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Victorian Londoners indulged in the view that their city was the heart of the Empire. In 1851, Prince Albert celebrated this sense of Imperial grandeur by holding the Great Exhibition under a massive glass pleasure dome in Hyde Park. As a trade advertisement to the rest of the world, it was a success, but fell short of Albert’s loftier aim of promoting international harmony. Prince Albert endeavored to further promote the arts and sciences by building various museums, concert halls and educational facilities on land he had purchased in South Kensington. However, the building of the Royal Albert Hall was, unfortunately, not begun until seven years after his death in 1861. The Victoria and Albert Museum of Fine and Applied Arts took another thirty-two years. The cathedral-like Natural History Museum was also erected nearby and opened in 1881. Albert himself is further remembered in the city through his grandiose memorial on the edge of Kensington Gardens.
In 1897, Queen Victoria celebrated her Silver Jubilee with a massive pageant in the streets of the capitol, in which many representatives from far corners of the Empire participated. She personally pressed the electrical button initiating the telegraphed message to India and beyond: “Thank my beloved people. God bless them”. Modern Times in the city
At the start of the new century, the city was a larger, busier place than it had ever been before. One could buy fresh fish from Billingsgate, meat from Smithfield Market, flowers and vegetables from Covent Garden, clocks from Clerkenwell Road, diamonds from Hatton Garden; all kinds of goods were readily available. As a thriving centre of trade and commerce the city had become very much the centre of the world’s largest empire.
Giant liners traversed the oceans; electric lighting was beginning to appear, and horseless carriages could occasionally be seen on the streets. Many of the things destined to play a major part in twentieth-century life were here already. But at the same time for most people there was little difference between this, and the city of fifty years previously. Victoria was still on the throne; there was still dire poverty, and those who were without work had to survive on charity and scavenging. The bad winter of 1902 caused great misery and degradation, and things became so desperate that an observer of the time might have felt that such a situation could not possibly go on for long.
But at the time the only alleviation remained the institution of workhouses, although philanthropists were constructing almshouses, cheap housing for the poor. Ironically those same almshouses that survive today are sold for hundreds of thousands of pounds. The capitol at the time was a curious mixture of ostentatious wealth hiding harrowing poverty. Although this was a period of extraordinary prosperity, the normal working man had a hard enough time of it. The music-hall song whose chorus goes, My old man said ‘Follow the van, and don’t dilly-dally on the way’ describes the plight of a couple who are leaving their lodgings owing rent and making their escape by moonlight - a predicament which was clearly one familiar to everybody in the audience.