The other features of the squares lay in their civic aspect. They were, in the best circumstances, regarded as small communities with church and market attached to their development. It seemed to be a way of creating an attractive and humane city outside the old walls. When the squares were first erected they were considered to be, in Macaulay’s words, “one of the wonders of England,” combining convenience and gentility. The regularity and uniformity of these squares, so unlike the baroque vistas of Paris or of Rome, might have been derived from the example of old monastery courtyards or convent gardens with which London was once familiar. To walk through Queen Square, Russell Square, Torrington Square and Bedford Square was to sense that “the traditions of the Middle Ages had been handed down” and that the tranquillity of the ecclesiastical establishments had been carried westward.
Yet it is never wise to underestimate the atavistic elements of London life, even as it grows beyond all of its old boundaries. Expansion takes place in waves, with a sudden movement and roar succeeded by a calm. The city will on one occasion brush against an area, or on another colonise it wholly. Leicester Fields and Soho Square, for example, were already so close to the burgeoning capital that no attempt at creating a graceful public or communal space was ever made. In this context, too, it is important to note that the restless movement of the city was, in the words of John Summerson, established upon “the trade cycle rather than the changing ambitions and policies of rulers and administrators.” For a while the city stopped to the west at what is now New Bond Street but what was then “an open field.” Building had come to a temporary halt on the southern side of Oxford Street which was little more than “a deep hollow road, filled with sloughs” and bordered by hedges. Regent Street was then a “solitude” and Golden Square, previously employed as a plague pit, “was a field not to be passed without a shudder by any Londoner of that age.”
The new squares did not necessarily remain models of civic or communal harmony for very long. Macaulay notes that by the end of the seventeenth century the centre of Lincoln’s Inn Field “was an open space where the rabble congregated every evening” and where “rubbish was shot in every part of the area.” St. James’s Square became “a receptacle for all the offal and cinders, for all the dead cats and dead dogs of Westminster”; at one time “an impudent squatter settled himself there, and built a shed for rubbish under the windows of the gilded saloons.” It is further evidence of the contrast and contrariness of London life, but it is also suggestive of a city which was even then established upon a basic brutality and offensiveness. It is tempting to think of the new squares as separate communities still surrounded by fields, for example, but in fact the fields themselves were being built upon. “At this end of town,” one resident of Westminster complained, “whole fields go into new buildings and are turned into alehouses filled with necessitous people.”
Where most of the developments of the western suburbs of London were conducted by means of leasehold arrangements and governed by Acts of Parliament, the extension of the eastern regions was confused and haphazard, governed as it was by ancient statutes of the manors of Stepney and Hackney which provided for only short “copyholds” of thirty-one years. Thus from the beginning the expansion of the city at the east end remained unplanned and underdeveloped. Wapping and Shadwell had taken shape ten years after the Fire, while Spitalfields was “almost completely built over” by the end of the century. Mile End was emerging as a populous district while the bankside from Ratcliffe to Poplar was a continuous mean street of houses and of shops.
The Ogilby map does not include the meaner streets of the east, nor the confused development of the west. Instead it reveals what in his poem,
More great then humane now, and more August,
New deified she from her fires does rise:
Her widening Streets on new Foundations trust,
And, opening, into larger parts she flies.
