen's careful guidance, those interiors that had been left incomplete since Charles II's time were finished with woodwork and plaster ceilings in similarity with the best of the 17th century work. Since then it has become one of Scotlandφs most visited historic buildings.
Down in the south of England, in the elegant coastal town of Brighton, there is a royal palace quite unlike anything to be found elsewhere. At the beginning of the 1800s Brighton was becoming a fashionable seaside resort under the patronage of the man who was later to become George IV. When in 1811 his father, King George III, grew too sick to reign, he consigned authority to his son, who thus became the Prince Regent. During his regency he engaged John Nash to transform a seaside house in Brighton into a gorgeous Pavilion that was decorated and furnished in an Oriental style of exotic grandeur. With its onion-domed roofs and its splendid Chinese-style interiors, the Brighton Pavilion speaks for a flamboyance and a light-hearted enjoyment of the good life that became the hallmark of the Regency period. For the Prince Regent, the Royal Pavilion was a consuming passion that endured for some thirty-five years. He was determined that the palace should be the ultimate in comfort and convenience.
The interior of the Pavilion today reflects the combined talents of the artist-designers Frederick Crace and Robert Jones. In 1817 the two met up with the Prince Regent to decide who would be responsible for which rooms. The Long Gallery, linking the main State Rooms and providing access to the first floor chamber, served as an area for playing cards, conversation or musical entertainments. It was dramatically lit by a large, central painted-glass ceiling in daylight, with brightly painted lanterns and a central chandelier for the evening. The tall painted windows at each end of the Gallery were illuminated from the exterior at night, suffusing the interior with soft colours. The walls of the Gallery, partitioned by bamboo fretwork, were painted with a design of rocks, trees, shrubs and birds in subdued tones of blue on a pink background. The furnishings were comprised of bamboo-pattern cabinets and pedestals, oriental jars, pagodas and Chinese figures.
The King's apartments included a bathroom, bedroom, dressing-room, library and anteroom. These private rooms were decorated in a restrained and dignified style, intended for comfort and convenience rather than public display. Designed by Robert Jones, the walls were covered with a printed paper featuring a dragon on a green background. The rooms were furnished with a mixture of objects of different styles and epochs. French and English furniture is thus combined with Japanese lacquer to create an atmosphere of quiet elegance.
George IV was not a man to indulge the senses with any degree of moderation. When it came to dining, in 1816-17 he secured the services of the renowned French chef Marie-Antoine CarΩme, who devised elaborate menus with as many as sixty dishes. Hardly surprisingly, the Banqueting Room was one of the Pavilion's most magnificent interiors. The walls were hung with large canvases painted with Chinese domestic scenes, and beneath the shallow central dome there hung a 10-metre-long chandelier weighing a ton, held in the claws of a silvered dragon suspended from the apex of the ceiling. By the same token, guests were also proudly escorted to inspect the Great Kitchen. It was erected in 1816, fitted out in 1817-18 and featured four cast iron columns with painted copper palm leaves supporting the high ceiling. Copper awnings were designed to draw off excess heat and smells from the cooking range beneath. On the south wall stood a kitchen fire with a device for mechanically turning a spit. Five spits could be operated simultaneously.
The Saloon was the central room of the earlier building and is therefore one of the oldest parts of the Pavilion. Nash preserved the physical shape of the room during his structural alterations, but the interior decoration changed several times between 1787 and 1823. Jones's final designs encompassed every aspect of the room, from floor to ceiling. The various elements were united by the Indian motifs used throughout and by the regal colour scheme.
One of George IV's great passions was music, so one of the major features in Nash's second extension scheme was the spectacularly decorated Music Room. In this extraordinary interior, lit by nine lotus-shaped chandeliers, the King's own band entertained guests with selections from Handel or Italian opera.
Many British sovereigns have preferred to build new residences for themselves rather than simply adopt and adapt to the heritage of their forebearers. Queen Victoria was no exception. At her own expense she built Osborne House as her seaside residence on the Isle of Wight in 1845. Her husband, the Prince Consort, played a prominent part in the design of the house, conceiving it as an Italian villa. The Queen died here in 1901 and her private apartments have been preserved more or less unaltered. Crowded with furniture and bric-a-brac, they epitomise the style we call 'Victorian'.
Osborne was deliberately divided into two main parts: a pavilion for the royal family and a big adjoining block for visitors and courtiers. Rather than enlisting the services of a well-known architect like Barry, Prince Albert preferred to have his own say in questions of design and therefore employed Thomas Cubitt, a distinguished property developer and builder who had developed much of Bloomsbury and almost all of Belgravia in London. Their combined skills did not have quite the architectural aplomb of a professional like Barry, and as a result the main block is like a vastly overgrown Belgravia mansion, to which the Royal Pavilion is uncomfortably attached by an umbilical cord of open arcading. At one corner of the Pavilion is a Barryesque belvedere tower, and a slightly different tower is attached by more arcading to the opposite side of the main block. To incorporate two prominent towers of the same size into a picturesque composition was not an easy task, and in fact Osborne has a somewhat lopsided appearance from the outside.
As a piece of architectural design, Osborne works best from the inside. With their bay windows offering fine views of the sea and the splendid gardens, the rooms are pleasantly intimate. They are agreeably decked out in a gentle harlequinade of soft blues, pinks, greens and golds. Clearly Queen Victoria and her husband meant it to be a family house, with the rooms grouped round a central staircase so that the necessary equerries and ladies-in-waiting could be in discrete attendance around the corner. Linking the two buildings is a large and spacious corridor lined with statues in alcoves and bright Minton tiles. New furniture was designed for the reception rooms on the ground floor, and on the floor above Victoria and Albert each had a separate dressing room complete with bath and shower, which was highly progressive for the time. In the 1840s the rooms would not have been as crowded as they now seem. In particular Victoria's private rooms reveal the fruits of a lifetime's hoarding.
