London: the pre-industrial, industrial, and post-industrial city?

A quick tour through London's and Britain's past at the Museum of London, Barbican, and the British Galleries of the Victoria & Albert Museum, South Kensington. I went early to Barbican to find a coffee shop and grade and to walk through Smithfield. Smithfield markets have long been the meat markets of London (here is the storefront of a tripe and offal establishment) from which restaurants and local butchers buy wholesale. (It was also infamous for the "fires of Smithfield," where unrecanting Protestants were burnt under Mary Tudor.)

We then met for a quick tour through Barbican, an area that was basically a large bomb crater after World War II and then was rebuilt into either an ideal urban residential area, or, if you see it that way, a concrete dystopia. The idea was that upper class and lower class flats would be intermingled (as many streets were in the early modern period). At least at its center (as in this photo), I find it more an ideal than a dystopia, but there are some walkways which are vaguely A Clockwork Orange.

Then on to South Kensington and Exhibition Road. At the bottom of Exhibition Road are the Victoria & Albert, the Science, and the Natural History Museum. Dr. Angela McShane-Jones walked us through the British Galleries focusing on the argument made in the panels that there is little to differentiate the Industrial Revolution between 1760 and 1830 from the mass production of the 17th, even 16th centuries. Perhaps one might find a full-fledged industrial revolution from the 1890s or even 1950s, but not, so the argument goes, before. The argument is interesting because it notes that historians have focused on cotton textiles because parliamentary committees focused on the cotton textile factories and, thus, produced reams of documents (which we historians love). But many industries were producing in mass quantities for the market much earlier, but left material culture artifacts not documents. Agree or disagree, the argument and the Galleries provoked thought and discussion (which is amazing because we were quite tired by Wednesday and thinking of flying home on Friday).

Most of us then walked up Exhibition Road towards Albert Memorial. I don;t have much to add about this recently cleaned monument, except to say "what was she thinking!?" Like Barbican, it can be seen as both beautiful and a monstrosity. On our way towards the Memorial in Kensington Gardens, we came to the gates at the end of Exhibitiion Road, which was the place where the Great Exhibition of 1851 (or the Crystal Palace) had been built and opened. The gates are, of course, the Coalbrookdale Gates, and they are still there (though turned 90 degrees so they don't block the road which now goes through the park dividing Kensington Gardens from Hyde Park) as are (in the photo) Ben, Carrie, Ashley, Krystal, Megan, Amanda, Cassie, Derrick, and Raymond.