Out West: Brentford, Chiswick and the Growth of Greater London 1894-1927

Greater London’s late-Victorian / Edwardian development is usually chronicled from the perspective of its centre, London, looking out. But what if we look, instead, at the conurbation’s development from the perspective of its outer ring, where the most rapid population growth and change occurred from the 1880s? How did regional realignments and zoning occur here decades before Patrick Abercrombie’s 1944 Greater London Plan? And what was it like, for two small districts abutting or near the capital’s border to experience life in the path of an oncoming metropolis?

‘Out West’ answers these questions through a novel statistical methodology, taking increasing candidacies for local elections as a potential sign of community concerns over Greater London’s advancing presence. It finds that in west Middlesex, between 1894 and 1927, the conurbation’s development was neither chaotic nor centrally directed. Rather it occurred piecemeal, district-by-district, contingent upon the resolution of diverse local versus central conflicts generated not by central government, but largely through the locally felt challenges of a revolution in public and private transport technologies.

Brentford and Chiswick, two riverine neighbours on the London to Bath road, experienced Greater London’s growth differently. Attempts by commercial interests, influential pressure groups, even dominant neighbours, to undermine these districts’ local jurisdictions were more or less successful depending on Brentford’s and Chiswick’s district wealth and experience of local government. This was especially true during a pre-war decade of local government austerity whose impact on small town governance has not previously been explored. This thesis demonstrates that the post-war rationalisation of Greater London’s government in west Middlesex occurred voluntarily, through power struggles between rival authorities, contributing new insights into the dynamic development of what H J Dyos once described as a constitutionally undifferentiated ‘continent of suburbia.’