William and Thomas Cubitt
Depending on your point of view, the gentrification of the Isle of Dogs is a vital shot in the arm for a decaying chunk of post-industrial Docklands, or an insensitive example of the way money comes first in the 21st
century – riding roughshod over a solid and established working class community.
But the yuppie homes of the 1980s weren’t the first attempt to entice the middle classes onto the Island. One hundred and fifty years ago, an ambitious builder and entrepreneur was trying to transform the Isle of Dogs into the Belgravia of east London.
Transforming London
William Cubitt was born in Dilham, Norfolk in 1785, with brother Thomas following three years later. They weren’t a pair born to greatness – their father was a poor miller, and William did well, in 1800, to secure an apprenticeship to a cabinet maker and joiner. Thomas had an equally mundane, if secure, trade mapped out, as a ship’s carpenter.
Yet the two of them were to play a huge role in transforming London from the still small city of Stuart England into the vast metropolis it is today.
Although Thomas was the younger, he had the more dramatic career. He had moved from carpentry to engineering and then started building in around 1815.
The 1820s were very productive for Thomas. Working with the Marquis of Westminster, who owned vast tracts of useless bogland to the south-west of the City of Westminster, he began designing, laying out and building streets, squares and whole districts.
His genius lay in forming the first true building firm, employing a wide range of
specialised craftsmen and architects (including another brother, Lewis) on his staff in order to enable the company to provide a one-stop shop.
His extraordinary energy produced the new suburbs of Belgravia, Pimlico, Barnsbury and much of Bloomsbury. Elsewhere, he built Brighton’s huge Kemp Town development, and worked with Prince Albert on Osborne House on the Isle of Wight.
Waste not want not
Belgrave Square was Thomas’ piece de resistance. Ironic, then, that this ‘future residence of the highest class of the fashionable world’ was built on waste from the East End! The energetic Thomas was building St Katharine Dock at the same time, and used the spoil carved out of the river bed to make the posh square’s foundations.
William was equally innovative. In 1807 he had, in a nod to his roots, patented what became the standard design for windmill sails. Then, in 1812, he turned his hand to engineering, specialising particularly in waterways and canals. He built railways and, like his brother, he was to work with the Prince Consort – in his case as consultant engineer on the Crystal Palace. And with a keen utilitarian sense that prisoners should be productive too, he invented that brutal mainstay of the Victorian penal system, the prison treadmill.
But if he had emulated
his brother’s inventiveness, William hadn’t accumulated the same wealth. William decided he too would capitalise on the middle class demand for villa
homes by developing an unexploited patch of the capital.
Back in the 17th century, Christopher Wren had admired the southern tip of the Isle of Dogs, though more for its views than its hinterland. He declared it the best spot from which to view the spectacular Greenwich Hospital.
Thomas decided the river views would make it the ideal focus of a villa community. There was only one problem – the resolutely plebeian community. And, ironically, they were outsiders too.
Social reformer Beatrice Webb wrote about the locals at the time. “They are for the most part countrymen imported some years back to break a combination of corn porters” [shipped in to break a strike, in other words].
Stubborn
Even then, she wrote that the Islanders were individuals, different: “Cut off by their
residence from the social
influences of the East End, they have retained many traits of provincial life.”
Most important, they were stubborn. They were not to be moved. The middle classes, meanwhile, sniffed the prevailing winds and proved resis-
tant to Thomas’ marketing attempts. The pragmatic entrepreneur instituted Plan B and built timber wharves, sawmills, cement factories, brickfields, roads and a church… and
terraces of artisans cottages.
Thomas died in 1861 as
Lord Mayor of London, but his work was completed in the 1880s. Sadly, most was swept away by World War II.
But just 40 years later, the architects would move in again, and Cubitt Town would attempt to go upwardly mobile once more.