London

1.1 Historical engravings and prints

Ok, this is a personal obsession of mine, but I recognise it might not be for everyone. Listed here are the places that look like they have good stocks at my price point (i.e. tending to 1-3 digit price facsimile engraving and copy engraving or ephemera rather than 4-digit-price original old masters or whatever).

• Storey’s (Cecil Court, WC2)
• Grosvenor Prints has an appropriately antiquated website (WC2)
• Portobello Print & Map Shop (Notting Hill, W11)
• The Map House (SW3)
• Antiqua Print Gallery (NW10 + online)

2.1 Prequel

Soon after 1066, William I issued a writ/charter confirming Londoners’ existing laws and customs — a document the City still treats as foundational to its corporate continuity (see modern translation).

Then London started getting special. By 1132, the Crown had conceded a key privilege: Londoners could choose their own sheriffs, an office that elsewhere functioned as a royal appointment. Then the City’s chief magistrate became an internally selected civic office. The first recorded mayor, Henry Fitz-Ailwyn (1189), is treated as the start of a continuous mayoralty, and the City describes the Mayoralty as a long-running civic institution. By 1215, the City’s liberties are explicitly named in Magna Carta clause 13 (translation). All this makes London a ground zero for democratic governance, of a sort, in England

2.2 1637: The City of London declines to include all of the city of London

By the 1600s, the built-up metropolis was spilling beyond the medieval City walls. In 1637, under Charles I, the Crown attempted an administrative reform that would have extended the City’s jurisdiction across the growing suburbs—what later writers call the “Great Refusal” (see The London Wanderer’s account and the Independent Labour piece).

The Crown presumably wanted tidier governance (plague control, order, taxation, all the usual early-modern state stuff). But another early-modern thing happened: Institutional power struggle! The City—already a powerful corporate body with entrenched privileges—declined the expansion and kept its governance tightly bounded to more-or-less the old city walls. I’m not sure I understand the mentality, but this happens again and again: when the metropolis grows, the institutions don’t naturally consolidate; they accrete around the gap and everyone preserves their own manor.

2.3 Patchwork metropolis

Most of the history from then on seems to have London as a mishmash of fragmented governance. The state didn’t so much “run London” as gardened a wild mess of parishes, vestries, boards, and carve-outs.

You can watch the Victorian state trying to put a lid on it in the Metropolis Management Act 1855, which created a London-wide body for infrastructure and sanitation: the Metropolitan Board of Works.

The Act is worth skimming just for the taxonomy. Its schedules enumerate a metropolis of parishes and districts, but also explicitly list extra-parochial places (“Schedule (C.)”). So here’s a category of London objects:

• The Close of the Collegiate Church of Saint Peter.
• Inner Temple.
• Lincoln’s Inn.
• Middle Temple.
• Staple Inn.
• The Charter House.
• Gray’s Inn.
• Furnival’s Inn.

I’m going to read this as “London normalizes exceptions”.

2.4 Engineering London’s governance

The Metropolitan Board of Works (MBW) was the Victorian attempt at metropolitan-scale capacity without metropolitan-scale democracy. It was created by the Metropolis Management Act 1855, staffed indirectly via parish vestries, and tasked with the big physical problems of a rapidly expanding city (roads, sewers, bridges, embankments). Under the Local Government Act 1888, the Board’s powers were transferred to the new London-wide council.

The MBW was rife with scandal. In 1889 it was acrimoniously replaced by the London County Council, the first London-wide authority to be directly elected, with the statutory transfer set out in the Local Government Act 1888.

One thing the reform didn’t do: absorb the Square Mile into a unified London government. The City remained apart.

Reformers organized through groups like the London Municipal Reform League, arguing for a single democratic authority for the metropolis. Check out The City’s shadowy figure in the under-gallery for an account of some amazing Victorian-era battles about this.

The greatest threat came with an 1884 Government-backed reform bill. This aimed to create a single metropolitan council based on a reformed Corporation. The unreformed Corporation was having none of it and formed a committee to coordinate opposition. This collected a petition of 20,000 signatures – many probably fake or bought – and circulated anti-reform pamphlets; paid people to create intimidating opposition at public meetings; financed groups to stall the bill and mislead Parliament, and established an ‘Anti-One-Municipality League.’ Its spending totalled £19,500 – around £1.9 million today. As a result, the bill ran out of time in the Parliamentary session, and was not reintroduced

The Royal Commission on the Amalgamation of the City and County of London was an inquiry into whether unification might be a good idea. The City’s own submission is defensive.

The Commission recommended unification in principle. London didn’t unify in practice. What did happen was a reorganization of the County of London beneath the LCC: the London Government Act 1899 replaced vestries and district boards with metropolitan boroughs, explicitly described in parliamentary debate as transferring the powers of the old patchwork to borough councils.

So the suburbs got rationalized. The Square Mile stayed special.

2.5 What the hell is the City now?

I’m not sure, but it’s weird, and very stable over time. Case in point 1:

The City employs a senior official called the City Remembrancer, created in 1571, whose modern job description includes monitoring legislation and acting as a parliamentary agent. The role is openly described within the City’s own institutional ecosystem (for example, the archival description of the Remembrancer’s parliamentary work, and City recruitment material that defines the Remembrancer as a parliamentary agent and head of protocol: City of London careers page).

Yep, a dedicated City officer, created in the 1500s, still has an officially acknowledged perch in Parliament’s gallery, tasked with tracking legislation that touches the City’s interests.

Inside the Square Mile, the governing machinery is its own ecosystem: wards, aldermen, a Court of Common Council, and an electoral culture tied to medieval guild structures.

A clean contemporary guide to the basic moving parts is the City’s own Wardmote Book, which sets out the City’s ward elections and the bodies involved. There’s also a livery system: the City states that livery companies are “integral to the City’s governance”, with liverymen participating in the selection of senior civic offices. The assembly called Common Hall exists for liverymen to elect the Lord Mayor and Sheriffs. The mechanics of those elections are described in livery sources such as the Election of Sheriffs notes.

The City retains a business vote. I mean, to be fair, there are not that many human beings who live in the city (<9000), so it’s just as well there is a business vote or there The legal basis for modernizing and expanding that system is the City of London (Ward Elections) Act 2002. Parliamentary scrutiny of that Bill includes evidence about how City elections operate in practice: for example, discussion of uncontested seats and electoral patterns.

The relationship between the City’s electoral system and modernist institutional design is the same as the relationship between a seagull and a quadcopter.

The City is also a long-lived corporate manager of funds and trusts. It operates multiple funding streams, including City’s Cash, described by the City as an endowment “built up over the last eight centuries” and used to finance activities “mainly for the benefit of London as a whole”. If I had more time, I’d read the City’s Cash annual report and financial statements.

Bridge House Estates—now branded as the City Bridge Foundation—was established roughly nine centuries ago to maintain London Bridge and now looks after multiple central London crossings. A more concrete “what it built and when” summary is laid out in Tower Bridge’s institutional history write-up.

2.6 Greater London: The bit that is not the City

Above borough level, London’s regional governance has repeatedly been, as we’d say now, “phoenixed”.

In 1965, the London Government Act 1963 created the Greater London Council (GLC) and the modern borough structure. The GLC was later abolished by the Local Government Act 1985. London then spent the late 20th century with strategic functions dispersed among multiple bodies. After the abolition of the GLC, “a complex web of bodies” handled aspects of city-wide policy. Thatcher nuked the Greater London Council in the ’80s, apparently as a power play against the left-wing GLC leadership. Regional government returned in 2000 via the Greater London Authority Act 1999 establishing the Mayor of London and the London Assembly.

So now Greater London has a Mayor after a huge hiatus. As opposed to the Lord Mayor of the City of London, who has been there uninterrupted for centuries. Because this is dumb and confusing, the City itself maintains an official explainer distinguishing the Lord Mayor of the City of London from the Mayor of London.

2.7 Institutions that survive by becoming owners, trustees, and exception areas

If we take a step back, London’s administrative oddness isn’t random. The same techniques recur across centuries:

• preserve a privileged jurisdiction inside a growing metropolis (the City after 1637);
• tolerate patchwork and exception areas until infrastructure forces a partial rationalization (1855);
• build metropolitan capacity through indirectly accountable bodies, then replace them when legitimacy collapses (MBW → LCC);
• attempt unification, then settle for reorganizing everything except the Square Mile (1890s);
• carry political access forward through specialized offices (the City Remembrancer);
• embed wealth and function in endowments and trusts that outlive normal municipal cycles (City’s Cash, City Bridge Foundation, Epping Forest conservatorship);
• re-cut regional government when national politics demands it (1963, 1985, 1999).

Now that we know all this, the steampunk detective radio play Victoriocity (set in “Even Greater London”) is even more entertaining.

2.8 Forward-facing policy setting

OK WHAT A WILD RIDE. HERE HAVE SOME YIMBY ARTICLES AS A PALATE CLEANSER:

• UK Foundations
• Labour’s building plans need a carrot as well as a stick
• Why Britain doesn’t build
• The plot against Mercia
• Upzoning London: the solution to Britain’s housing crisis

3.1 Shopping

I think I can see it in the shopping choices people make. In Britain, supermarkets seem to map out social class. While Australia’s Coles or Woolies don’t carry much real status baggage, in the UK a supermarket choice signals something about a person’s social position and taste.

At the top end is Waitrose, leaning into organic veg, nice wine, and “tasteful” interiors—basically shorthand for the comfortable middle class. Marks & Spencer (M&S) sits alongside it, with pricey ready meals and a food hall full of treats rather than essentials. Sainsbury’s is a polite middle zone—solid, reliable, slightly aspirational but still everyday. Tesco is the country’s main supermarket, stretching from basic to premium but leaning toward basic. I find this confusing because the first time I saw Tesco was in Thailand, where it was coded as fancy.

TBH the interiors don’t look that different to me, and the prices don’t either. Everything is expensive everywhere. Tesco seems to avoid dark chocolate or any seasonings with even a hint of chilli heat, except in bulk family-size packs marketed to South Asian shoppers; so there’s some ethnic segmentation too, I guess. Waitrose, perversely, seems to have more “British-grown” produce than the others, so, I guess local food is a class privilege? I’m curious whether this is specifically a London thing; maybe local stores in the countryside are heaving with local produce, and it’s only those London bankers flying their berries in from Morocco.

Below those local brands, Aldi and Lidl seem generally “cheap”-coded, but with the cost-of-living crisis even people who look rich seem to have Aldi groceries at home.

Also, department stores still seem big here, or at least culturally salient; I’m less sure what their actual turnover is. And they’re heavily class-coded too. More heavily class-coded? Harrods is old-school luxury—tourist heaven, chandeliers and caviar counters. Selfridges is modern luxury, more about design and art. M&S is also in this category, again playing its middle-class role: safe, familiar, mostly not flashy.

AFAICT, people don’t go to department stores at all if they’re lower-class-coded; instead they get their stuff at Argos, I guess?

The bakery coding is similar (Gail’s is middle-class, Greggs is working-class, Pret and Paul are in between).¹ This is… I guess, more familiar in Australia, where people also invest in bakery-based social signalling.

• Reddit: UK supermarket stereotypes
• British Supermarkets Explained (video)
• HuffPost on middle-class supermarkets (many more supermarkets ranked in terms of political and income demographics)

3.2 Arts and music and all that

TODO: write about arts scene.

• Research reveals stark class inequalities in access to the creative industries - The Sutton Trust
• Exposing the huge class divide in the music industry
• Let’s Talk About the Class Ceiling in Music | Youth Music