London—A City in Dissolution

Extract

‘It is evident’, wrote Thomas Carlyle a century ago, ‘that an old order of things is breaking up into fragments; and men watch it, as they watch all wrecks, fearfully’. Nothing could be more apt than this when applied to London today. For we see a city in dissolution, a city that has got out of hand.

The problem is so vast. The idea that the problem is solely one of traffic does not bear a minute’s examination; traffic congestion is a convenient scapegoat, an excuse for not doing anything, a reason for doing the barest minimum (the odd traffic roundabout here, the odd fly-over there). These muted attempts to solve traffic congestion savour of a sop to the conscience, just as the cornflake packets posing as architecture are acts of tardy defiance against a chaos that was predicted by Ruskin and Carlyle with ineffable accuracy.

Had there been no war, had the population remained static, then London might have tottered on for a century more or so, with its prisons disguised as Gothic castles and its abatoirs as Venetian palaces, and its churches built for little more than £4,000 (including fittings and furnishings). However, such was not to be. As Matthew Arnold wrote in another context, ‘For what wears out the life of mortal men? ‘Tis that from change to change their being rolls;’