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The Time and Talents was an Anglican organisation founded by Minna Gollock in 1887. Part of a wider "settlement movement" which aimed at getting middle-class people to live and work among the poor, it promoted women self-help by involving richer women in the fate of factory girls. 

In 1899, Time and Talents found permanent premises in Bermondsey Street and by 1908 a building in Arts and Craft style had been completed, which included a hostel for young women as well as space for 'healthy recreation' (Photo by CarolineLD)

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"The man of system... seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board." (Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments) (Photo: a scale model of Downtown Los Angeles, commissioned by the U.S. Works Progress Administration for long-term planning purposes and realised from 1938 to 1940 by a team of City Planning Department model makers, draftsmen, and architects)

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Long-exposure pictures of mating gold fireflies. Like tracks of light in the sky, patterns of order can emerge from the interaction of individuals going about their own purposes. Top-down directions can't determine in advance the most successful path for a firefly to follow, no more than any one can predict the success of a particular course of action. This concept of ecological rationality won Vernon L. Smith won the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics. (Photo by Tsuneaki Hiramatsu around Maniwa and Okayama Prefecture, Japan) 

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Arts, activism and greater visibility helped the evolution of a different attitude towards homosexuality at the same time as government legislated against "intentionally promot[ing] homosexuality or publish[ing] material with the intention of promoting homosexuality" or "promot[ing] the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship". (Infographic on "Sexuality in Thatcher Britain" by David Guest)

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Competing jurisdictions in nineteenth-century London. Until the introduction of the Metropolitan Board of Works as the first city-wide administrative body in 1856, political power and the administration of justice in London were fragmented across competing and overlapping jurisdictions: two cities (City of London and City of Westminster), four Cathedral (St Paul's, Southwark, Westminster Cathedral and St John's Cathedral), two counties (Middlesex and Essex), some 107 parishes in the City of London alone and a varying number of parish vestries and poor law unions.

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London developed in anarchy without any political body imposing uniform rules. Alsatia, formerly the Whitefriars' monastery, was a sanctuary where arrests could not be made until 1697. "Alsatia was not the only anomalous territory in London; there … were liberties, where the residents had special privileges and exemptions, and peculiars governed by outside authorities. … And suburbs deliberately grew up outside the walls to escape the powers of the City but benefit from the opportunities it offered. As London grew, it encompassed fields and pastures that had common rights attached to them. This combination of overlapping authorities and customary rights opened up quasi-autonomous spaces"

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Ireland‘s Conquer’d: Wales Subdu’d: Scotland United: But there are some few spots of ground in London, just in the face of the Government, unconquer’d yet, that hold in Rebellion still.

Thomas Shadwell's 1688 The Squire of Alsatia

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Two months before the Great Exhibition of 1851, US exhibitors had arranged to come to London as unpaid volunteers with the US Navy providing a free passage, but no money to disembark the exhibits could be made available without an appropriation from Congress. George Peabody offered a loan of £3,000 to the US ambassador to underwrite the US pavilion. “Without his donation, the new inventions of the United States would have been missing from the exhibits featured at the first World’s Fair.”

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The Great Exhibition of 1851 shows the links between commerce, philanthropy and science. Funded by charity, this celebration of commerce and ingenuity attracted one in three Britons as visitors. The profits made from ticket sales were in turn used to purchase the land for the Science Museum, the Royal Albert Hall, and the Victoria & Albert Museum. Residual funds endowed a body that still makes grants for scientific research, the Royal Commission for the Great Exhibition.

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When the organising committee for the Great Exhibition of 1851 found it hard to raise sufficient funds, a private company offered to anticipate the £20,000 needed for building of the Crystal Palace as an investment, with the potential of earning up to £100,000 in return. In the end the contract was not relied on and the entire sum was raised through voluntary contributions from over 300 local committees, with philanthropist George Peabody sponsoring US exhibitors when the US government refused to provide funds.

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The Great Exhibition of 1851 was built without taxpayers' money: "The circumstances of such large sums … being found by the people themselves, is at once an expression of the popular earnestness in the case, and a guarantee of the good which the people are to get out of it."

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How fashion and a commercial society enhance individual self-expression: “100 years of East London style in 100 seconds” (Source)

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Markets as labs for new forms of socialisation and the rise of the London coffee culture: "Remember the late 1990s? … One of globalisation’s most feared agents was Starbucks, a corporate coffee chain destined to drive out our neighbourhood cafés… In the end, things turned out very differently. Independent or … “specialist” coffee shops have been on the ascent for the better part of a decade and London is now recognised by the world’s most hardline coffee fanatics…" (Source)

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"Search for Enlightenment" by Simon Gudgeon outside One Hyde Park, W1, the apartment block where flats cost £6,000 per square foot on average and a penthouse sold for £140 million. Public art is one of the ways in which the super-rich make life in London more pleasant for everyone. (Source)

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Railway Map of London ca 1910, showing the extent of the railway network that railways companies had built around London before the government stifled competition 

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Sign for the "City Provident Dispensary & Surgical Appliance Association" at 164 Aldersgate St. Founded in 1872, it supplied medical devices to the poor cheaply by selling benefactors' tickets, taking whatever payment patients could afford and extending credit, without the need for letters of introduction (unlike the Truss, National Truss, Rupture and Surgical Aid Societies). (Source 1 & 2) 

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28 Dean Street, Soho, in Karl Marx's times