Hanoverian London: the making of a service town.

UNTIL THE NINETEENTH CENTURY London had two geographical poles, the Court and the Port. Economically both these poles were defined primarily by their relationship to what a subsequent age would call the service sector. They were of course very different. The Court is taken here as a convenient shorthand that includes the government, parliament, the aristocracy and the Court’s allies in the professions. The Port includes the City of London, the suburbs along the Thames and shipbuilding, as well as the financial sector that developed to finance trade and would also finance governments. The categorisation of Port and Court omits much, especially the enormous manufacturing sector that made eighteenth-century London the largest manufacturing town in the Western Hemisphere, if not the world. But in the last resort much of London’s manufacturing sector was defined by the Court and the Port. These had an enormous influence on the capital’s demand for labour and were largely responsible for the high level of prices, particularly the price of land. They bore responsibility for London’s wages being higher than elsewhere and were a very important, often dominant source of demand for the capital’s manufactured goods, especially of course for its luxury goods. It was not accidental that so many of the largest cities in Europe combined the roles of Port and Court, and were noted on the one hand for their poverty and casual labour and on the other hand for their high prices and highly skilled, well organised and relatively well-paid skilled artisans. A town that combined Port and Court would also have highly seasonal rhythms of production: the London Season did much to define the seasonality of production in the West End, while the trade winds dominated much of the life in the East End. This chapter will seek to outline some of the characteristics of this sector, particularly in Westminster. Westminster was the quintessential ‘service town’ of the eighteenth century, but it is obviously impossible to isolate Westminster from the rest