London's streets
Granite, mud and muck, the story of London's streets
Rather than being paved with gold, London’s streets were until the 18th century, infamous for their mixture of mud and straw, rotting animal flesh and household rubbish. And faeces, both human and animal.
In order to overcome the filth, from the late 18th century London’s parishes began using expensive granite blocks brought in from Scotland, Cornwall and Leicestershire, by the new railways. As a rule, West London was covered in Cornish/ Devonshire granite and the North and East with blocks from Scotland and Mountsorrel in Leicestershire. Blocks were either rectangular and known as cobbles, or were square in shape and known as ‘sets’. The latter were more popular with horses and their drives for the small shapes gave the horses better purchase as they walked across the stones.
However, people complained about the noise of the horses’ hooves and the clattering of the iron clad wheels of carts upon the stones. Londoners petitioned against the stone-laid streets for shop-keepers could not hear their customers, residents could not sleep, business could not be conducted, so infernal was the noise. Even the judges at the Old Bailey complained. And it was not just the noise which bothered people. Dust from the ground down granite was an issue too. ‘Wetters’ were employed by parishes to spray water on the streets in the hope of ameliorating the problem.
There were piecemeal experiments to find a better solution to the noise and dust of London’s streets. In 1839, the first serious experiment was made using wooden blocks outside the Old Bailey. However, despite being a much quieter road surface, they were not popular. They wore out quickly and were slippery. Horses regularly fell and injured themselves. Despite this, wooden blocks - or sets - continued to be used until the early part of the twentieth century. Indeed, the 1929 Bartholomew map of London shows that a significant proportion of the city’s streets were laid with wood. Huge quantities of timber from Australia, Canada and Scandinavia were imported. A technique of laying wood on a concrete base was popular, and experiments were made with covering the blocks with tar or even rubber. However, both were not hard wearing and water often accumulated between the wood and concrete, causing the blocks to swell, making the surface almost unusable.
The City of London was the first to champion compressed asphalt in 1869, but again it was unpopular with horse owners as animals slipped on it, but the public was pleased as the surface was smooth, quiet and dust free. However, horse owners were the nineteenth century equivalent of the car owning majority today and politicians were heavily influenced by them. The use of granite sets continued until the arrival of the bicycle and the car when further experiments with asphalt under rubber tyres led to what we are familiar with today.
To ride - or walk - the cobbled streets of London, click here