Imperial Capital

The Industrial Revolution propelled Britain into its climactic Victorian age of industrial and imperial supremacy. Capitalism crystallised into a fully developed mode of production based on manufacturing industry, with the defining ideology that productivity delivers profit, and profit delivers the bourgeois ideal of progress. At the same time, control of the world’s largest Empire meant that Britain was a global hegemon, controlling a vast imperial economy held together by a multilateral trading system orchestrated in the City of London. One of the peculiarities of British capitalism is that leadership of the ruling class passed not to the industrial bourgeoisie, but rather to the financial elite in the City. Through its control of global trade and investment, the City had established a uniquely powerful position within the national economy, and the industrialists could not match its power and influence. This meant that though the Industrial Revolution took place primarily in the manufacturing cities of the Midlands and North, its wider economic impacts were controlled from London. The hegemonic buildings of the Industrial Age embody most acutely that struggle between modernity and tradition that has been a persistent theme in English culture. The modernists were the engineers, working with new materials such as steel and glass to produce innovative new built forms such as the Crystal Palace which housed the Great Exhibition of 1851. The traditionalists were the architects, reviving past medieval and classical styles to clothe modernist structures with ornament of time-honoured acceptability. In London this contradiction is most apparent in the great railway termini such as Euston and St Pancras, where vast engineered railway sheds were fronted by Greek or Gothic Revival facades. Revivalism was all the rage in the City, in the private office buildings developed for banks and insurance companies. Classicism was the preferred style for the first generation of offices, bestowing upon their occupiers the desired aura of dignity and reliability. As classicism gave way to Gothic Revival, the emphasis shifted to the virtues of longevity and tradition. In turn, as the Victorian era gave way to the Edwardian, a more bombastic neo-Baroque style offered an unashamed celebration of imperial grandeur and plutocratic excess. Flamboyant Baroque was also the favoured style for the grand hotels and department stores established in the West End to satisfy the growing demand for conspicuous consumption. In Westminster the state launched a huge programme of hegemonic building worthy of an imperial capital. Following a fortuitous fire, the Houses of Parliament were rebuilt in majestic Gothic, adorned with a rich array of historical paintings and sculpture. New government buildings sprang up along Whitehall, in particular the Foreign Office, War Office and Treasury Building, all in versions of Classical. The cultural impact of Empire extended far beyond Whitehall, with the foundation of museums, galleries and educational institutions. London’s role as imperial capital reached its Edwardian climax in the aggrandisement of the royal route from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey, providing a fitting theatre for the pomp and ceremony of a seemingly invincible nation.