3 - Trends, cycles and wars

Summary

The long-run trends

An analysis of long-run trends in the development of the capital's economy for this period must begin with the better statistics that become available during the second decade of the eighteenth century, after the Peace of Utrecht. This appears to have inaugurated a boom; the effect of the bursting of the South Sea Bubble was relatively short-lived, and Defoe, writing during the mid 1720s, would wax eloquent on London's growth:

New squares and new streets rising up every day to such a prodigy of buildings, that nothing in the world does, or ever did equal it, except old Rome in Trajan's time … We see several villages, formerly standing, as it were, in the country and at a great distance, now joined to the streets by continued buildings, and more making haste to meet in the like manner; for example Deptford … Islington … Newington … Westminster is in a fair way to shake hands with Chelsea, as St. Gyles's is with Marybone …

It is … to be observed, as a particular and remarkable crisis, singular to those who write in this age, and very much to our advantage in writing, that the great and more eminent increase of buildings in, and about the city of London, and the vast extent of ground taken in, and now become streets and noble squares of houses, by which the mass, or body of the whole, is become so infinitely great, has been generally made in our time, not only within our memory, but even within a few years.