London: The Biography

Victorian London, as it might be seen from the window of a passing train; in certain areas the view has hardly changed, testimony to the conservatism of Londoners in their love for a house and back garden.

CHAPTER 61. How Many Miles to Babylon?

By the mid-1840s London had become known as the greatest city on the earth, the capital of empire, the centre of international trade and finance, a vast world market into which the world poured. At the beginning of the twentieth century the sanitary historian, Henry Jephson, considered this megalopolis in other terms. “Of that period,” he wrote, “it is to be said that there is none in the history of London in which less regard was shown for the conditions of the great mass of the inhabitants of the metropolis.” Charles Dickens, Henry Mayhew and Friedrich Engels are three of the Victorian city-dwellers who cried “havoc” over the exhaustive and exhausting city. In contemporary photographs and drawings the most striking images are those of labour and suffering. Women sit with their arms folded, hunched over; a beggar family sleep upon stone benches in a recess of a bridge, with the dark shape of St. Paul’s looming behind them. As Blanchard Jerrold put it, “The aged, the orphan, the halt, the blind, of London would fill an ordinary city.” This is a strange conception, a city entirely composed of the maimed and injured. But that is, in part, what London was. The number of children and tramps, too, sitting resignedly in the street, is infinite; infinite also are the street-sellers, generally depicted against a dull background of brick or stone.

The poor interiors of the Victorian city are generally crepuscular and filthy, with rags hanging among reeking tallow lamps; many of the inhabitants seem to have no faces, since they are turned towards the shadows, around them dilapidated wooden beams and staircases in crazed confusion. Many, outdoors and indoors, seem hunched up and small as if the very weight of the city had crushed them down. Yet there is another aspect of the Victorian city that photographs and images evoke: of vast throngs innumerable, the streets filled with teeming and struggling life, the great inspiration for the work of nineteenth-century mythographers such as Marx and Darwin. There are also flashes of feeling-of pity, anger, and tenderness-to be observed upon passing faces. And all around them can be imagined a hard unyielding noise, like an unending shout. This is Victorian London.

“Victorian London” is of course a general term for a sequence of shifting patterns of urban life. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, for example, it still retained many of the characteristics of the last years of the previous century. It was still a compact city. “Draw but a little circle above the clustering housetops,” the narrator of Dickens’s Master Humphrey’s Clock suggests (1840-1), “and you shall have within its space everything, with its opposite extreme and contradiction close by.” It was still only partially illuminated by gas and most of the streets were lit by infrequent oil-lamps with link-boys bearing lights to escort late pedestrians home; there were “Charleys” rather than policemen walking their beats. It was still hazardous. The outskirts retained a rural aspect; there were strawberry fields at Hammersmith and at Hackney, and the wagons still plied their way among the other horse-drawn traffic to the Haymarket. The great public buildings, with which the seat of empire was soon to be decorated, had not yet arisen. The characteristic entertainments were those of the late eighteenth century, too, with the dogfights, the cockfights, the pillory and the public executions. The streets and houses all contained plastered and painted windows, as if they were part of a pantomime. There were still strolling pedlars hawking penny dreadfuls, and ballad-singers with the latest “air”; there were cheap theatres and print-shops displaying in their windows caricatures which could always catch a crowd; there were pleasure gardens and caves of harmony, mug-halls and free-and-easies and dancing saloons. It was a more eccentric city. The inhabitants had had no settled education and no social “system” (a word which itself did not spring into full life until the 1850s and 1860s) had yet been introduced. So it was a more varied, more unusual, and sometimes more alarming city than any of its successors. It had not yet been standardised, or come under the twin mid-Victorian agencies of uniformity and propriety.

It is impossible to gauge when this transformation occurred. Certainly London took on quite another aspect when it continued to grow and stretch itself through Islington and St. John’s Wood in the north; then through Paddington, Bayswater, South Kensington, Lambeth, Clerkenwell, Peckham and all points of the compass. It became the largest city in the world, just at the time when England itself became the first urbanised society in the world.

It became the city of clock-time, and of speed for its own sake. It became the home of engines and steam-driven industry; it became the city where electromagnetic forces were discovered and publicised. It also became the centre of mass production, with the impersonal forces of demand and supply, profit and loss, intervening between vendor and customer. In the same period business and government were supervised by a vast army of clerks and bookkeepers who customarily wore uniform dark costumes.

It was the city of fog and darkness but in another sense, too, it was packed to blackness. A population of one million at the beginning of the century increased to approximately five million by its close. By 1911, it had risen to seven million. Everything was becoming darker. The costumes of the male Londoner, like those of the clerks, switched from variegated and bright colours to the solemn black of the frock-coat and the stove-pipe hat. Gone, too, was the particular gracefulness and colour of the early nineteenth-century city; the decorous symmetry of its Georgian architecture was replaced by the imperialist neo-Gothic or neo-classical shape of Victorian public buildings. They embodied the mastery of time as well as that of space. In this context, too, there emerged a London which was more massive, more closely controlled and more carefully organised. The metropolis was much larger, but it had also become much more anonymous; it was a more public and splendid city, but it was also a less human one.

Thus it became the climax, or the epitome, of all previous imperialist cities. It became Babylon. There was in the twelfth century a part of London Wall called “Babeylone,” but the reasons for that name are unclear; it may be that in the medieval city the inhabitants recognised a pagan or mystical significance within that part of the stone fabric. It was unwittingly echoed by a piece of late twentieth-century graffiti, by Hackney Marsh, with the simple scrawl “Babylondon.” There was of course the mysterious song

How many miles to Babylon?

Three scores miles and ten.

Can I get there by candle light?

Yes, and back again.

If your heels are nimble and light,

You may get there by candle light.

Although the derivation and meaning of the verse are unclear, the image of the city seems to assert itself as a potent beckoning force; in a variant of this song “Bethlehem” takes the place of Babylon, and may point to the madhouse in Moorfields rather than any more remote destination.

In the eighteenth century, too, London was considered “cette Babilone, le seul refuge des infortunés” in which the association of size and power is coloured by the invocation of the “infortunés” or refugees; this indeed is the other connotation of London as Babylon, a city loud with many disparate and unintelligible voices. To name London as Babylon, then, was to allude to its essential multiplicity. So William Cowper, the eighteenth-century poet, spoke of this “increasing London” as more diverse than “Babylon of old.”

Yet the association or resemblance became pressing only in the nineteenth century when London was continually described as “modern Babylon.” Henry James referred to it as “this murky Babylon” and, for Arthur Machen, “London loomed up before me, wonderful, mystical as Assyrian Babylon, as full of unheard-of things and great unveilings.” So Babylon has many associations; it conjures up images of magnitude and darkness, but also intimations of mystery and revelation. In this great conflation, even the gardens of Park Lane became known as the “hanging gardens,” although some echo may be found here of the Tyburn tree which was once located beside them.

By 1870 the sheer quantity of life in the city was overwhelming. Every eight minutes, of every day of every year, someone died in London; every five minutes, someone was born. There were forty thousand costermongers and 100,000 “winter tramps”; there were more Irish living in London than in Dublin, and more Catholics than in Rome. There were 20,000 public houses visited by 500,000 customers. Eight years later there were more than half a million dwellings, “more than sufficient to form one continuous row of buildings round the island of Great Britain.” It is perhaps not surprising that mid-nineteenth-century Londoners were themselves struck with awe, admiration or anxiety at the city which seemed without any apparent warning to have grown to such magnitude and complexity. How could it have happened? Nobody seemed quite sure. Frederick Engels, in his The Condition of the Working Classes in England in 1844 (1845), found his own considerable intellectual faculties to be strained beyond use. “A town such as London,” he wrote, “where a man may wander for hours together without reaching the beginning of the end … is a strange thing.” The strange city is indescribable, and so Engels could only resort to continual images of immensity. He writes of “countless ships,” “endless lines of vehicles,” “hundreds of steamers,” “hundreds of thousands of all classes,” “the immense tangle of streets,” “hundreds and thousands of alleys and courts” together with “nameless misery.” The sheer incalculability of the mass seems to render it also unintelligible, and therefore induces fear.

So great was London that it seemed to contain within itself all previous civilisations. Babylon was then joined with other empires. The naves and transepts of Westminster Abbey were compared to the City of the Dead beyond Cairo, while the railway terminus at Paddington invoked images of the pyramid of Cheops. Nineteenth-century architects, in their fantastic images of London, created pyramids for Trafalgar Square and Shooters Hill while also designing great pyramidal cemeteries beside Primrose Hill. Here we see the power of imperial London creating a cult of death as well as of magnificence.

In Ree’s Cyclopaedia of 1819, the docks once more arouse primitive imagery. The climate and atmosphere of London in turn create “startling hieroglyphics that are written by soot and smoke upon its surface.” So the stones of London became ancient by association. Somehow the spectacle of the metropolis encourages intimations of unfathomable age-“petrified,” to have been turned into stone, may also be covertly introduced into this vision in its contemporary sense of great fear.

And beyond Egypt there was Rome. The subterranean vaults beneath the Adelphi reminded one architectural historian of “old Roman works” while the sewer system of Joseph Bazalgette was often compared with the Roman aqueducts. It was the sense of magnificence, combined with the triumphalism of empire, which most notably impressed these observers of the nineteenth-century city. When Hippolyte Taine ventured into the Thames Tunnel, itself compared with the greatest feats of Roman engineering, he described it “as enormous and dismal as the gut of some Babel.” Then the association of ideas and civilisations became too strong for him. “I am always discovering that London resembles ancient Rome … How heavy this modern Rome, as did the ancient one, bear down upon the backs of the working classes. For every monstrous agglomeration of building, Babylon, Egypt, the Rome of the Caesars, represents an accumulation of effort, an excess of fatigue.” Then he described “the Roman machine” which made slaves of those who toiled for it. This was another truth, then, about London as Rome: it turned its citizens into the slaves of the machine.

As a model for the archway leading to the Bullion Yard of the Bank of England, Sir John Soane chose the Roman triumphal arch; the walls of Lothbury Court beside it were inscribed with allegorical figures taken from Roman mythology. The massive corner of the Bank, between Lothbury and Princes Street, was based upon the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli. The interiors, as well as the exterior, of the Bank had Roman antecedents. Many halls and offices constructed within, like the Dividend Office and the Bank Stock Office, were designed from models of the Roman baths; in addition the chief cashier’s office, forty-five feet by thirty, was built in homage to the Temple of the Sun and Moon at Rome. Here then, in direct form, is the worship of money based upon Roman originals; when the association is made with that ancient city, it is essentially one of barbaric triumphalism.

But there were other associations. Verlaine suggested that it was “a Biblical city” ready for the “fire of heaven” to strike it. Carlyle described it in 1824 as an “enormous Babel … and the flood of human effort rolls out of it and into it with a violence that almost appals one’s very sense.” So in one context it is compared with the greatest civilisations of the past, with Rome or Egypt, and yet in another it is quickly broken down into a violent wilderness, a savage place, without pity or restraint of any kind. When Carlyle adds that London is also “like the heart of all the universe,” there is a suggestion that London is an emblem of all that is darkest, and most extreme, within existence itself. Is it the heart of empire, or the heart of darkness? Or is one so inseparable from the other that human effort and labour become no more than the expression of rage and the appetite for power?

In one sense London has always been known as a wilderness or jungle, a desert or primeval forest. “Whoever considers the Cities of London and Westminster, with the late vast increases of their suburbs,” Henry Fielding wrote in 1751, “the great irregularity of their buildings, the immense number of lanes, alleys, courts and bye-places, must think that had they been intended for the very purpose of concealment, they could not have been better contrived. Upon such a view the whole appears as a vast wood or forest in which the thief may harbour with as great security as wild beasts do in the deserts of Arabia and Africa.” He described another aspect of this wilderness in Tom Jones, where he dwelled upon the difficulties of London life, “for as you are not put out of countenance, so neither are you cloathed or fed by those who do not know you. And a man may be as easily starved in Leadenhall Market as in the deserts of Arabia.”

Fielding’s contemporary Tobias Smollett had the same vision. London “being an immense wilderness, in which there is neither watch nor ward of any signification, nor any order or police” affords thieves and other criminals “lurking places as well as prey.” The images of jungle and desert are used as if they were alike precisely because they both suggest the “wilderness” of untamed and uncharted human nature; London represents some primeval force or habitat in which the natural instincts of humankind are allowed free expression.

In the nineteenth century the connotations of wilderness changed from unconstrained and uncurtailed life to one of barren desolation. The city is what Mayhew called “a bricken wilderness,” and the image of dense cover is replaced by one of hard stone with “its profuse rank undergrowth of low, mean houses spreading in all directions.” This is the nineteenth-century desert, far larger and far more desolate than that of the eighteenth century. It is what James Thomson, in “The Doom of a City” published in 1857, described as the “desert streets” within “a buried City’s maze of stone.” The endlessness of the city streets, so well evoked by Engels, is here associated with the coldness and hardness of stone itself; it represents not the wilderness of burgeoning life but the wilderness of death without sorrow or pity. “Wilderness! Yes, it is, it is,” a character says in Nicholas Nickleby. “It is a wilderness,” says the old man with such animation. “It was a wilderness to me once. I came here barefoot-I have never forgotten it.” And Little Dorrit cries out, “And London looks so large, so barren and so wild.”

So in turn London has recalled Pompeii, another wilderness of stone. After the bombardments of the Second World War, for example, it was remarked that London already looked “as ancient as Herculaneum.” But London has not been buried or overwhelmed by the lava-flow of time. All the constituents of its life return. An Italian visitor, perhaps more astute than those who preferred the conventional analogies, described London as “the Land of the Cyclops.” In a survey of late twentieth-century Docklands we find a great “Cyclops Wharf.” There is a photograph of South Quay in the same vicinity, where the tower of South Quay Waterside is surmounted by a pyramid. The great tower of Canary Wharf is adorned with a pyramid in similar fashion, suggesting that the associations with that empire have never really faded. Even the pumping station for storm water in the Docklands has been constructed, like some guardian of the waters, in the image of an Egyptian monument.

Yet there is one more salient aspect to this continual analogy of London with ancient civilisations: it is the fear, or hope, or expectation that this great imperial capital will in its turn fall into ruin. That is precisely the reason for London’s association with pre-Christian cities; it, too, will revert to chaos and old night so that the condition of the “primeval” past will also be that of the remote future. It represents the longing for oblivion. In Doré’s vivid depiction of nineteenth-century London-London, essentially, as Rome or Babylon- there is an endpiece. It shows a cloaked and meditative figure sitting upon a rock beside the Thames. He looks out upon a city in awful ruin, the wharves derelict, the dome of St. Paul’s gone, the great offices simply piles of jagged stone. It is entitled “the New Zealander” and derives its inspiration from Macaulay’s vision of a “colonial” returning to the imperial city after its destiny and destruction were complete; he wrote of the distant traveller as one “who shall take his stand on the broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.” It is a vision which, paradoxically, emerged during the period of London’s pride and greatness.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century Horace Walpole described a traveller from Lima marvelling at the ruins of St. Paul’s. Shelley looked towards that far-off time when “St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey shall stand, shapeless and nameless ruins in the midst of an unpeopled marsh.” In his imagination Rossetti destroyed the British Museum and left it open for the archaeologists of a future race. Ruskin envisaged the stones of London crumbling “through prouder eminence to less pitied destruction.” The vision is of a city unpeopled, and therefore free to be itself; stone endures, and, in this imagined future, stone becomes a kind of god. Essentially it is a vision of the city as death. But it also represents the horror of London, and of its teeming life; it is a cry against its supposed unnaturalness, which can only be repudiated by a giant act of nature such as a deluge. There may then come a time when London is recognisable only by “grey ruin and … mouldering stone,” sunk deep into “Night, Gothic night.”

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Yet the term “Gothic” has associations of its own which are no less powerful than those of Rome or Babylon, Nineveh or Tyre. The author of The London Perambulator, James Bone, has suggested that the shapes and textures of London stones might reveal “a Gothic genius loci of London fighting against the spirit of the classic.” But what, then, is this spirit of London place? It brings with it suggestions of excess and overpowering amplitude, of religious yearning and monumentality; it suggests ancient piety and vertiginous stone. In the eighteenth century Gothic acquired connotations of horror, then horror combined with hysterical comedy. All this the city can encompass.

Nicholas Hawksmoor, the great builder of London churches, defined a style which he termed “English Gothick”: it was marked by dramatic symmetries and sublime disproportion. When George Dance designed the Guildhall in the late 1780s with an elegant amalgam of Indian and Gothic elements, he was restoring a form of extravagance and vitality in homage to the great age of the city. But if Gothic was an intimation of antiquity, it was also an aspect of veneration. That is why the churches of Hawksmoor provide such a powerful statement in the places where they are located, among them the City, Spitalfields, Limehouse and Greenwich. As one eighteenth-century artist, Flaxman, remarked of the tombs within Westminster Abbey, they are “specimens of magnificence … which forcibly direct the attention and turn the thoughts not only to other ages but to other states of existence.” There is that within London which compels recognition as not of this earth.

Its most extravagant and notable manifestations were in the nineteenth century, however, when the spirit of neo-Gothic infused London. It found its first significant incarnation in the rebuilding of the Houses of Parliament after the great fire of 1834, but by 1860 “Gothic was the recognised language of all leading architects.” It has been suggested that the Gothic style embodied “the influence of London’s past.” That is why the Law Courts were constructed in Gothic style as a way of instilling the authority of time upon the judicial deliberations of the present; it is also the reason why London churches of the mid-nineteenth century were invariably in the Gothic style. Ironwork was fashioned in the same manner, and suburban villas were rendered in what was known as “Wimbledon Gothic”; the area of St. John’s Wood, in particular, is known for its toy or ornamental Gothic. Anything which might be considered too recent, or too newly made, was covered with a patina of false age.

So, in the nineteenth-century city, Gothic possessed the consolation of supposed antiquity; in a city which seemed to be careering beyond all familiar or predictable bounds, it offered the reassurance of some theoretical or presumed permanence. But sacred images have the strangest way of showing another face. The power of Gothic originals can also be associated with the presence of the pagan or the barbaric. That is why the city of empire was also known as a city of savages.

CHAPTER 62. Wild Things

As there is a darkest Africa, is there not also a darkest England … May we not find a parallel at our own doors, and discover within a stone’s throw of our cathedrals and palaces similar horrors to those which Stanley has found existing in the great Equatorial forest?” These are the words of William Booth in the 1890s. He notes in particular “dwarfish dehumanised inhabitants, the slavery to which they are subjected, their privation and their misery.” In this sense the city has created and nurtured a wild population. The poor of the slums and tenements were characteristically described by other observers as “savages” and even at the time of great national religious revival among the middle classes, when England was supposed to be the quintessentially Christian nation, the working class of London remained outside the Church. A report of 1854 concluded that the poor of London were “as utter strangers to religious ordinances as the people of a heathen country” or, as Mayhew put it, “religion is a regular puzzle to costers.” How could there be devotion, or piety, in such an oppressive commercial city where there was little chance of beauty or dignity, let alone worship?

The city of empire and commerce contained dens and lodging-houses “in the midst of a dense and ignorant population” where “the most diabolical practices were constantly perpetrated.” “I have seen the Polynesian savage in his primitive condition,” Thomas Huxley wrote, “before the missionary or the blackbirder or the beachcomber got at him. With all his savagery he was not half so savage, so unclean, so irreclaimable, as the tenant of a tenement in an East London slum.” The paradox here is that the imperial city, the city which maintained and financed a world empire, contained within its heart a population more brutish and filthy than any of the races it believed itself destined to conquer. “He thought he was a Christian,” Mayhew wrote of a young “mudlark” or river scavenger, “but he didn’t know what a Christian was.”

The poorest Irish immigrants sensed the atmosphere. “The Irish coming to London seem to regard it as a heathen city,” according to Thomas Beames in The Rookeries of London, “and to give themselves up at once to a course of recklessness and crime.” So the savagery was endemic, and also contagious; the inhabitants of the city were brutalised by its conditions.

Verlaine believed that, after Paris, in London he was living “among the barbarians,” but his commentary is on a wider scale; he is referring to the fact that in the alien city the only worship was that of money and power. Again the name of Babylon emerges to encompass this great pagan host. As Dostoevsky expressed it in 1863, on his journey to London, “It is a biblical sight, something to do with Babylon, some prophecy out of the Apocalypse being fulfilled before your very eyes. You feel that a rich and ancient tradition of denial and protest is needed in order not to yield … and not to idolise Baal.” He concluded that “Baal reigns and does not even demand obedience, because he is certain of it … The poverty, suffering, complaints and torpor of the masses do not worry him in the slightest.” His heathen slaves and worshippers are in that sense powerless as, with the break of each day, “the same proud and gloomy spirit once again spreads its lordly wings over the gigantic city.”

If mid-Victorian London was indeed a city of heathenism and pagan apocalypse, as Dostoevsky suggests, then what more appropriate monument for it than the one erected in 1878? An obelisk, dating from the Egyptian pharaohs of the eighteenth dynasty, was brought in a sealed ship to London; it had previously stood before the Temple of the Sun in On, or Heliopolis, where it had remained for 1,600 years. “It looked down upon the meeting of Joseph and Jacob, and saw the boyhood of Moses.” In 12 BC it had been moved to Alexandria but was never erected there, lying prone in the sand until its removal to London. The monolith of rose-coloured granite, hewn in the quarries of southern Egypt by bands of slaves, now stands beside the Thames guarded by two bronze sphinxes; on its side are hieroglyphics naming Thothmes III and Rameses the Great. This stone, known as Cleopatra’s Needle, has become a tutelary presence. As one French traveller noted of the Thames at this point, “the atmosphere is heavy; there is a conscious weight around, above, a weight that presses down, penetrates into ears and mouth, seems even to hang about the air.” Tennyson, on contemplating the pagan monument of a pagan London, gave it a voice. “I have seen the four great empires disappear! I was when London was not! I am here!” The granite has slowly disintegrated through the perpetual influence of fog and smoke, and the hieroglyphics have begun to fade; there are “chips and gashes” where a bomb fell in the autumn of 1917. Yet it has survived. Still buried beneath it, in jars sealed in 1878, are a man’s suit and a woman’s costume, illustrated newspapers and children’s toys, cigars and a razor; most significant, however, for the imperial obelisk, is a complete set of Victorian coinage embedded in its base.

Other pagan associations are intimately linked with the nineteenth-century city. Here the Minotaur made its appearance. In pagan myth the monster in the labyrinth was each year given seven youths and seven maidens, both as food and tribute. So Victorian crusaders against poverty and prostitution were, in the public prints, given the name of Theseus who killed the monster. Yet it did not wholly die. One journalist in the Pall Mall Gazette of July 1885 compared “the nightly sacrifice of virgins in London to the victims of the Athenian tribute to the Minotaur,” and it seemed that the “appetite of the minotaur of London is insatiable.” It was also described as the “London Minotaur … moving about clad as respectably in broad cloth and fine linen as any bishop.” This indeed is a vision of horror, worthy of Poe or De Quincey, but the suggestion of a pagan beast alive and rampant is one curiously aligned to the nineteenth-century perception that the city had indeed become a labyrinth to rival anything upon the Cretan island. In response to these articles on child prostitution in London George Frederic Watts depicted the horned beast, half man and half bull, gazing over a parapet of stone across the city.

In his Remaines of 1686 John Aubrey wrote that “on the south side of Tooley Street, a little westward from Barnaby Street, is a street called the Maes or Maze, eastward from the Borough (another name for labyrinth). I believe we received these mazes from our Danish ancestors.” Less than two hundred years later, however, new labyrinths emerged. Arthur Machen, reaching what he believed to be the outskirts of the city, “would say ‘I am free at last from this mighty and stony wilderness!’ And then suddenly, as I turned a corner the raw red rows of houses would confront me, and I knew that I was still in the labyrinth.” Of the labyrinth as a device the architectural theorist Bernard Tschumi has stated: “One can never see it in totality, nor can one express it. One is condemned to it and cannot go outside and see the whole.” This is London. When De Quincey wrote of searching for the young prostitute Ann whom he had befriended, he described their passing “through the mighty labyrinths of London; perhaps, even within a few feet of each other- a barrier no wider than a London street, often amounting in the end to a separation for eternity!” This is the horror of the city. It is blind to human need and human affection, its topography cruel and almost mindless in its brutality. The fact that the young girl will almost certainly be betrayed into prostitution once more conjures up the beast at its centre.

For De Quincey Oxford Street was made up from “never-ending terraces” and “innumerable groans.” Here the streets tease and bewilder. Of the City it has been written that a “stranger would soon lose his way in such a maze” and in fact the old centre is characterised by its curious serpentine passages, its secluded alleys and its hidden courts. H.G. Wells noted that if it were not for the cabs “in a little while the whole population, so vast and incomprehensible is the intricate complexity of this great city, would be hopelessly lost for ever.” This is curiously suggestive-a population lost in its own city, as if it had been swallowed up by the streets and the stone. A writer at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Robert Southey, had a similar vision with his realisation that “It is impossible ever to become thoroughly acquainted with such an endless labyrinth of streets; and, as you may well suppose, they who live at one end know little or nothing of the other.” The image is of a labyrinth which is constantly expanding, reaching outwards towards infinity. On the maps of England it is seen as a dark patch, or stain, spreading slowly but inexorably outwards.

CHAPTER 63. If It Wasn’t for the ’ouses in Between

In many works of nineteenth-century fiction, characters stand upon an eminence, such as Primrose Hill or Fish Street Hill, and are struck into silence by the vision of the city’s immensity. Macaulay acquired the reputation of having walked through every street in London but by the year of his death, in 1859, it was unlikely that anyone would have been able to reproduce that feat of pedestrianism. Here was a source of anxiety for an indigenous Londoner. He or she would never know all of the city thoroughly; there would always be a secret London in the very act of its growth. It can be mapped, but it can never be fully imagined. It must be taken on faith, not on reason.

It grew so large in the nineteenth century that Donald Olsen has remarked in The Growth of Victorian London that “Most of the London we enjoy is Victorian either in its fabric or its layout, or at least its inspiration.” And what is that inspiration? A passage in Building News of 1858 put the case that “It is the duty of our architecture to translate our character into stone.” The great rebuilding and extension heralded an equally great destruction of the past; that, too, was part of the Victorian “character.” Its improvements destroyed “the old gabled shops and tenements, the quaint inns and galleried court-yards, the churches and the curious streets that were the existing records of the life of another century.” Yet just as the Church yielded to commerce so the narrow streets gave way to wide and ever wider thoroughfares lined by new dwellings; great hotels, office buildings and blocks of flats, in brilliant limestone or burnished brick or terracotta, rose above the city. Shaftesbury Avenue, Northumberland Avenue, Holborn Viaduct, Queen Victoria Street, Charing Cross Road, all were driven through the capital so that a reporter in 1873 could observe that “old London … the London of our youth … is becoming obliterated by another city which seems rising up through it.” There was a disconcerting sensation, much remarked upon, that a strange city was emerging ineluctably like a phantom in a mist. And it was changing everything that it touched. The concerted impulse to create a gigantic London-to widen streets, to put up great monuments, to create museums and law courts, to drive huge new thoroughfares from one part of the capital to another-meant a chaos of demolition and reconstruction, with entire areas becoming building sites complete with hoardings and heavy machinery. The Holborn Viaduct was built to span the valley of the Fleet, linking Holborn Circus with Newgate Street; the great enterprise of the Victoria Embankment transformed the northern bank of the river and was extended into the heart of the city by Queen Victoria Street; Victoria Street transformed all of Westminster, while Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road created the “West End” as it is commonly understood. The City itself was steadily being depopulated, as bankers and merchants moved out to Kensington or Belgravia, until it became nothing but a counting-house. “This monster London is really a new city,” Charles Eliot Pascoe wrote in 1888, “new as to its life, its streets and the social conditions of the millions who dwell in them, whose very manners, habits, occupations and even amusements have undergone as complete change within the past half-century as the great city itself.” This is one aspect of London which the nineteenth century thoroughly revealed; the city itself changes its inhabitants, for better or worse, and actively intervenes in their lives. From that, of course, may spring a sense of oppression or imprisonment.

Yet there was a genuine feeling of awe concerning the vast extent of the city, as if a quite new thing had been created in the world. Where some saw only poverty and deprivation, others saw intelligence and industry; where some recognised only shabbiness and ugliness, others noted the blessings of trade and commerce. In effect London was now so large that practically any opinion could be held of it, and still be true. It was the harbinger of a consumer society. It represented energy, and zeal, and inventiveness. But it was also the “Great Wen,” a monstrous growth filled with “the bitter tears of outcast London.”

Another aspect of its size, therefore, was the fact that it contained everything. When Henry Mayhew ascended above London in a balloon he observed “that vast bricken mass of churches and hospitals, banks and prisons, palaces and workhouses, docks and refuges for the destitute” all “blent into one immense black spot … a mere rubbish heap” containing “vice and avarice and low cunning” as well as “noble aspirations and human heroism.” But in such a vast metropolis, forever growing, “vice” and “heroism” become themselves unimportant; the sheer size of London creates indifference. This, in a sensitive mind such as that of Henry James, can lead to acute depression or feelings of estrangement. “Up to this time,” he wrote to his sister in 1869, “I have been crushed under a sense of the sheer magnitude of London-its inconceivable immensity-in such a way as to paralyse my mind … The place sits on you, broods on you, stamps on you.” That is another aspect of its unimaginable size; it acts as a giant weight or burden upon each individual life and consciousness. It is not simply that the citizens were literally dwarfed by the huge blocks and intricate machinery of the Victorian city, but rather that the sheer scale of London haunted its inhabitants. No one could ever memorise a map of Victorian London with its streets packed so tightly together that they could hardly be made out; it was beyond human capacity. But a place of such vastness, without limit, is also horrifying. It weighs upon the mind. It may lead to desperation, or release energy.

Disraeli remarked upon this “illimitable feature” as the “special character” of London but in turn it resulted in the city’s becoming “very monotonous.” That is another paradox of this paradoxical city. Sheer size may arouse not sensations of awe and admiration but rather those of dullness and ennui. Disraeli was possessed by a vision of “flat, dull, spiritless streets” stretching in all directions so that “London overpowers with its vastness” and its sameness. If it was the largest city in the world it was also the most impersonal, spreading its dull life everywhere.

One of the characteristics of London faces was the appearance of tiredness. To journey through the city was itself fatiguing enough; it had grown too large to be manageable. The Londoner returned home exhausted, spiritless, dead to the world. So London wears out its citizens; it drains them of their energies, like a succubus. Yet for some “this senseless bigness,” as Henry James described it, was a source of fascination. Disraeli’s vision of a vast uniformity was reversed in that context, because the absence of limits could also mean that everything is there; there were myriad shapes to be discerned, an endless profusion and prodigality of scenes and characters.

“When I came to this great city,” an African traveller wrote, “I looked this way and that way; there is no beginning and no end.” He could have walked through Kennington and Camberwell, Hackney and Bethnal Green, Stoke Newington and Highbury, Chelsea and Knightsbridge and Kensington without ceasing to marvel. Between 1760 and 1835 the development rivalled that of the preceding two hundred years. By the latter date streets and terraces had reached Victoria, Edgware, the City Road, Limehouse, Rotherhithe and Lambeth. In the next sixteen years alone the city conquered Belgravia, Hoxton, Poplar, Deptford, Walworth, Bethnal Green, Bow Road and St. Pancras. By 1872 it had expanded exponentially again to encompass Waltham Green, Kensal Green, Hammersmith, Highgate, Finsbury Park, Clapton, Hackney, New Cross, Old Ford, Blackheath, Peckham, Norwood, Streatham and Tooting, all of it growing and coming together beyond any civic or administrative control. The roads and thoroughfares were not planned by any Parliament or central authority; that is why the city’s development was often compared to some remorseless instinctive process or natural growth. London colonised each village or town as it encompassed them, making them a part of itself, but not necessarily changing their fundamental topography. They were now London, but they retained streets and buildings of an earlier date. Their old structure can just be recognised in the remains of churches, marketplaces and village greens, while their names survive as the titles of Underground stations.

It was often said that all England had become London, but some considered London to be an altogether separate nation with its own language and customs. For others London corresponded to the great globe itself or “the epitome of the round world,” as one nineteenth-century novelist put it. It is an indication of its prodigiousness, when such a great mass exerts its own form of gravity and attraction-“lines of force,” Thomas De Quincey called them in an essay entitled “The Nation of London.”

Ordinary human existence seems uninteresting or unimportant in this place where everything is colossal. “No man ever was left to himself for the first time in the streets, as yet unknown, of London,” De Quincey continued, “but he must have been saddened and mortified, perhaps terrified, by the sense of desertion and utter loneliness which belongs to his situation.” Nobody regarded De Quincey; nobody saw or heard him. The people rushing past, bent upon their own secret destinations and contemplating their own hurried business, seemed “like a mask of maniacs” or “a pageant of phantoms.” Against the magnitude of stone, the city dwellers are like wraiths, replacing others and in turn to be replaced. It is a function of London’s size, and of its age, that all of its citizens seem merely its temporary inhabitants. Within the immensity of London any individual becomes insignificant and unnoticed; this is a tiring condition, too, and may also help to explain the weariness and lassitude which mark many London faces. To be perpetually reminded that the single human life is worth very little, that it is reckoned merely as part of the aggregate sum, may induce a sense of futility.

To live in the city is to know the limits of human existence. In many Victorian street-scenes the city dwellers seem lonely and unregarded, trudging along the crowded avenues with their heads lowered, carrying their burdens patiently enough but isolated none the less. This is another paradox of Victorian London. There is an appearance of energy and vitality in the mass, but the characteristic individual mood is one of anxiety or despondency.

“What is the centre of London for any purpose whatever?” De Quincey asked, and of course the city has no centre at all. Or rather, the centre is everywhere. Wherever the houses are built, that is London-Streatham, Highgate, New Cross, all as characteristically and indefinably London as Cheapside or the Strand. They were part of the malodorous, coruscating city, awakened from its grandeur and rising into shabby daylight as a wilderness of roofs and tenements. Not all were stable; not all were noble. This was another aspect of the ever expanding city; there were areas which were only of fragile growth. The various classes, and subdivisions of classes, were broadly segregated in distinct neighbourhoods; the difference between working-class Lambeth and genteel Camberwell, both south of the river, for example, was immense. But there were areas of more uncertain nature, where the chances of going up or down were precariously balanced. Pimlico was one such neighbourhood; it could have become grand or respectable, but was constantly on the verge of shabbiness. This in turn reflected a general anxiety among middle-class city dwellers; it was easy to go under, through drink or unemployment, and the tense respectability of one year might be succeeded by wretchedness in the next. Will this newly built terrace along the Walford Road become the dwellings of ambitious city workers, or will it degenerate into a set of tenements? This was the unspoken question about much of London’s development.

And then there was the immensity registered by its endless crowds. That is why the urban fiction of the nineteenth century is filled with chance encounters and coincidental meetings, with sudden looks and brief asides, with what H.G. Wells called “a great mysterious movement of unaccountable beings.” Travellers were frightened at street-crossings where the sheer number and speed of pedestrians created the effect of a whirlpool. “A Londoner jostles you in the street,” a German journalist observed, “without ever dreaming of asking your pardon; he will run against you, and make you revolve on your own axis, without so much as looking round to see how you feel after the shock.” Workers walked to the City from Islington and Pentonville, but now they came in from Deptford and Bermondsey, Hoxton and Hackney, as well. It has been estimated that, in the 1850s, 200,000 people walked into the City each day. As Roy Porter has put it in London: a Social History, “dislocation and relocation were always occurring-nothing ever stood still, nothing was constant except mobility itself.” To be engaged in a process of perpetual growth and change for their own sake, and to be sure of nothing but uncertainty, may be discomfiting.

Yet as the city expanded so continuously and so rapidly, there was no possibility of walking over its vast extent; as it grew, so did other forms of traffic emerge to steer a way through its immensity. The most extraordinary agent of innovation came with the advent of the railway; nineteenth-century London, in the process of its great transformation, was further changed by the building of Euston in 1837 followed by Waterloo, King’s Cross, Paddington, Victoria, Blackfriars, Charing Cross, St. Pancras and Liverpool Street. The entire railway network, which is still in use almost 150 years later, was imposed upon the capital within a space of some twenty-five years between 1852 and 1877. The termini themselves became palaces of Victorian invention and inventiveness, erected by a society obsessed by speed and motion. One consequence was that the city became truly the centre of the nation, with all the lines of energy leading directly to it. Together with the electric telegraph, the railways defined and maintained the supremacy of London. It became the great conduit of communication and of commerce in a world in which “railway time” set the standard of the general hurry.

The influence was also felt much closer to the capital itself, with the proliferation of branch or suburban lines in the northern and southern suburbs. By the 1890s there were connections between Willesden and Walthamstow, Dalston Junction and Broad Street, Richmond and Clapham Junction, New Cross and London Bridge, the whole perimeter of the city being ineluctably drawn into its centre with characteristic stone arches on both sides of the river.

When William Powell Frith exhibited his painting of Paddington Station, The Railway Station, in 1838, the “work had to be protected by railings from enthusiastic crowds”; they were fascinated by the crowds depicted upon the canvas itself, conveying all the magnitude and immensity of the great railway enterprise. Nineteenth-century Londoners were drawn to the spectacle of themselves, and of the achievements wrought in their name; it was indeed a new city, or, at least, the quality of experience within it had suffered a change. Somehow the great heavy urban mass had been controlled; the new lines of transport which crossed it also managed to hold it down, to elucidate it in terms of time and distance, to direct its palpitating life. “The journey between Vauxhall or Charing Cross, and Cannon Street,” wrote Blanchard Jerrold, “presents to the contemplative man scenes of London life of the most striking description. He is admitted behind the scenes of the poorest neighbourhoods; surveys interminable terraces of back gardens alive with women and children.” London had become viewable, and therefore legible. There was the phenomenon of railway-mania, too, when the stocks and shares of the variously competing companies traded high in the City; by 1849 Parliament had agreed the building of 1,071 railway tracks, nineteen in London itself, and it could be said that the whole country was transfixed by the idea of rail travel. The railway even managed to recreate London in its own image; thousands of houses were demolished to make way for its new tracks, and it has been estimated that 100,000 people were displaced in the process.

The opening of a new railway station provided mixed benefits. Older suburban retreats such as Fulham and Brixton came within range of the new commuters, previously unable to live at such a distance from their place of work. City dwellers poured in, and small or cheap houses were constructed for them. The growth of the railway system actually created new suburbs, with the Cheap Trains Act of 1883 materially assisting the exodus of the poorer people from the old tenements to new “railway suburbs” such as Walthamstow and West Ham. Areas such as Kilburn and Willesden became flooded with new population, creating the vague monotony of terraced housing which still survives; in these latter two districts lived the colonies of navvies who were themselves involved in the building of more railways.

But railways were by no means the only form of transportation within the capital; it has been estimated that in 1897 the junction of Cheapside and Newgate “was passed by an average of twenty three vehicles a minute during working hours.” This was the great roar, like that of Niagara, by which the city dwellers were surrounded. This vast crowd of moving vehicles comprised omnibuses and hansoms, carts and trams, horses and early cars, broughams and motor buses, taxis and victorias, all somehow managing to manoeuvre through the crowded granite streets. A wagon might break down, and bring a long line of carriages to a halt; a cart, a carriage, a dray and an omnibus might follow each other in slow procession, while the quicker cabs darted between them. In early moving pictures of London’s traffic you see the boys running among the vehicles to clear up horse-dung, while pedestrians make sorties into the road with the same courage and defiance as they do still. In photograph, or on film, it is a scene of indescribable energy as well as confusion; it might be a bacterium, or an entire cosmos, so instinctive its movement seems.

A photograph of Regent Street in the nineteenth century, with its relatively new phenomenon of the “sandwich man” as well as the horse-drawn omnibuses.

The porters at Billingsgate were well known for their characteristic attire. In a city of appearances, and street theatre, it was important to be dressed for the part. No man, whatever his trade, was seen without a hat.

Old houses in Bermondsey, at the end of the nineteenth century; they were swept away, or bombed, while in their place arose one of the great council estates of south London.

Clerkenwell Green: this inoffensive and often overlooked “green,” in the middle of Clerkenwell, has been the site of more riots and more radical activity than any other part of London. What is its secret?

River scavengers: these were the real tradesmen of the city, earning a meagre living by combing the banks of the tidal river.

Women sifting dust mounds: in a city where everything had its price, there was money to be made out of refuse of every kind. These women, sometimes known as “bunters,” inherited their noxious trade.

A wheel at the exhibition in the 1890s (and a similar wheel at Bartholomew’s Fair in the seventeenth century) anticipated the modern wheel of the “London Eye” in the year 2000. In a similar echoic spirit, the modern Lloyd’s building was erected on the site of the old London maypole.

William Whiffin’s marvellous photograph of children following a water cart. Many London children went barefoot in all weathers, however.

The stance and attitude of this ragged boy epitomise the defiance and independence of London children who were often brought up “on the stones.” The miracle is that they survived at all.

A photograph of a Millwall street, taken in 1938. Street games have been characteristic of London children ever since London was established, and somehow the most barren districts have become areas of play. Not all streets, however, are shadowed by great ships.

The “London particular” was the name given to the characteristic fogs of the city which descended without warning and created darkness at noon. This gaily dressed citizen is attempting to protect himself against what was considered to be a bearer of disease.

The “smog” of the Fifties and Sixties was a miasma of fog and smoke.

A Paraleytic Woman: Géricault visited London in the 1820s and was at once intrigued and horrified by the predicament of the poor. In a city based upon money, the indigent and the vagrant are the sacrificial victims.

Stanley Green, “Protein Man,” walked up and down Oxford Street for many years, parading the same dietary message. He was commonly ignored by the great tide of people who washed around him, and thus became a poignant symbol of the city’s incuriosity and forgetfulness.

The ruins of Paternoster Row, beside St. Paul’s, photographed during the air-raids of the Second World War by Cecil Beaton. It had been a street of stationers and publishers for three hundred years, but is now only a name.

Don McCullin’s photograph, taken near Spitalfields in 1969, provides an image of anger and helplessness. The poor and the desperate have always been a part of London’s history, and it might be said that the city is most recognisable by the shadow they cast.

The omnibus first emerged upon the streets of London in 1829 and, twenty-five years later, there were some three thousand of them, each one carrying approximately three hundred passengers a day. There is a painting of 1845 by James Pollard, entitled A Street Scene with Two Omnibuses, which vividly recalls the transport of that period. Each of the two buses is being pulled by two horses; in the first bus eight gentlemen in stove-pipe hats are sitting on the open roof behind the driver, while other passengers can be glimpsed sitting within. The bus is painted green and in large letters along the side it is advertised as part of the “FAVORITE” group; a board on a post attached to the back proclaims that it drives between Euston and Chelsea, while on the side are painted its other destinations. The original fares were sixpence rising to a shilling, so this form of transport was not favoured by the labouring classes of London, yet steady competition reduced the prices of tickets to twopence or a penny. The first journey of the day was filled with office clerks, and a second with their employers, the merchants and the bankers; towards midday “the ladies” entered the bus for shopping expeditions, together with mothers taking their children “for a ride.” In the evening the vehicles were filled with all those returning to the suburbs from the City while, in the other direction, travelled those who were “out for the night” at the theatres or supper-clubs.

A traveller in 1853 noted that “the omnibus is a necessity and the Londoner cannot get on without it,” and added that “the word ‘bus’ is rapidly working its way into general acceptation”; he remarked upon the prepossessing appearance of these carriages, brightly painted red or green or blue, as well as the high spirits of conductors and drivers alike. The former shouted out “All right!” and banged the roof of the vehicle to signal that it was time to move on, and all through the journey he was “never silent” but calling out destinations continually-“Ba-nk! Ba-nk!”

The London horses deserve attention and celebration, also, because their training in the streets and their “natural sagacity” meant that they could proceed through the crowded thoroughfares at a good pace without causing accidents. One late Victorian recalled that, at one of those moments when traffic came to a halt, he could see “hundreds of horses” which “tossed their heads and blew air from their nostrils” while their drivers “shouted and bellowed” greetings and pleasantries to one another.

Of all vehicles, however, the hansom-cab became most closely associated with Victorian London. Introduced in 1834 it was a four-wheeled vehicle with an interior more comfortable than that of the previous two-wheeled cab, and with the driver at a more impersonal distance behind the carriage. Once again the changing appearances of transport reflected the changing culture of London. But if the form of the cabs was altered, the appearance and manner of their drivers remained constant; they were well known for their “chaff” or insolence, and their dishonesty. “Whenever a stranger is bold enough to hail a cab, not one, but half a dozen come at once”; this German traveller’s observation is supported by other accounts of the violent competitiveness of cab-drivers all over the capital. They became the tutelary spirits, or imps, of the road. Although there were statutory fees they would attempt to bargain, with the customary phrase “What will you give?” They were also notorious for their drunkenness and, in turn, for their argumentativeness. “An old Londoner only may venture to engage in a topographical or geometrical disputation with a cabman, for gentlemen of this class are not generally flattering in their expressions or conciliating in their arguments; and the cheapest way of terminating the dispute is to pay and have done with the man.” The drivers of the hansom cabs were “as full as exacting and impertinent as their humbler brethren,” the drivers of the growlers or four-wheeled cabs, but they had more spirit, “most skilful in winding and edging their light vehicles through the most formidable knot of wagons and carriages.” London’s cab-drivers epitomise the spirit of the city-fast, restless, audacious, with a propensity for violence and drunkenness. They are closely related to the butchers and the street-criers, whose trades are also intimately attached to the life of the city: all part of London’s family.

By the end of the nineteenth century there were more than ten thousand cabs of various kinds, and even the new thoroughfares could scarcely accommodate the onrushing flood of vehicles of every description. Sometimes the crush grew too great, and there was a “stop” or “lock” (in the twentieth century, a “jam”). Nevertheless it is a matter for astonishment that through the centuries the city has managed to keep its avenues and thoroughfares open to the ever increasing demands of its traffic. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the endless stream of cars and buses and taxis and lorries is coursing along roads which were built in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for quite different forms of transport. The city has the ability to recreate itself silently and invisibly, as if it were truly a living thing.