London and the Land Question, c.1880–1914

Abstract

Victorian and Edwardian Britain was the most urbanized country in the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and there was a distinctly urban aspect to the land question in that period. Yet historians have paid relatively little attention to the urban land question. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Jim Dyos pioneered the scholarly study of Victorian urban history, but he paid little attention to urban politics and none to the land question.1 In 1961, David Reeder, another pioneer, published an article on the politics of urban leaseholds, but he did not follow it up with any more general study of the urban land question.2 In 1976, Roy Douglas published a good general history of the land question from the late Victorian period, but he concentrated mainly on rural rather than urban aspects of the land reform movement.3 In his Property and Politics (1981), Avner Offer examined the urban land issue in the context of legal and economic ideas and developments.4 In 1983, David Englander, Martin Daunton and Philip Waller all published useful books considering various aspects of the urban land question.5 Since then, however, there have been few further studies of the topic, partly because the focus of much Victorian urban history has shifted from economic and political topics to social and cultural ones.