In 1927, Virginia Woolf described the distinctive pleasures of an evening's walk through the streets of London. Through its happenstance encounters, the urban street allows her to escape the claustrophobia of her own head and home, briefly intruding into the lives and quarrels of strangers as they spill out into public view, but then withdrawing into the self again when nightfall forces her home. In “Street Haunting,” an urban walk is a balancing act between a dreadful solitude and the overwhelming companionship of city life. In The Streets of Europe, Brian Ladd's ambitious project is to construct a history of the street as it became the built frame for this dance between the ways we wish to be with strangers and the ways we wish to avoid them. He encourages us to see Woolf's evening walk as specific to her well-heeled twentieth-century domesticity but also as part of a longer history of the street as a space for both seeking and recoiling from human contact.
As Ladd tells it, this is a rich and fascinating history. His primary sources, focused on London, Paris, Vienna, and Berlin, are largely those of city observers, rather than planners or decision-makers. Together, their voices give the text the feeling of a long and meandering urban walk: the reader is invited to take in the sights, sounds, and smells of the city, with Ladd as a capable guide. This tour covers most of the major changes of the modern city and its built landscape but from the fresh perspective of a pedestrian, making it an excellent choice for an undergraduate course on urban history.
The Streets of Europe functions as a companion volume, or prequel, to Ladd's previous book Autophobia: Love and Hate in the Automotive Age (2008), which told the story of Europe's urban streets before the arrival of automobiles. For all his evident affection for the lively history of the street, Ladd eschews simplistic romanticization of this past. He argues that our present-day desire to recover the vibrancy of the pre-automotive street ignores the complex forces that changed streets in both function and form. We can perhaps take away the cars, but we cannot turn back the clock on the changed sensibilities that motivated the transformation of the street from public space to corridor for accelerating traffic in the first place—a process that began long before the automotive age, as this book details.
The book has six chapters. The first offers an overview of the history of the street in the European city and the development of its characteristic built form enclosed by a consistent façade. Ladd begins his account with the definition of rue offered by Antoine Furetière's 1690 dictionary as the “space between houses that provides passage for the public” (14). He identifies in this brief definition the conflict that drives his narrative: streets can be both spaces to be in—for gathering, selling, and laboring—and passageways to move through. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that are his chronological focus the needs of movement increasingly displaced all other functions of the street.
The subsequent five chapters are organized thematically. Chapters two and three deal with those interactions that used to be primary functions of street space—economic exchange and social connection. At the beginning of Ladd's chosen period, street hawkers sold everything from pickles to live animals to mounds of peat, and even bankers and doctors conducted their trades in the street. Wherever urbanites used street space for diverse purposes, they also encountered diverse others, generating constant opportunities for “social friction” (109) and attempts to regulate unsettling confrontations between classes and genders. A process that began as separating out zones for shoppers and traffic for control and convenience—widening streets, raising sidewalks, and designating spaces for market stalls—ended with the withdrawal of most shopping from the street behind enclosed storefronts.
Chapter four examines the most celebrated transformation of the street: the removal of its filth. This chapter includes some familiar stories, like the introduction of sewers, but also some less familiar ones, like the evolution of public toilets. What is most distinctive about Ladd's account is his attention to the human infrastructure that modern plumbing replaced. Here, as throughout, he argues that the very processes that made the street more hospitable were also those that emptied them of their life. The familiar figures of the crossing sweeper with his broom and the gutter crosser with his plank disappeared along with the offending filth from which they had protected people's shoes and skirts. Finally, chapters five and six take on the closely connected themes of transportation and public order. Ladd emphasizes how, entering the twentieth century, the desire of the state to control and the needs of traffic to move freely coincided, both demanding the elimination of unruly crowds.
The book ends with a lovely conclusion comparing two contrasting approaches to the street. The first is the “magisterial” view of the planner (or perhaps the wealthy apartment dweller from his balcony, or a contemporary urbanite navigating from her phone), who sees streets from outside or above as systems of routes through the city. The second is the street-level view of the pedestrian, who encounters the street at eye level from within its crowds. Ultimately, Ladd's book is a celebration of the pedestrian view as a way of experiencing the street, and also as a method for understanding its history. Despite all the changes Ladd recounts, the bracing feeling of locking one's door on a winter evening and setting out, giving oneself over to the unpredictable—and not always pleasant—sights, smells, and sounds of an urban walk is still part of life in Europe's cities. This is certainly a feeling Ladd's history has allowed me to appreciate even more than I did before.
