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
- 5 The objects of street improvement in Regency and early Victorian London
- 6 Workmen's fares in south London, 1860–1914
- 7 Railways and housing in Victorian London
- 8 Some social costs of railway-building in London
- Part Three The Urban Fabric
- 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
6 - Workmen's fares in south London, 1860–1914
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
- 5 The objects of street improvement in Regency and early Victorian London
- 6 Workmen's fares in south London, 1860–1914
- 7 Railways and housing in Victorian London
- 8 Some social costs of railway-building in London
- Part Three The Urban Fabric
- 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
‘I am quite sure’, Mr A. J. Balfour told the House of Commons in May 1900,
that the remedy for the great disease of overcrowding is not to be found in dealings, however drastic, with insanitary areas. If you can accommodate by raising the height of your buildings, a larger population on a given area, well and good. But if you cannot do that, then you must go outside the narrow area at the centre of your congested district, and you must trust to modern inventions and modern improvements in locomotion for abolishing time.
Almost all the major problems confronting his generation of Londoners had arisen from the extremely rapid rate at which London had grown during the previous half-century. Not least among these was the problem of eradicating the teeming slums which bordered the central reaches of the Thames and sprawled, on its southern bank, over the flat alluvium areas of Bermondsey, Walworth, Kennington, North Lambeth, and beyond. It is in this context, as a corollary to the housing problem of Victorian London, that workmen's fares on trains and trams should be viewed. They played perhaps the most significant role of all in the solution of these difficulties, and in contributing markedly to the pace and direction taken by suburban development in the generation before 1914. It is the purpose of this essay to examine the origins and extension of workmen's fares in south London in Victorian and Edwardian times, and to suggest the part played by them in these wider developments.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Exploring the Urban PastEssays in Urban History by H. J. Dyos, pp. 87 - 100Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1982