Transport in London

1. ®     To persuade people to live in garden suburbs of London a transport network needed. 
2.          The London underground railway partially solved the housing crisis by carrying large masses of people to and from the city.
3. ®     The very first section of the Underground in the world opened on 10 January 1863 between Paddington and Farrington Street in London.
4. ®      By 1880 the expanded train service was carrying 40 million passengers a year.

          Problems:

            (1) Charles Dickens wrote in Dombey and Son (1848) about the massive destruction in the process of construction. To make approximately two miles of railway, 900 houses had to be destroyed.

            (2) asphyxiation (Suffocation due to lack of oxygen supply) and heat.

          Bloody Sunday of November 1887

1.             London poor exploded in a riot, demanding relief from the terrible      conditions of poverty, it was brutally suppressed by the police.
2.            From this example it is clear that large masses of people could be drawn into political causes in the city.
3.           A large city population was thus both a threat and an opportunity.                                                

        The City in Colonial India

®        The pace of urbanisation in India was slow under colonial rule.

®        In the early twentieth century, no more than 11 per cent of Indians were living in cities.

®        Most urban dwellers were living in Presidency cities – The capitals of the Bombay, Bengal and Madras Presidencies in British India

            Bombay: The Prime City of India

1. ®        In the seventeenth century, Bombay was a group of seven islands under Portuguese control.
2. ®        In 1661, control of the islands passed into British hands after the marriage of Britain’s King Charles II to the Portuguese princess. East India Company shifted its trading base from Surat to Bombay.
3. ®        Bombay became the capital of the Bombay Presidency in 1819, after the Maratha defeat in the Anglo-Maratha war.
4. ®        The first cotton textile mill in Bombay was established in 1854.Large number of people migrated in Bombay to do work in mills. 

         Problem of housing

®        While every Londoner in the 1840s enjoyed an average space of 155 square yards, Bombay had a mere 9.5 square yards.

        With the rapid and unplanned expansion of the city, the crisis of housing and water supply became acute by the mid-1850s.

®        More than 70 per cent of the working people lived in the thickly populated chawls of Bombay.

®        Chawls were multi-storeyed structures which were divided into smaller one-room tenements which had no private toilets
.
®        People who belonged to the ‘depressed classes’ found it even more difficult to find housing in chawls.

®        Town planning in Bombay came about as a result of fears about the plague epidemic.
®        The City of Bombay Improvement Trust was established in 1898; it focused on clearing poorer homes out of the city centre.

®        In 1918, a Rent Act was passed to keep rents reasonable.
 

         Land Reclaimation

®        The Bombay governor William Hornby approved the building of the great sea wall which prevented the flooding of the low-lying areas of Bombay in 1784.

®        In 1864, the Back Bay Reclamation Company won the right to reclaim the western foreshore from the tip of Malabar Hill to the end of Colaba.

®        Marine Drive a familiar landmark of Bombay, it was built on land reclaimed from the sea in the twentieth century.

        Bombay as the City of Dreams: The World of Cinema

®        Bombay appears to many as a ‘mayapuri’ – a city of dreams.

®        Harishchandra Sakharam Bhatwadekar shot a scene of a wrestling match in Bombay’s Hanging Gardens and it became India’s first movie in 1896.

®        Dadasaheb Phalke made Raja Harishchandra (1913).

®        By 1987, the film industry employed 520,000 people.

         Note:

®        The factory acts 1902, introduced in London that children were kept out of industrial work.

®        In 19th century Chartism (a movement demanding the vote for all adult males) and the 10-hour movement (limiting hours of work in factories), mobilized large numbers of men in England.

®        Singapore city became an independent nation in 1965 under the leadership of Lee Kuan Yew, President of the People’s Action Party. Today, most of us know Singapore as a successful, rich, and well planned city.

        

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