The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part II: Filtering Tactics
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Lynne Walker
FAMILIAR GROUND
As one retraces the sites and spaces of Victorian London, new meanings can
be read from familiar buildings and greater texture can be given to a new social
mapping of the city. At the British Museum, for example, women readers
were a feature of both the old library and of the domed Reading Room
that opened in 1857. 37 Many were involved in systematic programs of selfeducation
or in professional research and writing; among them were Eleanor
Marx, who lived near the museum, and Clementina Black, who campaigned
for equal pay and improved living conditions for working women and who
supported herself through her research and writing at the museum, while
sharing a bedsit with her sister across Tottenham Court Road on Fitzroy
Street. 38 Two rows of ladies-only seating were provided in the Reading
Room until 1907, but they were treated as unnecessary and generally were
unoccupied. 39 In the museum itself, the expertise and authority of women
guides were accepted by visitors, who were taken around the exhibits by
peripatetic women lecturers. 40
SPACE FOR WOMEN
The buildings and places, both public and private, that were the arena of
women’s groups and networks and the sites and spaces of lived female identities
in London constitute a different mapping of the city. However, drawing
out a single narrative strand from the larger urban fabric is problematic;
it highlights women’s presence and achievement and perhaps thereby blunts
the critique of sexual difference, which accounts for their absence. Certainly,
the focus on one group of women (i.e., those associated with the women’s
movement) does eradicate, if only temporarily, the representation of the experience
of other numerous and diverse urban women, also users and producers
of the spaces of the West End. There were working-class women,
many of whom lived and toiled in their thousands as servants in the great
houses of the West End; street sellers and entertainers; barmaids and female
drinkers; prostitutes and performers; middle-class proprietors of shops—
more than forty women shopowners were listed in Regent Street alone in
1891; 41 lower-middle-class and working-class shop assistants in the burgeoning
department stores of Oxford Street and Regent Street; many kinds
of students and lesson takers and teachers; and thousands of visiting consumers,
both foreign and domestic. 42 Sheer numbers, or at least critical
mass, were important to women’s identity and experience of the city, and
to their impact on spatial definitions and material culture; but in latenineteenth-century
London, class divisions remained as strong as gender
bonds.