Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: H. J. Dyos and the urban process, by David Reeder
- Part One The Urbanising World
- Part Two Transport and Urban Transformation
- Part Three The Urban Fabric
- 9 The slums of Victorian London
- 10 The speculative builders and developers of Victorian London
- 11 A Victorian speculative builder: Edward Yates
- 12 A guide to the streets of Victorian London
- Conclusion Urban history in the United Kingdom: the ‘Dyos phenomenon’ and after, by David Cannadine
- Appendix: A bibliography of the published writings of H. J. Dyos
- Notes
10 - The speculative builders and developers of Victorian London
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 February 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: H. J. Dyos and the urban process, by David Reeder
- Part One The Urbanising World
- Part Two Transport and Urban Transformation
- Part Three The Urban Fabric
- 9 The slums of Victorian London
- 10 The speculative builders and developers of Victorian London
- 11 A Victorian speculative builder: Edward Yates
- 12 A guide to the streets of Victorian London
- Conclusion Urban history in the United Kingdom: the ‘Dyos phenomenon’ and after, by David Cannadine
- Appendix: A bibliography of the published writings of H. J. Dyos
- Notes
Summary
It seems strange that we should know so little about how Victorian cities were actually made. We know far more about the total effort that went into making them and the impact this had on the course of investment - perhaps on the very growth of the national income - than we do about the way in which these cities were literally pieced together. It is true, just the same, that no one has yet been able to say with real conviction whether, or to what extent, the growth of her cities in the nineteenth century of itself stimulated or retarded Britain's general economic expansion. Yet what seems in some ways more remarkable than our ignorance on these bigger questions is the smallness of our knowledge about a number of little things, especially those involved in the basic developmental processes of converting open country into closed-up streets and of the business operations that carried them through. Here is an industry - to consider it for a moment at large - which in the first Census of Production in 1907 accounted for about £80 million output per annum, or nearly as much as the whole of the clothing industry, appreciably more than that of gas, water and electricity undertakings combined. We know more about the movements of some of the prices of the factors involved in the productivity of the house-building industry itself than we do about its structure and its ways of working.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Exploring the Urban PastEssays in Urban History by H. J. Dyos, pp. 154 - 178Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1982