Empire Cities: The Rise of Amsterdam, London, and New York

Four hundred years ago, a village by the name
of Amsterdam set out to conquer the world, invented capitalism as we know it, and became
the richest city on the European continent. There was this sense among
the Dutch that whoever you were, you could have a piece of the action.
You could be involved in this great economic activity of your society. One hundred years later,
London, its main rival, took its place. The greatest trading power in
the world, London endured terrific hardships, but went on to
become the world’s largest city, and invented the megalopolis
of tomorrow’s world. When the railways crashed
through the poorer areas of London, people were just dispersed. They
were swept aside, you might say. Meanwhile, New Amsterdam had now
become New York. It was under British rule. The city cut itself free
and entered the fray. At the outpost of the technical
revolution, New York became the vertical city, and created
a whole new horizon for itself. You watched day by
day as this stone structure was being built in
the middle of the river. And it got bigger and bigger and bigger. Today, we admire the beauty of the
city’s houses, and the charm of its canals. But there’s much more
to Amsterdam than that. It marks the starting
point of a great adventure. That of the rise of liberal capitalism, the expansion of worldwide commerce, and the emergence of the global city. A combination of circumstances that
has rarely been seen in human history, and one which changed
the face of the world. Amsterdam was still just a small
town of less than thirty thousand inhabitants, a town of small consequence
in terms of the European continent. On this spring morning of 1594,
near Dam Square, which has been the heart of Amsterdam since its very
origins, ten men held a meeting. The meeting took place in
one of the participants’ houses, a certain Martin Spill, a brewer by profession. Around the table sat men whose
businesses traded wood, salt, and herring, products which Amsterdam
had become a specialist in. Their ships were,
however, excluded from the trade of pepper and
spices with South Asia, the most lucrative products around. Because this form of trade was run by Portugal,
which owned a huge number of trading posts along the route to Asia, serving as stopovers for its
trading boats and as bases for its warships. On the day in question,
it was this very monopoly that was at the heart
of their discussion. And the idea is we can
attack the Portuguese monopoly on trade with the Far East. And they realized that by this time,
the city of Amsterdam has developed. It’s got money. It’s got these people
with this kind of expertise. They’ve been building ships. So in other words, all
the ingredients are coming into place. Each of the men present that morning had
already amassed a fair amount of capital. But it was nothing compared
to what they’d soon own, and the veritable empire they’d
contribute towards founding. Among them was Dirk van Oss,
one of the city’s most dynamic traders. Originally from Antwerp,
he was a refugee, like many of the men
who attended this meeting. They moved to Amsterdam
following a conflict that had been ravaging this part of Europe
for the past twenty-five years. On one side was William
the Silent, who was championing the cause
of the Dutch Protestants. On the other side was Philip
II of Spain, an uncompromising Catholic and one of the most
powerful men on the continent. When the northern provinces
revolted, he put them to fire and sword. But Amsterdam and the Netherlands
finally gained their independence, whereas Antwerp and Flanders
remained under his control. Antwerp was, at that point, the main
commercial city in Europe, the richest city in the continent, a primordial source
of taxation for Philip II and his kingdom. However, the King of Spain made a bet, which would cost him dearly. They knew that one way or another, you couldn’t lock up all the merchants. Money is mobile. So they perhaps uniquely said to the
inhabitants of Antwerp, there is a choice. You can either stay with
us, you have to convert to Catholicism if you’re
not yet a Catholic, but you could also leave
and you have three years to liquidate your assets
and take them with you. Half of the inhabitants
of Antwerp, who were often more enterprising,
chose to leave. Many of them left for London or Germany, but ultimately chose to
settle just two hundred kilometres from their city
of origin, in Amsterdam. The richest among them bought themselves
a house in the small medieval town. But those who couldn’t
afford to do so built their own homes outside the city
walls, on agricultural land. There would soon be dozens
of thousands of people here, waiting for a better solution. For these refugees, it was
the start of a new life, and when a chance presented itself,
they weren’t going to miss it. They sit down with their cartographer.
They’ve got all the people there. And they work out a system
of how they’re going to do this, a route they’re going
to go, what ships they’ll need. And they form a company, which
they call the Compagnie Fanfare, which translates as something
like the Company for Faraway Lands. It’s fair to say that this small
group were well prepared. A man named Cornelius de
Houtman was sent to Lisbon in Portugal, where he would work for several years, and spy on the leading market players. He knew what he was doing, and despite his lack of
experience, he was designated by the group as the
leader of this expedition. The total amount invested was three hundred thousand Dutch
guilders, an enormous amount. Even the richest traders in Amsterdam didn’t have these kinds of sums available in
cash. A house in Amsterdam cost around five thousand Dutch guilders, and that would get you a very beautiful house. So
they needed to involve a lot of traders in order to raise such a sum of money. Certainly, dozens of traders were
involved as investors in this initial campaign of Houtmans. Three ships. Two hundred and forty-nine crew members. Nobody in Holland had ever
undertaken a voyage this far. Moreover, should they cross
into hostile territory, the Portuguese could at any moment intercept the
expedition, and destroy their ships. Plagued with scurvy and
rebellions, the voyage did not go well, and Houtman had to stop over
for several months in Madagascar. Before setting sail for
Asia, he was forced to leave the country. And
ultimately reaching Bantam, on the island of Java. Nothing was left to chance. During his stay in Lisbon,
Houtman realized that this was somewhere where he’d be
able to buy pepper and spices. But when he reached his destination,
he was met with disappointment. The Sultan, who initially greeted
him warmly, took him prisoner. Houtman escaped, and after several journeys,
on August the fourteenth, 1597, he returned to Amsterdam. More than two years later,
about eighty of the original two hundred and some people make
it back. They look like skeletons. And they’ve got just a few, really, a few
sacks of pepper and spices in their hold. So by any logical means,
this is a complete disaster, except that handful of
men who backed the voyage realized they had done it. They had actually
gone the whole way there, somehow or other gotten their hands on some of the spices and
came back. So they’d beaten the Portuguese. And they realized then that this was an opportunity.
This was going to work. Amsterdam now needed to gather
enough resources that it would need for its global ambitions. It needed ships.
Lots of ships. And as quickly as possible. And it just so happened that, in
1594, that is to say three years before Houtman’s return to
Amsterdam, one man found the answer. His name was Cornelis
Corneliszoon, and he owned several mills in the village of
Oudgeest, near Amsterdam. Cornelius Corneliszoon
was a great inventor. He helped Holland harness wind power. Until this point, sawing planks of wood
required several men and lots of patience. But this all changed when Cornelis
Corneliszoon developed the crankshaft. This revolutionized
shipbuilding production. The crankshaft is actually
a very simple invention that converts a circular movement
into a vertical movement. With this new technique, it was
possible to produce planks of wood, which were mostly used for shipbuilding,
thirty times faster than before. This considerably lowered production costs
and sped up the shipbuilding process, which made the production of ships, large ships, much
cheaper. And you have to remember, this was happening at the end of the sixteenth century.
The patent dates back to around 1592 to 1594. In other words, exactly at the time when
the Dutch set off on their huge explorations. At first, the invention
met a lot of opposition, and many shipyard workers
refused this piece of innovation. But within a few years, its usage
became more widespread, and Holland’s advantage over its
foreign competitors was overwhelming. Amsterdam was now the
leading shipyard in Europe, and that’s where they mass-produced
the best trade ship of its time. The five years that followed
were full of excitement. More and more expeditions were launched,
and many shipping companies were founded. Seventy-five ships were sent to Asia. And the ships start coming back loaded
with these incredibly valuable spices. And this is really the moment
that the Dutch Golden Age takes off. There’s a scene that’s described
by several writers where, when these first ships come back, all the church bells are
ringing, because this is just this awareness that something
really big has happened. These expeditions brought
back nine million Dutch guilders, which equated to the total
sum of Holland’s national debt. The debt amassed during
the war against Spain. They couldn’t carry on this way forever, because all these
companies would eventually start competing. They all wanted to travel to Asia and buy spices. The prices in Asia started climbing,
which nobody was happy about. And the second problem was the Portuguese and Spanish, who didn’t want to relinquish their
spoils to the Dutch. They needed to be a well-organized and centralized company, with a monopoly of the market, and one that
would be able to defend itself against the Spanish and Portuguese. And so, VOC was created. It’s a key date in the history of
capitalism, as well as that of Amsterdam. One morning in April 1602, Dirk van Oss
transformed a room of his house into a temporary office for the Dutch East India Company, of
which he’d just been nominated a director. Whoever wished to could buy
shares of this new company. There was this sense among the Dutch that
whoever you were, you could have a piece of the action. You could be involved in this
great economic activity of your society. One thousand one hundred and
forty-three people seized this opportunity. Not just traders, but also joiners,
bronze smiths, and all sorts of craftspeople, and even seven
people who worked as housekeepers. It was a sample of society
in Amsterdam at that time. A total of three million six
hundred and eighty thousand Dutch guilders were invested
in this new shipping company, a huge success for the
first operation of its kind in Dirk van Oss and his house in this moment when these
ordinary people came walking into his house to buy shares of stock might have an outsized place in history, because this
is, you could say, the moment that capitalism was born. But there was a problem. The investors
were used to investing in a single voyage. They had to wait. And when the ships
returned, they put their money back, and could either choose to continue or stop investing.
But with the VOC in 1602, they were told, you can invest, but for ten years.
Your money will be held for ten years. And ten years was much too
long for many small investors. The VOC found the
solution on a small bridge, which can now be found outside
the exit of Amsterdam station. This area, in the early seventeenth
century, was home to the city’s port and its many ships, which
were ready to set sail out to sea. On the old bridge, the one nearest
the sea, those who wanted to sell their shares of the VOC would
meet those who wanted to buy them. But the weather in Amsterdam
wasn’t always accommodating, and on rainy days, people would
meet inside the Saint Olaf Church, a Catholic church that had been
abandoned during the Protestant victory and since left to the traders of Amsterdam,
who’d come from Scandinavian countries. This place, to some
extent, became the first stock exchange to
exist in human history. The process was you did your exchange on the bridge or in the church.
And then you walked to the headquarters of the Dutch East India Company. And you had to get signatures and stamps.
And so that sealed the deal. That made it efficient. The Dutch East India
Company headquarters are now part of the
University of Amsterdam. It was the first headquarters
in the world, with its offices, managers
and board of directors. The edifice is the work of Hendrik de
Keizer, the leading architect at that time. He’s the one they called
when as stock trading activity increased, they decided to
build a proper stock exchange. Hendrik de Keizer had
two models to work with, the stock exchange in Antwerp and its copy, the stock exchange in London. But Antwerp was in enemy territory,
so Hendrik de Keizer went to England. Here only merchandise was traded,
company shares did not yet exist. But the architecture was interesting, and Hendrik de Keizer
used it for inspiration. Once back in Amsterdam, he built
an edifice based on the same model. Its location is no coincidence.
The new stock exchange was built right in the center of Amsterdam,
a stone’s throw from the city hall, a sign that finance and politics
would work hand in hand. In Amsterdam, unlike London,
merchandise was being exchanged, but so were shares of the
Dutch East India Company. In this regard, the Amsterdam
Stock Exchange became the first in the history
of global economics. The stock exchange was
inaugurated in 1611, meanwhile a truce was being signed between
the Dutch Republic and Spain. Temporarily relieved of
the burden of its war debts, the city would finally have
the resources to expand. In the space of thirty years, ten
square kilometers were dug up, around a hundred bridges were constructed,
and three thousand houses were built. With thirty thousand inhabitants in 1585,
and a hundred and five thousand thirty years later, Amsterdam would soon be the
third largest city on the European continent. The next part of this
story took place in London, at the heart of the city, the business district. Back then, much like now,
it was a city of traders too. In the early seventeenth century, London
had not yet undergone its urban revolution. It was still a city in the Middle Ages. Well, it was actually a very small
place compared to London we know now. A tiny fraction of the
scale of the city as it exists in the XXI century,
even in the XIX century. The city is currently
a crucial financial hub, and not many people live there. But back at this time
in history, most of the population of London
were still mostly living here. And the city was the area confined to the
old medieval walls, which had been built on top of the old Roman walls. So really a very
small space, what we call a square mile. A place that was made
up of medieval houses, packed very closely
together, essentially timber. There are some new
structures amongst them, but it was very much a medieval
city, very old-fashioned. The city was separate from the royal power. The sovereigns needed money
lent to them by traders, who would, in return, receive a
certain degree of freedom. England’s great fortunes
had their home there. In 1534, when Henry
VIII split from the Roman Church, he seized all
the Catholic monasteries. Until this point, they occupied
sixty percent of the city’s space. The king redistributed
this among his courtiers. And so when the king
appropriates that wealth for himself, you have a change in ownership of the property of more than
half of the buildings in the city of London. And they move from conservative
landlords, who are the churchmen, to go-ahead entrepreneurs,
the merchants, who are buying the church
property as investments. In a period of maybe fifty years, London becomes a place which
is actually filled with extremely wealthy people living in their own very large houses. And these people spent the winter months
in London with their wives, and their wives wanted to go shopping. And shopping is absolutely the key to what
happens to London. It becomes this extraordinary emporium where people come and buy and sell,
and buy and sell high-value luxury goods. At the start of the seventeenth
century, the city of London was therefore a rapidly
developing commercial center. But it was still far behind Amsterdam. And when the two cities
came up against each other, the city of London
would come up short. Back then, much like now,
in the city, business people often have confidential
information disclosed to them. Especially in pubs, where eavesdroppers
would often overhear conversations. Pubs are places where people meet. Pubs
are the social hubs, and business centers need social hubs as much as residential
areas. Work is primarily a social activity. The British, unlike
most other nationalities, drink standing up
rather than sitting down. If you’re sitting at a table in a French cafe, all you
hear is the gossip of your friends. You can never quite hear what’s being said on the next table, which is always
far more interesting than what your friends are saying. In a British pub, no such problem. Because you’re standing up, you can easily get
close enough to the other group to hear what they’re saying, and you can switch off from what your
friends are saying, which you already know anyway. Strategic information could
fall into the wrong hands. Which is exactly what
happened in late summer of 1608. And this changed the fate of London, Amsterdam, and even the whole of America. That morning, a certain Henry
Hudson had a meeting in the offices of the Muscovy Company, in a little
street of the city called Budge Row. The Muscovy Company was
specialised in trading with Russia. And it’s not the first time Henry
Hudson had put himself in their service. Henry Hudson had spent
many years undertaking many voyages to try to
find a short route to Asia. On two occasions, Hudson
tried to find the right route. The first one went via the North Pole, which obviously didn’t work. And the second attempt
went via the far north coast of Russia, and
wasn’t successful either. I think of him as kind of like a, I don’t know, a Steve Jobs or
someone like that of his era, who people started to look to
him as someone who knows. Whether or not he did know, and we know today that he
did not, but what you had to do was you had to guess. You had to say, I’m going to put all this information
together. And my next guess is that this is the best way. This time, Hudson had a new idea. Instead of travelling
towards the east, they’d have to cross the
Atlantic and the continent. That’s what he was
explaining to his employers. However, inside the building,
nothing happened as he’d expected. Not only did they refuse his offer,
but they showed him to the door. That said, this incident
didn’t go unnoticed. A sixty-two-year-old man, Emmanuel van
Metteren, quickly seized the opportunity. As the Dutch Consul in London,
he’d look for every piece of information. And he had spies. He paid people to find out
information. And one of the things that he was following was Henry Hudson. And he found out very quickly
that the Muscovy Company had fired Henry Hudson. And so he approached him and said, come to Amsterdam. We’ll fund you. London had just missed
an amazing opportunity, because Hudson
was quickly persuaded. And a month later, he sailed to Amsterdam. He comes to Amsterdam,
and there are different accents. There are different languages.
There’s different dress. It’s the very moment when they are building their first stock
exchange and starting the idea of expanding this canal grid. So it’s all just happening. And this multi-ethnic polyglot
society is something that would have been very strange to him. Hudson discovered a new
world. A mixed population with many refugees,
unlike his city of birth. In Europe, intolerance is official policy. And if you’re in London, basically you’re English. This is still
that moment when that kind of identity is intensified and codified by law almost. Here, there was no king or absolute power,
but a republic formed of seven provinces. They all had to reach a
compromise for any big decision. When the city became
Protestant, the Catholic churches were converted into the
general places of worship. But there were still
many Catholics in the city. They represented a
third of the population, and their faith had not been banned. Their churches were
simply no longer visible. They were now in individual homes. There were sixty-six churches like
this during the Dutch Golden Age. Everyone knew that services were held
every Sunday, but they were tolerated. At a time where Europeans
were killing each other for religious reasons, this was
proof of a greater openness. And it’s a legacy that Amsterdam passed on, throughout the Golden Age, across the entire world. So Hudson goes into the courtyard of
this now legendary building, which was the headquarters of the East India
Company, meets with the directors. And they hammer out an agreement
by which they will fund his voyage. On one condition, however. Hudson would not head
west, as he’d proposed, but would find a shortcut
to Asia through Russia. They, for their own reasons, insisted
that he try a northeast passage. He had tried that and failed. He
was convinced that wouldn’t work. But from one line in the
contract, we know that there was tension. And
the line says something like, Hudson will think of
taking no other route than a northeast passage. Which suggests that he was saying, no,
no, no. We want to go northwest. We want to go northwest. And they were saying,
no, no, no. We want you to do northeast. In May 1609, as he set
sail for Russia, the seafarer was under no illusions as
to his chances of success. But he had other intentions. Having only just arrived in Norway, and
facing the difficulties they’d encountered, he persuaded his crew to do a U-turn, and to head towards America. The Indians, so we’re told,
mentioned a waterway that wound its way far into
the depths of the continent. Hudson looked for it along the north side, turned round, and finally found the river Mouth. He made his way down this river,
which would later take his name, the Hudson River. But after a few days of sailing, he
had to face facts. It was a dead end. So Hudson turned back on himself. Along the route, he met some Indian tribes, some hostile, others happy to trade. And he saw lots of beavers, whose
fur was worth a fortune in Europe. Amsterdam had not found the
sea route it had been looking for. But the city had set foot
on the American continent. The year Hudson returned was also the year
Amsterdam underwent its transformation. Amsterdam, until that time, was
still this little medieval city. But from that moment, they undertake
this vast urban expansion program. A few years earlier, a new district
had popped up in the northeast of Many refugees from
Antwerp had settled there. The less wealthy were living
on top of each other in the three thousand three hundred small
homes built outside the city walls. They lay out a plan for a
belt of canals, a kind of U of canals that will wrap around
the medieval center of the city. And the canals will be used to take the problem of water and convert it to an advantage. A team was put together to
carry out this ambitious project, and Hendrik de Keizer was
one of the men in charge. At the start of the seventeenth
century, this construction company was formed of
around a hundred and fifty people. Specialists, craftspeople from various fields, masons,
carpenters, sculptors, and this number just kept growing. And we know that in the mid-seventeenth century,
it had between six hundred to seven hundred employees. There were huge difficulties, because
Amsterdam is built on marshy land, whereas each building
needs a solid foundation. As such, hundreds of ships traveled
back and forth to the Swedish port of Stavanger, to bring dozens of
thousands of tree trunks to Amsterdam. Amsterdam was transforming itself
into a huge, bristling construction site of wooden triangles, on top of
which heavy loads were being hoisted. And so, this is how the posts
necessary for the foundation of such construction were
buried into the ground. One post per meter across the entire city. So I have often thought that if you were walking through Amsterdam in its golden age, I think really you would have been struck by the sound of
hammering and of the piles being driven and driven, because that was going on all through the century as this belt of canals was
dug and these roads and bridges and houses were being built. The perimeter of the
city wall was extended. The refugee homes were demolished,
and two new districts emerged. A residential district, and on the outside
was a commercial and residential area for
those with fewer means. It was the first town planning scheme
in the history of European cities. In the commercial area, each
profession had its own area. Whereas in the residential
areas, it was forbidden to make noise, and no polluting forms
of industry were tolerated. Here, everybody was free
to build the house of their choice, to the size and
style of their pleasing. There was only one restriction. The house could only occupy
half the surface of the plot of land. And what’s unique about
the houses in Amsterdam along the canals, is that
each of them has a garden. The inhabitants of Amsterdam who lived in these
houses, the wealthy traders, the bankers and men in power, were passionate gardeners, and wanted to
create palatial gardens at the heart of the city. And the Dutch way of
designing these urban gardens was characterized by
their different designs. There were boxwood hedges,
plant beds, topiary, original plants. There were also statues,
benches, garden pavilions. Everything you’d find in
a palace garden could be found here, but on a smaller
scale, in a smaller space. On the ground floor of the
house, there’d be a reception area. Next door would be
the office, where one’s business would be run,
with one or two employees. Upstairs was the family space. Family in the strict sense of
the term, as we know it today. Before that, European homes
tended to be much more mixed. You may have extended
family. There might be servants or boarders who were renting rooms. The Dutch canal house, and this again reinforces this new
notion of what an individual is, and not just an individual, but what a family is. This new kind of sensibility, which I
think most of us consider now, today, to be part of our lives. The Dutch canal house was intended to be for a man
and his wife and their children. The Dutch have this
word, gezelligheid. It means cozy, intimate,
a place of domesticity. When you read the tales
of foreigners who walked along the canals in the
mid-eighteenth century, they seem surprised that there
are so many high-value houses, and no sovereign. They are also surprised that this
architecture is not solely used for the houses of rich individuals, but that even simple
public buildings are built this way too. Orphanages, retirement homes. They thought it’s really quite
astonishing, and they even thought it’s a bit excessive to design
public buildings like palaces. Amsterdam would now start
exporting this revolutionary societal design to the
other side of the Atlantic. 1623 marked the creation of
the Dutch West India Company, which had a monopoly
over trade with the Americas. A year later, it invited
volunteers to its headquarters in Amsterdam
to join its new colony. It’s the golden age in Holland, and it’s hard to get settlers. So they are advertising, and they have this multi-ethnic society. And as you would imagine would happen, it’s people who are at the bottom
rung of the society who are willing to, they’re the ones who have
nothing to lose, who say, OK, I’ll join. Young people in their
twenties, a boy for each girl. All from French-speaking
Flanders, now Belgium. In 1624, a few dozen volunteers
signed up for this American adventure. At that point, Amsterdam
and the Dutch Republic were, without contest, the world’s
leading commercial power. However, on the other side of the North
Sea, London was building up its forces. Its secret? Textiles. A
force born two hundred and fifty years earlier, in
terrible circumstances. The greatest epidemic in European history. The Black Death. Half of the English population were
wiped out in the space of a decade. But it was at this point that the English
economy discovered sheep farming. Before the Black Death, there
was a very high population. The economy was geared towards agricultural produce
to feed this population. But after the Black Death, there was what they called a dearth of people. There
were very few people, and there was a lot of land. And so the economy changed, and
they made use of the huge amount of land by switching the economy from this
agricultural economy to sheep farming. Wool supplies were gathering in London, and for the next
two centuries, the city traders exported it, particularly to Amsterdam and Holland, where a great number of some
of the best weavers on the continent were working. This was all very well. Exporting
wool was very good. It was a cargo that made good profit. But there was a way
to make even more profit, and that was to not only send wool abroad to allow
people to make cloth out of it, but to make the cloth yourself and then
sell that with its increased added value. In the mid-seventeenth century, London
finally decided to take the next step. The weavers of Holland were
invited to move to the English capital, as well as French
Protestants, the Huguenots. Among them were many textile craftsmen. London thus sowed the
seeds for its future industry. They settled in the east of
London, near to the city of London and close to the port where they
had arrived from the continent. They built houses with weaving
lofts at the top of the houses with large windows and plenty of daylight to
operate their looms for making cloth. And this early development of the cloth industry
in the UK was what really allowed the economy of London to take off, which produced the great
wealth that led to it becoming a financial centre. The weavers formed the
initial hub of the future East End, the major industrial district
of the nineteenth century. And the port in London saw
its activity increase tenfold. In a space of fifty years, the
population of London more than doubled. By the mid-seventeenth century, it had
amassed five hundred thousand inhabitants. The medieval city grew
beyond its confines, and rapidly spread towards the west, in
the direction of Westminster. Westminster, where the King reigned, and
he saw urbanization sprawl beyond control. There were real anxieties about the expansion of London,
because it was this place of disease, of vice, of crime. And the idea that the city might expand, might get
bigger, was an incredibly worrying thing for that reason. In his palace in Whitehall, the
King dreamt of a different city, a city devoted to royal greatness. The example to follow,
according to Charles I, is the Banqueting House, one
of the wings of his palace. With its classic design, the building
was used for great royal ceremonies. It was built by his father, King James I. The King, featured in
these ceiling paintings, done by Rubens in
person, celebrate glory. The two sovereigns
made life difficult in London. By imposing all sorts of regulations,
they wanted to force it to change. But they had a problem. Unlike European monarchies, where
the monarch genuinely had the power to completely remodel city centres, James I
and Charles I were completely dependent upon Parliament. And the City of London
government had a complete stranglehold, complete control over the nature of
the city. And so their hands were tied. London became one of the bones of
contention between the King and Parliament. And the conflict contributed
to the civil war which devastated England in the
mid-seventeenth century. Charles I was defeated, sentenced to death, and decapitated on thirtieth of January
1649, in front of the Banqueting House, the palace he’d so dearly loved, and
recommended as an example to be followed. It was a terrible period. But the city emerged richer
and more powerful than before, because this is when the
first banks set themselves up in London, and financial business
became a formal profession. Until this point, things
had been done in an informal manner, mostly
in settings like pubs. A rich tradesman would sit at a table,
from which he’d hold business meetings. A person who wanted to borrow
money would come up to him, accompanied by another
person who’d act as a guarantee. And the rich tradesman, if
he deemed them suitable, would lend them the
money they’d requested. But this practice changed
after the death of Charles I. A few months after his execution, Oliver Cromwell became Lord Protector, a sort of dictator, and allowed Jews to return to England. They’d been deported
several centuries beforehand. As such, Jewish bankers moved
to London from Lombardy in Italy. They chose a street in the city
center, now called Lombard Street, and set up their offices there. These were the first office blocks
such as we know them today. However, the newcomers still maintained a
vestige of the old practices. This type of sign, which all English pubs worthy of this name
would hang outside, and would be named after. Pubs and coffeehouses had done this for
a long time. They’d always had a picture outside, a picture of the king or a picture
of a castle or something more unusual. And so it is in Lombard Street
that to this day we see a collection of signs hanging from buildings
that look very much like pub signs. They don’t have any words on them. They are the world’s first logos. So when we see the cat and fiddle over a building in Lombard
Street, this is because it was the visual symbol of the company,
the bank that operated within, very much as had been the
case in the days of pub banking. In the space of fifty years, the city
had carried out its transformation. From a commercial center, it
was now becoming a financial hub. England now had the means required
for its ambitions, and a first war soon broke out between London and Amsterdam
to take control of certain sea channels. But Amsterdam continued to grow, an incredible success which
aroused keen interest from all around. Four hundred years ago, a village by the name
of Amsterdam began its mission to conquer the world, invented capitalism as we know it, and
became the richest city on the European continent. There was this sense among the Dutch that
whoever you were, you could have a piece of the action. You could be involved in this
great economic activity of your society. A hundred years later, London,
its main rival, took its place. The greatest trading power in the
world, London endured terrific hardships, but went on to become
the world’s largest city and invented the Megalopolis
of Tomorrow’s World. When the railways crashed
through the poorer areas of London, people were just dispersed. They
were swept aside, you might say. Meanwhile, New Amsterdam
had now become New York. It was under British rule. The city cut itself free
and entered the fray. At the outposts of technical
revolution, New York became the vertical city and created a
whole new horizon for itself. You watched day by
day as this stone structure was being built in
the middle of the river and it got bigger and bigger and bigger. What’s so special about the DNA of New York
is that unlike other American cities, other American developments, it doesn’t start with
religion. It doesn’t, frankly, start with idealism. It doesn’t start as an experiment in let’s
leave a place where we’re being persecuted or we can’t fulfill our identities. Let’s go do
something idealistic, perhaps even utopian. No. What is New York about? New
York is about making money. What is unique about New York is that it was expressly
founded as a commercial place by a commercial entity, the Dutch West India Company. They were here to trap beavers and send the pelts back to Europe. New York was a place to capture
animals and turn them into money. Spring, sixteen twenty-four. Amsterdam’s first settlers
make their way to America. On board are fifteen young
boys and fifteen young girls, some of whom became
couples during the journey. Upon arrival, they split into four groups. Four tiny colonies, each separated
by several hundred kilometers. And it was one year later, in
one of these colonies, that the destiny of this handful of
adventurers would change dramatically. The colonies had trade
relationships with the Mahican tribe, who were at war with the Iroquois tribe. So they came to the defense
of their business partners. But they fell into an ambush, and five of them were killed. In this time of tragedy,
a new leader stepped in. His name was Peter Minry. As a means of protection, he ordered all the
colonists to gather together. From then on, there would no
longer be four isolated colonies, but one single settlement, which
they named New Amsterdam. The settlers decided to settle on an
island located at the confluence of two rivers, at the heart of a huge bay
sheltered from the harshness of the ocean. They had access to sources
of clean water, which meant it was quite easy for
them to build a small town. At the time, the site was used
as a hunting ground by the Lenape Indians, which they’d named
Manahatta, the Island of Many Hills. And so one day,
Manahatta became Manhattan. It was this land, bursting with potential,
that Peter Minry and the Amsterdam settlers exchanged in 1626, the value
of which is estimated at sixty florins. In other words, the
equivalent of two weeks’ pay. If you’re doing history, you’ve got to slow
down, peel back the layers, and get down to these people at this moment and what they
thought they were doing. Nobody was looking ahead to a hundred years later, or three hundred
years later, or four hundred years later, when a one-bedroom co-op would sell for
a million dollars or something like that. They know perfectly well that the Indian idea of property ownership
is not their idea of property ownership. It’s kind of a defensive alliance.
So we’ll allow you to live here too. And if you’re attacked, we’ll help
you. And if we’re attacked, you’ll help us. A fortified camp and a small village. The settlers finally
had a solid base. However, for ten years, the colony wasn’t able to expand, and this is largely down to the
West India Company, who wanted to control everything. The West India Company insisted
on running this colony as a monopoly. So any money to be
made, it’s through them. So everybody is a West
India Company employee. And it’s failing. And the people who are making money
are smugglers or prostitutes. Those were kind of the pirates. These are the
main successful businesses, so to speak. In Amsterdam, the situation
was becoming worrying. In 1640, at the West India
Company headquarters, the managers finally decided to open trade
to whomever was interested. And what starts to happen then
instantly is these successful Dutch trading companies would send
one of their sons to New Amsterdam and they would set up a branch
office. And because the Dutch Republic is a ethnically mixed place, the settlers are ethnically mixed. Fifteen years later, the
population of New Amsterdam had multiplied by five, and now
exceeded four thousand inhabitants. The small village had become
a small city, and a smaller model of the great metropolis across
the other side of the ocean. Brick houses and canals, which made
it look rather like the Dutch Republic. Of course, all of this has
long since disappeared, with the exception of the
narrow streets of New Amsterdam, which can be found at the
southern tip of Manhattan. The famous New York canyons, where the
skyscrapers seem to touch each other, are the legacy of the island’s first European
inhabitants, almost four hundred years ago. On this new continent, a colony
so small in size was vulnerable. So a wall was built
along its northern edge. This protection was not
against the Indian tribes, but against New Amsterdam’s
two English neighbors. While in Europe, war was breaking out
between England and the Dutch Republic, Boston and Philadelphia were a threat
they needed to protect themselves from. Fifty years had passed since the start of
the Dutch Golden Age. Amsterdam’s belief in its future was resolute, and this building
is the best expression of that belief. A few years previously,
the Old Town Hall, a legacy of the Middle Ages,
had burnt down in a fire. Its replacement was built entirely
out of stone in a neoclassical style. Built on a foundation of
thirteen thousand six hundred and fifty-nine timber piles, its
construction was a real achievement. In the middle of the Town Hall is a
huge central hall called the Burgersaal, the Citizens’ Hall. Everyone has access to it, both the rich traders and
those with modest means. It all speaks of Amsterdam.
Amsterdam, which was at the center of the world. Or even
the cosmos. Or the universe! Embedded in the marble floor of
the Citizens’ Hall are two planispheres. Symbolically, when the
inhabitants of Amsterdam walked into this huge space, the
world would be at their feet. The city of Amsterdam is
portrayed as a female goddess, who reigns benevolently
over the entire planet. And, really, you should consider the central
hall as the axis on which the world span. And this building was placed exactly along an
East-West axis to accentuate this cosmic location. It was in this central meeting place, a
covered court, where important members of the middle class would meet. And where they’d
pace up and down on the maps of the world. Beneath the Citizens’
Hall, in the building’s basement level, was
Amsterdam’s financial core. This small room was the central
bank, which held access to the city’s gold reserves, thus acting as a
safe for the city and its inhabitants. The city therefore dominated global
trade, with the average income per inhabitant three times greater than
in other large cities on the continent. And with this money came
all sorts of possibilities. This money meant it could
complete the huge urban project it had started
forty years previously. Between 1650 and 1670,
the canals were extended by several kilometers, and
hundreds of houses were built. It was one of the largest developments
to take place in Amsterdam during the Dutch Golden Age, and
it was no doubt the most successful. At this point, large families were
opting for a more sober architecture, which never goes out of style, with
stone facades that stand the test of time. An architecture that distanced
itself from the early Amsterdam, when the beginnings of merchant
capitalism had only just emerged. Now, the city was entering
into an era of maturity. The beauty of this architecture was
no longer in the fanciful ornaments and sculptures, but more so in the
rhythm, harmony and proportions of doorways and windows, their length
and width. Everything was accentuated by pilasters, which were used
to highlight the flow of a building. The age of conquests, great adventures, and
new fortunes was mostly over. In fifty years, real empires had been established, not only
in trade, but also in finance and industry. The history of this house, the biggest
private house in Amsterdam, tells us the story of one of the dynasties that reigned
over the economy of the Dutch Republic. A family that, within two generations,
created a truly multinational entity, whose base was located in Sweden, where
they produced iron and traded weapons. The house belonged to the Tripp brothers. Their uncle Elias had started from nothing. Upon his death, his personal
fortune was worth one million florins, which is the equivalent of four thousand
years’ worth of an average salary. His successors, Louis and Hendrik Tripp, continued
to grow the family fortune, and it was they who built the house, which was, in actual fact, a
single façade that concealed two adjoining houses. The Trip Brothers sell to
anyone who is willing to pay, including the enemies
of the Dutch Republic. The Dutch had a lot of
enemies and if you didn’t sell to the enemies there wasn’t
that much business left to do. But the other reason is that, interestingly,
the authorities in the Dutch Republic are aware of the fact that doing business with
everybody brings in revenue, so ultimately it supports the Dutch state and if they wouldn’t
buy those arms from Dutch merchants they would go somewhere else and that would support,
perhaps, the enemies of the Dutch Republic. Once the house was built, it was twice as
high as all the other buildings around it. And when you stood on the top floor, you were
above all the neighboring houses, and the only building you could see in the distance, the only
building of the same height was the new Town Hall. The town hall was a place where only
families from Amsterdam could work. But the Tripp brothers were
from a village located about fifty kilometers outside.
They were therefore excluded. This largely explains the
position and height of their house. Its existence was an act of defiance
against the city’s political authorities. And on the roof, they had
chimneys shaped like canons. And you can imagine in winter, when the chimneys
were-being used, there’d be smoke coming out of the canons on the roof. There’s no better symbolic reference
to the actual weapons foundry and canons they owned. Amsterdam had now
spread to four times the size it was in the early
seventeenth century, and its population had exceeded
two hundred thousand inhabitants. As Europe’s third greatest city,
it was well aware of its power. But London was laying in wait, and it was ready to overtake its rival. As such, on the eighth of December, 1664, New Amsterdam became New York. This date, the city we know
today was formed, with its mix of populations and
unwavering commercial ambition. With utmost secrecy, the English
had sailed towards New Amsterdam, taking the small city’s inhabitants
and governor by total surprise. Pieter Stuyvesant had
led this Dutch colony on the other side of the
world for seventeen years. He knew his enemies well. They were his neighbors, and his best clients. For many years before this
point, the English colony in Virginia, when they were shipping things to
England, they would send them to New York Harbor and have the Dutch
do it because the Dutch could do it cheaper. They could do it faster.
They just had developed for over a couple of centuries, they had developed
systems for handling these things. Up against the four English
ships and their powerful artillery, New Amsterdam
didn’t stand a chance. And so, Pieter Stuyvesant had no choice but
to invite his enemies into his own home. However, despite this blatant show
of strength, the English conceded practically everything to the
small city they’d just conquered. And it’s an interesting document because if you read
it point by point, you wouldn’t know it’s like, these are the conquerors and these
are the conquered because it seems more like a
negotiation between two equals. The inhabitants of New Amsterdam were
allowed to keep their properties, trade as they wished, and retain their right
to decide on matters concerning the city. And the trading ships that sailed over
from Amsterdam would still be welcome. When there’s a takeover, you
have in your mind this notion that these people leave and these
other people come in. They all stayed. And even twenty years later, notaries in the Dutch Republic are writing documents to send people,
settlers, Dutch settlers to the colony. And they’re still calling it New Netherland,
like they don’t want to think about it. And just to jump ahead centuries, like in the nineteenth
century, when the great waves of migrants come from
Europe to America, by and large, they come into
New York Harbor and they first make footfall on Manhattan. And they look around and
they see what’s now this teeming society with people speaking
different languages and worshiping different faiths.
And they’re all struggling to get ahead by what we
would call upward mobility. And they say, well, this is
America, you know, but it wasn’t America. The rest of America
wasn’t like that. It was New York. And it was New York because
it had been New Amsterdam. In 1643, while New Amsterdam
only had a population of five hundred, one visitor recounted that eighteen
languages were being spoken there. This mix within a population
was passed on to the city of New York, and that’s what
gives it its identity to this day. The initial mark made by New Amsterdam is
no longer visible, but it is ever present. In this regard, Haarlem finds its root in
the small town of Haarlem, near Amsterdam. Broadway’s is in Bredve,
which means wide road in Dutch. Brooklyn is named after
Broekelen, another Dutch city. Coney Island comes from Conyon
Island, which means rabbit island. And Staten Island comes from
Staten Island, the state’s general, the governing body of the
republic in the Dutch Golden Age. In New York, the spirit of
Amsterdam and London had in some ways fused, giving
America a very unique city. And this is also why it’s important to
understand the story of Peter Stuyvesant, who, straight after his defeat, left for
Amsterdam to report back to his superior. Stuyvesant showed up at the
West India Company headquarters to defend his decision to hand
over the colony to the English. Once exonerated, he decided to head
back to New York, where he spent the rest of his life in his house, where he’d
signed the famous Treaty of Capitulation. The two years that followed
England’s seizure of New Amsterdam were horrific
for London and its population. In 1665, the plague killed
one hundred thousand people. And the following year was the great London then was a city of thatch, timber, plaster, all building materials
that are very flammable. The previous couple of
summers were very dry, so London was this
tinderbox ready to go. St. Bartholomew. The great church was one
of the only buildings to escape the flames. It was in these rather
dramatic circumstances that London took its
first step into modernity. I think it’s really difficult
today to get any sense of how catastrophic the Great
Fire of London actually was. Particularly when it started, it seemed like
it was just another one of the hundreds and hundreds of fires that happened every year and
that were dealt with and put out and controlled. And even after the fire had
been raging for twenty-four hours, it wasn’t really understood what
it was going to mean for London. People were moving their goods further to the other side
of the city. People were putting their goods in St
Paul’s Cathedral in the illusion that they would be safe in
there, and of course they weren’t. The fire broke out in a bakery on the night
of the second to third of September, 1666. And then it subsequently took hold. Although it only claimed nine victims, more than one hundred thousand inhabitants
saw their houses reduced to ashes. It burned until Wednesday,
the fifth of September, and destroyed a third of
the city in that time. So I tried to conceptualize what that would
mean to inhabitants at that moment. If you think of a third of London now was destroyed,
it’s that kind of magnitude of event. The fire had done what the kings of
England had never managed to do. The medieval city had disappeared. It could now be replaced with a new city. I think nobody really understood what to
do next. There was no manual they could go and get off the shelf saying, catastrophic
fire, page forty-seven, this is what you do. There was a real vacuum of power, and into that vacuum came two very powerful interests. One was
the commercial interest, which said, just get up, get going, we just can’t afford to
mess about, we’ve just got to get on. And on the other side was an opportunity. You had to move quickly.
Half the population of the city were camping out in areas
that had avoided the fire. What should be rebuilt? A new city? What should it look like? One man had the answer
to each of these questions. His name was Christopher Wren. He was a brilliant mathematician
and a very talented architect. Wren was a close
friend of King Charles the second. He’d known him
since they were children. The year before, the
king had sent him to Paris in what was, in some
ways, a spying mission. There he met Bernini, the
architect behind the Vatican, who would be asked to design a
new facade for the Louvre Palace. And Wren says in a
letter that he writes back, I brought back all
Paris with me on paper. Big trunks full of books, sketches,
drawings, prints, maps. These were all brought to London, and
we have to imagine him undoing this big trunk and putting the papers
out on a table in front of Charles II, and saying, we could do this,
we could do this, we could do this. Christopher Wren was in Cambridge where he
was teaching when he heard about the fire. He immediately travelled to the royal
palace to meet Charles the second. Wren had prepared for
this for a long time and couldn’t wait to seize upon
such a dream opportunity. And so, before the king, he unfolded
his plan for a completely new city. Totally un-English, because all of London’s
previous history had grown up through the individual acts of entrepreneurs and
merchants and individuals. Here was something that was being proposed
that would be imposed by the state. Christopher Wren wanted to
eradicate the traces of the medieval city and build a capital formed of
large squares and wide avenues. A royal capital, not dissimilar to
the large cities across the continent. This was an absolute catastrophe, because clearly
anything that was going to be state-directed was going to take ages to implement, and
therefore was going to interrupt the important business of making money. And of course, the
people who wanted to make money won, because London has always been about making money.
London was invented by the Romans to make money. The city was therefore
rebuilt on the outline of the old city but
with brick houses. It was the birth of a modern city. A city The Now found its calling. Thirteen and a half
thousand houses were burnt. Only four thousand
houses were built back. And so London begins to change
from being a place of dense population to a concentrated trading centre. for Christopher Wren. Although his city plan
didn’t come to fruition, he was put in charge of
rebuilding St. Paul’s Cathedral. At a hundred and eleven
meters high, it was the biggest building in London and the
biggest in Europe at the time. Even today, the cathedral
is a symbol of the city. The old medieval city of London,
which, having disappeared in the great fire, later became the first business
district in the history of economics. Had Wren’s plan been realised, we would have been a
beautiful, Parisian city, useless for the function of
being a world financial center. A city which was so grand,
so beautiful, so complete, so perfect, it couldn’t continue
to change and be adapted. The great constant in London’s
history is the constant of change. As London has never been planned,
it can easily be rebuilt and remade. It is in a constant change
in its physical form, as well as in its technology and
its forms of doing business. From a disaster, London had
invented a new urban form. And so, the failure of
Christopher Wren’s design of his perfect city opened the way
for the city we know today. As London, as a city, became
more and more commercial, it became a less
fashionable place to live. And so the rich and the
fashionable moved out to the West. And there they were able to build
larger houses, houses that had gardens, and houses that, instead of
being crammed in on these narrow streets, were set around
large, carefully planned squares. The model of using squares
came about forty years before the great fire with the
creation of Covent Garden. An Italian-style square, a Tuscan-style
church, and a collection of houses. A very successful
project that inspired all the aristocrats who owned
property in and around London. The square therefore became a
good way to make one’s fortune. The principle was as follows. The king gave a piece of
land to one of his courtiers. Said courtier or one
of his descendants would develop it and
consult an entrepreneur. The entrepreneur would take care of
everything, gathering income from the houses they’d built and would
pass back a share of it to the courtier. This continued from generation to
generation for a century, at the end of which the courtier’s family would
regain full ownership of the land. They could then decide to use another
entrepreneur who’d build more houses and return a share of the income back
to the landowner or their descendants. It was through this ingenious
system that West London, that is to say the chic
districts, were able to develop. The square was a very clever
invention, because at least initially the people who lived in these houses
were extremely wealthy. They may well also have owned, as well as
their house in a square, a vast country house somewhere in the country
with many rolling hectares of land. So they wanted their
townhouse to look grand. In the eighteenth century, they were no longer
squares but little parks that sat in the middle
of these districts. Small, very select parks
that were only accessible to the occupants of
the houses facing them. By creating what we call a terrace,
which is a row of houses together, and approaching it, you feel the terrace is designed
as a single structure, as if you are approaching
a great palace. But in reality you are
approaching one sliver of a great palace. Your servants lived downstairs, and upstairs in the attic, and in the
sandwich in between, lived the family. And so the squares and these
great terraces were very popular with the rich, because it
gave them a sense of status, a sense they were living in an
impressive palace, where in reality they were living in a very
manageable residence in the city. These types of property projects were
mainly aimed at aristocrats to begin with. But it wasn’t long before the upper
middle class took an interest too. And naturally, the rest of the
middle class wanted to copy it. The aristocratic developments
of these great squares set a fashion, and the
fashion trickled down. So whilst the aristocrats lived in
very big, tall terraces, maybe six, seven stories high, with huge squares
covering maybe a couple of hectares, the middle class, the clerks, the people who were
working in the city, had slightly smaller houses, which were built on a very similar principle, on
smaller squares with slightly narrower streets. Here, a simple developer could buy
some land, build and then rent out houses. The first to do so was
called Nicholas Barbon. As a person, he was incredibly
difficult, ruthless, ill-tempered, would not let anything stand in his way. He trained actually as a doctor of medicine in Leiden, and he returned to London at this
moment after the Great Fire when it was emerging as this new place
reborn, this newly emergent modern city. He saw building very much as a
commercial enterprise. He was the first speculative developer, and he found as
many possible ways to save money himself. Barbon did everything in sequence. The stairs, the plaster mouldings, the
chimneys and the window frames. In doing so, he amassed
a considerable fortune and was soon being imitated by
dozens of other developers. This is how London started
growing at a frantic pace. It was on its way to
becoming the most widely spread and highly
populated city in the world. And it kept repeating the same
urban model again and again. The square model
which it had invented following the tragedy
of the great fire of 1666. London was the rising power. Amsterdam was the established power. France was to be the referee
for this merciless rivalry. In 1672, the Hall of Mirrors
had not been built yet. However, it marks the
memory of a conflict that shook Europe and changed the
history of these two cities forever. London and Amsterdam had
already been met with two wars, and until now the Dutch Republic
had always won the battle. Three years earlier, the
Dutch Navy had even invaded England and had crept up on
the enemy navy along the Thames. Most of them had been destroyed. Ever since, the English had
dreamed of nothing but revenge. Louis XIV saw this as an opportunity. The King of England,
Charles II, was his cousin. He admired the King of
France and his absolute power. The two men were on good terms
and formed an alliance in Dover. In early spring, war broke out, and for
Amsterdam the situation was very dangerous. England had formed an alliance with Paris, but also with the communes
of Münster and Cologne. Danger was therefore
coming from all directions. The French troops entered Dutch territory, they moved quickly to positions
very close to Amsterdam. It looked as if Amsterdam itself might be conquered by the
French. That didn’t happen, but a major part of Dutch territory
was occupied by foreign forces, really for the first time
since independence. One of the problems
that the Dutch have in the sixteen seventies is they
have to maintain a huge army to fight Louis XIV. That army is about one hundred thousand
soldiers, possibly even more, and this implies that every twenty Dutch men, women, children,
twenty of them together are paying for one soldier and that becomes impossible to sustain. The Dutch Republic finally won the battle, but the country emerged from it exhausted. As for its opponents, it
was better luck next time. Sixteen years later, the same
scenario seemed to be transpiring. Louis XIV supported James II, Charles
II’s successor to the throne of England. So it was therefore
possible to establish a military alliance between
the two countries. But their enemy was a determined man. William of Orange was not a
king, but a symbolic character within the Dutch Republic, of
which he was also the army chief. His family tree alone
was a perfect synthesis between the Dutch
Republic and England. William was the grandson of William
the Silent, who, a century earlier, had won the war against Spain, to which the
Dutch Republic owed its independence. Charles I of England, the king
decapitated in 1649, was his grandfather. His wife, Mary, was
the daughter of the current king of England
at the time, James II. The man who hoped to ally
with Louis XIV to annihilate the Dutch Republic was
therefore his father-in-law. These very close
connections to London were a great asset, and William
used it to his advantage. With great secrecy, he
mounted an extraordinary armada. Five hundred warships crossed the sea. He takes a large invasionary force
across, twenty-five thousand men, as well as sixty thousand
copies of a pamphlet in which he says
this is not an invasion, I am English. William of Orange claimed that he was defending
the country’s interests against its own king, James II, whose diabolical advisors had imposed
an arbitrary government on the population. And the argument worked. James II, king of England, fled to France, and
when William reached London dressed in white to signify the purity of his intentions, he was
applauded and received the support of Parliament. The deal is that William, together with his wife Mary, become the new sovereign of England. For Parliament, the deal is that they will
have the final say on all important issues. Parliament granted William and Mary the Bill of
Rights and the Habeas Corpus, which, for the very first time, established the limits of a sovereign’s
power and respect for individuals’ freedom. This episode was later
called the Glorious Revolution. The royal couple were crowned
in Westminster Abbey in 1689, and ruled together for a decade. After which, the Dutch Republic
and England, now united around their two sovereigns, were able
to resume their independence. But within the space of a
few years, William managed to incorporate his own little country’s
values into his new kingdom. Individual rights. Tolerance. A moderated government system. By the time both sovereigns died, these
values were already perfectly instilled. This all cost the Dutch
Republic very dearly. It was another financial
burden for a country already in substantial
amounts of debt. At the beginning of the
eighteenth century, Amsterdam was still a large capital city,
but its heart wasn’t in it. One clue indicates that
the times were changing. Painting throughout the
Dutch Golden Age had been one of the great passions
of the Dutch Republic. Whereas until then, throughout
Europe, art had been the privilege of princes,
aristocrats, or very large families. Here, it had been democratised. All of these big and small houses
were decorated with paintings. We know that in the 17th century,
around a million paintings were painted. Not only in Amsterdam,
but across the whole Republic. A baker or a cobbler
could have five or six each, whereas large collectors
would have around 40 or 50. Owning paintings was a
very widespread phenomenon. It was like having a
poster on a wall today. Amsterdam was the birth of the individual. Everyone wanted to
showcase their existence, or their profession,
like a jeweler. Or their daily life. If you look at the journals and diaries
and letters of travelers from other parts of Europe, they would come to
Amsterdam and be on the Dom or another market. And they would find it
amazing that you would see a fish seller and a vegetable seller, and then
you’d see an art seller right next door. And then you would see ordinary
people going and buying these paintings. And the paintings would
not be of a saint or something like that. They would be
of ordinary people doing ordinary things like selling
vegetables or, you know, a woman pouring milk into a
bowl or something like that. None of them are important today, but
all of them have a Wikipedia page today. All of these people, these portraits hang in the Louvre or
the Rijksmuseum or the Metropolitan Museum. And it’s because of this.
It’s because they’re the first people who looked at themselves the
way that we look at ourselves. The War of the 1672
was a terrible blow, which impoverished the country
and ruined many art lovers. Vermeer, now a celebrated
painter, had no more customers. He started
facing financial problems. And he never got back on his feet. However, there were
some who set off for London. Van der Veldt the Younger
and Elder, for example. Two marine painters, famous
for their strikingly lifelike paintings depicting scenes
off the coast of the Netherlands, found their new customers in England. Of course, it would be
really nice if we could say on a particular day the
Dutch Golden Age came to an end, but that’s
not the way it works. Amsterdam’s decline was the
product of a slow degradation. But in 1715, the Dutch
Republic took a decisive step, which reduced their credit
and dissolved their power. The Dutch Republic defaulted on its debt. It was only temporary. But it was a step too far. This is something that only happens to
royals. So there was a kind of an idea in the Dutch Republic among all those bankers and
people who put their money into the public debt that you had monarchs who had flimsy characters and
therefore they defaulted on their debts. In the Netherlands, you had this solid institution
made up of businessmen who knew what they were doing. It wouldn’t happen to us, that was
the kind of feeling, and then it happened to us. And so this is also the start of a debate that takes
basically all of the eighteenth century where people are saying what did we do wrong and how
can we get back into paradise? But paradise had been lost. Amsterdam was now a
city almost like any other. It’s in New York, at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, that this
story finds its end. Amsterdam had had its golden
age in the seventeenth century. Two centuries later, New
York experienced its Gilded Age. By the late nineteenth century, the industrial era,
New York is this powerhouse, and it’s filled with these extremely wealthy men who become obsessed with art and
culture and, of course, European art and culture. And they are now suddenly buying up Europe and sending
their representatives to Europe to buy up its history. And they’re bringing it to America and founding these museums
so they can, in effect, look back on their own roots, on these very wealthy tycoons from
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who were their forebears. The Prince of Sugar? The Baron of Railways? The King of Abattoirs? Or the creator
of the first department stores in America? These huge collectors
bequeathed these masterpieces to museums
around New York City. By the end of the eighteenth
century, Amsterdam had fallen off the
pages of this great story. London and New York
now stepped out in front. On both sides of the Atlantic,
two rival powers would now dominate the world and face
the challenges of modernity. Two fast evolving cities shaken by
both industry and new technologies. Two cities in their extreme forms, both
extreme poverty and immense fortunes. They went on to invent the
megalopolises we know today. Four hundred years ago, a village by the name
of Amsterdam set out to conquer the world, invented capitalism as we know it, and became
the richest city on the European continent. There was this sense among
the Dutch that whoever you were, you could have a piece of the action.
You could be involved in this great economic activity of your society. One hundred years later,
London, its main rival, took its place. The greatest trading power in
the world, London endured terrific hardships, but went on to
become the world’s largest city, and invented the megalopolis
of tomorrow’s world. When the railways crashed
through the poorer areas of London, people were just dispersed. They
were swept aside, you might say. Meanwhile, New Amsterdam
had now become New York. It was under British rule. The city cut itself free
and entered the fray. At the outpost of technical
revolution, New York became the vertical city and created a
whole new horizon for itself. You watched, day by
day, as this stone structure was being built in
the middle of the river, and it got bigger and bigger and bigger. At the end of the eighteenth
century, Amsterdam, the leading global trading power,
finally had to accept defeat. Industrial revolution and
demographic explosion. London will become the dominant
power for the following century. But New York had followed hot on its
heels and caught up within a few decades. Now competitors, the two cities, were to be
the first to face the impact of modernity. Twenty-first of September,
1776. While the War of Independence raged,
New York was up in flames. Half of the city was reduced to ash. It was disastrous, but also heralded a fresh start. Since its very foundation, New
York had never stopped growing. But once the city was
freed from British rule, it underwent a remarkable development. Over the decades to come, it literally
engulfed the island of Manhattan. Manhattan had an interesting landscape. In fact, the name Manhattan
derives from the native word for Manahatta, which means the island of hills. Manhattan was the island of hills. It was a rolling landscape. No mountains and no deep valleys,
but high hills, many of them rocky. It was a beautiful place, but that is not what the commissioners had in mind. There were three members
of the Commissioner’s plan for the street and
road layout for New York. Simeon DeWitt, Surveyor General,
the only professional in the team. John Rutherford, former
Senator, the greatest landowner in the
state of New Jersey. Governor Morris, one of the
founding fathers of the United States. He took part in the
drafting of the American Constitution. In 1807, they were tasked with planning
the layout for the future city of New York. Four years later, they
invented the famous grid pattern. This marked the starting point
for a huge expansion, which ultimately made New York the
economic capital of the United States. At the turn of the
nineteenth century, New York had two key competitors,
Boston and Philadelphia. It’s at this point that
it took the upper hand. Its traders were selling raw materials and
buying manufactured products in England and got involved in the trafficking of slaves between
Africa and the southern states of the U.S. This is how they came
up with the idea of offering their clients a
completely new service. In Philadelphia or Boston or in
London at the time, the standard way of trading was to wait until a ship was
full and then send it across the Atlantic, and it would go across
the Atlantic and wait at the other port until it
was full and come back. The New York traders therefore proposed a
different and much more efficient service. Their ships would
set off at a set time, whether or not their
holds were full or empty. This way, their customers
would know exactly when the ship was leaving and when it
would arrive with their cargo. This method couldn’t be rivaled, and so New York gained a definitive
advantage over its competitors. And that’s not all. By sailing north up the
Hudson, then winding up a canal to the
Great Lakes region, the city was able to fashion
itself a path of traffic deeper into the country and therefore toward
its plentiful natural resources. It was a sizable challenge
because it stretched a huge distance, almost
six hundred kilometers. The Erie Canal was the
first major construction project in the history
of the United States. People were very skeptical. They were
concerned about the amount of money that was being borrowed, and it was just
not a sure thing at all. It turned out to be a fantastic thing, and within just
a few short years, the toll revenues being collected along the Erie Canal
were more than enough to pay off the debt. The Erie Canal was a small revolution
for New York because until that point, it had been difficult or even impossible
to travel around such a vast area. From this point onwards, it
was now much easier to transport wood, furs and soon coal and
agricultural production to New York, all the items that would be
necessary for its trade and industry. Philadelphia was the real
competition here. Philadelphia tried to build a canal to go west, but
west of Philadelphia are mountains, and so they started
later. It was more expensive to build
because of the mountains. That meant that the tolls had to be higher, so the Philadelphia
Canal went bankrupt, while the New York Canal
just prospered and grew. You could call the Erie Canal a kind of
vacuum, a suction and pressure pump that allowed New York to withdraw produce
from within the country and distribute imported products back into the
country. So that made the city completely unavoidable in the material sense of the
word. You absolutely had to pass through it. The Erie Canal was officially opened in 1825,
and gave the New York economy a considerable boost just as the city was being planned and
the famous grid pattern started taking shape. Both projects were intricately linked because two of the three
members of the Street and Road Layout
Commission for New York, Governor Morris and Simeon DeWitt, were also involved in
the design of the canal, and this mission took up
a great deal of their time. With time running out on
their street commission, they basically punted, which means they cast about for some plan that existed that they might adapt to
their purposes because they hadn’t really come
up with a plan of their own. Upon searching through
the archives, they came across some work done by
a man called Casimir Goerke. Goerke had drawn up the plans for plots
of farming land in the center of Manhattan, in a location that was, at the
time, worth almost nothing. Through these common lands, he
designed three avenues, perpendicular roads and a hundred and forty
plots, each measuring two hectares. Boom, there it is. There is the Manhattan grid. It comes directly from
the common lands grid, and what the commissioners did is simply
expand it, explode it out from there. And so, as if by chance, the
great grid pattern was born, a pattern without which New
York would not be New York. Many other cities would
have their planned core, and then as they expanded, they would plan additional subdivisions and add
additional streets, so you never really knew
what was coming up next. New York, in 1811, lays out this grid that extends
almost all of the island of Manhattan. All the streets were at right angles. There
was a standard plot size. All the plots were roughly the same size. The avenues
were roughly the same size. The streets were roughly the same size. It made every piece
of real estate more tradable, more buildable, more developable, more marketable, and it
made the real estate market very rational. Twelve avenues, a hundred
and fifty-five streets. The city was about to transform itself
into a real estate kingdom. But before it could do so, the island
of Manhattan was yet to be conquered. Nature posed a significant hurdle. The land on the isle was
very rocky, and its rolling hills were not compatible
with the desired grid pattern. And so New York set to
work on a gargantuan project, breaking up the rocks
and flattening the hills. The old farms were now a thing of the past,
and were destroyed one after the other. This is how, decade after decade, the
city crawled relentlessly further north. Manhattan was divided into
almost two thousand sections of houses, or what are now
known in New York as blocks. These, in turn, were divided into a few
dozen sections, which were very narrow and deep, each designed to accommodate
an individual house and small garden. But investors immediately
started buying several plots at a time, and the land
became a simple commodity. And what that of course leads to
is speculation, that I’m not buying the property with this notion that
I’m gonna live here forever and I’m gonna pass it on to my child
and he’s gonna pass it on to his child and it’s gonna be about the
great patrimony of the United States, none of that. It’s about I buy
this property and other people buy properties, it becomes a desirable
area and then I’m getting rid of it as fast as I can to buy more property someplace else. You create a
kind of regular system and I can just sell it off. I don’t have to like be describing every pros and
cons of this piece of property, I just sell it off to you like it’s
a car off an assembly line. Long before the Wall Street Stock Exchange,
which later made New York the financial capital of the United States, property was the driving
force behind an extraordinary type of growth. The auctioning of plots in New
York was a windfall for speculators. And so the first great
American fortunes were earned. The temple for this new passion was the
Traders’ Stock Exchange. It was located on Wall Street, but at a different
address to the one that exists today. There, all sorts of commodities
were exchanged, but land in the city of New York
was the most sought after. It was here that John Jacob Astor
began his career speculating on the property market, and earned
the first great American fortune. Before anyone else,
he realized that the city was going to see a huge
surge in its population, and he was subsequently proven right. There were a hundred
thousand inhabitants in 1810, but eight hundred
thousand fifty years later. In that time, the
price of land had, unsurprisingly, increased
by more than tenfold. Within a few decades,
the steamroller behind Manhattan’s Great Grid
had erased everything. With one exception. Broadway is really, to my mind, the grid’s saving grace. It creates these irregular angled intersections with
the north-south avenues, and these are graceful, urban oases, the only instances anywhere
in Manhattan of any irregularity. Broadway, the great
avenue of today, follows the outline of a
former Indian pathway. The city plan of 1811
should have erased it, but it provided access to a
great number of ranches, the owners of which ultimately
demanded that it be left in place. Two centuries later, it was one of
the most famous avenues in the world. Without Broadway, Madison Square and
even Times Square would not have existed. Broadway is the legacy of
a time where New York was still a little city on the
other side of the world. Before the start of the
nineteenth century, it was already heading towards the great
metropolis we know today. The East End, the eastern side of London. At the turn of the nineteenth
century, as the British Empire began to grow, products from around the
world started arriving in the East End. But London’s port was not
ready for such an influx of goods. It was simply known as the Pool of London, where
hundreds of ships would moor to load or unload their cargo. A multitude of small vessels would
continuously come and go on the Thames banks. You have to imagine this
dense congestion of craft moored in the tidal Thames,
rising and falling on the tide, and transferring their goods
to the warehouses, which still within living memory lined
most of the bank of the river. The tidal range of the Thames is
something like eight metres, so an enormous surge of water flowing
in and out of London. London would have to invest
massively to rise to the challenge. This led to the construction of
the docks, ports along the Thames that enabled ships to empty
or fill their holds much faster. Each of them specialised in a different
type of trade. It might be timber, it might be grain, it might be meat,
it might be sugar, it might be rum. And the flow of raw materials
from the empire and from world trade into the docks then
generated a huge industrial complex. And that was really
the basis of the East End. The East End was now
England’s leading port, far ahead of Liverpool, and it had more factories
and workshops than Manchester. What you had was narrow streets, lined densely with warehouses, and sometimes with overhead
passages which crossed the street and carried the goods to another set
of warehouses on the other side. You can still see that pattern. The
warehouses have been converted now into luxury dwellings, but
you can still see the physical pattern in Rotherhithe and in Wapping. A huge number of people from Ireland
and continental Europe had come and settled in the East End, which, in itself,
became England’s second largest city. Subsequently, the railway was built.
First came the train, then the underground. London was undergoing a revolution, a revolution more violent than ever before. Anybody who had any
money in the eighteen forties, fifties, sixties, eighteen
seventies even, plunged their investments into railways.
This was the way to make your fortune. And as that happened, these individual projects,
funded by individual investors, brought railways into the city, stopping at individual terminuses. And by the
eighteen fifties, there were as many as nineteen termini, dotted round the outside of London. And someone then had the
brilliant idea of joining up all these peripheral railway stations
with an underground railway. Long before electricity,
steam trains would go through tunnels which had vents
in them to let the smoke out. They were the first
underground trains ever invented. And the underground railway
solved the problem, because it enabled you to get on
to one station in the north, to get on the underground railway,
and to move round to get on to another station on the east. But the
destruction it caused was enormous. In the nineteenth century, the way you built a railway was to
get a private act of parliament that gave you the powers to drive your railway through other people’s land, to purchase
their houses and to build your stations and your goods yards. When the railways
crashed through the poorer areas of London, people
were just dispersed. People would be renting, by the week or by the
month, the home that they lived in. They wouldn’t have long-term leases, they wouldn’t have
security of tenure, they wouldn’t have ownerships. The landlords of the buildings
were quite happy to make a few pounds by throwing out their tenants and selling the
plot to the railway company, or selling a lease to the railway company, to build their railway through, and the poor people were
just totally disregarded. They were swept aside, you might say. And these people are moved, they’re
not rich enough to move far, and so they move into more slums, making them more
intense and creating worsened poor areas. Many parts of London changed dramatically in
their appearance, and there’s a famous Dore etching of the east end of London, with
railways on brick arches and very low-quality housing huddled in below, with the
steam and smoke belching out of the railway engines down into the residential property
below. This was one face of inner London. The French illustrator Gustave
Duret stayed in England on several occasions in the eighteen sixties
and drew hundreds of illustrations. Duret was one of those who
discovered, to their astonishment, the most populated city in the world,
now undergoing significant change. But London, with its mass
poverty, industrial districts and slums, was also the capital of
the most extraordinary wealth. The Prince Regent, future King George IV,
was a very flamboyant figure at the time. One of London’s most famous
streets is named after him, having been designed by
John Nash, his favorite architect. It started at the Prince Regent’s
Palace in Carlton House. It was the dividing line between the
poor and wealthy neighborhoods. The east of Regent Street were the slums. On the other side of Regent Street
was the fashionable West End. Piccadilly Circus and Regent Street. They were, and still are, some
of London’s great emblems. And so Regent Street
divided London socially, but it also created the first
really architecturally homogenous piece of architecture,
brilliantly designed, following the social fault lines of London. Very picturesque, very
elegant, very fashionable, very commercially successful, and very unusually for London,
stimulated by state action. It’s now a neighborhood
of brick buildings located in South Manhattan
overlooking the East River. Cherry Street. A place that underwent one of the
most spectacular transformations in New York during the first
half of the nineteenth century. George Washington, the first President
of the United States, had a house there, so it became one of the
most fashionable streets in the city. But in the nineteenth century,
everything changed in New York. Mass immigration, economic growth, urban explosion.
The face of Manhattan transformed. Population growth was so rapid all through this period
of time. There are some decades in the nineteenth century where we had hundreds of thousands of residents,
where the population in just one generation doubles. All these people want to
work in New York and live in New York, and there’s
a limited amount of space. Manhattan is an island,
rivers on both sides, so the only place to go is up or to squeeze
more people into every block. The people who invested in New
York City land became experts in fitting as many residents as
possible onto each one of those lots. Cherry Street had once been an
ideal place for living the sweet life, but immigrants had started settling
there in their tens of thousands, and so a new type of building emerged. The tenements. They were perfectly adapted
to Manhattan’s divided structure, and the blocks
carved out for individual houses, but not for such an influx of people. Instead of these little
houses and their gardens, the tenements filled
each plot in its entirety. Initially, a space was left at
the back of the building, but as Manhattan’s population exploded,
they spread throughout the entire block, leaving the occupants with
no light or room to breathe. You’re talking about
no bathroom facilities at all, you’re talking about
privies in the backyard, you’re talking about what we would
think of as absolute slum conditions but with the added feature that
it’s intrinsic to the architecture. Room is the right word.
These were not apartments. People, of course, had
many children. People are also taking in unrelated boarders
or lodgers to help make rent. So you might have in two small rooms, uh, uh,
fifteen people living, uh, you know, there would be a small area for cooking, and then
people are going to be sleeping in both rooms, sharing beds, uh, there might be people sleeping
on twenty-four hour cycles. You may have some people sleeping at certain times of day,
and then others sleeping at other times of day. A lot of work was also done at home,
especially in the garment industry. Textiles might be made in a
factory, but people were often sewing clothes themselves,
working as tailors in their tenements. So there’s a tremendous amount of activity. These
buildings were extremely crowded. You might have hundreds of people living in a single tenement
building, twenty feet wide by six stories tall. There were a hundred
thousand inhabitants in the 1810, but nine hundred and fifty
thousand sixty years later. More than half of them lived in a tenement. By the end of the nineteenth century,
this was the most crowded place on earth. Now, you might think that that’s hard to measure,
but we have a pretty good idea of what the population was of the other big cities in the world, and there
were more people per square mile on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City than there were
in the most crowded parts of cities in Asia or in London, which was a much bigger city at this time,
but not as crowded per square mile as New York was. The local authorities
tried to bring in legislation, but it only
imposed minor changes. At least until Jacob Rees
broke the taboo and revealed a reality that everyone until
that point had chosen to ignore. He was a Danish immigrant. He had
actually lived for a time on the Lower East Side in a tenement. He worked for
a newspaper and was a crime reporter. And he made it his mission
to try to reform the slums. Flash powder was invented in
Germany, and when Jacob Ries read about this in the newspaper, he had
an idea, proved to be a brilliant idea, and he wrote away and
sent for some flash powder. It was sent over from Germany, and he
learned to become a photographer. He got a camera and started
going out and taking pictures of places like Gotham Court,
places like Cherry Street. And he took hundreds of
photographs, and then he published a book in 1889
called how the other half lives. And there were certain themes he liked to depict, so
there’s lots of photos of children standing next to piles of garbage, or very menacing-looking young men who might be
part of a gang holding big sticks and looking very rough. Flash powder was essentially gunpowder. This was literally powder that
was ignited using a long fuse that would result in a very
bright, very loud explosion. So wherever Ries took photographs,
he had to find willing participants. So it was a very manipulative
and orchestrated operation, but it was effective. It worked.
It convinced mainstream New Yorkers, middle-class New
Yorkers, to support housing reform. How the Other Half Lives, the book
by Jacob Rees, was published in 1890. However, it would be another thirty years
before the worst tenements were destroyed. The first to go on Cherry Street
were only taken down in 1920, almost a century after their construction. Hyde Park, one of the largest and most
beautiful parks in the British capital. This is where, almost by chance,
a small revolution took place that would change the face of
London, but also that of New York. It all started when Queen Victoria, or
more precisely, her husband, Prince Albert, decided to organise a great exhibition and
design a building for that very purpose. The problem was that the
building had to be relatively cheap, it had to be constructed very quickly, and it had to be able to
be moved away at the end. Prince Albert, who is now commemorated by a memorial
located where the exhibition was held, appointed a commission that refused all proposed projects as
they were deemed too expensive or inappropriate. At least until Joseph Paxton proposed
the most ingenious solution yet. Paxton wasn’t an architect, but a gardener, and in the gardens he worked
on around the Chatsworth estate, he’d designed greenhouses
for growing tropical plants. And, of course, gardening is somewhere where you have to solve
problems with the limited materials you have around you in a relatively quick way. A lot of ingenuity is called for from gardeners, and Joseph
Paxson was probably the most ingenious gardener that has ever lived. To host a World Fair,
Paxton believed a giant greenhouse would
be the perfect solution. All the parts required for its construction
could be prepared in a factory. The building’s frame would be
cast iron, its roof would be glass. It was the first building
of this size to be open to the public and
totally prefabricated. Personnel of about two thousand men were
able to construct the Crystal Palace in a period of eight months, because of prefabrication,
because glass came in standard-sized pieces, and the components that contained
and held the glass were also manufactured in factories and brought to the site,
ready-made and ready for assembly. Even the drainage system was standardised, so that the gutters
were also part of the structure of the building. And then the columns of the buildings themselves, the supporting columns,
were actually drain pipes to take away the water from the roof. The whole thing was very
practical, very engineered. With its six million visitors, the
World Fair was a huge success, and it did not go unnoticed. New York, which already
saw itself as London’s major competitor,
refused to be outdone. It immediately chose
a location for its own exhibition, on the site of
what is now Bryant Park. Its pavilion was also
called Crystal Palace, and the discoveries made there
were very ahead of their time. It was at this exhibition that Mr. Otis
demonstrated his latest invention. He gave the order to cut the rope
holding the platform he was standing on. It stopped dead. Lifts could now be trusted. It’s danger-free, Otis yelled
to the awestruck crowd. It was the first leap
in the race to higher levels, which New York
would soon be leading. The second leap was taken three
years later, a bit further south, in a neighborhood that now no longer stands
out due to the height of its buildings. It was here that James Bogardus built his
first prefabricated cast-iron buildings. Bogardus used the same method that
was used for Crystal Palace in London, but adapted it to a building
of much smaller proportions. His first building looked like an
Italian palace from the Renaissance period, the difference being that its
façade was not sculpted out of stone. It was iron, cast in a warehouse. Bogardus designed three buildings
like this one, all in different styles. And since his invention was so
great, it was immediately copied. It led to the creation of a
whole neighbourhood filled with imitations of antique Italian
or Parisian architecture. These metallic office buildings, which weren’t yet
skyscrapers, were seven or eight stories high and they were extremely adaptable because they made it possible
to do what Corbusier referred to as free plans. In other words, a very flexible building that can be used
for storage or offices. Nowadays you can use them as artists’ workshops. They’re the first buildings on this scale using
cast iron frames that didn’t need load-bearing walls. It was four years later that one
such building, the Horwatt building, with its revolutionary architecture,
was finally introduced to the lift. Today, it has since been
modernised, but it was at this very location in 1857 that Mr Otis
installed his first vertical car. A few people would get into a car
and be transported to an upper level. They’d sit on a bench while the
elevator rose up slowly floor by floor. Those elevators are driven by steam engines
or hydraulic lifts. The technology is extremely primitive. They’re not electric
motors making them move fast up and down. Electricity, which would eventually
make it possible to equip much higher buildings with lifts, did not
arrive until the end of the century. For now, Mr Otis’s invention
was being tested on a smaller scale, and it was
still just a simple curiosity. In 1870, Manhattan was still a
city made up of small buildings, a fairly horizontal city,
a city in the making. That year, the summer was stifling, and the stagnant water in the Thames
became a swamp with an unbearable stench. It was a period called the Great Stink. The city’s population had just
reached beyond three million inhabitants. There was no sewage system. Pollution was a huge problem. London was the first to tackle it. Members of the House of Commons who
had meetings by the Thames could no longer work. Some meeting rooms were inaccessible
because the stench was so unbearable. They doused curtains in chlorine and hung them
in Parliament windows to try to alleviate the bad smells, but also to disinfect them as it was
still believed that bad smells carried disease. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Disraeli, was
forced to leave a meeting room with a handkerchief to his nose, practically gagging because he
could no longer bear to stay in the room. The press were delighted and they wrote,
finally, our leaders will do something, they’ll finally understand how our people have suffered
for a dozen or so years next to this cesspit. A few weeks later,
Parliament voted in favor of building a wastewater
collection network. But it dumped it into the Thames, only
a few kilometres upstream of London. And this is where, in 1878, the
Princess Alice crash occurred. A cruise ship going up
the river, with eight hundred people aboard, collided
with a collier twice its size. Six hundred people died. Many passengers fell in the water, and it was so polluted that
most of them were poisoned. And that’s not all. Three years earlier, in
1873, the city had experienced a period of particularly
deadly air pollution. It was smog, a combination of fog, mist and smoke
from factories and coal fires in houses. Eight hundred people
died in a matter of days. Witness accounts describe it
as a multi-sensory experience. Of course, like any fog, it affected
sounds. And more so than other fogs, it blocked people’s vision. You
couldn’t see a meter in front of you. It also affected people’s
sense of taste and smell. It had a slightly acrid taste to it, a
smell that some described as rotten egg, or at least left an aftertaste in their
mouth, that’s for sure, and it was sticky. It’s believed that the Victorians often wore black
because they had to protect their clothes, one way or another, because it was impossible to keep your
clothes white or clean for long if you lived in London. The fog caused great chaos outside, but
it also made its way into people’s houses. In 1832, the wife of the Russian ambassador
organised a huge ball and she recounted that in the room the ball was held in, where people
were dancing and spinning, it was like they were up in the clouds, simply because you
could no longer see people at the other end of the room, because they were engulfed in mist,
in the smoke that had worked its way in. The fog also produced many interesting
lighting effects, and as such it intrigued and interested some of the
top Impressionists, including Monet. Particularly towards the end of the
nineteenth century, between 1899 and 1901, he made three trips to London specifically
to paint these lighting effects. There are also amusing letters he wrote to his wife
in which he complains. He complains that there isn’t any fog, especially on Sundays. He complains when
there’s too much fog because he can’t see anything. But that’s what made Monet’s
job so exciting, because that’s what he wanted, to paint the moment,
to paint an instant of a particular light, a particular play on
colours, but at the same time that kind of instant is sometimes so
fleeting that it’s hard to capture. The London fog was very
quickly linked to criminality issues. Tourist guides recommended that people
travelling to London take great care, because London was a city of crime, particularly
at nightfall, when the fog began to rise. It’s particularly true of the poorest and
most dangerous part of London, which was the East End. That’s where after 1888, the
famous Jack the Ripper murders took place. This was in Whitechapel, not far from
the Thames, where there was a natural mist anyway, but when the fog intensified,
it meant that the murders multiplied too. December, 1952. The worst episode of air
pollution in the history of London. A four-day smog, which
claimed over ten thousand lives. Parliament finally decided to legislate.
Coal-fuelled heating was banned. London was finally taking
measures against the smog, a century after the first
deadly ones had arisen. The first skyscraper
in New York was neither a housing
block nor an office block. It was a bridge. A bridge whose pylons reached
over a hundred metres high. For the first time, Brooklyn
Bridge established a link between Manhattan
and the rest of the world. But for New York, it
meant much more than that. Before that, New York
had no skyline. It was a city without grandeur,
nor height, nor viewpoints. But gradually, as the
bridge took shape, New Yorkers found themselves
in a new dimension. If you lived in New York City, you watched day by day as this stone structure was being
built in the middle of the river, and it got bigger and bigger and bigger, and soon it was
bigger than the tallest buildings in either city,
and then it kept going. So it became this oversized structure. It seemed to dwarf the
cities that it was connecting. Bridge building was
not a science at the time. Engineering was not the
science that we think of it now. It was very imprecise.
It was an obscure art. There were people that said, I know how to build bridges,
and everybody else would say, okay, well, I see you built one, and it stands, so you maybe know what you’re
doing. But nobody really understood how they worked. New York was a city of
engineers, and John Roebling was one of its first
great representatives. Born in Germany, he graduated
from engineering school in Berlin. His passion was suspension bridges. His idea was steel cables. You take slender threads of
steel and you twist them into a rope. That’s what Roebling, the designer of the Brooklyn
Bridge does and that’s his first contribution is not the bridge itself but this notion of a
cable of twisted steel that’s able to support unimaginable amounts of waste. And then you turn to the Gothic past and you
build these masonry towers without internal steel that incorporate the voids of these
towers, incorporate not the solid part but the absence of building is carved into
pointed Gothic archways that look literally like a cathedral and you are doing nothing
more than building a conduit of traffic. It would have been his life’s
masterpiece, however, John Roebling died of his injuries following an accident
shortly after construction began. It was his son, Washington
Roebling, who took over the project. But Brooklyn Bridge would
eventually shatter his fate, too. In order to lay the pylons,
the Roeblings decided to use a brand-new invention, which
had been tested in France. It was called a casson. The idea was to sink a huge stone
tower into the river, then blow compressed air into a box, which would provide a
space where workers could then dig. But there, the pressure
was much higher than at the surface, and a fast
ascent could be fatal. Many workers lost their
lives to the project, and even Washington Roebling
himself emerged paralysed. His wife Emily took over
the project. She was the first person to cross the
bridge on the day it opened. New York had pushed back its borders. The city’s population
was at nine hundred and forty thousand in
the eighteen seventies. By nineteen hundred, it
was three point four million. This is how it became the
first American megalopolis. London, the biggest city in the world,
was now within its grasp. Four hundred years ago, a village by the name
of Amsterdam began its mission to conquer the world, invented capitalism as we know it, and
became the richest city on the European continent. There was this sense among
the Dutch that whoever you were, you could have a piece of the action.
You could be involved in this great economic activity of your society. A hundred years later, London,
its main rival, took its place. The greatest trading power in the world,
London endured terrific hardships, but went on to become
the world’s largest city and invented the megalopolis
of tomorrow’s world. When the railways crashed
through the poorer areas of London, people were just dispersed.
They were swept aside, you might say. Meanwhile, New Amsterdam had now become New York. It was under British rule. The city cut itself free
and entered the fray. At the outposts of technical
revolution, New York became the vertical city and created a
whole new horizon for itself. You watched day by
day as this stone structure was being built in
the middle of the river and it got bigger and bigger and bigger. The term skyscraper is interesting because
it refers to the urban landscape of New York,
the city where the notion of urban silhouette, of
skyline, was invented. The urban landscape of
New York was made up of the church bell towers
and the masts of the ships. At the top of the ships was a small
triangular sail, the highest of the ship, which we called the skyscraper. It
was the sail that was closest to the sky. The City Hall was where New
York’s skyscraper saga first began. At the end of the nineteenth
century, three major newspapers set up their
headquarters on either side. The competition between them was fierce. The winner would be the
one that went the highest. 1876, the New York Tribune
with its eleven stories was the tallest building in the
world upon its construction. 1889, the Times Building
to the right was immediately overtaken by the New York
World Building and its golden dome. The former was fifteen stories high. The latter had nineteen stories. While its two neighbors were
built out of brick, it was the first building in New York to have a
skeleton made entirely out of steel. With cast iron, we could go up to about fifteen, maybe
eighteen floors. With the steel, there is no more limit. There is no more limit. The only limit was the builder’s funds,
since the elevators can be repeated and can go up to the sky. Fifteen years later, in the same
square home to the City Hall, the Woolworth Building went a step further. Two hundred and forty-one
meters, fifty-seven stories. It was Manhattan’s first
emblematic skyscraper. Not only because it
was the highest tower in the city, and would
remain so for sixteen years, but because its style and outline
stood out from all those around it. This time, the building
wasn’t owned by a newspaper, but by one of the
richest men of that time. Frank Woolworth was the owner of a chain
of single-price shops named after himself. Everything was sold for
five, ten, or fifteen cents. And in America at the
start of the twentieth century, that was
a winning formula. According to Frank Woolworth,
the skyscraper’s construction was paid for by the little pieces of
change accumulated in his shops. In so doing, upon its construction,
the Woolworth Building acted as a fantastic publicity stunt for Frank
Woolworth himself and his company. But Woolworth and his architect, Cass
Gilbert, had another stroke of genius. An homage to Gothic architecture. To European cathedrals. How is this upstart nation, how is this upstart
city going to take its place on the international stage? Well, it’s going to do it by looking to the
European past, looking to the masters, looking to the cathedrals, looking to the great works of monumental
architecture. So when the Woolworth building is completed in the early twentieth century, and it’s the
tallest building in the world, it’s a Gothic cathedral. When you walk into the Woolworth
building, you’re aware of walking into a kind of cathedral-like portal,
which is quite monumental, and then into a lobby that makes
you feel like you’re in a magnificent church. But it’s rather scaled down.
It’s scaled to the human experience. And the lobby, interestingly
enough, has a cruciform shape to it. Suddenly you’re in a church,
and you recognize that you’re in a church, standing in the nave. I
mean, you get it, with the transept. It comes across, okay. Then
you look at some of the decorative features, and you see
things that look gargoyle-like. But when you look at it closely,
you realize that that’s not a griffin or something, that’s a
person. Okay, who’s the person? It’s Woolworth. And what’s he doing? He’s counting nickels and dimes. You look at another one of
these gargoyle-like things, you see that it’s the architect.
He’s memorialized himself. And what’s he holding? He’s holding the building. The period in which the
Woolworth Building was built was met with large waves of
immigration into the United States. And therefore, the arrival of dozens
of thousands of European craftspeople. They were the ones who created the mosaics
and decorations in the entrance hall. Here, it is the divinity of
work being worshipped. And it’s the goddess of trade welcoming
a visitor as they enter the skyscraper. The Woolworth Building
was just like a church. But it was a church of the new world. It’s not about the power of the king. It’s not about reaching
up to the heavens for God. It’s not about contemplation. It’s about rentable space, where people are doing really
ordinary, boring jobs. And yet, it’s a cathedral of commerce. I mean, that is the quintessential New
York idea, a cathedral of commerce. Like, it’s an oxymoron. And yet, in the hands of
a talented architect like Cass Gilbert, the Woolworth building becomes absolutely seared
in your brain as a memorable work of art. By the time the
Woolworth Building opened its doors on the eve
of the First World War, New York had found its new dimension. Skyscrapers began sprouting up across
Manhattan, giving birth to a new concept. The skyline. The urban silhouette. This landscape soon
spread around the world. It was a demonstration of
the city’s newfound power and its global ambitions. Never in human history had
an empire spread so widely. London dominated vast
territories across four different continents, thus becoming the
empire on which the sun never sleeps. The West End, the neighborhood
of aristocracy and the upper middle classes,
began expanding significantly. But here, the latest
additions were not external. These London terrace houses
had stayed more or less the same since their initial construction
in the eighteenth century. But now their interiors
were beginning to change. The growth of the terraced house in London
coincides with the growth of consumption, of individual families buying things. If you go back into the sort of
seventeenth century, people didn’t have many things in their houses because
there weren’t many things to buy. But by the Victorian period, the whole notion
of shopping and buying furniture, decorative items for your house, had exploded. The range of
things you could get were absolutely enormous. this was the first age in
which a relatively average person could afford to live in
a house that was decorated, that contained apparent
carvings and high-quality finishes, because these were
able to be mass-produced. Colors were being invented
through the invention of new dyes, and so these places
became much more colorful. And we were moving from a
monochrome society, for all bar the very richest, through
into something where you had very ornate, very colorful
interiors in buildings. And these little
terraced houses, as a result, are unique
because from the outside, they’re very anonymous, like an English person. No giving away of their character. At the moment you go inside, they were richly
and individually furnished, based on this extraordinary explosion of shopping and consumption
that gripped London in the nineteenth century. Such prosperity attracted growing interest. And the population
of London tripled between eighteen-fifty
and nineteen-hundred, reaching six million inhabitants
by the turn of the twentieth century. The richest city in the world
was also rife with inequalities. The poorest people were
concentrated to pockets of poverty. No part of the city was spared. It was a time of revolution. It was in London that Karl
Marx wrote Das Kapital. In eighteen-eighty-six, the
West End riots broke out. For three days, the violence spread
through to the posh neighborhoods. It was at this point that a man named
Charles Booth began his great project. To avoid future overcrowding,
he thought it would be worth better understanding
the population of London. You have to imagine a typical Victorian
businessman, an immensely successful ship owner, came from Liverpool, came from Britain’s second largest port in Liverpool. He used statistical analysis
of trade flows, of inventories, of prices, and it was through his ability with
applied statistics that he made his fortune and built the Booth shipping line into
the very successful company that it was. In the eighteen-eighties,
Booth moved to London. This time, he’d use his
mathematical skills to study the quality of life
of the city’s inhabitants. It was a huge undertaking, which
he funded with his personal fortune. His teams of investigators
went out with policemen. The police were constantly patrolling
the streets of London. There was no street which they didn’t patrol, and there would be an investigator
taking notes house by house of the condition of the property and the condition of the residents. Then, in the back room, these
data were tabulated and mapped, mapped cartographically in these celebrated images of London,
colored in seven different grades of color, to give you the social geography
of wealth and poverty in London. Booth’s study, published
in nineteen-o-two, is like a snapshot of a
huge metropolis in turmoil. Yellow for the wealthy. Red for those living comfortably. Orange for mixed neighborhoods. Light blue for
neighborhoods whose inhabitants, albeit poor,
had regular income. Dark blue for areas where
people were in chronic want. And black for those Charles Booth
deemed to be vicious and semi-criminal. Yes, it’s true, there was a broad gradient between the
east of London, London east of the Tower, and the west end of London, but as soon as you look at
the maps, you understand that the social geography is
much, much more complex. There were concentrations of deep poverty, very, very close to the beautifully manicured
lawns of the Bedford estate, and equally in the east end of London,
there were respectable middle-class families living in the middle of what was
caricatured as the jungle of the east end. In his book, Charles Booth
invented the concept of a poverty threshold, below which, he wrote,
a third of Londoners were living. Ten percent of the population of London, he
added, had no chance of escaping this fate. Central Park had been finished, but around
it, almost nothing else had yet been built. No houses, and certainly no buildings. This neighborhood, now
one of the most luxurious in Manhattan, was little
more than abandoned lots. So this is where the
American economy’s new millionaires were able
to build their little castles, which were called the mansions. For about thirty years,
this part of the city became a playground for
all kinds of eccentricities. There were no more than a
dozen or so of these incredibly large mansions, but certainly there were
probably fifty to seventy-five very substantial large houses, mainly
on Fifth Avenue, as well as on Park Avenue, and then several hundred
more smaller, still substantial, houses. And so New Yorkers nicknamed
Fifth Avenue Millionaire’s Row. The new residents
were men from industries such as railways, steel,
coal, oil, or finance. John Rockefeller, who would
soon be the richest man in the world. He brought a pre-built house, located
a stone’s throw from Central Park. The interior evoked all styles,
all eras, and all continents. Andrew Carnegie, the Prince of Steel. He built his own mansion on
a plot spreading half a hectare, which was a considerable
plot size for Manhattan. His house is one of the
only ones to have survived, alongside that of his business
partner, the coal baron, Henry Clay Frick. It was tremendously expensive. Frick spent the
equivalent of about two-point-eight million dollars to buy all of the lots, and this is a time when
there’s not a whole lot of other building on Upper Fifth Avenue yet, and then he spent even
more, the equivalent of about three million dollars, to construct this monstrously large palace to
live in and then to display his collection of art. It survived precisely because he designed the
house to also serve as a museum after his death, and he made sure to leave enough money along
with his collection to ensure its survival. Henry Frick’s mansion is an exception. Because as soon as the
First World War was over, these little palaces belonging
to America’s wealthiest individuals started to
disappear one after the other. In their place, they built much
taller buildings, which were incredibly luxurious, but much
more profitable and glamorous. The first to be completed
was the famous Dakota. These were palaces in the sky.
You’d have a building of twelve or fifteen stories that might only
have eight or ten families living in it. The apartments were usually
arranged on multiple stories, what in New York is called a duplex format, so
you’d have an interior staircase within the apartment that sort of replicated
the feel of living in a multi-story house. In some cases, you might
even get a three-story apartment. A developer would offer a huge
sum of money to owners of a mansion, which they’d eventually sell, thus
giving way to one of these huge buildings. But most of the time, the
owners made extra demands. And some demands bent all the rules. There was a woman named Marjorie Hutton. She was the
heiress from a breakfast cereal company from the Midwest, and she was married to an investment banker. They had
built a mansion for themselves on Fifth Avenue, and one day a developer came along and said, we’d like to buy
your house and to put up a new building, and she agreed on one condition, and the condition was that she be given
a custom-built apartment at the top of the new building, and she was given an apartment
that didn’t precisely replicate the architecture of her house,
but to a certain degree did. She had custom furnishings,
rugs, woodwork, other things that were replicated
in the new apartment. In addition, she was given her
own separate porte cochere with her own private corridor that
connected to her own private elevator that took her straight up to
the top of the building where she enjoyed three entire floors to
herself in thirty thousand square feet. The largest apartment,
to my knowledge, that has ever been built in New
York City, perhaps anywhere. Marjorie Hutton’s
apartment had fifty-four rooms, and no less than
seventeen bathrooms. A record that’s never
been beaten in New York. Even though several
years later, another apartment outdid it
through sheer extravagance. Built in the new, very chic
Upper West Side neighborhood, it was owned by a man
named William Randolph Hearst. He owned the leading media
group in the United States, and he was a very original
character, to say the least. She had a three-story, triple-height living
room that was decorated like a Gothic church with imported elements from
Europe, and then each room was decorated according to a different theme, again,
using imported architectural elements, so a French bedroom and, you know, an
Italian study, this, that, and the other. At that time, the American economy
appeared to have no bounds, and the First World War had accelerated
the United States’ rising power. This neighborhood was the fruit of
years of recklessness and excess, which was abruptly put to an end
by the Wall Street crash in 1929. Letchworth, fifty-odd kilometers
to the north of the British capital. While New York was
revolutionizing architecture, London was inventing the
urban structure of the future. Letchworth is now a cute little suburb
of around thirty-five thousand inhabitants. But it was the result of a radical project. A project dreamt up by a
man who saw the solution to the city’s complex
problems in nature. His name was Ebenezer Howard. He saw the problem of poverty as a
by-product of the city and of density. He wasn’t interested in
sort of social explanations or economic explanations.
It was the city itself that created social struggle and discontent and unhappiness. And nature, the countryside,
a better balance between peace of the countryside, the tranquillity of
nature, and the economic opportunity of the town, could be achieved if you rebuilt the town in
nature. This was his big idea, the Garden City. This developed into what we
call the Arts and Crafts Movement. The Arts and Crafts
Movement looked to vernacular cottages of
the English countryside. The half-timbered frontages,
the long roofs with their eaves, the gable ends, the open-plan
interiors with the Ingle Nook fireplaces. Wonderful, wonderful arts and crafts
echoes of medieval building style. This represented a return from the world of industrial
production to the world of handicraft, to the imagined equilibrium or utopia of a medieval society in which work would be local, people would make with their own hands. The Garden City was built on former
farming land, which by its very nature was worth practically nothing, but
was enhanced by the new settlers. At the center, they
established administrative buildings, public
services, and businesses. Around these, they
built the residential areas. Then the industrial areas. Then the farming built. Everything was accessible via
a star-shaped network of roads. But Howard saw beyond this, and believed that
the benefits derived from each Garden City would be invested in creating new small towns dotted
around London that worked on the same basis. The Garden City would have therefore
offered a counter-model to the megalopolis. Ultimately, this approach only worked once. But Howard’s invention immediately
caught people’s imagination, and acted as a basis to
create from scratch a city. So this was workers’ housing
of a very, very different sort, with a garden at the
front, a garden at the back, a street verge
planted with cherry trees, allotment workers’ gardens for
growing their own food, set in a small town surrounded by an agricultural
belt producing fresh food for the town, owned by the municipality,
owned by the people themselves. At the time, most residents in
Letchworth worked within the Garden City. Many of them were employed
at the Spirella factory, the biggest one in
Letchworth, which was set up inside a very innovatively
designed building. Here, most of the workers were women. They manufactured what was very sexy
underwear for the early twentieth century. Spirella saw itself as a model business, and its employees received far superior
perks to the average British worker. On the top floor of the factory,
they had their very own space. There, they’d engage
in all sorts of activities, gymnastics, gatherings of all
kinds, concerts, and dancing. Obviously, like all colonies,
they had to attract colonists, and the colonists that they
attracted tended to be progressives, they tended to be people who, like Ebenezer
Howard, believed in social experiment. So it’s in Letchworth Garden City that we see the first
extensive experiments in wearing sandals, in dress
reform, in vegetarianism, in sleeping out of doors at night. People had bedrooms with
overhead gantries in which their bed could be swung out so they
could breathe the fresh oxygen. Straight away, the Letchworth
phenomenon, a new city surrounded by nature, started gaining
interest beyond England’s borders. Paris, Brussels, Berlin,
and even Tokyo each, in turn, tried to develop
their own Garden Cities. London, the first metropolis in
history, had just invented its antidote. In the decades that
followed, Ebenezer Howard would help transform
cities around the world. By the early 1910s, and there really
was a new scale for the skyscraper, not just in terms of height, but
also in the lot coverage and the girth and the blockiness of buildings
that contained an enormous amount of floor space. And the best example
of that is the Equitable building. A hundred and sixty-four meters, forty-four stories. Nowadays, the Equitable
Building is much like dozens of other office
buildings in Manhattan. However, New York partially owes the
way it looks today to this very building. What is remarkable in the case of the Equitable
building, whose plan has the shape of an H, is the density and speed of the elevators. It is a gigantic
machine that makes people circulate vertically. Forty-eight lifts, for fifty thousand employees. That, now in Manhattan, is quite ordinary. But when it opened in 1915,
it was rather revolutionary. The Equitable’s neighboring
buildings were considerably smaller, and in the narrow roads in South Manhattan,
its arrival was not well received. Depending on the time of the day,
almost a four-block area of lower rise and older buildings had been cast
into the shadow of this titanic structure, stealing their light,
stealing the value of the sunlight that was used
to illuminate the space. Lights at that time, the
bulbs of lights, burned very hot. And they didn’t really
give off very much light. So light was a heat generator. Windows had to open
in order to ventilate the space. So buildings were much more dependent on natural sunlight and the
wind in order to create a habitable workspace. Manhattan, therefore,
had to find a way of building higher without upsetting
neighboring buildings. And it was George Burdett
Ford who found the solution. His idea was city planning
regulations, which were adopted in 1916. And
these were his instructions. First of all, vertically, you
could build the equivalent of the width of the street or
avenue bordering the building. Then, you draw a straight
line from the middle of the road. That way, you get a base structure
which you can build on, but with setbacks. Depending on the
neighborhood, residential or commercial, the main facade
would sit at various heights. And one last feature was
that on twenty-five percent of the plot, you could
build as high as you wanted. This was the recipe behind
the Empire State Building, and hundreds of other
skyscrapers in Manhattan. And although this is purely a
sort of technical formula that’s about preserving light and
air, one of the interesting things is very quickly it helps give
shape to a whole new style of architecture in the city, a kind
of ziggurat style of architecture. Those kinds of recessive mountain or cliff-like
projections give this very distinctive New York look, the zigzag that really kind of has a jazz-age
quality, because the way that light and shadow begin to develop in those right-angled spaces
get a kind of frenetic energy that you see when you see it in black-and-white photography and
when you see it in shade and shadow in the city. Many of Manhattan’s most famous buildings
were the result of the 1916 regulation. They all seem to be part of the same
family, and yet they’re all different. A hundred-and-twenty Wall
Street, with its stair-like shape. The New York Telephone Building
and its unorganized silhouette. The American Radiator
Building and its step-back roof. Or even the Chrysler Building
and its rocket-shaped roof. These were all built within the
space of around fifteen years. Meanwhile, America was
undergoing a period of huge economic growth in the
wake of the First World War. Dozens of buildings were now
transforming Manhattan’s urban skyline, thus making it instantly
distinguishable from others. In the the rise of the stock market
and the rise of the skyscraper were companions. In fact, you might think of
the graph of the rising stock market much like the rising profile of New York’s
skyline with peaks and then valleys during times of recession, because
skyscrapers are always connected to markets. With the exception of the Woolworth
Building, the number and height of skyscrapers in New York is well
married to the growth of Wall Street. But with a slight delay. While the stock market was crashing in autumn
1929, the Chrysler Building was already under construction, and work was just about
to begin on the Empire State Building. It was the apotheosis of
this era of great skyscrapers. Eighty-five stories, the tallest,
the biggest, and the fastest. The technology of its construction was really
not exceptional. The steel skeleton had been used now for almost twenty years. It has a kind of kit
of parts of steel beams and columns that are held together by rivets that workers in teams of five
constructed with an enormous amount of effort and heroism when you see the photographs of the steel
workers and, indeed, all of the workers on the site. But what was really extraordinary about the Empire
State Building was, first, its scale and then its speed of construction. And really, the genius of the Empire
State Building was the construction management. A skyscraper’s time is money.
You borrow money in order to construct the building. So
the shortest amount of time you have that money borrowed
and the quicker that you turn it into rentable space, the more
profitable the building will be. And the Empire
State Building was built much faster than any
skyscraper of its time. One story per day, on average,
through the summer of 1930. The Empire State’s construction
took little more than a year. But when it opened, only a
quarter of its offices had tenants. The king of buildings had
arrived at the wrong time. It would only become
profitable twenty years later, long after the
Second World War. The Blitz. The intensive bombing of
London by the German Air Force. From September the seventh,
1940, every night was a living hell. London was an unmissable
target for the Luftwaffe. It was a target twelve miles across. It is still, you must remember, the largest city in the
world. It was bigger than Calcutta at the
time. It was a vast target. Since 1900, London had doubled in size. With its eight million inhabitants,
it was a low-density megalopolis. That was its great strength
in this horrific ordeal. The intense period of the
Blitz lasted for a relatively short time, between
September 1940 and May 1941. In that period, there was
bombing every night. One hundred and sixty bombers
on average coming over. The worst night, there was five hundred
and eighty tons of high explosives dropped. Quarter of a million people were made
homeless. Their homes just disappeared. The psychological effect was enormous. The sirens sounded everywhere, the entire
population went down into the shelters. But in fact, in this low-density
city of eight million people, the impact of bombing was fairly localised. So we can see areas of very, very
dense bomb damage, side by side with large areas of London where
everyday life carried on as normal. In the first few weeks, London’s
docks in its industrial districts as well as the city, its financial
core, were targeted as a priority. But over time, the megalopolis
was affected as a whole. The Blitz killed thirty-thousand people. It changed the face of
Britain’s capital forever. What is, I think, so
important about the history of London has been its ability
to renew itself physically. And when we look at the
Blitz, we are simply looking at a reprise of what happened
when the railways came, what happened when the Great Fire came. It was an opportunity to start again, to revitalise the commercial, economic,
financial infrastructure of the city. At the end of the war, the
city was but a shadow of its former self. It had to
write itself a new story. It’s well known what happened next. The city caught a second wind when Margaret
Thatcher deregulated the financial markets. This decision greatly
boosted not only activity, but also the planning
of the old city of London. The original core around
which the English capital had begun expanding in
the seventeenth century. The medieval city, which had become
an increasingly specialised business hub, is where the metamorphosis
was accomplished. I became the City Planning Officer
in the year of the Government, as the Government was announcing
the deregulation of financial services. This meant that the City of London
was going to be opened up to competition, and that banks from all over the world
were going to be able to trade in London. Now we needed to incorporate
computer-operated trading on large dealing floors in
each of the Bank’s buildings. That required a very
different type of building. And therefore a decision was taken
that the City would have to go tall, would have to build skyscrapers. The City needed to go vertically because
it could no longer build on any other way. The influx of financial markets
was now growing beyond the city’s limits, so London’s old docks
began changing in appearance. The disused docks were
converted into a business hub. They were the pride of London
in the nineteenth century. Abandoned after the Second World
War, they’d now found a new use. But the very concept of
skyscrapers actually reached beyond the city of London’s
borders for the first time too. The Shard, two hundred
and forty-one meters high, contains offices, but
also luxury apartments. It’s a new urban trend,
one that started in New York, where it’s currently
changing the city. Of course, since the nineteen-thirties
and its symbolic buildings, hundreds of glass buildings
have been built in Manhattan. But none of them have led us to forget
the great starts of its urban skyline. They will always remain
iconic New York buildings. Objects that form an
integral part of its identity. In the future, however, there
may be serious challenges. A whole new kind of skyscraper. They’re called the Supertalls. Four hundred and twenty-five
metres, eighty-eight storeys high. This one is currently the
tallest skyscraper in New York. And it’s a luxury residential tower. The Supertalls are curious
yet exquisite objects, whose origin dates back over a
century ago, to when Cornelius Vanderbilt, the American railway king, decided
to build the Grand Central Terminal, the terminus for his railway lines. Grand Central is, above
all, a great architectural feat. But here, the real novelty
isn’t the main concourse. It’s the underground
platforms and their use, which one of the original
engineers came up with. The engineer William Wilgus, who is the great
operator of the Grand Central construction site, had this brilliant idea to build on the void,
that is to say, to create a new district above the railway tracks, simply because the foundations
of the buildings are made through the tracks. The ground is reached through the tracks, thus allowing
the buildings to stand on an artificial ground. So, the promoters who build the
buildings do not buy a piece of land They buy a volume of air, the possibility of building
on a volume of air by placing these foundations at a
lower level through the tracks. All the big cities in the
world now use this method. However, in New York, the concept of
air rights developed into something else. Take the famous St. Patrick
Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, for example. Since it had no intention
of giving way to a skyscraper, it sold a property
developer its air rights. In other words, the space
above it, which it owned. In exchange for said airspace,
it received a small fortune. The same principle
applies to all buildings that fall beneath the authorised
limit in their district. They can decide not to
build on the extra space they’re entitled to build
in and sell it to a promoter, who can build above the
authorised limit elsewhere. When you sell the air rights, you’re
selling that unbuilt space to a new developer who then is able to go to
the city and say, I bought twenty stories. And literally, the developer
then gets to add that volume to the volume that he is already able
to build. So if he’s able to build a thirty or forty-story building
and he buys twenty stories from surrounding properties, he’s now
able to legally build sixty stories. This concept has now been
applied to much bigger skyscrapers. There are customers
keen for this new type of tower, and technology
has made huge progress. Engineering today enables you to build incredibly
tall on a very small plot of land, so you can buy a plot of land that’s seventy-five feet by a
hundred feet and build a tremendously tall building. There’s really no limit. You
could go half a mile high. The first super-tall
tower was designed by Christian de Pontsant-Parc,
a French architect. His apartments are the most
expensive ever to be sold in Manhattan. Views have value. And this is the trophy of the New York
apartment, to walk out of the elevator into a domain that belongs to you and you alone, to see this commanding view
of the horizon stretching in all dimensions. There is no greater expression of power and possession than a view of
Central Park, an exclusive, singular place, even though the singularity of it is repeated at times in the sky until
you get to the penthouse with all the floors underneath. One Fifty-Seven is reported at just over A hundred
million dollars. There are others that have sold for Eighty-Seven million dollars, Ninety
million dollars, almost inconceivable amounts. These new buildings will
remain a simple curiosity unless they’re multiplied
in years to come, revolutionising New York’s urban skyline. A once fairly uniform landscape is giving
way to an irregular and chaotic horizon, as an expression of the new financial
world behind skyscrapers in Manhattan. Some of that market demand comes
from people who have generated enormous fortunes in countries
that have uncertain futures. So you have people with a lot of money from
Russia and the Middle East and Asian economies where there are
some very, very wealthy people so they want to invest in New York City
real estate and they’re essentially just using those buildings
as a place to park their money. In New York, an era is coming to an end. Soon, the kings of Manhattan
will no longer be office buildings, but residential skyscrapers, whose
apartments are often second homes. Fortunes from around the
world will dominate the skyline. It’s a strange reverse
situation for this city, whose main aim has always
been to conquer the world.