Fifteen minute čitties

My basic mental schema for the industrial revolution has been that it eventually brought great benefits, but only at the initial cost of millions of working people (including my Garvey ancestors) living in squalid and unhealthy conditions in city slums. Oliver Twist and all that. But I’m having to revise my ideas.

Rodney Stark’s The Rise of Christianity is basically a sociologist’s view of the subject, and hence it tends to disenchant the processes of conversion, evangelism and so on. That initially seems to challenge faith in divine providence, until the last chapter suggests that the unique doctrines of Christianity cannot be dismissed as a cause of its rampant success. It is notable that Stark, an atheist when he wrote the book, subsequently became a Christian.

Leaving that aside, one of his observations is how much of an urban movement early Christianity was, and in pursuing that he cites historical studies on what cities of the Roman Empire, and classical antiquity in general, were like. The truth is that, despite the imposing ruins of Rome or Ephesus, ancient cities were dreadful places to live, in nearly every way.

For a start, population densities were on a par with places like Calcutta, a feature not helped by the large areas given over to the monumental architecture of temples and palaces that remains. The average family lived in one room of tenements that were usually of wood, and often jerry-built by speculators. That made collapse a constant fear in overcrowded four or five story blocks, and fire a recurrent hazard, given that in the absence of chimneys, heating was invariably from wood-fired braziers resting on the floorboards, their pungent smoke escaping through small windows after depositing soot in the occupants’ lungs.

Privacy was non-existent. Dirty trades from metalwork to tanning took place wherever a site could be found. Water was from usually contaminated public fountains, and was insufficiently available for much bathing or housework. It is (Stark reminds us) unrealistic to think that in the imposing public baths senators rubbed shoulders with street-urchins. Mediterranean heat was oppressive in the summer, and damp from marginal building land and poor building repair a health hazard all year round. Public drains served only the main areas, and so most sewage went into open gullies in the street, sometimes thrown from upstairs windows. Consequently, disease was rife, and plagues devastated most cities at regular intervals, unless forestalled by city-wide fires, or by warfare, or by earthquakes (which were particularly common around the Mediterranean in sub-apostolic times).

Even the well-to-do were not much better off. As in mediaeval English towns, high-status residences often backed on to slum areas, if that’s where land was available. And in any case, sharing the same air and water supplies, the rich had no protection from infectious diseases or fire.

Then there was crime. People came to cities because of economic opportunities, or in the case of places like Corinth, they might be army veterans from all across the empire, settled for strategic purposes. It was a cosmopolitan empire with free movement, which means the various traders, labourers, slaves and so on, crammed together in the tenements, spoke different languages, had different cultural values, and shared little in the way of social ties. We can even extrapolate this situation back to the peoples, including Judah, that Nebuchadnezzar relocated to Babylon centuries earlier: we can dismiss the notion that social housing was provided, and no doubt the exiles had to make whatever living they could from scratch. The Jewish diaspora, of course, was also a significant in Roman cities, and (as Stark points out) was a focused subculture for the planting of the gospel.

This means that apart from the criminality that poverty and overcrowding always encourage (and the fact that one of the economic opportunities cities offer to incomers is professional crime), rioting as a result of social stresses was very common (think Leeds or London, 2024). It was unsafe for even the well-to-do to go out after dark, without a couple of beefy slaves as a bodyguard. No cities, least of all Rome, had thought of an efficient police force. And so Stark compares the great cities of antiquity with places like Dodge City or Tombstone, Arizona, rather than with our romantic fantasies:

Tie your painted shoes and dance
Blue daylight in your hair
Overhead a noiseless eagle
Fans a flame
Wonder everywhere

Cream, (Those Were the Days)

Even Jerusalem of the first temple period has been found from excavations to have been rife with parasitic bowel disease. City life was ever thus, and the cities were deemed “great” only because they generated wealth and power, and because those wielding wealth and power closed their eyes to the suffering. To be fair, cities also generated knowledge and national security – the point is that there was always a trade off between cost and benefit, and the costs were high.

Now, as I consider these things, I recognise all the elements that we find in the industrial cities of the nineteenth century. Their ills were not a unique fruit of the industrial revolution, but were absolutely typical of cities through the ages. The difference is that for the first time in history we have universal census records, old photographs and Dickensian novels to highlight the reality. If you read descriptions of London back in Tudor times, you gain much the same picture, but at that time London was pretty much the only big city in England. All that the industrial revolution did was to provide a massive expansion in economic opportunity that caused an unparalleled growth in unplanned urban living. Big cities multiplied in an unprecedented way.

Economic opportunity was a real factor, as it was in Roman times. We think of the “dark satanic mills” tangling women and small children in their machinery, but actually the pay for cotton spinners or iron workers was significantly higher than what could be earned in a depressed agricultural sector. The calculus for workers, of course, also included things like inflated rents in cities, the trap of poverty after injury or failed businesses, and so on. But as my own family history shows, these were choices made by free people making the best of life that they could, in a chaotic urban system little different from Roman times except in scale.

But there are some fundamental differences too. Britain’s industrial urbanisation occurred at a time when serious Christian ethics were endemic (think of those Quaker industrialists, or even of my Non-conformist ancestors, who took chapel-building as well as the baking trade with them to London from rural Essex). How much the conscience of the nation was driven by pure Christianity, and how much by liberalised religion like that of Dickens, is open to discussion. But the fact is that, uniquely in history, the industrial cities’ problems were seen as serious issues to be solved, whatever the difficulties, rather than ignored. Both pragmatic reasoning, and human compassion, were mobilised in a way that never happened in the Roman Empire, or any other.

From the start, some factors gave England’s city-dwellers advantages over Rome’s. The first industrial housing may have been substandard and soon overcrowded, but it tended to be of brick rather than wood, and it had chimneys to take coal-smoke into the sky, rather than filling the living space or setting fire to it. Furthermore, whilst workers may have converged on, say, Birmingham from Devon, Ireland and the Peak District, they all spoke one language and shared, or neglected, the same Christian faith and culture.

For whatever reasons, the problems were increasingly addressed at every level, as they never were in ancient Carthage or Antioch. In no particular order, legislation against child labour was passed, even as first the churches, and then the State, began to organise basic education. Perhaps the biggest improvements were the massive drives for good drains and clean water, both of which were facilitated by steam pumps. These were effective because as housing was renewed, thought was given to connecting them to utilities. The fact that much Victorian terrace housing is serviceable, or even fashionable, now, speaks volumes for the soundness of concept.

Coal also enabled the manufacturing of gas both for street-lighting and cleaner, brighter, house-lighting and cooking than the smoky oil lamps and coal ranges of the past. It was not that long before even that gave way to the general provision of electricity for lighting, electric fires, and eventually electric irons, vacuum cleaners, and radios, all of which my working-class grandparents possessed. Affordable electric appliances began to make the exploitation inherent in domestic service obsolete. De-industrialise white goods production, and you need maids to wash and scrub again. Or non-employed wives.

Add to that more efficient health and education provision, effective ground-up policing, holiday leave, cheap rail excursions, powerful trades unions, workers’ education associations, public libraries, art-galleries and parks, music halls and subsequently cinemas, the replacement of the horse with the internal combustion engine, and more, and for the first time in history cities begin to be healthy and happy places for ordinary people to live, as well as to make a bare living. This was a direct result both of fossil fuels and compassionate thinking, and the model spread round the world (this is not to assert categorically that it entirely a British idea, but the industrial revolution that both necessitated and enabled it started here).

And so for a generation or two, despite pockets of relative poverty, the Kray twins, corrupt councillors and so on, our experience of cities has been transformed. When I lived in London in the 1970s, even areas of relative deprivation like the soulless Aylesbury Estate near the Elephant and Castle offered clean and secure housing, steady jobs, free schools and health care, cheap transport, churches and missions, and reasonably clean air (whatever they say now, diesel particulates in the air are a massive improvement on wood smoke in your living room). Even being unemployed in Brixton (admittedly only for a couple of months) was perfectly tolerable.

Now, my question is whether the modern “user-friendly” city can survive apart from those fossil fuels, and the basically Christian commitment to human thriving, rather than elite profit or “saving the planet.” In Britain, we are beginning to see the breakdown of civic peace, from multiculturalism and industrial unemployment. Abroad, in cities like Portland and Los Angeles and some European cities, this decline has gone even further. Once more it is risky for women to go out alone after dark in London, health-care is patchy, schools non-educational, vehicles priced out and so on.

The ambition of the elites, we are told, is for the vast majority of people to live in “Fifteen Minute Cities,” in which private transport does not figure, and in which fossil fuels have been phased out. It appears now that in order to meet those goals, the actual energy consumption of individuals will have to reduce by 50%.

To me it does not appear that thought and funding have been seriously set aside to make such cities good places to live. The idea seems to be to force people into them, and hope they make good. I suspect the assumption is that, because our cities have been peaceful and pleasant for a century or more, that is the normal situation. But history says that is not how cities usually operate. Multicultural rioting (whether quelled by top-down riot-policing or allowed, like the Leeds riots, to burn themselves out) take us back to the unrest seen in Ephesus or Alexandria in Roman times. The running-down of industry makes for idle hands that the devil will happily employ. Economic decline makes for dirt in the streets, poor food in the shops, sick people in the apartments and desertion of the cities by the privileged to their country estates.

I suppose there will always be the mosques – but Karachi or Gaza City are not my idea of the New Jerusalem.

But the New Jerusalem – ah, there’s an example of urban planning to look forward to.