Traffic jams

The world runs on wheels, Thomas Dekker noted dryly in 1606. People ransacked their memories for a time when traffic was thicker, without luck. Thomas Procter thought that streets were to blame for ‘the dayly continuall great griefe and heartbreaking of man and beast’. ‘The greate streete called Cheapside’ was clogged up by carriages, coaches, and carts, Common Council complained in 1657. Venice's ambassador had a long delay there one day when his coach was hemmed in by twenty carts. No place seemed safe from ‘the continuall passage of horses, carts, and carriages’. This hustle and bustle grew with London. Pickpockets brushed against shoppers on Cheapside; the conduit was a good place to catch people unawares. Women sold ‘garden’ goods there, blocking pavements. ‘A world of knaves and cheaters passes’ Cheapside cross ‘each day’, Henry Peacham said in 1641, ‘herbwomen on one side and costermongers and tripe-wives on the other’. One ‘herbwyfe’ who stood selling close to the cross was locked in the stocks for a couple of hours in 1605 for tossing ‘beane, shales, and other things’ at the emperor's ambassador as he walked along Cheapside.

Crowded streets led to calls to ‘demynissh’ the number of ‘carres’ in 1573, 1580, and 1582. ‘The oversight’ of ‘carts and carres’ was put in the hands of Christ's Hospital board in 1582, and one of their first steps was to pick officers to ‘take up disordered cars’ and make sure that carmen served seven-year-long apprenticeships.