London Goes Upscale but Saves Its Past : Renewal: Nostalgia boom brings back suburbanites to inner cities in search of Georgian and Victorian properties to refurbish. Despite yuppification, it remains a quiet and good-natured city.

London is undergoing its biggest transformation since it climbed out of the rubble of World War II.

From the East End and King’s Cross to the westerly Thames-side districts of Chelsea, Fulham and Putney, vast tracts of the capital are changing as the post-industrial age overtakes Britain.

“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life,” Dr. Samuel Johnson once wrote. But today, the great 18th-Century wordsmith might have trouble finding his way around. His house off Fleet Street still stands, but otherwise, in a sense, London’s very center of gravity is shifting.

Fleet Street is no longer the main street for newspaper offices. Covent Garden, where Eliza Doolittle sold her flowers, is a chic, modern shopping and eating mall. The once seedy East End and Hackney are becoming yuppie country. Soho is losing its strip joints and going classy.

New Suburbs Opening

The 121-mile Orbital, the world’s longest beltway, was completed three years ago and is opening up new suburbs for Londoners who can no longer afford skyrocketing house prices.

At the same time, the nostalgia boom is bringing back suburbanites to the inner cities in search of old Georgian and Victorian properties to refurbish, and DIY--do-it-yourself--is Britain’s biggest hobby after TV-gazing.

The Docklands, once the world’s largest shipping hub, is now Europe’s biggest urban renewal project, although struggling with traffic and start-up problems. Rundown King’s Cross in the heart of the capital will soon get a similar face lift with the bulldozing of 135 acres of decayed Georgian and Victorian buildings, railroad sidings and warehouses.

King’s Cross may become the terminus of the rail tunnel being dug to link Britain and France, and high-speed trains thundering up from the English Channel promise yet more profound change for London.

The entrepreneurial forces unleashed by a decade of government by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her Conservatives are evident in this “flower of cities all,” as the 16th-Century poet William Dunbar called it.

“There’s a fantastic amount of money about after 10 years of Mrs. Thatcher’s enterprise culture and lots more has come to London from abroad because developers consider Britain a safe bet,” said realtor Joss Macleod.

“Thatcherism is reflected in the life style,” he added. “London is hotting up in all walks of life. It’s faster now. The English reserve has been replaced in part by a lot more energy and drive and it’s driven a lot of Londoners into the country.”

There is also a growing homelessness problem. The government puts the number at 23,000. Shelter, a charity, puts the number nearer 40,000.

Timeless Landmarks

Some things, of course, never change: Big Ben, still keeping time, precisely; taxi drivers, who can still refuse to go beyond the six-mile limit set in Victorian times to spare the horses; London’s three royal palaces, five great parks and timeless landmarks, such as St. Paul’s Cathedral and Nelson’s Column.

It’s still a quiet, good-natured city where the emphasis is on community, and children do most things at half-price. At night London retires to pubs or clubs, empties out into its suburbs, goes to bed early and eschews ostentation. No. 10 Downing St., the prime minister’s address, is just an ordinary door with a policeman outside.

The development boom uncovers extraordinary relics: the foundations of William Shakespeare’s Globe and Rose theaters at Southwark; prehistoric flints and arrowheads by Waterloo train station; a Saxon settlement under the Strand; a Tudor workman’s hat near London Bridge.

London has a population of 6.7 million, plus 21 million tourists a year, but no mayor; indeed, the City of London means no more than the business district, which has a figurehead Lord Mayor whose writ doesn’t run outside its square mile.

The rest of the capital is the sum of its 32 boroughs, each independent, with no over-arching authority to solve critical problems of traffic congestion and litter.

The left-led Greater London Council was abolished in 1986 as part of Thatcher’s crusade against socialism. And now “London looks out of control,” said Judy Hillman, an urban affairs consultant and author of “A New Look for London.” “ . . . It’s divide and rule with 33 fiefdoms and no forum for debating London-wide issues.”

Fleet Street, until a few years ago synonymous with newspapers, is deader than yesterday’s headline now that publishers have moved to new high-tech facilities in the Docklands and elsewhere.

In the City, imposing Victorian counting houses jostle against ultra-modern architecture, such as the glass-and-tube headquarters of the Lloyd’s insurance market.

The great shopping boulevard of Oxford Street still attracts shoppers from all over the world. But canny Londoners now head for the new American-style malls like Brent Cross in north London, with its thousands of free parking spaces.

Harry Shepherd, 66, who heads the storekeepers’ Oxford Street Assn., grew up in London’s East End when it was poor and tough, and regrets the decline of London’s community spirit.

“It’s because society itself has changed and become more selfish,” he said. “One example is the way crowds on the tube (subway) no longer stand aside to allow passengers to get off.”

The subway system, the world’s largest, is so crowded that it is raising fares to reduce passenger loads, meaning more automobiles clogging a road system so resistant to expansion that village lanes become major thoroughfares.

The real estate frenzy means rocketing land prices and rents, with houses in Mayfair, Belgravia and Hampstead fetching up to $4.7 million.

“The center and the well-known areas like Chelsea and Knightsbridge have become too expensive for anyone unless they belong to the international network,” said Hillman.

“Londoners used to move very little. Now they are moving everywhere.”

On Savile Row, where the well-heeled get their suits at 1,000 pounds ($1,500) apiece, tailors have been deprived of their light-industry status, exposing them to crippling rent hikes.

The unsentimental Thatcher government has told the tailors to adapt to market forces or “go to Hounslow,” a suburb 11 miles away.

The sex shops and massage parlors of once seedy but fascinating Soho are being replaced by smart restaurants, shops and designer offices. Gerard Street is the hub of a thriving Chinatown with all-night eating houses. Nearby, the West End offers its endless outpouring of musicals and quality drama.

Some London traditionalists dislike the changes, Prince Charles among them.

The heir to the throne and self-appointed arbiter of British architectural taste accuses postwar developers of doing more damage to London than Hitler’s air force.

The writer and jazz singer George Melly, writing in The Guardian newspaper, dismisses the current post-modernist school of architecture as “strip lighting and flickering computers visible through the sash windows of a fake Georgian facade.”

In the Soho he once loved, “advertising agents, creatures of the media, have ousted the painters, poets and eccentrics of my salad days,” he wrote.

A lot of London character is being priced out by chain stores, but Asian immigrants have rescued the news vending, candy and greengrocery trades.

“London is a much more cosmopolitan city these days,” Hillman said. “Whitechapel, which was Jewish immigrant, is now Bengali from Bangladesh. Brixton, Brent and Harringay are Afro-Caribbean, and so are bits of Notting Hill. Southall is Indian and Newham is Asian.”