No London Building Act of 1894

After all the events that everyone knows about (the Great Fire of 1666, the Blitz, building the twin embankments, etc,) this has to be one of the biggest things that affected how London grew. No buildings higher than 80 feet were allowed to be built and until 1962, St. Paul's Cathedral was the tallest structure in London.

So, instead of skyscrapers, we get endless suburbs. I can't imagine what the city would look like in this reality but two questions for anyone who knows better. First, how would it look? And how would the act - which I had no idea existed until tonight - be done away with?
 
I am absolutely out of my depth here since I don't know a great deal about London, the act, or the time period but I've seen a lot of cities in my time. In my experience whether a city grows out or up is purely an economic decision (is it cheaper to buy and develop land or build a taller building). If the economics in London ever dictated up rather than out I assume the 1894 act would have been quickly repealed or simply not enforced.
 
Its an interesting question, but unfortunately I don't think it would change too much.

Firstly - by the 1890s you've already got vast suburbs in London. Take Lewisham in South London, for example. By 1891 the population was 94,000 ish. That was up double twenty years before, and from only 34,000 before that in 1851. By 1911 it would be 174,000. At times just south of the Thames in London was growing faster than Manchester and Liverpool combined in the late Victorian period.

Secondly - People wanted suburban homes. Speculative building meant that people would advertise properties as they were being built and just keep going as land was so cheap as @Kevin Lessard says - the sprawl was just unstoppable. The idea of escaping the overcrowded and run down centre for an outer rim that was greener, cleaner, and embodied the growing separation between work and leisure that people valued in late Victorian Britain. Cheap train and later tram tickets by the 1900s meant that thousands upon thousands of Londoners could move in and out of the centre each day for work.

Thirdly - Victorians were often skeptical about apartment blocks. Many viewed them as distinctly 'European' in a bad way and disliked the idea of living on top of one another. With magazines and domestic handbooks for the middle-class pushing a vision of the perfect home as being clearly a detached house with a front and back garden. Also, they were not actually alone. There are very few apartment skyscrapers [as opposed to business based or hotel complex ones] in Western cities apart from those like Hong Kong, Singapore, etc where physical space to expand is geographically limited.

So whilst I think you might get a few more American-style skyscrapers in central London, its unlikely to change the nature of suburbia that was already well underway.
 
Also London is build upon fairly soft soil, not bedrock. It's far more difficult to get the foundations necessary to build a skyscraper.
 
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