INNOVATION & LEARNING
INNOVATION & LEARNING
GLOSSARY
cabinet of curiosities Large collection of uncategorized artefacts housed in rooms or purpose-made buildings that were the antecedent to modern museums.
chronometer A timepiece engineered to achieve extreme precision and used at sea to determine longitude.
City of London A city and county of Britain governed by the City of London Corporation and covering a geographic area broadly defined by the walls of the Roman settlement, also referred to as the Square Mile.
comprehensive education System of state education introduced in Britain after World War II based on non-selective intake of pupils.
the Enlightenment Philosophical movement developed in the eighteenth century that emphasized reason and the critical reappraisal of existing ideas and political, religious and educational institutions.
Greenwich Observatory Royal Observatory based in Greenwich, east London, founded in the seventeenth century, which established the Prime Meridian that created Greenwich Mean Time.
Kew Gardens World’s largest collection of living plants housed in the extensive grounds of the former Kew Park, southwest London, established in the eighteenth century by Lord Tewkesbury and later expanded by Augusta, Dowager Princess of Wales, to the exotic designs of Sir William Chambers.
livery companies Trade and craft associations based in the City of London also known as guilds, whose name derives from the uniforms that distinguished one livery company from another.
Modernist Adherent of modern ideas and theories, particularly those of the modern movement that, motivated by a rejection of tradition, dominated all forms of artistic expression in the twentieth century.
the Royal Society Scientific academy established in 1660 to promote and advance the study of science in all its forms.
Thames Estuary Area to the east of London where the Thames dispenses into the North Sea, characterized by extensive mudflats and marshland.
utilitarianism Moral movement established in the late eighteenth century and supported by leading theorists including Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill that proposes a morally good deed is one that benefits the greatest number of people. Utilitarianism has had a major impact on political, economic and social theory ever since.
Wellcome Trust An independent global charitable foundation that funds scientific research dedicated to improving health.
EDUCATION
the 30-second tour
In England, the state has never been keen on taking responsibility for education, preferring instead to subcontract it to religious, charitable and commercial institutions. London’s merchants, artisans, aristocrats, clergy and philanthropists filled the vacuum laudably. Since medieval times, the City of London’s guilds and livery companies have primed young Londoners for a merchant life in the same way that St Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey pioneered the city’s religious education. St Paul’s Cathedral School (1123) and Westminster School (1371) are London’s oldest surviving schools. Charity joined the ranks of educational providers from the fifteenth century, with the establishment of the City of London School (1442), St Paul’s School (1509) and Christ’s Hospital (1552), which later incorporated the Royal Mathematical School (1673). Nineteenth-century industrialization and urbanization heralded a modern system of public education in London. Following the Public Elementary Education Act (1870) the newly established School Board for London erected fine school buildings all over the capital, many of which still survive, albeit converted into luxury apartments or offices. In the early 1930s London County Council pioneered ‘comprehensive’ education, which later became the national standard.
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Forever a melting pot of people and ideas, London has a long educational tradition that has pioneered pedagogic developments in Britain and across the globe.
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University College London (UCL) was Britain’s first secular university, established in 1826 as an egalitarian alternative to the elitist religious institutions of Oxford and Cambridge. Open to students of any race, creed or political persuasion, UCL was founded on the utilitarian principles of ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ and was inspired and supported by the social reformer, Jeremy Bentham, whose clothed skeleton sits in a glass cabinet in the university’s South Cloister.
3-SECOND BIOGRAPHIES
SAMUEL WILDERSPIN
1791–1866
Pioneer of infant education and author of On the Importance of Educating the Infant Poor (1823)
SIR CHARLES REED
1819–81
MP for Hackney and Chairman of the London School Board, which pioneered a citywide system of education for London’s poor
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Edward Denison
Christ’s Hospital pupils today still wear the Tudor uniform of yellow stockings, bluecoat and breeches. London now has over 3,100 schools for 1.3 million pupils.
MUSEUMS & GALLERIES
the 30-second tour
London’s penchant for museums and galleries – totalling just over 200 – has its roots in the eighteenth-century cabinet of curiosities. This form of display allowed aristocrats to showcase their latest acquisitions and let everyone know how well travelled, clever and wealthy they were. Pre-eminent was Sir Hans Sloane, an Irish physician who, on his death in 1739, bequeathed to the nation his vast collection, worth an estimated £80–100,000, for just £20,000. Sloane’s gift became the basis of the British Museum, opened in 1759, and his books formed the nucleus of the British Library. His other specimens eventually helped create the Natural History Museum in 1860. This latter institution occupies imposing Victorian buildings alongside the Science Museum and Victoria & Albert Museum. Private donors helped establish the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square, among them the landscape artist and Chelsea resident J. M. W. Turner, who bequeathed over 1,000 pieces of his work. There are few areas of British life that have not been celebrated in a museum or gallery, with museums for all kinds of sports, toys, gardens, canals and even sewing machines, and galleries for paintings, cartoons and photography. Oddly, the most obvious topic – London itself – was not encapsulated in a museum until 1976, with the opening of the Museum of London.
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London has over 200 museums and galleries, covering an amazing range of subjects, periods and tastes, from great works of art to sewing machines.
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Many museums attract visitors not just for their collections, but also for their architecture. The Tate Modern is housed in a remodelled awe-inspiring mid-twentieth-century power station. The Great Court at the British Museum is covered by a stunning glazed canopy. And the Serpentine Sackler Gallery occupies a gunpowder store (built in 1805), with a curvaceous extension added in 2013. In each case, the juxtapositions of old and new constitute exhibitions in themselves.
3-SECOND BIOGRAPHIES
SIR JOHN SOANE
1753–1837
Architect and inveterate collector whose numerous artefacts gleaned from around the world are displayed in his beautifully preserved house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields
MADAME MARIE TUSSAUD
1761–1850
French sculptor who set up her eponymous waxwork museum on Baker Street in 1835
SIR HENRY TATE
1819–99
Made his fortune from sugar and spent much of it on art, now seen in the gallery on Millbank that bears his name
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Simon Inglis
London’s museums and galleries are second to none for their variety of subjects and artefacts.
GLOBAL KNOWLEDGE
the 30-second tour
Today the home for major museums, universities and institutions such as the Wellcome Trust and the Royal Society, London has for centuries been at the heart of global networks of knowledge. Its proximity to royal and government power encouraged the development of institutions such as the Greenwich Observatory and the Royal Society, while its coffee-house culture of debate helped to shape the development of the scientific method and of scholarly societies. In such a city, ideas could be tested and disseminated, while international trade brought a steady flow of written communication from savants around the world. London’s commercial and imperial role also underscored the practical nature of intellectual exploration, from the commercial exploitation of foreign flora to the development of naval technology, such as the longitude-revealing chronometer. A series of great collectors, such as Sir Robert Cotton and Sir Hans Sloane, formed the foundation for several of London’s foremost knowledge institutions, including Kew Gardens, the British Museum, the Natural History Museum and the British Library. This blend of commercial and scholarly endeavours can still be seen in London’s physical presence in the internet age. It is no accident that the web giant Google chose King’s Cross to be its new European home.
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Trade, developments in military technology and simple curiosity have placed London at the heart of the world’s knowledge networks since at least the seventeenth century.
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The Royal Society can safely claim to be one of the world’s oldest and most eminent scientific associations. It began with a gathering of polymaths at a lecture given by Christopher Wren in 1660 and gained royal approval in 1663 as ‘The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge’. Its published Philosophical Transactions established the idea of the peer-reviewed scientific journal, underpinned by the motto, ‘Nullius in verba’: take nobody’s word for it.
RELATED TOPICS
See also
3-SECOND BIOGRAPHY
SIR HANS SLOANE
1660–1753
Collector and, from 1727, royal physician. The bequest of his collections to the nation formed the basis of the British Museum and, later, the Natural History Museum
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Matthew Shaw
London is home to many learned societies that have helped transform our understanding of the world, from life on earth to the depths of space.
ENGINEERING
the 30-second tour
The existence of modern London is in large part a result of extraordinary feats of engineering, for as much as the Thames has always been the lifeblood of London, it has proved a challenge to domesticate. London Bridge was first erected in the thirteenth century, but it wasn’t until Charles Labelye’s Westminster Bridge, completed in 1750, that the river began to be engineered. That was soon followed by Kew (1759), Blackfriars (1769), Battersea (1773) and Richmond (1777). The Regent’s Canal soon crossed London, connecting the docks of the East End to the Grand Union Canal and the provinces. Joseph Bazalgette’s Victoria Embankment combined embankment of the river with a new underground railway and connection to a great sewage system – one that London relies on to this day. Further taming of the river occurred in the twentieth century with the construction of the Thames Barrier (1982) protecting London from flooding. In the twenty-first century Crossrail – an underground railway connecting outer west and east London and one of the largest and most complex engineering projects in Europe – presents a double engineering feat. The tunnelling has produced a mass of clay used to construct an island in the Thames Estuary, creating an artificial wild habitat for birds and a floodplain to protect London.
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Modern London is the product of engineering, bridges, canals, docks, tunnels (for rail and sewage), barriers and even artificial islands.
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London’s infrastructure is the product of great engineering feats. Along with the bridges and tunnels of London, one can observe mighty railway sheds, the tensile dome of the O2 Arena in Greenwich, the London Eye on the South Bank and the BT Tower – all made possible by civil, structural and mechanical engineers, whose institutes London is home to.
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CHARLES LABELYE
1705–62
Engineered London’s first modern bridge
WILLIAM HENRY BARLOW
1812–1902
Designed St Pancras station’s train shed, then the world’s largest single-span structure
JOSEPH BAZALGETTE
1819–91
Transformed London with a network of sewers and the Victoria Embankment
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Nick Beech
Today’s sophisticated city could not function without its sewers, tunnels, bridges and barriers.
RAILWAYS
the 30-second tour
In 1836 London Bridge terminus was opened to the public and so was created a new kind of building and a new kind of Londoner. Mid-nineteenth-century London was hit by a succession of ‘Railway Manias’, as investors flocked to sink capital into the new schemes passed in Parliament by joint stock companies. London Bridge was joined by Euston (1837) and five more, including Paddington (1838–54), Waterloo (1848) and King’s Cross (1852). All these were far outside the Cities of London and Westminster, as the Corporation of London and major estate holders refused to provide freeholds to the railway companies. A second wave beginning with Victoria (1862) and concluding with Liverpool Street (1874) brought the termini closer to the centre. The railways allowed Londoners to move out to the suburbs, creating the commuter. They also inaugurated the great London hotels as for the first time visitors arrived all at once in very large numbers. Every terminus was also an advert for the railway company – none more spectacular than the Midland Grand Hotel of St Pancras Station, outdoing its neighbour the Great Northern Hotel of King’s Cross. The peculiar pattern of above-ground railway lines in London, with far more south of the river than north, are a product of the difficulties presented by tunnelling in chalk and of belligerent landowners.
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The introduction of the railway to London contributed to the city’s great geographic and demographic expansion in the nineteenth century.
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For many millions, the stations of London have served as the first gateways to the metropolis. All Londoners, and many visitors and guests, have experienced at least some time spent waiting for delayed trains in one of the many termini. In these moments, one can admire the great engineering feats of the railway sheds, or the many station characters (Paddington Bear, Harry Potter, Sherlock Holmes) to whom Londoners have become attached.
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GEORGE THOMAS LANDMANN
1779–1854
Military and civil engineer and promoter of London and Greenwich Railway
ISAMBARD KINGDOM BRUNEL
1806–59
Engineer who linked London to New York under steam power with his Great Western Railway from Paddington to Bristol and SS Great Western from Bristol to New York
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Nick Beech
Since the age of steam, railways have linked London to the industrial Midlands and North, and now to Europe.
THE UNDERGROUND
the 30-second tour
One of London’s most successful and endearing brands is the Underground’s distinctive red roundel with a blue diameter line, first used in 1908. The world-famous underground railway was also the world’s first: the Metropolitan Railway opened in 1863 as a cut-and-cover route from Paddington to Farringdon Street, an engineering feat that required many houses to be demolished and residents displaced. To avoid scepticism about travelling under the ground, stations like Baker Street were designed with natural lightwells to the platforms and gas lamps on the trains. Today, well over a billion passengers a year travel on the Tube, a nickname that came from the first of the deep-level ‘tube’ tunnels through London’s susceptible clay in 1880. A complex series of other companies’ lines in subsequent decades merged as the Underground Group in 1902. A masterwork of visual brand identity, beyond the roundel and Johnston sans-serif typeface, the architecture of the stations is just as distinctive: Leslie Green’s 46 Edwardian ox-blood tiled facades, each in a different palette of interior tiles; Charles Holden’s brick Modernist stations on the Piccadilly Line; and turn-of-the-millennium Jubilee Line stations, like the Piranesian concrete at Westminster.
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London’s underground railway was the world’s first, opened in 1863, and thanks to a strong visual identify from the start, it is also the best known.
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The Underground has a fine reputation for commissioning art, particularly under Frank Pick in the early twentieth century. Evocative posters urged Londoners to go ‘To The Zoo’ and other uplifting locations newly reached by Tube. Finishes within stations include Harry Stabler’s creamy tiles embossed with iconic London buildings at Aldgate East, and Eduardo Paolozzi’s jazzy mosaics from the 1980s at Tottenham Court Road that introduce bold colour in the spirit of Harry Beck’s iconic map.
3-SECOND BIOGRAPHIES
CHARLES HOLDEN
1875–1960
Designed a series of striking Modernist stations on the Piccadilly Line in addition to the London Underground headquarters at 55 Broadway
FRANK PICK
1878–1941
Commissioned the famous typeface and roundel
HARRY BECK
1902–74
Designed the groundbreaking Underground map in 1931
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Emily Gee
London’s Underground has remained a pioneer of design, architecture and engineering.
