London: The Biography

A London hanging evoked by Rowlandson; the children in the crowd seem delighted by the spectacle, and a mother carries her infant without the least disquiet. It was often said, by foreigners, that Londoners did not fear death.

CHAPTER 24. A Newgate Ballad

Within four years of the Great Fire Newgate Prison was near to completion, rebuilt with a design which the London Encyclopaedia describes as one of “great magnificence” and “sumptuousness.” It was, in a sense, the very symbol of London. It had stood on the same site since the twelfth century and was, almost from its beginning, an emblem of death and suffering. It became a legendary place, where the very stones were considered “deathlike,” and it has inspired more poems, dramas and novels than any other building in London. Its role as gateway also created elements of myth, since it was the threshold from which prisoners left the earthly city and were dispatched to Tyburn or Smithfield or the gallows just beyond the walls of Newgate itself. It became associated with hell, and its smell permeated the streets and houses beside it.

In the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries Newgate Prison had begun to decay and to collapse upon itself; sixty-four prisoners died in an epidemic of “gaol fever” in 1419, while the various keepers were regularly charged with afflicting torture and unjust punishment upon the inmates. Jews falsely accused of circumcising Christian children, clippers and coiners, and murderers, were placed within deep underground dungeons where they were loaded with chains or confined in stocks. A bequest of money by Richard Whittington ensured that the prison was completely rebuilt in 1423 but it soon reverted to its natural state of gloom and horror. Approximately three hundred prisoners were confined within the space of half an acre, in a building divided into three sides-the Master’s side for prisoners who could pay for food and drink, the Common side for impecunious debtors and felons, and the Press Yard for “prisoners of note.” It can be inferred, then, that the Common side was the site of hardship and indignity.

The keepers of Newgate had always been notorious for their violence and intemperance. In 1447 James Manning left the body of one of his prisoners in the thoroughfare “causing a nuisance and great danger to the King who was passing there”; when he refused to remove it after several warnings, and after his wife had spoken “shameful words,” they were both taken to the compter. Two years later his successor was also imprisoned for “a dreadful assault” upon a female prisoner. So the keepers snuffed up the contagion of brutality as well as that of gaol fever. Perhaps the most famous of these gaolers, in the years before the Fire, was Andrew Alexander who in the reign of Mary I hurried his Protestant inmates to the fires of Smithfield with the words “Rid my prison! Rid my prison!” One favoured prisoner who played the lute for Alexander and his wife, who “do love music very well,” was granted the best lodgings in the prison. But the conditions of the gaol could not be escaped- the “evil savours … threw the poor gentleman into a burning ague.” Alexander offered to keep him in his own parlour “but it was near the kitchen, and the smell of the meat was disagreeable.” The smell is pre-eminent in these accounts from The Chronicles of Newgate while, in the dungeons themselves, “there was turbulence, rioting, disorders.”

Those who could afford liquor were continually drunk on “sherry sack … amber-coloured canary or liquorish Ipocras” while those imprisoned for their religious or political beliefs raved amid their shackles. “There are seditious preachings by fifth monarch men at Newgate,” according to the records “and prayers for all righteous blood,” while the prison was so overcrowded that the majority of prisoners had “an infectious malignant fever.” It was “a place of infamy and great distress” where lice were the prisoners’ “constant companions.” One inmate was forced to lie in a coffin for a bed, while another spent fourteen days “without light or fire, living on half penny worth of bread a day.” Here in 1537 eleven Catholic monks “were left, standing and chained to pillars, to die of starvation.”

It was in this period that there first emerged the legend of the “Black Dog”-“a walking spirit in the likenesse of a blacke Dog, gliding up and down the streets a little before the time of Execution, and in the night whilst the Sessions continued.” Some believed the creature to be an emanation of the miseries of twelfth-century Newgate, when famine compelled certain prisoners to cannibalism. Others surmised that it was a being which walked “in the Name of Service and Office”; that it was, in other words, a phantom created by the wickedness of the gaolers. By the early eighteenth century, however, “Making The Black Dog Walk” was the phrase used to designate “the prisoners’ brutal treatment of new inmates.” The present ivy-covered wall at the bottom of Amen Court, close to the old Sessions House yard, is supposed still to be the haunt of this malign spirit.

In the sixteenth century, however, the Black Dog was only one of the many terrors of Newgate. An underground dungeon, known as “Limbo,” was described as being “full of horrors, without light and swarming with vermin and creeping things.” This was the condemned hold beneath the gates which was “a most fearful, sad, deplorable place … They lie like swine upon the ground, one upon another, howling and roaring-it was more terrible to me than death.” This is the constant refrain of those who had entered Newgate-“being more full of horror than death”-which of course marked one of the entrances to London itself. When one prisoner, imprisoned for his religious beliefs, cried out: “I would not change my chain for my Lord Mayor’s great chain” he was in his agony making the connection between the sufferings of Newgate and the oppression of the city.

An anonymous drama of the early seventeenth century, Dick of Devonshire, contains the plea of a man as “loaden with gyves shackles amp; fetters” as any thief that lay in Newgate, confirming the notion that it was a prison from which it was impossible to escape. But it also became a symbol of brotherhood among thieves-“bothe shakeled in a fetter”-or, as Bardolph says to Falstaff, “Two and two, Newgate fashion” and, in Dekker’s Satiro-mastix:

we’ll walk arme in arme

As tho’ we were leading one another to Newgate.

It is in part a symbol of defiance under oppression and the prospect of death. That is why one cry of the rogue or thief was “Newgate or Victory!” The prison becomes the central token of authority and thus, as we shall see, the first object of London rioters who were determined to destroy the order of the city. In that capacity, too, it has often been the object of fire and flame, with the Great Fire itself as a notable token of wrath or vengeance.

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So it rose again in 1670, embellished and decorated in a manner appropriate to one of the city’s greatest public monuments. There was even a bas-relief model of Richard Whittington’s cat, and for a while the prison was known popularly as “the Whit”; no more lucid demonstration could be given of its intimate connection with London. It rose five storeys, spanning the entry to Newgate Street from Giltspur Street and the steep incline of Snow Hill. There were now five “sides” for various felons and debtors, together with a newly designed press room (the object of “pressing to death” was to extort confessions), condemned holds, a chapel and “Jack Ketch’s kitchen.”

On arrival the prisoners were fettered and “ironed,” passing under the gate to be led to their appropriate dungeon; they passed, on the left, the keeper’s house beneath which was the “hold” for those condemned to hang. A prisoner confined in this subterranean area, which did not perhaps differ very much from the dungeon before the Fire, is quoted in Anthony Babington’s The English Bastille as saying that there were “some glimmerings of light … by which you may know that you are in a dark, opaque, wild room.” Entered by a hatch, it was entirely constructed of stone with an “open sewer running through the middle” which diffused a “stench” that entered every corner. Fastened into the stone floor itself were hooks and chains to castigate and confine those who were “stubborn and unruly.”

Immediately to the right of the gate was the drinking cellar. This was run by a prisoner who was allowed a profit on sales. Since it was also below ground it was lit by candles “placed in pyramidal candlesticks made of clay”; those inmates who could afford the prices were allowed to drink themselves into senselessness day or night, with gin variously known as “Cock-my-Cap,” “Kill-Grief,” “Comfort,” “Meat-and-Drink” or “Washing-and-Lodging.” One prisoner recalled that “such wretchedness abounds there that the place has the exact aspect of hell itself.” Beyond this cellar tap-room, going along Newgate Street, were located a “stone hall” for common debtors and a “stone hold” for common felons. These were “virtually unlighted dungeons” strewn with “unutterable filth.” “Trampling on the floor, the lice crawling under their feet made such a noise as walking on shells which are strewn over garden walks.” The rest of the prison rose upward, for “master” prisoners and female prisoners.

So these were the quarters which greeted each new arrival, a place which no physician would enter. In the 1760s Boswell noticed the cells, “three rows of ’em, four in a row, all above each other. They have double iron windows, and within these, strong iron rails; and in these dark mansions are the unhappy criminals confined.” These “dismal places” stayed with him all that day, “Newgate being upon my mind like a black cloud.” Casanova, briefly imprisoned there, described it as an “abode of misery and despair, a hell such as Dante might have conceived.” Wilhelm Meister, crossing the Press Yard on a tour of inspection, was “attacked as by a swarm of harpies and had no means of escaping but to throw a handful of half-pence amongst them for which they scrambled with all the fury of a parcel of wild beasts” while others “who were shut up, stretched forth their hands through the iron bars, venting the most horrible cries.” This is the yard to which Daniel Defoe consigned Moll Flanders in his narrative of her adventures; since the author himself spent some time incarcerated in Newgate in 1703, his account bears the mark of genuine remembrance. It is “impossible to describe the terror of my mind, when I was first brought in, and when I looked round upon all the horrors of that dismal place … the hellish noise, the roaring, swearing and clamour, the stench and nastiness, and all the dreadful afflicting things that I saw there, joined to make the place seem an emblem of hell itself, and a kind of an entrance into it.” In more than one passage, however, it is emphasised that the inmates by degrees grow accustomed to this hell so that it becomes “not only tolerable but even agreeable” with its inhabitants “as impudently cheerful and merry in their misery as they were when out of it.” “‘It is natural to me now,’ one female prisoner declares, ‘I don’t disturb myself about it.’” This is of course an astute observation of Newgate manners, but it might perhaps be construed in the wider context of London itself. In the company of this “crew” Moll herself “turned first stupid and senseless, and then brutish and thoughtless” until she becomes “a mere Newgate-bird, as wicked and as outrageous as any of them.”

Some inmates were far from “thoughtless,”however, and contrived many ingenious plans of escape. The great heroes of London have often been those who freed themselves from the constraints of Newgate. The greatest of them all, Jack Sheppard, escaped from confinement on six separate occasions; for two centuries he remained a type or symbol of those who elude the practices of oppression with effrontery and bravery as well as skill. It is worth noticing, for example, that a report of the Children’s Employment Commission in the 1840s remarked that poor London children who had never heard of Moses or Queen Victoria had “general knowledge of the character and course of life of Dick Turpin, the highwayman, and more particularly of Jack Shepherd [sic], the robber and prison breaker.”

Jack Sheppard was born in White’s Row, Spitalfields, in the spring of 1702, and then placed in the Bishopsgate workhouse-built on the perimeter of the city, like Newgate itself-before being apprenticed to a carpenter in Wych Street. He broke free of his apprenticeship after six years of industry, even though he was within ten months of completing his terms, and turned to theft for his trade. In the spring of 1724 he was first imprisoned in the St. Giles Roundhouse, but was free within three hours after cutting open the roof and lowering himself to the ground with sheet and blanket. There “he joined a gathering throng” and made his escape through the lanes of St. Giles. A few weeks later he was arrested again, for a pickpocketing offence in Leicester Fields, and was incarcerated in the New Prison of Clerkenwell. He was taken to the “Newgate Ward” there and pinioned with links and fetters of great weight; he sawed through the fetters and somehow cut through an iron restraint before boring his way through an oaken bar some nine inches thick. The severed chairs and bars were afterwards kept by the prison authorities “to Testifie, and preserve the Memory of this extraordinary Event and Villain.”

For three months he was at liberty before being found by the notorious criminal and “thief-taker,” Jonathan Wild; Sheppard was now escorted to Newgate and, after being sentenced to death for three robberies, was consigned to the condemned hold. Even within that dreadful place, by some means or other, he managed to smuggle in a “Spike” and with that began to carve an opening in the wall (or perhaps ceiling); with the help of accomplices on the other side he was dragged out. It was the week of Bartholomew Fair, and he made his escape through the crowds of those going up Snow Hill and Giltspur Street into Smithfield. From there he travelled eastwards into Spitalfields, where he stayed at the Paul’s Head; on an eighteenth-century map, like that of John Roque, it is still possible to track his route. It is in any case a potent image-of a prisoner almost miraculously escaping from incarceration to join the crowds celebrating their own temporary liberty among the booths and shows of Bartholomew Fair.

During the next few days, according to Peter Linebaugh’s The London Hanged, he was seen by a “cobbler in Bishopsgate and a milkman in Islington.” In Fleet Street he entered a watch-maker’s shop and addressed the apprentice there, bidding him “stick to his Tools, and not use his Master to such ill Habits of working so late.” He promptly robbed the premises, but was pursued and taken. Then, once again, he was led to Newgate and in a secluded gaol was “fastened to the floor with double fetters.” Everyone came to see him, and everyone talked about him. He had become a true London sensation, the people “Mad about him” at a time of the greatest “idleness among Meckanicks that has been known in London.” They had all gone to the taverns and ale-houses, in other words, to discuss the prodigy. When certain reverend gentlemen visited his cell he declared that they were “Ginger-bread Fellows” and that “One File’s worth all the Bibles in the world.” The pagan temper of the Londoner is here revealed. “Yes, sir, I am the Sheppard,” he said while in confinement, “and all the jailors in the town are my flock.” A file was found upon him and he was removed to the “Stone Castle” on the fifth storey where he was chained to the floor, his legs secured with irons and his hands cuffed. These instruments were inspected daily, and Sheppard himself was under regular supervision.

And then, wonderfully if not miraculously, he escaped again. Somehow he managed to slip his hands through his handcuffs, and with a small nail managed to loose one of the links in the chains about his legs; like some “posture master” from Bartholomew Fair he then squeezed through the great chains which held him. With a piece of this broken chain he worked out a transverse bar from the chimney and climbed upwards into the “Red Room,” “whose door had not been unbolted for seven years.” With a nail he freed its bolt in seven minutes and got into a passage which led to the chapel; then with a spike from one of the interior railings he opened four other doors which were all locked and bolted from the other side. On opening the final door he found himself on the outside of the prison, with the roofs of the city below him. Then he remembered his blanket. He had left it in his cell. He returned all the way to the “Stone Castle,” through the chapel and down the chimney, in order to retrieve it. He returned to the outer air and, with the blanket spiked to the stone wall, slid down quietly.

Over the next few days, he disguised himself as a beggar and as a butcher, the two most familiar London types, while the streets around him were filled with ballads and broadsides proclaiming his latest escape. In the disguise of a foot porter he visited the printer of those “Last Dying Speeches” which, as he knew or guessed, would accompany his own journey to the scaffold. He robbed a pawn-broker in Drury Lane and, with the proceeds, bought a fashionable suit and a silver sword; then he hired a coach and, with that innate sense of theatre which never seemed to desert him, he drove through the arch of Newgate itself before visiting the taverns and ale-houses of the vicinity. Recaptured on that evening, two weeks after his escape, he was taken back to the prison from which he had effected such a remarkable exit, and constantly watched; when he was led to the court where the punishment of death was again pronounced, he was surrounded by “the most numerous Croud of People that ever was seen in London.” He was sentenced to be hanged within a week. There were reports that he would break away at Little Turnmill along Holborn-and on the road to Tyburn a penknife was taken from him-but there was to be no reprieve from what Peter Linebaugh has called his “final escape.”

It is an intensely private as well as a very public London story. We may infer that his youthful experience in the workhouse of Bishopsgate prompted his obsessive desire for escape, while it is likely that he somehow acquired his extraordinary skills while working as a carpenter’s apprentice; certainly he would have learned the uses of files and chisels while practising upon wood. He was a violent and dishonest man, but his series of escapes from Newgate transformed the atmosphere of the city, where the prevailing mood became one of genuine collaborative excitement. To escape from the most visible and oppressive symbol of authority-that “black cloud” which pursued Boswell-was in a sense to be freed from all the restraints of the ordinary world. We might then equate the experience of the prison with the experience of the city itself. It is indeed a familiar and often an accurate analogy, and the history of Jack Sheppard suggests another aspect of it. He hardly ever left London, even with the opportunity and indeed the pressing necessity of doing so; after three days “on the run” in Northamptonshire, for example, he rode back to the city. After his penultimate escape from Newgate he returned to Spitalfields, where he had spent his earliest days. After his final escape he was determined to remain in London, despite the pleas of his family. He was in that sense a true Londoner who could not or would not operate outside his own territory.

He possessed other urban characteristics. After his escapes he disguised himself as a variety of tradesmen, and generally behaved in a thoroughly dramatic fashion. To ride in a coach through Newgate was a mark of theatrical genius. He was profane to the point of being irreligious, while his violence against the propertied interests was not inconsistent with the egalitarianism of the “mob.” After one of his escapes a pamphleteer declaimed: “Woe to the Shopkeepers, and woe to the Dealers in Ware, for the roaring Lion is abroad.” So Jack became an intrinsic part of London mythology, his exploits celebrated in ballads and verses and dramas and fiction.

In 1750 the smell of Newgate had become pervasive throughout the neighbourhood. All its walls were then washed down with vinegar and a ventilation system was installed; seven of the eleven men working on that project were themselves infected with “gaol fever,” which suggests the extent of the pestilence within. Five years later, the inhabitants of Newgate Street were still “unable to stand in their doorways” and customers were reluctant to visit the shops in the vicinity “for fear of infections.” There were even directions for those who might come close to the criminals-“he should prudently empty his stomach and bowels a few days before, to carry off any putrid or putrescent substance which may have lodged in them.”

The prison was rebuilt in 1770 by George Dance, and was described by the poet Crabbe as a “large, strong and beautiful building,” beautiful, no doubt, because of its simplicity of purpose. “There is nothing in it,” one contemporary wrote, “but two great windowless blocks, each ninety feet square.” It was fired by rioters in 1780, and rebuilt two years later upon the same plan. It was in many respects now more salubrious and hygienic a prison than many others in London, but its ancient atmosphere lingered. A few years after the rebuilding, the new gaol “begins to wear a brooding and haunted air already.” The old conditions also began to re-emerge within the prison and, in the early years of the nineteenth century, it was reported in The Chronicles of Newgate that “lunatics raving mad ranged up and down the wards, a terror to all they encountered … mock marriages were of constant occurrence … a school and nursery of crime … the most depraved were free to contaminate and demoralise their more innocent fellows.”

The ministrations of Elizabeth Fry in 1817 seem to have produced some effect upon this “Hell above ground,” but official reports in 1836 and 1843 from the Inspector of Prisons still condemned the squalor and the misery. Immediately before the first of these reports, Newgate was visited by a young journalist, Charles Dickens, who from childhood had been fascinated by the looming gatehouse of the dark prison; by his own account in Sketches by Boz he had often contemplated the fact that thousands of people each day “pass and repass this gloomy depository of the guilt and misery of London, in one perpetual stream of life and bustle, utterly unmindful of the throng of wretched creatures pent up within it.” A “light laugh or merry whistle” can be heard “within one yard of a fellow-creature, bound and helpless, whose days are numbered” and who waits for execution. In his second novel, Oliver Twist, Dickens returns to those “dreadful walls of Newgate, which have hidden so much misery and such unspeakable anguish.” Here Fagin sits in one of the condemned cells-Dickens notes that the prison kitchen is beside the yard where the scaffold is erected-and an engraving by George Cruik-shank, drawn after a visit to one such “hold,” shows a stone bench with a mattress across it. Nothing else is visible except the iron bars set in a thick stone wall, and the blazing eyes of the prisoner himself. The young Oliver Twist visits the condemned cell, through “the dark and winding ways” of Newgate, even though the gaoler has said that “It’s not a sight for children.” Dickens might be revisiting his own childhood, since his most formative early experience of London was of attending his father and family lodged in the Marshalsea Prison of Southwark. Perhaps that is why the image of Newgate always haunted him and why, towards the end of his life, at night, utterly wearied and demoralised, he returned to the old gaol “and, touching its rough stone” began “to think of the prisoners in their sleep.”

Dickens was writing of a period when Newgate had ceased to be a general prison and was instead used to confine those who had been sentenced to death (as well as those waiting to be tried in the adjacent Central Criminal Courts), but a further refinement was added in 1859 when the prison was redesigned to house a series of separate cells where each inmate was held in silence and isolation. In a series of articles published in the Illustrated London News the prisoner awaiting a flogging is described as “the patient.” The prison becomes a hospital, then, or perhaps the hospital is no better than a prison.

In this manner the institutions of the city begin to resemble one another. Newgate also became a kind of theatre when, on Wednesdays or Thursdays between the hours of twelve and three, it was open to visitors. Here sightseers would be shown casts of the heads of notorious criminals, as well as the chains and handcuffs which once held Jack Sheppard; they could at their wish be locked into one of the condemned cells for a moment, or even sit within the old whipping post. At the end of their tour they were conducted along “Birdcage” walk, the passage from the cells of Newgate to the Court of Sessions; here also they could read “curious letters on the walls” denoting the fact that the bodies of the condemned were interred behind the stone. The name of the walk is strangely reminiscent of a scene from Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago where an infant visits her father “before a double iron railing covered with wire netting” at Newgate-“carrying into later years a memory of father as a man who lived in a cage.”

The last execution at Newgate took place at the beginning of May 1902, and three months later the work of demolition began. At a quarter past three in the afternoon of 15 August, according to the Daily Mail of the following day, “a piece of stone about the size of a foot fell on the pavement, and a hand with a chisel in it was seen working away in the breach. A little crowd soon gathered to watch the operations.” It was noticed, too, that the “old pigeons, rough and grimy as the prison itself compared with the other flocks in London,” fluttered about the statue of liberty on the pinnacle of the prison. These birds, at least, had no wish to leave their London cage.

Six months later an auction of Newgate relics was held within the prison itself. The paraphernalia of the execution shed sold for £5 15s 0d while each of the plaster casts of the famous criminals was “knocked down” for £5. Two of the great doors, and the whipping post for the “patients,” may now be seen by the curious in the Museum of London. The Old Bailey now lies upon the ancient site.

CHAPTER 25. A Note on Suicide

Many inmates committed “self-murder” within the walls of Newgate, but in London suicide assumes many forms. People have hurled themselves from the Whispering Gallery in the cathedral of St. Paul’s; poisoned themselves in the solitude of London attics; and drowned themselves for love in the waters of St. James’s Park. The Monument was another favourite location: the unhappy subject would throw himself or herself from the summit of the pillar and fall upon its base rather than the street. On 1 May 1765, according to Grosley’s A Tour of England, “the wife of a colonel drowned herself in the canal in St. James’s park; a baker hanged himself in Drury-lane; a girl, who lived near Bedlam, made an attempt to dispatch herself in the same manner.” In the summer of 1862 “the Suicide Mania” became a topic of public attention. In that same century the Thames was wreathed with the bodies of the drowned.

London was the suicide capital of Europe. As early as the fourteenth century Froissart described the English as “a very sad race,” which description applied particularly and even principally to Londoners. The French considered that the London vogue for suicides was owing to “the affectation of singularity,” although a more perceptive observer believed that it was “from a contempt of death and a disgust of life.” One Frenchman described the plight of London families “that had not laughed for three generations,” and observed that citizens committed suicide in the autumn in order “to escape the weather.” Another visitor remarked that self-slaughter was “no doubt owing to the fogs.” He also suggested that beef was another essential cause, since “its viscous heaviness conveys only bilious and melancholic vapours to the brain”; his diagnosis has a curious resemblance to the folk superstition of Londoners, in which to dream of beef “denotes the death of a friend or relation.” The modern connection between beef and “BSE” may be noted here.

It was also remarked by Grosley that “melancholy prevails in London in every family, in circles, in assemblies, at public and private entertainments … The merry meetings, even of the lowest sort, are dashed with this gloom.” Dostoevsky observed the “gloom” which “never forsakes” the Londoner even “in the midst of gaiety.” The wine sold in London taverns was also considered “to occasion that melancholy, which is so general.” Even the theatre was held responsible for the unhappy distemper; one traveller described how the son of his landlord, after being taken to see Richard III, “leaped out of bed and, after beating the wainscot with his head and feet, at the same time roaring like one possessed, he rolled about the ground in dreadful convulsions, which made us despair of his life; he thought he was haunted by all the ghosts in the tragedy of Richard the Third, and by all the dead bodies in the churchyards of London.”

Everything was blamed except, perhaps, for the onerous and exhausting condition of the city itself.

CHAPTER 26. A Penitential History

There have been more prisons in London than in any other European city. From the penitential cell in the church of the Knights Templar to the debtors’ prison in Whitecross Street, from the Clink situated in Deadman’s Place, Bankside, to the compter in Giltspur Street, London has been celebrated for its places of confinement. There was a prison in Lambeth Palace where early religious reformers, the Lollards, were tortured, and a roundhouse in St. Martin’s Lane where twenty-eight “were thrust into a hole six-feet square and kept there all night,” four of the women being stifled to death. New prisons were always being built, from the Tun in Cornhill at the end of the thirteenth century to Wormwood Scrubs in East Acton at the end of the nineteenth century. The prisoners were obliged to wear masks in the new “model prison” at Pentonville, while the “new prison” of Millbank was supposed to have been built as a “panopticon” whereby each cell and inmate could be individually scrutinised.

By the early seventeenth century the London prisons, like its churches, were celebrated in verse:

In London and within a mile I weene

There are of layles or Prisons full eighteene

And sixty Whipping-posts and Stocks and Cages.

The first prison mentioned in this sorrowful litany is the “Gatehouse” at Westminster, and it is followed by an encomium upon the Fleet Prison.

The Fleet was the oldest of them all, older even than Newgate, and had once been known as the “Gaol of London”; it was also one of the first of the medieval city’s stone buildings. It was situated on the east side of the Fleet and surrounded by a moat with “tree clad banks” where now Farringdon Street runs down to the Thames. The lowest “sunken” storey was known as Bartholomew Fair, although the usual reports of brutality, immorality and mortality render it an ironic sobriquet. The prison was, however, most notorious for its “secret” and unlawful marriages performed by “degraded clergymen” for less than a guinea. By the early eighteenth century there were some forty “marrying houses” in taverns of the vicinity, with at least six known as the Hand and Pen. Women, drugged or intoxicated, could be taken there and married for their money; innocent girls could be duped into believing that they were lawfully joined. There was a watch-maker who impersonated a clergyman, calling himself “Dr. Gaynam”-or, perhaps, gain them. He resided in Brick Lane and it was his practice to walk up Fleet Street. Crossing Fleet Bridge “in his silk gown and bands,” he was known for his commanding figure, and a “handsome though significantly rubicund face.” In the locality he was named as the “Bishop of Hell.”

On several occasions the Fleet Prison was itself consigned to the flames, the last notable fire taking place in 1780 when a mob-led, perhaps appropriately, by a chimney-sweep-mounted an incendiary assault upon it. It was rebuilt in its old form, with many of its more interesting details left intact. Along what is now Farringdon Street, for example, the wall of the gaol had one open grating with bars across it. Here was placed an iron box for alms and, from within, one chosen inmate would call out perpetually “Remember the poor prisoners.” This was the prison in which was incarcerated Samuel Pickwick who, after speaking to those who lay there “forgotten” and “unheeded,” muttered, “I have seen enough … My head aches with these scenes, and my heart too.”

The Fleet Prison was demolished in 1846, but the site was not cleared for another eighteen years. Where once were walls and cells there emerged “blind alleys” which, even on summer days, were so narrow and crowded that they “are bleak and shadowed.” The atmosphere of the ancient place lingered even after its material destruction.

It is likely that the Fleet inspired Thomas More’s famous metaphor of the world as a prison, “some bound to a poste … some in the dungeon, some in the upper ward … some wepying, some laughing, some labouring, some playing, some singing, some chiding, some fighting.” More eventually himself became a prisoner, too, but, before that time, as under-sheriff of London, he had sent many hundreds of Londoners to gaol. He consigned some to the Old Compter in Bread Street and others to the Poultry Compter near Buck-lersbury; in 1555 the prison in Bread Street was moved a few yards northward to Wood Street, where one of the inmates might have been echoing the words of Thomas More. He is quoted in Old and New London: “This littel Hole is as a little citty in a commonwealth, for as in a citty there are all kinds of officers, trades and vocations, so there is in this place as we may make a pretty resemblance between them.” The men consigned here were known as “rats,” the women as “mice.” Its underground passages still exist beneath the ground of a small courtyard beside Wood Street; the stones are cold to the touch, and there is a dampness in the air. Once a new prisoner drank from “a bowl full of claret” to toast his new “society,” and now the Compter is on occasions used for banquets and parties.

The image of the city as prison runs very deep. In his late eighteenth-century novel Caleb Williams, William Godwin described “the doors, the locks, the bolts, the chains, the massy walls and grated windows” of confinement; he affirmed then that “this is society,” the system of prison representing “the whole machine of society.”

When Holloway Prison was opened in 1852 its entrance was flanked by two stone griffins which are, of course, also the emblems of the City of London. Its foundation stone carried the inscription “May God preserve the City of London and make this place a terror to evil doers.” It is perhaps suggestive that its architect, James B. Banning, used the same principles of design in his work upon the Coal Exchange and the Metropolitan Cattle Market. There was a visible affinity between some of the great public institutions of the city.

In the 1970s V.S. Pritchett described London as “this prison-like place of stone” and in 1805 Wordsworth cursed the city as “A prison where he hath been long immured”; in turn Matthew Arnold in 1851 depicted it as this “brazen prison” where the inhabitants are “Dreaming of naught beyond their prison-wall.” In 1884 William Morris added his own note to this vision of incarceration with his account of

this grim net of London, this prison built stark

With the greed of all ages

A mean lodging was his “prison-cell/In the jail of weary London.” Keir Hardie, on returning to his native Ayrshire in 1901, wrote that “London is a place which I remember with a haunting horror, as if I had been confined there.” A report on London prisoners themselves, in London’s Underworld by Thomas Holmes, in the very same period as Keir Hardie’s observations, notes that “the great mass of faces strikes us with dismay, and we feel at once that most of them are handicapped in life, and demand pity rather than vengeance.” The conditions of poverty in the city were such that “the conditions of prison life are better, as they need to be, than the conditions of their own homes.” So they simply moved from one prison to another. But gaol was the place, in Cockney idiom, “where the dogs don’t bite.”

There were also areas of “sanctuary rights” in London, apparent neighbourhoods of freedom over which the prisons failed to cast their shadows. These areas were once within the domains of great religious institutions, but their charm or power survived long after the monks and nuns had departed. Among them were St. Martin’s le Grand and Whitefriars; they had been respectively the home of secular canons and of the Carmelites, but as sanctuaries from pursuit and arrest became in turn havens “for the lowest sort of people, rogues and ruffians, thieves, felons and murderers.” One of the presumed murderers of the “Princes in the Tower,” Miles Forest, took refuge in St. Martin’s and stayed there “rotting away piecemeal.” “St. Martin’s beads” became a popular expression for counterfeit jewellery. The privileges of St. Martin’s le Grand were abolished at the beginning of the seventeenth century, but the sanctuary of Whitefriars lasted for a longer period. The area became popularly known as “Alsatia” (named after the unhappy frontier of Alsace) because no parish watch or city officials would dare to venture there; if they did so, there was a general cry of “Clubs!” and “Rescue!” before they were seized and beaten. It is the area now marked by Salisbury Square and Hanging-Sword Alley, between Dorset Street and Magpie Alley.

Two other sanctuaries were connected with the coining of money. They were located by the Mints at Wapping and in Southwark, as if the literal making of money were as sacred as any activity which took place in monastery or chapel. In the mid-1720s legal officers attempted to infiltrate and expel the “Minters” of Wapping but were fought back. One bailiff was “duck’d in a Place in which the Soil of Houses of Office [lavatories] had been empty’d” while another was force-marched before a crowd with “a turd in his mouth.” The connection between money and ordure is here flagrantly revealed.

Other sanctuaries still clung around the churches, as if the tradition of begging for alms had continued in a more dissipated form. The area which had once been dominated by Blackfriars was a notorious haunt of criminals and beggars. A sanctuary in the neighbourhood of Westminster Abbey was for centuries “low and disreputable,” and Shire Lane beside the church of St. Clement Danes was known as Rogues’ Lane. Here were houses known as “Cadgers’ Hall,” “The Retreat” and “Smashing Lumber,” the last being a manufactory for counterfeit coin, wherein according to Old and New London “every room had its secret trap or panel … the whole of the coining apparatus and the employés could be conveyed away as by a trick of magic.” In any alternative London topography, sanctuaries, like prisons, become highly specific sites of ill fame. Tread there who dares.

CHAPTER 27. A Rogues Gallery

If the places of crime and punishment do not necessarily change, but leave a steady mark, there may also be continuity among the criminals of London. We read of fourteenth-century forgers and blackmailers, and the coroners’ inquests of 1340 reveal a long tally of “bawdy-house keepers, night-walkers, robbers, women of ill fame.” The city was even then so filled with thieves that in this period the right of “in-fangthief” was given to the city authorities; it permitted them “to hang thieves caught redhanded (cum manu opere)” without trial by jury.

It was not until the sixteenth century, however, that the literature of London crime becomes extensive. The works of Robert Greene and Thomas Dekker, in particular, reveal an underworld of thieves and imposters which remains as old and as new as the city itself. Certainly the argot or cant of the thieves had very ancient roots, while some of its more expressive phrases endured well into the nineteenth century. “And bing we to Rome-vill, to nip a bung” can be translated as “Now let us travel to London, to cut a purse.” How London acquired the name of “Rome-vill,” long before it was ever compared to that imperial city, is something of a mystery. “Yonder dwelleth a queer cuffin. It were beneship to mill him” (“There lives a difficult and churlish man. It would be a very good thing to rob him”).

The individuals, as well as their words, come to life in the pages of these old catalogues of crime-“John Stradling with the shaking head … Henry Smyth who drawls when he speaks … John Browne, the stammerer”-each of them engaged in some kind of fifteenth-century cheating trade. That trade, too, has survived. The game of cups, in which the spectator must choose which one conceals the ball, is still played on the streets of London in the twenty-first century; the fraud has now existed for over a thousand years in the capital.

In their record of “abraham men” (who pretended to be mad), “clapper dodgers” (who fished for goods from open windows) and “priggers of prancers” (horse thieves), Dekker and Greene may on occasions be guilty of over-emphasis; the streets of sixteenth-century London might not have been quite as violent or as perilous as they suggest. Nevertheless real criminality could be found in many specific areas. The neighbourhood of Chick Lane and Field Lane in Clerkenwell, for example, was always notorious. In Chick Lane itself there was a dwelling, once known as the Red Lion inn, which upon its demolition in the eighteenth century was discovered to be three centuries old; C.W. Heckethorn, in London Souvenirs, reveals that it contained “dark closets, trap-doors, sliding panels and secret recesses.” One of these trap-doors opened upon the Fleet Ditch, and “afforded easy means of getting rid of the bodies.” There was a morass of lanes off Ratcliffe Highway, with names like Hog Yard and Black Dog Alley, Money Bag Alley and Harebrain Court, which were known for “moral degradation.” There was also a dwelling near Water Lane, off Fleet Street, known as “Blood Bowl house” named “from the various scenes of blood that were almost daily exhibited, and where there seldom passed a month without the commission of a murder.”

In perhaps less sensational a context, a city recorder of the seventeenth century gave evidence of a raid upon Watton’s alehouse at Smart’s Key beside Billingsgate. The tavern was in reality a school “set upp to learne younge boys to cutt purses.” Pockets and purses were hung upon a line with “hawkes bells” or “sacring bells” attached to them; if a child could remove a coin or counter without setting off the bell “he was adjudged a judiciall Nypper.” During the following century there was another such school in Smithfield, where a tavern-keeper taught children how to pick pockets, to pilfer from shops by crawling through their wooden hatches, and to break into buildings by a simple expedient: they pretended to be asleep against the wall while all the time they were actively chipping away at the bricks and mortar until a hole had been breached.

It is curious, in this description of crime, that the criminals themselves adopted the terminology of “law.” “Cheating law” was the term for playing with false dice, “versing law” the art of passing counterfeit coin and “tigging law” that of cutting purses. It was the alternative law of “low” London.

Yet new crimes could also evolve. In the seventeenth century, for example, highway robbery became known as “high law.” The age of coaches meant also the age of coach theft, and in the last days of 1699 John Evelyn wrote: “This week robberies were committed between the many lights which were fixed between London and Kensington on both sides, and while coaches and travellers were passing.” Between flaring lights along the high road, there was at night absolute darkness where the robbers could easily strike. We may even hear them talking in the pages of The London Hanged. One drover, Edward Smith, suggested to a companion that they “go upon the Accompt” (take up highway robbery). “Let us enter into Articles to have no others than ourselves concerned for the future.” And if they were caught? There is an account of one thief taken and led back to London-“he was very unruly, pulling the horse about, making Motions with his Hands at every Body that came near him, as if he was firing a Pistol, crying Phoo!” Hounslow Heath and Turnham Green, Marylebone and Tottenham Court Road, were particular areas of danger for the unwary. These were the places for footpad robberies, known to the criminal fraternity as “low Tobies.” It became customary in the early eighteenth century for travellers into London to gather in bands for mutual protection, beginning their perilous journey only on the sounding of a bell; at night they would also be accompanied by link-boys carrying lights.

The same flaring torches were necessary for journeys within the city itself. “A gentleman was stopt in Holborn about twelve at night by two footpads, who on the gentleman’s making resistance shot him dead and then robbed him … One Richard Watson, tollman of Marybone turnpike, was found barbarously murdered in his toll-house.” A female who served in a public house in Marylebone is quoted in Charles Knight’s London as having “often wondered why I have escaped without wounds or blows from the gentlemen of the pad, who are numerous and frequent in their evening patroles through these fields; and my march extended as far as Long Acre, by which means I was obliged to pass through the thickest of them.” A commentator in the same volume has remarked that the citizens of London “looked upon the worshipful company of thieves much in the same way that settlers in a new country regard the wild beasts prowling in the forests around them.”

The “judiciall Nyppers” of one period had migrated into another, and it was reported that eighteenth-century London “swarms with pickpockets, as daring as they are subtile and cunning.” They stole under the very gibbet from which they might one day be suspended and “there never is any execution without handkerchiefs and other articles being stolen.” If they were caught in the act, by Londoners themselves, they were dragged to the nearest well or fountain “and dipped in the water till nearly drowned.” If they were taken up by the authorities, a more severe penalty was imposed. By the middle of the eighteenth century the number of offences, for which men and women could be hanged had risen from 80 to over 350. Yet this may not have been a powerful deterrent. A few years later, in a Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis, it was reported that “115,000 persons in London were regularly engaged in criminal pursuits.” This would amount to one-seventh of the population. So, in 1774, it was recorded by the Gentleman’s Magazine that “The papers are filled with robberies and breaking of houses, and with the recital of the cruelties committed by the robbers, greater than ever before.” We may surmise, therefore, that in a period of affluence and “conspicuous” wealth, crimes against property were as numerous as crimes against people-and this despite the fact that the larger the sum involved in theft or cheat, the greater the possibility of being hanged.

Peter Linebaugh has scrutinised the statistics for hanging all through the eighteenth century, and has arrived at interesting conclusions. Those born in London tended to hang in their early twenties, an earlier age than that of immigrants to the city. The main trades of those who reached the scaffold were butchers, weavers and shoe-makers. There was a pronounced association between butchers and highway robbers (Dick Turpin himself had been apprentice to a butcher). Cultural and sociological interpretations of this correspondence have been made, but, in general terms, the butchers of the city were always known for their boisterous, individualistic and sometimes violent nature. Certainly they were the most prominent of all London tradesmen, and one foreign visitor to London reported that it was “a marvel to see such quantities of butchers shops in all the parishes, the streets being full of them in every direction.” They were often the leaders of their little communities, too; those of Clare Market, for example, worked and dwelled among the patent theatres of the area and were described as “the arbiters of the galleries, the leaders of theatrical rows, the musicians at actresses’ marriages, the chief mourners at players’ funerals.” They were also leaders of the community in times of scarcity and disorder. It was reported of one violent assault, for example, that “The Buttchers have begun the way to all the rest, for within this toe days they all did rise upon the exise man.” It is not inconsistent, then, that they or their apprentices should be at the very forefront of adventurous or desperate crime.

In 1751 Henry Fielding published his Inquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, and a year later the Murder Act added a further terror to death by declaring that the bodies of the hanged should be publicly dissected by surgeons and anatomists. A measure such as this may have been prompted by a perceived increase in crime, but it was also a direct product of panic fear among the gullible and the anxious.

London has always been the centre of panic, and of rumour. At the end of the twentieth century, for example, an official survey reported that “fear of crime is a social problem in itself” with a significantly higher proportion of Londoners-as opposed to those living elsewhere-feeling unsafe both in their dwellings and in the streets. They might have been echoing the sentiments of a Londoner in 1816 who stated that “from the author’s own experience in almost every part of Europe … he can mention no place so full of peril as the environs of London.” Of course it was then still a relatively compact and enclosed city-the crucial intensity of crime has in fact diminished with London’s growth-and indeed its criminals seem to have borrowed their habits and demeanour from its earlier eighteenth-century life.

The “low Toby” or footpad was known in the early nineteenth century, for example, as a “Rampsman” but the violent assault had not changed. The house-breaker of this period was called a “Cracksman,” while a “Bug Hunter” was one who picked the pockets of drunks; a “Snoozer” was one who booked into a hotel before robbing its guests, while an “Area Sneak” called at kitchen doors in the hope of finding them open and unattended. These were the crimes typical of the city, and their perpetrators were generally thieves, pickpockets, burglars, and those fraudulent merchants and tricksters who took advantage of the gullibility or credulousness of the passing transient crowd.

Although it would be going too far to say that “the man who knew his London-could recognise each type by his dress and manner,” as Thomas Burke puts it in The Streets of London, criminals were still a particular and distinguishable element of city life until the middle of the nineteenth century. Their language, too, like that of the “abraham men” of a previous century, was itself pronounced and peculiar-“Stow that … pottering about on the sneak, flimping or smashing a little … If I’m nailed it’s a lifer.” This existence had its own kind of music also. A villain was known as a “sharp” and his victim a “flat.”

It was reported, in 1867, that this “criminal class” amounted to 16,000. Yet the streets were by then safer than they had ever been. Five years before there had been an outbreak of “garrotting,” the popular name for violent robberies, but that had been effectively suppressed by means of equally violent floggings. It was no longer possible to claim, as the Duke of Wellington had done forty years before, that “the principal streets of London” were “in the nightly possession of drunken women and vagabonds” as well as “organised gangs of thieves.” Where in previous periods of the city’s history the “vagabonds” and “thieves” were scattered indiscriminately in various “islands” off the main thoroughfares, they had by the middle of the nineteenth century retreated into various quarters on the fringes of the now more civilised metropolis. They were often located in the eastern suburbs or, as it soon became known, the “East End.” That area, some sixteen years before “Jack” rendered the region of Whitechapel notorious, was reputed to be a place of thieves’ kitchens and ragged public houses “charged with the unmistakable, overpowering damp and mouldy odour” attendant upon street crime. In Bethnal Green, too, there were pubs and houses which acted as “a convenient and secluded exchange and house of call” filled with “dippers” and “broads” and “welshers.” These are the words of Arthur Morrison, writing A Child of the Jago at the end of the nineteenth century when once more the slang or “patter” had changed in order ever more colourfully to depict the familiar crimes of London. A “house of call,” like “exchange,” was in fact a word used to describe a dealing room of city business. So, in mockery as well as implicit deference, the terminology of financial and commercial London was parodied by the more secretive, if more notorious, speculators in urban goods.

In Bethnal Green and its environs, Morrison noticed the presence of the most successful late nineteenth-century criminals who belonged to “the High Mobs” or, as one resident put it, “’Igh mob. ’Oohs. Toffs.” Morrison was in fact depicting a traditional London pursuit-that of an organised gang, generally of more than usually skilful or vicious practitioners of the criminal arts, with one or two leaders. The “mob” or gang controlled a certain area of the city or certain specific activities. Dick Turpin led “the Essex Gang” of thieves and smugglers in the 1730s; while a decade earlier such gifted individuals as Jonathan Wild could dominate the general course of London crime. But, as the city expanded, it became divided into separate territories controlled by specific gangs.

In the nineteenth century, rival gangs vied for territory and for influence. In the early twentieth century, east London once again became the scene of murderous conflict. The opposition of the “Harding Gang” and the “Bogard Gang” culminated in a violent confrontation in the Bluecoat Boy public house in Bishopsgate. In the 1920s and 1930s the crime families of the Sabinis and Cortesis fought against each other in the streets of Clerkenwell, over the control of clubs and racetracks, while in the next decade the White family of Islington were challenged by Billy Hill and his “heavy mob” from Seven Dials.

There were other criminal fraternities, known variously as “the Elephant Gang,” “the Angel Gang” and “the Titanic Gang.” These dealt in organised shoplifting or “smash-and-grab” raids as well as the general business of drugs, prostitution and “protection” racketeering. In the late 1950s and 1960s the Kray brothers of the East End, and the Richardsons from “over the water” in the southern suburbs, controlled their respective areas with notable success. In the Krays’ own territory, “the popular admiration for great thieves,” to use a phrase of the mid-nineteenth century, had never seriously abated. In 1995, the funeral procession for Ronnie Kray, along Bethnal Green Road and Vallance Road, was a great social event; as Iain Sinclair wrote of the East End in Lights Out for the Territory, “no other strata of society has such a sense of tradition.” The memories of grand criminality in that neighbourhood go back to Turpin’s “Essex Gang” and beyond.

It is hard to say that any aspect of crime or criminal behaviour is altogether new. “Smash and grab” became popular, for example, in the 1940s and 1950s although it did not originate then; there are records of that offence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The gangs of the Krays and the Richardsons have now been displaced by those with other ethnic origins, the Jamaican “Yardie” and Chinese “Triad” groups, for example, working their own particular areas. In the 1990s, as the trade in drugs such as heroin, khat, crack and ecstasy became ever more lucrative, gang elements from Nigeria, Turkey and Colombia participated in the city’s new criminal activity. The “Yardies” are considered to be, in the twenty-first century, responsible for the largest proportion of killings in a city where murder is perpetual. Murder, to paraphrase Thomas de Quincey, is one of London’s fine arts.

CHAPTER 28. Horrible Murder

It has come in many different forms. In the eighteenth century it was often remarked that the noses of the victims were bitten off during the act of strangling. Strangulation and stabbing were popular at the end of that century, succeeded in the early nineteenth century by slashed throats and clubbing; at the end of the nineteenth century poison and various forms of mutilation or hacking to death became more favoured.

Yet the element of mystery remains perhaps the most interesting and suggestive aspect of the London murder, as if the city itself might have taken part in the crime. One of the unsolved murders of the seventeenth century, in an age when all were inured to death, concerned a man known variously as Edmund Berry Godfrey or Edmunsbury Godfrey. He was found in 1678 upon what is now known as Primrose Hill, with his own sword thrust through his body but “no blood was on his clothes or about him” and “his shoes were clean.” He had also been strangled, and his neck broken; when his clothes were taken off, his breast was found to be “all over marked with bruises.” Another curious element lay in the fact that “there were many drops of white wax lights on his breeches.” A Catholic plot was suspected and, on concocted evidence, three members of the royal court at Somerset House were arrested and executed; their names were Green, Berry and Hill. The earliest name of Primrose Hill, where the body was found, was Greenberry Hill. The real murderers were never discovered, but it would seem that the topography of London itself played a fortuitous if malign part.

One evening at nine o’clock, in Cannon Street in the spring of 1866, Sarah Millson went downstairs to answer the street-bell. An hour later a neighbour who lived above her discovered her body at the bottom of the stairs. She had been killed by a number of deep wounds to the head but “her shoes had been taken off and were lying on a table in the hall”; there was no blood upon them. The gaslight had been quietly extinguished after the murder, presumably in order to save expense. The neighbour opened the street door to find help, and saw a woman on the doorstep apparently shielding herself against the heavy rain which was then falling. She was asked for assistance but moved away, saying, “Oh! dear no; I can’t come in.” The murderer was never apprehended, but the characteristics of London mystery are here found in almost emblematic detail-the lodging house in Cannon Street, the heavy rain, the gaslight, the perfectly cleaned shoes. The strange woman shielding herself from the rain only contributes to the air of intimacy and darkness that characterises this crime. Once more it is as if the spirit or atmosphere of the city itself played its part.

That is why the murders committed by “Jack the Ripper” between August and November 1888 are an enduring aspect of London myth, with the areas of Spitalfields and Whitechapel as the dark accomplices of the crimes. The newspaper accounts of “Jack’s” murders were directly responsible for parliamentary inquiries into the poverty of these neighbourhoods, and of the “East End” in general; in that sense, charity and social provision followed hard upon the heels of monstrous death. But in a more elusive way the streets and houses of that vicinity became identified with the murders themselves, almost to the extent that they seemed to share the guilt. One scholarly account by Colin Wilson refers to the “secrets” of a room in the Ten Bells public house of the neighbourhood, in Commercial Street, which suggests that the walls and interiors of the then impoverished streets were the killer’s confessional. There are contemporary reports of the panic engendered by the Whitechapel killings. M.V. Hughes, author of A London Girl of the Eighties, has written that “No one can believe now how terrified and unbalanced we all were by his murders.” This is recorded by one who lived in the west of London, many miles from the vicinity, and she adds: “One can only dimly imagine what the terror must have been in those acres of narrow streets where the inhabitants knew the murderer to be lurking.” It is testimony to the power of urban suggestion, and to the peculiar quality of late Victorian London, that popular belief lent “a quality of the supernatural to the work.” The essential paganism of London here reasserts itself. Even as the murders were continuing, the books and pamphlets began to appear, among them The Mysteries of the East End, The Curse Upon Mitre Square, Jack the Ripper: Or the Crimes of London, London’s Ghastly Mystery. The place becomes the central interest, therefore, and soon after the crimes sightseers were flocking through Berners Street and George Yard and Flower and Dean Street; a Whitechapel “peep-show” even provided wax figures of the victims for the delectation of the spectators. Such is the force of the area, and of its crimes, that several daily tours are still organised- mainly for foreign visitors-around the Ten Bells public house and the adjacent streets.

The connection between London and murder is, then, a permanent one. Martin Fido, author of The Murder Guide to London, states that more “than half the memorable murders of Britain have happened in London,” with the prevalence of certain killings within certain areas. Murder may appear “respectable” in Camberwell, while brutal in Brixton; a litany of cut throats in nineteenth-century London is followed by a list of female poisoners. Yet, as the same narrator has pointed out, “there has been too much murder in London for a comprehensive listing.”

There are episodes and incidents, however, which remain emblematic, and it is noticeable that certain streets or areas come to identify the crimes. There were “the Turner Street murders” and the “Ratcliffe Highway murders,” for example, the last of which in 1827 prompted de Quincey’s memorable essay on “The Fine Art of Murder.” He begins his account of a series of killings, “the most superb of the century by many degrees,” with an invocation of Ratcliffe Highway itself as “a most chaotic quarter of eastern or nautical London” and an area of “manifold ruffianism.” An entire family had been found murdered in a shop beside the highway, in the most gruesome circumstances; less than three weeks later in New Gravel Lane, very close to that highway, a man called out “They are murdering people in the house!” Seven citizens altogether, including two children and one infant, had been dispatched within eight days. One of the killers, John Williams, committed suicide in his cell within Coldbath Fields Prison at Clerkenwell; his dead body, together with the bloody hammer and chisel which had been the means of his crimes, were paraded past the houses where he had assisted in the murders. He was then buried beneath the crossroads of Back Lane and Cannon Street Road or, as de Quincey puts it, “in the centre of a quadrivium or conflux of four roads, with a stake driven through his heart. And over him drives for ever the uproar of unresting London.” So Williams became part of London; having marked a track through a specific locality, his own name was buried in the urban mythology surrounding “the Ratcliffe Highway murders.” He became instead the city’s sacred victim, to be interred in a formalised and ritualistic manner. Some hundred years later workmen, digging up the territory, found his “mouldering remains”; it is appropriate that his bones were then shared out in the area as relics. His skull, for example, was granted to the owner of a public house still to be seen on the corner of the fatal crossroads.

Other roads and streets can prove to be injurious. Dorset Street was the site of Mary Kelly’s murder in the winter of 1888, at the hands of “Jack”; it reclaimed its original name of Duval Street after this peculiarly savage crime, as a way of preserving anonymity, only to be the site of a fatal shooting in 1960. In both cases no murderer was ever convicted.

There are many accounts of such anonymous killers, wandering through crowds and crowded thoroughfares, concealing a knife or some other fatal instrument. It is a true image of the city. The remarks of the killers have on occasion been recorded. “Damn her! Dip her again and finish her … Yours to a cinder … Get the knives out!” The streets themselves then become the object of fascinated enquiry. We read, for example, in The Murder Guide to London that the “murder victim in Baroness Orczy’s Lady Molly of Scotland Yard, had his office in Lombard Street. In Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone the gem was pledged to a banker in Lombard Street.” An actual police station in Wood Street has been used as an imaginative location by several writers of mysteries, and Edgar Wallace turned All Hallows by the Tower into “St. Agnes on Powder Hill.” In a city where spectacle and theatre become an intimate part of ordinary reality, fact and imagination can be strangely mingled.

A complex of streets can also become haunted by crime, so that Martin Fido, himself an eminent criminologist, writes of “the dense murder area of Islington” located “in the back streets behind Upper Street and the City Road”; in this neighbourhood the sister of Charles Lamb killed her mother in the autumn of 1796, only a few yards from the room where Joe Orton was murdered by his lover in 1967. In the early decades of the twentieth century there were killings known generically as the “North London murders,” although they were in fact separately conducted by Hawley Harvey Crippen and Frederick Seddon.

The list of London murderers is long indeed. Catherine Hayes, proprietress of a tavern called the Gentleman In Trouble, severed her husband’s head in the spring of 1726 and tossed it into the Thames before strewing other parts of the corpse all over London. The head was recovered and placed upon a pole in a city churchyard, where eventually it was recognised. Mrs. Hayes was committed for trial and sentenced to death, earning the further distinction of being one of the last women ever to be burned at Tyburn.

Thomas Henry Hocker, described by an investigating policeman as “a fellow in a long black cloak,” was seen springing from behind some trees in Belsize Lane on a February evening in 1845. Singing to himself, he walked past the scene of the murder he had just committed and, still undiscovered, conversed with the policeman who had found the body. “It is a nasty job,” he said and then took hold of the dead man’s hand. “This site was his own handiwork,” as The Chronicles of Newgate puts it, “yet he could not overcome the strange fascination it had for him, and remained by the side of the corpse until the stretcher came.”

One of the most celebrated of London’s mass murderers was John Reginald Christie, whose house at 10 Rillington Place itself became so notorious that the name of the street was changed. Eventually the house was itself torn down, after harbouring a variety of transient lodgers. Extant photographs reveal a characteristic London location. It was a typical example of a Notting Hill tenement in the early 1950s with tattered curtains, cracked and badly stained plaster, bricks dark with soot. Murder, in such a context, can be concealed.

There is another aspect of London killings to be fathomed in the career of Dennis Nilsen who, while living in Muswell Hill and Cricklewood during the late 1970s and early 1980s, murdered and dismembered many young victims. The details of the lives of these murdered men may no longer seem of much significance except that, in the words of one report, “few of them were missed when they disappeared.” This is the context for many London murders, where the isolation and anonymity of strangers passing through the city leave them peculiarly defenceless to the depredations of an urban killer. One of Nilsen’s victims, for example, was a “down-and-out” whom he had met at the crossroads by the church of St. Giles-in-the-Fields; Nilsen, apparently “horrified by his emaciated condition,” killed him and burned him in the garden of his house in Melrose Avenue. Another victim was a young “skinhead” who had inscribed graffiti upon his own body, among them a dotted line around his neck together with the words, “cut here.” Here in these brutal and brutalising circumstances the darker face of London seems to emerge.

All that was known of Elizabeth Price, condemned to death for theft in 1712, was that she “had follow’d the Business of picking up Rags and Cinders and at other times that of selling Fruit and Oysters, crying Hot Pudding and Grey Pears in the Streets.” We read of “Mary Cut-and-Come-Again” who, when arrested by the watchmen, took out her breasts “and spurted the milk in the fellows’ faces, and said, damn your eyes, What do you want to take my life away?” That spirit of contempt against the forces of law and order is characteristic of London life. It is connected, too, with a buoyant paganism, as in the case of a domestic servant charged with murder who was reported to take “a mighty disgust at Things of Religion.” In similar spirit Ann Mudd, who was convicted of murdering her husband, was equally defiant. “Why, said she, I stabb’d him in the Back with a Knife for Funn.” She spent her last hours singing obscene songs in the condemned cell.

The Whitechapel murders encouraged the earliest use of police photographs recording “the scene of the crime,” while a murder in Cecil Court off St. Martin’s Lane, in 1961, resulted in the first success of the Identikit picture. The device of placing the head of Catherine Hayes’s husband upon a stake, as a means of identification, has had some interesting successors. The essential point remains that crime, and in particular murder, enlivens the urban populace. That is why, in London mythology, the greatest heroes are often the greatest criminals.

CHAPTER 29. London’s Opera

The exploits of Jack Sheppard proved how intense could be the excitement aroused in London by the adventures of a criminal. The most notable painter of the day, Sir James Thornhill, visited him in 1724 in order to complete a portrait which was then sold to the public as a mezzotint.

Nine years later, in 1732, Thornhill’s son-in-law, William Hogarth, made a similar journey to Newgate; here he sketched another famous malefactor, Sarah Malcolm, herself held in the condemned cell. She had strangled two elderly parties, and then cut the throat of their maid, the recklessness of the crimes lending her notoriety among the London public. She was very young-only twenty-two-and very composed. At her trial she declared the blood on her shift to be the issue of menstruation rather than of murder and, after the sentence of death had been pronounced upon her, confessed that she was a Roman Catholic. Hogarth painted her sitting in her cell, her rosary beads before her, and announced in the public press that his print would be ready within two days. It was an advertisement of his skill as well as a tribute to the notoriety of his subject. In her biography of Hogarth, Jenny Uglow describes how Sarah arrived at her hanging, by the scene of her crimes according to custom, “neatly dressed in a crape mourning hood, holding up her head in the cart with an air, and looking as if she was painted.” After she had been cut down, it was reported that there was “among the rest a gentleman in deep mourning, who kissed her, and gave the people half a crown.”

Here are all the elements of drama and intrigue which rendered memorable such rituals of crime and punishment in London. Hogarth himself could not resist the lineaments of the condemned. When in 1761 Theodore Gardelle was about to be hanged at the corner of Panton Street and the Haymarket, Hogarth captured his countenance of despair “with a few swift strokes.”

It is of some interest, then, that in February 1728 Hogarth attended and enjoyed The Beggar’s Opera by John Gay. In this drama the “low” criminal life of London is presented in bright theatrical guise. A true London production, part burlesque and part burletta, it was a parody of fashionable Italian opera, as well as a satire upon governmental cabal. With its main characters of Macheath, a highwayman, and Peachum, a receiver of stolen goods, it aspired to be a spirited representation of the London criminal world appropriately completed by the portrait of Lockit, the keeper of Newgate.

The dramatic scenes within Newgate itself confirm two of the city’s most permanent images: the world as a stage and the world as a prison. There are other aspects of London life within the drama. Its constant references to commerce and to currency, together with its tendency “to treat people and relationships in commodity terms” according to John Gay’s latest and best biographer, David Nokes, mark the powerful and possibly corrupting atmosphere of trade and finance which lingers over all the activities of the city. How else is it possible that the characters from the London streets should reach so casually and easily for “mercantile metaphors”? These people “are invariably valued in trading terms, that is, according to how much may be ‘got’ by them.” Here is the true spirit of city commerce, but it has an interesting and significant ramification. This trading activity is pursued by both “high” and “low,” by courtiers as well as highwaymen, so that the gaiety and exuberance of the “opera” are in part based upon its implicit denial of all distinctions of rank and class. It is the egalitarian-one might almost say, antinomian-instinct of the London populace, represented upon the stage in a colourful and spirited form.

In turn, Gay himself was accused of glamorising thieves and receivers of stolen goods, as if in the act of equalising the activities of the beggars and their “betters” he was somehow lending vulgar distinction to the more disreputable elements of London life. It was reported by one contemporary moralist that “several thieves and street robbers confessed in Newgate that they raised their courage at the playhouse by the songs of their hero Macheath, before they sallied forth in their desperate nocturnal exploits.” If that was indeed the case, then we see in the fervent and fevered context of London that street life feels no compunction in taking on the lineaments of dramatic art.

That is the significance of Hogarth’s admiration for The Beggar’s Opera. This quintessentially London artist saw the possibility of channelling his own genius through it. He painted the same scene from the play on six separate occasions, in the process, according to Jenny Uglow, “bursting into life as a true painter.” It is not hard to understand how this intense depiction of London life invigorated and animated the artist, since in his subsequent work he reveals his own vital engagement with the scenic possibilities of street life. In fact he creates his own tradition of London villains, in the characterisation of “Tom Nero” in The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751) and “Thomas Idle” in the Industry and Idleness series (1747); both end as murderers, suspended on the gallows, but the course of their fatal careers is given a lurid and sensational aspect by being placed within the context of the streets and “low” haunts of the city.

Everything there conspires to engender dreadful deeds. In The Four Stages of Cruelty the life of the city itself is the true engine of that cruelty; as Hogarth put it in his disquisition on these prints, the work was done “in hopes of preventing in some degree that cruel treatment of poor Animals which makes the streets of London more disagreeable to the human mind, than any thing what ever, the very describing of which gives pain.” In one scene outside Thavies Inn coffee house in Holborn, along the main route to Smithfield from the rural areas of Islington and Marylebone, the driver of cab number twenty-four is mercilessly belabouring his horse while a sheep is being clubbed to death in the foreground; a child unnoticed falls under the wheel of a brewer’s cart while on the wall there is a poster advertising a cock-fight.

At the execution of Thomas Idle, the drunken and violent rabble beneath the gallows act as a mirror of his existence and are an emblem of it. Recognisable figures are also part of the Tyburn crowd-Tiddy Doll, the eccentric seller of gingerbread, Mother Douglas, the fat and drunken procuress, and, on the gallows itself, half-witted “Funny Joe” who amused the populace at executions with his jokes and speeches. A suggestive biblical motto, from Proverbs, at the bottom of the print announces that “then they shall call upon God, but he will not answer.” Hogarth is depicting a pagan society from which these criminals have ineluctably emerged.

· · ·

If John Gay was intent upon turning thieves or receivers into dramatic heroes or characters, then he was himself following a distinguished London tradition. In the four years before The Beggar’s Opera had appeared on stage there had been other theatrical representations of Harlequin Sheppard and A Match in Newgate, the former suggesting a remarkable link between pantomime and crime. More than a century earlier Beaumont and Fletcher, in The Beggar’s Bush, had given dramatic currency to the tricks and slang of London criminals-again with the powerful insinuation that they were behaving no worse than those “betters” who ruled them. In 1687 Marcellus Laroon similarly depicted in elegant style and form “the Squire of Alsatia,” a notorious thief and confidence man, called “Bully” Dawson, who is nevertheless posed in Laroon’s print in the manner of a great fop and gentleman. The theatrical manner, and disguise, are emblematic of the contrasts and variety of the streets. All these various works manifest in turn a strange fascination for the life of the vagrant and the outcast, as if the conditions of London might propel anyone into a state of need or outlawry. Why else should the streets of London so haunt Hogarth’s own imagination?

The tradition continued in the sensational accounts of the lives of famous criminals, whose exploits were every bit as melodramatic as the characters upon the stage. “You cannot conceive,” wrote Horace Walpole in the latter part of the eighteenth century, “the ridiculous rage there is for going to Newgate, the prints that are published of the malefactors, and the memoirs of their lives set forth with as much parade as Marshal Turenne’s.” Swift satirised that “rage” some decades earlier with his description of “Tom Clinch” being driven to the scaffold:

The maids to the doors and the balconies ran,

And said, “Lack-a-day! he’s a proper young man.”

In the nineteenth century an essay was written on “Popular Admiration for Great Thieves,” in which it is noted that in the previous century Englishmen were no less “vain in boasting of the success of their highwaymen than of the bravery of their troops.” Hence the widespread popularity of The Newgate Calendar, the general title given to a succession of books which began to emerge at the end of the eighteenth century; the first was The Malefactor’s Register or New Newgate and Tyburn Calendar, and its popularity was such that it can be compared to Foxe’s Book of Martyrs in the mid-sixteenth century or perhaps the ubiquitous legends about saints of the medieval period. It might even be compared to the vogue for fairy tales emerging in the early nineteenth century. The ambiguity of the genre is further compounded by the school of the “Newgate novel” which emerged in the same period, with such celebrated practitioners as Harrison Ainsworth and Bulwer Lytton. It is perhaps significant that in Newgate itself the inmates were addicted to “light literature … novels, flash songs, plays, books.” Everyone was copying everyone else.

The content of these various publications was equally ambiguous, hovering somewhere between celebration and condemnation. In similar fashion skill and cunning, disguise and stratagem, were commonly admired as the dramatic expedients of street life. There was the infamous “Little Casey,” a nine-year-old pickpocket whose skills made him the wonder of late 1740s London. There was Mary Young, known as Jenny Diver, who practised in the same streets some forty years before; she would dress up as a pregnant woman and, hiding a pair of artificial arms and hands beneath her dress, opened pockets and purses with ease. She, in turn, was celebrated by the London populace for her “skills of timing, disguise, wit and dissimulation.”

At a later date there emerged Charles Price or “Old Patch”; he committed sophisticated forgeries, and passed off his bank-notes in a variety of elaborate disguises. He was a “compact middle-aged man” but typically would dress as an infirm and aged Londoner, wearing “a long black camlet cloak, with a broad cape fastened up close to his chin.” He had a large “broad-brimmed slouch hat, often green spectacles or a green shade.” He dressed up, in other words, as the “old man” of stage comedy.

In the late nineteenth century Charles Peace was also celebrated as a master of disguise and manipulation; the son of a file-maker, he conducted an ordinary life as a suburban householder variously in Lambeth and in Peck-ham. Yet “by shooting forward his lower jaw he could entirely alter his appearance. He had been a one-armed man, the live limb being concealed beneath his clothes … The police declared that he could so change himself, even without material disguises, that he was unrecognisable.” He even designed a folding ladder eight feet long which folded down to a sixth of that length, fifteen inches, and could be concealed under the arm. He had once been a street musician and had a great love for fiddles; he even contrived to steal them, although on occasions they furnished an awkward addition to his “swag.” After his death on the scaffold, his collection of instruments was put up for auction. Yet in a city of character and spectacle, it was his ability to disguise himself which exerted the most fascination. In the “Black Museum” of Scotland Yard there used to be exhibited the pair of blue goggles “he was accustomed to wear in his favourite character of eccentric old philosopher.”

He was also a callous criminal, who murdered anyone who got in his way, and so the celebration of disguise is tempered by disgust at the nature of his crimes. This indeed was a feature of The Newgate Calendar itself, as in “A Narrative of the horrid Cruelties of Elizabeth Brownrigg on her Apprentices.” She was a midwife chosen by the overseers of the poor of St. Dunstan’s parish “to take care of the poor women who were taken in labour in the workhouse.” She had several penniless girls working as her servants, at her house in Fleur-de-lis Court off Fleet Street, and she systematically tortured, abused and killed them. As she was led to her death, in the autumn of 1767, the London mob shouted out that “she would go to hell” and that “the devil would fetch her.” Her body was anatomised, and her skeleton displayed in a niche of Surgeon’s Hall.

After such events came the trade in “Last Dying Confessions.” Some were genuinely composed by the felons themselves-who often took great delight in reading their “Last Speeches” in their cells-but customarily it was the “Ordinary” or religious minister of Newgate who wrote what were essentially morbid and moralistic texts. The city then became a stage upon which were presented spectacles for the delight and terror of the urban audience.

There is a short story by Arthur Conan Doyle concerning Sherlock Holmes’s exposure of what were then known as “fraudulent mendicants.” In “The Man with the Twisted Lip” Neville St. Clair, a prosperous gentleman living in the suburbs of Kent, travelled to his business in the City every morning and returned on the five fourteen from Cannon Street each evening. It transpired, however, that he had secret lodgings in Upper Swandam Lane, a “vile alley” to the east of London Bridge, where he dressed up as a “sinister cripple” called Hugh Boone who was well known as a match-seller in Threadneedle Street with his “shock of orange hair, a pale face disfigured by a horrible scar.” This tale was published in 1892, as part of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Twelve years later there was a beggar who sold matches in Bishopsgate; he was well known in the vicinity, since he was “paralysed … He could be seen dragging himself painfully along the gutter, his head hanging to one side, all his limbs trembled violently, one foot dragged behind him and his right arm limp, withered and useless. To complete the terrible picture his face was most horribly distorted.” This account was written by a chief detective inspector of the City police force, Ernest Nicholls, in Crime within the Square Mile. In the autumn of 1904 a young detective constable from that force decided to “tail” the match-seller; the policeman discovered that the beggar would drag his paralysed body into Crosby Square and then “make his exit at another corner as a nimble young man.” He turned out to be a gentleman, by the name of Cecil Brown Smith, who lived in “the genteel suburbs of Norwood” and who earned a prosperous living from the charity of those who passed him in Bishopsgate. It is a curious coincidence, if no more, and may be accounted as one of the many strange coincidences which life in the city creates.

In the same book of police cases, there is the story of a bloodstained razor being discovered behind the seat of a bus; the young man who found the blade hesitated a few days before giving it to the police, because some years before he himself had slashed the throat of his “sweetheart” with just such a murder weapon. It is as if the city itself brought forth evidence from its own history. The stories of the mendicant beggars may imply that Cecil Brown Smith had read Conan Doyle’s story of London vagrancy, and had decided to bring it to life; or it may be that certain writers are able to divine a particular pattern of activity within the city.

In any case that connection of fact and fiction, in the realm of crime, was not wholly lost in the twentieth century. Tommy Steele played Jack Sheppard in Where’s Jack, Phil Collins was “Buster” Edwards in Buster, Roger Daltrey was John McVicar in McVicar and two performers from Spandau Ballet enacted the Kray brothers in The Krays. The tradition of The Beggar’s Bush and The Beggar’s Opera continues.

CHAPTER 30

Raw Lobsters and Others

If villains become heroes, it has been the fate of policemen to become figures of fun. Shakespeare satirised Dogberry, the constable in Much Ado About Nothing, in what was already a long tradition of city humour at the expense of its guardians.

At first “the watch,” as the police forces were called for many centuries, were literally watchers upon the walls of London. In a document of 1312 it is stipulated that “two men of the watch, well and fittingly armed, be at all hours of the day ready at the gate, within or without, down below, to make answer to such persons as shall come on great horses, or with arms, to enter the City.” But what of the enemy within? The “good men” of each ward were by custom responsible for maintaining order, but in 1285 an informal system of mutual protection was supplanted by the establishment of a public “watch” comprising the householders of each precinct under the jurisdiction of a constable. Each householder, when not assuming the offices of beadle, constable or scavenger, had to serve as part of the watch operating under the rules of “hue and cry.” So we hear of unruly apprentices being chased, and “nightwalkers” arrested. There are constant descriptions of roreres-roarers-who drink and gamble and beat people in the streets. These are taken up, locked up, and brought before the city magistrates the following morning.

To act as a member of the watch was considered a public duty, but it became customary for the hard-pressed householder to hire another to take his place. Those who took the job were generally of a low calibre, however; hence the description of the London watch made up of old men “chosen from the dregs of the people; who have no other arms but a lanthorn and a pole; who patrol the streets, crying the hour every time the clock strikes.” We also have the watch organised by Constable Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing: “You are thought here to be the most senseless and fit man for the constable of the watch; therefore bear you the lantern.” In the 1730s a Watch Act was introduced to regularise the situation; a system of payment out of the rates was supposed to encourage the employment of better watchmen, in some cases by hiring disbanded soldiers or sailors rather than the old pensioners of the parish, but it seems to have made little difference. There is a mid-nineteenth-century photograph of William Anthony, one of the last of the London watch, grasping a pole in his right hand and a lantern in his left. He is wearing the peculiar broad-brimmed hat and greatcoat which marked his profession, and his expression hovers somewhere between sternness and imbecility.

They were known as “Charleys,” and were continually mocked. They patrolled certain streets and were supposed to act as guardians of property. “The first time this man goes on his rounds,” César de Saussure remarked in 1725, “he pushes the doors of the shops and houses with his stick to ascertain whether they are properly fastened, and if they are not he warns the proprietors.” He also awakened early any citizens “who have any journey to perform.” But the Charleys were not necessarily reliable. The report of one high constable, who made an unannounced visit to their various lock-ups and boxes, included remarks such as “called out ‘Watch!’ but could get no assistance … No constable on duty, found a watchman there at a great distance from his beat; from thence went to the night-cellar … and there found four of St. Clement’s watchmen drinking.” In the sixteenth century they were well known for “coming very late to the watch, sitting down in some common place of watching, wherein some falleth on sleep by reason of labour or much drinking before, or else nature requireth a rest in the night.” Three hundred years later they were still being reviled as old codgers “whose speed will keep pace with a snail, and the strength of whose arm would not be able to arrest an old washerwoman of fourscore returned from a hard day’s fag at the washtub.” The watchmen were in turn the targets of rowdy or drunken “bloods” or “bucks.” It was reported that a “watchman found dozing in his box in the intervals of going his rounds to utter his monotonous cry was apt to be overturned, box and all, and left to kick and struggle helplessly, like a turtle on its back, until assistance arrived.” The Charley was often assaulted by roarers, as he made his way through the dark streets.

It is unlikely, therefore, that London was well policed through the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries. The evidence suggests that the medieval concept of co-operation within ward and precinct prevailed for many hundreds of years; the citizens of London themselves ensured that their city was at least relatively safe, and an informal system of local justice prevailed. Pickpockets and prostitutes were ducked, as were fraudulent doctors or merchants. A cuckolded husband was given a “charivari” or scornful music of “tin cans, kettles and marrow bones.” It was a system of self-policing which must have been effective, if only because the calls for a city police force were so long rejected.

But the growth of London demanded more effective measures of control. In the 1750s Henry Fielding almost single-handedly established at Bow Street a police office which acted as a kind of headquarters for the suppression of London crime. His “thief takers” or “runners” were known as “Robin Redbreasts” or “Raw Lobsters” because of their red vests. Their numbers increased from six to seventy by the end of the century, while in 1792 seven other “police offices” were set up in various parts of the capital. The old City of London, protecting its medieval identity, had already established its own regular police patrols-the Day Police were formed in 1784, and were immediately identified with the blue greatcoat which they wore, according to Donald Rumbelow in The Triple Tree, to “lend them an air of distinction when they provided the prisoner’s escort on execution day.” From such unhappy origins did the conventional police uniform emerge. In 1798 the Thames Police Office was instituted to protect quays and warehouses as well as the newly built docks along the river; it was outside the usual system of ward and precinct. Seven years later a horse patrol was established to deter highwaymen.

There is a painting, dating from 1835, of a watch house. It is a two-storeyed building of early eighteenth-century construction, with shuttered windows on the ground floor. It is situated on the west side of the piazza, just beside the church of St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, and shows several blue-coated and black-hatted policemen milling about its iron gateway. There are potted plants on the top window ledge, and the words “Watch House” vividly painted on to the white brick façade. The impression is that of an establishment nicely suited to its surroundings, with the potted plants as a picturesque emblem of Covent Garden. But the appearance is, perhaps, deceptive. There are underground dungeons behind the Queen Anne façade, and the painting was completed some six years after the passing of a Metropolitan Police Act which profoundly altered the face of “law and order” in London.

The problem had been one of corruption. As so often happens in the city, those who were supposed to regulate criminal activity eventually began to condone or even encourage it. The Bow Street Runners were found to be receiving money and goods, while congregating with “villains” in taverns. This is illustrative of the city’s demotic as well as commercial spirit. It was with great difficulty, therefore, that Robert Peel was able to enforce proposals to establish an organised and centralised police force for London. It was considered by some to be a direct threat to the city’s liberty and, according to The Times, “an engine … invented by despotism.” Yet by excluding the old city police from his ministrations, and by regaling a Select Committee with episodes of street crime and statistics of vagrancy, he ensured the success of his proposals.

In 1829 the office of the “New Police” was established in a small Whitehall courtyard known as Great Scotland Yard, with a force of some three thousand men organised into seventeen divisions. These are the officers to be seen in the painting of the Covent Garden watch house, with their black top hats and blue “swallow-tail” coats. Not popular in the streets of London, they were known as “Blue Devils” or “Real Blue Collarers,” the latter an allusion to the depredations of cholera in the 1830s. When in 1832 an unarmed police constable was stabbed to death near Clerkenwell Green, the coroner’s jury recorded a verdict of “Justifiable Homicide.”

The police came from the same class and neighbourhoods as the policed; they were in that sense considered to be attempting to control and to arrest their own people. Like the “runner” before them they were also open to the charges of drunkenness and immorality. But such offences were punished with summary dismissal, with the result that, according to the London Encyclopaedia, “within four years fewer than one sixth of the original 3000 remained.” Those who survived were known as “crushers” or “coppers,” with the less vivid terms of “peelers” and “bobbies” coming from their association with Robert Peel. Those terms have been transmogrified into the modern “old Bill” which in turn seems to share some of the derogatory tone of the previous “Charleys.” There is in fact a continuity in these forms of address. In the middle of the twentieth century a policeman was often known as a “bluebottle” which is precisely the term that Doll Tearsheet hurls at a beadle in the second part of Henry IV-“I will have you as soundly swindg’d for this, you blew bottle Rogue.” Over more recent years they have also been known as “bogeys” or “rozzers,” “slops” or “narks,” “fuzz” or “pigs,” “creepers” or “flatties.” Yet historians of the London police have noted that within two or three decades Robert Peel’s force had acquired some degree of authority, and success, in its pursuit of crime.

Allusions to the demeanour and appearance of the individual police officer are often made in this context. “The habitual state of mind towards the police of those who live by crime is not so much dislike as unmitigated slavish terror,” one observer wrote. It was a way of suggesting that the darkness of London had been effectively dispelled by the “bull’s-eye” lamp of the constables on the beat. In 1853 a foreign traveller, Ventura de la Vega, noted their quasi-military uniform, with their blue coats “closed in the front with a straight collar on which a white number is embroidered” and their hats lined with steel. When necessary, he goes on, “they take from the back pocket of their coat a stick a half a yard long in the shape of a scepter, which has an iron ball on the tip.” It is never used, however, since “on hearing a policeman’s voice nobody answers and everybody obeys like a lamb.” So against the records of the violence and energy of the London crowd, we must place this evidence of almost instinctive obedience. Of course this is not to claim that every costermonger or street trader cowered in fright at the advancing uniform. The statistics of attacks upon the police, then and now, are testimony to that. But the observers are correct in one general respect. There does seem to be a critical point or mass at which the city somehow calms itself down and does not consume itself in general riot or insurrection. A level of instability is reached, only to retreat.

Other shapes emerge to touch upon the very nature of London even in the twenty-first century. It might be suggested, for example, that the “Fenian” explosion at Clerkenwell prison in 1867 was part of a pattern which manifested itself at the Canary Wharf explosion by the IRA in 1996. The Trafalgar Square riots of 1887 occupied the same space as the poll tax riots of March 1990. Complaints about police incompetence and corruption are as old as the police force itself. In 1998 an official investigation into the murder of a black teenager, Stephen Lawrence, revealed many instances of bad judgement and mismanagement; it also suggested implicit racial prejudice within the police force which has indeed been bedevilled by that charge for fifty years. Ever since the first “peeler” put on his blue “swallow-tail” coat, the London police have been the object of derision and suspicion. Yet those officers lingering outside the Covent Garden watch house would no doubt have been surprised to learn that their arm of investigation would be extended to almost eight hundred square miles with the number of offences, according to the latest statistical survey, rising to over 800,000. They would not have been quite so surprised to learn, however, that the “clear-up” rate was only 25 per cent.

CHAPTER 31

Thereby Hangs a Tale

There can be no calculation of the numbers of burnings and stonings, beheadings and drownings, hangings and crucifixions practised in Roman and Saxon times. But by the fourteenth century we have written reports of a condemned man wearing “a striped coat and white shoes, his head covered with a hood” and pinioned to a horse; the hangman rode behind him, the rope in his hand, while his “torturers” rode beside him mocking him all the way from Cheapside to Smithfield. This was a very public, and formalised, ritual of death making its way through the streets of London. Contrition and penance, however, were as important as any severity of punishment. The penalty for one convicted of insulting an alderman was to walk with bare feet, from the Guildhall into Cheapside and through Fleet Street, carrying a three-pound candle in the hands. This carrying of a lighted candle was a common punishment for assaults upon the authority of civic leaders or the Church, and it suggests an atonement to London itself.

The preferred punishment for false trading was the pillory. There the shopkeeper came literally face to face with those whom he had deceived. The convicted man was drawn upon a horse, facing the tail, and wore a fool’s cap; he might be preceded by a band of pipers and trumpeters. On arrival at the pillory-there was one in Cheapside and another in Cornhill- the goods deceitfully sold were burned before his face. If he had committed fraud, false coins or dice were suspended about his neck. If he had been found guilty of lying, a whetstone was hung around him, as if representing a sharpened tongue. The time of the punishment in the pillory was exactly measured. For spreading lying reports that foreign merchants were to be allowed the same rights as freemen-one hour. For selling cups of base metal rather than silver-two hours. For selling stale slices of cooked conger-one hour. Yet the timing was only one measure of pain and humiliation. To be identified and paraded in front of neighbours and fellow tradesmen was, for any citizen of London, the cause of extreme embarrassment and shame. It could also be perilous. Some were plied with rotten fruit, fish and excrement, but the most unpopular or unprincipled offenders were in danger of being pelted to death with sticks and stones. It is a measure of London’s conservatism, or strictness, that the pillory was not abolished until the summer of 1837.

Among the other sights of the city were the impaled heads of traitors. Above the main gateway of London Bridge rose iron spikes upon which the remnants of condemned men were fixed; in most illustrations five or six of these mementoes are generally depicted, although it is not clear if demand outstripped supply. In 1661 a German traveller counted nineteen or twenty, which suggests that the civil conflicts of that unhappy period were fruitful in at least one respect.

In the following century the heads migrated to Temple Bar, “where people make a trade of letting spy-glasses at a halfpenny a look”; they were also visible from a telescope set up in Leicester Fields, which suggests that heads were a city attraction. Certainly the citizens seem to have become inured to these solemn spectacles of punishment except, according to “Aleph,” “when there had been a recent sufferer; the curious would then stop to ask ‘What new head is that?’”

In the late 1760s Oliver Goldsmith was wandering in Poets Corner of Westminster Abbey with Samuel Johnson who, surveying the memorial stones to the great dead, muttered “Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur istis” (There may be a chance that our name will be mingled with these). But when they walked up to Temple Bar and observed the heads, Goldsmith stopped Johnson “and slily whispered me ‘Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur istis.’”

During one memorable storm in March 1772, two heads of decapitated Jacobites fell down. Mrs. Black, the wife of the editor of the Morning Chronicle, recalled how “Women shrieked as they fell; men, as I have heard, shrieked. One woman near me fainted.” Thirty years later the iron spikes were finally removed from the malevolent Bar.

There was no respite in hanging, however. In the fifteenth century eight offences merited that fate, among them arson and “petty treason (the killing of a husband by his wife).” Anyone who could read a passage from the Bible, known as the neck verse, was deemed to be a cleric and therefore given over to the ecclesiastical authorities. Averting death was thus, for two centuries, one of the primary gifts of literacy.

From the twelfth century the favoured site for a hanging was Tyburn, the first (of William Longbeard) being noted in 1196 and the last (of John Austen) in 1783. The actual site of the gallows has been disputed, the notoriety being given variously to Connaught Place or Connaught Square, both on the edge of the desolate Edgware Road slightly to the north of Marble Arch. But antiquarian research has revealed that the site lies on the south-east corner of Connaught Square. A carpenter recalled that his uncle “took up the stones on which the uprights [of the gallows] were placed.” When the square itself was being built in the 1820s, a “low house” on the corner was demolished and quantities of human bodies were found. So some of the victims of the gallows were buried in situ. Other remains were discovered when the neighbouring streets and squares were laid out in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and a house in Upper Bryanston Street which overlooked the fatal spot “had curious iron balconies to the windows of the first and second floors, where the sheriffs sat to witness the executions.” There were also wooden galleries erected around the area, like stands at a race course, where seats were hired by curious spectators. One notorious stallkeeper was known as “Mammy Douglas, the Tyeburn pew-opener.”

Yet, of course, and more especially, the executioners themselves became notorious. The first known public hangman was one Bull, who was followed by the more celebrated Derrick. “And Derrick must be his host,” Dekker wrote of a horse-thief in his Bellman of London (1608), “and Tiburne the land at which he will light.” There was a proverb-“If Derrick’s cables do but hold”-which referred to an ingenious structure, like a crane, upon which twenty-three condemned could be hanged together. This device was then put in more general use for unloading and hoisting vessels on board ships, and still bears the executioner’s name.

Derrick was succeeded by Gregory Brandon upon whose name several puns were elaborated-“Gregorian calendar” and “Gregorian tree” among them-and who was in turn succeeded by his son, Richard, who claimed the public office by inheritance. “Squire” Dun followed, and the post was then given to the notorious Richard Jaquet, alias Jack Ketch, in the 1670s. There were many tracts and ballads directed against Ketch, among them The Tyburn Ghost: or, Strange Downfal of the Gallows: a most true Relation how the famous Triple Tree, near Paddington, was pluckt up by the roots and demolisht by certain Evil Spirits, with Jack Ketch’s Lamentation for the loss of his Shop, 1678. It was known as the triple tree because the gallows was triangular in shape, with three posts or legs acting as supports. Each of the three beams could accommodate eight people and so, marginally more effective than the derrick, it was possible to hang twenty-four at the same time.

“Execution Day” was a Monday. Those about to be hanged were taken in an open cart from Newgate, generally attended by a huge and enthusiastic crowd. “The English are a people that laughs at the delicacy of other nations,” one foreign traveller reported, “who make it such a mighty matter to be hanged. He that is to be takes great care to get himself shaved and handsomely dressed either in mourning or in the dress of a bridegroom … Sometimes the girls dress in white with great silk scarves and carry baskets full of flowers and oranges, scattering these favours all the way they go.” So the ceremonial way to Tyburn was also the site of celebration. It was customary for famous London criminals to wear white cockades in their hats as a sign of triumph or derision; they were also an emblem, occasionally, of their innocence. The more dashing or notorious criminals were handed a nosegay “from the hand of one of the frail sisterhood”-one of the prostitutes who stood before the Church of Holy Sepulchre opposite the prison.

The procession made its way down Snow Hill and across Holborn Bridge, down Holborn Hill and into Holborn itself, with those about to be hanged greeted with cheers or execrations; they were always surrounded by a group of officers on horseback who restrained the crowds. Ferdinand de Saussure, in A Foreign View of England, noted some eighteenth-century criminals “going to their death perfectly unconcerned, others so impenitent that they fill themselves full of liquor and mock at those who are repentant.” At the church of St. Giles-in-the-Field the malefactors were ritually handed jugs of ale. After the prisoners had quenched their thirst, the procession moved forward down Broad St. Giles, into Oxford Street, and on to Tyburn itself.

The cart was halted just before the gallows. Those about to die were escorted on to another carriage especially built like a platform for the occasion; it was driven beneath the triple tree. The halters were placed around the necks of the condemned, the horses kicked into action, and there the malefactors would be suspended until death overtook their pains. At this point friends and relatives might be seen “tugging at the hanging men’s feet so that they should die quicker, and not suffer.”

When the corpses were cut down there was a general rush for them, since the bodies of the hanged were believed to be of curious efficacy in the healing of disease. The London Encyclopaedia remarks upon one Frenchman who noted “a young woman, with an appearance of beauty, all pale and trembling, in the arms of the executioner, who submitted to have her bosom uncovered in the presence of thousands of spectators and the dead man’s hand placed upon it.” There was a disturbing paganism latent beneath the surface of this piece of dramatic theatre. In the mid-seventeenth century such a severed hand could command the price of ten guineas, since “the possession of the hand was thought to be of still greater efficacy in the cure of diseases and prevention of misfortunes.”

There was also a general struggle over the body, conducted between those who wished to retain it for their own purposes and those hired assistants come to transport it to the surgeons for dissection. In the mêlée “the populace often come to blows as to who will carry the bought corpses to the parents who are waiting in coaches and cabs to receive them.” It was all “most diverting,” again according to Ferdinand de Saussure, who was sitting in one of the stands which surrounded the whole event.

One thief and housebreaker, John Haynes, displayed signs of life after being escorted to the house of a famous surgeon. He was asked what he remembered-“The last thing I recollect was going up Holborn Hill in a cart. I thought then that I was in a beautiful green field; and that is all I remember till I found myself in your honour’s dissecting room.” So he came to death, and to life, babbling of green fields.

London did indeed become the city of the gallows. In 1776 the Morning Post reported “that the criminals capitally convicted at the Old Bailey shall in future be executed at the cross road near the ‘Mother Red Cap’ inn, the half-way house to Hampstead, and that no galleries, scaffolds or other temporary stages be built near the place.” This measure was promoted in order to curb rioting among the spectators at a time when a fierce radicalism characterised the politics of London. The site of the executions was, typically, at a crossroads where the present Camden Town Underground Station now stands. Other crossroads were also used as a natural location for the gallows, sending travellers upon their ambiguous journey-the division between the City Road and Goswell Road in Islington was once in use-but in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was also customary to hang offenders on or near the spot where their crimes had been committed. In 1790, for example, two arsonists were hanged in Aldersgate Street immediately opposite the house which they had fired. The last recorded example of topographical killing occurred in Skinner Street, in 1817, when a thief was despatched in front of the shop of a gunsmith which he had plundered.

At Wapping lay Execution Dock, the place of punishment for all those who had committed high crimes upon the high seas, while the suspended bodies of the hanged could be seen swaying opposite Blackwall and other sites along the Thames such as Bugsby’s Hole. The bodies of the condemned could also be seen at Aldgate and Pentonville, St. Giles and Smithfield, Blackheath and Finchley, Kennington Common and Hounslow Heath, so that these mementoes caught the attention of all those travelling into, or out of, London. It was not a pleasant prospect. Murderers, for example, were “first hung on the common gibbet, their bodies are then covered with tallow and fat substances, over this is placed a tarred shirt fastened down with iron bands, and the bodies are hung with chains to the gibbet … and there it hangs till it falls to dust.” Why this should have been considered an appropriate spectacle for those leaving or entering London is another matter; it is curiously reminiscent of the fact that the principal gates or entrances to the city were also used as prisons, and suggests an attitude both defensive and minatory.

Some forms of punishment, however, were more secret. In Newgate was a “press” reserved for those who refused to plead to their indictments. Here they were stripped “and put in low dark chambers, with as much weight of iron placed upon them as they could bear, and more, there to lie until they were dead.” There is an eighteenth-century engraving of a felon, one William Spiggot, “under pressure” in Newgate; he lies naked upon a bare floor, his arms and legs stretched and pinioned to hooks against the walls. Upon his naked chest is a wooden board loaded down with great weights. One gaoler, bearing keys, stands over him while another moves forward with a lighted candle to observe his sufferings. This quasi-medieval torture, known as “pressing to death,” continued until 1734-an apt indication of the barbarity of city justice.

In that spirit, too, the number of hanged rose in the latter part of the eighteenth century. In one month of 1763, for example, “near one hundred and fifty persons have been committed to New Prison and Clerkenwell for robberies and other criminal offences.” It was said in The Annual Register that the “reckless wretches seem almost to have crowded in, crying, ‘You cannot hang us all.’” But they could try.

Soon enough, however, the venue of slaughter had changed. The gradual spread of gentility to the west meant that the old tribal route from Newgate to Tyburn began to impinge upon the fashionable quarters close to Oxford Street. So in 1783 the authorities removed the gallows to Newgate itself, thus cutting off the procession at its source. The populace at large felt deprived of the spectacle of “the cheat,” to use the cant term for the gallows, and the more scholarly Londoners felt that an habitual aspect of the city was being removed in an untimely fashion. “The age is running mad after innovation,” Samuel Johnson told Boswell, and “Tyburn is not safe from the fury of innovation … No, Sir, it is not an improvement: they object that the old method drew together a number of spectators. Sir, executions are intended to draw spectators. If they don’t draw spectators, they don’t answer their purpose. The old method was most satisfactory to all parties: the public was gratified by a procession: the criminal was supported by it. Why is all this to be swept away?” Boswell might have had his own answer. He himself was addicted to the watching of executions-“I had a sort of horrid eagerness to be there,” he once wrote of Tyburn-and through the good offices of Richard Ackerman, the Keeper of Newgate, was able to witness many hangings outside that prison.

The first Newgate hanging was conducted on 9 December 1783, but its revolutionary system of “the new drop” soon claimed more victims. A few days after the sentence of death had been pronounced in the courtroom, the malefactor was “cast” and the “dead warrant” sent down to his cell. The Newgate Chronicles themselves detail the hours leading up to his appearance on the “stage.” On the first night in the condemned cell “the solemn notification of the impending blow keeps nearly all awake,” but soon they slept more easily. “All too have a fairly good appetite,” the same chronicler reports, “and eat with relish up to the last moment.” The “Italian boy” condemned for murdering a French woman in the Haymarket ate “constantly and voraciously,” as if to stuff himself before the final exit. One Jeffreys, who hanged his child in a cellar in Seven Dials, called for roast duck as soon as he entered the condemned cell.

In the hour before execution the condemned man was led from his cell into a “stone-cold room” which was the place where he was pinioned by the “yeoman of the halter” before being taken to “the new drop.” The engine of death, which was transportable, was dragged by horses into grooves marked upon Newgate Street itself. It consisted of a stage upon which were constructed three parallel beams. The part of the stage next to the gaol had a covered platform; here were the sheriffs’ seats, while around it stood the interested spectators. In the middle of the stage was a trap-door, ten feet long by eight feet wide, above which the beams were placed. The hour of execution was always eight o’clock in the morning and, a few minutes before that time, the sheriffs brought out the prisoners. Upon the dropping of a flag, the bolts holding up the trap were pulled and the convicted men or women fell or “dropped” to their deaths.

There are several contemporaneous prints displaying “The New Gallows in the Old Bailey” with those about to suffer praying or weeping with halters about their necks. Around them, hemmed in by soldiers, are the crowd, who stare up with fascination at the fatal stage. In fact a contributor to The Chronicles of Newgate wrote that “the change from Tyburn to the Old Bailey had worked no improvement upon the crowd or its demeanour. As many spectators as ever thronged to see the dreadful show, and they were packed into more limited space, displaying themselves as heretofore by brutal horseplay, coarse jests, and frantic yells.”

On one occasion, “A few minutes of most dreadful suspense” took place; “the culprits stood gazing at each other … at last the chime struck upon the ear, and the poor fellows seemed startled.” In Defoe’s account of Moll Flanders’s period in Newgate, the sound of the bell of Holy Sepulchre set up “a dismal groaning and crying … followed by a confused clamour in the house, among the several prisoners, expressing their awkward sorrows for the poor creatures that were to die … Some cried for them, some brutishly huzzaed, and wished them a good journey; some damned and cursed those that had brought them to it.”

The night before an execution, outside Newgate, all the paraphernalia of execution-the gallows, the barriers, the platforms-had to be set up. These preparations naturally attracted a crowd of idle or interested observers. The “low taverns and beer-houses about Newgate Street, Smithfield, and the Fleet district, are gorged with company, who sally out at intervals to see how the workmen get on” and “knots of queer-looking fellows form here and there” to discuss the following morning’s proceedings. The police moved them on, but they clustered elsewhere. Just after midnight on Sunday, when most of the night-revellers had been cleared, the gin shops and coffee houses opened their doors and hired out their rooms-“Comfortable room!,” “Excellent situation!,” “Beautiful prospects!,” “Splendid view!” Both roofs and windows in the vicinity were hired out; five pounds were “given for the attic storey of the Lamb’s Coffee House” and a first-floor front could command five times as much. The crowd began to assemble at four or five in the morning, and the whole area in front of Newgate was packed by seven o’clock. By the time of the ceremony itself some of the spectators, pressed up against the barriers for several hours, had “nearly fainted from exhaustion.”

When Governor Wall was marched from the press yard towards the place of execution, he was greeted with howls of abuse and execration from the other prisoners of Newgate. While the governor of Goree, in Africa, he had been responsible for the death of a soldier by excessive flogging-one of those abuses of authority which Londoners most detest. His appearance on the scaffold was then accompanied by three harsh and prolonged shouts from the crowd assembled in Newgate Street. After the hanging was over the yeoman of the halter offered portions of the rope for sale at one shilling per inch; a woman known as “Rosy Emma,” rumoured to be the yeoman’s wife, “exuberant in talk and hissing hot from Pie Corner, where she had taken her morning dose of gin-and-bitters,” was selling parts of the fatal cord at a cheaper rate.

Governor Wall met his fate with fortitude and in silence. Arthur Thistle-wood, condemned as one of the Cato Street conspirators in 1820, ascended the scaffold and exclaimed, “I shall soon know the last grand secret!” Mrs. Manning, convicted in 1849 of a more than usually unpleasant murder-with the connivance of her husband she had murdered her lover with a ripping chisel-appeared upon the scaffold in a black satin dress; her “preference brought the costly stuff into disrepute, and its unpopularity lasted for nearly thirty years.” It is curiously reminiscent of the case of Mrs. Turner, a notorious poisoner in the reign of James I; she was a woman of fashion who had invented yellow-starched ruffs and cuffs. Hence her sentence was to be “hang’d at Tiburn in her yellow Tinny Ruff and Cuff, she being the first inventor and wearer of that horrid garb.” To emphasise the moral the hangman on that day “had his hands and cuffs” painted yellow, and from that time the coloured starch, like Mrs. Manning’s black satin, “grew generally to be detested and disused.” It is a measure of the central importance of this ritual of execution that Newgate, and Tyburn, could affect the fashions of the day. Once more the idea of the city as spectacle asserts itself. Hanging, then, was essentially a form of street theatre. When five pirates were hanged for mutiny in front of Newgate, the Chronicles record that “the upturned faces of the eager spectators resembled those of the “gods” at Drury Lane on Boxing Night … The remarks heard amongst the crowd were of course ones of approval. ‘S’help me, ain’t it fine?’ a costermonger was heard to exclaim to his companion.” Theatricality and savagery are subtly mingled.

The “unceasing murmur” of the crowd broke into “a loud deep roar” as the condemned man appeared; there were calls of “Hats off!” and “Down in front” as he approached the halter. There followed a moment of silence, abruptly broken by the drop itself. At the moment of descent “every link in that human chain is shaken, along the whole lengthened line has the motion jarred.” The silence was replaced, after that sudden “jarring” of the body of the city, by a noise from the crowd “like the dreamy murmur of an ocean shell.” And then, more distinctly, the familiar cries of the sellers of “ginger-beer, pies, fried fish, sandwiches and fruit,” together with the names of famous criminals whose tracts were still being advertised on the spot where they, too, once fell. With these were soon mingled “oaths, fighting, obscene conduct and still more filthy language,” together, perhaps, with the faintest note of disappointment. There was always the hope or expectation that something might go wrong-that the condemned man might fight for his liberty or the engine of death might not function satisfactorily. Charles White, condemned for arson in 1832, sprang forward at the exact moment the trap was opened and balanced on its edge while “the crowd roared their encouragement as he struggled furiously with the executioner and his assistants.” He was eventually thrown down the drop with the hangman clinging to his legs. In these instances, the sympathy of the London crowd flooded instinctively to the condemned, as if they were watching their own selves in the act of being despatched by the authorities of the state.

There were occasions when death upon the scaffold was accompanied by death upon the streets. The execution of two murderers, Haggerty and Holloway, took place in February 1807; the anticipation was so great that close to 40,000 people were packed in front of the prison and its vicinity. Even before the murderers appeared upon the scaffold, women and children were trampled to death amid cries of “Murder.” At Green Arbour Court, opposite the debtors’ door of the prison, a pieman stooped to pick up some of his broken wares and “some of the mob, not seeing what had happened, stumbled over him. No one who fell ever rose again.” Elsewhere a cart filled with spectators broke down, “and many of those who were in it were trampled to death.” And yet amid these scenes of chaos and death the rite of execution continued. Only after the gallows had been taken down, and the mob partly dispersed, did the officers find the bodies of twenty-eight dead and hundreds injured.

Two great nineteenth-century novelists seemed implicitly to recognise the emblematic significance of these Monday mornings, when the city gathered to acclaim the death of one of its own. William Makepeace Thackeray rose at three on the morning of 6 July 1840, in order to witness the hanging of a manservant, Benjamin Courvoisier, convicted of killing his master. He recorded the scene in an essay, “Going to See a Man Hanged.” In a carriage bound for Snow Hill, Thackeray followed the crowd intent upon seeing the execution; by twenty minutes past four, beside Holy Sepulchre, “many hundred people were in the street.” Here Thackeray registered his “electric shock” when he first caught sight of the gallows jutting from the door of Newgate. He asked those around them if they had seen many executions? Most assented. And had the sight done them any good? “For the matter of that, no; people did not care about them at all,” and, in a transcription of genuine London speech, “nobody ever thought of it after a bit.”

The windows of the shops were soon filled with dandies, and with “quiet, fat, family parties,” while from a balcony an aristocratic rowdy squirted those assembled with brandy and soda from a siphon. The crowd grew more eager as the hand of the clock came closer to eight. When the bell of Holy Sepulchre tolled the hour, all the men removed their hats “and a great murmur arose, more awful, bizarre and indescribable than any sound I had ever before heard. Women and children began to shriek horribly” and then “a dreadful quick, feverish kind of jangling noise mingled with the noise of the people, and lasted for about two minutes.” This was a scene of fever and alarm, as if the whole body of London was starting up from an uneasy sleep. It was the noise, almost inhuman, which Thackeray immediately noticed.

The man about to be hanged emerged from the prison door. His arms were tied in front of him but “he opened his hands in a helpless kind of way, and clasped them once or twice together. He turned his head here and there, and looked about him for an instant with a wild imploring look. His mouth was contracted with a sort of pitiful smile.” He walked quickly beneath the beam; the executioner turned him round, and put a black nightcap over “the patient’s head and face.” Thackeray could look no more.

The episode left him with “an extraordinary feeling of terror and shame.” It is interesting that, apparently inadvertently, he uses the word “patient” to describe the condemned; it was the same term applied to the prisoners of Bridewell about to be flogged. It is as if the city were a vast hospital, filled with the diseased or the dying. Yet the city is also a surgeon’s hall, where the novelist and the crowd were all the spectators of the doomed and the dead. Thackeray described it as a “hidden lust after blood.” He was suggesting that there were permanent and atavistic forces at work.

Charles Dickens had gone down to Newgate early that same morning. “Just once,” he told his friends, “I should like to watch a scene like this, and see the end of the Drama.” Here a great London novelist instinctively reaches for the appropriate word to mark the fatal occasion. He found an upper room in a house close to the scene, and paid for its hire; from there he eagerly watched the movement of the London crowd, which he was soon to revive in his account of the Gordon Riots in Barnaby Rudge. And as he watched the mob, he saw a tall familiar figure-“Why, there stands Thackeray!” Chance encounters in the streets of London suffuse the novels of Dickens and in front of Newgate, amid the great crowd, the actual life of London confirmed his vision.

Nine years later, on a cold November morning, he rose from his bed to watch another execution. The Mannings were to be hanged outside Horsemonger Lane Gaol in Southwark, and immediately after the event Dickens wrote a letter to the Morning Chronicle. There, in the mob assembled before the prison, he saw “the image of the Devil.” “I believe that a sight so inconceivably awful as the wickedness and levity of the immense crowd … could be presented in no heathen land under the sun.” Here the evident paganism of London is given express form.

Dickens, like Thackeray, is appalled by the noise of the mob, in particular “the shrillness of the cries and howls,” like that “feverish kind of jangling noise” which Thackeray heard. There were “screeching and laughing, and yelling in strong chorus of parodies on Negro melodies, with substitutions of “Mrs. Manning” for “Susannah” … faintings, whistlings, imitation of Punch, brutal jokes.” Another “Mrs. Manning,” in the crowd itself, “proclaimed that she had a knife about her and threatened to murder another woman so that she might step up to the gibbet after ‘her namesake.’” The fury and excitement of the mob, expressive of “general contamination and corruption,” fill Dickens’s account of the proceedings. He declared that “there are not many phases of London life that could surprise me.” But he was astonished and alarmed by this experience.

The crowd outside Newgate and Horsemonger Lane often jeered and hissed the executioner. That of Courvoisier and the Mannings was one Calcraft, who had previously earned his living by flogging boys in Newgate. The Mannings were his only victims in 1849, and his services were less and less frequently required. Between 1811 and 1832 there were approximately eighty executions a year but from 1847 to 1871 that figure was reduced to 1.48 per annum. William Calcraft was succeeded by William Marwood who perfected the “long drop” method. He once declared that “It would have been better for those I execute if they had preferred industry to idleness,” thus in a fatal thread connecting the exercise of his craft with Hogarth’s depiction of the hanging of the idle apprentice.

Marwood died of drink. His most recent and celebrated successor within this unique profession was Albert Pierrepoint who boasted that he could kill a man within twenty seconds. Pierrepoint’s ministrations, however, were performed in silence and secrecy. The last public hanging outside Newgate was held in 1868, and from that time forward hangings took place in an especially constructed shed or hut behind prison walls. Ruth Ellis was hanged within Holloway Prison in 1955; her execution, and that of eighteen-year-old Derek Bentley two years before, materially assisted the campaign for the abolition of capital punishment. The last execution in London took place in 1964, more than a hundred years after Thackeray prayed for God “to cleanse our land of blood.”

Yet here is another mystery of London: according to city superstition, to dream of the gallows is a prophecy of great good fortune. Money and blood still run together.

Voracious London

A detail from an aquatint by Rowlandson entitled “Revellers at Vauxhall”; the gardens of that area had been known for their gentility, but they eventually degenerated into a place of drunkenness and sexual licence.

CHAPTER 32

Into the Vortex

When in the early months of 1800 de Quincey travelled towards London in an open carriage he experienced a “suction so powerful, felt along radii so vast, and a consciousness, at the same time, that upon other radii still more vast, both by land and by sea, the same suction is operating.” The image here, from his essay “The Nation of London,” is of a “vast magnetic range” drawing all the forces of the world towards its centre. When he was within forty miles of London, “the dim presentiment of some vast capital reaches you obscurely, and like a misgiving.” An unknown, and unseen, area of energy has found him out and leads him onwards.

One characteristic phrase, “London conquers most who enter it,” is perhaps now a truism. There is a famous early nineteenth-century cartoon, which has been embellished and elaborated in a thousand different ways. Two men meet beside a London milestone. One, returning from the city, is bowed and broken down; the other, advancing upon him, full of animation and purposefulness, shakes his hand and asks him, “Is it paved with gold?”

“Long ago,” Walter Besant remarked in East London, “it was discovered that London devours her own children.” It seems as if great city families die out or disappear within a century; the principal names of the fifteenth century, Whittington and Chichele, had vanished by the sixteenth. The families of seventeenth-century London were no longer active in the eighteenth. That is why London must continue to exert a continual attractive energy, and pull in new people and new families to replenish the constant loss. On the road to London de Quincey had noted the “vast droves of cattle,” all with their heads directed towards the capital. But the city needs animal spirits as well as animals.

In 1690 records show that “73 per cent of those given the freedom of the City by apprenticeship were born outside London”: an astonishing figure. The annual migration to London in the first half of the eighteenth century was approximately ten thousand, and in 1707 it was observed that for any son or daughter of an English family “that exceeds the rest in beauty, or wit, or perhaps courage, or industry, or any other rare quality, London is their North star.” The city is the lodestone, or magnet. By 1750 the capital was home to 10 per cent of the population, prompting Defoe’s remark that “this whole Kingdom, as well as the people, as the land, and even the sea, in every part of it, are employ’d to furnish something, and I may add the best of every thing, to supply the city of London with provisions.” A million people swarmed in the metropolis by the end of the eighteenth century; within fifty years that figure had doubled, and there was no sign of abatement. “Who could wonder,” wrote an observer in 1892, “that men are drawn into such a vortex, even were the penalty heavier than this?” Until the middle of the twentieth century the figures bear in one direction only-ever upward, counting by the millions, until in 1939 eight million are recorded to have inhabited Greater London.

Nearer our time these figures have diminished, yet still the power which De Quincey felt exerts its attraction. A recent survey at the Centrepoint night shelter, only a few hundred yards from the old haven of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, discovered that “Four fifths of young people … were from outside London and most were recent arrivals.”

As Ford Madox Ford has put it, “It never misses, it never can miss anyone. It loves nobody, it needs nobody; it tolerates all the types of mankind.” Yet if London needs nobody in particular, it requires everything to sustain its momentum. It draws in commodities, and markets, and goods. The anonymous author of Letter from Albion (1810-13) was suitably exultant. “It is impossible not to be astonished in seeing these riches displayed. Here the costly shawls from the East Indies, there brocades and silk tissues from China, now a world of gold and silver plate … an ocean of rings, watches, chains, bracelets.” Voracity, repeating itself in endless different ways, is one of the most prominent characteristics of London.

It was said of the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, a somewhat disturbing collection of anatomical specimens, that “the whole earth has been ransacked to enrich its stores.” To ransack is to pillage and to destroy-that, too, is the nature of the city. Addison was worked up into a similar enthusiasm by the spectacle of the Royal Exchange, “making this Metropolis a kind of Emporium for the whole Earth.” Emporium in turn excites Imperium, since the master of trade is the master of the world. The fruits of Portugal are bartered for the silk of Persia, the pottery of China for the drugs of America; tin is converted into gold, and wool into rubies. “I am wonderfully delighted,” Addison wrote in the Spectator of 19 May 1711, “to see such a Body of Men thriving in their own private Fortunes, and at the same time promoting the Public Stock … by bringing into the Country whatever is wanting, and carrying out of it whatever is superfluous.”

Here is an indication that London had become, by the early eighteenth century, the centre of world commerce. It was the age of lotteries and flotations and “bubbles.” Everything was for sale-political office, religious preferment, landed heiresses-and, said Swift, “Power, which according to the old Maxim, was used to follow Land is now gone over to Money.” In The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) John Bunyan had also derided London’s vanity, whereby “houses, lands, trades, places, honours, preferments, titles, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures, and delights of all sorts” all come under the general denomination of “trade.”

By 1700, 76 per cent of England’s commerce with the world passed through London.

There was trade in money, as well as goods. The centre of commerce was also the centre of credit, with the banker and the jobber taking over the spirit of the merchant adventurer. The bankers emerged out of the Company of Goldsmiths. Goldsmiths knew how to protect their goods, and for a time their offices had been used as informal places of safety for the deposit of money. Yet during the seventeenth century this primary function of hoarding and protecting was subtly supplanted by the issue of banking orders or cheques to facilitate the passage of revenue throughout the capital and beyond. Francis Child and Richard Hoare had both been goldsmiths before establishing their banking houses; with three or four others they were, as Edward, Earl of Clarendon put it in his autobiography of 1759, “men known to be so rich, and of so good reputation, that all the money of the kingdom would be trusted or deposited in their hands.” Out of these banking ventures emerged the Bank of England, the single greatest emblem of the City’s wealth and confidence; the principal stockholders of this new bank were themselves London merchants, but this essentially speculative venture was soon lent constitutional status when it was guarded by soldiers during the Gordon Riots of June 1780. Its gold was turned into guineas at the Mint of the Tower of London, and its huge reservoir of bullion was the prime agent in maintaining the financial stability of the nation through a succession of bubbles, panics and wars. Yet even as it maintained good governance, it expedited the adventures and trades of London businessmen-from linen and diamond merchants to small-coal men, from the exporters of hats to the importers of sugar.

One of the key figures of the period, derided in verse and drama, was the stockbroker or “jobber.” Gay denounced a capital and an age where “In sawcy State the griping Broker sits.” They sat, in fact, in the coffee houses of Change Alley. Jobbers were the lineal descendants of the London scriveners who set up documents for the exchange of land or of houses, but now they were concerned with the floating of companies and the transfer of stock or assets. Cibber anatomised the scene in his play The Refusal, of 1720. “There (in the Alley) you’ll see a duke dangling after a director; here a peer and a ’prentice haggling for an eighth; there a Jew and a parson making up differences; there a young woman of quality buying bears of a Quaker; and there an old one selling refusals to a lieutenant of grenadiers.”

Eventually the noise in the coffee houses, such as Jonathan’s or Garraway’s in Change Alley, grew too loud, and the jobbers removed to New Jonathan’s which in the summer of 1773 was renamed “The Stock Exchange.” A little more than twenty years later, a new building arose in Capel Court, its voices recorded in The Bank Mirror of 1795. “A mail come in- what news? What news? Steady, steady-consols for tomorrow-A great house has stopt-Payment of the Five per Cents commences-Across the Rhine-the Austrians routed!-the French pursuing! Four per cents for the opening!”

The Bank of England and the Stock Exchange still dominate this small compact area of land. The Mansion House stands close by, on the site of the original Stocks Market, where fish and flesh were traded from the thirteenth century. And so this trinity of institutions may mark one of the city’s sacred sites. A study of successive maps shows the area being more and more darkly engraved, as the building of the Bank of England gradually grew in size until it took up the entire area between Lothbury and Threadneedle Street. To the south of this site, during the Great Fire of 1666, John Evelyn observed the concurrence of the two great fireballs. It is not necessary to be a psychogeographer to recognise that this area is devoted to energy and to power.

And as the city incorporated more money, and more credit, so steadily it grew. It stretched out to the west and to the east. By 1715 the scheme of building Cavendish Square, as well as certain streets to the north of the Tyburn Road, was first suggested. Then came Henrietta Street and Wigmore Road, the development of which prompted the extraordinary growth of Marylebone. In the 1730s Berkeley Square emerged on the western side. Bethnal Green and Shadwell were built up in the east, Paddington and St. Pancras to the west. The maps grew denser, too, so that one square of the 1799 map covered six squares of the 1676 map. “I have twice been going to stop my coach in Piccadilly, thinking there was a mob,” wrote Horace Walpole in 1791, only to realise that it was the usual Londoners “sauntering or trudging” down the thoroughfare. “There will soon be one street from London to Brentford,” he complained, “and from London to every village ten miles round.” He was announcing a law of life itself. The direct consequence of power and wealth is expansion.

The eighteenth-century “improvements” within the capital were also an aspect of that power and wealth. Lincoln’s Inn Fields was enclosed in 1735 and, four years later, the increasingly squalid Stocks Market was removed from the centre of the city. In 1757 the houses upon London Bridge were demolished and, in the same year, the noisome Fleet Ditch was filled and covered and the Fleet River itself embanked. Four years later, the City gates were removed in order to encourage freer access into the centre of London. As the gates went, so did the street-signs, making the thoroughfares “more airy and wholesome” but also divesting London of its old identity. All these measures were designed to encourage the traffic of goods as well as of people, allowing a freer circulation throughout the urban body with a novel emphasis placed upon speed and efficiency.

In this spirit, too, the Westminster Paving Act of 1762 inaugurated legislation for lighting and paving throughout the city, and thus initiated a general cleansing and clearing of the civic thoroughfares. And, in a city which brought in silk and spice, coffee and bullion, why should not light also be imported? In the 1780s a German visitor wrote that “In Oxford Road alone there are more lamps than in all the city of Paris.” They represented more illumination for the burgeoning centre of world commerce. These measures had, according to Pugh’s Life of Hanway, altogether “introduced a degree of elegance and symmetry into the streets of the metropolis, that is the admiration of all Europe and far exceeds anything of the kind in the modern world.” “Symmetry” is another expression of uniformity and in the Building Act of 1774 there was a further attempt at standardisation; it categorised the types of London houses in a series of “grades” or “rates” so that the city might become as infinitely reproducible and as uniform as its currency. This was the age of stucco, or white light.

The public monuments were also a credit to commerce, with such homages to trade as the new Custom House, the Excise Office in Old Broad Street, the Corn Exchange in Mark Lane and the Coal Exchange in Lower Thames Street. South Sea House in Threadneedle Street and East India House in Leadenhall Street vied with one another for magnificence, while the Bank of England in 1732 rose to be continually embellished and enlarged. The livery halls of the various trades, too, were constructed in terms of munificent display.

And then there was Westminster Bridge, opened in the winter of 1750 to the accompaniment of trumpets and kettledrums. Its fifteen arches of stone spanned the river to create “a bridge of magnificence.” It had a decisive effect upon the appearance of the city in another sense, since its commissioners persuaded Giovanni Canaletto to visit London in order to paint it. It was still in the course of construction when he depicted it in 1746, but already his vision of London was tempered by his Venetian practice. London became subtly stylised, Italianate, stretching out along the Thames in a pure and even light. A city aspiring to fluency and grace had found its perfect delineator.

Yet the diversity and contrast of London are nowhere better exemplified than in the fact that at the same time the city was being celebrated by William Hogarth. In the foreground of a “new improved” street, Hogarth shows a beggar child scoffing pieces of a broken pie.

CHAPTER 33

A Cookery Lesson

One of the most cheerful origins of “Cockney” is coquina, the Latin term for cookery. London was once seen as a vast kitchen and “the place of plenty and good fare.” Thus, as has already been observed, it became “Cockaigne” or the fabled land of good living.

In one year, 1725, it consumed “60,000 calves, 70,000 sheep and lambs, 187,000 swine, 52,000 sucking pigs” as well as “14,750,000 mackerel … 16,366,000 lb of cheese.” The Great Fire began in Pudding Lane and ended at Pie Corner, where the golden figure of the fat boy still occupies a site; he was once accompanied by an inscription noting “This boy is in memory put up of the late fire of London, occasioned by the sin of gluttony, 1666.”

Pie Corner itself was known for its cook-shops and, in particular, its dressed pork. Shadwell writes of “meat dressed at Pie Corner by greasy scullions” while Jonson describes a hungry man there “taking his meal” by sniffing the steam from the stalls. The steam of cooked meat drifted just a few yards from Smithfield, where the cooked flesh of the saints once also rose in smoke. A twenty-first century restaurant, beside Smithfield, offers spleen and tripe, pig’s head and veal hearts, as part of its menu.

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A kitchen of the second century AD has been reconstructed in the Museum of London; it shows a large stove upon which were cooked portions of beef and pork, duck and goose, chicken and deer. Such was the profusion of wild life in the neighbouring woods and forests that London became a meat-eater’s haven. And so it has remained.

In recent years deep excavation of Roman London has also revealed evidence of scattered oyster shells, the stones of cherries and of plums, the remnants of lentils and cucumbers, peas and walnuts. One surviving beaker or amphora from Southwark bears the advertisement: “Lucius Tettius Aficanus supplies the finest fish sauce from Antipolis.”

The diet of the Saxon Londoner was less exotic. At the times of “noon-meat” and “even-meat,” a staple diet of flesh was enlivened by leeks, onions, garlic, turnips and radishes. An ox had a value of six shillings, a pig one shilling, but there is also evidence that at a slightly later date Londoners demanded a plentiful supply of eels. At various spots along the Thames there were eel fisheries which date back at least as far as the eleventh century. From this century, too, excavations beneath St. Pancras have uncovered more plum-stones and cherry-stones.

Bread was the most important commodity throughout London’s history. There are many city regulations of the thirteenth century concerning the conduct of bakers, whose profession was divided into those who made “white bread” and those who made “tourte bread.” “Pouffe” was French bread; “simnel” or “wastel,” white bread, fine as well as common; “bis,” brown bread; and “tourte,” the inferior bread. The principal bakers were situated to the east, in Stratford, and the loaves were carried by long carts to the various shops and stalls within the city. Bread was indeed the staple of life. Scarce supplies in 1258, for example, had the direct consequence that “fifteen thousand of the poor perished.” Shiploads of wheat and grain were imported from Germany, and certain London nobles distributed bread to the crowd, but “innumerable multitudes of poor people died, and their bodies were all lying about swollen from want.” The permanent contrast in London, between need and abundance, has taken many different forms. In the more prosperous years of the thirteenth century, however, the diet of the citizen included beef, mutton and pork together with lampreys, porpoise and sturgeon. Vegetables were not greatly in demand but there was a particular delicacy known as “soup of cabbage.” Londoners had also invented a kind of mixed meat dish, created by pounding together pork and poultry into one concoction. A household book at the end of the thirteenth century reveals that on fish days there was also a choice of “herrings, eels, lampreys, salmon” and on meat days a similar variety of “pork, mutton, beef, fowls, pigeons and larks” together with “eggs, saffron and spices.”

The records of the fourteenth century are less descriptive, but Stow denotes 1392 and 1393 as years of want, when a diet of “apples and nuts” was forced upon the poor. It is an open question whether the poor ever lived well, even in years of prosperity. The average wage of a London labourer was sixpence a day, while a capon pasty cost eightpence and a hen pasty fivepence. A roast goose could be purchased for sevenpence, while ten finches cost one penny. Ten cooked eggs also cost a penny, and a leg of pork threepence. Oysters and other shellfish were cheap, as were thrushes and larks. Here, then, is evidence of a strangely assorted diet, complemented by rich delicacies-“gruel of almondes … a potage of whelks … Blancmaung of fysshe … Gruel of porke … Pigges in sawce.” In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c. 1387-1400) the Cook is employed “To boil the chicken and the marrow bones … maken mortrewes and well bake a pie”-a mortrewe being a soup whose ingredients included fish, pork, chicken, eggs, bread, pepper and ale. One must also imagine the hasty Londoner picking up a roasted lark or thrush from a cook’s stall and eating it as he makes his way along the thoroughfare, perhaps picking his teeth with the bones before discarding the remains by the side of the road.

In the fifteenth century the main dish remained that of meat-“swan, roasted capons … venison in broth, coney, partridges and roasted cocks”- together with very sweet compound desserts such as Leche Lombarde, which was “a kind of jelly made of cream, isinglass, sugar, almonds, salt, eggs, raisins, dates, pepper and spices.” All dishes seem to have been highly spiced, with herbs for meat in particular demand. The author of London Lickpenny is assailed by merchants of Newgate-“Comes me one, cryd hot shepes feete/One cryd mackerel”-and as he wanders down into East Cheap “One Crys rybbs of befe, and many a pye.” The evidence of fifteenth-century kitchens and monastic gardens, given by an authority known simply as “Mayster Ion Gardener,” is of sage, chickweed, borage, rosemary, fennel and thyme as the staple “vegetable” diet. The other favoured vegetables were “garlike, onions and lekes,” which does not suggest much taste for green vegetables.

A change in that diet is marked by the Tudor chronicler, Harrison, who notes that “in old days”-by which he means the thirteenth century-herbs and roots were in great demand, but that they became less frequently used in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Yet “in my time their use is not only resumed among the poore comons-I mean of melons, pompines, gourds, cucumbers, radishes … carrots, marrowes, turnips, and all kind of salad herbes-but they are also looked upon as deintie dishes at the tables of delicate merchants, gentlemen.” At times of commercial success and plenty, however, meat is often required to maintain the animal spirits of Londoners. That is perhaps why there is so much emphasis in the contemporary chronicles on feasting, as a way of exemplifying the power and wealth of the city. Stow writes of one such occasion that “it would be tedious to set down all the preparation of fish, flesh and other victuals spent in this feast” but then goes on to enumerate the twenty-four oxen, the hundred sheep, the fifty-one deer, the thirty-four boars, the ninety-one pigs …

There were variations in diet according to the season, with fresh herrings at Michaelmas, pork and sprats at All Saints, veal and bacon at Easter. In the summer of 1562, a Venetian observer noticed that the native population enjoyed raw oysters with barley bread.

Other dietary habits were changed by law. After the partial relaxation of the intricate fast laws, for example, cheap meat was often substituted for fish. Alterations were also fostered by voyages of discovery; yams or sweet potatoes from Virginia and rhubarb from China became sixteenth-century commodities in a city which plucked its fruits from every known country.

In the early seventeenth century we read of the almost emblematic significance of roast beef, as well as fresh oysters, as a token of civic existence. These were invariably followed by a dessert of milk puddings or “apple pippin”; “To come in pudding time is as much as to say, to come in the most lucky moment in the world,” according to Misson de Valbourg in the early years of the century. In the houses of the more affluent citizens roast beef and pudding were sometimes exchanged for “a Piece of boil’d Beeff, and then they salt it some Days beforehand, and besiege it with five or six Heaps of Cabbage, Carrots, Turnips, or some other Herbs or Roots, well pepper’d and salted and swimming in Butter.” For more delicate fare, the London household would sit around a gridiron “roasting slices of buttered bread … This is call’d ‘toast.’”

From the seventeenth century, too, comes evidence of the food available from the hawkers of London. The illustrator Marcellus Laroon places the costermonger or “regrater” crying out “Buy my fat chicken!” next to the female huckster selling “ripe speragas,” because chicken and asparagus together were considered by Londoners to be a dainty dish. Chicken was cheap, too; that, and rabbit, seem to have been the only meats on sale in the streets. The rabbit-seller, shouting “Buy a rabbet a rabbet,” was likely to have been an Irishman who came to London in the autumn with his wares. Those sent out to buy from him were advised that “For being new killed, you must judge by the Scent.” Milk and water were carried through the streets in vessels, but not wine. Cherries were available in early summer, followed by strawberries later in the season, and apples in the autumn. From autumn to winter the costermonger sold her pears or “wardens” baking hot from a pot she balanced upon her head. The countryman’s attitude to these city fruits is perhaps best exemplified by Matthew Bramble in Smollett’s Humphry Clinker (1771), who declared that “I need not dwell upon the pallid, contaminated mash which they call strawberries, soiled and tossed by greasy paws through twenty baskets crusted with dirt.” Here the emphasis is upon dirt, of course, but also the endemic overpopulation of London wherein every item is passed through a selection of anonymous “paws.” Eels were a cheap element of the Londoner’s diet; sold alive, generally by female vendors, they were skinned on the spot before being used in pies or pastries. They were not the only fish hawked about the main thoroughfare; crabs were cheap, as were mackerel and flounders, while oysters were purchased for “twelve pence a peck” or approximately two gallons.

From the countryside came the young man trading “Lilly white Vinegar, three pence a quart!” Made from cider or white wine, vinegar was employed as a sauce and as a preventive against disease; but its main use was as a preservative. Almost anything could be pickled, including walnuts, cauliflowers, peaches, onions, lemons, oysters and asparagus.

By the eighteenth century roast beef was described as being of “Old England,” although in fact it had been only one of many meats burdening the tables of earlier centuries. As a token of national character the myth of roast beef may owe more to the observations of foreign visitors that Londoners were “entirely carnivorous,” with the prevailing assumption of voraciousness. In May 1718 a great meat pudding, eighteen feet two inches in length and four feet in diameter, was dragged by six asses to the Swan Tavern in Fish Street Hill but apparently “its smell was too much for the gluttony of the Londoners. The escort was routed, the pudding taken and devoured.” “A foreigner,” wrote a German pastor visiting London in 1767, “will be surprised to see what flesh-eaters the English are. He will be struck with the sight of an enormous piece of beef such, perhaps, as he never saw in his life, placed before him upon the table.” The same observer also noted that “the common people in London” insisted upon “daily beef or mutton” together with white bread and strong beer. The meat may not necessarily have taken the form of rib or haunch, however, since in the 1750s beef sausages became the culinary fashion.

One other aspect of the pastor’s account is of interest, in those passages where he remarks upon the fact that Londoners require their food and drink to be vivid in colour. The brandy and wine must be “deeply coloured,” the vegetables as bright and as green “as when gathered”; cabbage and peas, for example, are not boiled “for fear they should lose their colour.” It is, perhaps, an intimation of the unnaturalness of the London palate; in a city of spectacle, even the food must be completely seen before being understood. But it may also be a symptom of a certain craving after effect which may itself be unhealthy. He observes the whiteness of the veal and mentions that the calves are made to lick chalk in order to procure that colour. He also notices that the poorer Londoners “are much prejudiced in respect of the colour … the whiter the bread is, the better they think it to be.” One of Smollett’s characters considered the white bread to be nothing more than “a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk, alum and bone-ashes.” So Londoners mistake the nature of things by judging upon appearances alone. This, of course, was also the criticism of social moralists who saw villains and parvenus accepted as gentlemen because of their dress and manners.

Yet there are also intimations of a revulsion against so much greedy consumption. “What should they do,” as the poet John Lewkenor put it, “with all this greasie Meat?” Another of Smollett’s heroes enters a cook-shop filled “with steams of boiled beef” where the sight of “skin-of-beef, tripe, cow-heel or sausages … turned my stomach.” In this same period the Worshipful Company of Butchers, in debt and pestered by competition in the suburbs, proved wholly incapable of enforcing regulations on the sale of meat. Every kind of shoddy or mouldy flesh could be purchased. Once more the unchecked reign of commerce becomes a symbol of city life.

So it was that in the early part of the nineteenth century “food processing” took its place beside the manufactories along the Thames; essences of meat and meat sauces came from London Bridge, while tinned meat or “patent beef” came from Bermondsey. This was the century of anchovy paste and preserved tongue, of clarified butter and tinned pâté de foie gras. There were also more familiar items. Accounts describe nineteenth-century travellers breakfasting off ham, tongue and “a devil” (kidney), or dining off mutton chop, rump steak and a “weal cutlet,” while in less splendid establishments the fare included “hams, and sirloins, the remnants of geese and turkeys, codfish reduced to the gills, fins and tail.”

But the overwhelming mass of evidence still concerns food provided by the street-sellers of the period. With a restless, large and rapidly moving population the equivalent of fast-food was the most characteristic and appropriate form of sustenance. Whether they bought fried fish sold in oily paper, or boiled puddings in cotton bags, it was the custom of the poorer citizens to eat “upon the stones.” New-laid eggs were for sale on Holborn Hill and pork in Broad St. Giles. There was also the ubiquitous baked-potato stall, as well as the shops plying roly poly or plum duff. One trader in Whitechapel informed Henry Mayhew that “he sold 300 pennyworths of pudding in a day. Two thirds of this quantity he sold to juveniles under fifteen years of age … The boys are often tiresome: ‘Mister,’ they’ll say, ‘can’t you give us a plummier bit than this?’ or ’Is it just up? I likes it ’ot, all ‘ot.’” In competition with these hot delicacies came sandwiches, hailed as “one of our greatest institutions” by Charles Dickens, who saw them, in an image of perpetual activity and perpetual consumption, being engorged by the shelf-load at the Britannia Theatre in Hoxton.

The times of that consumption have changed, both in the commercial and the fashionable areas of the city. An entire history of social manners might be constructed from the essential fact that, over the last five centuries, the time for eating dinner, or the main meal of the day, has advanced by approximately ten hours. In the late fifteenth century, many Londoners dined “at ten o’clock in the forenoon,” although others delayed for a further hour; in the sixteenth century, the hour for meat varied between eleven and twelve but no later. In the seventeenth century, the hours of twelve and one became common. But then in the early decades of the eighteenth century there was a rapid acceleration of mealtime. By 1740 two o’clock was the appropriate hour, and by 1770 three was considered the vital moment. In the last decades of the eighteenth, and the first of the nineteenth, the dinner hour slid to five or six. Then Harriet Beecher Stowe, writing about London life in the 1850s, noted that dinner at eight or even nine o’clock in the evening was considered appropriate at “aristocratic” tables.

The reason for this postponement of the main meal was credited by eighteenth-century moralists to the decline of moral fibre and the rise of social decadence, as if it were important to devour food before successfully devouring the day. But a more specific circumstance may have assisted the process, particularly in the early decades of the eighteenth century when, according to Grosley, “the hour of going to Change interfered with dinner time, so that the merchants thought it most advisable, not to dine till their return from Change.” Once more commercial imperatives play their part within the intimate texture of London life.

CHAPTER 34

Eat In or Take Away

Eating-houses, or restaurants, have for many centuries been an intricate part of that texture. In the twelfth century one monk describes a great “public place of cookery” by the Thames where ordinary flesh and fish could be purchased-roasted, fried or boiled-while the more dainty could order venison, no doubt with ale or wine for refreshment. It may lay claim to being the first London restaurant, except that one historian of London believes that this place of city refreshment was in fact a survival of a Roman public kitchen. In that case the tradition of London hospitality is ancient indeed. The twelfth-century version included, for example, “a dining room for the rich man, an eating-house for the poor man” with a version of “take-away” in the event of friends calling unexpectedly. Certainly it was a large operation, perhaps equivalent to Terence Conran’s vast eateries in Soho and the West End, since according to William Fitz-Stephen “whatsoever multitude of soldiers or other strangers enter into the city at any hour of the day or night, or else are about to depart, they may turn in.”

The number of these eating-houses multiplied as the population increased, so that by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there were many cook-shops clustered in Bread Street and East Cheap. These thoroughfares were known as the quarters for eating-houses where, under the supervision of the civic authorities, the price of meals was strictly controlled. Sometimes the customers would bring their own food with them, to be cooked in ovens on the spot, with the price varying from a penny to twopence for the cost of fire and labour.

The “ordinaries” were a sixteenth-century variation upon the cook-shop. There were twelve-penny ordinaries as well as three-penny ordinaries, the price varying according to style and comfort as well as the cost of the main meal. Wooden benches and trestle tables stood on a rush-strewn floor and the tapster or his boy wandered among the customers crying out, “What do you lack?” or “What is it that you would have brought?” Meat, poultry, game and pastry were served in succeeding order; “to be at your woodcocks” meant that you had almost finished eating. The citizens arrived about eleven thirty, and wandered about singly or in groups waiting for their meat to be served while some “published their clothes, and talked as loud as they could in order to feel at ease.” It was indeed an easy environment, and it became the pattern of the London eating-house, continuing well into the succeeding century.

In the late seventeenth century there is a description by François Misson of the butchers’ meat on the menu in just such a place-“beef, mutton, veal, pork and lamb; you have what quantity you please cut off, fat, lean, much or little done; with this a little salt and mustard upon the side of a plate, a bottle of beer and a roll.” At the end of the meal, when the payment or “reckoning” was made, the server carried a basket to the table and with a knife cleared away the crumbs of bread and morsels of meat. In many such establishments there was a “best room” for those with delicate or expensive appetites, while for the ordinary citizen a sixpenny plate in the “publick room” would suffice.

These eating-houses had by now migrated far beyond the bounds of East Cheap and Bread Street, towards the populous areas of the capital. Bishopsgate Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the Old Bailey, Covent Garden, Haymarket and many others besides, all had their local and well-frequented places of call.

In the eighteenth century they became known as “beef-houses” or “chop-houses,” together with taverns specialising in more formal or protracted meals. Dolly’s Chop-house in Paternoster Row was a particular favourite, serving its meats “hot and hot”-which is to say, delivered up as quickly as they were cooked. There was also a famous resort of cook-shops behind St. Martin-in-the-Fields, known to the natives as “Porridge Island”; it was a somewhat unsavoury haunt, however, where gin and ale provided as much sustenance as the food carried from the cook “under cover of a pewter plate.”

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Yet of course the most famous establishments of eighteenth-century London were the coffee houses. In fact, they found their origins in the middle of the previous century when, according to a contemporary note recorded in The Topography of London, “theire ware also att this time a Turkish drink to be sould almost in eury street, called Coffee, and another kind of drink called Tee, and also a drink called Chacolate, which was a very harty drink.” The first coffee house was set up in St. Michael’s Alley, off Cornhill, in 1652; two or three years later a second was established close by, in St. Michael’s Churchyard. A third, the Rainbow, located in Fleet Street by the gate of the Inner Temple, was prosecuted in 1657 for being “a great nuisance and prejudice to the neighbourhood”; the principal complaint was of “evil smells” as well as the danger of fire. Yet the popularity of coffee houses among Londoners immediately became apparent, both from “the convenience of being able to make appointments in any part of town,” as Macaulay said, and the further convenience “of being able to pass evenings socially at a very small charge.” By the turn of the century, there were some two thousand of them in the capital.

An anonymous painting of one, dated approximately 1700, shows several bewigged gentlemen sitting down to “dishes” of coffee; there are candles upon the tables, while the floor is of bare wood. One customer is smoking a long clay pipe, others are reading periodicals. One such periodical, the Spectator, opened its first number in the spring of 1711 with an account of the world of coffee houses: “sometimes I am seen thrusting my Head into a Round of Politicians at Will’s, and listning with great Attention to the Narratives that are made in those little Circular Audiences. Sometimes I smoak a Pipe at Child’s, and whilst I seem attentive to nothing but the Post-Man overhear the Conversation of every Table in the Room. I appear on Sunday Nights at St. James’s CoffeeHouse, and sometimes join the little Committee of Politicks in the Inner Room, as one who comes there to hear and to improve. My Face is likewise very well known at the Grecian, the Cocoa-Tree …” In all these coffee houses the news and rumours of the day were disseminated.

There were coffee houses for every trade and every profession, and Macaulay noted that “Foreigners remarked that the coffeehouse was that which especially distinguished London from all other cities; that the coffeehouse was the Londoner’s home, and that those who wished to find a gentleman commonly asked, not whether he lived in Fleet Street or Chancery Lane, but whether he frequented the Grecian or the Rainbow.” The famous doctor, John Radcliffe, travelled from Bow Street to Garraway’s Coffee House, in Change Alley, Cornhill, where at a particular table he was always “to be found, surrounded by surgeons and apothecaries.” He timed his visits “at the hour when the Exchange was full,” no doubt in the hope of also being attended by rich merchants and brokers.

In other coffee houses, lawyers met clients and brokers met each other, merchants drank coffee with customers and politicians drank tea with journalists. The Virginia and Maryland Coffee House in Threadneedle Street became a recognised meeting-place for those engaged in business with Russia, and so changed its name to the Baltic. The Jerusalem in Cornhill was the haven of West Indies trade, while Batson’s in Cornhill was a kind of “consulting room” for doctors waiting to receive their clients in the City. Old Slaughter’s Coffee House, in St. Martin’s Lane, became the recognised centre for London artists. St. James’s of St. James’s Street was for Whigs, while down the road the Cocoa-Tree at the corner of Pall Mall was the haunt of Tories and Jacobites. The Grecian in Devereux Court catered for lawyers; Will’s on the north side of Russell Street, Covent Garden, was a haven for wits and authors. There was even a floating coffee house, a boat moored off the stairs of Somerset House, which was called the Folley. It was as “bulky as a man-of-war” and was divided into several rooms serving coffee, tea and “spiritous liquours.” Like many London establishments on the river it began with fashionable company but, by degrees, attracted drunken or disreputable customers until it seems to have become little more than a floating brothel. At length it decayed, and was sold for firewood. Not being on land, it had no tenacity of purpose.

Coffee houses, on land or on water, were generally somewhat dingy places, reeking of tobacco. The wooden floor was often sanded, with spittoons liberally placed. In some, the tables and chairs were stained and dirty, while in others there were “boxes with upright backs and narrow seats”; the lamps smoked and the candles spluttered. So why were they thronged with ordinary citizens and why did they, like the twentieth-century public house, become a token of city life? There was, as always, a commercial reason. The coffee houses acted as counting-houses and auction rooms, offices and shops, in which merchants and agents, clerks and brokers, could engage in business. Agents who sold estates or property would meet their clients in such places, while the sale of other goods was also encouraged. In 1708, for example, one could read the somewhat chilling notice, “A black boy, twelve years of age, fit to wait on a gentleman, to be disposed of at Denis’s coffeehouse, in Finch Lane.”

The ambience itself could also be used to commercial advantage and sales by auction became a coffeehouse speciality. At the “inch-of-candle sales” at Garraway’s, coffee, alcohol and muffins were employed to encourage the bidding. Garraway’s was opposite the Exchange and therefore a harbour “for people of quality who have business in the City, and for wealthy citizens”; as a result there were sales of books and pictures, tea and furniture, wine and hard wood. Wide and low-roofed, with boxes and seats running down its sides, it had a broad central stairway that led to the sale room upstairs, in such proximity that business and entertainment were curiously mingled. Its genial aspect, complete with sea-coal fire and muffins toasting on forks, is compounded by the description of its customers, by “Aleph” in London Scenes and London People, in “admirable humour; sly jokes were circulating from ear to ear; everybody appeared to know everybody.” But in London, appearances can be deceptive. Swift, commenting upon the effects of the bursting of the South Sea Bubble, in which fortunes were lost upon the crash of the South Sea Company in 1720, describes the speculators “on Garraway’s cliffs” as “A savage race by shipwrecks fed.”

“I am quite familiar at the Chapter Coffeehouse,” wrote Thomas Chatterton to his mother in May 1770, “and know all the geniuses there.” The haunt of booksellers and aspiring writers, the Chapter was situated on the corner of Paternoster Row, opposite Ivy Lane, and was characteristic of its class with small-paned windows, wainscoted walls and low ceilings with heavy beams, making it dark even at noon. When Chatterton wrote of the geniuses he may have been referring to a small club of publishers and writers who always sat in the box in the north-east corner of the house and called themselves the “Wet Paper Club.” When they chose to recommend “a good book,” it was of course one that had sold extensively and rapidly. In this context, and company, it is perhaps worth recalling that Chatterton’s apparent suicide was considered to be the direct result of his inability to profit from the commercial practices of the London publishing world.

The Chapter was also known for its custom among the clergy, since according to “Aleph” “it was a house of call for poor parsons who were in hire to perform Sunday duty” and who also wrote sermons on request. The discourses varied in price from 2s 6d to 10s 6d-“A buyer had only to name his subject and doctrine” and the appropriate pious lesson would be delivered. If there was “a glut of the commodity” of charity sermons, “a moving appeal,” for example, “for a parish school” could be obtained at a very cheap rate.

Prices at the Chapter were on a par with other such establishments. At the turn of the nineteenth century, a cup of coffee was fivepence while four ham sandwiches with a glass of sherry cost twopence; a pot of tea, serving three cups, together with six slices of bread and butter, a muffin and two crumpets, cost tenpence-or, rather, a shilling since twopence extra went to the head waiter, William, one of those London types who seem forever fixed in the establishment where they work, a figure entirely made out of the quintessence of London. Of average height, somewhat stout, William was rumoured to have money “in funds.” He was imperturbable, always civil and, as the ever observant “Aleph” put it, “carefully dressed in a better black cloth suit than many of the visitors, wearing knee breeches, black silk hose and a spotless white cravat.” Of few words, he was always attentive; “his eyes were in every corner of the room.” He expected his “tip” of a penny or twopence but had moments of unexpected generosity; when “he suspected a customer was very needy, he would bring him two muffins and only charge for one.” He was on easy terms with regulars, who always called him simply “William,” but he inspected strangers “with inquisitive looks.” Those whom he deemed not suitable for admission were dismissed by suggesting that they “must have mistaken the house-the Blue Boar was in Warwick Lane.”

To this coffee house of hacks or “pen-drivers,” seventy years after Chatterton, came Charlotte and Emily Brontë en route to Belgium. Charlotte recalled a head waiter, a “grey-haired, elderly man.” It is likely to have been William. He led them to a room upstairs which looked out upon Paternoster Row. Here they sat by the window, but “could see nothing of motion, or of change, in the grim dark houses opposite.” The street itself was so quiet that every footfall could be distinctly heard. One of Charlotte Brontë’s heroines, Lucy Snowe in Villette (1853), spends her first night in London in the very same coffee house. She looks out of her window on the following morning and “Above my head, above the house-tops, co-elevate almost with the clouds, I saw a solemn orbed mass, dark-blue and dim-THE DOME. While I looked my inner self moved; my spirit shook its always-fettered wings half loose; I had a sudden feeling as if I, who have never yet truly lived, were at last about to taste life.” So, in the shadow of St. Paul’s, the London coffee house could produce revelations.

· · ·

The coffee houses lingered well into nineteenth-century London. When some became specialised exchanges, others turned into clubs or private hotels, while others again became dining-houses complete with polished mahogany tables, oil-lamps and boxes with green curtains dividing them. At the beginning of the nineteenth century another kind of coffee house altogether emerged which catered for the breakfasts of labourers or porters on their way to work. It served chops and kidneys, bread and pickles; one familiar order was “tea and an egg.” In many of them different “rooms” charged different prices for coffee. At four o’clock in the morning the poor customer would have a cup of coffee, and a thin slice of bread and butter, for one penny halfpenny; at eight o’clock breakfast for the less impoverished would include a penny loaf, a pennyworth of butter and a coffee for threepence. Arthur Morrison in A Child of the Jago (1896) describes a coffee house with “shrivelled bloaters … doubtful cake … pallid scones … and stale pickles.” Yet it was still a more respectable establishment than the neighbouring cook-shop, filled with steam, and may have given rise to that Cockney expression in the depths of poverty or despair-“I wish I was dead; an’ kep’ a cawfy shop.” In one of his visitations to the East End Charles Booth entered a “rough coffeehouse,” and found a long counter “on which were piled, in rude plenty, many loaves of bread, flitches of bacon, a quantity of butter, two tea-urns … three beer pumps for Kop’s ale … and a glass jar filled with pickled onions.” Note the ubiquity of the pickle; Londoners love sharpness. Thirty years later George Orwell entered a coffee house on Tower Hill, and found himself in a “little stuffy room” with “high-backed pews” that had been fashionable in the 1840s. When he asked for tea and bread and butter-the staple of the working-class breakfast since the beginning of the nineteenth century-he was told “No butter, only marg.” There was also a notice upon the wall, to the effect that “Pocketing the sugar is not allowed.”

There were other places for a meagre breakfast. “Early breakfast houses” were essentially coffee shops by another name, “stiflingly hot,” with the flavour of coffee mingling with the “odours of fried rashers of bacon, and others not by any means so agreeable.” Ever since the eighteenth century there had also been “early breakfast stalls,” which were essentially kitchen tables set up at the corner of a street or the foot of a bridge, purveying halfpenny slabs of bread and butter together with large pots of tea or coffee heated over charcoal fires. These in turn were succeeded by more elaborate coffee stalls, which were constructed on the pattern of a medieval London shop with a wooden interior and shutters. They were generally painted red, ran on wheels, and were led by a horse to familiar locations at Charing Cross, at the foot of Savoy Street, on Westminster Bridge, below Waterloo Bridge, by Hyde Park Corner, and by West India Dock gates. They sold everything from saveloys to hard-boiled eggs, as well as coffee and “woods” (Woodbine cigarettes).

There is an animated painting, dated 1881, which depicts a variety of Londoners congregating around a “day stall” set up outside the gates of a park or square. The female proprietor is washing up a cup-most of the stalls were indeed run by women on the principle, maintained by many public houses of the present day, that aggressive customers were less likely to cause trouble and offence if a female was present. There is bread on the table, but no sign of the ham sandwiches and “water cresses” which were also part of the daily menu. A boy in a red jacket, bearing the livery of the City of London, sits in a wheelbarrow and blows upon his saucer of liquid; he was one of those employed by the City to run after horses in the street and scoop up their manure. A female crossing-sweeper and a female vendor, both with expressions of sorrow or perplexity, seem to be looking on at the feast. A well-dressed young lady, with umbrella and band-box, sips delicately from her cup on the other side of the stall. It is a suggestive picture of late Victorian London. In competition with such a stall was the baked-potato van, a portable oven wheeled around the streets. There were also oyster stalls where Londoners, as the saying goes, ate “on their thumbs.”

The ordinaries and the eating-houses continued well into the nineteenth century as chop-houses or ham-and-beef shops or à-la-mode beef-houses. There were also taverns or public houses where it was customary for the client to bring in his own piece of meat which was then dressed and cooked upon a gridiron by a waiter, who charged a penny for the service. The origin of twentieth-century pub food lies in these nineteenth-century establishments where “fine old cheese” and mutton pies and baked potatoes were generally on sale by the counter.

The old chop-houses and beef-houses were not necessarily of good reputation. Nathaniel Hawthorne described one such establishment, in The English Notebooks (1853-8), with “a filthy table-cloth, covered with other people’s crumbs; iron forks, a leaden salt cellar, the commonest earthen plates; a little dark stall, to sit and eat in.” He noticed that the conditions of this place, the Albert Dining-Rooms, were not uncommon. It was a measure of the discomfort and dirtiness to which Londoners, historically, have accommodated themselves. There were gradations in service and comfort, however. In the more formal dining-house a waiter, with napkin over his left arm, would announce to the client what was “just ready”; in a “rapid but monotonous tone” he would go through the list of “Roast beef, boiled beef, roast haunch of mutton, boiled pork, roast veal and ham, salmon and shrimp sauce, pigeon-pie, rump-steak pudding.” In the à-la-mode beef-houses there was a sixpenny plate and a fourpenny plate-“Two sixes and a four” the waiter would call out to the cook in a nearby kitchen.

Such places of resort, having dominated London in various forms for several centuries, were displaced in the latter half of the nineteenth century by “dining-halls,” “restaurants” associated with the new hotels, and “refreshment rooms,” connected to the new railway stations. They were not necessarily an improvement on their predecessors. In fact London’s reputation as the purveyor of drab and unpalatable food began essentially in the mid-nineteenth century. Henry James, in 1877, was scathing about London’s restaurants “whose badness is literally fabulous.” And yet they flourished. The St. James’s Hotel was reputed to be the one in which “separate tables for dining were first introduced,” but it was M. Ritz who capitalised upon the idea; the advent of his hotel restaurant effectively ended the old London fashion “of people dining together at large tables.” From the 1860s, the number of restaurants, “dining-rooms” and “luncheon bars” multiplied-the Café Royal opened in 1865 and the Criterion Restaurant (like many, named after an adjacent theatre) in 1874. Spiers and Pond Gaiety Restaurant, next to the Gaiety Theatre in the Strand, opened in 1869. There is a photograph of its “Restaurant amp; Ballroom”; a hansom is parked outside with men in top hats milling about the entrance. A contemporary description in Building News mentions a luncheon bar, a café and two dining-rooms all fitted out with an “ostentation of design” worthy of “the stained glass designer, or even the scene painter.” Restaurant and theatre were eventually swept aside for the construction of Aldwych.

Social changes were engineered by the advent of the restaurant. Women, for example, were no longer excluded from dinner. Walter Besant wrote in the early twentieth century that “Ladies can, and do, go to these restaurants without reproach; their presence has made a great alteration; there is always an atmosphere of cheerfulness, if not of exhilaration,” a description which by indirection suggests the somewhat mournful or low tone of the old-fashioned, all-male chop-house. The first restaurant to introduce music during meals was Gatti’s at Charing Cross, and the fashion spread quickly until by the 1920s only the Café Royal remained defiantly silent. With the new century, too, came the fashion for dancing at dinner and even between the courses. Other alterations were more gradual and subtler. Ralph Nevill, the author of Night Life in 1926, noted that the pace of the Victorian restaurant had been much slower with “always a pause between the appearance of the various dishes” as opposed to the speed and hustle of modern restaurants which the author ascribed to the advent of “the motor” on the streets of London. In the city everything connects.

In the new century, too, emerged the great chain of Lyon’s Corner Houses; they were instituted in 1909, and sprang from a number of tea shops and restaurants established at the very end of the nineteenth century-including the first entirely underground restaurant, Lyons of Throgmorton Street, with a grill room forty feet below ground level. All types of Londoners mingled within the plainer London coffee houses; similarly the London tea shops were considered to be “democratic … in the mixture of classes that you see therein seated together eating and drinking the same things.” Theodore Dreiser visited a “Lyons,” just above Regent Street, in 1913 and observed “a great chamber, decorated after the fashion of a palace ball-room, with immense chandeliers of prismed glass hanging from the ceiling and a balcony furnished in cream and gold.” Yet the dishes were “homely” and the customers “very commonplace.” Here, then, the demotic and theatrical characteristics of city living were effortlessly combined.

There is a vivid account of East End food at the beginning of the twentieth century in Walter Besant’s East London, with descriptions of salt fish for Sunday morning breakfast, of slabs of pastry known as “Nelson,” of the evening trade in “faggots, saveloys and pease pudding” and of course of the ubiquitous pie-houses or “eel-pie saloons” where jellied eels, saveloys or hot meat pies with mashed potatoes were the standard fare. These were rivalled only by the fish-and-chip shops.

In the years before the Second World War, a typical “Cockney” menu would comprise saveloy and pease pudding, German sausages and black pudding, fried fish and pickles, pie crust and potatoes, faggot and mustard pickle. Strong tea and lashings of bread and butter were the other staples of life. The situation was more complex in other parts of London, where there was much less emphasis upon a traditional cuisine, but the standard dish was always meat, potatoes and two veg swimming in gravy, thus reinforcing London’s reputation as a city with no real culinary skills.

Between the wars, and after the Second World War, London’s restaurants were considered very much below the standard of other European capitals. Some were restaurants of the middling English sort, serving beef and mutton and greens, sausage and mash, apricots and custard. But in Soho the restaurant trade flourished because of the influence of French, Italian, Spanish, Russian and Chinese cooking. In the purlieus of Soho, too, an informality of eating was introduced or, rather, reintroduced. The first sandwich bar, Sandy’s of Oxendon Street, was opened in 1933; very soon sandwich bars and the new snack bars were springing up all over the capital. This revolution in taste was complemented, twenty years later, by the opening of the first coffee bar, also in Soho, the Mika, in Frith Street.

The world of quick eating and quick drinking, a phenomenon previously noted in the pie-shops of the fourteenth century no less than in the baked-potato vans of the nineteenth, thus re-established itself. Sandwiches are now the staple ingredient of the London lunch, from the Pret A Manger chain to the corner shop on a busy junction. There has been a concomitant increase in fast food, from burgers of beef to wings of chicken. The staple of the city diet remains the same, therefore, while the statistics of its voracious appetite also remain constant. The budget of London households, for “restaurants and cafés … take-aways and snacks” is, according to a survey of national statistics, approximately “a third higher than for the United Kingdom as a whole.”

London’s reputation as a culinary inferno was gradually dispelled during the 1980s, when large restaurants catering to every taste in food or ambience became fashionable. Now the London customer can choose between monkfish tempura and chilli breast of chicken with coconut rice, grilled rabbit with polenta and braised octopus with chickpeas and coriander. Many of these restaurants soon became flourishing commercial enterprises; their chefs were recognised and controversial London figures, their owners part of a chic world of art and society. In the 1990s the connection between food and commerce was rendered all the more distinctive by the “floating” of certain restaurants on the Stock Exchange; others have been bought by large companies as a profitable form of speculation. Some of the more recently established restaurants are very large indeed, and the fact that few tables remain unbooked is testimony to the permanent and characteristic voracity of Londoners. That is why it has always been known as a city of markets.

CHAPTER 35

Market Time

The first markets were upon the streets. In fact it is possible to envisage the central axis of twelfth-or thirteenth-century London as one continuous street-market from the Shambles at Newgate to Poultry by Cornhill. At the Shambles, in 1246, “all the stalls of the butchers are to be numbered and it is to be asked who holds them and by what service and of whom.” Down the street, in the shadow of St. Michael “le Querne,” stood the corn-market. Corn, the staff of life, therefore lies under the aegis of the Church. Just beyond the corn-market were established the markets for fish in Old Fish Street and Friday Street (on Fridays people were to refrain from meat). Bread Street and Milk Street are adjacent, thus setting up a topographical alignment of great significance to the city. The naming of the streets is established upon the food which is purchased there. The city may be defined, then, as that place where people come to buy and sell.

As the citizens of thirteenth-century London walked down West Cheap-now Cheapside-away from the smell of the Shambles and the fish stalls, they passed shops where harnesses and saddles were sold, where cord-wainers plied their trade, and where mercers and the drapers laid out their fabrics upon their stalls. Beyond these lay Poultry, of which the meaning is self-explanatory, and Coneyhope Lane where rabbits were sold. Gracechurch Street was originally “Grass Church” street, named after the herbs which were sold within it.

There are some energetic if idiosyncratic drawings of adjacent street-markets in A Caveatt for the Citty of London (1598). Beside St. Nicholas Shambells, flanks of beef, whole pigs and lambs, hang outside a row of butchers’ shops. In Gracechurch Street, purveyors of apples, fish and vegetables have set up their stalls beneath pillars and awnings which proclaim their origin in Essex, Kent and “Sorre.” Yet not all goods were sold on open stalls, and it has been estimated that there were some four hundred small shops-perhaps like wooden kiosks-along the length of Cheapside. The noise and tumult were intense, and several laws were passed in order to prevent crowds. There were other perils, too, with strict measures against the resale of stolen articles. The clothes-market of Cornhill, for example, was notorious; it was here that the narrator of London Lickpenny recognised the hood which had been lifted from him at Westminster. In light of “many perils and great mischiefs … many brawls and disorders” during the “Evynchepynge” or evening market at “Cornhulle” it was ordained that “after the bell has been rung that hangs upon the Tun at Cornhulle,” no more items were to be taken to the market. One bell rang an hour before sunset, and another thirty minutes later; it is possible to imagine the traders calling out to the slowly diminishing crowds, as the sun begins to decline over the towers and rooftops of the city.

The general confusion of trades was one of the reasons why in 1283 a general “Stocks Market” was established at the eastern end of Poultry, where “fish and flesh” could be sold as well as fruit, roots, flowers and herbs. Its name came not from its “stocks” of provisions but from the stocks set up in that area for the punishment of city offenders. A “privileged market” which remained on the same site for 450 years, before being removed to Farringdon Street in the mid-eighteenth century, it acquired a reputation for having the choicest of all provisions. There is an engraving, limned just before its removal, which shows the statue of Charles II erected in the very heart of the market; two small dogs look up at a stall selling cheeses, while a woman and child sit with their baskets against the steps of the statue. In the background there is an animated scene of trading and bargaining. A pair of lovers meet in the foreground, apparently oblivious to the noise around them, while a Londoner is pointing out directions to a foreign visitor. Here we may remark upon the testimony of a stranger, one of the many hundreds in the three volumes of Xavier Baron’s wonderful London 1066-1914: “Whatever haste a gentleman may be in, when you happen to meet in the streets; as soon as you speak to him, he stops to answer, and often steps out of his way to direct you, or to consign you to the care of someone who seems to be going the same way.” On a balcony above the scene, a young woman is beating out a carpet. In such visions, London may be said to live again.

Billingsgate was perhaps the most ancient of London’s markets with its foundation supposedly some four hundred years before the beginning of the Christian era; it is not impossible that fishermen landed their catches of eel and herring here in remote antiquity, but the official records date only from the beginning of the eleventh century. That it was a place apart, from the rest of London, is not in doubt; here, in an atmosphere of reeking fish, with fish-scales underfoot and a “shallow lake of mud” all round, specific types and traditions had sprung up.

There were the “wives” of Billingsgate-perhaps the descendants of the devotees of the god Belin who was once purported to be worshipped here- who dressed in strong “stuff” gowns and quilted petticoats; their hair, caps and bonnets were flattened into one indistinguishable mass, because of the practice of carrying baskets upon their heads. Called “fish fags,” they smoked small pipes of tobacco, took snuff, drank gin, and were known for their colourful language. Thus came the phrase to shriek like a fishwife. A dictionary of 1736 defined a “Billingsgate” as “a scolding impudent slut.” But gradually throughout the nineteenth century the fish fags were extirpated, to make way for a breed of London porters who wore helmets made of hide with a flap which reached down to their necks so that they could more easily carry their baskets of fish. These fish porters were complemented by the fish salesmen who wore straw hats even in winter. So a definite tradition of dress, and of language, emerges from this small area of London.

The same phenomenon can be witnessed at a variety of sites. Smithfield does not have as long a history as Billingsgate but by the eleventh century the “smothe field” just beyond the City walls was a recognised area for the sale of horses, sheep and cattle, known for drunkenness, rowdiness and such general violence that it had earned the name of “Ruffians’ Hall.” That violence did not stop with the granting of a royal charter to the cattle-market in 1638.

Market days were held on Tuesday and Friday; the horses were kept in stables in the neighbourhood, but the cattle and other livestock were driven in from the outlying areas causing much distress to the animals and inconvenience to the citizens. It is recorded in Smithfield Past and Present by Forshaw and Bergstrom, that “Great cruelty was practised, the poor animals being goaded on the flanks and struck on the head before they could be marshalled in their proper places.” In the early part of the nineteenth century a million sheep and a quarter of a million cattle were sold annually; the noise, and the stench, were considerable. The danger, too, was significant. On one day, in 1830, “a gentleman was knocked down by a very powerful bull” in High Holborn and “before he could recover himself he was severely trampled on and gored.” In Turnmill Street, another thoroughfare into the market from adjacent fields, a hog “mangled a young child and ’tis judged would have eaten it.” The animals were sometimes goaded into stampedes down the narrow and muddy lanes off Clerkenwell and Aldersgate Street, while the general air of chaos and intemperance was exploited by various louche persons who preyed on the drunkenness and unwariness of others.

Dickens had an intuitive sense of place, and fastened upon Smithfield as a centre of “filth and mire.” In Oliver Twist (1837-9) it is filled with “crowding, pushing, driving, beating” among “unwashed, unshaven, squalid and dirty figures.” The protagonist in Great Expectations (1860-1) becomes aware that “the shameful place, being all asmear with filth and fat and blood and foam, seemed to stick to me.” Eight years before this was written, the market for live animals had been transferred to Copenhagen Fields in Islington, but the atmosphere of death remained; when the Central Meat Market was instituted on the Smithfield site in 1868, it was described as “a perfect forest of slaughtered calves, pigs and sheep, hanging from cast-iron balustrades.”

Of vegetable markets, there is no end. Borough Market in Southwark can claim to be the first ever recorded, having its origins at some time before the eleventh century, but Covent Garden remains the most illustrious. Once it was truly a garden, filled with herbs and fruit which seem uncannily to anticipate their later profusion on the same spot; then it was the kitchen garden of Westminster Abbey, contiguous with the garden of Bedford House erected at the end of the sixteenth century. But the market itself sprang from the Earl of Bedford’s proposals to build an ornamented and ornamental piazza as part of his grand scheme of Italianate suburban development; the plaza and adjoining houses began to rise in 1630, and very soon afterwards the trade of the populace began to flow towards the area. On the south side of the square, beside the garden wall, sprang up a number of sheds and stalls selling fruit and vegetables; it was a local amenity which had the additional merit of being financially successful, and in 1670 the estate obtained a charter authorising a market “for the buying and selling of all manner of fruits flowers and herbs.” Thirty-five years later, permanent single-storey shops were set up in two rows. Gradually, inexorably, the market spread across the piazza.

It became the most famous market in England and, given its unique trading status in the capital of world trade, its image was endlessly reproduced in drawings and in paintings. It was first limned in an etching by Wenceslaus Hollar in 1647, which work, according to the editors of London in Paint, has the merit of being “the first close-up depiction of one of London’s quarters.” Another work, of the early eighteenth century, shows a group of early morning shoppers making their way between lines of wooden shops and open stalls; fresh fruit and vegetables can be seen in wicker baskets, while a horse and cart are driving away from the main scene. Twenty years later, in 1750, the painted image has entirely changed; instead of ramshackle sheds there are now two-storey buildings, and the market activity stretches over the entire square. Everything is in life and motion, from the young boy struggling with a basket of apples to the middle-aged female trader who portions out some herbs. Here are cabbages from Battersea and onions from Deptford, celery from Chelsea and peas from Charlton, asparagus from Mortlake and turnips from Hammersmith; carts and sedan chairs jostle, while the covered wagons from the country make their way through the crowds. This picture depicts the very essence of a trading city, while another painting of slightly later date betrays the evidence of pickpockets and street musicians among the assembly.

The drawings of George Scharf, dated 1818 and 1828, depict in minute and various detail the life of the market. The shop of J.W. Draper “Orange Merchant” has a sign painted “yellow and green,” according to Scharf’s notes, while there are drawings of the shops of “Potatoe Salesman Whitman” and of “Butler,” seller of herbs and seeds. There are wheelbarrows filled with cabbages and turnips and carrots and cocoa nuts, alongside mobile stalls with apples and pears and strawberries and plums. One young costermonger’s barrow has a red, white and blue flag flying from it, with the sign that four oranges will cost a penny.

In 1830 a permanent market, with avenues and colonnades and conservatories in three parallel ranges, was completed; it gave the market an institutional aspect, as well as confirming its status as an emporium of world trade. “There is more certainty of purchasing a pineapple here, every day in the year,” John Timbs’s Curiosities of London declares, “than in Jamaica and Calcutta, where pines are indigenous.” Steam boats carried articles from Holland, Portugal and the Bermudas.

Order was introduced to the market, also, with vegetables to the south, fruit to the north, and flowers to the north-west. It became customary for Londoners to come and look upon the cut flowers, stealing “a few moments from the busy day to gratify one of the purest tastes.” They gazed at the daffodils, roses, pinks, carnations and wallflowers before once again withdrawing into the usual noise and uproar of the city.

The New Market, as it was called, continued for more than a century until in 1974 it was moved to a site in Battersea. The spirit of Covent Garden has of course changed since that removal, but it is still a centre of noise and bustle; the hucksters and hawkers are still there, but the sounds of the basket-sellers have changed into those of travelling musicians and the agile porters have turned into a different kind of street artist.

The great markets-Smithfield, Billingsgate, Covent Garden, the Stocks- were seen as central to London life, and somehow emblematic of it. Charles Booth, in his Life and Labour of the People in London (1903), revealed that in Petticoat Lane, on Sunday morning, could be found “cotton sheeting, old clothes, worn-out boots, damaged lamps, chipped china shepherdesses, rusty locks,” together with sellers of “Dutch drops” and Sarsaparilla wine, bed knobs, door knobs and basins of boiled peas. Here, in the early twentieth century, Tubby Isaacs set up his stall selling bread and jellied eels: the same small firm remains there at the beginning of the next century. In nearby Wentworth Street there were bakers and fishmongers. In Brick Lane were sold “pigeons, canaries, rabbits, fowls, parrots or guinea pigs.” Hungerford Market was known for its vegetables, Spitalfields for its potatoes, and Farringdon for its watercress. In Goodge Street there was a market for fruit and vegetables, while in Leather Lane tools, appliances and peddlers’ wares were sold together with “old bed knobs, rusty keys or stray lengths of iron piping.” Leadenhall Market, established since the thirteenth century, was first known for its supply of woollen cloths while its main courtyard was used alternately by butchers and tanners. Clare Market, off Lincoln’s Inn Fields, was notorious for its butchers. Bermondsey Market was known for hide and skin, Tattersall’s for horses. Fish-wives held their own market along the Tottenham Court Road “with paper-lanthorns stuck in their baskets on dark nights.” The litany of markets is a litany of London itself-Fleet Market, Newgate Market, Borough Market, Lisson Grove Market, Portman Market, Newport Market, Chapel Market in Islington.

The metaphor of the market has now spread all over London, and across its trading systems, and yet it springs from places such as Brick Lane, Petticoat Lane, Leather Lane, Hoxton Street and Berwick Street. All these, and almost a hundred others, survive still as street-markets, the majority of them on sites where they first flourished centuries before. Here the poor buy at fifth hand what the rich bought at first hand. Some street-markets, however, have vanished. Rag Fair, by Tower Hill, has gone: a woebegone place, where “raggs and old clothes” were sold beside rotten vegetables, stale bread and old meat, it disappeared beneath its own waste.

CHAPTER 36

Waste Matter

What the voracious city devours, it must eventually disgorge in rubbish and excrement. Thomas More, who as under-sheriff knew the malodorous and insanitary conditions of London at first hand, decided that in his Utopia (1516) anything sordidum (dirty) or morbum (diseased) should be forbidden within the walls. In the early sixteenth century, this was indeed a utopian state.

The sanitary conditions of London in the centuries of Roman civilisation, when a system of public baths and latrines helped actively to promote urban cleanliness, were as good as anywhere within the empire. Yet it would be unwise to depict a marbled city without stain; refuse heaps, containing the bones of oxen, goats, pigs and horses, were found in the open areas of the city still within the walls, although it is likely that semi-domesticated ravens were always ready to consume offending garbage littered upon the street. The practice of throwing the contents of urine jars out of the window is well known, as is attested by numerous court cases. In the entrance to Roman taverns and workshops, however, have been uncovered large stone vessels which can best be described as urinals. Here is the first physical evidence of London’s toilet facilities (in one such site, along Fish Street Hill, was found a bag of cannabis which also testifies to the longevity of the drug culture of the city).

In the period of Saxon and Viking occupation there is evidence of excrement dropped anywhere and everywhere, even within the houses, which suggests a deterioration in healthy practice. In turn we may imagine the medieval town littered with horse dung and cesspools, strewn with the offal of butchers, with wooden chips and kitchen refuse, human excrement and daily rubbish, generally impeding the “channels” which ran down both sides of the street. Regulations of the thirteenth century ordained that “no one shall place dung or other filth in the streets or lanes, but cause the same to be taken by the rakers to the places ordained”; these “places” were an early version of the rubbish tip from which the contents were taken by cart or boat to outlying areas where the dung could be used as manure for the fields. Pigs were allowed to roam through the streets as natural consumers of rubbish, but they proved a considerable nuisance with their custom of blocking narrow lanes and straying into houses; their place after a cull was taken by kites who performed the same function as ravens in first-century London. Indeed there were laws that forbade on pain of death the killing of kites and ravens, which became so tame that they would snatch a piece of bread and butter from a child’s hands.

In 1349 Edward III wrote to the mayor, complaining that the thoroughfares were “foul with human faeces, and the air of the city poisoned to the great danger of men passing.” As a result the civic authorities issued a proclamation denouncing the “grievous and great abomination” to be found in filth, dung and other nuisances obstructing the streets. From entries in the Letter Books and the Plea and Memoranda Rolls it is clear that the city leaders, fearing epidemic disease, accepted the need for sanitary legislation. Four scavengers (scawageours) were to be held responsible for rubbish in each ward, and each householder had a duty to ensure that the street outside his door was cleared of noisome waste. There were fines for any citizen found dumping refuse into the Fleet or Walbrook, and a “serjeant of the channels” was appointed to ensure that the rivulets of street and stream remained unimpeded. But old habits persisted. Households overlooking the Walbrook paid a tax or toll in order to build their latrines over the running water of the river, and upon London Bridge itself there were 138 houses as well as a public latrine which showered down upon the Thames.

Public places, in that capacity, were used more often than private spaces. Pissing Lane, later known as Pissing Alley, “leadinge from Paules Church into Pater Noster Rowe,” may be mentioned, along with two other alleys of the same name dating variously from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries. Similarly there were Dunghill Lanes beside Puddle Dock and Whitefriars as well as Queenhithe, while Dunghill Stairs was located to the front of Three Cranes Wharf.

The first public lavatories, since the urns of Roman London, were constructed in the thirteenth century. The new bridge across the river was equipped with one of these modern conveniences, which had two entrances, while the smaller bridges across the Fleet and the Walbrook also made provision for them. Against the streams and tributaries there were “houses of office,” too, although many consisted simply of wooden planks with holes carved out of them. More elaborate public privies were constructed, some with four or more holes, culminating in Richard Whittington’s fifteenth-century “House of Easement” or “Long House” over the Thames at the end of Friar Lane. It contained two rows of sixty-four seats, one row for men and the other for women, while the refuse dropped into a gully washed with the tides. Public exposure in the city’s privies, however, could be dangerous. A quarrel between two men in a privy beside the wall of Ironmonger Lane ended in murder. Death came in other forms from the same source. The privy above the Fleet, near the mouth of the Thames, caused much discomfort to the monks of White Friars who in 1275 declared to Edward I “that the putrid exhalations there from overcame even the frankincense used in their Services and had caused the death of manie Brethren.”

Certain other parts of London were renowned, and arraigned, for their dirtiness-Farringdon Without and Portsoken were known for their dung-heaps and rubbish dumps while the inhabitants of Bassinghall Ward and Aldrich Gate [Aldersgate] Ward were fined for “casting out of ordure and urine.” One may add to this noisome list the place known as Moorfields which, before being drained in 1527, was said to be “a melancholy region, with raised paths and refuse-heaps, deep black ditches, not unodourous and detestable open sewers.” It was a walk, according to one city history, suitable for London suicides and London philosophers.

The London memoranda (court records) of the fourteenth century are filled with complaints and exhortations. A wall “fallith down gobet-mele into the hie strete, and makith the wey foule … the commin privey of ludgate is full difectif and perlus, and the ordur thereof rotith the stone wallys.” In the parish of St. Sepulchre one Halywell was indicted “for anoyng the feld with donge on both sides horspole,” and one Norton for a similar offence “that there may neythir hors ne cart pas for his dong.” Fourteen households in Foster Lane were indicted “for castyngh out of ordour amp; vrine,” and in the parish of St. Botolph a nuisance was created by “stuppyng of the water, for by cause that the dunghe and the Robous that is dreuen doune ther-to.” All the cooks of Bread Street were arraigned for keeping their “dung and garbage” under their stalls, while a dung-hill in Watergate Street was deemed to create “ordour of Prevees and other orrible sigtis.” We can hear the voice of Londoners in these denunciations, and join in their very local vision of the “filth that cometh doun be Trinite Lane and Cordwanerstrete by Garlekhith and goth doun in the lane by twix John Hatherle shop and Rick Whitman shop, of whiche dong moche goth in to Thamise.”

The same kind of complaint emerges in every century, and there is a plaintive echo of these London memoranda in Samuel Pepys’s words from Seething Lane: “Going down to my cellar, I put my foot in a great heap of turds, by which I find that Mr. Turners house of office is full and comes into my cellar.”

Londoners are fascinated by excrement. Sir Thomas More, in the early sixteenth century, uses five names of shit-cacus, merda, stercus, lutum, co-enum-in his polemical work. These are Latin terms but in the English of the same century homage was paid to human excrement with the nickname of “Sirreverence.” In the late twentieth century those quintessentially London artists, “Gilbert and George” of Spitalfields, arranged large exhibitions of their Shit Paintings.

The very houses of London are built upon refuse. Discarded and forgotten objects, left among old foundations, help to support the weight of the modern city, so that beneath our feet are copper brooches and crucibles, leather shoes and lead tokens, belts and buckles, broken pottery and sandals and figurines, tools and gloves, jars and pieces of bone, shoes and oyster shells, knives and toys, locks and candlesticks, coins and combs, plates and pipes, a child’s ball and a pilgrim’s amulet, all spreading their silent ministry through the earth. But the city is built upon remains and ruins in a more literal sense. In Chick Lane, in 1597, it was discovered that thirty tenements and twelve cottages had been erected upon a great dump of public refuse, while Holywell Street was built upon a site of rubbish and waste which had accumulated for a hundred years after the Great Fire. Even the pavements of the modern city are made, according to The Stones of London by Elsden and Howe, “with slabs produced from clinkered household refuse by the municipal authorities.”

The streets also bear the marks of waste. Maiden Lane is named after middens, Pudding Lane after the “pudding” sent down it to the dung boats moored on the Thames. Public dumps were also known as laystalls and there is still a Laystall Street in Clerkenwell. Sherborne Lane was once known as Shiteburn Lane.

In the period when Pepys was complaining about the substances in his cellar, the privy was being used in most households for kitchen and domestic as well as human refuse. The streets, despite all the prohibitions and regulations, were still offensive “with dust and unwholesome stenches in summer and in wet weather with dirt.” This passage occurs in a report of 1654, and eight years later the city made one of its periodic efforts to cleanse itself with injunctions that householders on Wednesdays and Saturdays should put their refuse in “basket tubs or other vessels ready for the Raker or Scavenger”; the approach of his cart or carriage was meant to be heralded by “a bell, horn, clapper or otherwise,” thus alerting the inhabitants to bring out their rubbish. Excrement itself was removed from the cesspits by “night-soil men,” whose carts were notoriously leaky; they dropped “near a quarter of their dirt” and the great eighteenth-century philanthropist Jonas Hanway remarked that they subjected “every coach and every passenger, of what quality whatsoever, to be overwhelmed with whole cakes of dirt at every accidental jolt of the cart, of which many have had a most filthy experience.” It might be thought the Great Fire would bring a speedy and fiery end to the city’s problems of waste, but the habits of the citizen were not to be easily changed. The novels of the eighteenth century pay horrified, if somewhat oblique, attention to the malodorous and generally offensive conditions of the capital.

Yet if the Great Fire did not cleanse London, it is appropriate that commerce should do so instead. Improved methods of agriculture meant that, by 1760, manure had become a valuable commodity. Since household ash and cinders also began to be employed in brick-making, a whole new market for refuse emerged. Now there came new dealers, competing upon the exchange of the streets. In 1772 a city scavenger of St. James, Piccadilly, reported that he was “greatly injured by a set of Persons called Running Dustmen who go about the streets and places of this Parish and collect the Coal Ashes.” He begged the parishioners only “to deliver their Coal Ashes but to the Persons employed by him the said John Horobin who are distinguished by ringing a Bell.” One eighteenth-century advertisement parades the benefits of Joseph Waller, residing by the Turnpike at Islington, who “keeps Carts and Horses for emptying Bog-Houses.” When rubbish became part of commerce, the conditions of the city were improved more speedily than by any Paving Acts or Cleansing Committees.

In the nineteenth century, the history of city refuse became part of the history of city finance. The dust-heap in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, modelled upon a real and ever more offensive pile off the King’s Cross Road, was believed to contain buried treasure and had already made a fortune for its owner. “I’m a pretty fair scholar in dust,” Mr. Boffin explains, “I can price the Mounds to a fraction, and I know how they can be best disposed of.” There were “Mounds” or “Mounts” of refuse in various parts of London. One immediately to the west of the London Hospital was known as “Whitechapel Mount,” and from its summit could be seen “the former villages of Limehouse, Shadwell and Ratcliffe.” Another was situated at Battle-bridge and was known to the author of Old and New London as a mountain with “heaped hillocks of horse-bones” together with cinders, rags and ordure. It became the resort of “innumerable pigs” but its true commercial worth was proved in a remarkable manner when, in the first years of the nineteenth century, the Russians purchased all the ashes from that site to assist in the rebuilding of Moscow after its burning by the French. The area itself, just north of the present King’s Cross Station, had become the quarters of “dustmen and cinder-sifters” as well as more general scavengers, or, in other words, all those who lived upon the refuse of the city. In that sense it was a benighted place and, even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is characterised by its bleakness and ugliness. The atmosphere of dereliction hangs over it still.

At Letts Wharf, on the southern bank of the Thames near the Shot Tower at Lambeth, another band of Londoners used to sift and pick through the refuse. Most of them were women, who smoked short pipes and wore “strawboard gaiters and torn bonnet boxes for pinafores.” Theirs was an old profession, passed from mother to daughter, generation after generation. “The appearance of these women is most deplorable,” one medical officer wrote, “standing in the midst of fine dust piled up to their waists, with faces and upper extremities begrimed with black filth, and surrounded by and breathing a foul, moist, hot air, surcharged with the gaseous emanations of disintegrating organic compounds.” The dust was sifted into its coarse and fine components, while old pieces of tin were salvaged together with old shoes and bones and oyster shells. The tin often went to make “clamps” for luggage, while the oyster shells were sold to builders; old shoes went to the manufacturers of the famous dye, “Prussian blue.” Nothing was wasted.

It was once rumoured that the streets of London were paved with gold and so it is perhaps no surprise that, in the nineteenth century, the refuse “daily swept up and collected from the streets … is turned into gold to the tune of some thousands of pounds a year.” In photographs of the Victorian city, the gutters are filled with litter and street-sweepings with the added nuisance of multifarious orange peel. The rewards of the city sweepers were based entirely upon locality, but the most obvious product was “street mud” which was sold to farmers or market gardeners. The thoroughfares most highly prized were those where “locomotion never ceases”-Haymarket being “six times in excess of the average streets,” followed by Watling Street, Bow Lane, Old Change and Fleet Street. So even movement itself creates profit in a city based upon speed and productivity.

“Street orderlies” swept the streets and crossings. Some were “pauper labourers” set to the task as a convenient method of combining discipline with efficiency, while others were “philanthropic labourers” who were paid by various charitable concerns. By the middle of the century, all were in competition with the new “street-sweeping machines” which had a mechanical power “equal to the industry of five street-sweepers.”

The industry was complex, however, and different forms of scavenging were specific. Horse manure was collected by boys in red uniforms, who ran among the traffic shovelling it up and placing it in receptacles by the side of the road; this represented yet more London “gold,” at least to farmers in dire need of fertiliser. There were bone-pickers and rag-gatherers, cigar and cigarette pickers, old wood collectors, sweeps and dredgermen, dustmen and “mud larks,” all intent upon collecting up “the most abject refuse” of the city in case it might become “the source of great riches.”

From one owner of a beer-shop on the Southwark Bridge Road Henry Mayhew, who chronicled the street-finders as a different class of city dwellers, learned how the bone-grubbers took their bags of bones to his establishment. Here they received payment and “sat … silently looking at the corners of the floor, for they rarely lifted their eyes up.” The rag-finders had their own separate “beats.” The “pure” finders took up dog excrement from the street; in the early nineteenth century it had been the profession of women who were known as “bunters” but the increasing demands of the tanning trade, for which the excrement was used as an astringent, meant that male workers were also in demand.

In the hope of “finding fitting associates and companions in their wretchedness … or else for the purpose of hiding themselves and their shifts and struggles for existence from the world” the “pure” finders tended to congregate within tenements in the east of the City, just past the Tower of London, between the docks and Rosemary Lane. This was an area, according to Mayhew, “redolent of filth and pregnant with pestilential disease.” The inadvertent use of “pregnant” suggests here the general association of dirty people with sexual depravity. Indeed the attempt to take prostitution off the streets of London was itself linked with the removal of excrement for the cleanness of the city. In a similar spirit there were also warnings concerning the revolutionary potential of the poor, with their “fevers and … filth.” Once more is made the implicit connection between poverty, disease and excrement. It was an association which occurred to the “pure” finders themselves. “There’s such a dizziness in my head now,” one told Mayhew, “I feel as if it didn’t belong to me. No, I have earned no money to-day. I have had a piece of bread that I steeped in water to eat. I could never bear the thought of going into the great house [the workhouse]; I’m so used to the air that I’d sooner die in the street, as many I know have done. I’ve known several of our people, who have sat down in the street with their basket alongside them, and died.”

And thus the dead in turn became rubbish to be removed by the parish and swept away. The cycle of life was completed.

The outlines of age may be seen in the features of the very young. The youthful collectors of river refuse, known as “mud larks,” scavenged for pieces of coal or wood which they would then put in kettles, baskets, or even old hats. Many of them were small children, approximately seven or eight years old, and Mayhew questioned one of them. “He had heard of Jesus Christ once … but he never heard tell of who or what he was and didn’t ‘particular care’ about knowing … London was England and England, he said, was in London but he couldn’t tell in what part.” For him the condition which made up “London” was everywhere, therefore; and, as Mayhew observed, “there was a painful uniformity in the stories of all the children” of the city.

Another group of scavengers were known as “toshers,” hence the pejorative expression “tosh.” They were the sewer hunters, burrowing beneath the surface of the city in search of valuable waste. In the early part of the nineteenth century they could enter by the holes along the Thames, braving the crumbling brickwork and rotten stone, in order to creep along the underground labyrinth. But then, in the 1850s and 1860s, everything changed as a result of what was called London’s “sanitation revolution.”

It is a curious fact of city life that the sanitation of the early nineteenth century did not differ materially from that of the fifteenth century. There had been attempts at superficial improvement, with efforts to maintain the cleanliness of the Kilbourne and the Westbourne, the Ranelagh and the Fleet, the Shoreditch and the Effa, the Falcoln Brook and the Earl, all important rivers and streams. But the central feature of London’s sanitation remained its greatest disgrace; there were still cesspools beneath some 200,000 houses. Effluent was forced upwards through the wooden floors of the poorer households.

The solution of the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers in 1847, that all privy refuse was to be discharged directly into the sewers, seemed convincing at the time. But the effect was that the effluent was transported straight into the central reaches of the Thames. As a result the swan and the salmon, together with other fish, vanished in an open sewer. In the words of Disraeli, the river had become “a Stygian pool reeking with ineffable and unbearable horror.” Where once rose petals had been papered across the windows of the Westminster Parliament building, now sheets soaked with chlorine were used instead. The problem was compounded by the fact that the water supply for many Londoners was taken directly from the Thames, and from this time forward it was often described as of a “brownish” colour. The prevalence of cholera in the same period, when it was believed that “all smell is disease,” only increased the noxious horror of the city where the discharges of three million people were running through its midst. The concentration of people seeking work in the capital, and the rising consumption of the Victorian middle class, had led to a complementary rise in effluence. The pervasive smell may in that sense be regarded as the odour of progress. These were the conditions of London as late as 1858, the year of the “Great Stink.”

In 1855, under the pressure of extreme circumstances, a Metropolitan Board of Works had been established to remedy the unhappy situation. Three years later, during a long and hot summer, Joseph Bazalgette began his scheme to divert all sewage from the Thames through different types of sewer (main line and intercepting, storm relief and outfall) to outfalls at Barking and Crossness; it was described by the Observer as “the most extensive and wonderful work of modern times,” and by the end of this great engineer’s ministrations 165 miles of main sewers had been reconstructed in Portland cement with a further 1,100 miles of new local sewers. For all practical purposes, large parts of Bazalgette’s system remain in place at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It was a signal example of public health enterprise in the face of a rapidly deteriorating urban environment; characteristic of London administration, however, was that it occurred very quickly and in conditions of near panic. All the great works of the city seem to be in one sense improvised and haphazard.

· · ·

By the early twentieth century the dust mounds and open ash-pits were removed from the capital, and most of the rubbish was pulverised, burned or treated with chemicals; the environmental theory of disease, which simply prescribed that waste should be removed to as distant a point as possible, was replaced by the “germ” theory, which meant that waste had effectively to be neutralised. So changes in epidemiological research can affect the topography of the city. The fabric of London is susceptible to theory, therefore, and in the previous century huge areas of sewage purification were complemented by vast incineration plants. The enormous Solid Waste Transfer Station by Smugglers Way in Wandsworth and the great Sewage Works of Beckton are largely unseen; they are monuments to the city’s secret industry.

There are still rubbish tips located in various parts of the capital and, although gulls and pigeons have now taken the place of ravens and kites, the vagrant scavenger (once known as a “totter”) is still to be seen in the streets of London searching through bins and garbage for cigarette ends, food or drink. The ability-in fact the necessity-of the city to discharge its own rubbish continues in various guises. The quantity of waste in the ever-increasing city has risen higher than any nineteenth-century dust mound, with an average of ten million tonnes produced by the capital each year, among it almost one and a half million tonnes of scrap metal, and half a million tonnes of paper. It is only to be expected, too, that the history of modern effluent is still part of the history of commerce. In the sixteenth century it was discovered that the nitrogen from excreta could be used in the manufacture of gunpowder, but in the twentieth century human faeces yielded a different form of power. Incineration plants, like that at Edmonton, produce hundreds of thousands of megawatts of electricity each year. Gold and platinum are being emitted by the catalytic converters fitted to cars and deposited within exhaust fumes; soon, according to one scientist reported in The Times of 1998, “it will make economic sense to pan the deposits” along the city thoroughfares. So London’s streets are also now truly paved with gold.

CHAPTER 37

A Little Drink or Two

And, with the food, arrives the drink. The inhabitants of the London region, some four thousand years ago, imbibed a variety of beer or mead. Londoners have been drinking it ever since. Close to the Old Kent Road a Roman brooch of jasper was recently uncovered. Engraved upon it was the head of Silenus, the drunken satyr who was tutor to Bacchus; no better divinity of London could have been discovered. Thomas Brown noted of London, in 1730, that “to see the Number of Taverns, Alehouses etc. he would imagine Bacchus the only God that is worshipp’d there.”

In the thirteenth century London was already notorious for “the immoderate drinking of the foolish.” The wines of the Rhineland and of Gascony, of Burgundy and Maderia, the white wine of Spain and the red wine of Portugal, flooded in, but the less affluent drank ale and beer; the hop seems to have been cultivated by the beginning of the fourteenth century, but most ale was spiced with pepper and known as “stingo.” This again suggests the partiality of Londoners for highly flavoured comestibles, perhaps as a fitting adjunct to their energetic and competitive lives in the city. In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c. 1387-1400) the Cook is well aware of the requirements for what the poet elsewhere calls “a draught of moist and corny ale,” while his Miller, an ale-drinker, “far-dronken was all pale.” In the same period Glutton, in William Langland’s Piers the Plowman (c. 1362), “yglubbed a galon and a gille” of ale. Certainly there were many establishments for that purpose. By the early fourteenth century there were in London “354 taverns and 1,334 breweries,” more familiarly known later as boozing kens or tippling offices. Early in the fifteenth century it was recorded that there were some 269 brewers and in 1427 the London Company of Brewers was incorporated with its own coat of arms. Already it had composed rules for its members, such as that in 1423 which ordered that “retailers of ale should sell the same in their houses, in pots of peutre, sealed; and that whoever carried ale to the buyer should hold the pot in one hand and a cup in another, and that all who had pots unsealed should be fined.” A similar respect for quality was imposed upon the vintners who by city statute in the early fifteenth century were forbidden to “colaire ne medle” with their wine. One William Harold was, in 1419, sentenced to the pillory for an hour on the charge of “contrefetyng of old and feble spaynissh wyn for good amp; trewe Romeney, in the parisshe of seynt Martyns in the vyntry.”

By the sixteenth century, according to John Stow, the problems of drunkenness had become so acute that two hundred London alehouses were suppressed in 1574. There were some twenty-six brewers in London by that time, and their produce was variously known as Huffe Cup, Mad Dog, Angels’ Food, Lift Leg and Stride Wide. The ingredients seem to have varied, with constituents including broom, bay-berries and ivy-berries, together with malt and oats, although only the concoction brewed from hops was given the name of true beer. The Elizabethan chronicler William Harrison noted the drunkards in the streets and remarked that “our malt bugs lie in a row lugging at their dames teats, till they lie still againe, and not be able to wag.” Certain alehouses of the period were so identified with London itself, both in ballad and in drama, that they became representative of the city. The Boar’s Head in Eastcheap was the vivid setting of Falstaff and Pistol, Doll Tearsheet and Mistress Quickly, and so impressed itself upon the folk memory of Londoners that it was generally agreed that Shakespeare himself must have drunk on the premises. In the eighteenth century members of a literary club assembled there in order to assume Shakespearean roles, and such was the power of its associations that it attracted pilgrims to its site long after its destruction in 1831. There is, however, one specific remembrance. Robert Preston “late Drawer at the Boar’s head Tavern” departed this life at the age of twenty-seven on 16 March 1730; he “drew good Wine, took care to fill his Pots” and his headstone lay against the wall of St. Magnus the Martyr.

“The Myter in Cheape,” the Mitre of Cheapside, was a haunt of locals where according to Ben Jonson if “any stranger comes in amongst ‘em, they all stand up and stare at him, as he were some unknown beast brought out of Africk.” The drawer here, George, attained immortality when named in 1599 by Jonson in Every Man Out of His Humour-“Where’s George? call me George hither quickly”-and in 1607 by Dekker and Webster in Westward Ho!-“O, you are George the drawer at the Mitre.” It is evidence of the way in which a particular Londoner can become fixed as a type or character in the eyes of his contemporaries. The peculiar and persistent connection of alehouses with drama was also maintained by the memory of the Mermaid.

What things have we seen

Done at the Mermaid; heard words that have been

So nimble and so full of subtle flame

wrote Beaumont to Jonson. Keats, echoing the sentiment two hundred years later, knew no

Happy field or mossy cavern

Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern

The poet, himself a Londoner who as a child lived on the premises of the Swan and Hoop in Moorgate, had migrated in imagination to the junction of Friday Street and Bread Street where the Mitre was consumed in the Great Fire.

A tavern “is the onlely Rende-vous of boone company,” according to the Guls Horne-Booke of 1609 where it is important to know the bar staff or drawers and “to learn their names such as Jack, and Will, and Tom” to procure prompt service as well as credit. Then you may say to the waiter, “Boy, fetch me money from the barre.” The bill was known as “the reckoning” or “the shot.” Games of dice were played and travelling fiddlers went from establishment to establishment. We are allowed to peer closely into the rooms of an early seventeenth-century tavern, by using an inventory from the aptly named Mouthe in Bishopsgate Street. Here are listed the boarded partitions separating one room from another in that tavern, each chamber bearing a different name: the Percullis, the Pomgrannatt, the Three Tuns, the Vyne, and the King’s Head. So we have five different “barres” on the same premises, furnished with tables, benches and stools. In the Percullis, there was “one longe table of waynscote, with a fforme” as well as “one oyster table,” “one olde wyne-stoole” and “a payre of playinge tables”; in the King’s Head there was also an oyster table, as well as “a child’s stoole.” In one of the guests’ chambers, on the floor above, were listed down pillows, flaxen sheets and a tapestried coverlet as well as chests and cupboards.

A poem of 1606 mentions “the Bores head, hard by London stone … the swan at Dowgat … The Myter in Cheape … the Castel in Fishstreet” and others “to make Noses red,” but it was not only drink and lodging which seventeenth-century tavern-keepers supplied. An advertisement from a landlord, moving from the Swan at Holborn Bridge to the Oxford Arms in Warwick Lane, mentioned that “He hath also a hearse, and all things convenient to carry a Corps to any part of England.” “There are endless inns,” Thomas Platter wrote in the early 1600s, “beer and wine shops for every imaginable growth, alicant, canary, muscatels, clarets, Spanish, Rhenish.” Endless, also, are the verses written upon the topic of London alehouses. Ned Ward’s Vade Mecum for Malt Worms and John Taylor’s Pilgrimage are only two examples of poems that list public houses and their locations as a kind of topography of the city, in which the nature and shape of London are known only in terms of intoxicated reverie:

Hence to Cloak-lane, near Dowgate hill we steer

And at Three Tuns cast Anchor for good Beer …

Thereafter haste made waste, and sun was set

Ere to the Shoreditch Flagon I could get.

At ten I took my leave, and by the moon

Reached the Bell Inn, and fell into a swoon.

The words of the two poets are conflated here, in order to suggest the precision of their references to the city as a place where one must get drunk in order to survive.

The excise tax imposed upon beer in 1643 testifies to the increasing popularity of that drink. Pepys noticed during the Great Fire that the women “would scold for drink and be drunk as devels”; there may of course have been some excuse for their behaviour during that inferno but a calm observer, Henry Peacham, writing The Art of Living in London in 1642, commands “above all things beware of beastly drunkenness … some are found sometimes so drunk, who, being fallen upon the ground or, which is worse, in the kennel, are not able to stir or move again. Drinking begets challenges and quarrels, and occasioneth the death of many, as is known by almost daily experience … Drunken men are apt to lose their hats, cloaks, or rapiers, nor to know what they have spent.” Pepys also recorded a lady, dining at the house of a mutual friend, who in one draught knocked back a pint and a half of white wine.

Yet if the seventeenth century might rival any of its predecessors for the amount of alcohol flowing through the veins of London, it was overshadowed by the eighteenth century when drinking reached massive, even crisis, proportions. This was the period when Samuel Johnson, that great London luminary, declared that “a man is never happy in the present unless he is drunk.” A vast number of his fellow-citizens seemed to agree.

There was a fashion for “brown ale,” a sweet beer, but a further duty upon malt made it important for breweries to introduce more hops into their drink. This became “bitter beer”-“so bitter that I could not drink it,” according to Casanova-which, when mixed with regular ale, became known as “half and half.” In the same period “pale ale” was produced, and became so popular that pale ale houses were established in the city. In the early 1720s a mellow beer, brewed for four or five months, was introduced; the “labouring people, porters etc found its utility” for drinking at breakfast or at dinner, and thus it became known as “porter.” It was a beer brewed only in the city, and led directly to that class of beers known as “stout”: brown stout, double stouts, Irish, entire, or heavy wet, or London particular.

It was particular to London, also, that alehouses were directly connected with commerce. For many trades the only employment agency was a specific public house or “house of call.” Bakers and tailors, plumbers and bookbinders, congregated in one place where masters arrived “to enquire when they want hands.” The landlord himself was often of the same trade, giving credit to those out of employ, chiefly in the medium of drink. The tradesmen paid their employees at pay tables in the same public houses, with obvious and predictable results, compounded by the fact that money was not exchanged until the hours of midnight and one on a Sunday morning.

There were other working practices which demanded the consumption of liquor. “Entry money” for a new apprentice or journeyman was spent in the alehouse, and various fines for late or incomplete work were also paid in the same manner. According to one great historian, M. Dorothy George in London Life in the Eighteenth Century, “the consumption of strong drink was connected with every phase of life from apprenticeship”; we may also infer that the spirit of trade, so central to the life of London, thereby remained bright and fiery. Drink and fire go together, and distillers were accused of negligence whereby their stills “gave rise to frequent and terrible fires.”

There are some singular vignettes of drunkenness in the city-Oliver Goldsmith putting on his wig back to front to amuse friends in his Temple Lodgings, Charles Lamb staggering home beside the New River where he had once bathed as a schoolboy, Joe Grimaldi being carried home every night on the back of the landlord of the Marquis of Cornwallis. There were, however, less happy episodes. The Restoration dramatist Nathaniel Lee drank himself into Bedlam where he declared: “They said I was mad: and I said they were mad: damn them, they outvoted me.” He was eventually released, but on the day of his death “he drank so hard, that he dropped down in the street, and was run over by a coach. His body was laid in a bulk at Trunkits, the perfumer’s at Temple Bar, till it was owned.” William Hickey, the early nineteenth-century memoirist, was found in a gutter along Parliament Street, “utterly incapable of giving any account of myself, or of even articulating … having no more recollection of a single circumstance that had occurred for the preceding twelve hours, than if I had been dead.” He awoke the following day “unable to move hand or foot, being most miserably bruised, cut and maimed in every part of my body.” Another London particular in the eighteenth century was Richard Porson, the first librarian of the London Institution, who was often seen in the morning staggering “from his old haunt, the Cider Cellars; in Maiden Lane.” The editor of Euripides, he was a renowned scholar who “could hiccup Greek like a Helot,” but preferred to boast that he could repeat from memory the whole of Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748). “It was said of Porson,” according to Walford’s Old and New London, “that he drank everything he could lay his hands upon, even to embrocation and spirits of wine intended for the lamp. Samuel Rogers described him returning to the dining room after the people had gone, and drinking all that was left in their glasses.” His usual and familiar exclamation, when surprised or perplexed, was “Whooe!” and, on the day of his death, he was heard quoting from the Greek Anthologia. A friend noticed that on this last occasion “he gave the Greek rapidly, but the English with painful slowness, as if the Greek came more naturally.” Revived by wine and jelly dissolved in brandy and water, he was taken to a tavern in St. Michael’s Alley, Cornhill, but later died in the London Institution on the stroke of midnight.

· · ·

When the phrase “spirituous liquor” is applied to the city’s drinking habits, however, the spirit is generally that of gin. It was denounced by the magistrate Sir John Fielding as “this liquid fire by which men drink their hell beforehand.” The demon of London for half a century, it was held responsible for the deaths of many thousands of men, women and children. Whatever the truth of mortality rates, and they are open to question, there is no doubting the popularity of gin (concocted from grain, sloe or juniper). It has been estimated that in the 1740s and 1750s there were 17,000 “gin-houses.” The slogan, copied by Hogarth for his portrayal of Gin Lane, ran “Drunk for 1d, dead drunk for 2d, clean straw for nothing.” These “geneva shops” were located in cellars or in converted ground-floor workshops; they multiplied in poorer quarters, making the more familiar and traditional alehouses of the city seem respectable in contrast. Hogarth himself said of his portrait that “In gin lane every circumstance of its horrid effects are brought to view, in terorem, nothing but Poverty misery and ruin are to be seen Distress even to madnes and death, and not a house in tolerable condition but Pawnbrokers and the Gin shop.” In that famous study, an infant is seen falling to its certain death from the emaciated arms of its drunken mother; she is sitting upon wooden stairs, with ulcerated legs, her countenance expressive only of oblivion beyond despair. It may seem melodramatic, but it is a pictorial variant upon a salient truth. One Judith Defour took her two-year-old daughter from a workhouse, for example, and then strangled her in order to strip her of the new clothes with which she had been dressed. She sold the baby’s clothes and spent the money, 1s 4d, on gin.

“A new kind of drunkenness,” Henry Fielding wrote in 1751, “unknown to our ancestors, is lately sprung up amongst us, and which if not put a stop to, will infallibly destroy a great part of the inferior people. The drunkenness I here intend is … by this Poison called Gin … the principal sustenance (if it may be so called) of more than a hundred thousand People in this Metropolis.” There had been attempts to put a “stop” to this trade, most notably by the Gin Act of 1736 which was greeted only by “the execrations of the mob.” The Act was ridiculed and evaded, with gin being sold as medicinal draughts or under assumed names such as Sangree, Tow Row, the Makeshift, or King Theodore of Corsica. The gin-shops were still filled with men and women “and even sometimes of children” who drank so much that “they find it difficult to walk on going away.” The corn distillers of London claimed that they produced “upward of eleven twelfths of the whole distillery of England” and a contemporary, Lord Lansdowne, recognised in 1743 that “the excessive use of gin hath hitherto been pretty much confined to the Cities of London and Westminster.” It offered the comfort of forgetfulness to prisoners and vagrants; it provided oblivion to the poor of St. Giles, where one house in four was a gin-shop.

Distilling was highly profitable. The trade was “thrown open” and protected from excessive excise; so the great destroyer of the poor and disadvantaged was actually created by those who wished to make a quick and easy profit. Only belatedly did the authorities respond to crimes of violence against property, fuelled by the demand for gin, and to the number of “weak and sickly” children who were proving a burden upon the parish authorities. Some gin-shops were suppressed in 1751. This measure seemed to work. Improvements in the distilleries, closer inspection of gin-shops and increase in taxes eventually resulted in the observation of 1757 that “We do not see the hundredth part of poor wretches drunk in the street since the said qualifications.” The fever passed. The rage for gin subsided as quickly as it had arisen, leading to the surmise that it was some climacteric of the city’s history as if London itself had been seized by sudden frenzy and burning thirst.

Yet gin and ale were not considered to be the only addictive and dangerous liquids. There was also tea.

The grocer Daniel Rowlinson was the first man to sell a pound of tea, in the 1650s; fifty years later Congreve described the “auxiliaries to the tea-table” as “orange brandy, aniseed, cinnamon, citron, and Barbadoes water.” J. Ilive, author of A New and Compleat Survey of London in 1762, also blamed the “excessive drinking of Tea” for enervating “the Stomachs of the Populace, as to render them incapable of performing the offices of Digestion; whereby the Appetite is so much deprav’d.” A pamphleteer in 1758 declared tea-drinking to be “very hurtful to those who work hard and live low” and condemned it as “one of the worst of habits, rendering you lost to yourselves, and unfit for the comforts you were first designed for.” William Hazlitt was popularly supposed to have died in Frith Street, Soho, in 1830 from the excessive drinking of that plant infusion. The emphasis once again is on the tendency of Londoners-even imported citizens such as Hazlitt-to obsession and excess, so that an apparently harmless cordial can become dangerous. That is also why London tea gardens soon acquired a dubious reputation. Suburban retreats with agreeable names such as White Conduite House, Shepherd and Shepherdess, Cuper’s Gardens, Montpelier and Bagnigge Wells, devoted to the drinking of tea and other pleasant pastimes, became associated “with loose women and with boys whose morals are depraved, and their constitutions ruined” and were well known “for the encouragement of luxury, extravagance, idleness and other wicked illegal purposes.” It is as if the opportunity for pleasure, or leisure, in London was immediately transformed into excess, viciousness and immorality; the city can never be at peace.

Tea and gin are still with us, but one eighteenth-century drink has utterly disappeared. Saloop was a hot, sweet beverage made from a decoction of sassafras wood, milk and sugar, and sold for three halfpence a bowl; the name is supposed to have been derived from the slopping sound of those drinking it in the street. Coffee and tea were expensive, so stalls selling saloop were found in the poorer areas of London. In summer saloop was sold from an open table on wheels; in winter from a kind of tent made from a screen and an old umbrella. It was considered to be the best possible cure for a hangover, and Charles Lamb recalled the artisan and the chimney-sweep mingling with “the rake” at dawn around the saloopian stalls; “being penniless,” the young sweeps “will yet hang their black heads over the ascending steams, to gratify one sense if possible.” The spectacle prompted Lamb to reflection upon a city where “extremes meet.”

In the same period as Lamb wrote his reflections, designed for the London Magazine, the young Charles Dickens entered a public house in Parliament Street and ordered “your very best-the VERY best-ale.” It was called the Genuine Stunning and the twelve-year-old boy said, “Just draw me a glass of that, if you please, with a good head to it.” The spectacle of children drinking in the streets and alehouses was familiar, if not common, in the early years of the nineteenth century. “The girls, I am told,” wrote Henry Mayhew as late as the 1850s, “are generally fonder of gin than the boys.” They took it “to keep the cold out.”

Verlaine (1873) considered Londoners to be “noisy as ducks, eternally drunk,” while Dostoevsky (1862) noted that “everyone is in a hurry to drink himself into insensibility.” A German journalist, Max Schlesinger (1853), saw the inhabitants of a public house “standing, staggering, crouching, or lying down, groaning, and cursing, drink and forget.” An observer closer to home, Charles Booth, noticed that drinking among women in the 1890s had materially increased. “One drunken woman in a street will set all the women in it drinking,” he quotes one male inhabitant of the East End as saying. Nearly all women “get drunk of Monday. They say “we have our fling; we like to have a little fuddle on Monday.’” All classes of London women seem to have been drinking, largely because it was no longer considered wrong for a female to enter a public house for a “nip.” In the evening, children of the poorer classes were sent around to the local public house to have a jug filled with ale; as Booth reported, “it was constant come and go, one moment to go in and get the jug filled, and out again the next; none of the children waited to talk or play with one another, but at once hurried home.”

Gentlemen drank as deeply and freely as the poor. Thackeray noted those “who glory in drinking bouts” with “bottle-noses” and “pimpled faces.” “I was so cut last night” is one of the phrases he recalled.

In each year of the nineteenth century, approximately 25,000 people were arrested for drunkenness in the streets. Yet the conditions of life often drove poorer Londoners into their condition. One of them, a collector of “pure” (dog excrement) told Mayhew that he had often been drunk “for three months together”-he had “bent his head down to his cup to drink, being utterly incapable of raising it to his lips.”

So even though the gin fever had subsided, and its shops closed down, its spirit-we might say-was continued in the “gin palaces” of the nineteenth century. These large establishments, clad in shining plate-glass windows with stucco rosettes and gilt cornices, were resplendent with advertisements lit by gas-lamps announcing “the only real brandy in London” or “the famous cordial, medicated gin, which is so strongly recommended by the faculty.” The fine lettering reveals the attractions of “The Out and Out!,” “The No Mistake,” “The Good for Mixing” and “The real Knock-me-down.” Yet the exterior brightness was generally deceptive; the scene within these “palaces” was a dismal one, almost reminiscent of the old gin-shops. There was characteristically a long bar of mahogany, behind which were casks painted green and gold, with the customers standing-or sitting on old barrels-along a narrow and dirty area beside it. It might be noted here, too, that social observers believed drink to be “at the root of all the poverty and distress with which they came into contact.” Again the emphasis is upon the unhappy conditions of the city itself, literally driving men and women to drink with its relentless speed, urgency and oppression. Of the skeletons investigated in St. Bride’s Lower Churchyard, “just under 10 per cent had at least one fracture.” It is also revealed, in the fascinating London Bodies compiled by Alex Werner, that “almost half of these were rib fractures, commonly caused by stumbling or brawling.”

In the same period the breweries had become one of the wonders of London, one of the sights to which foreign visitors were directed. By the 1830s there were twelve principal brewers, producing, according to Charles Knight’s London, “two barrels, or 76 gallons, of beer per annum for every inhabitant of the metropolis-man, woman and child.” Who would not want to observe all this industry and enterprise? One German visitor was impressed by the “vast establishment” of Whitbread’s brewery in Chiswell Street, with its buildings “higher than a church” and its horses “the giants of their breed.” In similar fashion, in the summer of 1827, a German prince “turned my ‘cab’ to Barclay’s brewery, in Park Street, Southwark, which the vastness of its dimensions renders almost romantic.” He observed that steam engines drove the machinery which manufactured from twelve to fifteen thousand barrels a day; ninety-nine of the larger barrels, each one “as high as a house,” are kept in “gigantic sheds”; 150 horses “like elephants” transport the beer. His awareness of the size and immensity of London are here reflected in its capacity for beer and, in a final parallel, he notes that from the roof of the brewery “you have a very fine panoramic view of London.”

That emblematic significance was recognised by painters as well as visitors, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century there was established what London art historians have termed “the brewery genre.” Ten years after the prince’s visit, for example, Barclay’s brewery was painted by an anonymous hand; the entrance is depicted, together with the thriving life of London all around it. To the right is the great brewhouse, with a suspension bridge connecting to the other side of the street. In the foreground a butcher’s boy, in the blue apron typical of his trade, stands with another customer beside a baked-potato van; barrels of beer on sleds are being drawn by horses into the yard, passing a dray which is just leaving. In the street, to the right, a hansom cab is bringing in more visitors. It is a picture of appetite, with the meat carried on the shoulders of the butcher’s boy as an apt token of the London diet, as well as of immense energy and industry.

But there are other ways of conveying the immensity of the city’s drinking. Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Doré visited the same premises for their London: a Pilgrimage-“the town of Malt and Hops” as Jerrold called it in 1871-in order to see the brewing of the beer named Entire which assuaged “Thirsty London.” Jerrold noted that against the great towers and barrels the working men “look like flies,” and indeed in Doré’s engravings these dark anonymous shapes tend to their beer-mashing and beer-making duties like votaries; all is in shadow and chiaroscuro, with fitful gleams illuminating the activities of these small figures in vast enclosed spaces. Here again the life of the city is like that within some great decaying prison, with the metal pipes and cylinders as its bars and gates. Jerrold, like the German visitor before him, looked over London “with St. Paul’s dominating the view from the north,” and apostrophises beer as the city’s sacred drink. “We are,” he remarked, “upon classic ground.”

The gin palace was supplanted by the public house which was the direct descendant of the tavern and the alehouse. Of course taverns survived in the older parts of London, known to their adherents for privacy and quiet, to their detractors for gloom and silence. Public houses continued the tradition of segregation, with saloon, lounge and private bars being distinguished from public bars and jug and bottle departments. Many pubs were not salubrious, with plain and dirty interiors and a long “zinc-topped” counter where men sat solemnly drinking-“You enter by a heavy door that is held ajar by a thick leather strap … striking you in the back as you go in and often knocking off your hat.” Instead of the gin palace’s long bar, the public house bar was characteristically in the shape of a horseshoe with the variously coloured bottles rising up within its interior space. The furniture was plain enough, with chairs and benches, tables and spittoons, upon a sawdusted floor. By 1870 there were some 20,000 public houses and beer-shops in the metropolis, catering to half a million customers each day, reminiscent of “dusty, miry, smoky, beery, brewery London.”

A stranger asking directions in 1854, according to The Little World of London, was likely to be told “Straight on till you come to the Three Turks, then to turn to the right and cross over at the Dog and Duck, and go on again till you come to the Bear and the Bottle, then to turn the corner at the Jolly Old Cocks, and after passing the Veteran, the Guy Fawkes, the Iron Duke, to take the first turn to the right which will bring you to it.” In this period there were seventy King’s Heads and ninety King’s Arms, fifty Queen’s Heads and seventy Crowns, fifty Roses and twenty-five Royal Oaks, thirty Bricklayers Arms and fifteen Watermen’s Arms, sixteen Black Bulls and twenty Cocks, thirty Foxes and thirty Swans. A favoured colour in pubs’ names was red, no doubt complementing the analogy in London between drink and fire, while London’s favourite number seemed to be three: the Three Hats, the Three Herrings, the Three Pigeons, and so on. There were also more mysterious signs such as the Grave Maurice, the Cat and Salutation and the Ham and Windmill.

The variety and plentitude of the nineteenth-century pubs continued well into the twentieth century, with the basic shape and nature changing very little, ranging from the munificent West End establishment to the sawdusted corner pub in Poplar or in Peckham. Then, in one of those paradoxes of London life, public houses became more mixed and lively places during the Second World War. The beer may have run out before the close of proceedings, and glasses may have been in short supply, but Philip Ziegler suggests in London at War that “they were the only places in wartime London where one could entertain and be entertained cheaply, and find the companionship badly needed during the war.” There was an odd superstition that pubs were more likely to be hit by bombs, but this did not seem to affect their popularity; in fact, during the forced absence of men, women once again began to use pubs. A report of 1943 recorded that “they were often to be seen there with other women or even on their own.” “Never had the London pubs been more stimulating,” John Lehmann recalled, “never has one been able to hear more extraordinary revelations, never witness more unlikely encounters.”

By the end of that war in 1945 there were still some four thousand pubs in the capital, and peace brought a new resurgence of interest. Novels and films have conveyed the atmosphere of pubs in the late 1940s and early 1950s, from the East End, where the men still wore caps and scarves and the girls danced “holding cigarettes in their fingers,” to local saloons where what Orwell described as the “warm fog of smoke and beer” surrounded the “regulars.”

That emphasis upon conviviality continued into the twenty-first century, with pianos and juke-boxes being steadily supplanted by video games, fruit machines and eventually wide-screen televisions generally devoted to football. With the gradual take-over of public houses by the larger brewers and the establishment of chains in the 1960s and 1970s, however, there emerged a greater degree of standardisation and modernisation from which many London pubs have never recovered. Certain chains, for example, had the ceilings of their public houses smoked or painted brown to mimic the interior of the ancient alehouses, while various nineteenth-century objets and old books were discreetly planted to ensure an air of authenticity. But, of all the cities in the world, artificial history does not work in London.

Among the 1,500 licensed premises now listed within central London the familiar names still exist. Even if there is no real comparison between “London” of 1857 and “Central London” of 2000, it is at least comforting to find a significant number still of Red Lions and Queen’s Heads and Green Mans. “Three” is still a favourite number, from the Three Compasses in Rotherhithe Street to the Three Tuns in Portman Mews. There are no more Spotted Dogs or Jolly Sailors but instead a number of Slug and Lettuces. There are still Saints’ and Shakespeare’s Heads, but there are now five Finnegans Wakes, a Dean Swift, a George Orwell, an Artful Dodger and a Gilbert and Sullivan. The Running Footman is no more, but there are three Scruffy Murphys.

Despite justified complaints about the standardisation of both beer and the surroundings in which it is drunk, there is at the beginning of the twenty-first century a great deal more variety of public house than at any time in London’s history. There are pubs with upstairs theatres and pubs with karaoke nights, pubs with live music and pubs with dancing, pubs with restaurants and pubs with gardens, theatrical pubs in Shaftesbury Avenue and business pubs in Leadenhall Market, ancient pubs such as the Mitre in Ely Passage and the Bishop’s Finger in Smithfield, pubs with drag-acts and pubs with striptease, pubs with special beers and theme pubs devoted variously to Jack the Ripper, Sherlock Holmes and other London dignitaries; there are gay pubs for homosexuals and pubs for transvestites. And, in more traditional spirit, bicyclists still meet at the Downs, Clapton, where the Pickwick Bicycle Club first met on 22 June 1870.

There is another continuity. Recent surveys suggest that, despite varying levels of intoxication through the twentieth century, Londoners have returned to their old habits. It is now recorded that the average consumption in the city is higher than elsewhere so that according to a Survey of Alcohol Needs and Services published in 1991 “one and a half million Londoners may be exceeding recommended ‘sensible’ levels” with “a quarter of a million drinking at a dangerous level.” So the city manifests, as always, the “immoderate drinking of foolish persons.” The names for drunkards and drunkenness in London are many and various-“soaks,” “whets,” “topers,” “piss-heads” and “piss artists” are “boozy,” “fluffy,” “well-gone,” “legless,” “crocked,” “wrecked,” “paralytic,” “ratarsed,” “shit-faced” and “arse-holed.” They are “up the Monument” or “half seas over”; they are “on a bender,” “out of it” or “off their tits.”

Today’s vagrant drinkers of Spitalfields, Stepney, Camden, Waterloo and parts of Islington, are known as the “death drinkers.” They subsist on a diet of methylated spirits (jake or the blue), surgical spirit (surge or the white) and other forms of crude alcohol. It has been estimated that there are between one and two thousand down-and-out alcoholics in the city; they congregate under arches, in small parks, or on open sites where building has yet to begin; these places are known to their inhabitants by various names such as the Caves, Running Water, or the Ramp. These vagrants themselves have names like No-Toes, Ginger, Jumping Joe and Black Sam; they are covered by scars and sores, blackened by the makeshift fires conjured upon bomb-sites. When they die- as they do relatively quickly-they are interred in the City Cemetery at Forest Gate. London buries them because London has killed them.

CHAPTER 38

Clubbing

On the unhappy night of his drunkenness William Hickey was returning from a drinking club at the Red House. “Clubbing” is first used as a term in the seventeenth century; in July 1660, Pepys wrote that “We went to Wood’s, our old house, for clubbing.” But it was in the succeeding century that a variety of clubs emerged for a variety of members. Addison made the characteristic point that “Man is a sociable animal and we take all occasions and pretences of forming ourselves into those little nocturnal assemblies which are commonly known as clubs.” A club was not very different from a gang, however, a point which the Spectator made on 12 March 1712 in allusion to “a general History of Clubs” then being written. It is suggested that the compendium ought to include a “Set of Men” who have taken “the Title of The Mohock Club” and who set out to terrorise the streets of the city where citizens are “knocked down, others stabbed, others cut and carbonadoed.” In similar vein the Spectator noticed signs of “club” spirit at the opera where the women had placed themselves in opposite boxes with various “Party-signals” to display their loyalty to either Whig or Tory junta.

This is the context, then, for the drinking clubs of the eighteenth century. Characteristically they met weekly, in a tavern, to eat and sing and debate. There was the Kit-Kat Club of notable Whigs, which met in Shire Lane, and there was the Robin Hood Club in Butcher Row, which included “masons, carpenters, smiths, and others.” The discussions in Shire Lane continued well into the night, but in Butcher Row “each member has five minutes allowed him to speak.” There was the Beefsteak Club, which met in a room in the Covent Garden Theatre, and was devoted to drinking and wit “interspersed with snatches of song and much personal abuse.” The atmosphere of such a place is evoked by Ned Ward in The London Spy: he entered “an old-fashioned room where a gaudy crowd of odoriferous Town-Essences were walking backwards and forwards with their hats in their hands, not daring to convert them to their intended use, lest it should put the foretops of their wigs into some disorder … Bows and crimps of the newest mode were here exchanged … They made a humming like so many hornets in a chimney corner.” In contrast was the poor man’s Twopenny Club where one of the rules declared that “If any neighbour swears or curses, his neighbour may give him a kick upon the shins.” A club known as the House of Lords met at the Three Herrings in Bell Yard; it was made up from “the more dissolute sort of barristers, attorneys and tradesmen.” There were punch clubs, “cutter” clubs for those with boats upon the Thames, and “spouting” clubs for burgeoning public speakers.

These were centres of argument in the combative London tradition, combining obscene songs and egalitarian speeches in equal measure. They were often known as chair clubs, but there were also card clubs for gamesters and cock and hen clubs for youths and prostitutes. There was a No-Nose Club, and a Farting Club in Cripplegate where the members “meet once a Week to poyson the Neighbourhood, and with their Noisy Crepitations attempt to out-fart one another.” C.W. Heckethorn, in London Souvenirs, intones a litany of other London clubs: a Surly Club at a tavern near Billingsgate, filled with the tradesmen of that quarter who met to sharpen “the practice of contradiction and of foul language”; a Spit-farthing Club, which met weekly at the Queen’s Head in Bishopsgate, and was “composed chiefly of misers and skinflints; and the Club of Broken Shopkeepers, which met at Tumble Down Dick in Southwark and comprised bankrupts and others unfortunate in trade. The Mock Heroes Club met in an alehouse in Baldwin’s Gardens, where each member would assume the name of a “defunct hero,” while the Lying Club congregated at the Bell Tavern in Westminster where “no true word” was to be uttered during its proceedings. A Man-Killing Club which met at a tavern in a back-alley adjoining St. Clement Danes admitted to membership no one “who had not killed his man”; but there was also a Humdrum Club “composed of gentlemen of peaceable dispositions, who were satisfied to meet at a tavern, smoke their pipes and say nothing till midnight” when they went homeward. An Everlasting Club was so called “because its hundred members divided the twenty four hours of day and night among themselves in such a manner that the club was always sitting, no person presuming to rise until he was relieved by his appointed successor.”

The club tradition continued into the following century with members of the “free and easy” pub institution subscribing a shilling a week; there were also tavern debating clubs, characteristically to be found among such quarters of artisans as Spitalfields, Soho, Clerkenwell, or Finsbury. They were in part derived from the atheistical societies of the previous century, which had met in Wells Street as well as the Angel and St. Martin’s Lane, and were similarly disliked by the civic authorities. Many establishments flourished throughout the early nineteenth century in defiance of official policy, however, among them the Swan in New Street, the Fleece in Windmill Street, the George in East Harding Street and the Mulberry Tree in Moorfields. These taverns became the centre of London radical dissent. In 1817 the Hampden Club met at the Anchor Tavern, for example, from which alehouse issued the first demand for universal male suffrage.

There is a case for arguing that these societies and tavern debating clubs are associated, in London at least, with the informal debates of the early eighteenth-century coffee house. Such was the formative influence of that institution, however, that it can be held responsible for a club quite different from those which met in Windmill Street or Moorfields. It became known as “the gentleman’s club” which, according to a nineteenth-century account, arose from the “ill-appointed coffee-house or tavern” to effect “a revolution in the constitution of society.” White’s Club, the oldest of these establishments (1736), is the direct descendant of White’s Chocolate-house; Brooks’s and Boodle’s are of eighteenth-century date but the others, including the Athenaeum and the Garrick, are all of nineteenth-century foundation. These more recent establishments combined private associations with buildings which were deemed and planned to be on a public scale. They were designed by architects such as Wilkins and Barry and Smirke, and, with their bas-relief sculpture and elaborate modelling, they resembled large country houses or Italian palaces. They remain impressive principally because of the essential vulgarity of their appearance. In that sense they are very much the stage property of London.

The endless contrasts of the city can in fact be exemplified by those other gentlemen’s clubs of the nineteenth century, the working men’s clubs, generally held on the first floor of the local public house where the atmosphere was one of unrefined entertainment. Lectures were sometimes given, as in George Gissing’s The Nether World-“What would happen to the landlords of Clerkenwell if they got their due. Ay, what shall happen, my boys, and that before so very long”-but adult education or jolly debate often gave way to “the rattle of bones, the strumming of a banjo, and a voice raised at intervals in a kind of whoop.” In Arthur Morrison’s account (1896) of the Feathers in Bethnal Green, there is a clubroom where “the sing-song began, for at least a score were anxious to ‘oblige,’” although the effect is somewhat diminished by Morrison’s comment that the countenances of those attending were “as of a man betrayed into mirth in the midst of great sorrow.” Here again the importance, indeed the stern necessity, of drink is left unstated.

Such places were known variously, according to their locations, as glee clubs or mughouses. Between songs, there were toasts and speeches. The more formal of these establishments were known as saloons and generally demanded money for entrance in exchange for refreshment varying from “ale, inky-coloured porter, or strong beer” to tea and brandy. Tables with covers of oilcloth or leather were pushed against a wall, while at the end of the room was a table and a piano or harp. “There was no curriculum of entertainment,” one customer is reported as saying in Roy Porter’s London: A Social History, “every now amp; then one of the young women would say, ‘I think I’ll sing a song.’” A French visitor reported how, at the sound of an auctioneer’s hammer rapped upon the table, “three gentlemen, as serious as Anglican ministers, start singing, sometimes alone, sometimes in chorus, sentimental ballads.” He also noticed that in some taverns of the same type the landlords “have unfortunately installed mechanical organs which grind away unceasingly.” So complaints about pub entertainment are as old as public houses themselves. These taverns and saloons had their counterparts in “night cellars” such as the Cider Cellars in Maiden Lane and the Coal Hole in Fountain Court, the Strand, where established entertainers appeared as singers or performers among the combined fumes of ale, gas-jets and tobacco …

CHAPTER 39

A Note on Tobacco

All visitors to clubs and pubs saw and smelled “the fume of pipes,” and that smoke has hovered over London taverns since Sir Walter Raleigh, according to local legend, first began to smoke in Islington. A few years later an early seventeenth-century German visitor noted that Londoners “are constantly smoking tobacco and in this manner-they have pipes on purpose made of clay, into the farther end of which they put the herb, so dry that may be rubbed into powder, and putting fire to it.” Clay pipes are to be found everywhere in archaeological excavations.

Tobacco was at first supposed to have medicinal properties, and could be purchased at the shops of apothecaries, as a “Remedy for phlegmatick people.” Children were permitted to smoke it, too, and “in schools substituted a tobacco for breakfast, and were initiated into the trick of expelling the smoke through their nostrils by their masters.” One diarist in 1702 recalled an evening with his brother at Garraway’s Coffee House where he was “surprised to see his sickly child of three years old fill its pipe of tobacco, after that a second and third pipe without the least concern.”

This “strange drug” was everywhere in seventeenth-century London, but it had its detractors who denounced it for creating idleness and stupor. Even the King, James I, wrote a “Counterblast to Tobacco” in which he describes “an unctuous and oily kind of soot found in some great tobacco-takers that after their death were opened.” Yet nothing can dissuade Londoners from taking their amusements, or intoxicants, in a city so reliant upon excess. Although the medicinal properties of tobacco were advertised, its addictive properties soon became evident as a charm against anxiety and isolation-“a Companion in Solitude,” as one observer put it, “an Amusement in Company, an innocent Diversion to Melancholy.” We hear of early seventeenth-century vagrants, such as the Roaring Boys and the Bonaventoes, smoking pipes. Tobacco became, in that sense, one of the necessary pleasures of the London poor.

Another traveller to seventeenth-century London noted how the citizens smoked their small pipes at a play or in a tavern and how “it makes them riotous and merry, and rather drowsy, just as if they were drunk … they use it so abundantly because of the pleasure it gives.” It was also a matter of comment that a pipe was “passed round,” and that London women smoked “in secret.” There was a great trade in tobacco, close to half a million pounds, and so many shops sold pipes and tobacco that in themselves they formed “a large city.” So a city of smoke was wreathed within a city of trade. It has been suggested that, in the 1770s, the fashion if not the habit abated; but despite Samuel Johnson’s remark, in 1773, that “smoking has gone out,” in reality pipe-smoking effortlessly merged with the later use of the cigarette.

Cigarettes entered London soon after the Crimean War: the first manufactory was set up in Walworth in 1857. A second and third were set up in Queen Victoria Street and Leicester Square respectively, under the ownership of Greek immigrants, and the first filter-known as the “Cambridge” cigarette-was manufactured in 1865. “Fag” was the name applied only to the cheaper variety of cigarette. The addiction was always strongly present. In fact the city itself seemed to promote it. “I strive after tobacco,” Lamb once wrote, “as other men strive after virtue.” The tobacco warehouse in nineteenth-century London Docks contained almost five million pounds’ sterling worth of that commodity, and there were very many of the poor who spent time “picking up the ends of cigars thrown away as useless by the smokers in the streets,” selling the waste product at a price of 6d to 10d per pound. Every aspect of London can take part in trade.

CHAPTER 40

A Bad Odour

The smells of London linger. They are “always more pronounced in the heart of the City,” according to one late nineteenth-century Canadian writer, Sara Jeanette Duncan, “than in Kensington for instance.” She went on to report that “it was no special odour or collection of odours that could be distinguished-it was a rather abstract smell.” It has been likened to the smell of rain or of metal. It may be the smell of human activity or human greed. Yet it has been claimed that the smell is not human at all. When rain falls upon the city one of the most characteristic odours is that of “refreshed stone” but that dampness can also produce “the tired physical smell of London.” It is the smell of age or, rather, of age restored.

In the fourteenth century the odours were varied and multifarious, from the smell of baking meat to that of boiling glue, from the brewing of beer to the manufacture of vinegar; decayed vegetables competed against tallow and horse-dung, all of which made up “a richly confected cloud of thick and heavy smell which the people had to breathe.” This “medieval smell” is at this late date difficult to identify, although perhaps it lingers in stray doorways and passageways where a similar medley of odours confronts the passer-by. There are also parts of the world, as, for example, the souks of North Africa, where it is possible to savour something of the atmosphere of medieval London.

Every century, too, has its own smells. In the fifteenth century the dog house at Moorgate sent forth “great noyious and infectyve aiers,” while others complained about the reek of the lime kilns situated in the suburbs. The smell of sea coal, in particular, was identified with the smell of the city itself. It was, essentially, the odour of trade which proved unbearable. Thus in the sixteenth century the foundries of Lothbury were a source of much public disquiet. From the north came the smell of burnt bricks, while in the City itself by Paternoster Row emerged “a nauseous smell of tallow.” The smell of the Stocks Market, at the eastern end of Cheapside, was so strong that the worshippers in the adjacent church of St. Stephen Walbrook “were overcome by the stench” of rotting vegetables. Those who attended church risked other olfactory perils, however, and the odours emanating from the burial ground of St. Paul’s Churchyard alarmed Latimer in the sixteenth century. “I think verily that many a man taketh his death in Paul’s Churchyard,” he expounded in one of his sermons, “and this I speak of experience, for I myself when I have been there in some mornings to hear the sermons, have felt such an ill favoured unwholesome savour, that I was the worse for it a great while after.” This odour of graveyards was in fact one of the most permanent and prolonged smells of the city, with complaints against it from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

But there is the smell of the living as well as of the dead. References in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century dramatic literature point to the distinctive odour of a London crowd, in particular what Shakespeare described in Cori-olanus as “their stinking breaths.” Julius Caesar is felled by the savour of filthy bodies which belong more to London than to Rome. In the eighteenth century George Cheyne, in The English Malady, recoiled from “the clouds of Stinking Breaths and Perspirations … more than sufficient to poison and infect the Air for twenty miles.” In social reports of the nineteenth century, there are accounts of the noisome scents of “low” tenements and lodging houses which left inspectors faint and sick.

In a city of work and trade one of the principal inconveniences will be that of perspiration, “of greasy cooks at sweating work.” London is a kind of forcing house, and within it lies “the mixture of Scents that arose from Mundung as Tobacco, Sweaty Toes, Dirty Shirts, the Shit-Tub, stinking Breaths and uncleanly carcasses.” Certainly the more refined Londoner would, on a still day, be aware of the presence of other citizens without necessarily seeing them. The image generally employed is one of close, suffocating contact as if the inhabitants were pressing in on all sides with their rank bodies and dirty breath. This was one of the reasons why strangers and travellers at once felt so anonymous in London: suddenly they became aware of, and part of, the intimate yet cloying smell of human life. When a sixteenth-century report notes that the sick and infirm lie upon the streets of London where “their intolerable miseries and griefs … stunk in the eyes and noses of the City,” the olfactory sense is linked with the visual to suggest an overpowering sensory horror.

It is also an ageless smell. To walk down a narrow and evil-smelling passage in contemporary London-and there are many such off the main thoroughfares-is to walk again down Fowle Lane or Stinking Alley. To pass too close to an unwashed vagrant is to experience the disagreeable sensation of an eighteenth-century Londoner when confronted with an “Abraham man” or a common beggar. In its smells the city can inhabit many past times.

It should not be assumed, however, that the entire citizenry were unwashed. There was soap as early as the fifteenth century, as well as lozenges to sweeten the breath and unguents to perfume the body. The real problem, as with so many others in the city, concerned the presence and the perceived contamination of the poor. In the seventeenth century the smells of poverty intruded into fashionable areas with “stinking Allies” and “suffocating Yards” beside newly designed squares. The smells of London were a great leveller. The rushes laid upon the floors of poorer households harboured “spittle, vomit, scraps of food, and the leakage of dogs and other animals.” In areas such as Bethnal Green and Stepney some of those animals were pigs; in Orchard Street, Marylebone, there were twenty-three houses, which between them contained seven hundred people together with one hundred pigs creating “very nauseous smells.” Once more the difference between smell and no smell is decided in London by money. Money is odourless. In the city of finance, poverty stinks. So in the mid-nineteenth century an urban traveller visited the slums of Agar Town by St. Pancras which not even wind and rain could cleanse and where “The stench of a rainy morning is enough to knock down a bullock.”

In that century, too, other localities had their own especial odours. The area around Tower Street smelled of wine and tea (in the previous century its aroma was of oil and cheese), while Shadwell’s odour was that of the adjacent sugar manufactories. From Bermondsey issued the smells of beer, tanyards, pickle and “the odour of fruits fomenting for jam” while by the river itself Thomas Hardy, lodging in Adelphi Terrace, suffered from illness as a result of the smell of mud at low tide. In nineteenth-century Islington the smell was of horse-dung and fried fish, while the area around Fleet Street and Temple Bar was apparently permeated by the “odour of brown stout.” Visitors recall that the “characteristic aroma” of the City itself was of the stables, with an “anticipatory stench of its cab-stands.” The experience of walking from the Monument to the Thames, however, would unleash a series of identifiable smells from “damaged oranges” to “herrings.”

There were delightful smells as well as disagreeable ones. In the seventeenth century, at midnight, when the bakers of London began to heat their ovens, and when the kitchens and stoves using sea coal were finally at rest, then “the air begins to clear and the smoke of the bakeries, which are heated with wood rather than with coal, spreads a very country-like smell in the neighbouring air.” There were also London streets which had a reputation for being sweet-smelling; such a place in the sixteenth century was Bucklersbury in “simple” or herb time, and newly built Pall Mall. A Japanese visitor of 1897 said that the city smelled of food, while at the same time commenting unfavourably on the breath of London servants. The French poet Mallarmé suggested that the city had the odour of roast beef as well as the scent of fog with “a special smell you only find here.” At a slightly later date, J.B. Priestley recalled the odour of “greasy little eating houses” as well as that of “a smoky autumn morning … with a railway station smell about it.” The smell of transport, in all its forms, has always been characteristic of the city. In the spring the omnibus, for example, had the odour of onions and, in winter, of “paraffin or eucalyptus”; in the summer it was simply “indescribable.” Fog caught the throat “like a whiff of chlorine.” Rose Macaulay remembered a passage off High Street, Kensington, which “smelled of vaseline.” Long Acre smelled of onions, and Southampton Row of antiseptic. Twentieth-century London has been filled with odours, from the smell of chocolate along the Hammersmith Road to the smell of the chemical works down Chrisp Street in the East End and along the locally named “Stinkhouse Bridge.”

Old smells have lingered, like the odour of the river and of pubs, while whole areas have retained their own especial and identifiable atmosphere. An account of the East End written in the late 1960s notes “an almost overpowering smell of fish” and “boiled cabbage,” together with “a musty smell of old wood and crumbling bricks and stagnant air”; almost a century earlier in 1883 the area was similarly described, in The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, as imbued with “the fragrance of stale fish or vegetables,” and the nineteenth-century odour “of drying matchboxes.”

The ubiquitous twentieth-century smell, however, has been that of the bus and the motor car. The “air is tainted with their breath,” wrote William Dean Howells in 1905, “which is now one of the most characteristic stenches of ‘civilisation.’” Other persistent presences include the smell of dog excrement upon the pavements, and the greasy savour emanating from fast-food restaurants. And then, too, there is the dull acrid smell of the underground which is also the smell of London dust and burnt London hair. Worse, however, is the clinging odour of the morning rush hour below the ground with lungfuls of morning breath leaving a metallic quality at the back of the throat. It is both human and inhuman, like the smell of London itself.

CHAPTER 41

You Sexy Thing

Sex, in the city, has commonly been associated with dirt and disease; if not with these, then with trade. The resemblance exists even within the language itself; “hard core” is a term conventionally applied to pornography but its original meaning, in a London context, was that of “hard, rock-like rubbish” used in the building of roads and houses. Where there is rubbish, there is also death. The area around the Haymarket, a notorious haunt of prostitutes, encompasses “a march of the dead. It is a plague-spot-the real plague spot.”

From its earliest days London has been the site of sexual activity. A Roman model of a phallus was found in Coleman Street-later, paradoxically, a haven for Lollards and Puritans-as well as an architrave depicting three prostitutes. In the precincts of the Roman temple, where Gracechurch Street and Leadenhall Street now are, there would have been erotic celebrations connected with Saturn or Priapus, and beside the amphitheatre on the present site of the Guildhall we might expect to find a palaestra or promenade frequented by male and female prostitutes. There were brothels licensed by the Roman authorities, as well as “fornixes” or arches beneath which were located “mere dirty shacks” employed for the purposes of fornication. E.J. Burford, in his learned London: the Synfulle Citie, has remarked that on certain street corners a “herm” was placed, “a short stone pillar of Hermes” with an erect penis and “prepuce painted a brilliant red.”

Yet the use of arches and brothels meant that, in this most commercial of cities, sex had itself already been commercialised. In the centuries of Danish and Saxon occupation, young women were bought and sold like any other merchandise. “Gif a man buy a mayden with cattle,” according to one Saxon injunction, “let the bargain stand if it be without guile.” A thousand years later an eighteenth-century nursery rhyme contained the line, “I had to go to London town and buy me a wife.” There are supposed to have been auctions for women in certain secret markets, continuing well into the nineteenth century, and the emphasis upon finance is sustained by the enquiry of the late twentieth-century prostitute, “Do you want any business?” So does the spirit of London imprint itself upon the desires of its inhabitants. London is dedicated to selling. But the poor have nothing to sell, so they sell their bodies. Thus, sexual lust is free to roam down every lane and alley. London has always been the scene of covert debauchery.

Those medieval chroniclers who cited London for its drunkenness and sinfulness also rebuked it for its rapists and its lechers, its harlots and its sodomites. In the twelfth century there is reference to Bordhawe, an area of brothels in the parish of St. Mary Colechurch. In the thirteenth century, and probably much earlier, there was a Gropecuntlane in the two parishes of St. Pancras and St. Mary Colechurch (also known as Groppecountelane, 1276 and Gropecontelane, 1279); the context and meaning here are obvious enough. In the same period there are references to Love Lane “where yonge couples were wont to sport” and Maid Lane “so-called of wantons there.”

Beside Smithfields there was also Cock Lane, which in 1241 was “assigned” for sexual congress. It became in a sense the first red-light district, notorious for prostitutes; “at the approach of night they sally forth from their homes … low taverns serve them as a retreat to receive their gallants.” The description was pertinent at any time from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and serves to emphasise how one small area can continue the same activity even as the city changes all around it. That lane was inhabited by the very types of London, such as Mrs. Martha King, “a little fat woman, known last winter by her velvet gown and pettecoat,” Mrs. Elizabeth Brown, “who has been a dealer in cullies [young girls] ever since she was fifteen; modest and pleasant enough, till after the third bottle,” and Mrs. Sarah Farmer, “a great two-handed strapper, having no charms either in person or in humour.” In Piers Plowman (c. 1362) Langland also commemorates “Clarice, of cokkeslane, and the clerke of the cherche.”

In the fourteenth century there are records of proceedings against whores, courtesans and bawds as well as whoremongers. In June 1338 William de Dalton was arrested for “keeping a house of ill fame in which married women and their paramours were wont to resort” and in the following month Robert de Stratford was arraigned for harbouring prostitutes.

In the following year Gilbert le Strengmaker, of Fleet Street, was charged with maintaining “a Disorderly House harbouring prostitutes and sodomites” while at the same sessions two courtesans, “Agnes and Juliana of Holborne,” were also accused of harbouring sodomites. So there was in medieval London a thriving homosexual community, which aligned itself with the world of brothels and bawds. It would be tempting to describe it as an underworld except that it was well known and ubiquitous.

Charges were laid against brothels in the wards of Aldersgate, the Tower, Billingsgate, Bridge (here one prostitute was known as Clarice la Claterballock), Broad Street, Aldgate, Farringdon and elsewhere. Many of those arrested for sexual offences came from areas far from London itself, however, suggesting that the reports of sexual licence-and profit-had spread throughout the country. London had long ago become the centre of England’s sinfulness. A great chronicle of the period, Brut, remarks upon “ladies … waerynge Foxtayles sewed wythynne to hide their arses,” while another reports on the ladies of the town with “breasts and bellies exposed.” There were in fact sumptuary laws which proscribed lewd women from wearing the same clothes as “noble Dames and Damsels of the Realm”; they were obliged to wear striped garments as a sign of their profession, which indirectly suggests the level of tolerance exercised in medieval Catholic London: prostitution was neither banned nor excluded.

The level of vice was in late medieval London far higher, or at least more open, than at any period in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries; it reached such an extent that it provoked alarm among the city authorities who in 1483 published a proclamation against “the Stynkynge and Horrible Synne of Lecherie … which dayly groweth and is used more than in dayes past by the means of Strumpettes, mysguded and idyll women dayly vagraunt.” There were attempts then to remove the “mysguded” from the more respectable thoroughfares of the city, by confining the women to the areas of Smithfield and Southwark beyond the walls. But in Southwark the Bankside brothels south of the river were continually placed in jeopardy by the whims or panics of the authorities, and the women themselves chose to congregate in areas such as St. Giles, Shoreditch (where they still can be seen), and Ave Maria Alley beside St. Paul’s Cathedral. They were also to be found in the Harry in Cheapside, the Bell in Gracechurch Street, and a score of other stews within the city. The derivation of the term “stews” comes not from some reference to cloying meat or hot broth, but from the old French for artificially stocked fishponds-estuier, to shut up. That sense of closeted heat, stew-boiled, was exacerbated by the incidence of syphilis which in the sixteenth century became the object of outrage from moralists and rage from satirists.

The sexual life of the city continued regardless, in any case, with visitors remarking on the casual intimacy of the relations between the sexes. A Venetian of the sixteenth century commented that “Many of the young women gather outside Moorgate to play with the young lads, even though they do not know them … They kiss each other a lot.” Married females seem to have taken part in the same pursuit, and in the early seventeenth century a tall flagpole was set up on the shore of the Thames, just past Deptford, “to which horns of all kinds and descriptions are fixed, in honour of all the English cuckolds or horn carriers … and the English have much fun and amusement with each other, as they pass by and doff their hats to each other and to all around.” It was well known, as the title of one early seventeenth-century London broadside put it, to be A Marry’d Woman’s Case.

The ubiquity of whores meant that they had a hundred different nicknames-punks, madams, fireships, jilts, doxies, wagtails, drabs, smuts, cracks, mawkes, trulls, trugmoldies, bunters, does, punchable nuns, molls, Mother Midnights, blowzes, buttered buns, squirrels, mackerels, cats, ladybirds, blowzabellas, and others. Madame Cresswell of Clerkenwell was a notorious procuress, who was painted and engraved on several occasions; in her house she kept “Beauties of all Complexions, from the cole-black clyng-fast to the golden lock’d insatiate, from the sleepy ey’d Slug to the lewd Fricatrix” and she corresponded with agents all over England to discover the young and the attractive. She was one of many famous London bawds. In the first of his series A Harlot’s Progress, Hogarth pictured Mother Needham who owned a notorious brothel in Park Place. But she was pelted to death in the pillory, and Hogarth had to substitute for her Mother Bentley who was equally famous in the streets of London. These “Mothers” were indeed the mothers of a city of lust.

Some of its daughters, and its sons, were young indeed. “Every ten yards,” a German traveller wrote, “one is beset, even by children of twelve years old, who by the manner of their address save one the trouble of asking whether they know what they want. They attach themselves to you like limpets … Often they seize hold of you after a fashion of which I can give you the best notion by the fact that I say nothing about it.”

Boswell’s diary of street life in 1762 provides an account of sexual favours currently on offer. On the evening of Thursday 25 November, he picked up a girl in the Strand, and “went into a court with intention to enjoy her in armour [i.e. wearing a condom]. But she had none … she wondered at my size, and said if ever I took a girl’s maidenhead, I would make her squeak.” On the night of 31 March, in the following year, “I strolled into the Park and took the first whore I met, whom I without many words copulated with free from danger, being safely sheathed. She was ugly and lean and her breath smelled of spirits. I never asked her name. When it was done, she slunk off.” On 13 April, “I took a little girl into a court; but wanted vigour.” Boswell, often a moralist after the event, does not regard the fact that it was a “little girl” as of any significance; this suggests that there were many such thrown upon the streets of London.

When Thomas De Quincey met one of them, Ann, he spent many nights with her walking “up and down Oxford Street” but “she was timid and dejected to a degree which showed how deeply sorrow had taken hold of her young heart.” He left her for a while, naming a spot at the corner of Titchfield Street where they should wait for each other. But he never saw her again. He looked for Ann in vain among the thousand faces of young girls in the London crowd and called Oxford Street “stony hearted stepmother, thou that listenest to the sighs of orphans, and drinkest the tears of children.” This compassionate attitude to the suffering of young female prostitutes rarely, if ever, emerges in eighteenth-century records, including that of Boswell. The month after taking the “little girl into a court,” for example, Boswell picked up a woman and “conducted her to Westminster Bridge, and then in armour complete did I engage her upon this noble edifice.” This, in the slang of the time, was probably “a threepenny upright.” “The whim of doing it there with the Thames rolling below us aroused me much.”

To Boswell she was only a “low wretch” and by definition unclean; therefore, after the event, she became an object of suspicion and threat. Boswell was always terrified of catching venereal disease, like most of his contemporaries. John Gay in a purview of London warned against the pursuit of

the tawdry band

That romp from lamp to lamp-for health expect

Disease, for fleeting pleasure foul remorse

And daily, nightly, agonising pains

Such were the pains suffered by Casanova who, after visiting a prostitute in the Canon Tavern, was infected with gonorrhoea.

Casanova described how on an earlier occasion he entered another brothel, the Star Tavern, where he ordered a private room. He engaged in conversation with “the grave and reverend landlord”-a good aside, touching the assumed character of many London brothel-keepers-before turning away all the women who came to his room. “Give a shilling for the porters and send her away,” said his host after the first refusal. “We don’t trouble ourselves about ceremonies in London.”

There was no ceremony when Samuel Johnson was accosted by a prostitute in the Strand-“No, no, my girl,” he murmured, “it won’t do.” Richard Steele was approached by another such girl, “newly come upon the Town,” near the Piazza in Covent Garden. She asked “if I was for a Pint of Wine” but, under the arches of the Market at twilight, he noticed in her countenance “Hunger and Cold; Her Eyes were wan and eager, her Dress thin and tawdry, her Mien genteel and childish. This strange Figure gave me much Anguish of Heart, and to avoid being seen with her I went away.”

The Strand and Covent Garden, as well as all the lanes which crossed them, were known places of sexual resort. There were public houses in the vicinity where “posture dancers” performed an eighteenth-century version of striptease; there were “houses of pleasure” which specialised in flagellation, and there were “Mollie houses” which were frequented by homosexuals. The London Journal of May 1726 discovered twenty “Sodomitical Clubs”-including, it would seem, the “Bog-Houses” of Lincoln’s Inn-“where they make their execrable Bargains, and then withdraw into some dark Corners to perpetrate their odious Wickedness.” Mother Clap’s in Holborn, and the Talbot Inn in the Strand, were favourite meeting-places for homosexual men, and there was a male brothel by the Old Bailey “where it was customary for the men to address each other as ‘Madam’ or ‘Ladyship.’” The Horseshoe in Beech Lane, and the Fountain in the Strand, were the eighteenth-century equivalent of “gay pubs” while the area around the Royal Exchange was known for its “cruising” when, as a contemporary verse put it, “Sodomites were so impudent to ply on th’Exchange.” Pope’s Head Alley and Sweetings Alley were all streets with a similar reputation; the male owner of a tavern or brothel in Camomile Street was known as “the Countess of camomile.” At Mother Clap’s itself there were beds in every room with “commonly thirty to forty Chaps every Night-and even more-especially on Sunday Nights,” while in a Beech Street brothel were found “a company of men fiddling dancing and singing bawdy songs.” There was a darker side to these festivities, however. When a certain “Club of Buggerantoes” was raided, several of those arrested committed suicide, among them a mercer, a draper and a chaplain. There were also many cases of blackmail so that there was danger, as well as excitement, in the city. Nevertheless London remained the centre of homosexuality where, under conditions of privacy and anonymity, the elect could pursue their calling. City juries were in any case notoriously reluctant to pronounce the capital sentence for the crime of sodomy; the usual verdict was “attempted” sodomy, for which a fine, short imprisonment, or spell in the pillory, was sufficient. Londoners are characteristically lenient in matters of sexual impropriety. How can they be otherwise in a city where every form of vice and extravagance is continually available?

The sexual ambience of nineteenth-century London, despite the cliché of “the Victorian age” as one of upright family values, was no less lascivious than its eighteenth-century counterpart. In her London Journal Flora Tristan wrote in 1840 that “in London all classes are deeply corrupted. Vice comes to them early.” She had been shocked by an “orgy” in a tavern where English aristocrats and Members of Parliament disported themselves with drunken women until daybreak. In quite a different sphere Henry Mayhew noted of London street children that “their most remarkable characteristic … is their extraordinary licentiousness.” As a result of his observations he guessed that the age of puberty came much earlier than most people believed; he declined to give, however, “the details of filthiness and of all uncleanness.” Even in the areas where the more respectable working class lived, it was customary for couples as young as thirteen and fourteen to live and procreate without the need for marriage vows; there was a church in Bethnal Green, for example, where these “Cockney marriages” could be performed and where “you might be married for sevenpence if you were fourteen years old.” One curate of the East End recalled a Christmas morning when he “stood marrying blaspheming youths and girls to one another … ghastly mockery.” Here sexual profligacy is associated with a general irreligion or atheism which is another characteristic emblem of London life.

Yet the major concern of nineteenth-century urban observers lay with the extent and nature of prostitution. Surveys-by Mayhew, by Booth, by Acton and others-suggest that it became something of an obsession. There were books entitled Prostitution in London, or, more elaborately, Prostitution, Considered in its Moral, Social amp; Sanitary Aspects. There were tables and statistics about where prostitutes were kept, lodged or resorted, with divisions and subdivisions: “Well-dressed living in Brothels,” “Well-dressed living in Private Lodgings,” “In Low Neighbourhoods,” “Introducing Houses” and “Accommodation Houses.” There were detailed observations on “Bent and Character of Mind,” “Manner of Passing Their Leisure Hours,” “Moral Defects” (spiritous liquor) and “Good Qualities” (strong sympathy for one another). Prostitution seems to have been the overwhelming consideration of Victorian social reformers, complementary to the efforts of other workers in matters of sanitation and housing; in that sense all were concerned with the inheritance of a thousand years of unchecked urban living, with a strong effort to cleanse or purify it.

The connection of sexuality and disease was also explicitly made. William Acton, in Prostitution in London, revealed that these “rouged and whitewashed creatures, with painted lips and eyebrows, and false hair, accustomed to haunt Langham Place, portions of the New Road, the Quadrant … the City Road, and the purlieus of the Lyceum” were on investigation more often than not found to be “a mass of syphilis.” The characteristic metaphor of waste or refuse was also adduced. “As a heap of rubbish will ferment, so surely will a number of unvirtuous women.” The prostitute then becomes a symbol of contagion, both moral and physical. Of the eighty thousand in London in the 1830s, it was said that eight thousand would die each year. In the London hospitals 2,700 cases of syphilis occurred each year “in children from eleven to sixteen years of age.” The actual number of female prostitutes was a subject of endless speculation and invention-seventy thousand, eighty thousand, ninety thousand, or higher, and in the mid-nineteenth century it was computed that “£8,000,000 are expended annually on this vice in London alone.” In that sense prostitution itself becomes a token of London’s commercial rapacity, as well as of the fears attendant upon the overwhelming growth of both vice and the city itself.

The degradation of civilisation, in the very centre of London, can take many different forms. Some of them were recorded in Ryan’s Prostitution in London, published in 1839. “Maria Scoggins, aged fifteen, held a situation as a stay-maker. On her way to her father’s house in the evening she was decoyed to a brothel kept by Rosetta Davis, alias Abrahams, and turned upon the streets.” Another girl, aged fifteen “was actually sold by her stepmother to the keeper of one of these houses in the eastern part of London.” Unwary children of both sexes were merchandise. Leah Davis was an elderly female, the mother of thirteen daughters, “all either prostitutes or brothel-keepers.” The metaphor of youth being sacrificed is redolent of barbaric rituals at the altars of Troy or Gomorrah, while the image of girls “thrown,” “turned,” or “decoyed” upon the streets suggests a vision of a dark and labyrinthine city where innocence is quickly scented and destroyed. Three girls of fifteen were despatched to lure many youths together “so as to make their united payments considerable”; “they were admitted to the scene of depravity which the establishment unfolded … These houses were used as lodging houses for thieves, vagabonds, mendicants, and others of the lowest grade … it was well known that the most diabolical practices were constantly perpetrated within them … in the midst of a dense and ignorant population … Men, women and children, of all ages, were there associated for the vilest and basest purposes … spreading a moral miasma around.” This is a record of what was considered to be the shadow of pagan darkness not in the suburbs, or in well-localised stews, but in the very heart of the city.

But if one image of the London prostitute was of disease and contagion, embodying in striking form all the anxieties and fears which the city itself may provoke, the other was of isolation and alienation. De Quincey’s account of Ann, daughter of stony-hearted Oxford Street, is one of the first examples of that urban vision which sees in the plight of the young prostitute the very condition of living in the city; she had become a prey to all its merciless commercial forces as well as to its underlying indifference and forgetfulness.

Dostoevsky, when wandering down the Haymarket, noticed how “mothers brought their little daughters to make them ply the same trade.” He observed one girl “not older than six, all in rags, dirty, bare-foot and hollow cheeked; she had been severely beaten and her body, which showed through the rags, was covered with bruises … Nobody was paying any attention to her.” Here we have an image of suffering in London, amid the endlessly hurrying and passing crowd who would no more pause to consider a bruised child than a maimed dog. What struck Dostoevsky, who himself was used to terror and hopelessness in his own country, was “the look of such distress, such hopeless despair on her face … She kept on shaking her tousled head as if arguing about something, gesticulated and spread her little hands and then suddenly clasped them together and pressed them to her little bare breast.” These are the sights and pictures of London. On another evening a woman dressed all in black passed him and hurriedly thrust a piece of paper in his hand. He looked at it and saw that it contained the Christian message “I am the Resurrection and the Life.” But how could anyone believe the precepts of the New Testament, when they had witnessed the pain and loneliness of a six-year-old girl? When the city was described as pagan, it was partly because no one living among such urban suffering could have much faith in a god who allowed cities such as London to flourish.

Yet perhaps the true gods of the city are of a different nature. When the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain, otherwise known as Eros, was unveiled in 1893 at Piccadilly Circus, it was only a few yards from the infamous Haymarket where mothers had brought their young daughters for sale. Eros was the first statue ever made of aluminium, and in that conflation of ancient passion and new-minted metal, we have an emblem of desire as old and as new as the city itself. Eros has been drawing people ever since. In a twentieth-century novel by Sam Selvon, entitled The Lonely Londoners, one of the protagonists, a Trinidadian, notices that the “circus have magnet for him, that circus represent life, that circus is the beginning and ending of the world.”

Throughout this century Piccadilly Circus has been the site of nightly sexual encounters, and an area where young people drift in search of adventure. It is a place where all the roads seem to meet, in endless disarray, and it exudes an atmosphere both energetic and impersonal. That is perhaps also why it has been for many decades a centre of prostitution and easy pick-ups, both male and female. It has always been the part of London most identified with casual sex. “There were regular places they haunted,” Theodore Dreiser wrote of London prostitutes at the beginning of the twentieth century, “Piccadilly being the best,” and that sentiment has been echoed in a thousand novels and documentary reports. The statue of Eros has, after all, commanded a strange power. The city itself is a form of promiscuous desire, with its endless display of other streets and other people affording the opportunity of a thousand encounters and a thousand departures. The very strangeness of London, its multifarious areas remaining unknown even to its inhabitants, includes the possibility of chance and sudden meetings. To be alone or solitary, a characteristic symptom of city life, is to become an adventurer in search of brief companionship; it also is the mark of the predator. The anonymity or impersonality of London life is itself the source of sexual desire, where the appetite can be satisfied without the usual constraints of a smaller society. So the actual vastness of London encourages fantasy and illimitable desire.

That is why the general sexual condition of London has always remained the same, in its voraciousness and insatiability. Today, there are strip bars and clubs where lap dancers perform; a thousand pubs and nightclubs cater for every kind of sexual perversity; there are streets known for prostitutes and parks used at night for cruising. Whole areas of London at night assume a different face, so that the city is like some endlessly fecund source which can offer alternative realities and different experiences. That is why it is in itself “sexy,” displaying its secret places and tempting the unwary. To turn just one more corner, or walk down one more path, may bring … who knows what? The telephone booths are littered with advertisements for sadistic or transsexual prostitutes, some of them claiming to be “new in town” or “new to London.” They are reminiscent of the eighteenth-century prostitute in Covent Garden, “newly come upon the Town.” But nothing is ever new in London, where the young still offer up their bodies for sale.

CHAPTER 42

A Turn of the Dice

Drink, sex and gambling once always consorted together. They were the trinity of London vice and weakness, an unholy threesome which disported happily across the city. They represented recklessness and defiance, in the face of an uncertain life in a city bedevilled by insecurity.

All the commercial and financial institutions of London were established upon a giant gamble, so why not participate in the same perilous but enthralling game? Your encounter with a prostitute might lead to a fatal disease, but a turn of the dice might make you wealthy; then, in the face of all these hazards and difficulties, you might drink to forget. The social historian of eighteenth-century London, M. Dorothy George, noted that the “temptations to drink and gamble were interwoven with the fabric of society to an astonishing extent, and they did undoubtedly combine with the uncertainties of life and trade to produce that sense of instability, of liability to sudden ruin.” Many men of business were ruined by dissipation and gambling-Industry and Idleness, charting the decline of a London apprentice through drink, dice and women to eventual hanging at Tyburn, was a characteristic London story.

· · ·

The first evidence of gambling in London can be adduced from the Roman period, with the excavation of dice carved out of bone or jet. The unexpected turns of life, as then experienced, are also revealed in the elaborate equipment of a fortune-teller found beneath Newgate Street. In the early medieval period Hazard was played in taverns and other low houses, together with another dice game known as Tables. In medieval brothels, too, gambling and drinking were part of the service. Quarrels over a game were sometimes fatal and, after one round of Tables, “the loser fatally stabbed the winner on the way home.” There was plentiful scope for fraud, also, and there are reports of the gaming boards being marked and the dice loaded. Yet the passion for gaming was everywhere. An excavation in Duke’s Place revealed “a piece of medieval roof-tile shaped into a gaming counter,” according to a report in The London Archaeologist, and as early as the thirteenth century there were rules in Westminster for the punishment of any schoolboy found with dice in his possession. A stroke of the rod was delivered for every “pip” on the dice.

Playing cards were imported into London in the fifteenth century, and their use became so widespread that in 1495 Henry VII “forebad their use to servants and apprentices except during the Christmas holidays.” Stow records that “From All hallows Eve to the day following Candlemas-day there was, among other sports, playing at cards, for counters, nails and points, in every house.” They were found in every tavern, too: packs of cards had the names of various inns imprinted upon them. Their merits were widely advertised. “Spanish cards lately brought from Vigo. Being pleasant to the eye by their curious colours and quite different from ours may be had at 1/- [one shilling] a pack at Mrs. Baldwin’s in Warwick Lane.” The business in cards became so brisk that the tax upon their sale is estimated to have furnished in the mid-seventeenth century an annual income of five thousand pounds which meant that “some 4.8 million packs of cards” must have been traded.

Fulham earned a reputation as early as the sixteenth century for its dubious traffic in dice and counters; it is evoked by Shakespeare in The Merry Wives of Windsor, where

For gourd and fullam holds

And “high” and “low” beguile the rich and poor.

A fullam in this context was a loaded die. Another recognised centre for gambling was Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Here boys “gambled for farthings and oranges”; one popular game was the Wheel of Fortune with a movable hand spinning within a circle of figures, “the prize being gingerbread nuts the size of a farthing.” These gaming fields of course attracted dissolute Londoners. Lincoln’s Inn Fields was the recognised harbour for “idle and vicious vagrants” known collectively as its Mummers. Among them were Dicers and Chetors and Foists who specialised in gambling. Dice were carved out of true so that they seemed “good and square, yet in the forehead longer on the cater and tray than the other.”

“What shifts have they to bring this false die in and out?”

“A jolly fine shift that properly is called foisting.”

So went a dialogue in a pamphlet entitled Manifest Detection, which outlined a score of other tricks used by the fraternity of the Shifters. Another pamphlet, Look on me, London, warned against the city’s tricks and devices to gull the innocent or the unwary; strangers and visitors were liable to be duped or defrauded by “the Picker-Up, the Kid, the Cap and the Flat,” nicknames which seem to span the generations. And, once more, the language used to describe London’s principal vices is one of corruption and contagion. Dice and cards “were the Green Pathway to hell, whereby followed a hundred gowtie, dropsy diseases.” In a city terrified of sickness and epidemic plague the metaphors for any type of excess, or pleasure, become insistent.

The fever ran unabated. When the floor of the Middle Temple Hall was taken up in 1764 “no less than a hundred pair” of dice were found to have slipped through its boards during the play of previous generations. In the mid-seventeenth century Pepys observed of the players in one gaming house, “how ceremonious they are as to call for new dice, to shift their places, to alter their manner of throwing” and he noticed “how some old gamesters that have no money now to spend as formerly do come and sit and look on as among others.” These places became known in London as “hells,” and in them Pepys heard the cries of the damned. So “one man being to throw a seven if he could, and failing to do it after a great many throws cried he would be damned if ever he flung seven more while he lived.” Another player, who had won, shouted out, “A pox on it, that it should come so early upon me, for this fortune two hours hence would be worth something to me but then, God damn me, I shall have no such luck.”

The London gaming houses were often characterised, too, as places where gentlemen and noblemen would sit down with the “meaner” sort, to use Pepys’s word. The same observation was made in the late twentieth century, in connection with casinos and gaming clubs where the aristocracy and the underworld consorted. The dissipations of London, like the city itself, act as great levellers. Lord Chesterfield, perhaps struck by the egalitarian mood of the city, once remarked that “he preferred playing with a sharper to playing with a gentleman, for though he might not often win of the former, he was sure when he did win to get paid.”

By the early eighteenth century there were approximately forty gaming houses in the city, known as subscription-houses and slaughter-houses as well as hells. There were “more of these infamous places of resort in London,” according to Timbs’s Curiosities of London, “than in any other city in the world.” They were recognisable by an ornate gas-lamp in front of the entrance and a green or red baize door at the end of the hallway. Gaming rose in frequency and excessiveness throughout the century, a century which by curious chance was the one most marked by financial uncertainty and sudden ruin. Thus in the age of the Bubble, and other panics, whist was perfected by gentlemen who met at the Crown Coffee House in Bedford Row.

Gaming was declared illegal but, despite nightly raids upon certain selected hells in the city, it continued to flourish. There was always “assembled a mixed crowd of gentlemen, merchants, tradesmen, clerks and sharpers of all degrees and conditions,” ready to play at Hazard, Faro, Basset, Roly-poly and a score of other games involving dice and cards. Into these hells came the puffs, the flashers, the squibs, the dunners, the flash captains with a regiment of spies, porters and runners to give notice of approaching constables. At Almacks, a famous gaming club in Pall Mall, the players “turned their coats inside out for luck”; they put on wristbands of leather to protect their lace ruffles and wore straw hats to guard their eyes from the light and to prevent their hair from tumbling. Sometimes, too, they put on “masks to conceal their emotions.” At Brooks’s, the twenty-first rule stated that there should be “No gaming in the eating room, except tossing up for reckonings, on penalty of paying the whole bill of the members present.” There were other less agreeable occasions for a wager, as recorded in London Souvenirs. A prospective player once dropped down dead at the door of White’s; “the club immediately made bets whether he was dead or only in a fit; and when they were going to bleed him the wagerers for his death interposed, saying it would affect the fairness of the bet.”

Londoners, according to one foreign observer, “violent in their desires, and who carry all their passions to excess, are altogether extravagant in the article of gaming.” Another visitor offered a similar account. “What will you lay? is the first question frequently asked by high and low, when the smallest disputes arise on subjects of little consequence. Some of the richer class, after dinner over a bottle, feel perhaps an inclination for betting; the one opens a nut with a maggot in it, another does the same, and a third immediately proposes a bet, which of the two worms will crawl first over a given distance.”

Betting was of course involved in the games of violence-rat-catching, cockfighting, female wrestling-with which London abounded, but natural phenomena also became the subject of speculation. On the morning after violent tremors in the city, bets were laid at White’s “whether it was an earthquake or the blowing up of powder-mills.” It was indeed an earthquake, one of the less predictable hazards of London life.

A market-worker in Leadenhall “made a bet that he would walk 202 times around Moorfields in twenty seven hours; and did it.” A minister of state, the Earl of Sandwich, “passed four and twenty hours at a public gaming table, so absorbed in play, that, during the whole time, he had no subsistence but a bit of beef, between two slices of toasted bread, which he eat without ever quitting the game. This new dish grew highly in vogue … it was called by the name of the minister who invented it.”

The traditions of public gaming were continued into the nineteenth century by such places as the Royal Saloon in Piccadilly, the Castle in Holborn, Tom Cribb’s Saloon in Panton Street, the Finish in James Street, the White House in Soho Square, Ossington Castle in Orange Street, and Brydges Street Saloon in Covent Garden otherwise known as “The Hall of Infamy” or “Old Mother Damnable’s.” On the other side of London, in the East End, there were gambling rooms and gambling clubs, to such an extent that one minister working among the poor of the area informed Charles Booth that “gambling presses drink hard as the greatest evil of the day … all gamble more than they drink.” The street urchins gambled with farthings or buttons, in a card game known as Darbs, and betting on boxing or horseracing was carried on through the agency of tobacconists, publicans, newsvendors and barbers. “All must bet,” according to another informant in Charles Booth’s survey of the East End, “Women as well as men … men and boys tumble out in their eagerness to read the latest ‘speshul’ and mark the winner.”

And then of course there was the lottery. It was first established in London in 1569. The “passion for lucky numbers” has burned for centuries. “Aleph” in London Scenes and London People noted that acquaintances, on a sudden meeting, would talk not about the weather but “the great prize just, or about to be, drawn, and to the fortunate winner, or to the blank you had just drawn, and your confident belief that No. 1,962 would be the £20,000 prize.” There were lottery magazines as well as lottery glovers, hat-makers and tea-dealers who offered a small share on their ticket if you used their services. The winning ticket was chosen in the Guildhall by a blindfolded Bluecoat schoolboy (a London version of blindfolded Fortuna), and around the building were “prostitutes, thieves, dirty workmen, or labourers, almost naked-mere children, pale and anxious, awaiting the announcement of the numbers.” In 1984, George Orwell’s vision of a future London, there is also “the Lottery”: “It was probable that there were some millions of proles for whom the Lottery was the principal if not the only reason for remaining alive. It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant.” Orwell understood London very well, and here he is suggesting some deep connection between the principle of its civilisation and the necessity of the gamble and the cheat. Londoners require the stimulus, and the desperate hope of gain; the chances are infinitesimal but, in so vast and disproportioned a city, that is taken for granted. A wager can be shared with many millions, and still be a wager. The anticipation and anxiety are shared also, so that gambling can be viewed as a sudden spasm of communal attention.

Today the betting shops and casinos are full in Queensway and Russell Square, in Kilburn and Streatham and Marble Arch, and a hundred other locations. Life, in London, can then be construed as a game which few can win.

London as Crowd

An etching by James Gillray, which caricatures Sheridan as Punch blowing theatrical bubbles above the heads of a cheering crowd. London has always been a theatrical city and its mobs were once part of its dramatis personae.

CHAPTER 43

Mobocracy

In a city of rumour and of fluctuating fortune, of excess in every form, the London crowd has over the generations acquired an interesting pathology. The crowd is not a single entity, manifesting itself on particular occasions, but the actual condition of London itself. The city is one vast throng of people. “On looking into the street,” one seventeenth-century observer recalled, “we saw a surging mass of people moving in search of some resting place which a fresh mass of sightseers grouped higgledy piggledy rendered impossible. It was a fine medley: there were old men in their dotage, insolent youths and boys … painted wenches and women of the lower classes carrying their children.” A “medley” suggests a show or spectacle, and in the mid-seventeenth century painters began subtly to examine the London crowd. It was no longer an indistinct mass, seen from a safe distance, but a general group of people whose particular features were differentiated.

There was always the noise, as well as the spectacle. “It was very dark, but we could perceive the street to fill, and the hum of the crowd grew louder and louder … about eight at night we heard a din from below, which came up the street continually increasing till we could perceive a motion.” The loud indistinct hum, rising to a roar and accompanied by strange general motion, is the true sound of London. “Behind this wave there was a vacancy, but it filled apace, till another like wave came up; and so four or five of these waves passed one after another … and throats were opened with hoarse and tremendous noise.” There is something crude, and alarming, about this sound; it is as if the voice of the city were primeval, unearthly. The occasion described here, in Burke’s The Streets of London Through the Centuries, was a late seventeenth-century anti-Catholic procession down Fleet Street, and its air of menace is enlarged by the reference to how “one with a stenterophonic tube sounded ‘Abhorrers! Abhorrers!’ most infernally.” The sound of London can be harsh and discordant. Yet sometimes its collective breath is charged with misery. On the day of the execution of Charles I, 30 January 1649, a great throng was assembled in Whitehall; at the instant of the blow which removed the king’s head, “there was such a Grone by the Thousands then present, as I never heard before amp; desire may never hear again.”

Yet, for the royalists of the seventeenth century, the throng of London were “the scum of all the profanest rout, the vilest of all men, the outcast of the people … mechanic citizens, and apprentices.” The crowd, in other words, became a tangible threat; it was turning into a mob (the word was coined in the seventeenth century) which might become King Mob.

The salient fact was that London had grown immeasurably larger in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and so obviously the size of its crowds was enlarged. In an atmosphere of religious and political controversy, too, there was no model of civic polity to restrain them. Pepys records a crowd “bawling and calling in the street for a free Parliament and money” and, in the summer of 1667, “it is said that they did in open streets yesterday, at Westminster, cry ‘A Parliament! a Parliament!,’ and do believe it will cost blood.” In the following year there were riots in Poplar and in Moorfields, and the new prison at Clerkenwell was broken open by the people to rescue those who had been imprisoned for the old London custom of pulling down brothels. “But here it was said how these idle fellows have had the confidence to say that they did ill in contenting themselves in pulling down the little bawdy-houses and did not go and pull down the great bawdy house at Whitehall.” This is the authentic radical and levelling voice of the Londoner, newly become a crowd or throng or mob, in the heart of the city. “And some of them last night had a word among them, and it was ‘Reformations and Reducement.’ This doth make the courtiers ill at ease to see this spirit among the people.”

So London had become dangerous. “When a mob of chairmen or servants, or a gang of thieves or sharpers, are almost too big for the civil authority,” wrote Henry Fielding, “what must be the case in a seditious tumult or general riot?” The history of the eighteenth-century crowd displays a gradual change of temper which was disturbing to magistrates such as Fielding. The scorn and insults were no longer primarily levelled at strangers or outsiders but, rather, at those of wealth or authority. “A man in court dress cannot walk the streets of London without being pelted with mud by the mob,” Casanova wrote in 1746, “… the Londoners hoot the king and the royal family when they appear in public.” In this “chaos,” as Casanova described it, “the flower of the nobility mingling in confusion with the vilest populace,” the “common people affect to show their independence … the most wretched Porter will dispute the wall with a Lord.” It was similarly reported by Pierre Jean Grosley that “In England no rank or dignity is secure from the insults” and that “no nation is more satirical or quicker at repartee, especially the common people.” A Frenchman made the acute point that “This insolence is considered by many only as the humour and pleasantry of porters and Watermen; but this humour and pleasantry was, in the hands of the long parliament, one of their chief weapons against Charles the First.” “Repartee” and insult can, in other words, have political consequences. In that context it is perhaps worth noting that the street urchins used the statue of Queen Anne, outside St. Paul’s Cathedral, as the target for their practice of throwing stones.

One of the characteristics of the London mob was its irritability and sudden changes of mood, so that when a spark was struck in its depths it flared up very quickly. When an offender did not arrive at a pillory in Seven Dials, as expected, the crowd erupted in a fury which principally fell upon passing hackney coaches; they were pelted with filth and ordure while the coachmen were forced to cry out “Huzza!” as they went along. At one controversial election meeting in Westminster “in a very few minutes the whole scaffolding, benches and chairs and everything else were completely destroyed.” The rage of the crowd was random and sporadic, fierce and exhilarating in equal measure. One German visitor, after a visit to Ludgate Hill, noted: “Now I know what an English mob is.” He was driving in a coach, at a time of general rejoicing at the release from prison in 1770 of the great London politician, Wilkes, and recalled “half-naked men and women, children, chimney sweeps, tinkers, Moors and men of letters, fish-wives and elegant ladies, each creature intoxicated by his own whims and wild with joy, shouting and laughing.”

It is as if the very restriction of the city encouraged the sudden appetite for wildness and licence; the restraints imposed by a mercantile culture, ruinous in its effects upon many who comprised the crowd, encouraged rapid volatility of rage and exhilaration. There were also too many people forced into too small a space, and this massive overcrowding in narrow streets engendered strange fevers and excitements. That is why the instinctive fear of the mob, or crowd, had as much to do with its propensity for disease as its prevalence towards violence. It was the fear of touch, of the unhealthy warmth of London as transmitted by its citizens, which went back to the times of fever and of epidemic plague when, in the words of Defoe, “their hands would infect the things they touched, especially if they were warm and sweaty, and they were generally apt to sweat too.”

The mob can also turn upon itself, or upon one of its number. The cry of “a Pick Pocket!” in Moll Flanders set the crowd alight when “all the loose part of the Crowd ran that way, and the poor Boy was deliver’d up to the Rage of the street, which is a Cruelty I need not describe.” There is an element of sudden horror here, as if a whirlpool of rage manifested itself without warning. A record of the last days of a reputed astrologer and magician, John Lambe, in the middle of June 1628, is printed in “The Life and Death of John Lambe,” by Leva Goldstein in Guildhall Studies in London History. Lambe was recognised by some boys in the Fortune Theatre who waited outside “and followed him when he left.” More people joined them, and Lambe hired some passing sailors to form a protective bodyguard; he walked down Red Cross Street, turned left into Fore Street and then left again to the Horseshoe Tavern in Moor Lane, the crowd growing larger and louder all the time. He dined in the inn, while the sailors “kept the crowd at bay” but, when he left and entered the city by Moorgate, the mob once more pursued him with cries of “Witch” and “Devil.” The situation was now very serious. He walked quickly down Coleman Street, into Lothbury, where he took refuge in an upstairs room of the Windmill Tavern on the corner of Old Jewry. His bodyguards were assaulted, and both entrances to the tavern watched by the eager citizens. He attempted to leave in disguise but was again marked down; he took refuge in a nearby house, belonging to a lawyer who called out four constables of the ward to guard him. “But the rage of the people so much increased … that in the midst of these auxiliaries they struck him down to the ground” and beat him with stones and clubs; he never spoke again, and was carried to the Poultry Compter where he died of his injuries on the following day. This is an accurate report on the actions of a characteristic London crowd.

· · ·

If you had any hope of finding “a community life” in London, “all foreigners” agree that it is as if you searched “for flowers in a vale of sand.” There was no community in London in the eighteenth century, and no sense of communal life, only a number of distinctive and distinguishable crowds. There were crowds of women attacking bawdy houses or dishonest shops, crowds of citizens alerted by a “hue and cry,” crowds of parishioners attacking a local compter, crowds watching a fire, crowds of beggars, and, most ominously, crowds of distressed or unemployed workers. One eminent London historian, Stephen Inwood, has in fact remarked in his A History of London that rioters “could be a form of ‘collective bargaining’ between labourers and masters.” In 1710 there was violent rioting by framework-knitters, which presaged decades of unrest and disorder in the poor urban districts such as Whitechapel and Shoreditch.

There were riots by silk-weavers and coal-heavers, hat-makers and glass-grinders, and a host of assorted tradesmen whom creeping industrialisation and increased food prices had rendered ever more desperate. Indian calico was a threat to the weavers of Spitalfields, for example, and one woman was attacked by a crowd who “tore, cut, pulled off her gown and petticoat by violence, threatened her with vile language, and left her naked in the fields.” London channelled the energies of its citizens in the crooked shape of its lanes and thoroughfares, rendering them ever more fierce and desperate.

That is why the process of city life itself was seen as a movement within a crowd. Sometimes it is indifferent and banal, an aspect of “the great metropolis” where exists “the vast unhurried audience that will still gather and stare at any new thing.” Yet on occasions its speed and confusion were decisive, as in Gray’s poem where on the streets of the city the crowd “Tumultuous, bears my Partner from my side.” This is a defining image, well expressed in Moll Flanders: “I took my leave of her in the very Crowd and said to her, as if in hast, dear Lady Betty take care of your little Sister, and so the Crowd did, as it were Thrust me away from her.” The impersonal crowd parts friend from friend, and separates loved one from loved one; those dearest to us are no longer near, borne away by the surging tide in unknown directions. Yet for some there is comfort to be found in this anonymity. “I shall therefore retire to the Town,” wrote Addison in the Spectator of July 1711, “… and get into the Crowd again as fast as I can, in order to be alone.” The crowd encourages solitude, therefore, as well as secrecy and anxiety.

The nineteenth century inherited all these propensities but, in the enormous Oven or Wen, the crowd became increasingly impersonalised. Engels, the great observer of imperial London, remarked that “the brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each … is nowhere so shamelessly barefaced … as just here in the crowding of the great city.” By which he meant not only the crowding in the thoroughfares, as the indifferent mass of people moved in preordained directions, but the general overpopulation within the capital; it had become dense to blackness with the number of human lives within it. Engels recorded again that “The very turmoil of the streets has something repulsive, something against which human nature rebels. The hundreds and thousands of all classes and ranks crowding past each other …” He noticed, too, how “each keeps to his own side of the pavement, so as not to delay the opposing streams of the crowd, while it occurs to no man to honour another with so much as a glance.” The nineteenth-century London crowd was a new phenomenon in human history, which is why so many social and political reformers chose to observe it. In Engels’s account, for example, it became a mechanism imitating the financial and industrial processes of the city, representing an almost inhuman force. Lenin rode on the top of an omnibus the better to observe the movement and nature of this strange creature; he reported upon “groups of bloated and bedraggled lumpen proletarians, in whose midst might be observed some drunken woman with a black eye and a torn and trailing velvet dress of the same colour … The pavements were thronged with crowds of working men and women, who were noisily purchasing all kinds of things and assuaging their hunger on the spot.” In his account the London crowd became the fierce embodiment of energy and appetite, with the forces of its dark life intimated by the black eye and black dress of the drunken woman.

When Dostoevsky lost his way, among the crowds, “what I had seen tormented me for three days afterwards … those millions of people, abandoned and driven away from the feast of humanity, push and crush each other in the underground darkness … The mob has not enough room on the pavements and swamps the whole street … A drunken tramp shuffling along in this terrible crowd is jostled by the rich and titled. You hear curses, quarrels, solicitations.” He sensed all the chaos of collective experience, in a city which was itself a curse, a quarrel and a solicitation. The whole mass of nameless and un-differentiated citizens, this vast concourse of unknown souls, was a token both of the city’s energy and of its meaninglessness. It was also an emblem of the endless forgetfulness involved in urban living. “The children of the poor, while still very young, often go out into the streets, merge with the crowd and in the end fail to return to their parents.” They achieved, in other words, the final destiny of city dwellers-to become part of the crowd.

There is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, set in London in the 1840s, entitled “The Man of the Crowd.” The narrator is to be found in a coffee house beside one of the principal thoroughfares, studying the nature and composition of the “two dense and continuous populations” passing the door. Many had “a satisfied business-like demeanour … their brows were knit and their eyes rolled quickly; when pushed against by fellow-wayfarers they evinced no impatience.” But there also emerged a “numerous class” who “were restless in their movements, had flushed faces, and talked and gesticulated to themselves … if jostled, they bowed profusely to the jostlers, and appeared overwhelmed with confusion.” Here then are two types of the London crowd. There are the satisfied travellers in the stream of life and time, and the awkward or confused who cannot join its steady progress. They apologise for their confusion, but only by talking to themselves can they manage any communication.

The narrator notices junior clerks, wearing the fashions of last year, and upper clerks or “steady old fellows”; he looks upon pickpockets, dandies, pedlars, gamblers, “feeble and ghastly invalids upon whom death had placed a sure hand,” modest young girls, ragged artisans, exhausted labourers, piemen, porters, sweeps, “drunkards innumerable and indescribable-some in shreds and patches, reeling, inarticulate.” The London crowd of the midnineteenth century is revealed here, “all full of noisy and inordinate vivacity which jarred discordantly upon the ear and gave an aching sensation to the eye.”

Then the narrator is arrested by one countenance, that of an old man, which displays caution and malice, triumph and avarice, merriment and “extreme despair.” He resolves to learn more about him and, through the night, he follows him. In streets filled with people the old man’s pace is quick and restless but in deserted thoroughfares he shows signs of “uneasiness and vacillation.” He runs down abandoned streets until he finds a crowd leaving the theatre-here, moving among them, “the intense agony of his countenance abated.” He joins a party of gin-drinkers jostling outside the entrance to a public house and “with a half shriek of joy … stalked backward and forward, without apparent object, among the throng.” In the small hours of the night he walks to an area of poverty and crime, where “the abandoned of London” are “reeling to and fro”; then, at daybreak, he returns “with a mad energy” to a principal thoroughfare where “he walked to and fro, and during the day did not pass from out the turmoil of the street.”

Finally the narrator understands who, or what, he has been following. It is the embodiment of the crowd, the nothing which feeds off the turbulent life of the streets. The old man, with a face expressive “of vast mental power … of coolness, of malice,” is the spirit of London.

Others came to the city precisely to experience this new and strange life of the crowd. “Whenever I want to get an idea for painting or writing I always throw myself among the thickest crowds such as Earl’s Court or Shepherd’s Bush,” one nineteenth-century Japanese artist wrote. “Let the crowds push me to and fro-I call it a human bath.” And Mendelssohn could not disguise his delight at being plunged “in a vortex” where among the endless stream of people he could view “shops with signs as huge as a man and stage coaches piled up with people and a row of vehicles left behind by pedestrians … Look at that horse rearing in front of a house where his rider has acquaintances and those men used for carrying advertisements … look at the negroes and those stout John Bulls with their slender, beautiful daughters hanging on their arms.” A description of Londoners, in 1837, quoted in London Bodies, may also be apposite. “The appearance of the people in the streets of London,” John Hogg wrote, “is one of the first things that attracts the notice of strangers. The native inhabitants … are somewhat under middle size, but their limbs and features are generally well formed. They are of spare habit, but rather muscular; they are characterised by firmness of carriage, and an erect, independent air; they move with a measured step, and generally at a very brisk pace. The features are generally very strongly marked, and pointed; the eye in particular presents an openness and fullness that is remarkable. The tout-ensemble of the countenance bears an air of keenness, animation and intelligence, that distinguish the Londoner from his country neighbour.”

The crowd of the nineteenth century was also aware of itself as a new form of human congregation. That great representative of Victorian feeling, W.P. Frith, endlessly depicted crowds in paintings which themselves attracted endless crowds. The London theatres were filled with melodramas in which the transient crowd was the characteristic setting for individual stories of pathos and violence. There is an account by George Gissing of the continuous movement “of millions” on Jubilee Day (1887). “Along the main thoroughfares of mid London where traffic was now suspended; between the houses moved a double current of humanity … a thud of footfalls numberless and the low unvarying sound that suggested some huge beast purring to itself in stupid contentment.” So the crowd becomes a beast, contented and obedient, wandering through the city which has created it. But then its movements may become suddenly alarming. “These big crossings are like whirlpools; you might go round and round, and never get anywhere.” It is easy to see “how perilous such a crowd might be.”

The crowd, aware of its identity, sends signals to itself. During a bad reverse for British troops during the Crimean War, “we all stood about the streets-regardless of all appearances, reading the telegrams (in the newspaper) with breathless anxiety … There was a perfect sea of newspapers and curious faces behind, intense gravity prevailed … People walked along speaking in whispers and muttering.” The citizens of London then become one body with a corporate feeling of dismay; the crowd is alive and alert, responding in unison. The cry of “Mafeking is relieved,” on 17 May 1900 at nine thirty in the evening, had an equally instantaneous effect upon this corporate body. “Instantly the cry was taken up on the omnibuses and the people came clambering down in hot haste to hear the news repeated over and over again … Others rushed off into the byways, carrying the tidings further and further away, and all the time the streets became thicker with people cheering, shouting and singing.” This mass excitement is almost as disturbing as the “intense gravity” of the crowd recorded four months earlier; both show symptoms of that excess and over-reaction, close to hysteria, by which city life is characterised.

There is something childish about the mob in action, as if it had been bru-talised, or infantilised, by the condition of living in the city. In the fourteenth century the London mob greeted one supposed enemy with a “savage yell,” and five centuries later at a Chartist meeting in Coldbath Fields “a most fearful shout burst from the lips of the crowd.” It is the same terrifying and implacable voice. In 1810 the crowds during the Burdett riots “stopped all vehicles and compelled the occupants to signify their adherence to the cause.” In the same period a mob around a pillory “resembled beasts dipped in a stagnant pool.” The “vast and tumultuous crowds” which gathered to watch the battle of Sidney Street in 1911 provoked similar reactions, when a reporter for the News Chronicle noted that “the voices of these many thousands came up to me in great murderous gusts, like the roar of wild beasts in a jungle.”

Yet the city itself is curiously unmoved by its crowds. One of the reasons for civic peace in London, as opposed to other capitals, lies directly in its size. Its very scale determines its quietness. It is at once too large and too complex to react to any local outbreaks of passionate feeling, and in the twentieth century the most marked characteristic of riots and demonstrations was their failure to make any real impression upon the stony-hearted and unyielding city. The disappointment of the Chartist uprising in 1848, preceded by a large meeting on Kennington Common, anticipated the inability in 1936 of Oswald Mosley to proceed down Cable Street with thousands of fascist sympathisers. It was as if the city itself rebuked them and held them back. The poll tax riots of the late 1980s, around Whitehall and Trafalgar Square, were another instance of a violent local disturbance which did not affect the relative composure of the rest of the city. No movement could sweep through the entire capital, and no mob could ever control it. The city is so large, too, that it renders the average citizen powerless in its presence. In the early decades of the twentieth century there was something curiously compliant and complacent, not to say conservative, about the Cockneys; unlike the Parisians they did not want to fight the conditions of the city and were happy to live with them unchanged. That happy equilibrium could not last.

One unwelcome novelty of the latter half of the twentieth century, for example, was the race riot, among the most notable being those of Notting Hill in 1958 and of Brixton in 1981. The Notting Hill riots began with individual harassment of black men by gangs of white youths, but an incident on 23 August provoked a full-scale riot. Tom Vague, in the aptly named London Psychogeography, describes “a crowd of a thousand white men and some women … tooled up with razors, knives, bricks and bottles.” In the following week a large mob proceeded down Notting Dale and beat up any West Indian they could find, but the worst rioting took place on Monday 1 September, in the central area of Notting Hill Gate. Mobs congregated in Colville Road, Powis Square and Portobello Road before going on a “smashing rampage, chanting ‘Kill the niggers!’ … women hang out of windows shouting, ‘Go on boys, get yourselves some blacks.’” One observer noted that “Notting Hill had become a looking-glass world, for all the most mundane objects which everyone takes for granted had suddenly assumed the most profound importance. Milk bottles were turned into missiles, dustbin lids into primitive shields.” So an area of London becomes profoundly charged with the emotions of its inhabitants; everything is irradiated and transformed by their hatred. The accoutrements of a civilised city had suddenly been transformed into primitive weapons.

A youth leader remarked that “Those sort of boys take up any activity to break the boredom,” and in the twentieth century boredom had to be considered a component of any crowd behaviour. The sheer daily tedium of living in impoverished and unprepossessing surroundings is enough to break the spirit of many Londoners, who feel themselves trapped in the midst of the city without redress or relief. It creates not apathy but active tedium. Thus the violence starts.

On that Monday evening the West Indians collected together in Blenheim Crescent with “an armoury of weapons including milk bottles, petrol and sand for Molotov cocktails.” The white mob entered the area, with shouts of “Let’s burn the niggers out!,” and were greeted by home-made bombs. The police arrived in force, just before things could develop into out-and-out race war; some rioters were arrested, the others dispersed. Then by curious chance the great heat of these August days was swept away by a thunderstorm, the rain falling among the debris of broken bottles and wooden clubs. At their trial in September certain white rioters were told: “By your conduct you have put the clock back 300 years.” But this would only take them back to 1658; they had in fact behaved like their medieval predecessors who “swarmed” upon supposed enemies or aliens with often fatal results.

In the spring of 1981 the young black Londoners of Brixton, enraged by the perceived prejudice and oppression of the local police, erupted in streetrioting. For the first time petrol bombs were used in attacks upon the police, together with the conventional deployment of bottles and bricks, while a general wave of burning and looting left twenty-eight buildings damaged or destroyed. The depth and diversity of the disturbances suggest that they had a cause more fundamental than those of police oppression, however, and we may find it in the propensity among certain Londoners for riot and disorder. It then becomes a way of fighting structural oppression, whereby the very texture and appearance of the streets are oppressive and oppressing.

Poverty and unemployment have also been cited as the causes of sporadic violence, like that in Brixton; certainly they confirm the character of the city as a prison, confining or trapping all those who live within it. What more inevitable consequence, therefore, than rage against its conditions and its custodians? There have been other race riots; there have been riots against the police; there have been riots against the financial institutions in the City of London. Reports produced after the event characteristically refer to “the collapse of law and order” as well as the “fragile basis” of civic peace. But in fact the curious and persistent feature of London life is that “law and order” have never collapsed and that civic peace has been maintained even in the face of grave disorder. It is often wondered how, in its diversity and bewildering complexity, the city manages to function as a single and stable organism. In a similar fashion the fabric of the city, despite a variety of assaults, has always been preserved. Its mobs have never yet dominated it.

CHAPTER 44

What’s New?

The crowd lives upon news and upon rumour. Elizabeth I recalled that, as a princess, she had asked her governess, “What news was at London?” On being told that it was rumoured she was about to marry Lord Admiral Seymour, she replied, “It was but a London news.” So in the sixteenth century “London news” was considered to be fleeting and inaccurate but, even so, the object of much curiosity. In King Lear the “poor rogues Talk of Court news … who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out.” Shakespeare also invoked “the newes Of hurly burly innovation” in Henry IV, Part One as well as “the new newes at the new Court” in As You Like It. It was often observed that, on entering a coffee house, the first and immediate enquiry was “What news? What news?”

The city is the centre of scandal, slander and speculation; the citizens are rumourmongers and backbiters. In the sixteenth century there were handbills and pamphlets and broadsheets devoted to the more sensational events of the day, and the street-sellers ensured that they were reported from door to door. In 1622 a weekly pamphlet of news was published in London, under the rubric of “Weekly Newes from Italy, Germanie, Hungary, Bohemia, the Palatinate, France and the low Countries etc.” Its success was such that it provoked the publication of many other weekly pamphlets which went under the common title of “Corantos.” The “news” was treated with great suspicion, however, as if the reports of London were based on faction or fractiousness. It was not an honest city and the editor of the Perfect Diurnal, Samuel Peche, was described in the 1640s as being “constant in nothing but wenching, lying and drinking.” He was, in other words, a typical Londoner.

There was one other aspect of London “news” which did not escape the attention of Ben Jonson. In his The Staple of Newes (1625) he suggests that news ceases to be “news” when it is printed and distributed; its essence is intelligence given in whisper or rumour, the kind of report that in the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries could permeate all London within a very short period. Jonson had his own view, then, of the “stationer” or publisher of news, who

knows Newes well, can sort and ranke ’hem

And for a need can make ’hem.

In 1666 the London Gazette emerged as the most authoritative of the public prints. “It inserts no News but what is certain,” wrote one contemporary, “and often waits for the Confirmation of it, before it publishes it.” It was printed on single sheets each Monday and Thursday, and was sold on the streets by vendors known as “Mercury women” calling out “London’s Gazette here!” in Cornhill, Cheapside and the Royal Exchange. Macaulay described it as containing “a royal proclamation, two or three Tory addresses, notices of two or three promotions, an account of a skirmish between the imperial troops and the Jannissaries … a description of a highwayman, an announcement of a grand cockfight between two persons of honour, and an advertisement offering a reward for a stray dog.” It may be considered certain that the highwayman, the cockfight and the dog provoked the most attention.

It is some indication of the appetite for news in London that its first daily newspaper, Daily Courant, issued in 1702, predates by some seventy-five years the appearance of a “daily” in Paris. By the end of the eighteenth century there were 278 newspapers, journals and periodicals available in the city. Most of this astonishing number were published within the Strand, Fleet Street and those adjoining streets east of the present Waterloo Bridge and west of Blackfriars.

Fleet Street is an example of the city’s topographical imperative, whereby the same activity takes place over hundreds of years in the same small area. In this case, too, it was an activity that dominated the character and behaviour of those who took part in it, so that it can be said that the very earth and stones of London created their own particular inhabitants. In 1500 Wynkyn de Worde set up his printing press opposite Shoe Lane, and in the same year Richard Pynson established himself as a publisher and printer a few yards down the road at the corner of Fleet Street and Chancery Lane. He was succeeded as Printer to Henry VIII by Thomas Berthelet who set up shop by the conduit, again opposite Shoe Lane, and in the early 1530s William Rastell began a printing firm in the churchyard of St. Bride’s. William Middleton printed at the George, Richard Tottell at the Hand and Star, John Hodgets at the Flower de Luce-all signs within the narrow and crowded thoroughfare.

“This part of London,” wrote Charles Knight, “is a very Temple of Fame. Here rumours and gossip from all regions of the world come pouring in, and from this echoing hall are reverberated back in strangely modified form echoes to all parts of Europe.” So it is an echoic as well as ancient place, a part of London from which that strange commodity known as news spreads in all directions.

In the eighteenth century news was disseminated largely by means of the daily and weekly journals provided by coffee houses and taverns. “What attracts enormously in these coffee-houses,” wrote Saussure “are the gazettes and other public papers. All Englishmen are great newsmongers. Workmen habitually begin the day by going to coffee-rooms in order to read the latest news. I have often seen shoe blacks and other persons of that class club together to purchase a farthing paper.” Another eighteenth-century account, by Count Pecchio, is of “English working men” in taverns for whom “are published a number of Sunday newspapers which contain an abridgement of all the intelligence, anecdotes, and observations, which have appeared in the daily newspapers in the course of the week.” “In the coffee-houses, as soon as the newspaper arrived,” wrote another commentator, “there was the silence of the grave. Each person sat absorbed in his favourite sheet, as if his whole life depended on the speed with which he could devour the news of the day.”

Here we have the image of the Londoner as “devourer” of the news, just as he was a devourer of food and drink. It is one of the first intimations of the “consumer,” one who can only experience the world by the act of ingestion or assimilation. A city is perhaps by its nature an artificial arrangement, so it creates artificial demands. Addison characterised as a definite London type “the Newsmonger” that “rose before Day to read the Postman” and was avid for the “Dutch Mails” and “inquisitive to know what passed in Poland.” There were those who followed the latest case of rape or divorce in the Sunday newspapers, with the same avidity as their medieval counterparts purchased ballads “o’ the newest and truest matter in London.” The search for fresh titillation or sensation is strong and enduring and, in a city where the inhabitants are surrounded by a bewildering variety of impressions, only the most recent can be entertained. That is why, in a city of fire, the latest news is “hot,” especially at the coffee house “where it is smoking new.” “Our News should indeed be published in a very quick Time,” commented the Spectator, “because it is a Commodity that will not keep cold.” It must be shouted out like “Fire!” to arrest the attention of the passers-by.

London itself was like a newspaper, as Walter Bagehot observed, where “everything is there, and everything is disconnected,” a series of random impressions and events and spectacles which have no connection other than the context in which they were found. In reading the newspaper, the Londoner was simply continuing with the normal perceptions of urban life; he “read” the public prints and the city itself with the same idle curiosity, as if the newspaper confirmed that vision of the world which London had already imparted to him. The very form of the city was imprinted in the pages of the journals-a man called Everett of Fleet Street sold his wife to one Griffin of Long Lane for a three-shilling bowl of punch (1729), a boar lived off the rubbish of Fleet Ditch for five months (1736), a man found frozen and standing upright in the same ditch had been drunk and fallen into the mud (1763), bread and cheese were thrown to the populace from Paddington steeple according to annual custom (1737), the wife of one Richard Haynes was delivered of a monster with nose and eyes like a lion (1746), a grave-digger was found smothered to death by his own exertions in an open grave (1769), a man stood up in the church of St. Sepulchre and shot at a choir of charity children (1820), a man named James Boyes walked in front of the congregation in a chapel at Long Acre and proclaimed himself Jehova Jesus (1821). And so it goes on, endlessly, the “news” conveying the accidents and disasters of the city in columns of print like thoroughfares. It was well known to the firemen of London, as one of their greatest hazards, that a crowd would spring up immediately around any great conflagration in order to witness the course of its destruction.

That is why, in a period of growth and uproar, the news itself became more strident. The sale of early nineteenth-century newspapers, for example, was a raucous affair. “Bloody News,” “Horrible Murder!” and “Extraordinary Gazette” were bellowed out “with stentorian lungs, accompanied by a loud blast of a long tin horn” by porters and costermongers who kept editions of the papers under their hatbands. The advent of the steam-printing press also allowed the newspapers to imitate the “resistless force” of London, with all its energy and expansiveness. Two and a half thousand copies of The Times could be printed every hour and the whole process came to the attention of Charles Babbage, the inventor of the prototype computer, who remarked that the great rollers of the steam press devoured sheets of white paper “with unsated appetite.” Charles Knight noted that the courts around Fleet Street are “bustling and vivacious” with the production of more news to ever larger readerships-“the fingers of the compositors cease not; the clash and clang of the steam press knows no intermission.” Sales of newspapers amounted in 1801 to sixteen million copies; thirty years later it had increased to thirty million, and the figures continued to rise.

Ford Madox Ford in The Soul of London, published in the first years of the twentieth century, remarked that in the capital “you must know the news, in order to be a fit companion for your fellow Londoner. Connected thinking has become nearly impossible, because it is nearly impossible to find any general idea that will connect into one train of thought.” So the consciousness of the Londoner is composed of a thousand fragments. Ford recalled that, as a child, “the Sunday paper … was shunned by all respectable newsagents” and that he had to walk two miles to pick up an Observer from “a dirty, obscure and hidden little place.” But Sunday sales soon became as large as, if not larger than, daily sales. The hegemony of “news” in London was maintained and increased throughout the century as new techniques of printing and lithography were introduced. Perhaps the most significant transition, however, took place in 1985 when News International moved its production of the Sun and The Times to Wapping. This sudden and clandestine operation destroyed the restrictive “Spanish practices” of London printers, while the employment of new technology facilitated the expansion of other newspaper organisations which moved from Fleet Street to sites south of the river and to Docklands itself. The echoic force of Fleet Street has gone for ever. But “London news” is still paramount. As one twentieth-century social observer, Lord Dahren-dorf, puts it, Britain “is run from London in virtually all respects.”

To the history of rumour and of news must be added that of craze and of cheats, again mediated by the collective agency of the crowd. The popularity of fashions and delusions and false prophecies has always been most intense in the capital. The gullibility of the citizens is perpetual. The various bubbles of the eighteenth century encompassed the South Sea financial disaster as well as a fashion for Italian music; “how ill a taste for wit and sense prevails in the world,” Swift wrote, “which politicks and South-sea, and party and Operas and Masquerades have introduced.” When Mary Tofts was believed to have given birth to a succession of rabbits, in the autumn of 1726, “every creature is in town, both men and women have been to see and feel her … all the eminent physicians, surgeons and man-midwives in London are there Day and Night to watch her next production.” The seventeenth-and nineteenth-century craze for tulips in the West End was rivalled only by that for the aspidistra in the East End of the early twentieth century. In the early part of that century, too, there was a fashion for china cats “and forthwith no home was complete without a cat.” A living cat caught “the news” in 1900: it was the cat that licked a stamp at Charing Cross Post Office, which then attracted crowds wanting it to perform the same feat over and over again. The cat became a “stunt” which, in the words of one journalistic practitioner, represented “the creation of the temporary important.” A captured elephant called Jumbo was responsible for songs, stories and a range of sweets known as “Jumbo’s chains” before fading out of public memory.

Yet all the fashions of London are transitory. Chateaubriand noticed this in 1850 when he remarked upon “The fashions in words, the affectations of language and pronunciation, changing, as they do, in almost every parliamentary session in high society in London.” He remarked how the vilification and celebration of Napoleon Bonaparte succeeded each other with extraordinary swiftness in London, and concluded that “All reputations are quickly made on the banks of the Thames and as quickly lost.” “A catch word in every one’s mouth one winter,” wrote Mrs. Cook in her Highways and Byways in London, (1902), “is quite forgotten by next summer.” Horace Walpole remarked, on the same subject, that “Ministers, authors, wits, fools, patriots, whores, scarce bear a second edition. Lord Bolingbroke, Sarah Malcolm and old Marlborough, are never mentioned but by elderly folk to their grandchildren, who had never heard of them.” To be “out of sight” in London was to be “forgotten.” In 1848 Berlioz wrote that in London there were a great many “whom the sight of novelties only makes more stupid.” They watch the trajectory of events and careers “with the eye of a postilion at the side of the railway track reflecting on the passing of a locomotive.”

And so the history of London is also the history of forgetting. In the city there are so many strivings and impulses which can only momentarily be entertained; news, rumour and gossip collide so quickly that attention to any of them is swift but short-lived. One craze or fashion follows another, as the city talks endlessly to itself. This transitoriness of urban affairs can be traced back to the medieval period. “Certainly by the fourteenth century,” G.A. Williams noted in Medieval London, “nothing lasted long in London.” And forgetfulness itself can become a tradition; on the first Tuesday of June, ever since a benefaction in the late eighteenth century, a sermon is preached at the church of St. Martin within Ludgate upon the theme that “Life is a bubble.” It is highly appropriate that London should celebrate its transience in a permanent fashion. It is a city endlessly destroyed and endlessly restored, vandalised and renewed, acquiring its historical texture from the temporary aspirations of passing generations, an enduring myth as well as a fleeting reality, an arena of crowds and rumour and forgetfulness.

The Natural History of London

A Cockney flower-seller dressed in the traditional accoutrements of her trade. Flower-sellers congregated around Eros in Piccadilly Circus, and were last seen in the early years of the twentieth century. They were generally poor and dishonest.

CHAPTER 45

Give the Lydy a Flower

It may come as a surprise to those who see nothing but narrow streets and acres of rooftops that, according to the latest Land Cover Map taken from the Landsat satellite, “over a third” of London’s total land area “is semi-natural or mown grass, tilled land and deciduous woodland.” It has always been so. One of the first delineators of London, Wenceslaus Hollar, was surprised by the contiguity of city and country. His London, Viewed from Milford Stairs, View of Lambeth from Whitehall Stairs and Tothill Fields, all dated 1644, show a city encompassed within trees and meadows and rolling hills. His “river views” also suggest the presence of open countryside just beyond the frame of the engraving.

In the first years of the eighteenth century, pastures and open meadows began by Bloomsbury Square and Queens Square; the buildings of Lincoln’s Inn, Leicester Square and Covent Garden were surrounded by fields, while acres of pasture and meadow still survived in the northern and eastern suburbs outside the walls. Wigmore Row and Henrietta Street led directly into fields, while Brick Lane stopped abruptly in meadows. “World’s End” beside Stepney Green was a thoroughly rural spot, while Hyde Park was essentially part of the open countryside pressing upon the western areas of the city. Camden Town was well known for its “rural lanes, hedgeside roads and lovely fields” where Londoners sought “quietude and fresh air.” Wordsworth recalled the song of blackbirds and thrushes in the very heart of the city and De Quincey found some consolation, on moonlit nights, in walking along Oxford Street and gazing up each street “which pierces northwards through the heart of Marylebone to the fields and woods.”

From the early medieval period onward, almshouses and taverns, schools and hospitals, had their own gardens and private orchards. The city’s first chronicler, William Fitz-Stephen, noted that “the citizens of London had large and beautiful gardens to their villas.” Stow recorded that the grand houses along the Strand had “gardens for profit” while within the city and its liberties there were many “working gardeners” who produced “sufficient to furnish the town with garden ware.” In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries gardens occupied the area between Cornhill and Bishopsgate Street while the Minories, Goodman’s Fields, Spitalfields and most of East Smithfield were comprised of open meadows. Gardens and open ground were to be found from Cow Cross to Grays Inn Lane, as well as between Shoe Lane and Fetter Lane. Milton, born and educated in the very centre of the city, always professed an affection and admiration for the “garden houses” of London. His own houses in Aldersgate Street and Petty France were fine examples of that construction, and it is said that at Petty France the poet planted a cotton-willow tree in the garden “opening into the Park.”

Today there are many “secret gardens” within the City itself, those remnants of old churchyards resting among the burnished buildings of modern finance. These City gardens, sometimes comprising only a few square yards of grass or bush or tree, are unique to the capital; they have their origin in the medieval or Saxon period but, like the city itself, they have survived many centuries of building and rebuilding. Seventy-three of them still exist, gardens of silence and easefulness. They can be seen as territories where the past may linger-among them, St. Mary Aldermary, St. Mary Outwich, and St. Peter’s upon Cornhill-or perhaps their lesson can be adduced from the open Bibles in the hands of sculpted monks in the church of St. Bartholomew in Smithfield. The page to which they attend, as they congregate around the recumbent figure of Rahere, reveals the fifty-first chapter of Isaiah. “For the Lord shall comfort Zion: He will comfort all her waste places; and He will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord.”

The image of the garden haunts the imaginations of many Londoners. Among the first painted London gardens is Chiswick from the River by Jacob Knyff. This urban garden is small in scale, and set among other houses. It is dated between 1675 and 1680; a woman walks along a gravelled path, while a gardener bends down towards the earth. They might have appeared in the twentieth century. Albert Camus wrote, in the middle of that century, “I remember London as a city of gardens where the birds woke me in the morning.” In the western areas of London of the twenty-first century almost every house either has its own garden or shares a community garden; in northern areas such as Islington and Canonbury, and in the southern suburbs, gardens are an integral feature of the urban landscape. In that sense, perhaps, a Londoner needs a garden in order to maintain a sense of belonging. In a city where speed and uniformity, noise and bustle, are characteristic, and where many houses are produced to a standard design, a garden may afford the only prospect of variety. It is also a place for recreation, contemplation and satisfaction.

The man known as “the father of English botany,” William Turner, lived in Crutched Friars and was buried in Pepys’s church of St. Olave’s, Hart Street, in 1568. It is not at all paradoxical that the first established botanist should be a Londoner, since the extensive fields and marshes beyond the walls were fertile ground. Turner followed the intellectual practice of his time in not giving locations “for the 238 British plants he records for the first time”-this is noted in the indispensable Natural History of the City by R.S. Fitter-but it has been revealed that one of them, the field pepperwort, was found in a garden in Coleman Street. Another sixteenth-century botanist, Thomas Penny, lived for twenty years in the parish of St. Andrew Undershaft and collected many of his specimens in the area beside Moorfields. The Tower ditch was also famed for its “aquatic” or water-loving plants such as flote grass and wild celery, while a naturalist of Holborn registered wild celery from “the fields of Holburne, neere unto Graies inn” and vernal whitlow-grass from “the brick wall in Chauncerie Lane, belonging to the Earl of Southampton.”

If the suburbs of the west were good hunting-places for naturalists, the unlikely areas of Hoxton and Shoreditch became known for their nursery gardens. A native of Hoxton in the late seventeenth century, Thomas Fairchild, introduced “many new and curious plants”; and wrote a treatise on how best to order “such evergreens, fruit trees, flowering shrubs, flowers, ex-otick plants etc as will be ornamental and thrive best in the London gardens.” He entitled his book the City Gardener and by that name he was always afterwards known. Another native of Hoxton, who lived just outside Bishopsgate, George Ricketts, brought into the area trees such as the myrtle, the lime and the cedar of Lebanon. But there were many other gardeners in this strangely fruitful area amid the mud and rubble of the northern suburbs, where grew the buddleia, the anemone and the striped phillyrea.

It has always been said that Londoners love flowers; the craze for “window gardening” in the 1880s represented only the most prominent manifestation of the window boxes or window pots to be seen in almost all prints of the London streets from generation to generation. But the most striking sign of the London passion for flowers comes with the London flower-seller. Scented violets were sold upon the streets, while in early spring primroses were “first cried.” To the Cockney, wrote Blanchard Jerrold in London: a Pilgrimage, “the wall-flower is a revelation; the ten-week stock a new season; the carnation, a dream of sweet Arabia.” They are all part of a busy London trade which began in the 1830s. Before that time the only visible London flowers- or, rather, the only flowers on display-were the myrtle, the geranium and the hyacinth.

Then as the taste for floral decoration extended, particularly among middle-class Londoners, flowers, like everything else in the city, became a commercial proposition, and many of the outlying suburbs began production and distribution on a large scale. The entire north-western corner of Covent Garden Market was given over to the wholesale vendors of roses and geraniums and pinks and lilacs, which were then sold on to shops and other dealers. Very quickly, too, flowers became the object of commercial speculation. The fuchsia arrived in London in the early 1830s, for example, and the traders prospered. The interest in flowers spread ineluctably down to the “humbler classes” with hawkers at street corners selling a bunch of mixed flowers for a penny, while in the market were sold basket-loads of cabbage roses and carnations. Female vendors at the Royal Exchange or the Inns of Court hawked moss-roses; the violet girl was to be seen on every street and the “travelling gardener” sold wares which were notorious for their short lives. The price of commerce, in London, is often death and the city became nature’s graveyard. Many millions of flowers were brought into London only to wither and expire. The establishment of large extra-mural public cemeteries, located in the suburbs, in turn led to an enormous increase in the demand for flowers to place upon the newly laid tombs.

The trees of London may also become a token. “We may say,” Ford Madox Ford has observed, “that London begins where tree trunks commence to be black.” That is why the plane tree is London’s own; because of its power to slough off its sooty bark it became a symbol of powerful renewal within the city’s “corrupted atmosphere.” There was a plane tree growing some forty feet high in the churchyard of St. Dunstan’s in the East, but the oldest are those planted in Berkeley Square in 1789. Curiously enough, like many Londoners themselves, the London plane tree is a hybrid: an example of successful intermarriage between the oriental plane introduced into London in 1562 and the western plane of 1636, it has remained the tree of central London. It is the single most important reason why London has been apostrophised as a “City of Trees” with “solemn shapes” and “glooms Romantic.”

That gloom may also descend upon London’s parks, from Hyde Park in the west to Victoria Park in the east, from Battersea to St. James’s, from Blackheath to Hampstead Heath. No other city in the world seems to possess so many green and open spaces. For those in love with the hardness and brilliancy of London, they are an irrelevance. But they call to others-to vagrants, to office workers, to children, to all those who seek relief from life “on the stones.”

When the horse-drawn omnibuses, going from Notting Hill Gate to Marble Arch, travelled beside Hyde Park “hands on the upper deck would greedily snatch at a twig to take to the City” to be met with “the cries of nuthatch and reed-warbler, cuckoo or nightingale.” This observation is taken from Neville Braybrook’s London Green. Matthew Arnold suggested in “Lines Written in Kensington Gardens,” that

The birds sing sweetly in these trees

Across the girdling city’s hum

immediately setting up a contrast between the quiet presence of pine, elm and chestnut, “amid the city’s jar.” The paradox is that London contains this peace within itself, that Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens are as much a part of the city as Borough High Street or Brick Lane. The city moves slowly, as well as quickly; it provides a history of silence as well as of noise.

There were also once oases of the countryside to be found in Clerkenwell and Piccadilly, Smithfield and Southwark; here the trades included threshing and milking. The names of the streets bear evidence of London’s hitherto rural nature. Cornhill, by obvious derivation, is a token of a “hill where corn was grown,” according to Ekwall’s Street Names of the City of London, and Seething Lane is to be interpreted as “where chaff was plentiful … the chaff came from corn threshed and winnowed in the lane.” Oat Lane and Milk Street speak of the countryside. Cow Lane was not a place where cows were kept but a “lane along which cows were driven to or from pasture.” Addle Street, off Wood Street, and a few yards up from Milk Street, is derived from Old English adela or stinking urine and eddel or liquid manure; so we derive from it “lane full of cow dung.” The Huggin Lanes in Cripplegate and Queenhithe were both known as Hoggenlane in early transcripts. There were no fewer than three Hog Lanes-in East Smithfield, Norton Folgate and Portsoken. Chicken and Chick Lanes occur, together with Duck Lane, Goose Lane and Honey Lane-the latter indicating “that bees were formerly kept in the street.” The name of Blanch Appleton, a district of Aldgate, comes from appeltun, Old English for orchard.

The natural life of London deserves, then, to be celebrated. There are photographs of horse chestnuts in Watford and of cedars in Highgate, woodpigeons nesting by the Bank of England and of hay-making in Hyde Park. Insects innumerable and other invertebrates have made their homes in the stones of London while various wild plants such as charlock and mayweed, broad dock and sun spurge, grow luxuriously in the natural habitat of the capital. While the rook and the jackdaw have been slowly driven outside the range of the city, the woodpigeon and the martin have moved in to take their place. The canals intersecting London have preserved territory for aquatic birds as have large water reservoirs. The development of sewage farms in the 1940s, recreated the conditions of the primeval Thames marshes with such inadvertent skill that many thousands of migrating birds descend upon London each year.

There are more than two hundred different species and sub-species of birds in the London area, ranging from the magpie to the greenfinch, but perhaps the most ubiquitous is the pigeon. It has been suggested that the swarms of feral pigeons are all descended from birds which escaped from dovecotes in the early medieval period; they found a natural habitat in the crannies and ledges of buildings as did their ancestors, the rockdoves, amid the sea-girt cliffs. “They nest in small colonies,” one observer has written, “usually high up and inaccessible” above the streets of London as if the streets were indeed a sea. A man fell from the belfry of St. Stephen’s Walbrook in 1277 while in quest of a pigeons’ nest, while the Bishop of London complained in 1385 of “malignant persons” who threw stones at the pigeons resting in the city churches. So pigeons were already a familiar presence, even if they were not treated with the same indulgence as their more recent successors. A modicum of kindness to these creatures seems to have been first shown in the late nineteenth century, when they were fed oats rather than the now customary stale bread.

From the end of the nineteenth century woodpigeons also migrated into the city; they were quickly urbanised, increasing both in numbers and in tameness. “We have frequently seen them on the roofs of houses,” wrote the author of Bird Life in London in 1893, “apparently as much at home as any dovecote pigeon.” Those who look up today may notice their “fly-lines” in the sky, from Lincoln’s Inn Fields over Kingsway and Trafalgar Square to Battersea, with other lines to Victoria Park and to Kenwood. The air of London is filled with such “fly-lines,” and to trace the paths of the birds would be to envisage the city in an entirely different form; then it would seem linked and unified by thousands of thoroughfares and small paths of energy, each with its own history of use.

The sparrows move quickly in public places, and they are now so much part of London that they have been adopted by the native population as the “sparrer”; a friend was known to Cockneys as a “cock-sparrer” in tribute to a bird which is sweet and yet watchful, blessed with a dusky plumage similar to that of the London dust, a plucky little bird darting in and out of the city’s endless uproar. They are small birds which can lose body heat very quickly, so they are perfectly adapted to the “heat island” of London. They will live in any small cranny or cavity, behind drain pipes or ventilation shafts, or in public statues, or holes in buildings; in that sense they are perfectly suited to a London topography. An ornithologist who described the sparrow as “peculiarly attached to man” said it “never now breeds at any distance from an occupied building.” This sociability, bred upon the fondness of the Londoner for the sparrow as much as the sparrow for the Londoner, is manifest in many ways. One naturalist, W.H. Hudson, has described how any stranger in a green space or public garden will soon find that “several sparrows are keeping him company … watching his every movement, and if he sit down on a chair or a bench several of them will come close to him, and hop this way and that before him, uttering a little plaintive note of interrogation-Have you got nothing for us?” They have also been described as the urchins of the streets- “thievish, self-assertive and pugnacious”-a condition which again may merit the attention and admiration of native Londoners. Remarkably attached to their surroundings, they rarely create “fly-lines” across the city; where they are born, like other Londoners, they stay.

And so they become associated with, and characterised by, their surroundings. The “Tower sparrows” were notorious as “feathered murderous ruffians” who kept up continual warfare with the pigeons and starlings of the building even though they had shared quarters with them for many centuries. In the autumn of 1738 a bolt of lightning left the ground covered “with heaps of dead sparrows” at Mile End Turnpike. There is something pitiful and yet splendid about this mass slaughter, as if again they represented the spirit of the city itself. These little creatures embody “sheer invincible fecundity,” according to E.M. Nicholson, the author of Bird-Watching in London: “they may be massacred perpetually and raise no obstacle, only they never diminish, that is the salvation of the species.” So their “incessant and indescribable” noise, when congregated in a roost, is the sound of collective triumph, “all mad and very happy,” fluttering and darting in the boughs as if the trees themselves had come alive.

Gulls are now perpetual visitors, although they first arrived in London as late as 1891. They came to enjoy the warmth of the city during a severe winter, and their entry soon excited the attention of Londoners. The citizens thronged upon the bridges and the embankments in order to watch them dive and tumble. In 1892 London magistrates forbade anyone from shooting them, and at that point for the first time the habit of feeding the gulls appeared; clerks and labourers of the 1890s would, during the free hour for lunch, go down to the bridges and offer them various foods. Theodore Dreiser walked upon Blackfriars Bridge one Sunday afternoon, in 1912, and found a line of men feeding “thousands of gulls” with minnows which they purchased at a penny a box. A sense of awe and kindliness, combined, would seem to characterise the native attitude. Yet their success in obtaining food from humans hands led to the continual reappearance of the gulls, until they acquired the reputation of being the principal scavengers of the city, supplanting the services of the raven. So the activity of the city can change the habits, as well as the habitat, of birds.

There are some birds, such as the robin and the chaffinch, which are less approachable and trustful in the city than in the country. Other species, such as the mallard, grow increasingly shyer as they leave London. There has been a severe diminution of the number of sparrows, while blackbirds are more plentiful. Swans and ducks have also increased in number. Some species, however, have all but vanished. The rooks of London are, perhaps, the most notable of the disappeared, their rookeries destroyed by building work or by tree-felling. Areas of London were continuously inhabited by rooks for many hundreds of years. The burial ground of St. Dunstan’s in the East and the college garden of the Ecclesiastical Court in Doctors’ Commons, the turrets of the Tower of London and the gardens of Grays Inn, were once such localities. There was a rookery in the Inner Temple dating from at least 1666, mentioned by Oliver Goldsmith in 1774. Rooks nested on Bow Church and on St. Olave’s. They were venerable London birds, preferring to cluster around ancient churches and ancient buildings as if they were their local guardians. Yet, in the words of the nineteenth-century song, “Now the old rooks have lost their places.” There was a grove in Kensington Gardens devoted to the rooks; it contained some seven hundred trees forming a piece of wild nature, a matter of delight and astonishment to those who walked among them and listened to the endless cawing that blotted out the city’s noise. But the trees were torn down in 1880. The rooks have never returned.

Yet other birds haunt the city. These are the caged birds, the canaries and the budgerigars, the larks and thrushes, who sing out of their confinement in a manner reminiscent of Londoners themselves. In Bleak House, Dickens’s novel which is so much a symbolic restatement of London vision, the caged birds belonging to Miss Flite are a central emblem of urban imprisonment. The occupants of Newgate were known as the “nightingales of Newgate” or “Newgate birds.” In Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) Orwell noted that the inhabitants of doss-houses or low lodging-houses kept caged birds, “tiny, faded things that had lived all their lives underground.” He recalled in particular one “old Irishman … whistling to a blind bullfinch in a tiny cage,” suggesting that there is a strange affinity between the luckless in London and the incarcerated birds. On the stone wall of the Beauchamp Tower, in the Tower of London, was inscribed with a nail “Epitaph on a Goldfinch”:

Where Raleigh pin’d within a prison’s gloom

I cheerful sung, nor murmur’d at my doom …

But death, more gentle than the law’s decree,

Hath paid my ransom from captivity.

Beneath it are engraved the words, “Buried, June 23, 1794, by a fellow-prisoner in the Tower of London.” The names of Miss Flite’s imprisoned birds were “Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheapskin, Plunder.”

There was a trade in caged birds, of course, with street-markets in St. Giles and Spitalfields devoted to selling them. Most in demand was the goldfinch, with a regular supply of trapped and caught birds offered at sixpence to a shilling each; their attraction lay in their longevity, upwards of fifteen years, and in the possibility of cross-breeding. Chaffinches and greenfinches were also popular, although the latter bird was described by one street vendor to Henry Mayhew as “only a middling singer.” Freshly caught larks were sold at between sixpence and eightpence. Mayhew witnessed “the restless throwing up of the head of the caged lark, as if he were longing for a soar in the air”; yet he was trapped in a small and dirty cage in a nineteenth-century slum. The nightingale had also become a favourite of London’s bird dealers by the mid-nineteenth century but, again according to Mayhew, “shows symptoms of great uneasiness, dashing himself against the wires of his cage or aviary, and sometimes dying in a few days.”

Where there are birds, there are cats. They were ubiquitous throughout London, at least as early as the thirteenth century, and Cateaton Street was named in their honour. Now called Gresham Street, it was in the thirteenth century known variously as Cattestrate and Cattestrete and in the sixteenth as Catlen Strete or Catteten. Cats were considered to be the bearers of good luck, as the fourteenth-century legend of Richard Whittington and his cat attests, so there is every reason to believe that they were treated as welcome and perhaps even useful pets. But the London cat is also associated with strange superstitions. There is evidence of ritual cat sacrifice, where the unfortunate animal has been walled in an alcove and often preserved in mummified form. A significant example was discovered, in the autumn of 1946, behind a cornice in the tower of St. Michael Paternoster Royal, which is the church in which Richard Whittington was buried in 1423. Thus the continuance of a London legend was deemed worthy of a sacrifice in the rebuilt Wren church of 1694.

No doubt the dead beast was once one of that army of animals known collectively as “the city cats.” The night of the capital was their domain, where they sat upon old walls or slunk down dilapidated alleys. They were the guardians of London, patrolling streets and territories down which their distant ancestors once trod on quiet paws. There were other “cat streets” in the metropolis, most notably in the area of Clerkenwell Green and the Obelisk in St. George’s Fields as well as the lanes and alleys behind Drury Lane. Here, according to Charles Dickens, the cats took on all the characteristics of the people among whom they lived. “They leave their young families to stagger about the gutters, unassisted, while they frouzily quarrel and swear and scratch, and spit, at street-corners.” It is sometimes observed that pets come to resemble their owners, but it is also possible that a peculiarly London type of animal is produced by urban conditions.

By the close of the nineteenth century it was estimated that there were some three-quarters of a million cats in London, and they were of course variously treated. In late nineteenth-century Whitechapel an ancient prostitute-“a frowzy, debauched, drunken-looking creature,” as described by Charles Booth-distributed meat from a basket to every passing stray. Kindness of this nature seems to have emerged in the late nineteenth century. One old resident remarked to Booth: “The day was when no cat could appear in the streets of Bethnal Green without being hunted or maltreated; now such conduct is rare.” If there were ever to be written a history of moral emotions, it could do worse than study Londoners’ treatment of animals.

Dogs appear in almost every depiction of a London “street-scene,” prancing on the road and mingling joyfully with horses and pedestrians alike. There have been dogs at every stage of the city’s history, accompanying families in their walks along the fields, barking at passing processions, eager and fierce during riots, growling at and fighting each other in obscure disputes over London territory. In the twelfth century a royal edict declared that “if a greedy ravening dog shall bite” a “Royal beast,” then its owner forfeited his life. So we may imagine the inhabitants of early medieval London nervously taking out their dogs for sport, or pastime, or hunting, in any of the fields and meadows beyond the walls of the city. Yet the dogs which were taken to these areas had to be “expeditated”; their claws were cut down to the balls of their feet to stop them from running after deer.

A proclamation was made in 1387 “that dogs shall not wander in the City at large”; yet in the same order a distinction was made between wild or wandering dogs and household dogs. So the concept of the “pet” existed in medieval London. The most prized of London dogs was the mastiff. Many were sent as gifts to prominent persons abroad, and a German traveller of the sixteenth century noted that some of those dogs “are so large and heavy that if they have to be transported long distances, they are provided with shoes so that they do not wear out their feet.” They were also used as guard dogs and in the records of London Bridge there are payments made in compensation to those who had been bitten or hurt by the mastiff hounds. The major problem in the city, however, has always been that of strays. A notice at the newly built St. Katherine Docks, by the Tower of London, dated 23 September 1831, warned that “the Gate Keepers will prevent the admission of DOGS, unless the Owners shall have them fastened by a Cord or Handkerchief.” The principal complaint against the animals was that they wreaked “Considerable Injury” upon goods, but the age of commerce was also the age of philanthropy. In the mid-nineteenth century a Home for Lost and Starving Dogs was established in London; this is the first instance of canine welfare in the city. “When it first opened there was a disposition to laugh,” “Aleph” wrote in 1863, “but subscribers were found, and the asylum flourishes”; removed to Battersea in 1871 after complaints in the neighbourhood about the noise, it flourishes still, as the Battersea Dogs Home.

The flea is as ancient as the dog, but its part in the natural history of London is shrouded in obscurity. The bed bug was first noticed publicly in 1583, while the cockroach was reported by 1634. We may infer, however, that lice and fleas of every kind have infested London from the beginning of its recorded history, to such an extent that its condition has often been taken to resemble them. London, according to Verlaine, was “a flat, black bug.”

If animals in London were not used for labour or for food, they were characteristically employed for the purposes of entertainment. Ever since the first lions were placed in the Tower of London in the thirteenth century (to be joined later by a polar bear and an elephant), animals have provided a spectacle for the restless and voracious crowd. The first performing elephant in the London streets was recorded by Robert Hooke in 1679. Londoners could “see the animals” at Exeter Change. A building of three floors at the corner of Wellington Street and the Strand, it was known in the 1780s as “Pidcock’s Exhibition of Wild Beasts.” The animals were kept on the upper floors “in a small den and cages in rooms of various size, the walls painted with exotic scenery, in order to favour the illusion.” The menagerie went through the hands of three separate owners, and an engraving of 1826 shows the old house jutting above the Strand with pictures of elephants, tigers and monkeys daubed upon its front between two grand pillars of Corinthian design. Its popularity was very great, largely because, apart from the Tower zoo, it was the only menagerie of exotic species in London. The less dangerous animals were, on occasions, led through the streets as a living advertisement. Wordsworth mentions a dromedary and monkeys; and J.T. Smith in his Book for a Rainy Day, writes of an elephant “being led by its keeper between ropes along the narrow part of the Strand.” On 6 February 1826 this elephant, named Chunee, could stand his restraint no longer and, in violent anger, was about to burst out of his cage. A firing squad of soldiers from neighbouring Somerset House could not dispatch him, and a cannon was deployed to no effect. Eventually his keeper killed him with a spear, and he expired with 152 bullets found inside his body. Then the commercial spirit of London pursued him after his death. His carcass was on display to the crowds for some days until it became noisome, at which point it was sold off as 11,000 pounds of meat. The skeleton was displayed thereafter, until it became part of the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons. Chunee was finally obliterated by a bomb in the Second World War. From his promenade along the Strand in 1825 to his destruction by fire in 1941, his story has an authentic London flavour.

The spirit of the city may also explain the passion for performing animals and circuses. In the streets of the capital rats danced on ropes and cats played dulcimers. Performing bears were ubiquitous from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, while performing monkeys and horses were part of the standard repertoire in rings and arenas. In the 1770s, Daniel Wildman specialised in riding upon a horse with a swarm of bees covering his face like a mask. Half a century later the Zoological Society was given a few acres of land in Regent’s Park for the erection of various pits and cages in a “zoological garden,” which was opened to the public two years later in 1828 and soon became a principal attraction of London; there are many prints showing the citizens enjoying the antics of the imprisoned creatures. In fact serious scientific research was soon overtaken by the demands of entertainment. “It is the very place for quiet easy talk in the open air,” Blanchard Jerrold wrote in 1872, “with the animals to point the conversation … will pass all London in review in the course of the season.” A shop by the bear pit was opened “for the sale of cakes, fruits, nuts and other articles which the visitor may be disposed to give to the different animals,” and a long stick was provided for feeding buns to the bears themselves.

Many visitors had their favourites, some preferring the monkey to the lynx or the hippopotamus to the wombat, and would come back each week to mark their condition. But together with pleasurable sympathy, there was always some anxiety that these creatures might break out of their imprisonment and wreak havoc among their captors. That is why both Dickens and Thackeray, joined by interest in public hangings, were also fascinated by the snakes held in confinement. Curiously enough, both of them depicted the same scene at feeding time. This is part of Thackeray’s account: “an immense boa constrictor swallowing a live rabbit-swallowing a live rabbit, sir, and looking as if he would have swallowed one of my little children afterwards.” So the zoo takes on symbolic importance in the life of a violent and dangerous city; here is violence tamed and danger averted, in the green surroundings of the Park. Here sits the lion which, in the words of a poem by Stevie Smith, is “Weeping tears of ruby rage.”

It would be the merest commonplace to note that the citizens, all dressed alike and walking through the zoo with well proportioned steps, are themselves imprisoned in the city. It was a trite comment even in the nineteenth century, when Gustave Doré depicted the Londoners by the monkey cage or in the parrots’ walk as equivalent to the animals-animals which in turn seem to be observing them. Yet there is a resonance between the zoo and the city, in terms of noise and in terms of madness. The confused or shrill sound of the crowd was often compared with the sound of animals, while the deranged at Bedlam were in 1857 said by the Quarterly Review to resemble the “fiercer carnivores at the Zoological Gardens.” The comparison is obvious enough. The mad were kept in cages where they were visited by curious observers for the sake of entertainment. Said to sound like “ravens, screech-owls, bulls, and bears,” the deranged were as “ravenous and unsatiable as wolves” or as “drenched by compulsion as horses.” The deranged Londoner, in other words, is an animal; this definition spills over into descriptions of the crowd or mob as a “Beast.” The city itself becomes a vast zoo in which all of the cages have been unlocked.

CHAPTER 46

Weather Reports

When Boswell and Johnson were tasting all the delights of rural life in Greenwich Park, the following conversation ensued.

J.: “Is this not very fine?”

B.: “Yes, Sir; but not equal to Fleet Street.”

J.: “You are right, sir.”

Robert Herrick celebrated his return to London from Devon in 1640, and declared that

London my home is: though by hard fate sent

Into a long and irksome banishment.

To live in the country is a form of melancholy exile. “If these are comforting for a wife,” a sixteenth-century poem suggests, “Defend, defend me from a country life.” When a young West Indian boy from Notting Hill of the 1960s was given a week’s holiday in a Wiltshire village, he was asked how he had enjoyed the change. “I like it,” he replied, “but you can’t play in the streets as you can in London.” “I love walking in London,” Mrs. Dalloway remarks in Virginia Woolf’s novel (1925). “Really it’s better than walking in the country.” To the city dweller the country may not come as a revelation, but as a restriction. It is “dreadful slow,” one nineteenth-century Cockney girl is reported as saying, “no swings, no rahndabarts, nor origins [oranges?], no shops, no nothink-jest a great bare field only.”

The city is more beautiful than the country because it is rich in human history. Milton, in his blindness, remarked sadly that he was destined never more to look upon the sights “of this fair city.” Here he anticipated Wordsworth’s famous reflection upon London, from the vantage of Westminster Bridge in 1802: “Earth has not any thing to shew more fair.” The great poet of the nineteenth-century natural world wonders upon “the beauty of the morning” as it irradiates “Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples”:

Never did sun more beautifully steep

In his first splendor valley, rock, or hill.

It is a vivid, urban testimony from one whose poetic vision is always associated with landscape. The London suburbs, too, “can be so beautiful,” Vincent van Gogh wrote in the 1880s, “When the sun is setting red in the thin evening mist.”

The beauty and symmetry of the city are manifest in another sphere, also, as exemplified by Aristotle’s remark that “a man that is by nature and not merely by fortune citiless is either low in the scale of humanity or above it,” which is to say that humankind belongs to the city as much as fish belong to water. The city is the natural element for all those people who feel a compulsion to look upon the earth for contemporaries and companions. If the city is not “natural” then let us say, with Henry James, that it has recreated nature. “As the great city makes everything,” he wrote, “it makes its own system of weather and its own optical laws.”

The city is hotter, and dryer, than other parts of the country because the pollution that it creates has the effect of trapping warmth within the streets and buildings while, paradoxically, at the same time obscuring the sun’s rays. Many dark buildings retain their heat, and the vertical surfaces of the rising city are also better equipped to catch the low-lying sun; the materials of which London is made also retain the circumambient warmth.

Yet another explanation for the perceptible increase of heat in the capital may be found in the sheer congregation of people within so relatively small an area. The body heat of the citizens pushes up the temperature so that, on modern satellite maps, the city is a pale island among the brown and the green. Two hundred and fifty years ago a seventeenth-century observer made the same point. “The torrent of men, women and children, carts, carriages and horses from the Strand to the Exchange is so strong that it is said that in winter there are two degrees of Fahrenheit difference between this long line of street, and that of the west end.”

London’s weather shows other variations. Much of Westminster and the adjacent areas are built upon primeval swamps, and in these quarters the exhalation of damp and mist seems more palpable than elsewhere; Cornhill, built upon a summit, seems crisper and drier.

In the sixteenth century the London climate impressed itself upon the scholar and alchemist Giordano Bruno as “more temperate than anywhere else beyond and on this side of the equinoctial, snow and heat being banished from the subjacent earth as well as the excessive heat of the sun, which the perpetually green flowery ground witnesses, and so enjoys a perpetual spring.” There is an alchemical, or magical, tendency within his vocabulary which points to the image of London as embodying a mild chemical flame.

But then there was the rain.

Now in contiguous drops the flood comes down

Threatening with deluge this devoted Town.

Thus Jonathan Swift celebrates a “city shower” in the autumn of 1710. Annual amounts of rainfall were calculated from 1696, and they demonstrate that London’s showers and deluges declined in frequency towards the end of the eighteenth century only to rise again in the period from 1815 to 1844. Even in 1765, however, a French traveller noted the humidity of the city climate, which required fires to be lit “when it might be most easy to do without one”; he noted that as late as May all the apartments of the British Museum had fires within them “to preserve from damps and humidity the books, the manuscripts, the maps.”

But there have also been great floods. In 1090 London Bridge was carried away by a tumultuous river, and in 1236 the waters rose so high that boats could be rowed in the middle of Westminster Hall; there, too, in 1579, “a number of fish were left stranded after a flood.” The Walbrook became a rushing torrent in the autumn of 1547, sweeping away a young man attempting to cross it, and in 1762 the waters of the Thames were so raised “that the like had never been known in the memory of man.” “In less than five hours,” the contemporary report goes, “the water rose twelve feet in vertical height” and “people were lost in the high roads.” Even at the beginning of the twentieth century Lambeth was so inundated by the waters of the Thames that the houses of the area had to be visited by boats. So the air of London has always been laden with vapours and rains.

Londoners are also more accustomed to the cold than to the heat of summer days. “There’s nothing left but London once it’s winter,” says a character in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1949). London becomes more purely itself in the cold, harder and brighter and far more cruel. In the winter of 1739-40 “Tramps froze to death … Birds dropped stiff from the sky, bread hardened into rocks on market stalls.” Thirty years later, according to the Annual Register of 18 February 1771, “A poor boy who on Tuesday night had crept into a dunghill at a stable yard in London in order to preserve himself from the cold was found dead by the ostler” while “A poor woman also, with a child at her breast, and another about three years old lying by her, was found in Rag Fair.”

The cold weather could be so intense that the Thames itself froze regularly over the centuries, some twenty-three times between 1620 and 1814, because the old London Bridge impeded the movement of the water until it became so sluggish that, in the colder conditions, it could not move. In 1281 “men passed over the Thames, between Westminster and Lambeth,” and in 1410 “Thys yere was the grete frost and ise and the most sharpest wenter that ever man sawe, and it duryd fourteen wekes so that men might in dyvers places both goo and ryde over the Temse.” In 1434, 1506 and 1515 the river was again frozen so that carts and horses and carriages could travel easily from one bank to the other. As early as 1564 such sports as archery and such entertainments as dancing took place at a Frost Fair on the frozen river. Stow and Holinshed record that, on the eve of 1565, “some plaied at the football as boldlie there, as if it had been on the drie land; diverse of the Court being then at Westminster, shot dailie at pricks set upon the Thames; and the people, both men and women, went on the Thames in greater numbers than in anie street of the City of London.” So the Thames becomes a newly populous thoroughfare in the greatly expanding city. The emphasis here is upon excitement and recreation but forty-four years later, in 1608, the general atmosphere of trade and commerce in London had exploited even the weather, and many set up booths “standing upon the ice, as fruitsellers, victuallers, that sold beere and wine, shoe makers and a barber’s tent.” Again in 1684, “The Thames before London was still planted with booths in formal streets, all sorts of trades and shops furnished” so that “another city, as it were, was erected thereon.” The city spawns its own replica, with all the characteristics of its own turbulent life-“bull baiting, horse and coach races, puppet plays and interludes, cookes, tipling and other lewd places, so that it seemed to be a bacchanalian triumph or carnival on the water.” The perilousness of London life, too, was enacted upon the river, when within hours the ice had melted and swept the whole carnival away; a century later, in 1789, a “sudden breaking up of the ice” occasioned a “fearful scene” of damage and fatality.

The cold winters of London impeded the course of trade as well as that of the river. In the winter of 1813-14, the wax and glue froze in their pots, leaving tailors and shoe-makers without the means of work. Silk deteriorated in freezing conditions, so the silk-makers of Spitalfields and elsewhere were also severely affected. Porters and cab-men, street traders and labourers, were unable to pursue their livelihoods. The price of coal and the price of bread were dramatically increased. The master of a school in St. Giles reported “that of the seventy children in his school sixty had not eaten any food that day until he gave them some at noon.” In the severe winters of 1855, 1861, 1869, 1879 and 1886 there were bread riots, and in the latter year mobs of the unemployed looted the shops of central London. In the city there was a direct correlation, then, between weather and social unrest.

There is a connection, too, between outer and inner weather. In the winter “there is a vague smell of alcohol in the streets” since everyone “drinks heavily and incessantly” to combat the aching and intrusive cold. The drink “excites and urges on the rabble to vicious practices.” This account, written in 1879, describes the rain falling like liquid mud, the yellow shadows of the fog which render breathing painful and difficult, and the darkness at midday. The description of a physical fact conveys an immense psychological charge. “Vile” weather at Christmas 1876, according to Henry James, “darkness, solitude and sleet in midwinter” within a “murky Babylon.” November was the worst month for suicides in London and, during the Blitz of the winter of 1940-1, Londoners were more depressed by the weather than by the air-raids.

The sky in London, like its weather, seems to have different orders of magnitude. In some streets, which are the canyons of the city, it seems infinitely remote; it becomes a distant prospect continually crowded by rooftops and towers. Yet in the large squares of Islington where the houses are low, and in the council “cottage” estates of the western districts, the sky is a vast canopy encompassing all the adjacent areas. In “this low damp city,” as V.S. Pritchett put it, “the sky means a great deal to us.” The quality of cloud cover which may or may not bring rain, and the subtle gradations of blue and violet in the evening sky, are sensible reminders of the unique atmospherics of London. A panorama of London from Southwark (c. 1630), is the first view that grants the city its sky; the westward passage of grey and white clouds gives the painting enormous space and lightness, and in this novel brightness the city itself seems to breathe. It is no longer the tangle of dark buildings beneath a narrow strip of sky but an open city whose towers and spires beckon towards the empyrean.

These are the vertiginous skies when at sunset the west is all on fire, reflected in the shifting mass of cloud; on one January evening, at approximately five o’clock, in the year 2000, the cloud cover was rose-red striated with patches of dark blue sky.

Yet the lights of the sky also reflect the lights of the city, and the very brightness of the modern city obscures the brightness of the stars. That is why the typical London sky seems low, damp and tactile, part of the city itself and its thousand stray lights and gleams. It is the sky which inspired Turner living in Maiden Lane, and Constable in his lodgings in Hampstead. According to G.K. Chesterton, “all the forces which have produced the London sky have made something which all Londoners know, and which no one who has never seen London has ever seen.”

The prevailing wind is westerly or south-westerly; the south and west façades of St. Paul’s Cathedral show marked deterioration in the face of wind or rain, and the stone itself “is washed clean and exhibits a whitened and weather-beaten aspect.” Yet these winds kept the western areas of the city relatively free of the fog or smog which settled over the central and eastern part. Indeed an eastern wind was a token of harm, since all the smoke and stench of the industries situated in the East End filtered over the rest of the capital.

London was, and is, a very windy city. By the eleventh century there were seven windmills erected in Stepney, while the earliest maps show windmills in Moorfields and Finsbury Fields. There was a windmill in the Strand, and one by Leather Lane; there was one in the Whitechapel Road, and one beside Rathbone Place. Great Windmill Street is still at the top of the Haymarket, and there were many windmills along the south side of the river in Waterloo, Bermondsey, Battersea and the Old Kent Road. In February 1761 the wind was so high that, in Deptford, it drove a windmill “with such velocity that it could not be stopped, and took fire, and was entirely consumed, besides a large quantity of flour.” John Evelyn recorded that “the Town of Bowe” had continual winds which mitigated the effects of atmospheric pollution and Charles Dickens wondered why metropolitan gales always blew so hard at Deptford and Peckham. In addition, “I have read of more chimney stacks and house-copings coming down with terrific smashes at Walworth.”

Yet in a city established upon extremes, there will also be an extremity of weather. In 1090 six hundred houses, and a score of churches, were overthrown by a mighty wind. The spectacle of Bow Church rafters impaled twenty feet deep within the mud and stone of Cheapside inevitably led to demands for public penance and humiliation to avert the further wrath of God. But the pious citizens of London were not able to turn away the further calamities of their history. In 1439 there came a “grete wynd that dyd a moch harme in many placys”; it tore off the lead roof of the Grey Friars and “it blew almost dovne the ton side of the Old Change” knocking down so many “grete long trees that nether horss ne cart myght pass thorow the streete.” In 1626 “a terrible storm of Rain and hail … with a very great Thunder and Lightning” knocked down the wall of the churchyard of St. Andrew, and exposed many coffins in the crash. It says something about the attitude of Londoners to death that thereupon “the ruder sort” lifted up the lids of the coffins “to see the posture of the dead Corps lying therein.” During this storm a strange mist emerged above the turbulent waters of the Thames “in a round Circle of a good-bigness above the waters” which eventually “ascended higher and higher till it quite vanished away.” There was immediately talk of conjuring and black magic.

Pepys described the great storm of January 1666: “The wind being very furious … whole chimneys, nay, whole houses in two or three places blowed down.” In November 1703 a storm of nine hours descended upon the city- “all the ships in the river were driven ashore” and the barges smashed against the arches of London Bridge; the towers and spires of certain London churches fell to the ground, and in many areas whole houses were lifted up before falling upon the earth. “The lead on the roofs of the highest building, was rolled up like paper,” and more than twenty “night-walkers” were killed by falling chimneys or tiles. Daniel Defoe published an account of “the late Dreadful Tempest” in which he revealed that the shriek and frenzy of the wind were such that “nobody durst quit their tottering habitations for it was worst without” and “many thought the end of the world was nigh.”

Over the next sixty years London was ravaged by several hurricanes, the last being in 1790 when the copper covering of the new Stone’s Buildings, Lincoln’s Inn, “was blown off in one sheet and hung over the front like a large carpet or mainsail.” On the night of 16 October 1987, “London’s Hurricane” hit the capital. It had been preceded by two years of unnaturally cold and windy weather. In January 1987 fifteen inches of snow fell on the higher parts of London, the chimes of Big Ben stopped and the River Thames iced over from Runnymede to Sunbury; in March of that year, sands from the Sahara fell with the rain upon Morden. Then, in that October, the great wind visited the city. The balconies of high-rise flats collapsed, walls were ripped down, roofs stripped of their tiles. Market stalls were thrown through the air, and thousands of trees were destroyed by the effects of the gales.

Extraordinary climatic change is not at all unusual in London; if the city can attract plague and fire, then it also can attract tempest and earthquake. There were three earthquakes during the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603), the first of which did not exceed a minute but the shock of which “was so severe that many churches and houses were much shattered and several people killed.” One of the incidental features of this catastrophe was the fact that the great bells of the city were so shaken that they began to ring of their own accord-the Westminster clock bell, for example, “spoke of itself against the hammer with shaking”-as if the city itself were heralding its own disaster. There also seems to have been some method in the mayhem; the two further earthquakes of Queen Elizabeth’s reign both occurred on Christmas Eve four years apart. The next most notable tremor occurred in February 1750 when two shocks were felt some hours apart, the second being preceded by “a strong but confused lightning darting its flashes in quick succession.” People flocked into the street, in panic that their houses were about to fall upon them, and the most powerful forces were visible and audible in the West End near St. James’s Park; here “it seemed to move in a south and north direction, with a quick return towards the centre, and was accompanied by a loud noise of a rushing wind.” So London has been visited by elemental forces, invading its central areas; the last record of such a visitation, at least notable in its effects, occurred in the spring of 1884. And then there came the fog.

CHAPTER 47

A Foggy Day

Tacitus mentions it in his account of Caesar’s invasion, so its spectral presence has haunted London from earliest times. The fog was originally generated by natural means, but soon enough the city was taking over from nature and creating its own atmosphere. As early as 1257 Eleanor of Provence, wife of Henry III, complained about the smoke and pollution of London and, in the sixteenth century, Elizabeth I was reported to have been “herself greatly grieved and annoyed with the taste and smoke of sea-coals.” By the sixteenth century a pall of smoke hung over the capital, and the interiors of the more affluent London houses were dark with soot. One of the contributors to Holinshed’s Chronicles noted that the number of domestic chimneys had greatly increased throughout the latter decades of the sixteenth century, and that interior smoke was considered a preventative against wood decay and a preservative of health. It is as if the city enjoyed its own darkness.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century numerous and various complaints issued from the polluted city. In 1603 Hugh Platt wrote a ballad, “A Fire of Coal-Balles,” in which he claimed that the fumes of sea coal damaged plants and buildings; seventeen years later James I was “moved with compassion for the decayed fabric of St. Paul’s Cathedral near approaching ruin by the corroding quality of coal-smoke to which it had long been subjected.” There was also the prevalent fear of fire; there can be no doubt that the sight and smell of smoke aroused instinctive fears of flame in the thoroughfares of the city.

John Evelyn, in his treatise entitled Fumifigium, or The inconvenience of the Air and the Smoak of London (1661), lamented the condition of a city covered by “a Hellish and dismal Cloud of SEA-COAL.” Here the invocation of hell is significant, as one of the first manifestations of that connection between the city and the lower depths. The dark and dismal cloak of London comes from “few funnels and Issues, belonging to only Brewers, Diers, Lime-burners, Salt and Sope-boylers and some other private trades, One of whose Spiracles alone, does manifestly infect the Aer, more than all the chimnies of London put together besides.” Here, rising with the sulphurous smoke, is the spectre of infection. The city is literally a deadly place. It is the same image conjured by a contemporary Character of England which described London as enveloped in “Such a cloud of sea-coal, as if there be a resemblance of hell upon earth, it is in this volcano in a foggy day: this pestilent smoak, which corrodes the very yron and spoils all the movables, leaving a soot on all things that it lights: and so fatally seizing on the lungs of the inhabitants, that cough and consumption spare no man.” It was in this period that in meteorological observations there emerged the incidence of “Great Stinking Fog” as well as that consistent cover of smoke which has become known as the “urban plume.” It might be said that the industrial city emerged from this terrible childbed.

Despite written records of great fogs in previous eras, it is commonly believed that nineteenth-century London created the foggy darkness. Certainly Victorian fog is the world’s most famous meteorological phenomenon. It was everywhere, in Gothic drama and in private correspondence, in scientific reports and in fiction such as Bleak House (1852-53). “I asked him whether there was a great fire anywhere? For the streets were so full of dense brown smoke that scarcely anything was to be seen. ‘Oh dear no, miss,’ he said. ‘This is a London particular.’ I had never heard of such a thing. ‘A fog, miss,’ said the young gentleman. ‘O indeed!’ said I.”

Half a million coal fires mingling with the city’s vapour, “partly arising from imperfect drainage,” produced this “London particular,” rising approximately 200 to 240 feet above street level. Opinions varied concerning the colour of the fogs. There was a black species, “simply darkness complete and intense at mid day”; bottle-green; a variety as yellow as pea-soup, which stopped all the traffic and “seems to choke you”; “a rich lurid brown, like the light of some strange conflagration”; simply grey; “orange-coloured vapour”; a “dark chocolate-coloured pall.” Everyone seemed to notice changes in its density, however, when it was sometimes interfused with daylight or when wreaths of one colour would mingle with another. The closer to the heart of the city, the darker these shades would become until it was “misty black” in the dead centre. In 1873 there were seven hundred “extra” deaths, nineteen of them the result of pedestrians walking into the Thames, the docks or the canals. The fogs sometimes came and went rapidly, their smoke and gloom blown across the streets of the city by the prevailing winds, but often they lingered for days with the sun briefly seen through the cold yellow mist. The worst decade for fogs was the 1880s; the worst month was always November.

“The fog was denser than ever,” wrote the author Nathaniel Hawthorne on 8 December 1855, “very black indeed, more like a distillation of mud than anything else; the ghost of mud, the spiritualised medium of departed mud, through which the departed citizens of London probably tread in the Hades whither they are translated. So heavy was the gloom, that gas was lighted in all the shop windows; and the little charcoal furnaces of the women and boys, roasting chestnuts threw a ruddy misty glow around them.” Again the condition of the city is likened to that of hell itself, but with the additional association that somehow the citizens are privately enjoying-and indeed are rather proud of-their hapless condition.

Fog was called a “London particular” with some measure of satisfaction, since it was a unique emanation from what was then the largest and most powerful city on the earth. Darwin wrote that “there is a grandeur about its smoky fogs.” James Russell Lowell, writing in the autumn of 1888, remarked that he was living within a yellow fog-“the cabs are rimmed with a halo” and the people in the street “like fading frescoes”-but at the same time “It flatters one’s self-esteem”; he was proud to survive such an extreme condition of the city.

In turn the fog itself conjured up images of immensity. “Everything seems to be checked,” wrote a French journalist of the nineteenth century, “to slacken into a phantom-like motion that has all the vagueness of hallucination. The sounds of the street are muffled; the tops of the houses are lost, hardly even guessed … The openings of the streets swallow up, like tunnels, a crowd of foot passengers and carriages, which seem, thus, to disappear for ever.” The people in this fog “are innumerable, a compact army, these miserable little human creatures; the struggle for life animates them; they are all of one uniform blackness in the fog; they go to their daily task, they all use the same gestures.” So the fog renders the citizens indeterminate, part of a vast process which they themselves can hardly understand.

One other aspect of this darkness severely affected the inhabitants of London. Every observer noticed that the gas-lights were turned on throughout the day in order to afford some interior light, and noticed, too, how the street-lamps seemed like points of flame in the swirling miasma. But the ambience of the dark fog settled upon many streets which had no lighting at all, thereby affording cover for theft, violence and rape on an unprecedented scale. In that sense the fog was indeed “particular” to London because it intensified and emphasised all the darker characteristics of the city. Darkness is also at the heart of the notion of this black vapour as an emanation of sickness. If “all smell is disease,” as the Victorian social reformer Edwin Chadwick thought, then the acrid smell of the London fog was a sure token of contamination and epidemic fear; it is as if the contents of a million lungs were being disseminated through the streets.

The very texture and colour of the city carried all the marks of its fog. The author of Letters from Albion, written as early as 1810, noticed that above the level of the ground “you see nothing but the naked brick fronts of the houses all blackened by the smoke of coal,” while an American traveller remarked on the “uniform dinginess” of London buildings. Heinrich Heine was the author of one of the most evocative and instructive remarks upon the city-“this overworked London defies the imagination and breaks the heart” (1828)-and he himself observed that the streets and buildings were “a brown olive-green colour, on account of the damp and coal smoke.” So the fog had become part of the physical texture of the city, this most unnatural of natural phenomena leaving its presence upon the stones. Perhaps in part the city defied the imagination, in Heine’s phrase, because in that darkness “which seems neither to belong to the day nor to the night” the world itself was suspended; in the fog it became a place of concealment and of secrets, of whispers and fading footsteps.

It can be said that fog is the greatest character in nineteenth-century fiction, and the novelists looked upon fog as might people upon London Bridge, “peering over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.” When Carlyle called the fog “fluid ink” he was rehearsing the endless possibilities of describing London through the medium of the fog, as if only in the midst of this unnatural darkness could the true characteristics of the city be discerned. In the narratives of Sherlock Holmes, written by Arthur Conan Doyle from 1887 to 1927, the city of crime and of unsolved mysteries is quintessentially the city of fog. On one foggy morning in A Study in Scarlet, “a dun-coloured veil hung over the housetops looking like a reflection of the mud-coloured streets beneath.” In “the steamy, vaporous air” of a “dense drizzly fog” in The Sign of Four, Dr. Watson soon “lost my bearings … Sherlock Holmes was never at fault, however, and he muttered the names as the cab rattled through squares and in and out by tortuous by-streets.” London becomes a labyrinth. Only if you “soak up the atmosphere,” in the cliché of travellers and sightseers, will you not become bewildered and lost.

The greatest novel of London fog is, perhaps, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) in which the fable of changing identities and secret lives takes place within the medium of the city’s “shifting insubstantial mists.” In many respects the city itself is the changeling, its appearance altering when “the fog would be quite broken up, and a haggard shaft of daylight would glance in between the swirling wreaths.” Where good and evil live side by side, and thrive together, the strange destiny of Dr. Jekyll does not seem quite so incongruous. Then for a moment the mist melts and the curtain lifts, revealing a gin palace, an eating-house, a “shop for the retail of penny numbers and two penny salads,” all this life continuing beneath the canopy of darkness like a low murmur of almost inaudible sound. Then once again “the fog settled down again on that part, as brown as umber, and cut him off from his blackguardly surroundings.” This also is the condition of living in London-to be “cut off,” isolated, a single mote in the swirl of fog and smoke. To be alone among the confusion is perhaps the single most piercing emotion of any stranger in the city.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote of “the great town’s weltering fog” as somehow erasing all the signs and tokens of the city, blurring “Spires, bridges, streets, and squares as if a sponge had wiped out London” (1856). Fear of this invisibility actively assisted the programme of building and decoration that marked the Victorian city. Building News, in 1881, discussed the fact that “the smoky atmosphere has done its best to clothe our most costly buildings in a thin drapery of soot … they soon become dark and sombre masses … all play of light and shade is lost.” That is precisely why architects decided to clothe their buildings in bright red brick and shining terracotta so that they would remain visible; the features of nineteenth-century building, which may seem vulgar or gaudy, were attempts to stabilise the identity and legibility of the city.

Of course there were some who extolled the virtues of the fog. Dickens, despite his lugubrious descriptions, once referred to it as London’s ivy. For Charles Lamb it was the medium through which his vision, in every sense, was conceived and perfected. Where some saw only the amounts of sulphate deposited in the bowels of the fog, particularly in the City and the East End, others saw the murky atmosphere as clothing the river and its adjacent areas “with poetry, as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanile, and the warehouses are palaces in the night.” This devoted invocation is from Whistler, the painter of mist and smoke at twilight, and it contrasts sharply with a comment about the building of the Embankment in the same period as his atmospheric works of art. “Who would think of promenading along the channel of a great hazy, ague-giving river in any case?” But Whistler’s opinions were shared by other artists who saw the fog as London’s greatest attribute. The late nineteenth-century Japanese artist Yoshio Markino noted that “Perhaps the real colours of some buildings in London might be rather crude. But this crude colour is so fascinating in the mists. For instance that house in front of my window is painted in black and yellow. When I came here last summer I laughed at its ugly colour. But now the winter fogs cover it and the harmony of its colour is most wonderful.” It is sometimes observed that the buildings of London look best in the rain, as if they had been built and coloured especially for the sake of showers. A case can be made, then, that even the private houses of Londoners are designed to be pleasing in the fog.

When Monet stayed in London between 1899 and 1901, he had come to paint the fogs. “Then, in London, above all what I love is the fog … It is the fog that gives it its magnificent breadth. Those massive, regular blocks become grandiose within that mysterious cloak.” Here he is repeating, in more delicate tones, a conversation which Blanchard Jerrold held with that Gothic delineator of fog, Gustave Doré. “I could tell my fellow traveller that he had at last seen one of these famous darknesses which in every stranger’s mind are the almost daily mantle of the wonderful and wonderworking Babylon.” Here the fog contributes to the city’s splendour and awfulness; it creates magnificence, yet, with the suggestion of Babylon, it represents some primeval and primitive force which has lingered over the centuries. For Monet the London fog became a token, or revelation, of mystery; in his depictions of its subtle atmospheres and ever-changing colours, there is also a strong impression that the city is about to dissolve or be hidden for ever. In that sense he is trying to capture the essential spirit of the place beyond particular epochs and phases. His paintings of Charing Cross Bridge, for example, give it the brooding presence of some elemental force; it might be a great bridge constructed by the Romans or a bridge built in the next millennium. This is London at its most shadowy and powerful, powerful precisely because of the shadows which it casts. Ancient shapes loom out of the foggy darkness or the dim violet light, yet these shapes also change quickly in a sudden shaft of light or movement of colour. This again is the mystery which Monet presents; this shrouded immensity is instinct with light. It is prodigious.

In the early years of the twentieth century, there was a marked diminution in the frequency and severity of foggy weather. Some attribute this change to the campaigns of the Coal Smoke Abatement Society, and the various attempts to substitute gas for coal, but the very expansion of the capital might paradoxically have lowered its levels of fog. Industries, and people, were now more widely dispersed and the intense heat-laden centre of smoke and fog was no longer burning so brightly. The whole phenomenon has been ably reported in an essay, “The Mysterious Disappearance of Edwardian London Fog,” by H.T. Bernstein, in which it is claimed that coal-burning was not directly related to the incidence of fog. Some of the great London fogs appeared on Sundays, for example, when no factory chimneys were in operation. If fog was in part a meteorological phenomenon, it exhibited local and specific characteristics; it particularly affected parks and riversides, for example, as well as areas with low wind speed. It might swallow up Paddington, where no one could see their way, but leave Kensington less than a mile away to its brightness.

It has been said that “the last real fog was ‘presented’ on or about December 23, 1904”; it was pure white in colour and “the hansom cabmen were leading their horses, lamps went before the crawling omnibuses and some guests … went past one of the biggest London hotels without seeing it.” In fact, throughout the 1920s and 1930s “pea-soupers” descended without warning. H.V. Morton, in his In Search of London (1951), remembered one such fog “which reduces visibility to a yard, which turns every lamp into a downward V of haze, and gives to every encounter a nightmare quality almost of terror.” Here once more there is intimation of fog carrying fear into the heart of the city; it is perhaps no wonder that, when the easterly wind sent the clouds of yellow haze away from the city, the Berkshire farmers called it “blight.”

Others, less distant, also suffered from early twentieth-century fogs. The Stoll film studios at Cricklewood had to close during the winter because, according to Colin Sorensen’s London on Film, “The fog got into the studio for about three months.” The element of intrusiveness, or of invasion, also emerges here: many people recall how, upon the opening of a front door, draughts of smoke-laden fog would eddy through a private house and curl up in corners. The “eternal smoke of London” found other pathways, not least through the vent holes of the underground system where Arthur Symons noticed how its “breath rises in clouds and drifts voluminously over the gap of the abyss, catching at times a ghastly colour from the lamplight. Sometimes one of the snakes seems to rise and sway out of the tangle, a column of yellow blackness.”

But perhaps the worst of all London fogs were the “smogs” of the early 1950s, when thousands died of asphyxiation and bronchial asthma. In some of the theatres the fog was so thick that the actors could not be seen upon the stage. On the afternoon of 16 January 1955 there was “almost total darkness … People who experienced the phenomenon said it seemed as if the world was coming to an end.” A Clean Air Act was passed in 1956, as a result of public disquiet, but in the following year another smog caused death and injury. Then again in the winter of 1962 a lethal smog killed sixty people in three days; there was “nil visibility” on the roads, shipping “at a standstill,” trains cancelled. A newspaper report put the facts plainly: “The amount of smoke in the London air was 10 times higher than normal for a winter day yesterday. The amount of sulphur dioxide was 14 times higher than normal.” Six years later there followed a more extensive Clean Air Act, and this legislation marked the end of London fog in its ancient form. Electricity, oil and gas had largely taken the place of coal, while slum clearance and urban renewal had reduced the level of close-packed housing.

But pollution has by no means disappeared; like London itself, it has simply changed its form. The city may now be in large part a “smokeless zone” but it is filled with carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons which together with “toxic secondary pollutants” such as aerosols can produce what is known as a “photochemical smog.” High concentrations of lead in the London air and a general increase of sunshine in the cleaner air have in turn inspired more contamination. There is a problem with ozone at ground level and the effects of “temperature inversion” mean that the emissions from traffic and power stations, for example, cannot be released into the upper atmosphere. So they linger at the level of the streets. The fog that Tacitus described in the first century AD still hovers over London.

Night and Day

A depiction by Gustave Doré of poor vagrants huddled on Westminster Bridge on a starry night in the 1870s; it was said that the number of such vagrants could fully populate an average city.

CHAPTER 48

Let There Be Light

The high death rate in London has been blamed in part upon the lack of natural light. The prevalence of rickets, for example, has been noted in this connection. It is revealed in Werner’s London Bodies that in St. Bride’s Lower Churchyard over 15 per cent of children’s skeletons, dating from the nineteenth century, showed signs of that disorder, while those who did not succumb spent their lives upon “badly bowed limbs.” So there was a yearning for light, or, rather, an instinctive need for light. If it could not be found naturally, then it must be artificially created to satisfy the appetite of the Londoner.

As early as the fifteenth century lights were established by statutory decree. In 1405 every house beside the main thoroughfare had to display a light at the Christmas watch and, ten years later, the mayor ordered that the same dwellings bear lamps or lights in the dark evenings between October and February, in the hours from dusk until nine o’clock. These lanterns were of transparent horn, rather than of glass. But medieval London remained in relative obscurity except, perhaps, for the light spread by those who carried torches to guide pedestrians or by servants who used the flare of flaming brands to accompany the passage of some great lord or cleric. In the early years of the seventeenth century “link-boys” bearing lights also became a source of brightness.

The great change in the street lighting of the capital did not occur, however, until 1685 when a projector named Edward Heming “obtained letters patent conveying to him, for a term of years, the exclusive right of lighting up London.” He stipulated that for a fee he would fit a light in front of every tenth door, from six to twelve, on nights without a moon. Heming’s patent was not ultimately satisfactory, however, and nine years later the aldermanic authorities gave permission to the Convex Light Company to illuminate the city; the name of the company itself suggests the development from the horn lantern to more subtle and sophisticated means of lighting with lenses and reflectors. Light had become fashionable. Indeed in the first decades of the eighteenth century, as part of the general “improvements” in the condition of London, the illumination of the streets became of paramount importance. It was still a matter of security-the Kensington Road, a notorious haunt of highwaymen, was the first to introduce oil-lamps with glazed lights, as early as 1694. In 1736 an Act was passed permitting the city authorities to implement a special lighting rate or lamp rate so that all the streets could be properly illuminated each night; as Stephen Inwood has suggested in A History of London, “this gave the City around 4,000 hours of lighting a year, compared to 300 or 400 before 1694, and 750 from 1694 to 1736.” Suburban parishes also began to levy special rates for lighting; so gradually, and by degrees of illumination, London at night became a different city.

In the early decades of the eighteenth century observers and strangers remarked upon its glare, and upon its “white ways.” By 1780 Archenholz reported that “As the English are prodigal of their money and attention in order to give everything that relates to the public an air of grandeur and magnificence, we might naturally expect to find London well lighted, and accordingly nothing can be more superb.” It seemed that, as every year passed, the nights of the city became steadily brighter. In 1762 Boswell noted “the glare of shops and signs,” while in 1785 another observed that “Not a corner of this prodigious city is unlighted … but this innumerable multitude of lamps affords only a small quantity of light, compared to the shops.” It is entirely appropriate that in these two accounts of London’s brightness the shops, the centre of trade and commerce, shine brightest of all.

Yet if it is an attribute of London that it becomes continually brighter- at first starting at a slow pace but then gradually increasing momentum until by the late twentieth century it had become almost over-bright-the brightness of one generation will also be the dimness of a succeeding one: the light of eighteenth-century London, the glory of the world, forty years later was dismissed as little more than a toy. In his Memoirs, published in the middle of the nineteenth century, John Richardson declared that “forty years ago the lighting of the streets was effected by what were called parish lamps. The lamp consisted of a small tin vessel, half filled with the worse train oil … In this fluid fish blubber was a piece of cotton twist which formed the wick.” In those days, therefore, the lamplighter became a familiar figure in the streets of London. There is a portrait of one in Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress lighting a lamp at the corner of St. James’s Street and Piccadilly; his face has an oafish, if not bestial, cast and he is spilling oil on the wig of the rake beneath. This must have been a familiar enough mishap upon the streets. Richardson has his own description of the lamplighters. “A set of greasy fellows redolent of Greenland Dock were employed to trim and light these lamps, which they accomplished by the apparatus of a formidable pair of scissors, a flaming flambeau of pitched rope and a rickety ladder, to the annoyance and danger of all passers-by. The oil vessel and wick were enclosed in a case of semi-opaque glass … which obscured even the little light it encircled.” These lamps were rarely, if ever, cleaned. And so by all accounts the great brightness of eighteenth-century London seemed, at least to later Londoners, to be an illusion. The streets did not seem ill-lit to their inhabitants at the time, however, because the brightness of London exactly conformed to their sense of the social milieu. The light is relative to the expectations and preoccupations of the city.

That is why the great change came at the beginning of the era of the imperial city when, in 1807, oil gave way to gas. It was first employed in Beech Street and Whitecross Street, where now the Barbican stands, but a year later it was used to light up Pall Mall. There is a cartoon by Rowlandson, dated 1809 and entitled A Peep at the Gas Light in Pall Mall. One gentleman points a cane towards the new lamp and explains that “the Smoke falling thro water is deprivd of substance and burns as you see,” while a less expert citizen protests: “Aarh honey if this man bring fire thro water we shall soon have the Thames burn down.” In the same print a Quaker declares, “What is this to the inward light,” as if the progress of technology were itself a kind of profanity, while a prostitute tells her client, “If this light is not put a stop to-we must give up our business. We may as well shut up shop.” To which he replies, “True my dear not a dark corner to be got for love or money.”

In 1812 Westminster Bridge was the first to be illuminated by the new fuel. The highly intellectual Hester Thrale declared, in 1817, towards the end of her life, that “such a glare is cast by the gas lights, I knew not where I was after sunset. Old Father Thames, adorned by four beautiful bridges, will hardly remember what a poor figure he made eighty years ago, I suppose, when gay folks went to Vauxhall in barges, an attendant barge carrying a capital band of music playing Handel’s ‘Water Music’-as it has never been played since.” So the river, quite changed by the gaslight, became the object of surprise or bewilderment-“I knew not where I was.” Even the music upon the water seemed changed.

There were many illustrations of street-lights in all their variety, modelled in baroque and classical styles, with additional representations of gasometers and elaborate retorts. The old epoch of the lamplighter was mocked in the process, but the less advantageous aspects of the new lighting were also depicted. A series of cartoons depicting A London Nuisance has one of a lamplighter on the top of his ladder spilling oil over an unfortunate pedestrian, in the old style, while another shows a gas explosion in a chemist’s shop. That prospect of combustion was one of the reasons why the domestic use of gas was not fully in place until the 1840s. Yet by 1823 there were four private companies vying for trade, much of which, along the two hundred miles of gas mains laid just beneath the surface of the streets, was once more devoted to the lighting of the principal shops.

The shops of the eighteenth century, with their narrow windows and panes of bulging glass, were lit inside by tallow candles or blinking oil-lamps. With the modern shops of the next century, the encroaching darkness of twilight was suddenly the “herald of such a light such as the sun never darts into the nooks and crannies of traffic; broad streams of gas flash like meteors into every corner of the wealth-crammed mart.” The new gaslighting would not only banish vice and crime from the streets, it would also materially increase the speed and volume of trade: truly London light. “But it is really at night that London must be seen!” wrote Flora Tristan in her London Journal of 1840. “London, magically lit by its millions of gas lights, is resplendent! Its broad streets disappearing into the distance; its shops, where floods of light reveal the myriad sparkling colours of all the masterpieces conceived by human industry.” A similar enthusiasm is evinced in an account of the Strand where “the shops were all brightness and wonder,” and of another thoroughfare where the shops “seem to be made entirely of glass.” You might be forgiven for thinking that the great new brightness was the brightness of burgeoning commerce.

Yet there were other attitudes towards the new light. For some it was harsh and unnatural, the lurid emanation of an artificial city. To other Londoners, however, the gas was most glorious for the shadows which it cast. It created a city of softness and mystery, with sudden pools of light fringed by blackness and silence. So in certain areas London’s ancient presence stifled its new light; the shadows, and the mystery, returned. This may perhaps account for the speed with which London became accustomed to higher levels of brightness. When they ceased to be dazzled by the illumination of gas, the old presences of London began to reassert themselves. The author of The Little World of London noticed down one lane that “the glass of the gas-lamp has been wantonly pelted away to the last fragment. The flame flickers in the night-breeze, and casts its fitful gleams upon every form of poverty and wretchedness and vice, here huddled together as in a common asylum.” Gas, instead of being the incandescent banisher of vice and crime, here compounds the misery of the dispossessed. In a poem of the 1890s by Arthur Symons, there is a description of

The dim wet pavement lit irregularly

With shimmering streaks of gaslight, faint and frayed

where once again it is the flickering, inconstant and insubstantial nature of the city light that is manifested. It is as if the city has swallowed up the light or, rather, fundamentally changed its nature. In the night paintings of late Victorian London, for example, the dark shapes of the city beneath the moon are only momentarily illuminated by lines of gas-lamps. Paradoxically that which had seemed most new, and revolutionary, in lighting soon became identified with all that was overburdened with age and history. Who has not, in imagination, seen the gas-lamps in the fog? It is the very permanence and longevity of London which transform even the most recent invention into an aspect of its ancient life. The yellow gas in the old square lamps was replaced by green incandescent gases, dancing like so many glow-worms in their glass bottles, but these in turn were replaced by a new force.

The first employment of electric light was upon the Embankment in 1878, followed by the illumination of Billingsgate and the Holborn Viaduct as well as two or three theatres. Since London was then the great centre of world power it is appropriate that the first power station in the world should be at 57 Holborn Viaduct; it was constructed by Thomas Edison in 1883 and less than ten years later, according to that commercial imperative which is by now so familiar, the first electric advertising signs were placed in Piccadilly Circus. The city exploited this new brightness from the beginning, and once more “the golden tint of the electric light” was apostrophised; when “the gold and silver lamps” emerge from the twilight, “The shops shine bright anew.” There seems to be no escape from the conjunction of light and trade. Like other forms of light before it, however, electricity was said to render the city unreal and unfamiliar. One Londoner suggested that the novel light lent “a corpse-like quality” to the skin while in the floodlit streets “the crowd looks almost dangerous and garish.” This particular light was also more “cruel and clinical” than its predecessors. Those who became accustomed to electricity, however, soon looked back upon gas with the same nostalgic contempt as those living in gaslight regarded the old days of the oil-lamp. Arthur Machen, in the early 1920s, recollected that gas-lit London was “all glorious and glittering” but that now “I should find it sombre and gloomy, an abode of shadows and dark places, ill-lit with flickering and unsteady yellow flames.” The electricity moved down Oxford Street and Kensington High Street, Knightsbridge and Notting Hill. It spread from Piccadilly by means of overhead cable to Regent’s Park and the Strand. By 1914 there were seventy power stations operating within the metropolis, turning it into a generator of energy and power.

The variety of lighting supplies at first had the effect of turning London into an unevenly lit city; each of its twenty-eight boroughs made their own arrangements with the suppliers of electricity, which means that a car travelling at speed in the 1920s might pass from one street bathed in a very high light intensity to one shrouded in comparative darkness. But this had always been the case, since the city of contrasts had relied upon contrasted light. As Arthur Symons wrote in London: A Book of Aspects, “In London we light casually, capriciously, everyone at his own will, and so there are blinding shafts at one step and a pit of darkness at the next.” The many accidents in the 1920s, however, created a demand for a level standard of illumination, which in turn led to a standardisation of lamp-posts with columns 25 feet high and 150 feet apart. It is one aspect of London life which even the most knowledgeable citizens scarcely notice, and yet the uniformity of lighting in the major streets is perhaps the most significant aspect of the modern city.

In the autumn of 1931 certain public buildings were illuminated by floodlighting for the first time; so great was the interest and excitement that the streets were filled with spectators. It is as if London is always revealing itself anew. Nine years after the floodlighting, however, the night city was plunged into profound darkness during the black-out, when in certain respects it reverted to medieval conditions. In the streets themselves, as reported in Philip Ziegler’s London at War, “It seemed … sinister to have so many people shuffling around in the blackness”; familiar roads became “impenetrable mysteries,” leaving Londoners frightened and confused. One recalled finding her destination but only after becoming “damp with perspiration and quite exhausted.” Storms were welcomed since, in the instantaneous lightning flash, a well-known corner or crossing could be glimpsed. This sense of bewilderment and panic could have emerged in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries no less than during the Second World War, but this latter-day darkness served only to confirm how frightening and mysterious London might still become.

When the black-out was lifted in the autumn of 1944 the relief was palpable. “It is no longer inky black, but all softly lit up and shining, and all the little beams of light are reflected most charmingly in the wet streets.” Those “little beams” in later years gave way to neon, mercury and general fluorescence so that, at the beginning of a new century, the city lights up the sky for many miles around and has become a greater source of brightness than the moon and stars. For some this is a source of anger, as if the artificial city were somehow contaminating the cosmos itself. Yet there are still many streets which are only partly illuminated, and many small passages and byways which are scarcely lit at all. It is still possible to cross from a brightly lit thoroughfare into a dark street, just as it has been for the last three hundred years, and to feel afraid.

But does London have its own natural light? Henry James noted “the way the light comes down leaking and filtering from its cloud ceiling.” There is a sense of damp and misty brightness which other observers have recorded, as if everything were seen through tears. But James also noticed “the softness and richness of tone, which objects put on in such an atmosphere as soon as they begin to recede.” Buildings and streets dissolve into the distance, therefore, without the clarity of the light in Paris or New York. It has been said that nowhere “is there such a play of light and shade, such a struggle of sun and smoke, such aerial gradations and confusions.” Richard Jefferies, who in his apocalyptic novel After London (1885) depicted the city as a miasmic wasteland, had an eye for just such “aerial gradations”-from a yellow sunset to an “indefinite violet” in the south-west, from the dazzling light of summer to the redness of the winter sun when the streets and buildings are suffused with a “fiery glow.” The faint blue-green mist was known as the light “that London takes the day to be,” softening and blending the cityscape while in the parks there hovers “a lovely pearl-grey haze, soft and subdued.” Yet there is also a coldness in the light of the streets which may be glimpsed in the grey of winter and the blue mist of spring, the haze of summer and the “orange sunsets of autumn.” It is derived from the immensity which the light of London reflects so that, as Hippolyte Taine put it, it becomes the emanation of a “huge conglomeration of human creation” when “the shimmering of river waves, the scattering of the light imprisoned in vapour, the soft whitish or pink tints which cover these vastnesses, diffuse a sort of grace over the prodigious city.” That sense of immensity is glimpsed in Virginia Woolf’s account of London as “a swarm of lights with a pale yellow canopy drooping above it. There were the lights of the great theatres, the lights of the long streets, lights which indicated huge squares of domestic comfort, lights that hung high in the air. No darkness would ever settle upon these lamps, as no darkness has settled upon them for hundreds of years.” The lights of London blaze perpetually. From the air the lights shine for miles like a vast web of brightness. The city will never cool down. It will remain incandescent. Yet where there is light there is also shadow, and the darkness of night.

CHAPTER 49

Night in the City

There have been many accounts of the London night. Books entitled City Nights and Night Life have been entirely devoted to the subject. James Thomson called it the city of dreadful night (1874). It may be that the city is truly itself, and becomes truly alive, only at night. That is why it exercises a constant fascination. The effect begins at twilight, in that crepuscular hour with “the dusky multitude of chimney pots and the small black houses,” of “muddy ways and slatternly passages” when, in the words of Julian Wolfreys’s Writing London, “the sinister, the threatening, monstrous inhumanity of the limitless city” becomes apparent. These are all accounts from the nineteenth century, but night terrors of earlier centuries are no less substantial. From earliest times the streets of the city have never been safe at night. Curfew was rung at nine and, in theory, the alehouses were closed and citizens were meant to stay indoors. In the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, however, drama, verse, epistles and satires came to emphasise the nature of the city night with lines such as these quoted in Thomas Burke’s The Streets of London:

Frightening of cullies, and bombastine whores,

Wringing off knockers, and from posts and doors

Rubbing out milk maids’ and some other scores,

Scowring the watch, or roaring in the streets,

Lamp-blacking signs with divers other feats …

These were the pranks of the “roaring boys,” which were juvenile enough compared with the more violent excesses of the gangs, or the thieves, or the rapists, under cover of darkness. Thomas Shadwell, the late seventeenth-century dramatist, remarked how at approximately “two in the morning comes the bell-man, and in a dismal tone repeats worse rhymes than a cast poet of the nursery can make; after him come those rogues that wake people with their barbarous tunes, and upon their tooting instruments make a more hellish noise than they do at a Playhouse when they flourish for the entrance of witches.” From the evidence of the drama, and reports such as this, it seems clear that at night the city was almost as noisy as day, with the difference only that the sounds at night were more frantic and desperate, among yells and screams and shouts and whistles punctuating the early hours with their own uneasy refrain. If you were to listen intently you might hear “Who’s there?” or “Your purse!” or “Dog, are you dumb? Speak quickly!”

“My ears were so serenaded on every side,” wrote Ned Ward at the beginning of the eighteenth century, “with the grave musick of sundry passing bells, the rattling of coaches, and the melancholy ditties of Hot Bak’d wardens and Pippins … nothing could I see but light and nothing hear but noise.” The unnaturalness of the London night is emphasised here, filled as it is with light and sound rather than the silence and darkness celebrated in the poetry of the evening landscape. When Samuel Pepys accompanied Lady Paulina Montague through the nocturnal streets she was terrified “every step of the way.”

The reasons for her fear are outlined in John Gay’s poem, “Of Walking the Streets by Night,” which is part of his Trivia-trívium being the point where three streets meet, the word generally used to characterise public thoroughfares of every description. In the “busie Street” at night planks and ladders and low awnings offered continual obstacles to progress. “Now all the Pavement sounds with trampling feet” amid the neighing of horses and the lowing of bullocks; the coachmen hustled each other, and lashed each other with whips; there were fights in the streets also “till down they fall and grappling roll in Mud.” Gay noticed one notorious spot for night traffic jams, by St. Clement Danes in the Strand where the church itself acted as a massive impediment; the streets upon either side of it had no posts to distinguish road from pavement, so the result was a confusion of coaches, horses and pedestrians worse compounded by the fact that loaded wagons were brought from the Thames through the narrow side-streets which led on to the main thoroughfare. To be caught in the “mob” or “throng” was dangerous indeed. If the solitary walker was not pushed and jostled and cursed, his wig, or cambric handkerchief, or watch, or snuff-box were likely to be stolen; to the raucous sounds of the night, then, was added the cry of “Stop Thief!” The pedestrian risked being crushed by carriage wheels, or pushed aside by chair-men, but more dangerous were the open cellars from which goods were sold. There was thick mud in the streets and, from above,

empty Chamber-pots come pouring down From

Garret Windows; you have cause to bless

The gentle Stars, if you come off with Piss.

It was wise to pay no attention to the sound of blows being exchanged, or the cries for help.

Yet, at night, even the houses of Londoners were not necessarily havens from the anxiety and unrest of the streets. About two o’clock in the morning on 21 March 1763 Boswell’s candle went out at his lodgings in Crown Street, Westminster. He went down to the kitchen in order to find a tinder-box, but he could see nothing of the kind there. “I was now filled with gloomy ideas of the terrors of the night.” So the darkness without spread fear within. “I was also apprehensive that my landlord, who always keeps a pair of loaded pistols by him, might fire at me as a thief.” The dangers of vandalism and theft were very great, then, if the owner of the house must keep pistols by his bed; it resembles the practice of Samuel Johnson, who always took a stout cudgel with him before he ventured upon the streets. So Boswell “went up to my room, sat quietly till I heard the watchman calling ‘Past three o’clock.’ I then called to him to knock at the door of the house where I lodged. He did so, and I opened it to him and got my candle relumined without danger.” Here is a vignette of London life which, despite its brevity, is arresting-the call of the watchman, the instruction from Boswell, and the hurried lighting of the candle.

The night of nineteenth-century London has a less intimate aspect. The Victorians were fascinated and appalled by it. It is the period when the genre of “night painting” emerged among the artists of London, while in the theatre there were melodramas such as London By Night (1845) and After Dark, a Tale of London Life (1868). The poetry of the age is filled with intimations and images of the dark city, from Dowson and Lionel Johnson to George Meredith and Tennyson. It is as if the inhabitants of nineteenth-century London were haunted by the night city so that, in the words of Rudyard Kipling recalling his early experience of London in lodgings, “Here, for the first time, it happened that the night got into my head.”

In the middle of the nineteenth century there came a vogue for “night walks”: sketches or essays in which the solitary pedestrian made his way across the dark city, marking significant moments and scenes in a journey of unknown destination. For Charles Dickens, walking at night was a way of allaying private miseries; as a child he had walked through the city, and even in its nocturnal aspect it offered him a strange comfort and reassurance. It was if, whatever his own personal unhappiness, “it,” the thing known as London, would always be there both solid and tangible. It was his true home, after all, and somehow it was incorporated within his own being. So Dickens walked “under the pattering rain … walk and walk and walk, seeing nothing but the interminable tangle of streets save at a corner, here and there, two policemen in conversation.” This was now a guarded and supervised city, its corners manned by officers of the law; no longer the anarchy and exuberance recorded by John Gay in the 1770s. The silence is the silence of its vastness. Dickens crossed Waterloo Bridge, paying a halfpenny to the toll-keeper wrapped up in his booth, where the Thames had an “awful look” of blackness and reflected light and where “the very shadow of the immensity of London seemed to be oppressively upon the river.” This is what is most noticeable about the nineteenth-and twentieth-century city at night: its “immensity,” a vast capital stretching outwards into the darkness. Having crossed the bridge Dickens passed the theatres of Wellington Street and the Strand, “with the rows of faces faded out, the lights extinguished and the seats all empty.” Here is a representation of London in miniature as one great darkened theatre. It is significant that Charles Dickens next made his way to Newgate Prison in order to touch “its rough stone.” London is both theatre and prison. At night its true aspects are outlined clearly, shorn of the vagaries of the day.

He visited the Courts of Law, then at Westminster, before moving on to the abbey where it became for him “a solemn consideration what enormous hosts of dead belong to one old great city and how if they were raised while the living slept, there would not be the space of a pin’s point in all the streets and ways for the living to come out into. Not only that, but the vast armies of dead would overflow the hills and valleys beyond the city, and would stretch away all round it, God knows how far.” This is perhaps what one inheritor of Dickens’s urban vision, George Gissing, meant when he exclaimed “London by night! Rome is poor by comparison.” It is the presence of the past, or the presence of the dead, which lends the night images of London their peculiar intensity and power. Of all cities London seems most occupied by its dead, and the one which most resounds to the tread of passing generations. It is not as if the physical fabric of the old city has survived intact. Gissing’s comparison with Rome is again appropriate here; the “eternal city” has so many ruins of its greatness that the spirit of the past has had no room in which to flourish. In London the past is a form of occluded but fruitful memory, in which the presence of earlier generations is felt rather than seen. It is an echoic city, filled with shadows, and what better time to manifest itself than at night?

Another night voyager of the mid-nineteenth century, Charles Manby Smith, noticed, in an essay entitled “Twenty Four Hours of London Streets,” that the slightest sound reverberated between the great walls of houses and public buildings, with his own footsteps echoing as if “some invisible companion dogged our march.” He heard the silence in the old walled City, which is all the more fearful and oppressive after the “humming, booming surge-like sound” of the day.

It represents a great change in the nature of city life which over the years spread wider and wider beyond the old City; that which was most populous during the day is now the least populated at night. Few people lived in the City-and fewer now, at the start of the twenty-first century-and the old centres of habitation have been steadily abandoned for life upon the perimeters. It is the single most important reason for the relative silence and peace-fulness of London over the last century.

This mid-nineteenth-century pedestrian anticipated the later environment and atmosphere of London, when he observed “the apparently numberless and interminable rows of streets lying in the voiceless silence, and distinctly mapped out by the long and regular lines of lamps on either side of the way.” This is a vision of the city as part of an inhuman, mechanical alignment. “There is no other spectacle, that we know of that intimates so significantly the huge extent of this overgrown metropolis. The dead dumbness that reigns in these long, empty avenues appals the mind, and sends the imagination of the pedestrian wandering for ever onwards and onwards.” So at night London becomes a city of the dead, the silence of the nineteenth century continuing through the twentieth into the twenty-first.

In London Nights, published in 1925, it is remarked that “the past has a stronger hold on the night than it has on the day”; while walking beneath the Thames in the tunnel which connects the north and south banks, for example, “you might be exploring the tombs of buried London thousands of years hence.” In this sense it then becomes an infinite city-“London is every city that ever was and ever will be”-which in its illimitable regions manifests the true nature of the human community. That is why at night the most visible inhabitants of the city are those without a home. In “all manner of holes and corners the homeless may be found sleeping in winter nights; ’mid the ruin of half-demolished houses, on the stairs leading from viaducts, in corners of the Blackwall Tunnel, in recesses in massive buildings, in porches of churches.” That reality has not changed in the intervening years. Then, as now, the Embankment remains a central place for the vagrants to gather despite the cold and damp air coming from the Thames. It is almost as if, at night, the river calls them.

There are certain streets which in the present century seem never entirely empty at night-one may name Old Compton Street in Soho, Upper Street in Islington and Queensway in Bayswater as examples-and there are, as there have been over the centuries, all-night restaurants such as those in St. John Street and in the Fulham Road. But the general impression of contemporary London at night is of a dull silence. There is no feeling of real danger, only the awareness that one can walk until dawn, and then a further dawn, without coming to the end of interminable streets with houses on either side. The shopping malls and some of the thoroughfares are monitored by surveillance cameras, so that it is impossible ever to feel completely alone.

The cameras represent one way in which modern London has changed. It has become self-conscious, forever watchful of its own citizens, almost daring them to manifest the energy and violence of their predecessors. There is never complete silence, however; it is punctuated by the humming of neon lamps and by the sirens of police cars or ambulances. That low and remote sound is of the traffic perpetually passing through, while in the east the glow of the lamps becomes paler with the approaching dawn.

CHAPTER 50

A City Morning

God give you good morrow, my master, past five o’clock and a fair morning”: that is how the watchman of the seventeenth century heralded the dawn, the time when most of the citizens were waking and preparing for the work of the day.

Then as now the eastern suburbs of the city went to bed earlier, and rose earlier, than their western counterparts. The markets were busy and the produce had already been brought from the surrounding countryside in wagons. One of the complaints of Londoners was that they were perpetually being woken, while it was still dark, by the clatter of the wheels and the neighing of the horses as fruits and vegetables were transported to Leadenhall or Covent Garden. The essayist Richard Steele has a fine description (11 August 1712) of the gardeners who sailed down the river with their produce to the various markets of the city: “I landed with Ten Sail of Apricock Boats at Strand-Bridge, after having put in at Nine-Elms, and taken in Melons, consigned by Mr. Cuffe of that Place, to Sarah Sewell and Company at their stall in Covent-Garden.” They unloaded the cargo at Strand-Bridge at six that morning, at the time when the hackney-coachmen of the previous night were just going off duty. Some passing sweeps engaged in “Raillery” with the fruit girls “about the Devil and Eve.” The details of the wit are not recorded. There are other descriptions of the cart-horses steaming and stamping in the market as the dawn breaks, of the carters sleeping upon their sacks, of the lines of porters carrying fruits and vegetables to their various stalls.

By six o’clock the apprentices were already pulling up the shutters, lighting the fires, or putting out the wares for sale and display. They washed down the pavement outside, while the maids swept the steps of the more fashionable houses. The street vendors, and sweeps, and other itinerants, were soon making their way through the thoroughfares which grew more crowded as the day advanced. And, as the years progressed, the street activity seemed to increase. In the eighteenth century it was suggested that cheesemongers “should not set out their butter and cheese so near the edge of their shop-windows, nor put their firkins in the path-ways, by which many a good coat and silk gown may be spoiled.” Here was one indication of the general lack of room. The sheer crowdedness of the daytime city is always a paramount feature of its life, and there were remarks that “barbers and chimney sweepers have no right by charter to rub against a person well-dressed, and then offer him satisfaction by single combat.” There were other traders whom it was wise to avoid including the baker with his apron covered in flour and paste, the small-coal man, the butcher with his bloody leather apron and the chandler from whose basket spots of tallow might fall. There were constant complaints about car-men using the pavement rather than the road to carry their charges, and about workmen carrying ladders or pieces of timber upon their shoulders in the middle of crowded thoroughfares.

So there was of necessity an art of walking the streets by day, as well as by night. There were certain rules which were generally observed. The wall was “surrendered” to females, so that they would not be jostled on to the road, while it was considered a duty to direct “the groaping Blind.” Never ask directions from an apprentice, because these young and lively Londoners were known to delight in sending any stranger in the wrong direction; it was always best to ask assistance from a shopkeeper or tradesman. If you wished to urinate go into some court or “secret corner.” Avoid Watling Street and Ludgate Hill because of the crowds that throng there; much better to walk along the broader pavements of the Strand or Cheapside, but in every main street, nevertheless,

Full charg’d with News the breathless Hawker runs,

Shops open, Coaches roll, Carts shake the Ground,

And all the Streets with passing Cries resound.

In the early nineteenth century, as occupations and areas began to be differentiated on social lines, various formal urban types appear. At eight o’clock and ten o’clock the postman, in scarlet tunic, made his deliveries in the West End, while the “musicians” and old-clothes-sellers made their way from the East End towards the centre. The commercial clerks walked down the Strand towards the Admiralty and Somerset House, while the government clerks tended to ride down to Whitehall and Downing Street in broughams.

This was the morning tide of the citizens. The nineteenth-century journalist G.A. Sala knew them well. “You may know the cashiers in the private banking houses by their white hats and buff waistcoats; you may know the stock-brokers by their careering up Ludgate Hill in dog-carts, and occasionally tandems … you may know the Jewish commission agents by their flashy broughams … you may know the sugar-bakers and soap-boilers by the comfortable double-bodied carriages,” and the warehousemen only “by their wearing gaiters.”

Between nine and ten the omnibuses arrived at the Bank with thousands of occupants, while on the Thames itself a large number of “swift, grimy little steamboats” had picked up passengers from the piers at Chelsea and Pimlico, Hungerford Bridge and Southwark, Waterloo and Temple, before disgorging them to the piers by London Bridge. Thames Street, both Upper and Lower, was “invaded by an ant-hill swarm of spruce clerks, who mingle strangely with the fish-women and the dock-porters.”

The London morning “hungered” for its crowds and, equally voracious, “the insatiable counting houses soon swallow them.” Not just the counting-houses were filled, but also all the workshops, warehouses and factories of the metropolis. The bars of the public houses were opened. The baked-potato men and the owners of coffee stalls were engaged in their brisk business. In the West End the shoe-cleaners and commercial travellers were already at their work, while in the adjacent courts and alleys the vast army of the poor swarmed out of doors. There was a nineteenth-century phrase that “you can hardly shut the street door for them” and, even in the poor quarters, the morning brought “a desperate, ferocious levity” as if the opening of each day’s misery could elicit only an hysterical response.

There is indeed an insistent rhythm to the routine of London. The Exchange opens and closes its gates, the banks of Lombard Street are filled with and then emptied of customers, the glare of the shops brightens and then fades. In the later decades of the nineteenth century the trains as well as the omnibuses brought in the multitudes from the suburbs. But what the city takes in during the morning it spews forth at evening, so that there is a general pulse of people and power which keeps its heart beating. This is what Charlotte Brontë meant when she recorded that “I have seen the West End, the parks, the fine squares; but I love the City far better. The City seems so much more in earnest; its business, its rush, its roar, are such serious things, sights, sounds … At the West End you may be amused; but in the City you are deeply excited.” She was “deeply excited” by the process of urban life itself, fulfilling in its own fashion the rhythms of night and day.

By the time the Post Office had barred up its letter boxes on the stroke of six o’clock, the businessmen and their clerks had left the City to its shopkeepers and dwindling number of householders. The full tide of the citizens ebbed and, through a thousand different streets, returned homeward. And, at the close of Dickens’s Little Dorrit, “as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted and chafed, and made their usual uproar,” all to return on the following morning.

And if they had woken up fifty, or a hundred, years later no doubt they would still have been able to follow the instinctive movement of the rush hour. Yet there is one distinction. If a nineteenth-century Londoner were to be set down in the City of the twenty-first century, perhaps at twilight in Cheapside when the office workers and computer operators are returning homeward, he would be astonished by the orderliness and uniformity of their progress. He might recognise a type, or an expression of thoughtfulness or anxiety-he might also be familiar with those who mutter to themselves- but the general quietness, together with a lack of human contact and of friendly exchange, might be unnerving.

London’s Radicals

The Sessions House on Clerkenwell Green, part of the ritual of riot and punishment which has marked this small area for many hundreds of years.

CHAPTER 51

Where Is the Well of Clerkenwell?

There is a story by Arthur Machen in which he describes an area in Stoke Newington where, on occasions, an enchanted landscape can be glimpsed and sometimes even entered; perhaps we may locate it near Abney Park, a somewhat desolate cemetery beside Stoke Newington High Street. This is the street where Defoe lived and where Edgar Allan Poe went unwillingly to school. Few people have seen this visionary place, or even know how to see it; but those who have can speak of nothing else. Machen wrote this story, “N,” in the early 1930s, but as the century progressed other enchanted areas of London have emerged into the light. These remain powerful and visible to anyone who cares to look for them. One of these districts finds its centre upon Clerkenwell Green.

It is not “green” at all; it is a small area enclosed by buildings with a disused public lavatory in the middle. On both sides are narrow streets which in turn lead off into alleys or other streets. The green has its restaurants, two public houses, commercial premises and offices for architects or public relations consultants. It is, in epitome, a typical area of central London. But there are other signs and tokens of a different city. Just beyond the green are the relics of the eleventh-century church and hospital of St. John, where the Knights Templar and Knights Hospitaller had their headquarters; the crypt survives intact. A few yards to the south of the crypt, in the early sixteenth century, was erected St. John’s Gate; this also still remains. Just on the northern edge of the green itself can be found the original site of the medieval well from which the district derives its name; in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it was simply a broken iron pump let into the front wall of a tenement building but, since that time, it has been restored and preserved behind a thick glass wall. It marked the site of the stage where mystery plays were performed for centuries “beyond the memory of man,” and in fact for many hundreds of years Clerkenwell was notorious for its dramatic representations. The yard of the Red Bull Inn, to the east of the green, is reputed to be the first theatrical venue where women appeared on stage. It is one example of the many continuities that charge Clerkenwell and its environs with an essential presence. But perhaps it is best to begin at the beginning.

On Clerkenwell Green the remains of a prehistoric settlement or encampment have been discovered, suggesting that this area of London has been continuously inhabited for many thousands of years. Perhaps the melancholy or ancientness which writers as diverse as George Gissing and Arnold Bennett have intuited, in this location, derives from the weariness of prolonged human settlement with all the cares and woes which it brings.

The area itself is first noticed in the early records of St. Paul’s when, in the seventh century, it became part of the property of the bishop and canons of that institution. In the eleventh century William I awarded the land to one of his most successful supporters, Ralph fitz Brian, who in the proper terminology became lord of the fee of Clerkenwell, held of the bishop of London within the manor of Stepney by knight service. It is important to note here that from the beginning Clerkenwell was beyond “the bars” of London, and effectively part of Middlesex.

The heirs of Ralph became lords of the manor of Clerkenwell, and they in turn granted land and property for the maintenance of two religious foundations. The convent of St. Mary in Clerkenwell was established, roughly where the present church of St. James now stands, and the priory of the Knights Templar-known as St. John of Jerusalem-a little to the south-east on the other side of the green. So from the medieval period Clerkenwell became known, and identified, through its sacred or spiritual affiliations. Since the priory was first in the ownership of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, it was a mustering point for the Crusaders; gradually it grew in size and extent over the adjacent area. The convent of St. Mary was similarly extensive but, as always, the life of the city kept on breaking through.

In 1301 the prioress of Clerkenwell petitioned Edward I “to provide and order a remedy because the people of London lay waste and destroy her corn and grass by their miracle plays and wrestling matches so that she has no profit of them nor can have any unless the king have pity for they are a savage folk and we cannot stand against them and cannot get justice by any law.” This is one of the first reports that the Londoners were indeed “savage,” and it is intriguing to note that the miracle plays were “their” own; it throws a wholly new light upon the presumed sacredness of early drama. Two generations later an even more “savage” and violent assault was mounted against the priory of St. John when, in 1381, the stone buildings of the Order were put to the torch by Wat Tyler’s followers. The priory was badly damaged but not entirely destroyed, while the prior himself was beheaded on the spot because of his role as Richard II’s principal tax-collector. Tyler’s followers camped upon Clerkenwell Green, watching the hall and dormitory of the Knights go up in flame together with the counting-house, the distillery, the laundry, the slaughterhouse and very many other apartments or stables. It seemed as if the whole of Clerkenwell were on fire.

One of the most notorious lanes in the neighbourhood was Turnmill Street (so named because of its proximity to the many mills which harnessed the current of the Fleet), also known as Turnbull Street (because of the lines of cattle which crossed it in order to reach Smithfield). By the late thirteenth century the salubriousness of the area had been under threat from “filth and ordure and rubbage” thrown into the Fleet and, a century later, Henry IV ordered that it be “cleansed anew.” He also obliged the authorities “to repayre a stone brydge over the Flete neare unto Trymyllstreate,” the remote ancestor of the bridge over the Underground line which was once more repaired in the late 1990s.

Yet public works could not affect the public reputation of Clerkenwell; since it was “beyond the bars” it became the harbour for the outcast and those who wished to go beyond the law. So, from the beginning, it has been the home of groups who wish to be separate and separated. In Turnmill Street one William the Parchmenter in 1414 harboured the Lollard, Sir John Oldcastle, and was subsequently hanged, drawn and quartered for his hospitality. Clerkenwell also became the home of Jesuits and other recusants, and the district “was notorious as a centre for papists”; three suspected papists were hanged, drawn and quartered on Clerkenwell Green in the late sixteenth century. The Catholics moved out under the threat of persecution, although they returned in another guise 235 years later when Clerkenwell became an Italian quarter; in the interim other proscribed religious groups such as the libertarian Quakers, the Brownists, the Familists and the Schismatics congregated in the area of the green. Here is further evidence, then, of continuity in persecutions and outlawry. In more recent years the Freemasons have entered the area, with their headquarters in the Sessions House upon the green.

But if Turnmill Street began life as a haven for heretical Lollards and other radical proselytisers, it soon acquired a more dissolute reputation. It was marked down for condemnation in an ordinance of 1422 for “the abolition of Stewes within the City” but, since it was literally “without” the walls, few public measures touched it. In 1519 Cardinal Wolsey raided houses in Turnmill Street and the aptly named Cock Alley. “Now Farewel to Turnbull Street,” writes the anonymous author of The Merrie Mans Resolution in 1600, “For that no comfort yields.” E.J. Burford in London: the Synfulle Citie has reconstructed the topography of the street itself, with no less than nineteen “rents”-alleys, yards or courts-issuing off it. Their conditions were generally described as “noysome” which, in the context of sixteenth-century London, suggests a degree of nastiness which is perhaps not now imaginable. One of them was only twenty feet long and two feet six inches wide, so that “there was not room to get a coffin out without turning it on edge.” Turnmill Street appears very often in city records as the haunt of crime as well as prostitution. In 1585 “Bakers hause, Turnmyll Street” was known as a harbouring house “for masterless men, and for such as lyve by thiefte and other such lyke sheefts,” while, seven years later, a pamphlet entitled Kinde Hartes Dreame cited Turnmill Street as a place in which the owners charged “forty shillings yearly for a little Room with a smoky chimney … where several of these venereal virgins are resident.” The association of Clerkenwell, and Turnmill Street in particular, with prostitution did not end in the sixteenth century. In 1613 Joan Cole and three more “Turnbull Street Whoares” were sentenced to be carted and whipped through the streets; one of them, Helen Browne, had been arrested while concealed “in a lewd house in Turnbull Street in a dark cellar.”

If you come out of Farringdon Road Underground Station and walk a few feet to the left, you will find yourself in the very same Turnmill Street. Its left-hand side makes up the dead wall of the railway tracks, laid where the Fleet River once flowed, while on the other side are office premises and warehouses of a generally unprepossessing nature. There are one or two alleys which act as a reminder of its interesting past; Turks Head Yard, formerly known as Bull Alley, Broad Yard on the site of Frying Pan Yard, and Benjamin Street, first laid down in 1740, are still to be seen. Yet echoes of a more distant past also survive. At the very top of Turnmill Street was, until recent years, a twenty-four-hour night-club of equivocal reputation known as Turnmills. Mad Frank, the memoirs of Frankie Fraser, a member of a notorious London gang, begins: “The Independent had it wrong when their reporter said I’d been shot dead outside Turnmills Night Club in 1991. I was only in hospital for two days that time.” Streets such as this are reminiscent of Henry James’s description of Craven Street, which runs down from the Strand, as “packed to blackness with accumulations of suffered experience.” And, if there is a continuity of life, or experience, is it connected with the actual terrain and topography of the area? Is it too much to suggest that there are certain kinds of activity, or patterns of inheritance, arising from the streets and alleys themselves?

Clerkenwell Green is notable in other respects. The invasion of Clerkenwell by Wat Tyler and his followers is an example of its continuing radicalism, while the popular obloquy directed against the wealthy nuns of the priory beside the green speaks for the individual and the dispossessed. But the ramifications of these actions are rich and complex indeed. That great populist and demagogue John Wilkes, commemorated in the phrase “Wilkes and Liberty,” was born just off the green in St. James’s Close in 1727. One of the first meeting-places of the egalitarian London Corresponding Society was established at the Bull’s Head in Jerusalem Passage just east of the green, and in 1794 “Clerkenwell crowds attacked recruiting offices at Battle Bridge and at Mutton Lane at the foot of the Green” with no doubt the same intensity as early fourteenth-century Londoners showed in attacking the Clerkenwell Priory. A group of radical plotters, the United Englishmen, were seized “at a low public house at Clerkenwell” in the spring of 1798 and then, a year later, a number of United Irishmen were arrested in the Nag’s Head, St. John’s Street, which leads away from the green towards Smithfield. Here undoubtedly is a catchment area of dissent and possible radical disruption.

In 1816 Henry Hunt, one of the leaders of the Chartist movement which called for universal suffrage, spoke to a crowd of 20,000 above the Merlin’s Cave Tavern just north of Clerkenwell Green. Ten years later William Cobbett addressed a meeting on the green itself in opposition to the Corn Laws; then, in 1832, the National Union of the Working Classes advertised a meeting in Coldbath Fields north of the green preparatory to a “National Convention, The only Means of Obtaining and Securing The Rights of The People.” On the day itself “a man wearing a new white hat excited passers-by by reciting passages from a publication called The Reformer and loudly proclaiming that people in such an emergency ought to carry arms openly,” a sentiment which had already been heard many times, over many centuries, in this neighbourhood.

The mass meeting was held and an affray took place in which a policeman was killed, all this in the immediate vicinity of Coldbath Prison, one of a number of penal institutions in the area. On Roque’s map of London, delineated in the 1730s and 1740s, the area of Clerkenwell is seen to be exceedingly well regulated indeed and, as the editor of The History of London in Maps noticed, “Clerkenwell Green has a watch-house for policing; a pound for felons; a pillory to put them in; and a turnstile to provide a check on people passing through.” As a known centre of radical activity, there was a strong emphasis on official surveillance. On Roque’s map, too, can be seen the outline of Clerkenwell Gaol just to the east of the green.

It was a notorious prison, built in 1775, part of which comprised a number of underground tunnels lined with cells. Many radicals and schismatics were incarcerated there, and it became known as “a jail for hereticks.” Of the inmates it was observed in W.J. Pinks’s History of Clerkenwell that “they were lamentably ignorant and superstitious, and took great delight in sitting in a ring and telling their adventures and relating their dreams; they tell stories of spirits.” We find in the “New Prison” of Clerkenwell one John Robins who “said that he was God Almighty … Richard King said his wife was with child of him that should be the saviour of all those that shall be saved … Joan Robins said she was with child, and the child in her womb was the Lord Jesus Christ.” Richard Brothers, the self-styled “Prophet of the Lost Tribe” and “Slain Lamb of Revelation,” was imprisoned a few yards up the road in the madhouse of Ashby Street. The Quakers, who in the mid-eighteenth century “went naked for a sign,” met in Peel Court off St. John Street, while in 1830 was instituted a Free-Thinking Christian Meeting House in St. John Square in the centre of the old Templar priory. There is evidence once more of a continuity.

The radical history of Clerkenwell did not end with the riot of 1832. Five years later the Tolpuddle Martyrs, on their return from Botany Bay, were first greeted on the green, and a year later there was a great Chartist meeting on the same spot. In 1842 Prime Minister Peel “banned meetings on Clerkenwell Green,” but, in the same period, the Chartists met each week in Lunt’s Coffee House at 34 Clerkenwell Green; there were other radical meeting-places close by, such as the Northumberland Arms at 37 Clerkenwell Green. The unions, too, met in public houses in precisely the same area: the Silver Spoon-makers at the Crown and Can, St. John Street; the Carpenters at the Adam and Eve, St. John Street Row; and the Silversmiths at St. John of Jerusalem; altogether the Trade Union Directory lists nine separate unions meeting regularly in Clerkenwell. The disturbances and meetings in that area continued throughout the 1850s and 1860s, with marches leaving from the green, while an additional strength was lent to the area by the pro-Fenian Irish radicals of the Patriotic Society who used regularly to meet at the King’s Head in Bowling Green Lane a few yards north of Clerkenwell Green itself. At the time of the Paris Commune in 1871, “a red flag, surmounted by a ‘cap of liberty,’ crowned a lamp-post in the Green.” These events may provide an explanation why, in the press and on the music-hall stage, the area became a synonym for radical change.

Yet not all the forces at work there were violently libertarian. John Stuart Mill was one of a number of subscribers who set up a fund to endow “a place for political lectures and discussions independent of coerced tavern keepers and licensing magistrates”; a location was chosen, “in a neighbourhood well known to the democracy of London,” and the hall was established at 37a Clerkenwell Green which had once been a school for the children of Welsh Dissenters. It became known as the London Patriotic Club and its history of twenty years “is a history of radical issues”; Eleanor Marx Aveling, Bradlaugh and Kropotkin all used it as a centre for demonstrations and mass meetings. But perhaps the most interesting occupant was one of the last. A socialist press had been founded at the premises in the 1880s, and in 1902 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin walked every day from his lodgings in Percy Circus to Clerkenwell Green in order to edit an underground revolutionary journal entitled Iskra, “The Spark,” which was meant to ignite Russia. It might be mentioned here that in the seventeenth century the printers of Clerkenwell were denounced for issuing “Blasphemous and seditious” literature. That prolonged pattern or alignment of activities continued well into the twentieth century when the Communist newspaper, the Morning Star, had its offices just west of the green in Farringdon Road. In the 1990s the magazine for the homeless and the unemployed, the Big Issue, took up residence a few yards south of the green in the same area where Wat Tyler had led his army of radical protesters more than six hundred years before.

So over a period of time, in one tiny part of the city, at first outside “the bars” and then within the ever expanding capital, the same forms of activity have taken place. It may simply be coincidence that Lenin followed in the path of the seventeenth-century printers. It may have been in conformity to habit, custom, or some kind of communal radical memory that the Chartists, the London Corresponding Society and the unions chose the same area for their meetings and demonstrations. It may be chance that the nineteenth-century affrays took place in the same vicinity as those of the fourteenth century. The editor of the Big Issue has assured the present author that he had no notion of Clerkenwell’s radical history when he decided to situate the office of his magazine in the area.

But other territorial clusters abound. The emergence of Clerkenwell as an instigator or abettor of radical activity is paralleled, for example, by the gradual identification of Bloomsbury with occultism and marginal spiritualism. When the great London mythographer William Blake was completing his apprenticeship in Great Queen Street, an elaborate Masonic lodge was being constructed opposite his employer’s workshop. It was the first city headquarters for what was then a controversial occult order of adepts who believed that they had inherited a body of secret knowledge from before the Flood. Before the erection of their great hall they had congregated at the Queen’s Head in Great Queen Street, and, in the same street less than a century later, the occult Order of the Golden Dawn held their meetings. The Theosophical Society met in Great Russell Street while around the corner, opposite Bloomsbury Square, exists the Swedenborg Society. Two occult bookshops can be found in the vicinity, while the Seven Dials close by marks the convergence of astrologers in the seventeenth century. So here again there seems to be a congregation of aligned forces, by coincidence or design, remaining active within the neighbourhood of a very few streets.

One street, and a particular church, also throw a suggestive light upon London itself. According to Stephen Inwood in A History of London, St. Stephen’s, Coleman Street, was “an old Lollard stronghold”; in the early sixteenth century it became a centre of incipient Lutheranism where heretical texts were placed on sale. In 1642 the five Members of Parliament whom Charles I rashly tried to arrest on charges of treason took refuge in Coleman Street-“a loyal street to the Puritan party”-which was “their stronghold.” Six years later Oliver Cromwell met with his supporters in the same street, as can be gathered in the trial of Hugh Peters after the Restoration.

COUNSEL: Mr. Gunter, what can you say concerning meeting and consultation at the “Star” in Coleman Street?

GUNTER: My lord, I was a servant at the “Star” in Coleman Street … that house was a house where Oliver Cromwell, and several of that party, did use to meet in consultation.

During this period, too, the parish and local congregation were also of strongly Puritan sympathies. Then in 1645 there were weekly public lectures “near Coleman Street,” established by women proselytisers and characterised by “confusion and disorder” during discussions subsequent to the lectures. A few years later, in a “conventicle” in an alley off Coleman Street, “that dangerous fanatic Venner, a wine-cooper and Millenarian, preached to ‘the soldiers of King Jesus’ and urged them to commence the Fifth Monarchy.” During the rising of the Anabaptists we read that “these monsters assembled at their meeting house, in Coleman Street, where they armed themselves and sallying thence, came to St. Paul’s in the dusk.” Even after the Restoration Coleman Street maintained its Puritan allegiances: the old Dissenting preacher, who had been presented with the living of St. Stephen’s in 1633, “opened a private conventicle” after the destruction of the Commonwealth from which he ministered to the “too-too credulous soul-murdered proselytes of Coleman Street and elsewhere.” We read of “Radical independents inhabiting the same quarter,” among them “Mark Holdesby of St. Stephen Coleman Street.”

So there is evidence here of a broad continuity over several centuries, from the Lollards to the Anabaptists, suggesting once again a certain destiny or pattern of purpose among the streets of the capital. Arthur Machen was only one commentator who recognised that “the stones and regions of the great wilderness have their destinies and that these destinies are fulfilled.” Thus there are certain “quarters which are appointed as sanctuaries.”

So the secret life of Clerkenwell, like its well, goes very deep. Many of its inhabitants seem to have imbibed the quixotic and fevered atmosphere of the area; somehow by being beyond the bars of the city, strange existences are allowed to flourish. Mrs. Lewson lived in Coldbath Square until her death at the age of 116; in the early nineteenth century she still wore the dress of the 1720s, thus earning herself the nickname of “Lady Lewson.” She lived in one room of a large house which for thirty years was “only occasionally swept out, but never washed.” In addition it is revealed in W.J. Pinks’s The History of Clerkenwell that “She never washed herself, because she thought those people who did so were always taking cold, or laying the foundation of some dreadful disorder; her method was to besmear her face and neck all over with hog’s lard, because that was soft and lubricating, and then, because she wanted a little colour on her cheeks, she bedaubed them with rose pink.” Her house was lined with bolts and boards and iron bars so that no one might enter, and she never threw anything away; even “the cinder ashes had not been removed for many years; they were very neatly piled up, as if formed into beds for some particular purpose.” The case of “Lady” Lewson has other parallels in London history; there are many instances of old women for whom time has suddenly come to a halt, and who characteristically wear white as some emblem of death or virginity. It may be that, for those whose lives have been damaged by the turbulence and inhumanity of the city, it is the only way of withstanding chance, change and fatality.

Another lady of Clerkenwell, living outside London time, was the Duchess of Newcastle, known as “Mad Madge.” She rode in a black and silver coach with her footmen all in black; in addition “she had many black patches because of pimples about her mouth,” wrote Samuel Pepys (1 May 1667), “… and a black juste-au-corps.” This lady in black wrote books of experimental philosophy, the most famous being The Description of A New World, called The Blazing World. “You will find my works,” she told a friend, “like infinite Nature, that hath neither beginning nor end; and as confused as the chaos, wherein is neither method nor order, but all mixed together, without separation, like light and darkness.” Pepys, having read some of them, called her “a mad, conceited, ridiculous woman.”

But if an area such as Clerkenwell can engender activity of a certain kind, perhaps a single street or house might exert its own influences. In the same house, where the Duchess of Newcastle once resided, lived another crazed duchess just fifteen years later. The Duchess of Albemarle on the death of her husband “was so immensely wealthy that pride crazed her, and she vowed never to marry anyone but a sovereign prince. In 1692 the Earl of Montague, disguising himself as the Emperor of China, won the mad woman, whom he then kept in constant confinement.” But she outlived him by thirty years, and to the end remained insane with pride; she insisted, for example, that all her servants knelt while ministering to her and then walked backwards in her presence. It is suggestive, perhaps, that the house which contained these two mad women was located on the same site as the cloister of the black nuns of the medieval period.

In Pentonville Road, in the parish of Clerkenwell, lived that most notorious miser Thomas Cooke, who did not care to pay for his food and drink but “when walking the streets he fell down in a pretended fit opposite to the house of one whose bounty he sought.” With his powdered wig and long ruffles, he seemed a respectable citizen; so he was promptly taken in, given some wine and nourishing victuals. “A few days after he would call at the house of his kind entertainer just at dinner time, professedly to thank him for having saved his life …” He begged his ink from the various counting-houses he visited and, according to Pinks, “his writing paper was obtained by purloining pieces which he saw upon the counter of the bank, on his daily visits.” Here is a true London original, taking advantage of the urban world to float himself. He turned his flower garden into a cabbage patch, which, in order to waste nothing, he enriched with his own and his wife’s excrement. On his death-bed, in the summer of 1811, he refused to pay for too much medicine since he was convinced that he would live only six days. He was buried at St. Mary’s, Islington, and “some of the mob who attended the funeral threw cabbage stalks on his coffin when it was lowered into the grave.” Yet it was a life consistent to the point of perfection, that of a native of Clerkenwell who rarely strayed beyond its bounds.

Yet perhaps the most curious and notable resident of Clerkenwell was Thomas Britton, known everywhere as “the musical small-coal man.” He was an itinerant vendor of coals who lived above his coal-shed in Jerusalem Passage, between Clerkenwell Green and St. John’s Square; despite his humble trade, in the words of Walford’s Old and New London, he “cultivated the highest branches of music, and drew round him for years all the great musicians of the day, including even the giant Handel.” The musicians met every Thursday evening, in his room above the coal-shed; to reach this temporary concert hall, they had to climb a ladder or, as Britton put it in his invitations:

Vpon Thursdays repair

To my palace, and there

Hobble up stair by stair.

Ned Ward described Britton’s house as “not much higher than a canarypipe, and the window of his State-Room but very little bigger than the Bunghole of a Cask.” He himself played the viol di gamba, in the company of his excellent musicians, and afterwards served coffee to his distinguished visitors at a penny a cup. Then in the mornings he would take up his sack of coal, and tread the familiar streets calling out his trade. Britton’s death was no less fanciful than his life. A ventriloquist named Honeyman or “Talking Smith” “threw” his voice and announced that, unless Britton recited the Lord’s Prayer immediately, he would expire within hours. Britton fell on his knees and prayed “but the chord of his life was unstrung by this sudden shock”; he died a few days later in the autumn of 1714. It was rumoured that he was a Rosicrucian, one of the sects which haunted Clerkenwell, and naturally believed in the efficacy of invisible spirits. So the trick of the ventriloquist, or the atmosphere of the area, deeply affected a credulous mind.

Another native of Clerkenwell, Christopher Pinchbeck, may also throw a curious light upon the neighbourhood. He proclaimed himself, in the summer of 1721, as the “Inventor and Maker of the famous Astronomical-Musical Clocks … for showing the various motions and Phenomena of planets and fixed stars, solving at sight several astronomical problems.” He has been denominated “The Near-Alchemist,” yet his was the alchemy of time which bore strange fruit in the vicinity.

By the end of the eighteenth century some seven thousand artisans-almost half the parish-were dependent upon watch-making. Clerkenwell itself produced some 120,000 watches each year. In almost every street there were private houses which had as door-plates the sign of escapement-maker, engine-turner, springer, finisher, and so on. These were modest but solid properties, with the workshop generally constructed at the back. But not all the tradesmen were so fortunately placed, and a nineteenth-century essay upon clocks in Charles Knight’s Cyclopaedia of London remarks that “if we wish to be introduced to the workman who has had the greatest share in the construction of our best clocks, we must often submit to be conducted up some narrow passage of our metropolis, and to mount into some dirty attic where we find illiterate ingenuity closely employed in earning a mere pittance.” The passages, closets and attics may be compared with the wheels and dials of the clocks themselves, so that Clerkenwell itself becomes a vast mechanism emblematic of time and the divisions of time. The census of 1861 listed 877 manufacturers of clocks and watches in this small parish. But why here? The historians of horology have pondered the question and arrived at no satisfactory conclusion; “the commencement of that remarkable localisation” is not certain, according to one authority cited by Charles Knight, except that “it appears to have made a noiseless progress.” Another remarks: “nor have we heard any plausible reason assigned by those who, residing on the spot, and carrying on these branches of manufacture, might be supposed to be best informed on the matter.” So, we may say, it just happened. It is one of those indecipherable and unknowable aspects of London existence. A certain trade emerges in a certain area. And that is all.

But in Clerkenwell we have learned, perhaps, to find larger patterns of activity. Did the presence of skilled artisans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries actively promote the cause of radicalism? By 1701 the manufacture of the watch was being used as the best example of the division of labour, so that one might say that the creation of time-pieces formed the paradigm of industrial capitalism. “Here every alley is thronged with small industries,” George Gissing wrote of Clerkenwell in The Nether World (1889), “here you may see how men have multiplied toil for toil’s sake … have worn their lives away imagining new forms of weariness.” Lenin and Eleanor Marx had found fertile ground. Or was it that the creation of the division and subdivision of time was an obvious neighbourhood idol, to be smashed by those patriotic radicals who wished to return to an earlier polity and a more innocent state of society? Nevertheless the clock-and watch-makers are there still. The mystery of the place remains.

The Marx Memorial Library is still to be found on Clerkenwell Green, within which is preserved the small office where Lenin once edited Iskra. Beside it are a snack bar and a restaurant, which have been owned by the same Italian family for many years. Until recent days Clerkenwell Green and its vicinity retained that dusty, faded look which was a direct inheritance of its past. It was secluded, out of the way of the busy areas to the south and west, something of a backwater which few Londoners visited except those whose business it was to be there. The green harboured printers, and jewellers, and precision-instrument makers, as it had done for many generations. St. John’s Street was dark and cavernous, lined with empty or dilapidated warehouses.

Then, in the 1990s, all was changed. Clerkenwell became part of a social revolution, in the process of which London seemed once more able to renew itself. The great transition occurred when Londoners decided that they would rather live in lofts or “shell” spaces than in terraced houses; these were not the same as Parisian apartments, since the loft offered inviolable privacy as well as proximity. Since Clerkenwell itself was noticeable for its warehouses and commercial properties, it became part of that movement of refurbishment and modernisation which had begun in the warehouses of Docklands before reaching other parts of inner London. St. John’s Street, and the lanes around it, have now been extensively redeveloped with floors of glass attached to old structures and new buildings rising so fast that parts of the area are now almost unrecognisable. As one character says in Arnold Bennett’s Riceyman Steps, a novel set in early twentieth-century Clerkenwell, “You’d scarcely think it … but this district was very fashionable once.” It was indeed “fashionable” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as even the presence of the mad duchesses testifies, and now perhaps that period has returned. Yet that same speaker when alone had another realisation, of “the ruthless, stoney, total inhospitality of the district.” Even in the middle of its restoration and rebuilding, St. John’s Street is curiously empty; from dusk to dawn it affords echoic effects rather than the energy of any real movement or business. One is reminded of the fact that in the eighteenth century travellers felt obliged to walk together down this road, guarded by link-boys bearing lights, in case they were harassed or attacked. Whether it was wise of property speculators and developers to choose the street as a great site of renovation is an interesting question, therefore, since it may not be easy to impose a new method of living upon a thoroughfare with so ancient and violent a past.

Clerkenwell persists in London’s history as a kind of shadowland, therefore, complete with its own recognisable if ambiguous identity. But it is also important to realise that the same effects may be found almost anywhere within the city. Of violence, for example, there is no end.

Violent London

An anonymous engraving of the Gordon Riots in London in 1780; here the mob attacks and fires Newgate Prison, one of the most hated symbols of the city’s oppressive authority.

CHAPTER 52

A Ring! A Ring!

London has always possessed a reputation for violence; it stretches back as far as the written records. In a signal instance of city savagery the coronation of Richard I in 1189, for example, was marked by the wholesale murder of the Jews in London; men, women and children were burned and cut to pieces in one of the first but not the last pogroms against resident foreigners. Under cover of the general savagery of the Peasants Revolt, which was also a London revolt, apprentices and others fell upon the Flemings and butchered many hundreds while “the cries of the slayers and slain went on long after sunset, making night hideous.”

But the violence was not directed at aliens alone. The record of bloody attacks upon tax-raisers like William de Aldgate (stabbed to death) and John Fuatara (finger bitten off by a woman) emphasises what one historian, G.A. Williams in Medieval London, has called the Londoner’s reputation for “reckless violence.” In the Latin records of London’s courts in the early thirteenth century, that violence is vividly depicted. “Roger struck Maud, Gilbert’s wife, with a hammer between the shoulders, and Moses struck her in the face with the hilt of his sword, breaking many of her teeth. She lingered until Wednesday before the feast of St. Mary Magdalen and then died … while he was conducting him to the sheriffs the thief killed him … They dragged him by the feet on to the stairs of the solar, beating him severely about the body and under the feet, and wounding him in the head.”

Violence was everywhere-“endemic” is the word used by one scholar. Robberies, assaults and manslaughters are recorded with predictable frequency; quarrels degenerated quickly into fatal affrays, while street fights often turned into mass riots. Random brutality was common, and at times of political crisis the crowd to the well-known cry of “Kill, kill!” would set upon perceived enemies with unmatched ferocity. Many of the trades-notoriously those of saddler, goldsmith and fishmonger-were prone to “periodical gusts of homicidal rage,” while the guilds fought one another in the most pugnacious way. The religious orders were not immune from violence. The prioress of Clerkenwell took barley from disputed land belonging to the prior of St. Bartholomew’s “with force and arms to wit with swords, bows and arrows.” The memoirs of every century are filled with blood lust.

There was also violence against animals. When a horse being baited by dogs seemed likely to be spared, a seventeenth-century London crowd “cryed out it was a cheat, and thereupon began to untyle the house, and threatened to pull it quite down, if the Horse were not brought again and baited to death. Whereupon the Horse was again brought to the place, and the dogs once more set upon him; but they not being able to overcome him he was run through with a sword and dyed.” Cock-fighting was the Shrove Tuesday sport of schoolboys, so that the young Londoner could acquire an early taste for blood and death. Bears and bulls were often baited together, and “at such times you can see the breed and mettle of the dogs, for although they receive serious injuries from the bears, are caught by the horns of the bull, and tossed into the air so frequently to fall down again upon the horns … one is obliged to pull them back by the tails and force open their jaws.” Evelyn, a more fastidious citizen than most, complained about the “barbarous cruelties” as well as the “rude and dirty” pastimes of the people. He remarked, on visiting the famous bear garden by the Bankside, that “One of the bulls tossed a dog full into a lady’s lap, as she sate in one of the boxes at a considerable height from the arena. Two poor dogs were killed: and so all ended with an ape on horseback.” It might be remarked that blood sports are common to every culture and to every city; nevertheless this form of London violence is described as something intrinsic and particular. As Dryden put it in the seventeenth century:

Bold Britons, at a brave Bear-garden fray,

Are rouz’d: and, chatt’ring Sticks, cry Play, Play, Play.

Mean time, your filthy Foreigner will stare, And utter to himself, Ha! gens barbare!

This was indeed how Europeans considered Londoners-as barbarous people-although, as Dryden’s couplets intimate, that ferocity was perhaps a matter of civic pride. “If two little boys quarrel in the street,” one seventeenth-century French traveller observed, “the passengers stop, make a ring round them in a moment, and set them against one another, that they may come to fisticuffs … During the fight the ring of bystanders encourages the combatants with great delight of heart … The fathers and mothers of the boys let them fight on as well as the rest.”

“A ring! A ring!” was one of the perennial cries of the London street. “The lower populace is of a brutal and insolent nature,” another traveller remarked, “and is very quarrelsome. Should two men of this class have a disagreement which they cannot end up amicably, they retire into some quiet place and strip from their waists upwards. Everyone who sees them preparing for a fight surrounds them, not in order to separate them, but on the contrary to enjoy the fight, for it is a great sport to the lookers-on … the spectators sometimes get so interested that they lay bets on the combatants and form a big circle around them.” This is “congenital to the character” of Londoners, according to yet another foreign reporter, which suggests how unfamiliar and alarming these street fights in fact were to non-Londoners.

Combats between men and women were also frequent-“I saw in Holbourn a woman engaged with a man … having struck her with the utmost force, he retreated back … the woman seized these intervals to fall upon his face and eyes with her hands … The Police take no cognizance of these combats of individuals.” By “the Police” is meant the watch in each ward, which took no notice of these fights because they were common and familiar. Yet it did not end there. “If a coachman has a dispute about his fare with a gentleman that has hired him, and the gentleman offers to fight him to decide the quarrel, the coachman consents with all his heart.” This pugnacity could, and often did, have fatal consequences. Two brothers fought, and one killed the other outside the Three Tuns Tavern-“His brother intending, it seems, to kill the coachman, who did not please him, this fellow stepped in and took away his sword, who thereupon took out his knife … and with that stabbed him.”

A “diversion” of the English, according to many reports, was female combat in places of resort and amusement such as Hockley-in-the-Hole. It was recorded that the “women fought almost naked with two handled swords which, at the points, were sharp as razors.” Both combatants were frequently cut with these weapons, and retired briefly to have their wounds “sown up” without the benefit of any anaesthetic other than their own animosity. The fight continued until one of the participants swooned, or was so badly wounded that she could fight no more. On one occasion, one combatant was twenty-one and the other sixty. It became a highly ritualised, if bloody, affair. The two female warriors would bow to the spectators and salute each other. One was decked in blue ribbons, the other in red; each carried a sword, about three and a half feet in length with a blade approximately three inches wide. With these fierce weapons, and only a wicker shield for defence, they attacked each other. In one fight a swordswoman “received a long and deep wound all across her neck and throat”; some coins were thrown to her from the crowd, but “she was too badly hurt to fight any more.”

The introductory “chaff” between the two women (one declaring, for instance, that she beat her husband every morning to keep her hand in) was also echoed in the advertisements or “notices” which preceded each fight. “I Elizabeth Wilson, of Clerkenwell, having had some words with Hannah Highfeld and requiring satisfaction, do invite her to meet me on the stage and box with me for three guineas, each woman holding half a crown in each hand, and the first woman that drops her money to lose the battle.” The coin was held to prevent the participants scratching each other. To which a reply was printed: “I Hannah Hyfeld, of Newgate Market, hearing of the resolution of Elizabeth, will not fail to give her more blows than words, desiring home blows and from her no favour.” The London Journal reported in June 1722 that “They maintained the battle with great valour for a long time, to the no small satisfaction of the spectators.”

Men also fought one another with swords, each with a “second” bearing a large wooden club to ensure fair play, and again the struggle ended only when the participants’ wounds were too disabling for them to continue. On many occasions the audiences joined in the battle. “But Lord!” Pepys wrote, “to see in a minute the whole stage was full of watermen to revenge the foul play, and the butchers to defend their fellow, though most blamed him; and there they all fell to it, to knocking down and cutting many on each side. It was pleasant to see, but that I stood in the pit, and feared that in the tumult I might get some hurt.” This account emphasises the almost tribal loyalties engaged in civic violence, the effect of which could be witnessed in even the most “polite” circles. When the speculator Barebone engaged some workmen to build upon Red Lion Fields, the lawyers of the adjacent Gray’s Inn “took notice of it, and thinking it an injury upon them, went with a considerable body of one hundred persons; upon which the workmen assaulted the gentlemen, and flung bricks at them, and the gentlemen at them again; so a sharp engagement ensued.”

The tribalism of the city was manifested, in a no less unhappy way, with the exploits of a group of young people known as the Mohocks, named after “a sort of cannibals in India,” according to the Spectator, “who subsist by plundering and devouring all the nations about them.” These young Londoners would rush down the streets with linked arms for the pleasure “of fighting and sometimes maiming harmless foot passengers and even defenceless women.” Street-brawling has an ancient history within the city, and similar gangs of youths were known in previous generations as Muns and Tityre-Tus, then Hectors and Scourers, and then Nickers and Hawkubites. The Mohocks themselves began the evening by drinking too much, before tumbling on to the streets with their swords ready. The consequences are revealed in Walford’s Old and New London. As “soon as the savage pack had run down their victim, they surrounded him, and formed a circle with the points of their swords. One gave him a puncture in the rear, which very naturally made him wheel about; then came a prick from another; and so they kept him spinning like a top.” That is why they became known as Sweaters, and also as Slashers since in more ferocious mood they took pleasure “in tattooing, or slashing people’s faces with, as Gay wrote, ‘new invented wounds.’” Another poet of London has memorialised their exploits in more expressive verse:

And in luxurious cities, where the noise

Of riot ascends above their loftiest towers,

And injury and outrage, and when night

Darkens the streets, then wander forth the sons

Of Belial, flown with insolence and wine.

So did John Milton place the violence of London within the context of myth and eternity.

Within the context of the streets, the Mohocks were not alone in their depredations. In the 1750s William Shenstone wrote that “London is really dangerous at this time; the pickpockets, formerly content with mere filching, make no scruple to knock people down with bludgeons in Fleet Street and the Strand, and that at no later hour than eight o’clock at night; but in the Piazzas, Covent Garden, they come in large bodies, armed with couteaus, and attack whole parties.” Here is a graphic illustration of how at night the city, without an adequate police force, could become terrifying. Sir John Coventry had his nose slit by a street gang. A courtesan named Sally Salisbury, displeased by an admirer’s speeches, “seized a knife and plunged it into his body”; she was conveyed to Newgate, surrounded by plaudits. “Now it is the general complaint of the taverns, the coffee-houses, the shop-keepers and others,” wrote the City Marshal in 1718, “that their customers are afraid when it is dark to come to their houses and shops for fear that their hats and wigs should be snitched from their heads or their swords taken from their sides, or that they may be blinded, knocked down, or stabbed; nay, the coaches cannot secure them, but they are likewise cut and robbed in the public streets etc. By which means the traffic of the City is much interrupted.”

“Traffic” is as much in goods as in vehicles, and this is one of the indications that the prosperity of the city was being threatened by the violent propensities of some of its citizens. In this period, too, the apprentices would “go to Temple Bar in the evening, set up a shouting and clear the pavement between that and Fleet Market of all the persons there. The boys all knew boxing, and if anyone resisted one or two would fall upon him and thrash him on the spot, nobody interfered.”

James Boswell was very observant of the streets in the decade after Fielding’s death (1754). “The rudeness of the English vulgar is terrible,” he confided to his diary in December 1762. “This indeed is the liberty which they have: the liberty of bullying and being abusive with their blackguard tongues.” On many occasions he would have heard the familiar shouts of “Marry, come up!” and “Damn your eyes!” A month later he was reporting that “I was really uneasy going home. Robberies in the street are now very frequent” and then, in the summer of 1763, he recorded that “There was a quarrell between a gentleman and a waiter. A great crowd gathered round, and roared out ‘A ring-a ring.’” It may also be that in that cry there is a folk memory of the chant “A ring-a ring of roses” which commemorated the period of the Plague when scarlet tokens upon the flesh were harbingers of death. In the streets of London, fear and violence are fatally mingled.

In the eighteenth century there are accounts of mobs with lighted torches and sticks or clubs; their leaders would read out the names of people, or of specific streets, in order to direct the violence against local targets. Houses and factories and mills could be literally pulled down; looms were cut apart. Sometimes we can hear them shouting-“Green you bugger, why don’t you fire? We will have your heart and liver!” There is also a remarkable collection of threatening letters, which testifies to the spirited and violent language of Londoners when addressing one another, “Sir, Damn Your Blood if You do not Ryes Your Works Too 2 pence a Pair moor We Well Blow your Braines out For We will Bllow your Brans out if You Doo not Do itt You slim Dog We shall sett You Houes on fier … if you do not Lay the Money at the place that we shall mention we will set your House and all that belongs to you on fire for it is in my power for to do it … Mr. Obey, we gave you now an Egg Shell of Honey, but if you refuse to comply with the demands of yesterday, we’ll give you a Gallon of Thorns to your final Life’s End.”

It is perhaps significant, in the context of the violent language of London, that much Cockney dialect springs immediately from pugilism: “breadbasket” for stomach, “kisser” for mouth, “conk” for nose, “pins” for legs and “knock-aht” for a sensation. Many of the words for beating, such as “hammer,” “lick,” “paste,” “whack” and “scrap,” also derive from the ring, suggesting that the vernacular of confrontation and pugnacity remains very much to the taste of the Londoner.

Fights took place off the streets as often as upon them, and the printed records testify to the fact that the “lower” drinking clubs and alehouses were characterised by violence as well as liquor. William Hickey reported upon his visit to a den called Wetherby’s in Little Russell Street off Drury Lane where “the whole room was in an uproar, men and women promiscuously mounted upon chairs, tables, and benches, in order to see a sort of general conflict carrying on upon the floor. Two she-devils, for they scarce had a human appearance, were engaged in a scratching and boxing match, their faces entirely covered with blood, bosoms bare, and the clothes nearly torn from their bodies. For several minutes not a creature interfered between them, or seemed to care a straw what mischief they might do each other, and the contest went on with unabated fury.” Here it is the indifference and callousness of the crowd that are most evident, an indifference which, it can be presumed, was carried over into their general demeanour at work or upon the streets. The phrase “Never mind it” was a frequent one. Another phrase in Hickey’s account, “promiscuously mounted,” also, if no doubt inadvertently, introduces the element of sexual excitement and sexual congress into this account of bloody combat; sex and violence are, in the city, indissolubly connected.

Hickey watched another beating in a corner of Wetherby’s where “an uncommonly athletic young man of about twenty five seemed to be the object of universal attack.” Hickey then experienced, naturally enough, “an eager wish to get away” but was stopped at the door. “No, no, youngster,” he was told, “no tricks upon travellers. No exit here until you have passed muster, my chick”; not until he had paid his “reckoning,” in other words, or had his purse stolen. He was then called a “sucker,” a word which lingered for more than two hundred years. Hickey was literally imprisoned within “this absolute hell upon earth” which then itself became a very emblem of the city as a prison.

no biography of London would be complete without reference to the most violent and widespread riot of its last thousand years. It started as a demonstration against legislation in favour of Roman Catholics, but quickly turned into a general assault upon the institutions of the state and the city.

On 2 June 1780, Lord George Gordon assembled four columns of his supporters in St. George’s Fields, in Lambeth, and led them to Parliament Square in order to protest against the Catholic Relief Act; Gordon himself was a quixotic figure of strange and marginal beliefs, but one who managed to inspire the vengeful imagination of the city for five days. He always protested, in later confinement, that he had never meant to uncork the fury of the mob, but he never properly understood the moods and sudden fevers of the city. His supporters were described as “the better sort of tradesmen,” and Gordon himself had declared that for the march against Parliament they should be decent and “dressed in their sabbath days cloaths.” But no crowd in London remains unmixed for long; soon more violent anti-papist elements, such as the weavers of Spitalfields bred from Huguenot stock, merged with the general crowd.

Charles Dickens, in Barnaby Rudge, has given an account of the riots; the novel is fired by his interest in violence and by his fascination with crowds but it is also conceived after much reading and research. From the Annual Register of 1781, for example, he could have learned that the day was “intensely hot, and the sun striking down his fiercest rays upon the field those who carried heavy banners began to grow faint and weary.” Yet they marched in the heat three abreast, the main column some four miles in length, and when they converged outside Westminster they raised a great yell. The heat now inflamed them, as they invaded the lobbies and passages of Parliament. So great was the crowd that “a boy who had by some means got among the concourse, and was in imminent danger of suffocation, climbed to the shoulders of a man beside him and walked upon the people’s hats and heads into the open street.” Now this great multitude threatened the government itself; their petition was carried into the chamber of the House of Commons while, outside, the crowd screamed and yelled in triumph. They even threatened to invade the chamber but, even as they threw themselves against the doors, a rumour spread that armed soldiers were advancing in readiness to confront them. “Fearful of sustaining a charge in the narrow passages in which they were so closely wedged together, the throng poured out as impetuously as they had flocked in.” In the ensuing flight a body of Horse Guards surrounded some of the rioters and escorted them as prisoners to Newgate; this removal was, as events demonstrated, an unfortunate one.

The mob dispersed, among a hundred rumours which resounded through the city, only to gather itself again as evening approached. Doors and windows were barred as the nervous citizenry prepared itself for further violence. The crowd had diverted its energies from Westminster to Lincoln’s Inn Fields where a notorious “mass house” was situated; it was in fact the private chapel of the Sardinian ambassador, but no diplomatic nicety could assuage the temper of the mob which burned it down and demolished its interior. According to a contemporary report “the Sardinian Ambassador offered five hundred guineas to the rabble to save the painting of our Saviour from the flames, and 1,000 guineas not to destroy an exceeding fine organ. The gentry told him they would burn him if they could get at him, and destroyed the picture and organ directly.” So opened a path of destruction which would burn its way across London.

The next day, Saturday, was relatively quiet. On the following morning, however, a mob met in the fields near Welbeck Street and descended upon the Catholic families of Moorfields. There they burned out houses and looted a local Catholic chapel. On Monday the violence and looting continued, but now it was also directed against the magistrates involved in confining some of the anti-Catholic rioters to Newgate as well as against the politicians who had inaugurated the pro-Catholic legislation. Wapping and Spitalfields were in flames. It was not a “No Popery” protest now but a concerted assault upon the established authorities.

Yet in promoting disorder they had themselves fallen out of all order or preconcerted arrangement. When “they divided into parties and ran to different quarters of the town, it was on the spontaneous suggestion of the moment. Each party swelled as it went along, like rivers as they roll towards the sea … each tumult took shape and form from the circumstances of the moment.” Workmen, putting down their tools, apprentices, rising from their benches, boys running errands, all joined different bands of rioters. They believed that, because they were so many, they could not be caught. Many of the participants were in turn motivated “by poverty, by ignorance, by the love of mischief, and the hope of plunder.” This is again according to Dickens, but he was one who knew the temper and atmosphere of London. He understood that, once one breach had been made in the security and safety of the city, others would follow. The city enjoyed a very fragile equilibrium, and could be rendered unsteady in a moment. “The contagion spread like a dread fever: an infectious madness, as yet not near its height, seized on new victims every hour, and society began to tremble at their ravings.” The image of distemper runs through London’s history; when it is combined with the imagery of the theatre, where each incendiary incident becomes a “scene,” we are able to glimpse the complicated life of the city.

On Tuesday, the day of Parliament’s reassembly, the crowds once more gathered at Westminster. It is recorded in “Lord George Gordon’s Narrative” that when the members of the Commons were informed that “people from Wapping were just then arriving with large beams in their hands and seemed determined to make an attack upon the soldiers” it was decided that the session should be adjourned. There were now mobs all over the city; most citizens wore a blue cockade to signal their allegiance to the rioters, and houses displayed a blue flag with the legend “No Popery” inscribed upon their doors and walls. Most of the shops were closed, and throughout London there was fear of violence “the like of which had never been beheld, even in its ancient and rebellious times.” Troops had been stationed at all the major vantage points, but they also seemed to be sympathetic to the cries and demands of the mob. The Lord Mayor felt unable, or was unwilling, to issue direct orders to arrest or shoot the rioters. So fires and destruction started up in various areas.

A contemporary account, in a letter by Ignatius Sancho written from Charles Street dated this Tuesday, 6 June and reprinted in Xavier Baron’s exhaustive London 1066-1914, complains that “in the midst of the most cruel and ridiculous confusion, I am now set down to give you a very imperfect sketch of the maddest people that the maddest times were ever plagued with … There is at this present moment at least a hundred thousand poor, miserable, ragged rabble, from twelve to sixty years of age, with blue cockades in their hats, besides half as many women and children, all parading the streets, the Bridge, the Park, ready for any and every mischief. Gracious God, what’s the matter now? I was obliged to leave off, the shouts of the mob, the horrid clashing of swords, and the clutter of a multitude in swiftest motion drew me to the door where every one in the street was employed in shutting up shop. It is now just five o’clock, the ballad mongers are exhausting their musical talents with the downfall of Popery, Sandwich and North … This instant about two thousand liberty boys are swearing and swaggering by with large sticks, thus armed in hopes of meeting with the Irish chairmen and labourers. All the Guards are out and all the horse, the poor fellows are just worn out for want of rest, having been on duty ever since Friday. Thank heavens, it rains.”

The letter is interesting because of its rush and immediacy, and it is worth noting, for example, that the correspondent writes of the demonstrators being “poor, miserable, ragged”; in more scathing terms Dickens describes them as “the Scum and refuse” of the city. So here we have a vast army of the disadvantaged and the dispossessed turning upon the city with fire and vengeance. If ever London came close to a general conflagration, this was the occasion. It was the most significant rebellion of the poor in its entire history.

A postscript to the letter from Charles Street has equally interesting news. “There is about a thousand mad men armed with clubs, bludgeons and crows, just now set off for Newgate, to liberate, they say, their honest comrades.” The firing of Newgate, and the release of its prisoners, remains the single most astonishing and significant act of violence in the history of London. The houses of certain judges and law-makers had already been burned down, but as the various columns of rioters descended upon the prison to the cry of “Now Newgate!,” something more fundamental was taking place. One of these leading the riot described it as “the Cause”; on being asked what this cause was, he replied: “There should not be a prison standing on the morrow in London.” Clearly this was not simply an attempt to release the “No Popery” rioters incarcerated a few days before. This was a blow against the oppressive penal institutions of the city, and those who watched the spectacle of the fire received the impression that “not only the whole metropolis was burning, but all nations yielding to the final consummation of all things.”

The columns marched on the prison from all directions, from Clerkenwell and Long Acre, from Snow Hill and Holborn, and they assembled in front of its walls at a little before eight o’clock that Tuesday evening. They surrounded the house of the Keeper, Richard Akerman, which fronted the street beside the prison. A man appeared on the rooftop, asking what it was that they wanted. “You have got some friends of ours in your custody, master.” “I have a good many people in my custody.” One of the mob leaders, a black servant called John Glover, was heard to cry out: “Damn you, Open the Gate or we will Burn you down and have Everybody out.” No satisfactory answer was given, and so the mob fell upon Akerman’s house. “What contributed more than any thing to the spread of the flames,” one eyewitness, Thomas Holcroft, reported, “was the great quantity of household furniture, which they threw out of the windows, piled up against the doors, and set fire to; the force of which presently communicated to the house, from the house to the Chapel and from thence, by the assistance of the mob, all through the prison.” It seems to have been the actual sight of the prison, with its great walls and barred windows, which roused the mob to fury and instilled in them a determination as fiery as the brands which they flung against the gate.

That great door was the focus of their early efforts; all the furniture of the Keeper’s house was piled against it and, smeared with pitch and tar, was soon ablaze. The prison door became a sheet of flame, burning so brightly that the clock of the church of the Holy Sepulchre could clearly be seen. Some scaled the walls and threw down blazing torches upon the roof. Holcroft went on to report that “A party of constables, to the amount of a hundred, came to the assistance of the keeper; these the mob made a lane for, and suffered to pass until they were entirely encircled, when they attacked them with great fury, broke their staffs and converted them into brands, which they hurled wherever the fire, which was spreading very fast, had not caught.”

The poet George Crabbe watched the violence and recalled that “They broke the roof, tore away the rafters, and having got ladders they descended. Not Orpheus himself had more courage or better luck; flames all around them, and a body of soldiers expected, they defied and laughed at all opposition.” Crabbe was one of four poets who observed these events, Johnson, Cowper and Blake comprising the others. It has been suggested that all the defiance and laughter of the incendiary mob are represented in one of Blake’s drawings of this year, Albion Rose, which shows a young man stretching out his arms in glorious liberation. Yet the association is unlikely; the horror and pathos of the night’s events instilled terror, not exultation, in all those who observed them.

When the fire had taken hold of the prison, for example, the prisoners themselves were in peril of being burned alive. Another witness, Frederick Reynolds, recalled that “The wild gestures of the mob without and the shrieks of the prisoners within, expecting instantaneous death from the flames, the thundering descent of huge pieces of building, the deafening clangour of red-hot iron bars striking in terrible concussion on the pavement below, and the loud, triumphant yells and shouts of the demoniac assailants on each new success, formed an awful and terrific scene.” Eventually the gate, charred and still in flames, began to give way; the crowd forced a path through the burning timbers and entered the gaol itself.

Holcroft noted that “The activity of the mob was amazing. They dragged out the prisoners by the hair of the head, by arms or legs, or whatever part they could lay hold of. They broke the doors of the different entrances as easily as if they had all their lives been acquainted with the intricacies of the place, to let the confined escape.” They ran down the stone passages, screaming exultantly, their cries mixing with the yells of the inmates seeking release and relief from the burning fragments of wood and the encroaching fire. Bolts and locks and bars were wrenched apart as if the strength of the mob had some unearthly vigour.

Some were carried out exhausted and bleeding; some came out shuffling in chains and were immediately taken in triumph to a local blacksmith to the shrieks of “A clear way! A clear way!” from the multitude who surrounded with joy those who had been released. More than three hundred prisoners were liberated. Some had escaped from imminent execution, and were like men resurrected; others were hurried away by friends; others, habituated to the prison, wandered in astonishment and bewilderment through the wreckage of Newgate. Other prisons were fired and opened that night, and it was- for that night, at least-as if the whole world of law and punishment had been utterly demolished. In subsequent years the Londoners of the area recalled the unearthly light which seemed to shine from the very stones and streets of the city. The city was momentarily transformed.

It was appropriate, therefore, that the crowd should then make its way from the burning ruins of the prison to the home of the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Mansfield, in Bloomsbury Square. It is one of the aspects of eighteenth-century London that the house of every notable or notorious citizen was well known. The serried spearpoint railings were torn down and hurled within; the windows were broken; the mob entered the house, went through all of its rooms, broke or set fire to its furniture. Mansfield’s paintings and manuscripts were consigned to the fire, together with the contents of his law library; this, in vivid form, was the burning of the Law. A curious episode might be mentioned here, as all the power and oppression of the city are despatched to the flames. From the window of the burning house one demonstrator exhibited to the roaring mob “a child’s doll-a poor toy … as the image of some unholy saint.” On reading this account Dickens immediately assumed that it was a token of that which the late occupants had worshipped but in fact this strangely anonymous, almost barbaric, object can be seen as the deity of the crowd.

On the following morning Samuel Johnson toured the scene of that night’s riots. “On Wednesday I walked with Dr. Scot to look at Newgate, and found it in ruins with the fire yet glowing. As I went by the Protestants were plundering the Sessions-house at the Old Bailey. There were not, I believe, a hundred; but they did their work at leisure, in full security, without sentinels, without trepidation, as men lawfully employed, in full day.” He added a curious statement: “Such is the cowardice of a commercial place.” By this he meant, no doubt, that there was no communal spirit or civic pride abroad to avert or prohibit these outrages; London, as a commercial city, had no defences except those of fear and oppression. When those twin guarantors of security were lifted, then theft and violence naturally and inevitably emerged in their stead. A “commercial place” is an arena of rapine and anxiety under another name. Samuel Johnson, who understood the pleasures and virtues of the city, also understood its debilitating faults better than any of his contemporaries.

But that day witnessed more than the smoking ruins of the Law. Horace Walpole termed it, in a phrase that was not then a cliché, “Black Wednesday.” It might almost have been termed Red Wednesday. That morning the “cowardice” of London was manifest in the closed shops and shuttered windows. Many of the citizens were so dismayed and astounded by the destruction of Newgate, and the complete failure of the city authorities to punish or apprehend those who were responsible, that it seemed to them that the whole fabric of reality was being torn apart before their eyes. And “round the smoking ruins people stood apart from one another and in silence, not venturing to condemn the rioters, or to be supposed to do so, even in whispers.” There was another curious aspect of this lawlessness. Some prisoners lately released sought out their gaolers, “preferring imprisonment and punishment to the horrors of such another night as the last,” while others actually returned to Newgate in order to wander among the smoking ruins of their erstwhile place of confinement. They were brought there by some “indescribable attraction,” according to Dickens, and they were found talking, eating and even sleeping in the places where their cells had once stood. It is a curious story but somehow all of a piece with the greater story of London, where many will dwell upon the same stones for the whole of their lives.

Troops had been stationed throughout the city, but the energy and purpose of the rioters were not significantly diminished; in fact the burning of the night before seemed only to have increased their rage and resentment. Threatening letters were posted up outside those prisons which had remained secure, including the Fleet and the King’s Bench, assuring their keepers and gaolers that they would be fired that night; the houses of prominent legislators were similarly picked out. The leaders of the riot declared that they would take and fire the Bank, the Mint and the Royal Arsenal-and that they would occupy the royal palaces. A rumour spread that the demonstrators would also throw open the gates of Bedlam, thus contributing a curious terror to the general fear of the citizens. Truly then the city would become a hell with the desperate, the doomed and the distracted wandering its streets against buildings collapsing and houses on fire.

That night it seemed that the fire of 1666 had come again. The rioters emerged upon the streets “like a great sea,” and it seemed their purpose “to wrap the city in a circle of flame.” Thirty-six major fires were started-the prisons of the Fleet, the King’s Bench and the Clink were all alight-while the soldiers fired upon the crowds with sometimes fatal effect. Some of the greatest conflagrations were in the vicinity of Newgate itself, beside Holborn Bridge and Holborn Hill, as if the destruction of the previous night had somehow magnetised the area so that it drew more vengeance upon itself. The image of the blank-faced doll, as some anonymous and infernal deity of the riotous city, seems appropriate.

Samuel Johnson wrote to Mrs. Thrale that “one might see the glare of conflagration fill the sky from many parts. The sight was dreadful.” And, from Horace Walpole: “I never till last night saw London and Southwark in flames.” This spectacle of the burning city, again according to Johnson, created a “universal panick.” There were sporadic riots on the next day, Thursday, but the incandescent scenes of the day before seem to have exhausted that lust for violence which had so suddenly visited the streets of London. The military had been posted at all the appropriate sites, while bands of soldiers were actively seeking out and arresting rioters, so that by Friday the city was quiet. Many of those who had left London in fear of their lives still remained apart, and the majority of shops were closed, but the insurrection had passed as quickly and as generally as it had gathered just a week before. Two hundred were dead, more lying badly and often fatally injured, while no one was able to compute the numbers of those who had burned to death in cellars or hiding-places. Lord George Gordon was arrested and taken to the Tower of London, and hundreds of rioters were confined in the prisons that had not already been destroyed by fire. Twenty-five were hanged on the spots where their crimes had been committed; two or three boys were suspended before Lord Mansfield’s house in Bloomsbury Square.

So ended the most violent internecine episode in the city’s history. Like all London violence it burned brightly but quickly, the stability and reality of the city being distorted by the heat of its flames before once more settling down.

The violence upon the Broadwater Farm Estate, in north London, in 1985, suggests a prevalent instinct towards riot which has never been suppressed. It is necessary only to look into the inner courtyards of a council-house estate, with graffiti on every wall, the windows covered with metal grilles and the doors padlocked, to understand that state of siege in which part of London still lives. The anxiety is still palpable in certain districts, and along certain roads, where the forces of repressed anger and fear are overwhelmingly present. An additional and unpredictable element in the general level of city violence is added in those parts of London that are infected with drug gangs.

The Broadwater Farm disruption began in the autumn of 1985, upon a predominantly black council estate, where for several months there had been “rumours of riots.” A series of separate incidents in the early autumn had exacerbated already emerging tensions. But the death of Mrs. Cynthia Jarrett on the night of 5 October, allegedly while the police were searching her flat, precipitated the disturbances upon the estate. The official report, Broadwater Farm Enquiry (1986), includes the statements of witnesses as well as descriptive analysis of the violence itself. “So I thought: ‘Oh my God they down there and those children are there.’” The actions of the police were reported in similar fashion. “There was cries of ‘wait until we get in there and get you … get back in there, you bastards, get back in there’ … The only people who may not have been pushed back were a few of the older ones … A lot of people said ‘No. Don’t go back. Why should we go back?’ … It was a general state of confusion. There were young girls there with young children and then a lot of screaming, a lot of shouting.” These could be the voices of any angry crowd, scattered across London over the past centuries, but it is incarnated here within a group of black youths confronted by lines of police in riot gear attempting to force them back upon the council estate as if they were prisoners being driven back into their cells.

“Some of the youths then began to turn over cars, and missiles were thrown at a line of police. Two cars were turned over and burned close to the junction. They attempted to turn over another car but were stopped … Soon after a wall at the corner of Willan Road and The Avenue was knocked down and dismantled for ammunition to throw at the police line. The fighting had started.” It spread rapidly, in characteristic fashion, and from the estate came “constant volleys of dangerous missiles. Slabs of pavement were broken up and thrown. When the available slabs from nearby were used up, young people were seen rushing through the estate carrying missiles in various containers. A shopping trolley, a milk crate and a large communal rubbish bin were all mentioned to us as being used. At a later stage, tins stolen from the supermarket became a common form of ammunition.” Once more the common “reality” of the city was being disrupted and changed. Crude and often ineffective petrol bombs were hurled at the encroaching police. “Two people, both black, started shouting orders at the others: ‘we need more ammunition.’ Immediately five or six responded by running round the houses gathering up empty milk bottles, while four others turned over a car for petrol. In less than five minutes I counted more than 50 petrol bombs completed.” Curiously and perhaps significantly this testimony came from “Michael Keith, a research assistant at St. Katherine’s College, Oxford” who “had been preparing a history of rioting.” So the historical dimension or historical resonance is confirmed by one who, witnessing the events of 1985, had other riots in his head. Perhaps the Gordon Riots provided an echo or parallel.

Many of the demonstrators wore masks or scarves in order to conceal their identity, but, as in previous incidents over the centuries, some emerged who took command of the riots. “It was like when you look at ants,” one witness on Broadwater Farm explained, “you see how ants move and you identify which ones are the workers. Because you see them from high. Now what I saw, was three or four people moving and giving signs to each other with their hands … and they were moving like a group. You could see they were white by the hands.” One of the characteristics of accounts of the Gordon Riots was the allegation that secret managers exploited the violence and mayhem for their own ends. On Broadwater Farm the same phenomenon emerged. “They were outsiders doing it to our Estate,” a witness explained, suggesting in turn that there are some people who relish urban conflagration for its own sake or as a means of affecting the entire social and political system. The fact that these strange organisers were apparently white, as witnessed by others, may suggest that sixth columnists wanted to inflame hatred against the black Londoners who lived upon the estate.

Yet the general movement of the crowd was as ever one of controlled confusion. The historian of rioting noted that “Most of the people were united by a sense of anger which regularly escalated to fury. In this situation a dramatic cast, representative of any cross-section of society, was clearly evident.” Here his understanding of the patterns of riot comes into play, with his reference to “a dramatic cast” as if it were part of London’s theatre. He mentioned those, too, who attempted to compete in their bravery and aggression against the ranks of the police. “Many more spent most of their time giving moral support, joking with each other, but no less committed in occasional forays.” He noticed some who tried to establish a plan of concerted action and impose order upon incipient chaos. But they were not wholly successful. “In this sense,” he concluded, “organisation was extemporised.” These are precisely the sentiments expressed by those who watched the unfolding of the Gordon Riots, and they suggest a great truth about violence in the city.

Another witness observed that “When people thought that their lines were a bit thin, then they went to reinforce the lines running from one point to another. There were no generals.” This suggests another aspect of London riots; they are rarely orchestrated but patterns emerge from within the crowd itself. It might also be construed as part of that egalitarian spirit of the city that there can be no “generals” or leaders. One observer on the Broadwater Farm, speaking of the rioters, was “struck by how young they were. She saw ‘kids of 12 and 13.’” It may be recalled here that children were hanged in the aftermath of the Gordon Riots.

After the first confrontation there was no sustained attack but intermittent forays. Cars were overturned and shops looted. “I discovered he was an Irish boy and he said that it’s the first time he has had so much food in six months because he’s unemployed.” Yet the most violent incident took place in the Tangmere precinct of the estate. One of the policemen despatched to guard the fire-fighters putting out a blaze in a newsagent’s shop, PC Keith Blakelock, slipped and fell in the face of a pursuing mob. D. Rose, in A Climate of Fear, takes up the narrative. “The rioters came at Blakelock from all sides … he was kicked on the ground and stabbed again and again.” Here we have an example of the sudden viciousness of a London mob. “In the words of PC Richard Coombes, the mob were like vultures, pecking at his body as his arms rose and fell to death with their blows.” Another observer described them as “a pack of dogs,” inadvertently using a simile which has become customary in dealing with the threatening crowd. Older than Shakespeare’s line in Coriolanus, “What would you have, you curs?,” it suggests the wildness and the untamed savagery latent within the civic order. “The instruments were going up and down being flayed at him. The last I saw of PC Blakelock was he had his hand up to protect himself … Blakelock’s hands and arms were cut to ribbons … His head seems to have turned to one side, exposing his neck. There he took a savage cut from a machete.” And there he died.

It was another terrible episode in the history of London violence, where all the rituals of blood and vengeance have their place. The Tangmere precinct itself “is a big, squat building, shaped in conscious imitation of a Babylonian ziggurat.” Babylon is ever associated with paganism and savagery.

There were gunshots, and sporadic fires started upon the estate, but by midnight the rioters had begun to disperse. It started to rain. The violence ended as quickly and as suddenly as it had begun except, that is, for examples of brutality among the police towards various unnamed and still unknown suspects. That same pattern of vengeance was no doubt also part of the aftermath of the Gordon Riots.

It would be absurd to declare that these two events, separated by two hundred years, are identical in character and in motive. The fact that one was on a general and the other on a local scale, for example, is a comment on London’s huge expansion over that period. One travelled along the streets, and the other was confined to the precincts of a council estate; this also testifies to changes within the society of London. Yet both sets of riots were against the power of the law, symbolised by the walls of Newgate Prison in the one case and by the ranks of police officers in riot gear in the other. It might be said that both therefore reflect a deep unease about the nature and presence of authority. The Gordon rioters were generally poor, part of the forgotten citizenry of London, and the inhabitants of the Broadwater Farm Estate were, according to Stephen Inwood, predominantly “homeless, unemployed or desperate.” There may, again, be a connection. In both cases, however, the riots burned themselves out fierily and quickly. They had no real leaders. They had no real purpose except that of destruction. Such is the sudden fury of London.

Black Magic, White Magic

A woodcut from the title page of Astrologaster or the figure casterby John Melton; Londoners were notoriously fearful and superstitious so astrologers and seers of every variety were readily available. Many astrologers congregated in lodgings around Seven Dials.

CHAPTER 53

I Met a Man Who Wasn’t There

And in this dark city, whom or what would we expect to see? In 1189 Richard of Devizes records that “a sacrifice of the Jews to their father the devil was commenced in the city of London, and so long was the duration of this famous mystery, that the holocaust could scarcely be accomplished the ensuing day.” But then it truly became a city of devils as the citizens fell upon, and slaughtered, the innocent inhabitants of old Jewry.

In London, the home of pride and wealth, the devil was always greatly feared. In 1221, according to the Chronicles of London, “that ys to say vpon seynt Lukys Day, ther Blewe a grete Wynde out off the North Est, that ouerthrewe many an house and also Turrettes and Chirches, and fferde ffoule with the Woddes and Mennys orcherdes. And also fyrye Dragons Wykked Spyrites weren many seyn, merveyllously ffleynge in the eyre.” A similar vision of flying fiends was vouchsafed at a much later date in London’s history in Stopford Brooke’s Diary: “Oct. 19, 1904. England was in sunshine till we came to the skirts of London, and there the smoke lay thick. I looked down to the streets below, filled with the restless crowd of men and cars. It was like looking into the alleys of Pandemonium, and I thought I saw thousands of winged devils rushing to and fro among the mad movement of the host. I grew sick as I looked upon it.”

In medieval London many noble personages were buried within the precincts of Blackfriars, suitably robed, because it was believed that to be interred in the habit of a Dominican monk was a certain means of warding off the devil. Yet there were some who were so far beaten down by the city that they identified with the fiend. When one London thief and beggar was taunted for his infamy on his way to the Tyburn gallows he replied: “What would the Devil do for company, if it was not for such as I?” “A Straunge Sighted Traueller,” of 1608, coming to London in a poem by Samuel Rowlands, visited the whores of Shoreditch and the statue of King Lud, “and swore in London he had seene the Deuill.” A real devil was supposed to have appeared at a performance of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus in the Belle Sauvage Inn on Ludgate Hill.

Yet when the devil does emerge in London he is often, according to folklore, gulled and outwitted by the cheating citizens who are more than his match in dishonesty and double-dealing. In Jonson’s The Devil Is an Ass, the foul fiend is first shown the city as a kind of inferno:

Child of hell, this is nothing! I will fetch thee a leap

From the top of Paul’s steeple, to the Standard in Cheap.

But within twenty-four hours “he has been cheated, robbed, cudgelled, thrown into prison and condemned to be hanged.”

The devil can be found everywhere and anywhere in London, ranging far and wide from his own street, Devil’s Lane in Lower Holloway which has since been renamed. Richard Brothers, the self-styled prophet, claimed to have met him “walking leisurely up Tottenham Court Road.” Some claim to have seen him near the stake of the martyrs-“Thou art the seat of the Beast, O Smithfield”-and, at midnight in the streets of Victorian London, where “The devil puts a diamond ring on his taloned finger, sticks a pin in his shirt, and takes his walks abroad.” In ancient fashion Punch tells Old Nick that “I know you have a deal of business when you come to London.” One of the devil’s duties is to wander through the prisons. Coleridge and Southey envisaged him touring the notorious Coldbath Prison, and admiring the interior of the cell set aside for solitary confinement. Byron called London the “Devil’s drawing-room.”

He has his guests, and his familiars. There is a tradition of witches in London, with the names of Old Mother Red Cap and Old Mother Black Cap still used upon shops and signs. Perhaps the most notorious was Mother Damnable of Camden Town, whose cottage lay at a fork in the road where the Underground station is now to be found. In the mid-seventeenth century she was known as a healer and fortune-teller with “her forehead wrinkled, her mouth wide, and her looks sullen and unmoved.” Her story is told in The Ghosts of London by J.A. Brooks. On the day of her death “Hundreds of men, women and children were witnesses of the devil entering her house in his very appearance and state, and … although his return was narrowly watched for, he was not seen again … Mother Damnable was found dead on the following morning, sitting before the fire place, holding a crutch over it, with a tea-pot full of herbs, drugs, liquid.” And what a sight that must have been, the devil making his way through Camden Town.

Stranger still is the case of “Spring-Heeled Jack.” He appeared in the streets during the 1830s and was soon known as “the terror of London.” One statement, given by Jane Alsop at Lambeth Street Police Office, describes how the unfortunate girl encountered him on her doorstep. “She returned into the house and brought a candle and handed it to the person, who appeared enveloped in a large cloak, and whom she at first believed to be a policeman. The instant she had done so, however, he threw off his outer garment, and applying the lighted candle to his breast, presented a most hideous and frightful appearance, and vomited forth a quantity of blue and white flame from his mouth and his eyes resembled red balls of fire.” This may seem the merest fantasy, and yet the particulars are confirmed in an account of another attack by “a tall thin man, enveloped in a long black cloak. In front of him he was carrying what looked like a bull’s eye lantern. With one bound he was in front of her, and before she had a chance to move, he belched blue flames from his mouth into her face.” The entire grotesque history is narrated by Peter Haining in The Legend and Bizarre Crimes of Spring Heeled Jack.

Jane Alsop’s testimony had other, equally disturbing elements. From “the hasty glance which her fright enabled her to get at the person, she observed that he wore a large helmet; and his dress, which appeared to fit him very tight, seemed to her to resemble white oilskin. Without uttering a sentence he darted at her, and catching her part by the dress and the back part of her neck, placed her head under one of his arms, and commenced tearing her gown with his claws, which she was certain were of some metallic substance.” She screamed aloud, and her sister came to the door. But in her police statement that sister, Mary Alsop, admitted that although she “saw a figure as already described … She was so alarmed at his appearance, that she was afraid to approach or render any assistance.” A third sister then ran down and dragged Jane away from the terrible assailant, yet his grip was so strong that “a quantity of her hair was torn away.” She slammed shut the door but “notwithstanding the outrage he had committed, he knocked loudly two or three times at the door.” This knocking at the door, so strange that it could scarcely have been invented, is perhaps the most alarming moment in an entire alarming episode. It is as if to say-Let me in, I have not finished with you yet.

It is not at all surprising that in the popular urban imagination “Spring-Heeled Jack” was identified as the offspring of the devil, and described by witnesses as possessing horns and cloven feet. In February 1838 he was reported to have been seen in Limehouse with blue flames issuing from his mouth, and in the same year was said to have thrown a prostitute into the water at Jacob’s Island in Bermondsey. Peter Haining has suggested that the perpetrator was a fire-eater who wore a helmet or mask to protect his face. The great leaps and bounds that were also ascribed to him were perhaps the effect of springs concealed in the heels of his shoes. The metallic “claws” have yet to be fully explained. Yet the point is that “Spring-Heeled Jack” became a true London myth because he was so fantastic and artificial a monster. With his helmet and “white oilskin suit,” breathing fire like a circus performer, he is a London devil curiously resembling the fiends portrayed in the Clerkenwell mystery plays. Accounts of his appearance and behaviour spread very rapidly all over the city; he was seen, or was reported to have been seen, in various locations. It is almost as if this bizarre figure emerged from the streets themselves, like a “golem” which is supposed to be made from the mud and dust of a certain vicinity. The fact that “Jack,” like a later and more notorious “Jack,” was never apprehended serves only to deepen that sense of anonymity which suggests the monstrous figure to be some token or representation of London itself.

For the city is seen, by many, to be a kind of hell. It became a cliché in the poetry of the nineteenth century; its citizens resembled a “Satanic throng” while the atmosphere was that of a “brown Plutonian gloom.” The sulphurous smell of coal dust and smoke provoked images of Satan, while the manifold and manifest vices of the city represented all the works of the devil incarnate.

Images of Babel and Sodom abound, therefore, yet there is a more profound sense in which the city represents hell. It is the ultimate place of degradation and despair, where solitude is sought as an escape from the exactions of pity or compassion and where the only fellowship found is the fellowship of misery. Of all writers perhaps George Orwell possessed that sense of the city most strongly and, in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Gordon Comstock, surveying the brightness of Piccadilly Circus in 1936, remarks that “The lights down in hell will look just like that.” Often “The fantasy returned to him that he was a damned soul in hell … Ravines of cold evil-coloured fire, with darkness all above. But in hell there would be torment. Was this torment?”

There are still, in this city, places where suffering seems to linger. On a small garden or patch of waste ground, near the intersection of Tottenham Court Road and Howland Street, solitary people sit in postures of despair. It was close by, at 36 Howland Street, that Verlaine composed his wonderful poem “Il pleure dans mon coeur/Comme il pleut sur la ville.” “It weeps in my heart just as it rains upon the city,” all the loneliness and sorrow of London are caught in this image of the grey and falling rain. The cemetery garden behind the Hawksmoor church of St. George’s-in-the-East, beside Wapping, attracts the lonely and the unhappy. The garden of another church, Christ Church, Spitalfields, by chance by the same architect, was for many years a resting place for the vagrant and the deranged; it was known as “Itchy Park.” There was a famous area known as “Poverty Corner” along the Waterloo Road, by the corner of York Road; here out-of-work actors, artistes and music-hall “turns” used to wait in the generally forlorn hope of being seen or chosen by the music-hall agents. That corner has remained an anonymous and transient locale, between the bridge and the station, with its own peculiar sense of desolation.

Whole areas can in their turn seem woeful or haunted. Arthur Machen had a strange fascination with the streets north of Grays Inn Road-Frederick Street, Percy Street, Lloyd Baker Square-and those in which Camden Town melts into Holloway. They are not grand or imposing; nor are they squalid or desolate. Instead they seem to contain the grey soul of London, that slightly smoky and dingy quality which has hovered over the city for many hundreds of years. He observed “those worn and hallowed doorsteps,” even more worn and hallowed now, and “I see them signed with tears and desires, agony and lamentations.” London has always been the abode of strange and solitary people who close their doors upon their own secrets in the middle of the populous city; it has always been the home of “lodgings,” where the shabby and the transient can find a small room with a stained table and a narrow bed.

A true Londoner will tell you that there is no need to travel when you have the unexplored mysteries of the city all about you; a walk down Farringdon Road, or Leather Lane, will give you as much cause for wonder and surprise as any street in Paris or Rome. “I do not understand my own city,” you might say, “so why travel elsewhere in search of novelty?” There is always a sense of strangeness in London, to be experienced around unexpected corners and in unknown streets. As Arthur Machen said, “it is utterly true that he who cannot find wonder, mystery, awe, the sense of a new world and an undiscovered realm in the places by the Grays Inn Road will never find those secrets elsewhere, not in the heart of Africa.”

It has often been observed that certain streets or neighbourhoods carry with them a particular atmosphere over many generations. An air of emptiness or ennui, for example, can be sensed along those thoroughfares that have been created by municipal edict and have taken away much of older London in their construction-Victoria Street and New Oxford Street, artificial creations of the nineteenth century, remain anonymous unhappy places. Kingsway, cut through ancient dwellings in the early twentieth century, is merely dull. The Essex Road and the unluckily named Balls Pond Road are areas of manifest greyness and misery. Another cold spot, over many years, has been Shepherd’s Bush Green; it was described as “bald, arid, detestable” at the beginning of the twentieth century and has remained thus ever since.

There were nineteenth-century alleys and courts which gave an immediate sensation of penury and wickedness. The air was “poisonous with miasma and nauseous with dank and dismal stenches,” remarked Charles Manby Smith in The Little World of London. “Rags and brown paper substitute half the glass of the windows, and what is left is so crusted with dirt that it shuts out the light it was intended to admit.” Andrew Mearns, in his Bitter Cry of Outcast London, records that “You have to ascend rotten staircases, which threaten to give way beneath every step … You have to grope your way along dark and filthy passages swarming with vermin.” Who can say what mark such places leave upon the city? “In that close corner where the roofs shrink down and cower together as if to hide their secrets from the handsome street hard by, there are such dark crimes, such miseries and horrors, as could hardly be told in whispers.”

The area in the vicinity of prisons has a strangely oppressive and clandestine atmosphere. This is perhaps why the entire area of Southwark and the Borough has for centuries conveyed an impression of meanness and mournfulness. There have been many prisons in the vicinity, the Marshalsea and the King’s Bench among them, and “there is no place like this in the suburbs of London,” according to Walford’s Old and New London, “a spot that looks so murderous, so melancholy and so miserable … There is a smell of past ages about these ancient courts, like that which arises from decay-a murky closeness … and all old things had fallen and died just as they were blown together and left to perish.” And so it remains today, with an atmosphere quite unlike that of any other part of London. The area of East Acton, beside the prison of Wormwood Scrubs, is an example of a modern neighbourhood that is enveloped by the shadow of the gaol.

Death can cast its own shadow over a specific locale. Viaducts and crossroads can also be objects of inexplicable gloom. One young Londoner of the early twentieth century, Richard Church, recalled a crossroads south of the river near the Battersea Road, “a crossroads called The Latchmere, a sinister junction that always filled me with dread.”

There are other streets and areas that seem to emanate misery. Along the Embankment there have always been iron seats at regular intervals, and here in the evening or at night you will find solitary figures sitting and looking down at the river or up at the sky. In 1908 H.G. Wells walked beside them and noticed “a poor old woman with a shameful battered straw hat awry over her drowsing face, now a young clerk staring before him at despair; now a filthy tramp, and now a bearded frock-coated collarless respectability; I remember particularly one ghastly long white neck and white face that lopped backward, choked in some nightmare.” The tramps are still there but more disquieting are the young who often sit in some daze of not belonging anywhere. There are middle-aged men in respectable clothes so worn down that their compulsion to wear them provokes pity; and there are old women with their worldly possessions in plastic carrier bags. The Embankment is a haven for them all, and will no doubt continue to be so for many centuries.

The small streets beside Drury Lane were renowned for their misery. Summer Gardens, in winter, was a picture of urban desolation with its gutters filled with frozen dirt. It was the abode of costers, and the narrow road was littered with paper wrappings from the oranges upon their barrows. Charles Booth noted that “In one street is the body of a dead dog and near by two dead cats which lie as though they had slain each other. All three had been crushed flat by the traffic which has gone over them and they, like everything else, are frozen and harmless.” There was also a great quantity of scraps and bread crumbs strewn over the road which, according to Booth, is “the surest sign of extreme poverty all over London.”

There was also the notorious Whitecross Street, once Whitecross Place, with its gaol blighting the vicinity. “It is said, God made everything. I don’t believe it; He never made Whitecross Place.” And if God did not, who did? Who is the “author of filthy lanes and death-breeding alleys?” Of Clifford’s Inn, in Chancery Lane, long known for its legal obfuscation and delay, Walford states: “I should say that more misery has emanated from this small spot than from any one of the most populous counties in England.” Only a gate and passage now remain; some flats were built over the ancient quadrangle which, in 1913, Virginia and Leonard Woolf found to be “incredibly draughty and dirty … and all night long there fell a slow gentle rain of smuts so that, if you sat writing by an open window, a thin veil of smuts covered the paper before you had finished a page.”

The vicinity of Old St. Pancras, with the graveyard as its centre, has been an area of dereliction for many centuries. Norden, in the sixteenth century, cautioned “Not to walk there late”; in the early years of the twenty-first century it is encompassed by railway arches within which small garages and car repairers have set up their trades. Much of it remains waste ground. Swain’s Lane, leading down to the great mound known as “Parliament Hill” on Hampstead Heath from the walls of Highgate Cemetery, is considered to be unfortunate. The local press and local historians have investigated the condition of the place without notable success, except for certain inexplicable or at least unexplained “sightings”: “I have seen what appeared to be a ghost like figure inside the gates at the top of Swains Lane.” In the weeks after this report appeared in the Hampstead and Highgate Express, in February 1970, other local correspondents conveyed their apprehension: “My fiancee and I spotted a most unusual form about a year ago. It just seemed to glide across the path. I am glad somebody also has spotted it … To my knowledge the ghost always takes the form of a pale figure and has been appearing for several years … a tall man in a hat who walks across Swains Lane … Suddenly from the corner of my eye I saw something move … which seemed to be walking towards us from the gates, sent us running up Swains Lane as fast as we could … I have also had a strange happening at the lower end of Swains Lane … My advice is to avoid Swains Lane during dark evenings, if at all possible.”

· · ·

Yet there are also areas of peacefulness and care. The old Foundling Hospital in Coram Fields has long been demolished, but on the perimeter of its site is now the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children. Wakley Street, a short and narrow thoroughfare between Goswell Road and the City Road, has on one side the headquarters of the National Children’s Bureau and on the other the National Canine Defence League.

In another context it is perhaps encouraging to note that the pitches of puppet-shows were set upon a fixed local abode for decades, and that together they form a kind of charmed circle around the centre of London-Holborn Bridge, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Covent Garden, Charing Cross, Salisbury Change and the Fleet Bridge.

On the perimeter of this circle lies Fountain Court, amid the buildings of the Temple; there has been a small fountain there for three hundred years, commemorated by writers as diverse as Dickens and Verlaine, while the softness and serenity of this small spot have been experienced by many generations. The fountain and its pool were once square-fenced with palisades, then encircled by iron railings, but now stand unbarred; whether in a square, or a round, or open on all sides, the fountain plays on, and its atmosphere has remained constantly evocative. One Londoner came here as a schoolboy, with no knowledge of its history or its associations, and immediately fell under the spell of its enchantment; it was as if innumerable good acts or kind words had emerged here as calmly and as quietly as the little fountain itself. At last, in these pages, he has the chance of recording his debt.

If persistence through time can create harmony and charity, then the church of St. Bride’s-only a few yards from Fountain Court-has some claim to good fortune. A prehistoric ritual site, as well as evidence of a Roman temple and wooden Saxon church, have been found within its grounds. So the various forms of divinity have been venerated on one spot for many thousands of years. London is blessed as well as cursed.

CHAPTER 54

Knowledge Is Power

There was, in the city, another way of opening the gate of heaven. The pursuit of knowledge has always been one of the city’s defining characteristics, even though it may take unfamiliar forms. In the reign of Edward III a man was taken “practising with a dead man’s head, and brought to the bar at the King’s Bench, where, after abjuration of his art, his trinkets were taken from him, carried to Tothill, and burned before his face.” During the reign of Richard I one Raulf Wigtoft, chaplain to the archbishop of York, “had provided a girdle and ring, cunningly intoxicated, wherewith he meant to have destroyed Simon [the dean of York] and others, but his messenger was intercepted, and his girdle and ring burned at this place before the people.” “This place” was again Tothill which is supposed to have been the site of druid worship; the tools of conjurors and alchemists were no doubt traditionally destroyed here because it was considered an area of more powerful magic.

But in London it is impossible to distinguish magic from other versions of intellectual and mechanical aptitude. Dr. Dee, the great Elizabeth magus of Mortlake, for example, was an engineer and a geographer as well as an alchemist. In 1312, Raymond Lully, attracted by its scientific reputation, came to London, where he practised alchemy both in Westminster Abbey and the Tower. The magician Cornelius Agrippa arrived in the city at the end of the fifteenth century, in order to associate with the great divines and philosophers of the period; he struck up a particular friendship with John Colet, dean of St. Paul’s and founder of St. Paul’s school, who had become interested in magic during his Italian travels. An alchemist named Hugh Draper was imprisoned within the Salt Tower of the Tower of London for sorcery and magic; he inscribed upon his cell wall a great horoscope, which he dated on 30 May 1561, and then added that he had “MADE THIS SPHEER” with his own hands.

By chance, or coincidence, many astrologers came to inhabit Lambeth. The name itself, however, may have drawn them. Beth-el was in Hebrew the name for a sacred place, here fortuitously connected with the Lamb of God. At Tradescant’s house in south Lambeth dwelled Elias Ashmole, who convinced John Aubrey of the powers of astrology. The interment of Simon Forman, the great Elizabethan magus, is entered within the Lambeth parish registers. Lully stated that Forman wrote in a book, found among his possessions, “this I made the devil write with his own hand in Lambeth Fields, 1569, in June or July, as I now remember.” Captain Bubb, who was a contemporary of Forman, dwelled in Lambeth Marsh where he “resolved horary questions astrologically,” a pursuit which led him eventually to the pillory. At the north-east corner of Calcott Alley, in Lambeth, lived Francis Moore, an astrologer and physician, who has now entered the realm of the immortals as the author of the almanac which bears his name. In Lambeth there were many rare devices. In the collection of Tradescant, later to become a museum in the area, were gathered salamanders and “Easter egges of the Patriarchs of Jerusalem,” dragons two inches long and two feathers from a phoenix, a piece of stone from the tomb of John the Baptist and “Blood that rained in the Isle of Wight, attested by Sir Jo. Oglander,” a white blackbird and “halfe a hasle-nut with seventy pieces of household stuffe in it.” Those were once the sights of Lambeth.

The close associations between alchemy and the beginnings of science were also present in the very heart of London. When Newton came up to the city in order to purchase the material for his researches, he took the coach to the Swan Tavern in Grays Inn Lane before walking or riding to Little Britain. Here, through a bookseller called William Cooper, he bought such texts of alchemical knowledge as Zetner’s Theatrum Chemicum, and Ripley Reviv’d by the London alchemist George Starkey. In the process, Newton became acquainted with a secret group of London magicians and astrologers. Many of the original founders of the Royal Society, which in later days was explicitly associated with “modern” scientific research and knowledge, were in fact part of the “Invisible College” of adepts who practised alchemy as well as mechanical philosophy. They were part of that tradition adumbrated by John Dee which saw no necessary disparity between the various forms of occult and experimental understanding. Samuel Hartlib was the prime mover among a group of London experimenters who wished to marry rationality and system with alchemy in order to create a practical magic; among his friends and supporters were Robert Boyle, Kenelm Digby and Isaac Newton himself. They corresponded by means of codenames, and used pseudonyms in the publication of their work; that of Newton was “Jeova Sanctus Unus.”

Yet there emerged out of this a society which was, in the words of Macaulay, “destined to be a chief agent in a long series of glorious and salutary reforms.” The Royal Society held its first meetings in Gresham House in Bishopsgate before removing to Crane Court off Fleet Street and beside Fetter Lane; on the nights upon which the members met, a lamp was hung out over the entrance to the court from Fleet Street. The pragmatism and energy of their consultations are evident in some of their earliest labours-“to promote inoculation … electrical experiments on fourteen miles of wire near Shooters Hill … ventilation apropos of gaol feaver … discussion on Cavendish’s improved thermometers.” Not all the experimenters were of London, and not all of them lived in London, but the city became the chief centre of that empirical philosophy and practical experiment which developed out of alchemical research. The pragmatic spirit of London science must be emphasised in all these varied and various areas; it is the spirit that has pervaded its learning ever since.

There were experiments in agriculture and in horticulture; medicine “became an experimental and progressive science,” and the example of the pestilence of 1665 led the members of the society to examine “the defective architecture, draining and ventilation of the capital.” Sir William Petty created the science of political arithmetic, so that we might plausibly suggest London as the nurse of statistical enquiry. It was another form of understanding, and controlling, the population. Yet in a city of commerce the introduction of statistics also had a financial advantage; the Board of Customs in 1696 represented to the Treasury “the need they felt to collect certain basic material if they were able ‘to make a balance of the trade between this Kingdom and any part of the world.’” Newton himself spent many of his latter years as Warden of the Mint, in which capacity he refined and ordered the currency of the kingdom. He brought to the manufacture of coin all the precision and thoroughness of his experimental work, thus creating the scientific economy which exists still. In turn he became the prosecutor of anyone who defied his inexorable laws, despatching to the gallows all who clipped the coins or counterfeited the currency. Science, in London, truly was power.

In the fields of induction and mathematical demonstration, both relying upon a close observation of particulars, the London genius was most successful. John Wallis “placed the whole system of statics on a new foundation,” again according to Macaulay, while Edmond Halley investigated the principles of magnetism and the flow of the sea. So from Crane Court in the city issued lines of thought which connected the earth to the sea and the sky. It may seem fanciful to suggest that any one city can affect the cast of thought, or the science, of its inhabitants but Voltaire himself announced that “A Frenchman arriving in London finds things very different, in natural science as in everything else … In Paris they see the universe as composed of vortices of subtle matter, in London they see nothing of the kind … For a Cartesian light exists in the air, for a Newtonian it comes from the sun in six and a half minutes. Your chemist performs all its operations with acids, alkalis and subtle matters.” Once more the theoretical spirit of Parisian enquiry is implicitly opposed to the practical bent of London science. “Where finds philosophy her eagle eye?” Cowper wrote, and then answered his own question:

In London: where her implements exact,

With which she calculates, computes, and scans,

All distance, motion, magnitude, and now

Measures an atom and now girds a world.

It is sometimes suggested that, by the end of the eighteenth century, the climate and pace of industrial development had shifted away from London to the manufacturing towns of the north. But this is to misunderstand, and certainly to underestimate, the force of practical intelligence within the capital. One of the founders of the Royal Society, Robert Hooke, was the direct inspiration behind advances in the technology of time, while Henry Maudslay’s exceedingly accurate machine tools were produced in Lambeth. In 1730 John Harrison came to London in order to develop his marine chronometer which for the first time fixed degrees of longitude. That spirit was maintained by the mechanical engineers of the nineteenth century who in the workshops of Lambeth produced the steam-hammer and the automatic spinning mule. Lambeth was, then, still a centre of transformation.

Yet in London the pursuit of knowledge was not confined to the search for technical proficiency. From his lodgings in Great Marlborough Street, after his famous voyage, Charles Darwin wrote that “It is a sorrowful but I fear too certain truth that no place is at all equal, for aiding one in Natural History pursuits, to this dirty smokey town.” After travelling around the world Darwin considered London to be the most appropriate place for his research, as if the whole of evolutionary nature could be viewed and studied there. He wrote this in 1837 and his insight was confirmed, forty-seven years later, when the prime meridian of zero degrees longitude was established upon a brass rail in Greenwich.

In true London tradition, science also was turned into theatre, with lectures and demonstrations all over the capital. The early nineteenth century in particular witnessed a great public demand for scientific knowledge; the London Institution of Moorfields, the Surrey Institution of Blackfriars Bridge, the Russell Institution in Bloomsbury and the City Philosophical Society in Dorset Street were only some of the many clubs and societies devoted to disseminating the new understanding. There were societies all over the city, founded in the 1820s and 1830s, among them Geological, Astronomical, Zoological, Medico-Botanical, Statistical, Meteorological and British Medical. In the capital there were also many inventors and theorists who were able to meet and to work together. The contributors to “Scientific London” in London World City remark that “London was a crucial instrument for forging new specialist disciplines.” It was as if new commodities were being produced and traded in this intensely heated atmosphere. Bessemer developed his steel-making process in St. Pancras, while Hiram Maxim invented the machine-gun in his Clerkenwell workshop.

The pragmatism and practicality of London science were then disseminated into its teaching. In 1826 the first university college in London was established in Bloomsbury with specifically utilitarian aims; its purpose was not to educate scholars and divines, on the model of Oxford and Cambridge, but to train engineers and doctors. It was a true London institution, its founders comprising radicals, Dissenters, Jews and utilitarians. It is not at all surprising, therefore, that it should be infused with a radical egalitarian spirit which began with the inclusion of non-Anglican students. It became a university in 1836, opening its gates to women twelve years later and from the 1850s creating evening classes for working Londoners.

The university also began to teach science as a separate discipline, and created the first Faculty of Science in 1858; there was also established a school of medicine which reached into practical areas as diverse as mathematics and comparative anatomy. It was a progressive, enquiring energy which animated all of these concerns. It has been termed the energy of empire since the vast power and resourcefulness of nineteenth-century London, at the centre of the imperial world, had somehow managed to infiltrate all aspects of its life. In the early nineteenth century statisticians, mathematicians and engineers, again according to London World City, “saw the city as a potentially universal centre of calculation whence trade and machinery would link world-wide networks of British power.” Charles Babbage, together with colleagues such as Herschel, established the Astronomical Society in 1820 during a meeting at the Freemasons’ Tavern in Great Queen Street. In his workshop Babbage created the “Difference Engine” which is the harbinger of the modern computer, and so it may be suggested that information technology itself was created in London. In the process of invention he had employed precision engineers and of course skilled workmen, so that once again the capital became the home of major technical innovation and technological progress.

London has often been apostrophised as the city of gold. It is a home of golden dragons and golden cocks, while the golden cross and golden ball on the dome of St. Paul’s have become a symbol of London’s energy. On a summer morning, when the shimmering brightness envelops the city in a haze, and all is quiet, then it might be transformed: “’Tis El Dorado-El Dorado plain, The Golden City!” It is all before you, its vistas unexplored, and becomes in the words of Wordsworth,

The great city, an emporium then Of golden expectations.

The golden city has been built out of the will and desire of a human community, and that is why in the verse of W.E. Henley it burns so brightly and why

Trafalgar Square

(The fountains’ volleying golden glaze)

Shines like an angel-market.

And as the sun descends in The Secret Agent “the very pavement under Mr. Verloc’s feet had an old-gold tinge in that diffused light … Mr. Verloc was going westward through a town without shadows in an atmosphere of powdered gold.” This is a gleam of brightness in an otherwise dark novel, and the effect is that of the alchemist creating gold out of base materials. Alchemy and science provide the seeds of light and knowledge in a dark city so that, as it seemed to Don Juan looking at London from the heights of Highgate:

each wreath of smoke

Appear’d to him but as the magic vapour

Of some alchymic furnace.

Dryden, too, had the same vision:

Methinks, already, from this chymic flame

I see a City of more precious mould …

Now deified, she from her fires does rise.

It is the magical energy of London, visible in every one of its giant transformations, like that after the Great Fire when empirical knowledge and practical genius helped to rebuild the city. This magical energy survives still.

A Fever of Building

A drawing by George Scharf which illustrates the building of Carlton House

Terrace in the early 1830s, part of Nash’s original grand design to embellish

London. Note that the workmen are wearing hats.

CHAPTER 55

London Will Soon Be Next Door to Us

From the middle of the eighteenth century London expanded in a fitful and almost feverish manner according to a cycle of profit and profiteering. The metaphor of fever was taken up by Henry Kett who, in 1787, suggested that “The contagion of the building influenza … has extended its virulence to the country where it rages with unabating violence … The metropolis is manifestly the centre of the disease … Mansions daily arise upon the marshes of Lambeth, the roads of Kensington, and the hills of Hampstead … The chain of buildings so closely unites the country with the town that the distinction is lost between Cheapside and St. George’s Fields. This idea struck the mind of a child, who lived at Clapham, with so much force, that he observed, ‘If they go on building at such a rate, London will soon be next door to us.’” By the time he grew to be a man, his words had come to pass.

The “hills of Hampstead” were in part threatened by the “New Road” from Paddington to Islington, upon which work began in 1756; it acted as a bypass, avoiding the congerie of narrow and unpaved roads which led to the centre of the city, and for a while was considered to be a northern perimeter road, acting as a barrier between the city and the country-or, rather, between the city and the assortment of brick-fields, tea gardens, orchard gardens, cow-yards, tenter-grounds, allotments and sodden marsh-like fields which were always a feature of the land immediately surrounding the capital. But then the city, almost in a bound, travelled to its other side with the erection of Somers Town and Pentonville, Camden Town and Kentish Town. The new road became a road within, rather than outside, the city; and as such it remains.

The “marshes of Lambeth” were invaded by a more deliberate act of policy, designed to increase the speed of business within the city and to open up the capital to its outer regions. Until 1750 only London Bridge acted as a conduit between the northern and southern areas of the Thames; the river itself was at the centre of all traffic. But the construction of Westminster Bridge over a period of twelve years entirely changed the relationship between the northern and southern sections; instead of being isolated and apart, almost like different countries sharing the same border, they became interrelated. A new road was built from the bridge into Lambeth for some half a mile, where it then touched existing roads which were in turn extended and widened in order to create a free-flowing route “for promoting the intercourse and commerce” between both parts of the city. In the process both Kent and Surrey became so accessible that much open country disappeared beneath streets and squares.

The experiment was so profitable that four other bridges followed at Blackfriars, Vauxhall, Waterloo and Southwark. London Bridge itself was stripped of its houses and shops in order to render it suitable for the faster movement of a new age. Everyone was going faster. Everything was going faster. The city was growing faster, too, and the traffic within its bounds was moving ever more rapidly, starting a momentum which has never stopped. By the latter half of the eighteenth century the evidence of London’s commercial power, and future imperial status, was already present. It was about to burst its bounds completely, and become the first metropolis of the world. So almost by instinct the old boundaries and gateways were destroyed; in a symbolic act of relinquishment, London prepared for its future.

The “roads of Kensington” then found the city to be advancing upon them. In the early eighteenth century the area of Mayfair, south of Oxford Street and east of Hyde Park, was established in a series of streets and squares; in its immediate vicinity the Portland estate laid out the territory north of Oxford Street. Cavendish Square, Fitzroy Square and Portman Square arose. Grosvenor Square was completed in 1737 and, at a size of six acres, remains London’s largest residential square. It was followed by the building of Berkeley Square only three streets away, so that the entire area was given a uniform discipline and appearance. The idea of the square and its surrounding streets took possession of London. The Bedford estate in Bloomsbury moved beyond its origin in Covent Garden to establish Bedford Square in 1774, and twenty-five years later this was succeeded by Russell Square, Tavistock Square, Gordon Square, Woburn Square and their network of interconnecting terraced streets. In its turn the Portman estate established Dorset Square, Portman Square and Bryanston Square. Square upon square, giving London its now familiar appearance.

But the city did not stop there. The districts of Shoreditch, Whitechapel and Bethnal Green in the east continued their steady growth, while south of the river areas such as Southwark, Walworth, Kennington and St. George’s Fields grew up beside the new thoroughfares. Fields were filled with terraced streets rather than corn. The population itself expanded to meet London’s demands, so that a figure of 650,000 in 1750 had reached over a million fifty years later. It was not until 1790 that baptisms exceeded burials, but from that time forward the momentum could not be stopped. In each of the five succeeding decades, after 1800, the population would rise by 20 per cent.

By the end of the eighteenth century “the City of London” was only part of the city; instead of being essentially London it had turned into an enclave within London. This led to no diminution in its power: the dispersal of its population, and the attendant removal of various trades and occupations, allowed it to focus its energies even more fiercely upon commercial speculations. The City became purely a place of business. It remained the financial capital of the world, even if it was not in itself the capital of England; for that purpose, it was continually recreating itself in each generation. Many of the great livery halls were rebuilt or refaced; the largest commercial enterprises, private banks and insurance companies established their premises on a grand scale, imitating or in some cases anticipating the construction of the Bank of England and the Stock Exchange. It truly became a city of Mammon, with precincts and labyrinths and temples devoted to that deity. There was a new Custom House, a new Excise Office, a new Stocks Market, while Sir John Soane and George Dance exercised all their gifts for a “neo-classicism” not untouched by an acquaintance with the mysteries of Piranesi and of Egyptian form. The destruction of the old walls allowed more development upon the northern perimeters of the city, where Moorfields and Finsbury Circus were laid out. The hospitals and prisons were rebuilt or refurbished, although it is not clear which of the two institutions imitated the other. We might speak of religious architecture, such as Hawksmoor’s wonderful if barbaric St. Mary Woolnoth, except that by this date Christianity itself had little impact upon the momentum or atmosphere of the newly resurgent City.

But even as London grew, it maintained and deepened its coherence. There were Road Acts, Lighting Acts and Pavement Acts. The Building Act of 1774 had a greater effect upon London than any other legislative measure. It standardised and simplified houses into four categories, thereby recreating large areas in a uniform image. It may not be too fanciful to suggest that this method of identifying and controlling London in the course of its immense expansion represented a means of purging all the excess and theatricality of the city in order to make it fit for its imperial destiny.

Such an exercise in architectural uniformity, however, could never succeed. London was too large to be dominated by any one style or standard. Of all cities it became the most parodic and the most eclectic, borrowing architectural motifs from a score of civilisations in order to emphasise its own position as the grandest and most formidable of them all. Indian, Persian, Gothic, Greek and Roman motifs vied for position along the same thoroughfare. It says much for the heterogeneity of its development in this period, for example, that architects as unalike as Robert Adam and William Chambers were working within a few hundred yards of each other on strikingly different projects which leave their mark upon London still; Chambers was presiding over Somerset House, while Adam was working upon Adelphi. Where Adelphi had a light and extravagant aspect, Somerset House was solid and conservative in feeling; one is the work of innovative genius, the other of academic solemnity. Both architects found a place within the city.

The only successful and permanent attempt to bring uniformity and order to London’s chaos was the grand scheme to link St. James’s Park in the south with Regent’s Park in the north. With the creation of Regent Street and Waterloo Place, it remains the single most important exercise in city planning within the metropolis. That it worked is not in doubt; the combination of the genius of John Nash with shrewd speculation was perhaps unstoppable in such an opportunistic age and city. Nash formulated the plans for Trafalgar Square; he created the conditions for Piccadilly Circus; he designed the reconstruction of Buckingham Palace; he laid out the terraces on the perimeter of Regent’s Park; he created Oxford Circus. “London,” wrote Prince Pückler-Muskau in 1826, is “extremely improved … Now for the first time, it has the air of a seat of Government, and not of an immeasurable metropolis of ‘shopkeepers’ to use Napoleon’s expression.”

But this “air” of government was only achieved by demarcating poorer and richer areas, in effect cutting off the rich from the sight and odours of the poor. Nash himself declared that he wished to create a line or barrier “between the Streets and Squares occupied by the Nobility and Gentry” and “the narrow Streets and meaner houses occupied by mechanics and the trading part of the community.”

It has been suggested that Nash’s achievement was out of keeping with the history and atmosphere of the city, but he was a Londoner by birth, probably homosexual, who became prosperous through a legacy from a merchant uncle; here was a man who understood in every sense the workings of the city. From these roots sprang his genius for theatricality, for example, and it has been observed that the curve of Regent Street resembles that of an amphitheatre. The great designs of Trafalgar Square, Buckingham Palace and Oxford Circus have been in turn seen as a form of popular stage-set combining all the energy and spectacle of London in a great work of cunning artifice. When Nash took advantage of the reversion of Marylebone Park to the Crown in 1811, and fashioned Regent’s Park out of an undistinguished patch of land, all his skills as a theatre designer were used to project a grand double circus with what was described as a “National Valhalla” rising in the centre. Financial restrictions, however, made such a scheme implausible and impossible; what emerged from the wreckage of Nash’s ambition were eight villas and the ring of terraces which still possess what Sir John Summerson has described as “an extravagant scenic character … dream palaces, full of grandiose, romantic ideals” but, behind the scenes, comprising “identical houses, identical in their narrowness, their thin pretentiousness, their poverty of design.” He concludes that the terraces of the park are “architectural jokes … an odd combination of fantasy and bathos.” Yet in that sense they convey the sheer vulgar theatricality and opportunism of the city, and of Nash himself; that is why the great tourist attractions of Buckingham Palace and Trafalgar Square seem in a sense to be a joke upon their visitors themselves.

In other respects the pressures of commerce and property speculation have damaged Nash’s dream city beyond repair. Regent Street had been first constructed on a purely commercial basis, with the selling of prime sites along the road, but what is born in commerce dies in commerce; the famous colonnade lasted for thirty years before being removed on the grounds that business was being lost in its obscurity, while the street itself was extensively remodelled in the 1920s and 1930s. The dereliction or damage also suggests a more general truth about London, where grand and large-scale developments have rarely been successful. The finest of London’s public buildings, like the Bank of England, are somehow secret and withdrawn, as if not wishing to overstate their case. In the same way grandiose projects failed because, as Andrew Saint has observed in London World City, “any but the most pragmatic approach to planning was doomed to failure.” Once again that note of pragmatism, so intrinsic to the intellectual and social life of the capital, is struck.

The “improved” London of the early nineteenth century had acquired a momentum of its own. The National Gallery, the British Museum, the Marble Arch, Westminster Palace, the Royal College of Surgeons, the Law Courts, the screen and arch at Hyde Park Corner, the General Post Office at St. Martin’s le Grand, London University, the Inner and Middle Temples, as well as various theatres, hospitals, prisons and gentlemen’s clubs, completely changed the external aspect of London. For the first time it became a public city. The detailed drawings of George Scharf, throughout this period, provide a significant account of the work itself. A great mobile crane stands before a half-completed Marble Arch, while a man in a top hat is perched upon a wooden scaffolding making notes; a new portico is being constructed, and Scharf notes the iron rod which is being cased within brick to form a pillar; plasterers are at work, standing upon wooden stalls, while two workmen strain upon a rope to raise a beam. These are views of building sites which could have been taken in London in any period over the last six hundred years. There is always building and rebuilding. Yet Scharf emphasises the human scale of this new London, before the advent of the Victorian megalopolis. He shows citizens in small groups, or as couples, rather than crowds; people are seen talking from upstairs windows, and Scharf is very interested in particular trades and in the names of individual shops or shopkeepers. Yet he still manages, in this compendium of local and specific detail, to capture a sense of progress and renewal; there is something distinctly and distinctively inspiriting in the air of these drawings. The city had lost something of its old packed intensity but it had recaptured its sense of the marvellous. Talleyrand, arriving in London in 1830 after an interval of thirty-six years, described it as “much more beautiful,” while an American visitor believed it to be “a thousand times more beautiful.” A visiting Italian general wrote in 1834 that London “has become an exceedingly beautiful and magnificent city; it is, in short, the leading capital of the world.”

But had there been any concomitant improvement in the lives of its citizens? Some contemporaries believed that there was a true connection. Francis Place, the London radical and democratic reformer, declared that “the progress made in refinement of manners and morals seems to have gone on simultaneously with the improvement in arts, manufactures and commerce. It moved slowly at first, but has been constantly increasing in velocity … we are much better people than we were then [in the 1780s], better instructed, more sincere and kind-hearted, less gross and brutal.” This enthusiastic report may seem surprising, in the light of subsequent denunciations of the Victorian city by writers as diverse as Engels and Booth, but it cannot be dismissed. Place was very close all his life to the actual conditions of the city, and he had seen a clear diminution in mob violence, open licentiousness and the intermittent savagery of ordinary life. He was a moral as well as a social reformer, and noticed with satisfaction an abatement of observable vice and squalor.

In fact the “improvements,” with the new roads as well as the changes in transportation, had a general and profound effect upon the nature of the city. As one historian of London, Donald Olsen, has put it, in The Growth of Victorian London, “The nineteenth century saw the systematic sorting out of London into single-purpose, homogenous, specialised neighbourhoods … Strict social segregation became a prerequisite for success in any new development.” In addition, “the shift from multi-purpose to single-purpose neighbourhoods reflected the pervasive move towards professionalisation and specialisation in all aspects of nineteenth century thought and activity.” The generalisation is perhaps too broad, since there continued to be areas where rich and poor were obliged to mingle, but it hits upon an important truth. It is the truth which Francis Place in part expressed, albeit unwittingly. The vices of the poor could no longer be seen, and therefore there must have been an improvement. In fact they had departed into areas of misery created by the slum clearances of the new city. They had moved “behind the scenes” of the newly dramatised London.

CHAPTER 56

Nothing Quite Like It

Of London areas, there is no end. The vibrancy of Walthamstow, the mournful decay of Pimlico and Mornington Crescent, the confusion of Stoke Newington, the intense and energetic air of Brixton, the watery gloom of Wapping, the bracing gentility of Muswell Hill, the excitement of Canary Wharf, the eccentricity of Camden Town, the fearfulness of Stepney, the lassitude of Limehouse, can all be mentioned in the vast oration of London. Every Londoner has his or her own favourite location, whether it be Victoria Park in Hackney or rolling Long Lane in Southwark, although it must also be admitted that most inhabitants of the city rarely know or visit anywhere beyond their own neighbourhood. Most citizens identify themselves in terms of their immediate locale.

There is a passage in G.K. Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill where he envisaged a city with its own assertive districts as, for example, “Clapham with a city guard. Wimbledon with a city wall. Surbiton tolling a bell to raise its citizens. West Hampstead going into battle with its own banner.” Of the eponymous region of the book, he writes, “There has never been anything in the world absolutely like Notting Hill. There will never be anything quite like it to the crack of doom.” In this, at least, he will be proved correct.

Where Notting Hill Gate now stands, a beacon was situated in the Roman period; part of a Roman sarcophagus was found in St. John’s Vicarage off Ladbroke Grove. The district’s name comes from a band of Saxons, “sons of Cnotta.” For 1,700 years it remained in open countryside, with a reputation for springs and healthy air; there were in the eighteenth century, however, colonies of brick-makers and Irish pig-keepers apparently marring the sylvan peace of the neighbourhood. Complaints were lodged but nothing ever done. One of the peculiar characteristics of Notting Hill is that it was attached to the city, but not of it, and so was characterised by a “mixed” atmosphere at once urban and suburban. Hence its ambivalent air.

In the 1850s, for example, the east end of Notting Hill High Street was inhabited by “private people, foreigners, adventurers, or respectable confidential employés of west-end commercial houses,” while almost fifty years later Percy Fitzgerald complained that the grand terraces and houses were “mixed up” with “flashy shops and all the vulgar incidents of traffic.” A racecourse was opened in 1837 where Kensington Park Gardens and Ladbroke Grove now meet; it was known as the Hippodrome, and was advertised as “a racing emporium more extensive and attractive than Ascot or Epsom.” It was not a success and, from the 1840s onward, houses and villas were being constructed over the entire area.

So by degrees it assumed its present shape, but not before a cycle of speculations and bankruptcies lent the neighbourhood another of its characteristic tones. In the 1820s James Ladbroke tried but failed to develop the area; in the boom of the 1840s great developments were undertaken before the speculators went bankrupt in the bust of the 1850s. In the 1860s Notting Hill was described in Building News as “a graveyard of buried hopes … naked carcasses, crumbling decorations, fractured walls, slimy cement. All who touch them lose heart and money by the venture.” Ever since that period, there has been a persistent pattern of decay and recovery. In the 1870s, for example, there was a resurgence of activity and habitation but by the next decade some of the imposing novelty of the site had diminished. As urban development began to hesitate and falter at Earl’s Court, always a wilderness, there was a resurgent tide in favour of Notting Hill which gathered strength in the 1890s. By the early decades of the twentieth century, however, the stucco mansions of Kensington Park Gardens and its environs once more began to fade and peel. The great houses were turned into flats by the 1930s, less than a century after they had been erected, and in the place of what was once termed “the upper middle class” came “Viennese professors and Indian students and bed-sitter business girls.” This description is by Osbert Lancaster, who lived in the area during the slow decline of its “Edwardian propriety.”

In the late 1940s and the 1950s, however, Notting Hill declined into “slumdom” with broken windows and racketeering landlords. During the 1950s immigrants from the West Indies congregated in the area, like the Irish before them, which in turn led to riots; in the 1960s and early 1970s, precisely because of this mixed and heterogeneous past, it became a haven for those who, like the hippies of the period, required a kind of louche informality in which to pursue their lives. The peeling streets, the grimy balconies, were combined with the street-market along the Portobello Road to produce an atmosphere of happy dereliction. In the 1980s there were festivals. Here, in miniature, we see the passage of many different London cultures.

Then again, in one of the strange and instinctive processes of urban life, the conditions of the area seemed slowly to change. The harbinger of that change might be found in 1967 when large areas of Notting Hill were protected by a Conservation Act, so that the original streets of the 1840s and 1850s became privileged territories beyond the reach of speculators and developers. By the late 1970s this special status began to attract back the wealthy Londoners who had deserted the neighbourhood fifty years before. The area was itself gradually restored to its former state of lambent stucco; to walk down Kensington Park Gardens in 2000 is to experience that wide thoroughfare as it had emerged 150 years before.

The area in recent years has acquired a certain solidity and strength of purpose; it is no longer as fluid and as heterogeneous as once it was. Situated between the bewildering cosmopolitanism of Queensway, where the Tower of Babel might once more be constructed, and the mournful region of Shepherd’s Bush, it is an enclave of quiet urban solidity. Accepting its past, Notting Hill has incorporated it within its being, so that now the summer Notting Hill Carnival is a truly mixed urban celebration. Of course there are still areas of relative poverty and deprivation within its bounds-Trellick Tower of the Kensal Estate, for example, dominates the northern skyline and lends an atmosphere of old and poor communal living to the market of Golborne Road within its shadow. Here, too, are the first intimations of the maze of West Kilburn to the north of the Harrow Road. But Notting Hill itself has retrieved its charm and good humour, principally because it has come to terms with its destiny.

· · ·

Go to the north-east, and discover mournful Paddington which has always been blasted as a place of transit and of transience. In that it resembles the other gateways into the city. The area around the railway terminus at King’s Cross, for example, has acquired a wandering population which takes advantage of travellers and tourists who venture into the immediate streets. The area around Victoria Station is anonymous and unhappy. But Paddington has a desolation all of its own. It is a place of transit in more than one sense, since one of its main sites was once the gallows of Tyburn. Lord Craven also donated some land, now covered by Craven Gardens, which, if London should once more be touched by pestilence, will be made available as a burial pit. Presumably the current inhabitants of Craven Gardens are not aware of this noble intention. The hospital is beside the station, and the gloomy brown brick exterior of the original institution still exudes in its own way the recognition of transit and mortality. The message of Paddington, in the words of William Blake, which predate the railway and the hospital, “mournful ever-weeping,” seems to be that we are all travellers passing through.

If we travel further north-east, over Cato Street where the conspirators met in 1820, over the then New Road, which is now the Marylebone Road, and the Euston Road, past the broken columns of the old Euston Arch in front of the modern station, past bleak and windy King’s Cross, past Penton Hill where the Druids may once have met, past the tribal trackway which exists beneath the modern layout of the Angel, we will arrive at Islington.

The Romans fought their battles there against Boudicca; there is evidence of a Roman encampment at Barnsbury, and the area of King’s Cross was once known as Battle Bridge. A now forgotten track, Hagbush Lane, exists beneath the Liverpool Road. An ancient British settlement lies to the immediate south-east of Islington Green. The Saxon King Aethelbert granted Islington to the canons of St. Paul’s (hence the name Canonbury), and it appears in the Domesday Book that the ecclesiastical authorities owned approximately five hundred acres of territory. Fitz-Stephen depicts the area as “fields for pasture and open meadows, very pleasant, into which the river waters do flow, and mills are turned about with a delightful noise … beyond them an immense forest extends itself, beautified with woods and groves, and full of the lairs and coverts of wild beasts … and game, stags, bucks, bears and wild bulls.” The theme of the waters here is significant, since it dominated Islington’s subsequent history as a source of health and refreshment. The pursuit of sport and hunting in the area, outside the confines of the city, is again a persistent one so that for some thousand years it was a haven of relaxation and entertainment for those ordinarily trapped within the city. In the time of Henry II (reigned 1154-89) “citizens played ball, exercised on horseback and took delight in birds, such as sparrow hawks, goss hawks, and in dogs for following the sports of the fields of Iseldon.” In the sixteenth century Stow described Islington as a place of “fields commodius for the citizens therein to walke, shoote and otherwise to recreate and refresh their dulled spirits in the sweete and wholesome ayre.” Immediately south of the Angel, fields were set aside for target practice; on eighteenth-century maps almost two hundred “marks” can be discerned, with the most proficient archers being awarded titles such as the “Marquis of Islington,” the “Marquess of Clerkenwell” and the “Earl of Pancridge.”

It was in Islington that Sir Walter Raleigh first smoked tobacco; the site of his house later became an inn for the citizens seeking refreshment of another kind. Islington was famous for its hostelries, among them the Three Hats, Copenhagen House, White Conduit House and the Angel itself, which gave its salubrious name to an entire district. Here also were Sadler’s Wells, Islington Spa, the New Wells, the Pantheon in Spa Fields, the English Grotto in Rosoman Street, the London Spa, Merlin’s Cave, Hockley-in-the-Hole, Bagnigge Wells, St. Chad’s Well in Gray’s Inn Road and Penny’s Folly on the Pentonville Road; the entire area was covered by tea gardens, walks and entertainments. Charles Lamb, the great romantic antiquary of London, settled here in 1823 and according to William Hazlitt “took much interest in the antiquity of ‘Merrie Islington’ … the ancient hostelries were also visited, and he smoked his pipe and quaffed his nut brown ale at the Old Queen’s Head.” The air of liberation which Islington induced was still with Lamb two years later, when he remarked that “It was like passing from life into eternity … Now when all is holyday there are no holydays … Pleasuring was for fugitive play days; mine are fugitive only in the sense that life is fugitive. Freedom and life co-existent!” That is why there are so many ballads about Islington, “The Bailiff’s Daughter of Islington” and “Tom, Tom of Islington” among them; for many centuries it remained a haven of carelessness.

But Charles Lamb’s residence, Colebrook Cottage, became attached to other houses; then they became a terrace; then became part of a row of terraces as London crept northward. In the early 1800s houses “of a very small and slight character” were built in the environs of Colebrook Cottage, only to become slums. In the 1830s, the Northampton estate built cheap tenements on its vacant ground, while sixteen years later the Packington Estate constructed a network of wide streets in the area which still bears its name. Soon the entire region was covered with terraces, villas and the general ribbon development which characterised the tentacular stretch of London. An issue of Building News in 1863 named Islington as an area of “trumpery allotments which have been dealt out to builders, and the closely packed streets and terraces which have arisen.” And all those who lived in these new terraces moved daily to the centre of their being. Dickens noticed them in one of his early sketches. “The early clerk population of Somers and Camden Towns, Islington and Pentonville, are fast pouring into the city, or directing their steps towards Chancery Lane and the Inns of Court. Middle-aged men, whose salaries have by no means increased in the same proportion as their families, plod steadily along, apparently with no object in view but the counting-house; knowing by sight almost everybody they meet and overtake, for they have seen them every morning (Sundays excepted) during the last twenty years, but speaking to no one … Small office lads in large hats … milliners’ and staymakers’ apprentices.” All of them can be imagined walking into the city, acquiring a settled anonymity as they steadily approach it. Dickens was very interested in Islington; he placed several of his characters in that vicinity, denominating most of them as clerks. Potters and Smithers and Guppy are all clerks of Islington and Pentonville, for example, as if those areas adjacent to the centres of finance and power had themselves a subsidiary clerkly function.

The more affluent Londoners moved further out to Sydenham or Penge, even as the poor travelled north. So by stages Islington itself became poor. Rows of terraced houses, of two or three or four storeys, can be seen in early photographs; their grimy stucco is matched by the darkness of their brick, and they seem to stretch on interminably. In 1945 Orwell depicted the area as having become one of “vague, brown-coloured slums … He was walking up a cobbled street of little two-storey houses with battered doorways which gave straight on the pavement and which were somehow curiously suggestive of rat-holes. There were puddles of filthy water here and there among the cobbles. In and out of the dark doorways, and down narrow alley-ways that branched off on either side, people swarmed in astonishing numbers … Perhaps a quarter of the windows in the street were broken and boarded up.” This is taken from 1984, a novel of the future, but the details are based directly on Orwell’s observation of the streets beside Essex Road. It is as if the dereliction had entered his soul and he had come to believe that London, somehow, will always be sordid, and grimy, and squalid. Islington will always be Islington.

Certainly it entered the postwar era in an impoverished state. It has been recorded that “three quarters of its households did not even have running water, an inside lavatory nor a bath.” One resident recalled that “We had sixteen people using one toilet.” Islington, once a village in the environs of London, had been transformed into a central core of slum conditions. A familiar pattern then reasserted itself. Swathes of Victorian and Georgian terraces were razed in order to accommodate council-house estates and tower blocks; the urge to destroy, however, was quickly succeeded by the need to conserve. Islington may stand as representative of London in this respect, where the fashion for wholesale redevelopment was displaced by a no less urgent desire for preservation and improvement. It is as if an amnesiac had suddenly recovered his memory. A process of gentrification then ensued whereby generally middle-class couples, attracted by the prospect of “improvement grants” from the civic authorities of Islington, settled in the neighbourhood and began to restore or rejuvenate their properties. They were the direct successors of those who had arrived in the 1830s and 1840s, and in fact the newly refurbished streets acquired their original characteristics. There were of course disadvantages. The poorer “locals” were now congregated upon the housing estates of Islington, or had dispersed. What has been lost in the process? Certainly that sense of belonging to a small patch of local territory, however squalid, disappeared. Or perhaps it is better to say that it had changed hands. The poor colonised the area for a hundred years: they had driven out the more affluent residents of Islington in the 1880s and 1890s, but now in turn they were being driven away.

But a larger pattern has also been introduced. Where there was once a rooted and identifiable community in Islington, there is now a greater sense of transience. Like the rest of London it has grown more mobile but also more impersonal. Another paradox has emerged in the process, however, emphasising the unique conditions of each urban area. In the course of its present changes, Islington has reacquired its principal or original identity. Where once it was known for its inns and tea gardens, it is now celebrated for its bars and restaurants. Along the central highway of Upper Street there are now proportionally more restaurants than in any other part of London, with the possible exception of Soho, and so the area has regained its reputation for hospitality and conviviality which it possessed long before it ever became part of London. The old presence lingers beneath every change of appearance.

The City Road, emanating from Islington, directly approaches the site of London’s old wall. Before its arrival there it crosses Old Street, where to the east Shoreditch and Spitalfields beckon. These once forlorn areas still bear the marks of their past. In the mid-seventeenth century Shoreditch “was a disreputable place, frequented by courtesans.” The female prostitutes still ply their trade at the upper end of Commercial Street, a dismal thoroughfare between the two areas, while Shoreditch High Street is notorious for its strip pubs catering for local residents as well as gentlemen from the City who symbolically pass beyond the old walls of London, through Bishopsgate, in order to indulge themselves. In the late nineteenth century violent street gangs issued out of the slums of “Old Nichol,” a congerie of streets around Old Nichol Street which might have been named after Old Nick himself. Violence flares still; a murder, or a suicide, awakens memories of the not so recent past.

The name itself derives from Soerditch, a ditch issuing into the Thames, but the idea of a sour ditch is suggestive. The later addition of Shore suggests something stranded or laid up. In turn the name Spitalfields, detached from its origin in “spital,” a house for the sick, suggests spittle-something spat out, violently ejected. Thus it became a haven for refugees. The wrong etymology is often accurate about the nature of an area.

So we may move on to the hunting grounds of Soho, “So-ho” or “So-hoe” being the call of the huntsmen who originally rode across its fields. Now, with its sex shops and strip clubs, the hunt is on for another kind of game. Of all the regions of London, this is the one that has most fully preserved its appearance. Gerrard Street may have been transformed into the centre of Chinatown, but the house in which John Dryden lived is still recognisable. In Soho every street is a memorial; here is where Marx lived, here Casanova, here Canaletto, and here De Quincey.

There are deeper continuities, too, since the area had a reputation for its cuisine long before it was ever populated. In 1598 Stow wrote of the conduit in Soho Fields that “The Lord Mayor, aldermen, and many worshipful persons rode to the conduit … according to custom, and then they went and hunted a hare before dinner and killed her; and thence went to dinner at the banqueting house at the head of the conduit, where a great number were handsomely entertained by the chamberlain.” So the air of dining and conviviality has always been part of the neighbourhood. On the same patch of ground where sixteenth-century dignitaries ate, the modern traveller can still dine at the Gay Hussar, Quo Vadis or L’Escargot.

There was a parish located here by 1623, and in 1636 certain people were described as living at “the brick kilns near Soho,” but the area first began to flourish in the 1670s when Gerrard Street, Old Compton Street, Greek Street and Frith Street emerged as part of a development north of Leicester Fields. A proclamation from the Court, dated as early as April 1671, forbade the erection of “small cottages and other tenements” in “the windmill Fields, Dog Fields and the fields adjoining So-Hoe” but, as usual, the social and commercial imperatives of the city over-ruled royal proclamations.

How Soho itself acquired its “raffish” flavour is obscure. The area just to its east, beside St. Martin’s Lane, was already inhabited by artists or artisans who catered to the rich or the fashionable. Art studios and art schools also began to cluster there, alongside the inevitable taverns and coffee houses. But they did not directly affect Soho itself. A sudden influx of French residents was of more consequence. In the area of Newport Market and Old Compton Street it was remarked by Maitland that “many parts of the parish abound with French, so that it is an easy matter for a stranger to fancy himself in France.” By 1688 over eight hundred of the empty and newly built houses had been filled with Huguenots, who characteristically transformed the ground floors into “genuine French shops,” cheap cafés and restaurants “like those near ‘the barrier’ in Paris.” So by degrees this emerging region of London came to be compared with the French city. It maintained that ambience for more than 150 years, and as late as 1844 Soho was still being described as “a sort of petty France.” It was recorded that “Most of the shops are thoroughly French, and they evidently have been established solely for the supply of the foreign colony. Here are French schools for the education of the young, and wine-shops and restaurants where an Englishman who entered would be looked on with surprise.” Perhaps the most notable institution, in the early days of twenty-first-century Soho, is the York Minster or French Pub known colloquially as “the French”; it is said to have been the meeting-place of the French Resistance during the Second World War. Again a small area of London, no more than a few streets and a market, has retained its traditional culture for more than three hundred years.

But the presence of the French immigrants in a place where the arrival of an Englishman would be a “surprise,” in turn created an odd air of strangeness or unfamiliarity which encouraged natives of other countries to feel more secure in its environs. In certain respects it was not English. “Of all quarters in the queer adventurous amalgam called London,” Galsworthy wrote in The Forsyte Saga, “Soho is perhaps least suited to the Forsyte spirit… Untidy, full of Greeks, Ishmaelites, cats, Italians, tomatoes, restaurants, organs, coloured stuffs, queer names, people looking out of upper windows, it dwells remote from the British Body Politic.” From the start it was a mixed area, both in terms of demography and of trade. “This district,” according to one Handbook, “is also a principal rendezvous for foreigners in London, many of whom here ply their avocations as artists and mechanics.” There were emporia of furniture acquired from various eras and various cultures, curiosity shops filled with multifarious relics of the Romans or the Habsburgs, musical-instrument makers and print-sellers, china manufacturers, booksellers and taverns where artists and literary gentlemen gathered. Modern institutions, such as the French Pub and the Colony Room Club, still attract poets and painters.

The phenomenon of transference from age to age is in certain respects inexplicable. It may be that the previous reputation of an area attracts its new residents, so that there is a kind of advertised continuity; but this does not apply to other districts which simply flare and fade away. Or is it that an atmosphere of freedom and unfamiliarity, first created by the Huguenots liberated from the cruelty of their compatriots, has continued to linger? Certainly immigrants arrived in their wake, from Russia and from Hungary, Italy and Greece. In the churchyard of St. Anne’s, Soho, there was a tablet with the following inscription: “Near this place is interred Theodore, King of Corsica, who died in this parish, December 11, 1756, immediately after leaving the King’s Bench Prison by the benefit of the Act of Insolvency; in consequence of which he registered his kingdom of Corsica for the benefit of his creditors.” He had accepted his crown in March 1736, but could not raise enough money to pay for his army; so he travelled to London where, finding himself in debt, he was soon arrested and consigned to prison. On his release on 10 December 1756, he took a sedan chair to the house of a tailor and acquaintance in Little Chapel Street Soho. But he died the next day, and his funeral expenses were paid by an oil-man in Old Compton Street. So a foreign king is buried in the middle of Soho, thus emphasising its reputation as a foreign land in the heart of London. This penniless exile might almost be considered the true monarch of the area.

Its reputation for heterogeneity and freedom was also associated with liberties of another sort, and by the end of the eighteenth century it was notorious for courtesans. A celebrated member of that order, Mrs. Cornelys, arranged weekly assemblies in Carlisle House on the south side of Soho Square. There was a notice outside in which she “begs the chairmen and hackney-coach drivers not to quarrel, or to run their poles through each other’s windows,” which suggests that the spirit of disorder affected anyone who came within the parish. In Carlisle House were held masquerades and promenades which featured scantily dressed ladies “in violation,” according to one observer, “of the laws, and to the destruction of all sober principles.” Mrs. Cornelys was one of those redoubtable London characters holding court to thieves and nobility alike, who dominated all company with a quick wit and a loud if vulgar manner. She was enterprising, irrepressible, charming and scathing in equal measure; she created a great stir in the 1760s and 1770s until after the failure of one of her fashionable schemes she “retired into private life.” She started selling asses’ milk in Knightsbridge, and in 1797 died in the Fleet Prison.

She was the very type of the London club hostess, a figure so much larger than life that no one-not even the most drunken or aristocratic customer- would dare to cross her. Kate Hamilton and Sally Sutherland both managed dubious “night-houses” of the 1860s, and Kate was described as “presiding as a sort of Paphian queen” over her scantily clad dancers. There is a wonderful description of her “weighing some twenty stone, with a countenance that had weathered countless convivial nights. Mrs. Hamilton presented a stupendous appearance in the low cut evening dresses which she always wore. From midnight to dawn she sipped champagne [and] with her foghorn voice, knew how to keep her clients of both sexes in order.” Her establishment was in Leicester Square, which by the mid-nineteenth century had become associated with the delinquencies of neighbouring Soho, and her twentieth-century successor was Muriel Belcher who ran the Colony Room Club, a drinking room in Dean Street. She also kept her clients in order with a voice as piercing, if not as loud, as a foghorn, and specialised in a form of obscene badinage which only the vulgar mistook for wit.

From its beginning, in fact, Soho has been associated with demonstrative and sometimes difficult women. In 1641 “a lewd woman,” Anna Clerke, was bound over for “threteninge to burne the houses at Soho” for reasons unknown. A once famous inn known as the Mischief, in Charles Street, had as its sign a drunken courtesan straddling a man’s back while holding a glass of gin with the legend “She’s as Drunk as a Sow” inscribed beside her. The female, and male, prostitutes of the area were well known by the middle of the nineteenth century; once more the relative “foreignness” of the neighbourhood ensured that it would be the context for more relaxed sexual behaviour than in Lombard Street, for example, or in Pimlico. The proximity of the rookeries, in St. Giles and elsewhere, also meant that there was no shortage of fresh bodies for the clients. Only the recommendations of the Wolfenden Report, in 1957, managed to keep “the girls” off the streets; but they migrated instead to small rooms and attic spaces in the same area.

There were the “Argyll Rooms,” Laurent’s Dancing Academy, the Portland Rooms, and a score of other venues. The night-houses and flash-houses changed into nightclubs, the penny gaffs and cheap theatres into striptease joints, the gaming clubs into bars, but despite the external alterations governed by time and fashion the essential atmosphere and purpose of Soho have remained the same. It was estimated that in 1982 there were some 185 premises used as part of the sex industry; more recent legislation has attempted to mitigate the business but, at the beginning of a new century, Soho remains the centre of a flourishing trade in prostitution. The spirit of the area has also asserted itself in another guise, with Old Compton Street becoming in the 1980s and 1990s a centre of “gay” pubs and clubs. The narrow thoroughfares of Soho are always crowded now, with people in search of sex, spectacle or excitement; it has retained its “queer adventurous” spirit and seems a world away from the clubs of Pall Mall or the shops of Oxford Street which lie respectively to its south and north.

This is only to be expected, however. Each area of London has its own unmistakable character, nurtured through time and history; together they resemble a thousand vortices within the general movement of the city. It is impossible to look at them all steadily, or envisage them as a whole, because the impression can only be one of opposition and contrast. Yet out of these oppositions and contrasts London itself emerges, as if it sprang into being out of collision and paradox. In that sense its origins are as mysterious as the beginning of the universe itself.

London’s Rivers

An engraving by Charles Grignion, after Francis Hayman, of the insalubrious Fleet River; since it was the last resting place of dead dogs, corpses, human waste and noxious refuse, it is hard to believe that anyone actually swam in it.

CHAPTER 57

You Cannot Take the Thames with You

It has always been the river of commerce. The watercress-growers of Gravesend, the biscuit-bakers and store-shippers of Tooley Street, the ship-chandlers of Wapping, the block-makers and rope-makers of Limehouse, all owe their trades to the Thames. The great paintings of its business, with its warehouses, refiners, breweries and builders’ yards, all bear testimony to its power and authority. Its predominance within the city was understood long before the Romans came. Copper and tin were transported along it as early as the third millennium BC; as a result of commerce upon the river the area comprising London acquired, by 1500 BC, supremacy over the region of Wessex. That is perhaps why ceremonial objects were thrown into its waters, where they lay hidden until recent archaeological discoveries.

The city itself owes its character and appearance to the Thames. It was a place of “crowded wharfs and people-pestered shores,” the water continually in motion with “shoals of labouring oars.” The movement and energy of London were the movement of horses and the energy of the river. The Thames brought in a thousand argosies. Venetian galleys and three-masted ships from the Low Countries vied for position by the riverside, while the water itself was crowded with wherries and ferries transporting the citizens from one shore to the other.

The other great commercial value of the Thames lay in its fish, and in the fifteenth century we read of “barbille, fflounders. Roaches. dace. pykes. Tenches,” all caught in nets with baits of cheese and tallow; there were eels and kipper salmon, mullet, lamprey, prawn, smelt, sturgeon and “white bayte.” A vast range of vessels also plied their trades upon the water. Barges and barks sailed beside chalk-boats; they were joined by cocks, or small work boats, by pikers, rush-boats, oyster-boats and ferry-boats, by whelk-boats and tide-boats.

Most Londoners earned their living directly off the river, or by means of the goods which were transported along it. Documents of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries reveal a host of Thames employees, from the “conservators” who were in charge of river safety to the “tidemen” whose work on embanking or building upon the river depended upon the state of the tide. There were boatmen and chalkmen, eelmen and baillies, gallymen or garthmen, ferriers and lightermen, hookers and mariners, petermen and palingmen, searchers and shipwrights, shoutmen and piledrivers, trinkers and water-bailiffs and watermen. There are recorded no fewer than forty-nine ways of trapping or catching fish, from nets and weirs to enclosures and wicker-baskets. But there were many other activities such as the erection of dams and barriers, the construction of landing-stages and jetties, the repairing of watergates and causeways, quays and stairs. We may call this the early stage of the Thames when it remained the living centre of the city’s development and trade.

But then it first touched the imagination of poets and chroniclers. It became the river of magnificence, used as a golden highway by princes and diplomats. Barges were “freshly furnished with banners and streamers of silk” while other boats were “richly beaten with the arms or badges of their craft”; there were many covered with awnings of silk and silken tapestry, while around them the wherries took their course heavily weighted with merchants or priests or courtiers. This was a time when, in the early years of the sixteenth century, the oars of the London watermen might become entangled in water lilies while they kept stroke “to the tune of flutes” which made “the water which they beat to follow faster.” The Thames has always been associated with song and music, beginning with the watermen’s chant of “Heare and how, rumblelow” or “Row, the boat, Norman, row to thy lemen” dated respectively to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

More formal music, beating not to the ebb and flow of the current but rather to its history, could be heard on diplomatic or nuptial occasions. When in 1540 Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves, his fourth wife, removed to Westminster by water on their bridal day they were accompanied by “instruments sweetly sounding” in barges “gorgeously garnished with banners, pennons and targets richly covered.” On the previous ceremonial entrance of Henry’s second wife Anne Boleyn from Greenwich into London in 1533, “there were trumpets, shawms, and other divers instruments, all the way playing and making great melody.” Her welcome provided one of the richest pageants upon the Thames ever recorded, with the state barge of the mayor leading the procession “adorned by flags and pennons hung with rich tapestries and ornamented on the outside with scutcheons of metal, suspended on cloth of gold and silver.” It was preceded by a flat vessel, rather like a floating stage, upon which “a dragon pranced about furiously, twisting his tail and belching out wildfire.” Here the freedom of the river inspires extravagance as well as music. The barge of the mayor was followed by fifty other barges belonging to the trades and guilds, “all sumptuously decked with silk and arras, and having bands of music on board.” Here commerce makes its own music upon the water, which was itself the conduit of its wealth.

It is clear, however, that the Thames can harbour and accommodate supernatural forces as well as more conventional goods. It was typically described as the colour of silver, the great alchemical agent; the “silver streaming Thames” in Spenser is followed by “the silver-footed Thamesis” in Herrick and the “silver Thames” in Pope. Herrick introduces nymphs and naiads, but his central tone is one of mournful regret upon being forced to abandon the river in leaving London for the country-no more sweet evenings of summer bathing, no more journeys to Richmond, Kingston or Hampton Court, no more departures “and landing here, or safely landing there.” Drayton invokes the “silver Thames” also, and uses the familiar metaphor of a “clearest crystal flood,” where Pope describes “Old Father Thames” whose “shining horns diffused a golden gleam.” It has often been suggested that rivers represent the feminine principle within the general masculine environment of the city, but with the Thames this is emphatically not the case. It is the “Old Father,” perhaps in a somewhat menacing or primeval way equivalent to William Blake’s vision of “Nobodaddy.”

It looked, from a distance, as if it were a forest of masts; there were approximately two thousand ships and boats each day upon the water, as well as three thousand of the then notorious watermen who transported goods and people in every direction. “The Pool of London,” the area between London Bridge and the Tower, was filled to capacity with barges and barks and galleons, while a map of the middle sixteenth century shows boats moored beside the various stairs which were the transportation stops of the capital. Upon this map the streets are depicted as almost devoid of activity while the river is a hive of business; it was a pardonable exaggeration, designed to emphasise the paramount importance of the Thames. There is a London story which is appropriate. One sovereign, more than usually irate about the reluctance of London to subsidise his adventures, threatened to move his court to Winchester or Oxford; the mayor of London replied, “Your Majesty may with ease move yourself, your Court and your Parliament, wheresoever you wish, but the merchants of London have one great consolation-you cannot take the Thames with you.”

When Wenceslaus Hollar arrived in England in December 1636, he travelled to London by barge from Gravesend. He was given lodgings in Arundel House, beside the Thames, so that his first and earliest views were of the river. His sketches and etchings are filled with its breadth and light, while its continual activity spills over upon its banks and embarkation points; the wherries and barges are crowded, seeming to skim the water before the small quiet buildings which line its shores. It is the river which breathes life within his great panorama of the city; the streets and houses seem deserted, as if all London were gathered by the riverside. The names of each wharf are prominently displayed-“Paulus wharfe … Queen hythe … The 3 Cranes … Stiliard … Cole harbour … The Old Swan”-while their stairs and landing-stages are busy with the activity of tiny human figures. The great sheet of bright water is lent depth and interest by the numerous craft, some of which are named; “the Eel Ships” lie among barges carrying vegetable produce, while small boats with two or three passengers voyage from shore to shore. Below London Bridge many great ships are moored while around them teems the marine business of the port. In the right-hand corner of this engraving the figure of a water god, Father Thames, holding an urn from which pour a multitude of fish, completes an image of the river as the source of power and life. Just as its swans were in the pre-Christian era under the protection of Apollo and of Venus, so the river itself lies under divine tutelage. It is of some significance, too, that the classical deity, depicted by Hollar as pointing to the cartouche of “LONDON,” is Mercury who is the god of commerce.

Hollar’s prospect is taken from a high point south of the river and just west of London Bridge; it was a real location, on top of St. Mary Overy (now Southwark cathedral), but it also became a conventional or idealised vantage point. An earlier etching by Claes Jansz Visscher takes approximately the same position but from a theoretical high locality further westward; this allowed him to suggest a great central sketch of the busy river, and he emphasised the point with the Latin inscription of London “emporium que toto orbe celeberrimum” (the most famous market in the entire world). The power and persuasiveness of this slightly fictionalised topography affected many later artists and engravers, who kept on borrowing each other’s mistakes and false perspectives in their continuing effort to celebrate the Thames as representing the commercial destiny of the city. Just as the river had been the great subject of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century London poetry, so it became the central theme of London painting.

As trade and commerce increased, so did the significance of the river. It has been estimated that the volume of business grew three times between 1700 and 1800; there were thirty-eight wharves on both sides of the river, from the bridge to the Tower, and nineteen further below. It has been estimated that, even by 1700, the London quays were handling 80 per cent of the entire country’s imports and 69 per cent of its exports. Within the river’s banks sailed tea and china, as well as cotton and pepper, from the East Indies; from the West Indies came rum and coffee, sugar and cocoa; North America brought to the Thames tobacco and corn, rice and oil, while the Baltic states offered hemp and tallow, iron and linen. When Daniel Defoe wrote of trade “flowing” in and out of London, he was using the river as a metaphor for London’s life.

It rare to find a picture of London that does not contain a glimpse of the river; there are views from Westminster Pier and from Lambeth as well as from Southwark. Three very popular collections of river prints were published in the latter part of the eighteenth century-Boydell’s Collection of Views (1770), Ireland’s Picturesque Views of the Thames (1792) and Boydell’s History of the Thames (1794-6)-in which the most usual “views” were those west of London Bridge where the newly renovated city was matched by images of a dignified and elegant river.

Of course Canaletto is the master of these riverscapes in which he creates a city aspiring towards magnificence. Two companion portraits, in particular, The Thames from the terrace of Somerset House, Westminster in the distance and The Thames from the terrace of Somerset House, the city in the distance, take the measure of London as essentially a noble European city. It seems likely that Canaletto came to London in the 1740s specifically to paint the recently constructed Westminster Bridge and to give an aesthetic imprimatur to the city’s latest public building, but his is an idealised city and an idealised river. The sky is free of fog and soot, so that the buildings shine with expressive clarity; the river itself is luminous, its surface iridescent, while the activity upon it is so calm and bright that it is no longer a picture of commerce but of contentment.

A more direct and intimate depiction of the eighteenth-century Thames is found in what is generally classified as the British School, but might as well be termed the London School. William Marlow’s Fresh Wharf, London Bridge and The London Riverfront between Westminster and the Adelphi, for example, acquire much of their strength from their detail. The view of Fresh Wharf shows the work of the wharf with its wooden barrels and olive jars and bales of merchandise being inspected or unloaded; scaffolding and fencing on the north side of London Bridge are an indication that the shops and houses which were once located there have been only just removed. The painting of the London riverfront also acquires its power from its specificity. Here can be seen Buckingham Street and Adam Street, together with the tower and chimneys of the York Buildings Waterworks Company. In the foreground are displayed all the multifarious activities of a messy and grubby river. A coal barge is being unloaded by men in dirty smocks while a woman, surrounded by a pile of baskets, is being ferried towards the shore.

It was in just such a place, and among just such activity, that the youthful imagination of Turner, born in 1775 in Maiden Lane, first moved towards the Thames. In Modern Painters (1843) John Ruskin describes the painter’s early life as involved intimately with “the working of city-commerce, from endless warehouses, towering over Thames, to the back shop in the lane, with its stale herrings.” Here he ventured into the world of barges and ships, “that mysterious forest below London Bridge-better for the boy than wood or pine or grove of myrtle.” Turner was, in other words, a child who derived his inspiration from the city and its river rather than from more conventional and pastoral settings. “How he must have tormented the watermen,” Ruskin goes on to suggest, “beseeching them to let him crouch anywhere in their bows, quiet as a log, so that only he might get floated down there among the ships, and by the ships, and under the ships, staring and clambering;-these the only quite beautiful things in the world.” The great world itself was for Turner contained within the city and its river.

The Thames flowed through him, giving him light and movement. As a child he walked down from his birthplace in Maiden Lane and crossed the Strand to wander among the myriad small streets which led to the river; as an old man he died looking over the Thames in Cheyne Walk. For most of the intervening years he lived “on or within easy reach of its banks.” So we must consider Turner, more than Canaletto or Whistler, as the true child of the river-or, rather, one through whom the spirit of the river emerged most clearly and abundantly. On certain occasions he clothed it with classical beauty, invoking the gods and nymphs which once haunted its banks, while in other paintings he depicted all the immediate and instinctive life of its waters. One of his early sketches was of Old Blackfriars Bridge where he emphasised the tide of the river by painting the piers of the bridge as if they were still dark and wet. An early watercolour of Old London Bridge exhibited the same intense and absorbed observation: here the water wheel of the London Waterworks Company is the central focus, with the force of the water rushing upstream at precisely twenty-five to eleven according to the clock of St. Magnus the Martyr just beyond the bridge.

Vessels were moored side by side, with each ship being assigned its place on its arrival. Barges or smaller boats came alongside in order to receive the goods, which were then rowed upstream to the various official quays and wharves. It was a cumbersome procedure, given the general overcrowding of the Pool, and one which obviously led to theft and dishonest dealing on a large scale. As a result of various parliamentary inquiries, however, a decision was eventually taken to build proper docks, where cargo could be more expeditiously handled and enclosed. So began the great scheme of the “wet docks.” In 1799 the West India Dock Company Act was passed, and the whole Isle of Dogs began its transformation into its home. It was followed by the London Dock at Wapping, the East India Dock at Blackwall and the Surrey Dock at Rotherhithe. It was the largest single, privately funded enterprise in the history of London. Great fortress-like structures with gates and high walls were built, beside what were essentially artificial lakes covering some three hundred acres of water. The Isle of Dogs, formerly a wasteland of marsh, was turned into something like an elegant prison island; the sketches and aquatints of a contemporary artist, William Daniell, show grand avenues of brick warehouses. A new road was built connecting the docks to the City of London, from Aldgate to Limehouse; hundreds of houses were demolished in its path, and it entirely changed the aspect of east London. The Commercial Road was in that sense aptly named since this transformation of the city was done solely in the name of profit. The foundation stone of the West India Dock was inscribed with the motto: “An Undertaking which, under the Favour of God, shall contribute Stability, Increase and Ornament, to British Commerce.” Further changes followed with the building of the Regent’s Canal to connect the docks with the greater world, by means of a waterway going westward until it met the Grand Union Canal at Paddington Basin. Once again the city was opened up to more transport and traffic.

The whole enterprise was considered at the time to be an almost visionary undertaking, and the apotheosis of successful commercialism. The tobacco warehouse at Wapping was celebrated for “covering more ground, under one roof, than any public building, or undertaking, except the pyramids of Egypt.” Many of these Wapping warehouses were the work of Daniel Asher Alexander, who also built the huge prisons of Dartmoor and Maidstone; we may see here the association between money and the nature of power. One architectural historian has compared the edifices of Alexander with the architectural engravings of Piranesi. “While Coleridge turned the plates of the Opere Varie and young De Quincey drugged himself into Piranesian frenzy,” Sir John Summerson wrote in Georgian London, “Alexander built these reminiscences of the Carceri into gaols and warehouses.” Here money and power are given visionary, or mythic, potential.

The drawings and engravings which display the dock works in progress also command grand vistas and vast numbers of workmen to emphasise the scope of the enterprise. There were crowds when the work was completed, crowds when the waters of the Thames were allowed to flow into the basins, crowds when the first vessels were admitted. These were schemes of immensity, and resembled “the hydraulic works of ancient river civilisations,” suggesting that London’s great riverine adventure revived memories of ancient empires. “The docks are impossible to describe,” Verlaine wrote in 1872. “They are unbelievable! Tyre and Carthage all rolled into one!” He and his companion, Rimbaud, spent hours in the vast region noting the myriad goods and the myriad types of humanity jostling together; “they heard strange languages spoken,” Enid Starkie wrote in her biography of Rimbaud, “and saw printed on the bales of goods mysterious signs that they could not read.” James McNeill Whistler is generally considered to be the painter who evokes the poetry of the Thames when it is subdued by mist and occluded light, but that opinion neglects half of his achievement as a painter of the river. In his early sketches of the Thames between Tower Bridge and Wapping, the central images are of wharves and warehouses where work and trade are the persistent, essential London element. These etchings in fact elicited a remark from Baudelaire that they manifested “the profound and complex poetry of a vast capital.”

Here the experience of confusion is compounded by the sense of mystery-of something living and alien-that lies at the heart of the city’s life. This is also the effect manifested in Gustave Doré’s engravings of the docks where the carters and the porters, the sailors and labourers, become darkly anonymous figures tending to the trade of London like ancient votaries; the warehouses and custom houses are generally enmeshed in shadow and chiaroscuro, like the thick netting of sails and masts which dominates the foreground. Fitful gleams can be seen upon the dark water “black with coal, blue with indigo, brown with tides, white with flour, stained with purple wine, or brown with tobacco.” These are the ranges of colours which Doré knew, at first sight, to be “one of the grand aspects of your London.” Again his scenes conjure up images of Piranesi, with the rigging and the spars and the ropes and the land bridges and planks blending together to form a picture of endless turmoil. “A whole people toil at the unloading of the enormous ships,” another French observer, Gabriel Mourey, wrote, “swarming on the barges, dark figures, dimly outlined, moving rhythmically, fill in and give life to the picture. In the far distance, behind the interminable lines of sheds and warehouses, masts bound the horizon, masts like a bare forest in winter, finely branched, exaggerated, aerial trees grown in all the climates of the globe.”

Since the docks had become one of the wonders of creation, many travellers felt obliged to visit them. It was necessary to obtain a letter of introduction for the captain of each dock, and then hire a boat from one of the stairs to take advantage of the ebbing tide. “You see shipping at anchor on both sides, many Dutch, Danes, Swedes, with licences I suppose, and many Americans”: this is from the 1810 diary of a French visitor. A German had pronounced upon the same subject in 1787: “It is an area of restless activity,” he wrote, “of constant noise, and of the hubbub of people … broad quays, large splendid warehouses like palaces.” This visitor also commented that “nearby rural pleasures seem to be very far away.” Since those pleasures, at Greenwich and Gravesend, were themselves upon the Thames the sheer imposition of the city’s trading machinery seemed to have obliterated their presence. When Prince Herman Pückler-Muskau visited the docks in 1826 he conceded “astonishment, and a sort of awe at the greatness and might of England … Everything is on a colossal scale” with “sugar enough to sweeten the whole adjoining basin, and rum enough to make half England drunk.” He might have commented, too, that nine million oranges arrived each year, together with twelve thousand tons of raisins. The peripatetic prince had just visited the great breweries of the city and, after his journey to the docks, he went to a freak-show. So the spectacles of London merge into an unnatural phantasmagoria.

The history of the docks is in fact the central story of the commercial Thames in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is the story of a riverside thoroughfare busy for 150 years. In Commercial Road, and Thames Street, and a score of narrow streets between them descending to the riverside, there were wagons and vans; Mile’s Lane, Duck’s Foot Lane and Pickle-Herring Street were filled with the sound of carts, horses, cranes and human voices mingling with the whistles of the railway. On the banks themselves there was a profusion of commercial activity, with factories and warehouses approaching as close to the water as they dared, while its wharves and mills and landing-stages pulsated with the energies of human life and activity. Further upriver, between Southwark Bridge and Blackfriars Bridge, the riverside scene subtly changed; the warehouses and houses here were older and more dilapidated. They leaned towards the river, narrow and lopsided, while between them were the openings of little alleys, through which sacks and barrels were taken from the river into the city. By Ludgate a huge steam flour-mill could be seen, while on the other bank lay a whole range of factory chimneys. This was a true avenue of commerce, with its institutions on both sides.

But there was also less serious business upon the Thames. There were halfpenny steamers, penny steamers and twopenny steamers going to Greenwich or Gravesend, Ramsgate and Margate. There was a Dover boat and a Boulogne boat, an Ostend boat and a Rhine boat; there were coasters to Ipswich, Yarmouth and Hull, and steamboats to Southampton, Plymouth and Land’s End. There were slower boats which made the journey to Kew, Richmond and Hampton Court complete with musical bands.

Then beyond the shoreline itself lay a whole host of commercial properties dependent upon the river and its tides-ship yards, sailors’ lodgings and public houses, marine stores, the hovels of porters, apple stalls and oyster shops waiting for custom. The whole panoply of street life attended the river, then, with a group of sailors getting out of hansom cabs to descend upon a public house, a breakdown of a wagon in the streets attracting a crowd of spectators, the endless chaff of speech resounding against the walls and bridge. “Go it!” “I can come it slap.” “She can be very choice!”

By 1930 the port and docks of London gave employment to a hundred thousand people and carried thirty-five million tons of cargo within their seven hundred acres; there were in addition almost two thousand riverside wharves. In this period, too, heavy industries such as gas production and food processing clustered around the river as if in homage to its ancient mercantile past; other industries such as timber and chemicals made use of the Regent’s Canal and the River Lea as avenues to and from the Thames.

In the following decade the business of the river was amplified by “rapid handling” methods which lifted cargo by fork-lift trucks and fast-moving cranes, but by the 1960s the equally rapid changes in the industrial process left the docks almost literally high and dry. The new phenomenon of containeri-sation, whereby goods were transported in vast boxes from ship to truck, precluded the system of warehousing; the vessels were too large for the original early nineteenth-century docks to handle.

The docks are silent now, and, within memory, the great buildings of the early nineteenth century have become a wasteland. The East India Dock closed in 1967, while the London Dock and St. Katherine’s Dock followed just two years later. The West India Dock survived until 1980, but by then the active and busy life of the region seemed to have gone for ever. The economy of the East End was severely depleted, and unemployment among the population reached very high levels. Yet out of this dereliction, ten years later, rose the shining edifices and refurbished warehouses known as Docklands, confirming that pattern of deliquescence and renewal which is at the heart of London’s life. As Mrs. Cook said of the Thames in Highways and Byways of London (1902), “nothing destroys antiquity like energy; nothing blots out the old like the new.”

In place of a derelict St. Katherine’s Wharf a new hotel and a world trade centre were constructed, the latter at least an appropriate edifice beside the ancient river which had for two thousand years carried the trade of the world. The restoration of other dock areas continued in a similar manner, although the greatest scheme of all was the regeneration of what became known as the East Thames Corridor between Tower Bridge and Sheerness. There will be no diminution in the mysterious ability of the commercial Thames to attract money and enterprise in the twenty-first century. The building of great offices upon the Isle of Dogs can be compared only with the original development of the West India Dock upon the same site; in both cases, that of 1806 and that of 1986, the enormous scale of the enterprise was noted. In typical London fashion both giant works were funded by the private money of speculators and businesses, with discreet public help in the nature of tax-incentives, and on both occasions new forms of transport had to be provided. The Docklands Light Railway, in its size and character, is the late twentieth-century equivalent of the Commercial Road. On the western quay of the Brunswick Dock, built in the late eighteenth century, stood a great mast-house of some 120 feet which for many years dominated and symbolised the area as one of marine commerce and London’s maritime power; now, only a little distant, the Canary Wharf Tower fulfils a similar function in the celebration of power and commerce. The Thames runs, softly or powerfully according to the tidal currents, and its dark magniloquent song is not over.

CHAPTER 58

Dark Thames

From early times it was a river of the dead, to which the bodies of the local population were consigned. The number of human skulls found in Chelsea has given it the name of “our Celtic Golgotha.” As Joseph Conrad said, of another stretch of the Thames, “And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth.” The derivation of its very name, pre-Celtic in origin, is tamasa, “dark river.” How can so many influences and associations be denied when, in modern times, lonely and unhappy people are often to be seen staring down into its turbulent depths? The German poet Heinrich Heine in 1827 described “the black mood which once came over me as toward evening I stood on Waterloo Bridge, and looked down on the water of the Thames … At the same time the most sorrowful tales came into my memory.”

The river has embraced many such tales, as the old “dead houses” along its banks might testify. Here were brought the bodies of those who in the words of the ubiquitous posters were “found drowned.” Three or four suicides, or accidents, every week were laid upon a shelf, or within a wooden “shell,” to await the attentions of beadle and coroner. Heine went on to declare that “I was so sick in spirit that the hot drops sprang forcibly out of my eyes. They fell down into the Thames and swam forth into the mighty sea, which has already swallowed up such floods of human tears without giving them a thought.” It might be said that the river had swallowed them already. The toll-keepers upon the bridges were well known for their willingness to discuss the suicides-how many they were, how difficult to stop them, how difficult, indeed, to find them once they jumped. The river can in that sense become a true emblem of London’s oppression. It can carry away all of life’s hopes and ambitions, or deliver them up quite changed.

The river banks mark that point where the stone of the city and the water meet in perpetual embrace, with the scattered debris of ships and urban waste mingling together; here are found sheets of metal, planks of rotten wood, bottles, cans, ash, bits of rope, pieces of board of no identifiable purpose or origin. The river also affects the fabric of the city with what Dickens described in Our Mutual Friend as “the spoiling influences of water-discoloured copper, rotten wood, honeycombed stone, green dank deposit.”

There were small communities beside it which became a picture of urban dereliction. The area of Deptford was described in the nineteenth century as quite “the worst part of the great City’s story.” It is a record of that city’s decay when its commercial life has departed, with “the muddy, melancholy banks … the desolation of empty silent yards.” This, in the words of Blanchard Jerrold, was the “dead shore”; yet not so dead that there were not inhabitants of the area, living off the detritus which the Thames offered. These were the people of the river. They lived, too, in Shadwell (“the well of shadows”). Here, in the early twentieth century, “the houses of the people are square and black and low. The walls of storages are sheer and blind upon the narrow streets.” The darkness of the river against the darkness of the surrounding buildings renders it “invisible.” On the other bank, close to Rotherhithe, can be found Jacob’s Island which was also black with the “dust of colliers and the smoke of close-built low-roofed houses”; where once the bright water reflected and illuminated the brightness of the buildings along its banks, in the nineteenth century darkness called to darkness. Jacob’s Island, too, was “the filthiest, the strangest, the most extraordinary of the many locations that are hidden in London, wholly unknown, even by name, to the great mass of its inhabitants.”

It is those elements of anonymity, and of secrecy, which the river accommodates within itself. Conrad compared the buildings that lined the shores to “the matted growths of bushes and creepers veiling the silent depths of an unexplored wilderness, they hide the depths of London’s infinitely varied, vigorous seething life … Dark and impenetrable at night, like the face of a forest, in the London waterside.” Sometimes it becomes almost too black and sad to bear examination. The author of London Nights, Stephen Graham, describes his pilgrimages within the “long, strange passages under the Thames in East London” where “one is descending, one is going back, one is bearing all London.” Just as Heine spoke of his instinctive and intuitive sorrow at the sight of the dark river, so in Stephen Graham’s book the Thames itself and all its submerged secrets “told of an enigma which would never be solved; the enigma of London’s sorrow, her burden, her slavery.” The river has brought London money and power, but at the cost of the city’s being enslaved to those insidious principles. One late twentieth-century writer, Iain Sinclair, has described the Thames in his novel Downriver as “breathless, cyclic, unstoppable. It offers immersion, blindness: a poultice of dark clay to seal our eyes for ever from the fear and agony of life … passions reduced to silt.”

No wonder the watermen of the Thames, from the thirteenth century to the nineteenth, were known for their insulting and foul language. The violent and blasphemous abuse they used was known as water-language, to which anyone could be subject. Monarchs were often reviled in this manner when they took to the water and H.V. Morton, in In Search of London (1951), notes that “remarks which on land would have been treasonable were regarded as a joke upon the Thames.” It has even been suggested that Handel’s Water-Music was composed in order to “drown the torrent of abuse that would have greeted the new king, George I, during his first river-progress” (1714). It may be that the antiquity of the Thames has given its watermen licence to speak without fear; in that sense the river can be considered the essence of that radical and egalitarian temper so often associated with London.

But that sense of darkness, continually moving upon the face of the water, also acts as a toughening and coarsening presence for all those who work there. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote of “the muddy tide of the Thames, reflecting nothing, and hiding a million of unclean secrets within its breast-a sort of guilty conscience as it were, unwholesome with the rivulets of sin that constantly flow into it.”

When Samuel Johnson gave the injunction to Boswell “to explore Wapping” as one way of understanding “the wonderful extent and variety of London” he could not have guessed the curious construction that might have been applied to his words in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By the early decades of the twentieth century Wapping was as much blasted by decay as Shadwell or Jacob’s Island. Where the banks of the Seine are open and approachable, there are stretches of the Thames which actively deter visitors. The area of Wapping was itself hard to find, with its high street running beneath the great walls of the old warehouses, while the adjacent streets seemed to wish to conceal themselves behind gasworks and tenements. It had always been a lawless area, beyond the jurisdiction of the city, but its dereliction at the beginning of the century was also an echo of the shame and waste of the short-time labouring system at the docks; crowds of men seeking work would gather outside the gates, while only a few were ever selected by the foremen. The rest slunk back to that life of poverty, drink and oblivion so well documented by Charles Booth as well as Sidney and Beatrice Webb. “Indeed it is a sight to sadden the most callous,” according to Henry Mayhew, “to see thousands of men struggling for one day’s hire … To look in the faces of that hungry crowd is to see a sight that must be ever remembered … For weeks many have gone there, and gone through the same struggle-the same cries; and have gone away, after all, without the work they had screamed for.” So the Thames, the begetter of commerce, is also the most visible harbour for the misery which commercial principles can impose.

In the forlorn graveyard of St. George’s in the East, one of the unhappy and ill-favoured places of London over many generations, lay “the sailors’ women, inured to immorality from childhood, rotten with disease.” Wapping was also a place of death at Execution Dock, where those accused of crimes upon the “high seas” were summarily despatched into eternity. In the police station at Wapping was kept what has been described as “one of the saddest books in the world”; it is a journal of the narratives of attempted suicides, with the events and circumstances which led each towards the river. The author of Unknown London, Walter George Bell, wandering through the area in 1910, observed the “reeking drink shops; inexpressible in their squalor and dirt, the natural home for every kind of abomination” with “the inner recesses of the hive” being a “gloomy slum area.” So we may take to heart Samuel Johnson’s injunction to “explore Wapping” in order to understand London.

CHAPTER 59

They Are Lost

There are other rivers of London which lie concealed, encased in tunnels or in pipes, occasionally to be heard but generally running silently and invisibly beneath the surface of the city. To name them in order, west to east-Stamford Brook, the Wandle, Counter’s Creek, the Falcoln, the Westbourne, the Tyburn, the Effra, the Fleet, the Walbrook, Neckinger and the Earl’s Sluice, the Peck and the Ravensbourne.

It has always been said that enchantment is bought in the burying alive of great waters, yet the purchase may be a perilous one. The “lost rivers” can still create stench and dampness. The Fleet River, at times of storm, can still reach beyond its artificial containment and flood basements along its route; at its source in Hampstead it was the expediter of agues and fevers. The valleys of these rivers, many now converted into roads or train-lines, were subject to fog as well as damp. According to the author of The Lost Rivers of London, Nicholas Barton, rheumatism “was unusually common both sides of Counter’s Creek from Shepherd’s Bush to Chelsea,” while the London “ague” of the seventeenth century has been suggestively associated with streams and rivulets now sunk beneath the earth.

The lost rivers may provoke allergies also. One recent investigation of patients in London hospitals revealed that “38 out of the 49 allergic patients (i.e. 77.5 per cent) lived within 180 yards of a known watercourse” while among asthmatics “17 out of the 19 [were] living within 180 yards of a watercourse,” in most cases the “buried tributaries of the Thames.” The reasons for this strange correlation are still unknown, although those who understand the various powers of London places may have their own theories. But the enchantment, white or black, does not end there. A study published in 1960, The Geography of London Ghosts by G.W. Lambert, has found that approximately 75 per cent of these disturbances occurred “in houses significantly close to watercourses,” where perhaps the spirit as well as the sound of buried waters may be asserting themselves.

We may take the fate of the Fleet River as characteristic. As befits an ancient river, it has gone by many names. It was christened the Fleet in its lower reaches, from the Anglo-Saxon term for a tidal inlet; in its upper reaches it was known as the Holebourne, and in its middle section as Turnmill Brook. It has in a sense been the guardian of London, marking the boundary between Westminster and the City from ancient times. It has always been used as part of London’s defences; during the Civil War, for example, great earthworks were built on either bank. Of all the city’s lost rivers, therefore, it is the one which is best documented and most often depicted. It has shared in the defilement of London, as a repository of its discarded and forgotten objects. An anchor was discovered as far north as Kentish Town, which may provide some indication of its width and depth at this far point, but more generally it has been the last resting place for the more local and immediate items of urban existence-keys, daggers, coins, medals, pins, brooches and the detritus of such riverine industries as tanning. It needed continually to be cleansed of its mud and general filth, so the scouring of the river took place every twenty or thirty years. Those who wished to rail against London, and all its squalor, inevitably chose the Fleet River as their example; it epitomised the way in which the city fouled water once sweet and clear. It carried the savour of each street, readily identifiable; it was full of dung and dead things. It was London in essence. “The greatest good that I ever heard it did was to the undertaker,” Ned Ward wrote, “who is bound to acknowledge he has found better fishing in that muddy stream than ever he did in clear water.” The Fleet, like the Thames its father, was a river of death.

It has always been an unlucky river. Once it moved through the regions of Kentish Town and St. Pancras, melancholy still with the touch of the water; then at Battle Bridge it entered “the pleasure grounds of Giant Despair,” according to William Hone, where “trees stand as if not made to vegetate; clipped hedges seem willing to decline, and weeds struggle weakly upon unlimited borders.” It then moved around Clerkenwell Hill and touched the stones of the Coldbath Prison; passed Saffron Hill, whose fragrant name concealed some of the worst rookeries in London; and entered the path of Turnmill Street, the vicious reputation of which has already been chronicled. Then it flowed down into Chick Lane, later known as West Street, which was for many centuries the haven of felons and murderers; the river here became the dumping ground of bodies slain or robbed when dead drunk. Once more it became the river of death before flowing in front of the noxious Fleet Prison.

Prisoners died of its stench, and of the diseases which it carried with it. In the valley of the Fleet, wrote a doctor in 1560, and “in its stinking lanes, there died most in London and were soonest inflicted, and were longest continued, as twice since I have known London I have marked it to be true.” In later testimony quoted in The Lost Rivers of London, it was revealed that “In every parish along the Fleet, the Plague stayed and destroyed.” It might be asked why the area was always so fully populated, therefore, were it not for the fact that the river seemed to draw certain people towards its banks by some form of silent contagion. It attracted those who were already dirty, and silent, and evil-smelling, as if it were their natural habitat. It was treacherous, too, in its natural state. In stormy weather it was liable to sudden increase of volume, causing inundation of its surrounding areas. At times of thaw, or in periods of heavy rain, it became a dangerous torrent tearing down streets and buildings. The deluge of 1317 carried away many citizens as well as their houses and sheds; in the fifteenth century the parishioners of St. Pancras were moved to plead that they could not reach their church “when foul ways is and great water.”

Every attempt to render it clean or noble failed. After the Great Fire, when the wharves along the Thames were utterly destroyed with all their merchandise within them, its banks were raised upon brick and stone while four new bridges were constructed to maintain its formal harmony. But the refurbishment of the New Canal, as it was then called, was not successful; the waters once more became sluggish and noxious, while the neighbouring streets and banks continued their notorious lives as harbours for thieves, pimps and malingerers. So, within fifty years of the grand development, the river itself was bricked over. It is almost as if it represented a flow of guilt which had to be concealed from public view; the city literally buried it. In 1732 it was bricked in from Fleet Street to Holborn Bridge and then, thirty-three years later, it was bricked in from Fleet Street to the Thames. At the beginning of the next century its northern reaches were buried underground so that no trace of this once great guardian of London remained.

Yet its spirit did not die. In 1846 it blew up, “its rancid and foetid gas,” trapped within brick tunnels, “bursting out into the streets above”; three posthouses were swept away by “a tidal wave of sewage” and a steamboat was crushed against Blackfriars Bridge. The waters of the Fleet Ditch then actively hampered the efforts to construct an underground railway beneath it: its waters filled the tunnels with dark and fetid liquid, and for a while all work was abandoned. It is now employed only as a storm sewer, with its outfall into the Thames by Blackfriars Bridge, but it still manifests its presence. In storms it may still flood the roadway, while building works upon its old course have regularly to be pumped out. So the waters from ancient streams and wells collect themselves in their old courses and run along the familiar beds of the now enclosed main rivers.

The rivers themselves are not wholly dead, then, and occasionally emerge into the light. The course of the Westbourne River can be observed rushing through a great iron pipe above the platform of Sloane Square Underground Station; the Tyburn is also carried in great pipes at the tube stations of Baker Street and Victoria. In February 1941 the Tyburn was observed flowing at the bottom of a bomb crater. The Westbourne was not covered until 1856. The Lost Rivers of London reveals that in Meard Street, Soho, is “a grate in the basement beneath which waters can be seen running in a southward direction”; the phenomenon is mysterious but it has been suggested that this water is pursuing the course of a seventeenth-century sewer and has created an unknown stream. As Nicholas Barton has put it, “once a channel has been made they cling to it with great persistence.” It raises the possibility of other streams and tributaries, still flowing beneath the streets of the city, replete with their own underground ghosts and nymphs.

Under the Ground

A portrait of a sewer-hunter, taken from Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor; theirs was a dangerous and despised occupation, but the city has always been characterised by the search for profit of any kind.

CHAPTER 60

What Lies Beneath

There are always rumours of a world under the ground. Underground chambers and tunnels have been reported, one linking the crypt of St. Bartholomew the Great with Canonbury, another running a shorter distance between the priory and nunnery of Clerkenwell. There are extensive catacombs in Camden Town, beneath the Camden goods yard. Roman temples have been discovered within “hidden” London. Statues of ancient deities have been found in a condition which suggests that, for reasons unknown, they were deliberately buried. At All Hallows, Barking, a buried undercroft and arch of a Christian church were constructed with Roman materials; a cross of sandstone was also found, with the inscription WERHERE of Saxon date; it is somehow strangely evocative of WE ARE HERE. Lost beneath Cheapside, and found only after the bombing of London, was the figure of the “Dead Christ” laid horizontally in a stratum of London soil. Evidence of the passage of generations, themselves buried in the clay and gravel, was found on the corner of Ray Street and Little Saffron Hill; thirteen feet below the surface, in 1855, “the workmen came upon the pavement of an old street, consisting of very large blocks of ragstone of irregular shape. An examination of the paving-stones showed that the street had been well used. They are worn quite smooth by the footsteps and traffic of a past generation.” Beneath these ancient stones were found piles of oak-thick, hard and covered with slime-interpreted as fragments of a great mill. Beneath the oak, in turn, were crude wooden water pipes. The great weight of the past had pressed all this material of London “into a hard and almost solid mass, and it is curious to observe that near the old surface were great numbers of pins.” The mystery of the pins remains.

The author of Unknown London has remarked: “I have climbed down more ladders to explore the buried town than I have toiled up City staircases,” which may lead to the impression that there is more beneath than above. One of the characteristic drawings of the city is that of its horizontal levels, from the rooftops of its houses to the caverns of its sewers, bearing down upon and almost crushing one another with their weight. It was well said, in one guide to the city’s history, that “certain it is that none who know London would deny that its treasures must be sought in its depths”; it is an ambiguous sentence, perhaps, with a social as well as a topographical mystery associated with it.

Another great London historian, Charles Knight, suggested that if we were to “imagine that this great capital of capitals should ever be what Babylon is-its very site forgotten-one could not but almost envy the delight with which the antiquaries of that future time would hear of some discovery of a London below the soil still remaining. We can fancy we see the progress of the excavators from one part to another of the mighty but, for a while, inexplicable labyrinth till the whole was cleared open to the daylight, and the vast systems laid before them.” It is a stupendous conception, but no more stupendous than the reality.

There is indeed a London under the ground, comprising great vaults and passageways, sewers and tunnels, pipes and corridors, issuing into one another. There are great networks of gas and water pipes, many long since disused but others being transformed into conduits for the thousands of miles of coaxial cables which now help to organise and control the city. Walter George Bell, the author of London Rediscoveries, noticed how in the early 1920s Post Office workmen were laying earthenware conduits for their telephone cables within a trough created by the wall of a Roman villa lying in Gracechurch Street, so that, as he said, “our messages go whispering” through rooms where once the citizens of a lost London spoke in an alien tongue. There are deep-level tunnels for British Telecom and for the London Electricity Board, with National Grid cables carried in conduits and trenches. A great system of Post Office tunnels was inaugurated after 1945, complicating the topography of this subterranean region. There are more tunnels under the Thames than under the river of any other capital city-tunnels for trains, for cars, for foot passengers as well as for the supplies of public utilities. The whole area under the river, and indeed under the whole of the city, is a catacomb of avenues and highways mimicking their counterparts above ground.

Yet something happens when you travel beneath the surface of London; the very air itself seems to become old and sorrowful, with its inheritance of grief. The Thames Tunnel, built between 1825 and 1841, was, for example, established only at the cost of much labour and suffering. Its history is recorded in London Under London by Richard Trench and Ellis Hillman. Marc Brunel began the tunnel at a depth of sixty-three feet, using a great “shield” to take out the earth, while the bricklayers continually formed the walls of the tunnel itself. There were often eruptions of earth and deluges of water; the workmen were “like labourers in a dangerous coal-mine, in constant terror from either fire or water.” One labourer fell down the great shaft, while drunk, and died; some drowned in floods, others died of “ague” or dysentery, and one or two suffocated in the “thick and impure air.” Marc Brunel himself suffered a paralytic stroke, yet insisted upon continuing his work. He left a diary which is sufficiently compelling to need no description-“16 May, 1828, Inflammable gas. Men complain v. much. 26 May. Heywood died this morning. Two more on the sick list. Page is evidently sinking very fast … I feel much debility after having been some time below. 28 May. Bowyer died today or yesterday. A good man.” The metaphor of “sinking” is instructive in this context, as if the whole weight of the underground world were fatal. The air of dream, of hopelessness and dreariness, seems to have haunted this tunnel. “The very walls were in a cold sweat,” The Times reported upon its opening in 1843.

It is suggestive that Marc Brunel discovered his unique way of tunnelling underground while incarcerated in a debtors’ prison in London; here he noticed the activities of a worm, teredo navalis, which itself is a “natural tunneler.” The atmosphere of prison, too, is incorporated within the very structure of these tunnels. Nathaniel Hawthorne descended into the depths of the Thames Tunnel after its completion, down “a wearisome succession of staircases” until “we behold the vista of an arched corridor that extends into everlasting midnight.” Here is a depiction of melancholy anxiety transformed into brick and stone, “gloomier than a street of upper London.” Yet there were some Londoners who soon became acclimatised to the depth and the dankness. Hawthorne observed in the dusk “stalls or shops, in little alcoves, kept principally by women … they assail you with hungry entreaties to buy their merchandise.” It was his belief that these subterranean women “spend their lives there, seldom or never, I presume seeing any daylight.” He describes the Thames Tunnel, therefore, as “an admirable prison.” It was for this reason, precisely, that it never succeeded as a pathway for vehicles or pedestrians; the gloomy associations and connotations were just too strong. So it was little used after its inception, and in 1869 it was taken over by the East London Railway. In that capacity it has existed ever since, and now forms the underground connection between Wapping and Rotherhithe.

The other tunnels under the Thames have not lost their overpowering sense of gloom. Of the Rotherhithe Road Tunnel, built between Stepney and Rotherhithe, Iain Sinclair has written in Downriver, “If you want to sample the worst London can offer, follow me down that slow incline. The tunnel drips with warnings: DO NOT STOP” and he goes on to suggest that “The tunnel can achieve meaning only if it remains unused and silent.” That silence can be forbidding: the Greenwich Foot Tunnel, opened in 1902, can seem more lonely and desolate than any other part of London. Yet there are some, like the female shopkeepers pleading in the dusk of the Thames Tunnel, who seem to belong to this subterranean world.

An eighteenth-century German traveller observed that “one third of the inhabitants of London live under ground.” We may date this inclination to the Bronze Age, when underground tunnels were built a little to the west of where the Greenwich Observatory is now situated. (It has been suggested that the wells or pits which ventilate them were themselves early forms of stellar observation, which may once more suggest that continuity for which London is notable.) The German traveller was in fact remarking upon the curious basements or “cellar dwellings” of eighteenth-century London, which had already been a feature of the city for two hundred years. They were let to the very poor who “entered by steps from the street down a well which was supposed to be closed at nightfall by a flap.” In the transcripts of the poor we have some brief glimpses of this subterranean life-“I am a cobbler. I live in a cellar … I am a shoemaker. I keep a kitchen [basement dwelling] in Monmouth Street … I do not know the landlady’s name, I pay my money every Monday.” But these traps of dampness and darkness also had more nefarious uses. “I keep a public cellar” seems to have meant that vagrants or drunks or debauchees had access to a buried life.

This tendency to seek refuge beneath the city became most noticeable in the twentieth century. It has been estimated that during the First World War, one-third of a million Londoners went underground in February 1918, to shelter in the tube stations which extended below the capital. They became accustomed to their buried life, and even began to savour it. Indeed, according to Philip Ziegler in London at War, one of the principal fears of the authorities was that a “‘deep shelter’ mentality might grow up and result in paralysis of will among those who succumbed to it.” It was also suggested that the underground Londoners “would grow hysterical with fear and would never surface to perform their duties.”

In the autumn of 1940 Londoners were once more buried. They flocked to underground shelters or the crypts of churches, and certain people “lived underground, and saw less of the sky than any miner.” In each of the deep shelters more than a thousand people might congregate “lying closer together than the dead in any graveyard” while those in the crypts “sought shelter amongst the dead.” This is a constant image in descriptions of the subterranean life. It is like being dead, buried alive beneath the great city. The most famous of these caverns under the ground was the “Tilbury” beneath Commercial Road and Cable Street where thousands of East Enders sheltered from the bombs.

The tube stations were the most obvious locations of safety. Henry Moore wandered among their new inhabitants, and made preliminary notes for his drawings. “Dramatic, dismal lit, masses of reclining figures fading foreground. Chains hanging from old cranes … Mud and rubbish and chaotic untidiness everywhere.” The stench of urine was noticeable, as well as fetid human smells: this is a picture of London in almost primeval state, as if in the journey under ground the citizens had gone back centuries. “I had never seen so many reclining figures and even the train tunnels seemed to be like the holes in my sculpture. And amid the grim tension, I noticed groups of strangers forming together in intimate groups and children asleep within feet of the passing trains.” He compared it to “the hold of a slave ship” except that its passengers were sailing nowhere. Once again, as in the previous episodes of wartime bombing in London, the vision of a subterranean population alarmed the authorities. In Michael Moorcock’s Mother London, a late twentieth-century hymn to the city, the narrator had once “sought the safety of the tubes” during the Blitz, and had since that time become obsessed with “lost tube lines” and the whole world under the surface of the city. “I discovered evidence that London was interlaced with connecting tunnels, home of a troglodytic race that had gone underground at the time of the Great Fire … Others had hinted of a London under London in a variety of texts as far back as Chaucer.” It is a wonderful fantasy, but in the early 1940s there was a genuine fear that these “subterraneans” would become a reality.

“We ought not to encourage a permanent day and night population underground,” Herbert Morrison stated in the autumn of 1944. “If that spirit gets abroad we are defeated.” The prospect of defeatism was not the only concern. It was also noticed that the experience of living underground encouraged an anti-authoritarian and egalitarian spirit, as if the conditions above the ground could be reversed. Here, out of sight, radicalism might flourish; one newsletter which circulated among the subterraneans denounced the wartime authorities for “indifference amounting almost to callousness, neglect, soulless contempt for elementary human decencies.” So those under the ground instilled an element of fear in those who remained above it; it resembles the ancient superstitious fear of the miner, as an emblem of the dark world in which he works. It is the fear of the depths.

That is why the figure of the underground man is so potent, known over the centuries as the fermor, the raker and the flusher, whose employment it was to clean out the sewers and clear them of obstruction. There were sewer-hunters as well, also known as toshers, who wandered through the sewers looking for articles which they could sell. “Many wondrous tales are still told among the people,” Henry Mayhew wrote, “of men having lost their way in the sewers, and of having wandered among the filthy passages-their lights extinguished by the noisome vapours-till, faint and overpowered, they dropped down and died on the spot. Other stories are told of sewer-hunters beset by myriads of enormous rats … in a few days afterwards their skeletons were discovered picked to the very bones.” These alarming stories testify to the fear associated with the underground passages of London, and there were indeed real dangers in this enterprise of converting rubbish-iron, copper, rope, bone-into money. The brickwork was often rotten and liable to crumble or to fall, the air was noxious, and the tides of the nineteenth-century Thames swept through the sewers leaving some victims “quite dead, battered and disfigured in a dreadful manner.” They worked silently and stealthily, closing off their bull’s-eye lanterns whenever they passed beneath a street-grating “for otherwise a crowd might collect overhead.” They wore greasy velveteen coats with capacious pockets, and trousers of dirty canvas. They were, in the words of one Londoner not meaning to make a pun, “the lowest of the low.”

There are more recent accounts of the honest flushers and gangers who are gainfully employed to clear the sewers of soft mud and grit. A newspaper account of 1960 reports, of a Piccadilly sewer which drained into the Tyburn, that “it was like crossing the Styx. The fog had followed us down from the streets and swirled above the discoloured and strong-smelling river like the stream of Hades.” So the descent conjures up mythological imagery. Eric Newby descended into the sewer of the Fleet and “seen fitfully by the light of miners’ lanterns and special lamps, it was like one of the prisons designed by Piranesi.” Again the imagery of the prison emerges. One sewerman told an interested guest below: “You should see some of ’em under the City. They’re medieval. They don’t show ’em to visitors.” In that medieval spirit we read then of a “cavernous chamber … with pillars, arches, and buttresses, like a cathedral undercroft.” It is a strange city beneath the ground, perhaps best exemplified by worn manhole covers which, instead of reading SELF LOCKING, spell out ELF KING.

No account of underground London, however, could be complete without the Underground itself. It is a great subterranean metropolis covering an area of 620 square miles, 254 miles of railway connecting this extraordinary profusion of tunnels and stations with their mysterious names such as Gospel Oak, White City, Angel and Seven Sisters.

The scheme for transport under London had been broached in the 1840s and 1850s, but had met with serious objections. It was feared that the weight of traffic overhead (which an underground system was meant to relieve) would crush any tunnels beneath, and that the houses above the proposed routes would shiver and fall from the vibrations. Eventually in 1860 one scheme was accepted. The Metropolitan Railway was constructed from Paddington to Farringdon Street within three years, by means of the “cut and cover” method, and immediately proved a great success. The enterprise represented a triumph of mid-Victorian energy and ingenuity; there is an engraving of the “Trial Trip on the Underground Railway, 1863” in which the open carriages are filled with men waving their stove-pipe hats in the air as they pass beneath a tunnel. On opening day “the crowd at the Farringdon Street station was as great as at the doors of a theatre on the first night of some popular performer,” and in fact the sheer vivacity and theatricality of the undertaking were a large part of its popularity; the spectacle of steam trains disappearing under the ground, like demons in a pantomime, satisfied the London appetite for sensation.

By the early twentieth century the shape of the contemporary underground “network” was beginning to emerge. The City and South London Railway opened in 1890, for example; because the route from King William Street to Stockwell was created by means of tunnelling rather than the older “cut and cover” method, it has the distinction of being the first named “the tube.” It had the further distinction of being the first electrically operated underground system in the world, after years of steam; the carriages had no windows, on the understandable principle that there was nothing particular to see, and the luxurious furnishings gave them the nickname of “padded cells.”

The tube was followed by the Central Line in 1900, the Bakerloo and the Piccadilly in 1906, and the Hampstead (or Northern) line in 1907. It had ceased to be a spectacular or even surprising innovation, and had become an inalienable part of London’s quotidian life. By slow degrees, too, it acquired the familiar characteristics and aspects of the city. Or perhaps it is the case that the city above ground has made a replica of itself below. The Underground has its streets and avenues which the pedestrians quickly recognise and follow. It has its short cuts, its crossroads, its particular features (no escalators at Queensway, deep lifts in Hampstead, long escalators at the Angel) and, just like the city itself, areas of bright lights and bustle are surrounded by areas of darkness and disuse. The rhythms of the city are endlessly mimicked beneath the city, as well as its patterns of activity and habitation.

Like the great city, too, the thoroughfares of the Underground have their own particular associations and connections. The Northern Line is intense and somehow desperate; the Central Line is energetic, while the Circle is adventurous and breezy. The Bakerloo Line, however, is flat and despairing. The gloom of Lancaster Gate sits between the bustle of Bond Street and the brightness of Notting Hill Gate. Where disasters have occurred, such as Moorgate and Bethnal Green, the air is still desolate. But there are stations, like Baker Street and Gloucester Road, which lift the spirit. The air itself becomes quite different as the passengers travel towards the oldest sections of London in the City. As the Circle Line moves from Edgware Road and Great Portland Street towards the ancient centre, it travels through ever deeper levels of anonymity and oblivion. On one stretch of that line G.K. Chesterton noticed that the names of St. James’s Park, Westminster, Charing Cross, Temple, Blackfriars “are really the foundation stones of London: and it is right that they should (as it were) be underground” since “all bear witness to an ancient religion.”

These images are entirely appropriate for an enterprise which, in its operations, has descended so deeply that it has reached the levels of the old primeval swamp which once was London; beneath Victoria Underground Station some fossils, fifty million years old, were uncovered. These ancient depths may indeed account for the peculiar sensation and atmosphere which the Underground evokes. There are accounts of ghosts, or presences, in the subterranean depths. Certainly there are “ghost stations” with long-forgotten platforms, some of them still retaining their faded hoardings and posters. There are some forty of them remaining-British Museum, City Road, South Kentish Town, York Road, Marlborough Road and King William Street among them-silent and generally invisible.

The Underground is also a place of chance meeting and coincidence, but it generates greater fear and anxiety-of strangers, of thieves, and of the mad who haunt its endlessly running trains. Yet it has become familiar. Ford Madox Ford, in The Soul of London, wrote that “I have known a man, dying a long way from London, sigh queerly for a sight of the gush of smoke that, on a platform of the Underground, one may see, escaping in great woolly clots up a circular opening, by a grimy, rusted, iron shield, into the dim upper light.” Here is a true Londoner, wishing on his death-bed once more to see and savour the smoke of the Underground, like a prisoner dreaming once more of his confinement. And still the work goes on. As London expands, so does its buried counterpart grow and stretch beneath it.

If in the last days of the twentieth century you sat in the shadow of the great tower of Canary Wharf, you would have seen hundreds of workmen hurrying around the track of the Jubilee Line extension; the work was endless and noisy, with great arcs of light and gleams of silver fire charging the night air with power in alliance with some unknown future city.