This feature first appeared in August 2023 on Londonist: Time Machine, our much-praised history newsletter. It's part of an ongoing series looking at how Londoners of the past imagined their future city. To be the first to read new history features like this, sign up for free here.
“He awoke, he said, to find himself standing on a bridge with a companion. He saw a man fishing from the walls of the Embankment and was told he was fishing for salmon and trout. Now not a single bit of refuse went into the Thames, and they had a salmon weir at London Bridge. Southwark had been rebuilt, and the roofs of the houses were flat, and the people sat in the summer evening in their roof gardens, looking at London twinkling in the evening sun.”
This press report of a speech by Sir Aston Webb appeared in early 1914. Webb, the founder of the London Society, was using the old visionary’s conceit of pretending that he’d fallen asleep and woken 100 years in the future. This was his description of far-off 2014.
The London he imagines bears many similarities to our modern city. He accurately predicts the regeneration of the South Bank, with swanky apartments replacing the tumbledown warehousing and dockyards of Webb’s own time. He notes how clean the river has become, even allowing salmon to thrive. (And, though we still read of frequent discharges, the Thames is still much cleaner than it used to be… though still not clear enough for salmon.) Spanning the Thames, he commends “St Paul’s Bridge”, and was “glad to see it aligned upon St Paul’s Cathedral”… a first glimpse of the Millennium Bridge, 85 years before its construction.
Smoke is abolished from the capital, as is the unsightly rail bridge that once spanned Ludgate Hill. The factories are all deleted. As for the road network: “The great roads out of London are 120 feet wide, with two divisions, one for slow-moving and the other for fast-moving traffic; and there will be a huge belt of green fields surrounding London.” Dual carriageways, radial roads and protected green belt. All this he got right, 30-50 years before the changes took place. Who was this great prophet?
Aston Webb: Forward thinker
His prophecies might seem spookily prescient, but they were often self-fulfilling prophecies. Webb sat on many committees and trained a new generation of star architects. Many of his predictions are simply common sense solutions to the problems of his time. The river in 1914 was filthy and devoid of fish; hence, by 2014, one would naturally hope it would be free of refuse and teeming with salmon.
St Paul’s Cathedral was hopelessly obscured from the river (by warehousing) and from Fleet Street (by the rail viaduct); hence, a brighter future is easily imagined where these obstructions are removed. Indeed, a competition to design a St Paul’s bridge was instigated in 1914, but sputtered out because of the war.
The prediction of a green belt around the city might seem less obvious. It stems from the ideas of Ebenezer Howard whose hugely influential book Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1902) promoted self-contained towns with radial roads and concentric belts of open spaces and built environment, all ultimately surrounded by preserved green land.
Webb was tapping into the mood of the time. He synthesised disparate ideas, curling them into his own masterplan for the ideal city, a century in the future. That many of its facets were eventually realised is a combination of good intuition mixed with the clout to see that his ideas would be propagated by his successors.
Webb didn’t get everything right, however. In the same speech, he also predicted that future London would have just two railway stations: one for the north and one for the south. Cannon Street and Charing Cross rail bridges would also be removed as unsightly, the tracks buried underground. His expected Imperial Parliament on the Southbank sounds hopelessly dated. And the most unfortunate false prediction of all: “The housing problem had solved itself”.
Even so, Webb stands pre-eminent among London’s future-gazers. His legacy lives on, thanks to the London Society who recently updated his book London of the Future. But he wasn’t the only London soothsayer. Predicting the world 50 or 100 years hence is a long-running staple of newspapers and magazines. With modern digitised archives, we can now retrieve some of these long-lost prophecies and see how they stack up. Simply by searching for “London in the year 2000” or “future of London”, we can readily find all kinds of curious ideas.
Bigger city, but virtual commuting
A common observation by crystal-ball gazers was how big and busy London might become. The city had grown rapidly in Victorian times, and numbered more than five million souls by 1900. In that year, journalist Joseph Darby pre-empted Webb by imagining a dream journey 100 years into the future of London.
“The magnitude of the great Metropolis was the first thing to strike my observation,” he began, “being apparently 10 times the magnitude I had understood it to be when in the flesh.” HG Wells concurred. In his 1902 book Anticipations, the famed novelist foresaw a city of fast rail networks where “it is not too much to say that the London citizen of the year 2000 a.d. may have a choice of nearly all England and Wales south of Nottingham and east of Exeter as his suburb”. His foresight has pretty much come to pass. Most of us will know somebody who regularly commutes into London from beyond the Home Counties (although Exeter is perhaps pushing it).
Not everyone saw commuting from distant suburbs as the future, though. In 1935 the architect EA Rowse was dreaming of video-call technology that became so familiar during the recent pandemic. He also anticipated its effect on commuting: “When the television had been fully added to the telephone, there would be less need for direct personal contact between buyer and seller,” reported one newspaper, paraphrasing one of Rowse’s talks. “This also would mean less coming and going about the streets. But these declines in traffic would be replaced by greater travel in and out of the city on sports and recreation.”
This is precisely what we’ve seen since the pandemic. Tube passenger numbers have returned to normal at weekends, as Londoners travel around for recreation, but weekday numbers remain at 85% of pre-pandemic levels. Just as Rowse predicted, our adoption of remote working, with help from a television-telephone hybrid (the video-call) has lessened our appetite for office work.
So what would this bigger, but less bustling city look like? Darby and Rowse both envisaged tall tower blocks, on a scale not then to be seen in London. According to Darby’s vision:
“...London had not only spread itself out in every direction, but developed into great beauty. Instead of streets with buildings all alike, there were vast structures of great architectural beauty into which associated families were domiciled and they were termed associated homes. This consolidation of population gave abundant space between for gardens and pleasure grounds, causing London's suburbs to be more pleasant than country villages.”
Here, Darby offers a compelling description of the best social housing projects, with large green spaces between immense housing blocks — the 1950s Alton Estate in Roehampton seems to fit the bill. Aside from the idea of associated families, it might also be an accurate sketch of the Barbican complex — although such projects are not everyone's idea of 'beautiful'.
Manhattan-on-Thames
“It will be possible to jump out of bed in the suburbs, seven miles away, be dashed into the city by electricity, rushed with clanging bells and another current of electric fluid to the office, where the ascent to business will actually commence by 'lightning' lifts. On each floor we may complete our toilets — shave on floor one, boots and brush upon floor two, breakfast on three, read morning papers on four, discuss events on five, and on reaching six do a little work (if there is time) by a system of pigeonholing, electric fans, typewriters, telephones, phonographs, and despatch messengers that will reduce labor to a minimum. It sounds all very beautiful, but it's coming — in the sweet by and bye!”
This was written at a time when most office work in London was confined to two or three-storey buildings. Lifts, lightning or otherwise, were still a novelty. New York, meanwhile, had just completed the 29-storey Park Row Building. The fear of an ever-taller London was echoed a year later when Harmsworth’s Magazine published a series of images set five years in the future, following a notional US invasion. Of the many wonderful images in this magazine, perhaps the most resonant with the times is this vision of Trafalgar Square, redubbed Washington Square and surrounded by multistorey offices.
Such lofty streetscapes had their champions on this side of the Atlantic. Writing in his 1905 book 100 Years Hence: The Expectations of an Optimist, T Baron Russell foresees “Thirty, forty, fifty or a hundred-story houses, and houses which perhaps burrow to some distance underground,” to feed demand for city-centre living in London. The tallest residential building in London today is the Landmark Pinnacle in Canary Wharf, which manages 75 floors.
One particularly beautiful, and well-known imagining of London’s skyline, from 1926, looked ahead 100 years. It is noteworthy for two themes: the proliferation of air transport and the great spurt of tall buildings. The image, originally used on a London Underground poster, was in 2013 hand-picked by then-Mayor Boris Johnson as a curiosity piece in his 2020 Vision report.
Writing of its artist Montague B. Black, Mr Johnson critiqued the vision:
“He is wrong about airships. He is wrong about skyscrapers, in that they are made of glass and steel, and not brick. But he is right about some big things. We do have such demand for space, office and residential, that we now build some very tall buildings… Though we don’t have commuters regularly using individual planes - as the people of the 1920s briefly imagined that we would - we do have extreme pressure on aviation capacity.”
Johnson was, of course, banging the drum for his pet “Boris Island” project, to build a new airport in the Thames Estuary. The idea of placing landing strips over and alongside the Thames was not a new one. Indeed, a London Bridge rooftop airport is suggested in Black’s painting above (on the blocky building, centre-right). There’s much more to say on this topic, but I’ll save that one for another instalment, in which we’ll look at historic predictions about the future of London transport.
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