In Our Time - The City - a history, part 1

Episode Date: March 25, 2010

Melvyn Bragg presents the first of a two-part discussion about the history of the city. With Peter Hall, Julia Merritt and Greg Woolf.The story of cities is widely held to begin in the 8th millennium BC in Mesopotamia. By 4000 BC, there were cities in the Indus Valley, by 3000 BC in Egypt, and by 2000 BC in China. What happened in the west was the furthest ripple of that phenomenon. In 1000 BC Athens still only had a population of one thousand. At its height, Athens' position as a powerful Mediterranean trading city allowed it to become the birthplace of much that would later characterise western cities, from politics through architecture to culture. Then, early in the first millenium AD, the world saw its first million-strong city: Rome. Maintaining a population of this size required stupendous feats of organisation and ingenuity. But in following centuries, as Rome declined and fell, the city itself, in the west at least, declined too; power emanated from kings and their mobile courts, rather than particular settlements.In China, urban trading posts continued to flourish, but their innovative energy dwindled before the end of the first millennium. Between 1150 and the onset of the Black Death in 1350, the city underwent a resurgence in Europe. City-states developed in Italy and in Germany. At this stage, there was no omnipotent power-centre to match Ancient Rome. But with the growth of sea and then ocean trade, and the centralisation of power in capitals ruling nation-states, cities like London, Paris, Madrid, Amsterdam and St Petersburg became increasingly wealthy, dynamic and ostentatious. By 1801, one of these - London - finally matched Ancient Rome's peak population of a million. Along the way, the city had become an ideal to be revered and a spectre to be feared.Peter Hall is Professor of Planning and Regeneration at The Bartlett School of Planning, University College London; Julia Merritt is Associate Professor of History at the University of Nottingham; Greg Woolfis Professor of Ancient History at the University of St Andrews.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in 1625, a traveller from Rome found himself in an antique land. In the sands of the desert, he came upon ancient bricks, cemented together with tar and stamped with strange symbols.

The site wasn't excavated until over 200 years. later, but what emerged from the dust was the remains of the city of Err. Along with other urban settlements in the Bronze Age Mesopotamia, such as Babylon and Nineveh, Err is accorded to be one of the earliest cities. Ever since, across the globe, cities have risen and fallen and risen again, though through many millennia, millions would never have seen one. Nonetheless, the story of human civilization has been to a great degree the story of the city. Today in the first part of a special two-part edition of in our time, we're going to explore the growth, decline and resurgence of cities from their beginnings until just before the coming of the railways.

With me to explore the development of the city from its origins until 1800, Julia Merritt, Associate Professor of Early Modern British History at the University of Nottingham, Peter Hall, Professor of Planning and Regeneration at the Bartlett School of Planning University College London, and Greg Wolf, Professor of Ancient History at St Andrews University. Greg Wolf, what do we know about the way cities might have begun in the 8th millennia, 8,000 BC?

Well, the story really starts with the beginnings of agriculture, not long after the beginning of the current warm period. And for a while, most people who were farmers weren't living in cities. But there were one or two very early examples. Chattelhoeuk in Anatolia, Jericho, where people seem to have come together into what were much larger villages than otherwise. Then by the 4th millennium BC, you begin to get real cities in Mesopotamia. Then 3rd millennium BC in the 200, Egypt,

North, West India, China, and that's where it all starts. What is all that is starting in the 18th millennium? How do you describe it as a city? Why has it become a city and it's not a village? Why are we using that word about something established in 8,000 BC? And you went along the dates, 4,000, 3,000, 2,000. Europe doesn't appear at a long time later. But let's leave that aside.

When is a village a city? When it gets big, how big? Difficult to tell. Difficult to tell when you're excavating any parts of very, very ancient. sites. Some people wouldn't use the word city for these early Neolithic villages. I think a city comes about in the fourth millennium when you begin to get writing, great monuments, huge structures, and when you begin to see that the people who live in a city are divided into classes, different occupations, the priests, warriors, and most of all these cities are created by kings,

sometimes claiming to represent the gods. But let's go back to the beginnings, because we did promise our listeners that we would start at the beginning. And you, yourself, Er was dug up, there's Babylon. We're talking about the 8,000. Are we talking about 30 or 40,000 BC? We're talking about 30 or 40,000 people said to have lived there. Is that where the first consequence of the change in agriculture bites in? Most places, agriculture, you don't need high-dentity of population.

A few places maybe had big concentration to population before there was agriculture, Chaffler, who might be one of them. In those cases it's really about resources where you've got enough food to feed a population of that kind of density. My guess you probably don't get to levels of population around 30,000, 40,000 until the 4th millennium at the point in Mesopotamia

where the Uyad period changed into the Uruk period. But these early centres are enormously important because they show the potential that happens when you put large numbers of people together. They have to develop some kind of social organisation. They have to organise planning. Have to think about their waste. They have to think about water.

and food supply, and all those things are going to be important for the city throughout history. So there's a real sense in which these very early mega-villages are precursors of the city. And they develop all sorts of specialisations which they simply didn't need before. That's right. With the Bronze Age, the Bronze Age in the Agean collapsed around 1,500 BC, when things seem to be going along quite well with the city, and the urban settlement didn't develop for 500 years later. Why did they collapse?

No one's completely sure why the Bronze Agee. centres in the Mediterranean collapse when they did. It may be that we should think of them as the sort of final fringe of a civilization based in the Near East. That places like Crete and Mycenae seem fantastically important to us because they're important to European history. But they're the sort of third world for Mesopotamian civilization. When Mesopotamian civilization goes through its own rough patches, maybe when that catches cold, what happens in the Mediterranean is that those societies go down completely. The palace is abandoned, replaced with smaller-scale settlements.

Writing disappears. Technologies disappear not to be rediscovered for centuries. People are living not just in villages, but in tiny villages of 20, 30 houses at most. So this is how Europe looks until about 1,000 BC, when Athens is first noted as a place, but again a very small place. That's right. In Athens in 1,000 BC is a cluster of these tiny little hamlets scattered around. the edge of the land around the Acropolis. The Acropolis itself probably has temples on it,

but it no longer has a great Mycenaian palace. And there are fields and cemeteries in between the little hamlets. So it's more like a sort of cluster of villages, gradually growing together. Peter Hall, let's stay with Athens for the moment. Is something distinctive and particularly to do with the culture of cities emerging from Athens? Well, we all think.

Athens was distinctive. Perhaps it wasn't as distinctive as we tend casually to think, because as Greg has said, there are earlier civilizations that were doing interesting things like writing and recording and exchanging ideas. But it was the first time, I think, in history where this coming together of people exploded into something really significant

that has survived all the surviving period and has contributed so much. much to our present civilization. It's this continuity of the Athenian experience, which is distinctive. We're talking about the 6th, 5th, 4th centuries BC. Exactly so, yes. So can you just spell out what made it the city that became almost the prototype city? I think it was essentially the exchange of ideas, the ideas in drama, ideas in the visual arts, and above all ideas in the organisation of communities,

the first democracy, indeed the famous direct democracy, where every citizen came out to discuss issues and resolve them. We have to remember that there were a lot of non-citizens, including slaves in ancient Athens, who weren't part of this process. But it was an extraordinary experiment, only possible perhaps at that scale of city. You can't imagine modern London or modern New York

with the mayor asking all the citizens to gather somewhere to resolve issues. But it was very significant, and that too, of course, has survived as an overwhelmingly powerful idea across the intervening centuries. By that time, the idea of feeding large populations, though not being directly involved in agriculture, was well developed. But also trade was beginning,

and that was a factor, wasn't it? Athens was a great trading city. It was, and I think you can say this. As we've seen, the earliest cities were perhaps agricultural cities or towns or whatever we want to call them. And you still see those in southern Italy, for instance, those hilltop agricultural villages, essentially,

all towns, if you want to call them that. But the distinctive feature of a city is that people do something different. they trade or they run things or they exchange ideas. In order to do that, they have to eat. They're not growing anything, so they have to get their food from the surrounding countryside. As the city grows, it requires a more and more sophisticated system of trade,

maybe local trade, bringing the food in from the surrounding countryside, and then eventually needing to trade farther and farther afield and a system of exchange develops between the economy. of the city and the economy, first of the surrounding area, and then of an empire, and we think of Greece, although perhaps not often, we should think of it as an empire. It was quite a big empire when you look around the eastern rim of the Mediterranean and pushing into Asia Minor as well. The next big leap is to Rome. Athens is an emblemative of a great number of things, and Rome also is in 0.D. some of these figures are a bit too accurate to be believed in, but never mind.

Around then, Rome had the first city ever to have had a population of one million, which was a great feat of organisation, wasn't it? It was. Rome's population at that time, it's disputed, of course, as to the exact size when it happened, but round about a million about that time was amazing. And it took a very long time, for London, for instance, to reach that same population in 1800. and it required a feat of urban organisation on parallel scale.

Not only did Rome have to extend its empire over roughly the same area as the Greeks had, but then even farther, including us here in Britain, or I should say southern Britain, but also it had to organise the supply of fresh water, for instance, over long-discipline. through the famous aqueducts. All this required, first, technology, understanding how to move water long distances, and secondly, tremendous organisation to distribute that water, and also clear away the waste matter,

because if you did not do that efficiently, you'd have rampant disease, and the city would soon cease to exist, as the population or the remaining population fled to the countryside. Julian Mary, by the time of Athens, certainly, but absolutely by the time of Rome, cities had a sense of themselves, and Rome had a great sense of itself as an imperial city. And two ideas were emerging, which can be summarised in the two great poets of the time, that first century, AD, Horace about the city was a civilising, optimistic place, great opportunities and sophistication,

and juvenile saying it was a monster, it was a predator, it ate up values, and it ate up people. Can you tell us a bit more about those two points? points? Well, I think these ideas of civility and also corruption in the city are very sort of powerful ones that emerge in writing and thinking about cities in this period. If you turn to an idea like civility, I suppose there is this Greek idea of the polis as being this essential sort of form of social life. So in that sense, the city is being seen as very much as a sort of civilising force. Excuse me. And it's really a place where humanity can can actually achieve its full

potential. So there's an idea that cities also provide the sort of amenities, the sort of environment in which man can actually live a life of reason. So those ideas are very significant. And I suppose there are related aspects here as well that you get. So you begin to get in thinking and writing about the period a contrast made between the sophistication, the civilization that you find in cities,

particularly Rome, contrasted then with the sort of rustic barbed of the countryside. So when you have writers, Roman writers like Cicero and Ovid, who are actually exiled from Rome, they feel this sort of very strongly. Ovid misses the, you know, the sort of glittering sort of metropolis.

Ovid among the Goths, yeah. Yeah. There's also this idea of civic virtue, this idea of kind of selfless devotion to public life. And I think more broadly what we can talk about is this, in a way, this more kind of positive discourse about the city, in which you kind of get the development of a language of praise

about the city, Panegyric, where orators are praising the size of cities like Rome. They're praising its public buildings. They're praising all the different aspects and features of city life. So that sort of discussion or that sort of discourse of civility is very important. But equally very powerful and one that certainly later generations will latch on to is also the discourse of corruption, the idea that the city corrupts. And we get that very fully in particularly satirists like Horace

and particularly sort of juvenile. I think Horace perhaps has a rather more ambiguous idea about being torn between or seeing the attractions of the city while also appreciating the way in which cities seem in various ways to be places which encourage excessive behavior of various kinds. So the wealth of Rome that you might sort of praise and see as one of its chief features can also be seen as something which

ultimately sort of breeds greed, it breeds luxury, all the things that in a way are actually kind of innovating. You also win this idea of corruption. There is this sort of sense that cities are places where people lose their identity, perhaps their sense of self, their values

and is especially in juvenile, the writing of juvenile, that I think you get this most powerfully, partly because he writes in a very sort of strident, furious way, kind of denouncing city-like. And as you mentioned, there is this idea the city is a monster, the city is a place where people are driven mad. And driving a lot of that is this idea that there is corruption,

there's greed, cities or places of falsehood. Everything's down to money. And so it's partly that cities, I suppose, lead to the corruption of the individual, but they're also about the corruption of social relationships as well that all become corrupted in various ways. And there's the fact of just trying to keep at bay diseases, with people crowding in. Rome sucks people in, as great cities did more and more.

They stick to Rome at the beginning of being of the Anodominoid. And it sucks people in, and they come from all over the place and bringing diseases with them and crowded into the centre and hegel de peggledy arrangements. So you have real disease and criminality and danger on the streets, as well as the ideas that you've been discussing as distilled through the poets at the time. Were the elements developed about the city in Athens and Rome,

did they become the defining elements about what a city should be from then on? Excuse me. I think that that's very true. I mean, people keep returning, I suppose, to the classical era. Whenever they're measuring or they're talking about cities, and people particularly return to classical literature, and I think that you're quite right that people are also discussing

what they see around them. It isn't just about ideas. It isn't just about a discourse that people sort of pick up over generations. But people do return particularly to classical literature and the ideas that it has about the city. Greg, Wolf, Rome, as it were, let's call that a peak period in all sorts of ways,

buildings, poets, culture, power, organisation, wonderful engineering. As Peter pointed out, the aqueducts, and so on. But when Rome went into a decline, it went into a real decline, and a few hundred years later, on our time scale, a mere

snap of the fingers, in about 600 AD, the whole idea of cities in the whole of Europe had crumbled, literally, and in fact, in terms of their organisation. That's right. I mean, it's the extraordinary story of the first great European urbanisation is that there's

none effectively in 1,000 BC. And then by 200 BC there's maybe a dozen of 100,000 people, and then there's Rome, a million, as Peter said, and then this keeps rising until about 200, and then goes into a very dramatic decline, plunges down, and in the West in particular, up part of the world, France, North Italy, Spain, Britain, they shrivel away to almost nothing. In Britain, they do shrivel away to nothing.

There's nothing already left. And, of course, it's a different story in the East, where urbanism is picked up, particularly after the Islamic conquest. and by 1,000 AD, Baghdad is probably the biggest city in the world and maybe has as many as 2 million people. So there's the huge Islamic urban tradition that's growing in the background. But in our end of the world, the Mediterranean, yes, it's an enormous plunge. Why did it plunge so rapidly?

Why, as it were, nobody stand out against the plunge? Well, there's various ideas. I apologize, but I apologise, fine. Well, one possibility is that cities never really took in some parts of the empire. They're always there doing the job of government, that they were imposed on France and Britain and other places. And when government no longer needed cities to collect taxes and collect it through some other methods,

through the growing bureaucracy of the late empire, in those areas where people didn't want to have cities anyway, they disappeared. Now, in areas where they've got that civic ideal that Julie was talking about with urbanism, civility, particularly the Greek world, people kept cities going anyway because they wanted to have cities.

But out in the northwest, and in other areas, they seem to have shriveled away. And they shivered away dramatically. I mean, people came and grazed in them and looted the stones and muttered around in the ruins, but writing went. Yeah, it's amazing. I mean, in all of northern France or Britain, the areas that have been cities have big, thick areas of dark soil

over the Roman urban layers, which just must represent foliage growing there. Everything disappears in Britain, except for town walls and a few fragments of buildings. Peter, Greg made a swift dash across to Baghdad ruining our thesis that London was the second city with 1 million which we got from your note, you guys, I say, and we laid it very firmly on the three of you, thank you very much,

all of a sudden saying Baghdad's got 2 million. Well, good, but let's go to China. And yes, you're looking to be doubtful. Anyway, we've concentrated in far as you've concentrated on anything, on Europe up to this point. What's happening over in China, for instance, which they had cities from the 3,000, 4,000 BC. They had a very sophisticated system,

which somehow grew up in parallel to the Western system, which also waxed and waned, but never waned in the same way as ours. So China has been an urban civilization for an extraordinary long time, and also from what we would call the Middle Ages, a centralised system. Did it have the ups and downs, the same pattern as was happening in Europe? He did have some ups and downs, yes, but never the pattern of complete abandonment of cities,

which Greg has recorded in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. What did happen was the growth of the first real continental nation-state power, which has survived for longer than any other. I mean, you can call the Roman Empire a sea empire essentially around an inland sea. that then spread across part of a continent, but only in China did a single power, the imperial power, gradually extend over this vast territory, and has remained essentially an inland empire ever since.

And developed a civil service then, thousands of years ago, which is held onto and developed one one way and other since. Well, the very fact that we talk about the Mandarin class, we used to talk about the British Civil Service as the Mandarin class, and direct imitation of that classic Chinese civil service, which was recruited, of course, on merit and the reforms to the civil service, which we introduced in the middle of the 19th century,

which created our modern civil service, based on competitive examinations to get the best people into the jobs, were really directly based on the Chinese model. Looking to Africa briefly, what's happening there in Nigeria with cities about this time? let's say 2,000 years ago? You did get some independent cities associated with trading in parts of West Africa, for instance,

and North Africa. But they were never really on the scale of what happened in Asia or in Europe. And in fact, one could make a very sweeping generalisation that continents and even parts of continents, very in the degree to which they have been fundamentally urban civilizations over a very long period. Greg has made the point that here the Roman cities were almost imposed as colonial entities on the people that weren't really urban. One can argue that we've never been wholeheartedly urban country or urban civilization.

But I think Africa is the extreme case, which was less urbanized, essentially than any other, apart from perhaps North America. And this has remained a problem ever since. Julia, back to Europe now, from about, let's say, 1150 to 1350, there's a great rise of urbanisation in Europe. Trade is driving it again. Can you tell us how that's developing into the towns or small cities that we developed at that time in profusion?

This is a very dynamic period, as you're suggesting, partly because simply you get the development of thousands of new towns. So that's going to be very important. You also get the expansion of existing urban centres. And as far as trade is concerned, I suppose it works in two different ways. One way is more exciting perhaps, but one way is in other ways is more fundamental. And partly you get the development of regional centres that are very important in terms of networks of regional trade. that's your bread and butter stuff.

That's what most medieval towns were involved in because this sort of trade tends to involve food stuffs. So places like Réin-Rourin in France. Then you have long-distance overseas trade or indeed overland trade as well, but this long-distance trade. And that leads to really the flourishing of cities in two parts of Europe,

partly the Mediterranean, not surprisingly, again. So particularly we're talking about sort of northern Italy, so cities like Florence, Pisa, Venice. You're also talking about Iberia, sort of Spain, so places like Cordova. So you're talking about trade which is based on the Mediterranean, particularly trade with the Near East, going also North Africa. And a lot of that trade, it's all about importing spices, silks, luxury goods. So it's a very profitable trade.

It's also in some ways a very risky trade. But it's also very useful in the sense that they're easily transportable things as well. And then in this strange eventful history of city in Europe, they plunge again. The black death comes in around 13, 14, 14, 15, 50, 50, 51, the first big wave, it had been building up and then it kept going on. The first big wave, and from the statistic we know, and they're all a bit dodgy, as I know, Peter, but this is what we're given. London, for instance, fell from a population of 150,000 to 50, and this happened all. over the place in Europe and the idea of the growth, the steady growth, here we go, the idea of steady, is confounded again, down they go. Greg? Yeah, I mean, I think there's two things happening. One is we're seeing the way in which this big urban system spread right the way from the China Sea to the Atlantic go through periodic sort of convulsions. And that's partly to do with disease, it's partly to do with the economy, it may even partly be to do with changing climate. And then the other thing is the way in which people's ideas of urban civilising.

accumulate. And then it followed the same rhythm. So the Florentine example you gave is both the period of economic growth, but also a period in which people are going to constantly try and rebuild Roman cities and they're going into so that the architects, the Quattrocento have visited Rome to actually look at how Roman buildings were made and then come back to Florence in order to build domes on those models. So you've got the sort of the cultural trajectory and that's what people are conscious of and they're right about. And then there's the economic, cultural, demographic disease trajectory, which we have to piece together from other evidence. And as we keep saying, it's incredibly difficult to do.

But it's also the classical idea having these great public spaces. The city is a place where you have great, great in the sense of both, great in importance and great in size and great in architecture. And this is where you go, you sit here, say, gosh, we don't have that in our village, whatever it is, it is only in these great places. And that's where Western Urban is different from the others. Because we are deliberately reclassicizing again and again right the way through. And that isn't something that's happening.

Peter knows China better than I do, but China has a quite different sort of stylistic, cultural idea of urbanism. At this stage, we're still talking about very small cities and they diminish radically after the black death and take quite a long time to re-emerge. How did they re-emerge? Well, I think there are two big principles operating here.

One is economic, and there's a sort of yin and yang here between the growth and decline of trade. And on the other hand, the great migrations of people in search of land, the Roman Empire fell, partly because the organisation of the empire collapsed, but also because the Germanic tribes, including the ones that got here, were seeking more and more fertile land to shop down the forests and established a village economy again.

The other thing is that is, of course, disease, which in a population of this kind is ever present. And funnily enough, when trade came back and began to create the cities again around the Mediterranean and also around the North Sea and the Baltic Sea up here in northern Europe, the trade was itself dangerous. It was rats on trading ships out of Genoa, I think, that actually brought the plague out of its original location,

finally to reach here in the Black Death in 1349. So we have this thing, as you say, Ying and Young, we can't leave the Chinese alone really, what are they doing at this moment? Can we just flash over there? I'm a news flash from China. They were having similar problems, of course, of urban organisation, and their populations, too, were wrapped by disease. And this is true, as the democracies show,

of all populations at that stage in history. Julia, can you tell us about the development of capital cities, then they start to grow again in Europe, 16th and 17th century. Can you just tell us how that growth occurs? I suppose that that growth occurs, partly because what we're seeing in the 16th and 17th century, is the gradual development of more centralized states. The idea of the nation state, really?

Yes, I think that's right. And so it's here what kind of politics and cities then very much intersect, because there is an idea that now that you have capital cities, which are the centers of government, administration, there are centres of patronage, there are also places of display that make an important political statement for rulers as well. And it's interesting that you get in the 16th and 17th century the development of entirely new capital cities.

Madrid is a very good example here. Plunked in the middle of Spain for power purposes. Yes, exactly. And the point is that Spain is a country, it's an artificial creation. It's one with very strong regional identities. So Philip the second wants to create that capital precisely to make a sort of political point as well. Cities are also seen as kind of unifying factors in other ways if you think about Paris. In the 16th century they've had these dreadful wars of religion.

Henry IV comes to the throne, manages to these wars of origin come to a close. And the point is then he undertakes a massive architectural program, which is making a point about Paris as the center of a unified French state. It's interesting this architectural connection, isn't it? I mean, obviously you have to build places they live in, but this is more than that. This is making a statement about themselves, about the power centre, as I understand it.

And you've got similar things happening later in St. Petersburg, but in Amsterdam, and so it goes. I think it's about making a power statement, and here, once again, people are maybe aware of examples from antiquity. Also, as states expand, you have the need to house government bureaucracy. So if you think about even today, sort of grand classical buildings we associate as being public buildings, in places like Berlin, which is a new capital, St. Petersburg as well, Paris.

They're often classical sort of buildings used to house government administration. Peter Holg. Well, I think it's an interesting principle. It's an unequal principle because you do have these very powerful expressions of sun kings in France and in Spain. But you also have the continuing growth of commercial cities like Antwerp and then Amsterdam and then London. and fighting for commercial supremacy. Now, they had some good places, grand places, in the centre of those, Flemish cities,

but never the overwhelming display of national strength. And London is a funny old place, because, of course, it grew to be the greatest city, the greatest trading city, and eventually the most powerful political city in Europe. But we never had the grand architecture that these other cities had, because we were fundamentally, I think, a trading city rather than a big political city.

And adamant believe is in freehold. Yes. When after the Great Fire, Wren and all the other fellows of the Royal Society had massive plans for beating France to it and constructing an amazing city. But people said, I've got the freehold on these two square yards of house and you're not getting it. And the city was a kind of city of shopkeepers. And so they knocked down Ren's plans and all the others. and we got the city we have today.

Can we talk, Greg, about the city as it's developing now, and it's assuming a recognisable form to that in which we who come to cities or live in cities know about. How is it affecting, is it restructuring social connections, and is it restructuring society at this time? We're still in the 16th and 17th century. Well, there's a sense in which the history of cities is the history of inequality,

and it's the history of specialisation in all periods. And so there's a sense in which cities are simply the most visible aspects of society that become more complex, more unequal, more specialised, more differentiated. But yes, you're right, there is then a sort of a factor that there's then a feedback effect that cities, once they're there, the people who are sustaining them have to sustain them by exercising some kind of muscle, economic, political or whatever, in order to keep them going like this. So the cities are dragging people in from the kind of.

countryside. As far as we know, most pre-modern cities have death rates that are vastly greater than birth rates. And that means when you've got a big city, it's not just that it got big eventually, it's that it's constantly replenishing itself. It's constantly taking new people now. In Rome, some of those new people come in chains as slaves. In other places, they're forced by centralising monarchs. Perhaps in London, it's the Dick Whittington effect. But one way or another, you're having to keep topping up the demographic capital of a city because people are dying there fast than they're being born. As these cities grow, we're still in the 16th and 70th century in Europe,

how well were they working? What new inventions were brought in to make them work because these problems hadn't been faced by people before? So what were they doing? Well, London had an extraordinary growth rate from around 1,500 right through to 1800 and beyond. and of course this caused massive problems of overcrowding of very poor health as Greg has indicated.

The cities literally kill people. They suck people in and then killed them very gruelly. And so often at very early ages, so that you had to have some primitive attempts to sort the thing out. And given that we were here a merchant city, it was a private enterprise solution. So in the early around 1600

a city merchant Hugh Middleton brought the new river down from the headquarters of the river Lee up in Hertfordshire by what was essentially a kind of Roman aqueduct into the city of London and you still see the signs of that in Islington

it winds prettily through Islington and then at Sadler's Wells where the old metropolitan water port had it said quarters at the very reservoir of the new river. And that worked for time, but of course you needed something much bigger in terms of organisation, but that had to wait until the 19th century.

Julia May it's still around that time. We're beginning to talk 17th century, the developments of city transport, people getting around. I mean, the streets were, as we understand it, filthy mud streets. The most efficient and healthy way to move around was still on the water.

I mean, when the raw society people moved up and down the river, they got in a boat, even to get round London, they take a boat instead of, we know that. So what, how did the roads change? What developments came in in transport? Excuse me. I think the big development that comes in here

is the use of coaches, use of carriages. And bats, not just happening in London, it particularly takes off in places like Rome by the middle of the 16th century. London's perhaps a little bit slower, but we know by 1636 you've got about 6,000 carriages in London and that is going to end up having a huge effect on urban society. It's going to have an effect on people's behaviour.

It's going to have a big effect on the urban environment. How is that? Well, partly, as you might imagine, you were talking about these dirty, windy sort of streets. There is a certain amount of impetus to try and widen streets, particularly there's an impetus to pave streets. So cities like Paris I was mentioning under Henry IV. also in London.

So you want to, if you can, to make streets, places where vehicles can move more smoothly and you get more and more thinking which is about trying to make streets as places for the circulation of traffic. You're also going to find it's affecting behaviour as well because once you've got carriages moving around, these are things for very elite people initially.

So you get all sorts of forms of etiquette that are connected with that. How do you see people to their carriages, does one carriage give precedence to another? If you're talking about people of higher social class, they're very aware of these sort of niceties. And cities themselves, if you get new housing, they have to be perhaps adapted to allow for carriages.

So you've got to have places to keep the carriages. You've got to have places to keep the horses and stables. And we know that, for example, certain Roman palaces are actually adapted so that the entrances are not on narrow streets, but they're more on the piazza, so they're more accessible to visitors coming with the carriages as well. And this happened in London to quite a go-so. And they developed with a sedan chair,

increasingly insulating those with wealth. You could be taken from, as somebody said, from your sitting in your fire in a grand drawing room, they come and put you in a sedan chair, take you out and now they take you through London in a sedan chair, pop you into a carriage, close the carriage, draw the curtains, go to the next place, sedan chair, back in again.

Same sort of room. Yeah, I mean, it's, It's amazing, particularly with the sedan chair, as you say, where you're never really out in public space. And people talk a lot about the impact of carriages as well, as something which distances you from the urban environment. The point is that you're distance from the smell, the noise, the dirt. You're not simply mixing with other inhabitants of your city in that way.

Well, it's interesting because this causes a system of massive social segregation between the posh people who had access to this, essentially private transport, whether it's the sedan chair or the carriage and all the rest. And it's interesting that in the 19th century even, they still talked about carriage folk and all those wonderful Georgian houses, of course, for design with the muse at the back,

which is like the private garage, the carriage. But the rest of the population, the mass of the population, didn't have that. And so they were dependent on their own feet. And that caused a growing crisis in the city, as London grew to a million by 1800. Most of the population were crowded more and more together in very unhealthy conditions near the centre.

They couldn't escape. Sorry, can I just go to Greg for a moment, Julia? Not a paradox. I mean, as the cities grew and London has grown, which is, well, we've got into defence's programme, but this part won in 1800 with a million people. As it grew in numbers, the veneration for the countryside and the celebration of the countryside intensified.

Yeah, I think you see that in every. age of great urbanism and when Julie was talking about juvenile horrors I was thinking about this that these are poets composing in an urban setting and saying how beautiful it would be to be a shepherd and a shepherdess and then of course you go all the way up to Dresden

China and so on and pastoral poetry again appearing at age of great urbanism so yeah I think and gardens and parks inside cities as well which appear at the point where you're no longer living in the countryside yourself so there's an idealisation of nature or

culturalisation of nature. Peter said earlier that, or was it you, that we were a very reluctant city country, and it's interesting that we don't have any great, well, we have few, but not massive, great public buildings, but London has dominated by wonderful parks all over the place, open spaces, not trying to pretend we're still in the middle of the country, Julia.

That's very true of London. I mean, we're quite lucky in a sense in that London was surrounded by royal hunting grounds, and so some of these, like High Park, are actually turned into parks as we think of them today. I think also there's the idea in the 17th century more that somehow you try and make the city a place that's kind of balancing out and having the best of the countryside as a way of trying to make city more healthy sort of places as well.

Well, the interesting thing here, I think, is that as we moved into the 18th century, you've got the great age of the agricultural improvers. Who were these improvers? The great country landlords who owned the great country landlords who owned the great country houses where they dwelt and managed the land most of the time. But it was a rural civilization. They came into London for the season, which was relatively short.

But they fundamentally thought of themselves as great country managers, stewards of the countryside. And that's the fundamental image which has retained. And so all the people who seek second homes in the countryside today are really imitating those 18th century improvers. When we get at the end of the age century, looking back on the city generally, I know it's been a... Anyway, it's been a gallop, but what the heck, you can we?

You're not allowed to gallop. What are we seeing? Are we seeing a progressive development or I was seeing a bumpy ride? And what's going on, Greg? It's a bumpy ride, but almost none of the things that are created are lost completely. So there's periods where it collapses down, but then when it grows again, people reach back to the past and take those models and reuse them again. So the upward trajectory is continuous, but there are bumps along the way. And we have this million numbered city here.

So Peter, finally, do you think that in 1800 people would have said, are we've arrived at something that is going to dominate the world, the great city? Or do you think they were still thinking, well, most of us live elsewhere and never see a big city? I think there was a very powerful sense of those in London and those aiming to get to London that this was a truly great city and the city that attracted all the talent. thus over the preceding centuries, perhaps talented people. Shakespeare is the most notable example and made their way from the countryside, from small country towns to London.

So it was a great sense that this was the great magnet. But at the same time, it was a hugely problematic city, a disease-ridden city, and one storing up problems for the future. Well, let's talk about the future next week in part two over our time on the city. We'll start in 1800 and bring it nearly up to date. Thank you very much for listening. this Radio 4 podcast, why not try others, such as Thinking Aloud, where Laurie Taylor discusses the latest social science research. To find out more, visit bbc.co.com.uk

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