London: The Biography

A detail from Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress showing a small black servant; black slaves were often employed in the more affluent London households of the eighteenth century.

CHAPTER 73. Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner

London has always been a city of immigrants. It was once known as “the city of nations,” and in the mid-eighteenth century Addison remarked that “when I consider this great city, in its several quarters, or divisions, I look upon it as an aggregate of various nations, distinguished from each other by their respective customs, manners, and interests.” The same observation could have been applied in any period over the last 250 years. It is remarked of eighteenth-century London in Peter Linebaugh’s The London Hanged that “here was a centre of worldwide experiences” with outcasts, refugees, travellers and merchants finding a “place of refuge, of news and an arena for the struggle of life and death.” It was the city itself which seemed to summon them, as if only in the experience of the city could their lives have meaning. Its population has been likened to the eighteenth-century drink “All Nations,” made up of the remains at the bottoms of various bottles of spirit; but this is to do less than justice to the energy and enterprise of the various immigrant populations who arrived in the city. They were not dregs or leftovers; in fact the animation and enterprise of London often seemed to invade them and, with one or two exceptions, these various groups rose and prospered. It is the continuing and never-ending story. It has often been remarked that, in other cities, many years must pass before a foreigner is accepted; in London, it takes as many months. It is true, too, that you can only be happy in London if you begin to consider yourself as a Londoner. It is the secret of successful assimilation.

Fresh generations, with their songs and customs, arrived at least as early as the time of the Roman settlement, when London was opened up as a European marketplace. The working inhabitants of the city might have come from Gaul, from Greece, from Germany, from Italy, from North Africa, a polyglot community all speaking a variety of rough or demotic Latin. By the seventh century, when London rose again as an important port and market, the native and immigrant populations were thoroughly intermingled. There was also a more general change. It was no longer possible to distinguish Britons from Saxons and, after the northern invasions of the ninth century, the Danes entered the city’s racial mixture. By the tenth century the city was populated by Cymric Brythons and Belgae, by the remnants of the Gaulish legions, by East Saxons and Mercians, by Danes, Norwegians and Swedes, by Franks and Jutes and Angles, all mingled and mingling together to form a distinct tribe of “Londoners.” A text known as IV Aethelred mentions that those who “passed through” London, in the period before the Norman settlement, were “men from Flanders, Pontheiu, Normandy and the Ile de France” as well as “men of the emperor: Germans.”

In fact London has always been a hungry city; for many centuries it needed a permanent influx of foreign settlers in order to compensate for its high death-rate. They were also good for business, since immigration has characteristically been associated with the imperatives of London trade. Foreign merchants mingled here, and intermarried, because it was one of the principal markets of the world. On another level, immigrants came here to pursue their trades when denied commercial freedom in their native regions. And, again, other immigrants arrived in the city ready and able to take on any kind of employment and to perform those tasks which “native Londoners” (given the relative nature of that phrase) were unwilling to perform. In all instances immigration corresponded to employment and profit; that is why it would be sentimental and sanctimonious to describe London as an “open city” in some idealistic sense. It has acquiesced in waves of immigration because, essentially, they helped it to prosper.

There were, however, occasions of criticism. “I do not at all like that city,” Richard of Devizes complained in 1185. “All sorts of men crowd there from every country under the heavens. Each brings its own vices and its own customs to the city.” In 1255 the monkish chronicler Matthew Paris was bemoaning the fact that London was “overflowing” with “Poitevins, Provençals, Italians and Spaniards.” It is an anticipation of late twentieth-century complaints that London was being “swamped” by people from Africa, the Caribbean, or Asia. In the case of the thirteenth-century chronicler there is an atavistic and incorrect notion of some original native race which is being displaced by others. Yet other forces are at work in his attack upon the foreigners; he was not wholly sympathetic to the commercial instincts of the capital, and felt himself alienated or removed from its heterogeneous life. Thus to single out foreign merchants was a way of neutralising or challenging the city’s commercial nature. Those who attacked immigrants were in effect attacking the business ethic which required the constant influx of new trade and new labour. The attack did not succeed; it never has succeeded.

The immigrant rolls of 1440-1 provide an absorbing study in ethnicity and cultural contrast. An essay by Sylvia L. Thrupp in Studies in London History, “Aliens in and around London in the Fifteenth Century,” offers interesting parallels with other periods. Some 90 per cent were classified as Doche; this was a generic term including Flemish, Dane and German, but more than half in fact came from Holland. The evidence of their wills suggests that their common characteristics were “a striving towards piety and economic advancement through honest work and mutual help within the group,” an observation which could equally be applied to more recent immigrants from, for example, South Asia. These fifteenth-century immigrants tended to settle into defined trades such as goldsmithery, tailory, haberdashery, clock-making and brewing. They were also celebrated as printers. Others mingled within the broader urban community as beer-sellers, basket-makers, joiners, caterers and servants within London households or at London inns. Evidence from the guilds and from extant wills also “indicates that English became the means of communication within this group,” again a characteristic and often instinctive response of any immigrant community. In the city wards the Italians comprised “a commercial and financial aristocracy,” although there were differences within the group. There were Frenchmen, and a number of Jews; and “Greek, Italian, and Spanish physicians,” but the underclass of that period seems to have been Icelanders who were commonly employed as servants.

There was a period of sustained suspicion in the 1450s, when Italian merchants and bankers were condemned for usury. But the imbroglio passed, leaving only its rumours as confirmation of the fact that Londoners were particularly sensitive to commercial double-dealing. The “Evil May Day” riots of 1517, when the shops and houses of foreigners were attacked by a mob of apprentices, were dispelled with equal speed and without any permanent effect upon the alien population. This has been the custom of the city over many centuries; despite violent acts inspired by demagoguery and financial panic, the immigrant communities of the city have generally been permitted to settle down, engage with their neighbours in trade and parish work, adopt English as their native language, intermarry and bring up their children as Londoners.

A wave of immigration in the mid-1560s, however, when the Huguenots sought refuge from Catholic persecution, provoked a general alarm. On 17 February 1567, there was “a great watch in the City of London … for fear of an insurrection against the strangers which were in great number in and about the city.” The Huguenots were accused of trading secretly among themselves and of engaging in illicit commercial practices such as hoarding. They “take up the fairest houses in the city, divide and fit them for their several uses [and] take into them several lodgers and dwellers”; thus they were held directly responsible for London’s overcrowding. Even if the children of these immigrants “born within this realm are by law accounted English,” they remained foreigners by “inclination and kind affection.” Once more it is a familiar language, adopted by those who were uneasy at the presence of “aliens” in their midst. There were also charges that they pushed up the prices of London properties.

It was perhaps inevitable that, at times of financial recession or depression, the onus fell upon the supposedly unfair or restrictive commercial practices of the “aliens.” In similar manner, at times of growth and expansion, the presence of the same traders was greeted as an indication of the city’s munificence and varied wealth. Addison, on viewing the polyglot assembly at the Royal Exchange, remarked that it “gratifies my Vanity, as I am an Englishman, to see so much an Assembly of Country-men and Foreigners consulting together upon the private Business of Mankind, and making this Metropolis a kind of Emporium for the whole Earth.” There is no Jew-baiting or Francophobia in this account.

In 1850 William Wordsworth, writing of his earlier residence in London, reflected upon the fact that within the city crowd he had found

every character of form and face:

The Swede, the Russian; from the genial south,

The Frenchman and the Spaniard; from remote

America, the Hunter-Indian; Moors,

Malays, Lascars, the Tartar and Chinese

And Negro Ladies in white muslin gowns.

He also mentions the “Italian … the Turk … the Jew” and can thus be said to provide a comprehensive survey of the immigrant population. It provides a now familiar insight into the character of a city which contains many nations within itself, but in the nineteenth century there came a fresh movement of political as opposed to religious refugees. Carlyle noticed their presence in London when he observed that “one might mark the years and epochs by the successive kinds of exiles that walk London streets and, in grim silent manner, demand pity from us and reflections from us.” The Russian revolutionary Kropotkin celebrated London as the haven for political refugees from all over the world, and indeed it has been claimed that by the close of the nineteenth century the city had become the most significant arena for the dissemination of political ideas, for the creation of political ideologies, and for the promulgation of political causes. So there were Spanish refugees in Somers Town-“you could see a group of fifty or a hundred stately tragic figures, in proud threadbare coats; perambulating, mostly with closed lips, the broad pavements of Euston Square and the regions about St. Pancras New Church.” They became conspicuous in 1825 and then, like many other such groups, vanished almost as suddenly as they had first arrived. In the spring of 1829, according to a diarist of the period, “there was an abrupt increase in the numbers of French in London”; as political agitation and civic uprisings fluctuated in intensity, so did the numbers of the French. London became the political barometer for the whole of Europe. Garibaldi and Mazzini came, as did Marx and Engels; in 1851 Herzen and Kossuth arrived, the one a Russian, the other a Hungarian; so did political refugees from Poland and Germany. England, and in particular London, was the place most welcoming to exiles.

The history of any one group is filled with profound interest. There were Jews, Africans, and representatives of most of the European races, at the time of the Roman settlement. It is not too much to claim that their lives have haunted London ever since. The mystery of difference and of oppression has been played out over the centuries, touching upon the need to define oneself or one’s race and implicated in the pride or susceptibility of a “native” population. This narrative has been largely conceived in terms of acceptance and assimilation, but no known human history is without its victims.

The Jews suffered early from prejudice and brutality. Refugees from the Rouen pogrom arrived in the city in 1096, but the first documentary evidence for a Jewish quarter emerges in 1128. They were not permitted to engage in ordinary commerce but were allowed to lend money, the “usury” from which Christian merchants were barred; then of course they were blamed or hated for the very trade imposed upon them by the civic authorities. There was a murderous assault upon their quarters in 1189 when “the houses were besieged by the roaring people … because the madmen had not tools, fire was thrown on the roof, and a terrible fire quickly broke out.” Many families were burned alive, while others fleeing into the narrow thoroughfares of Old Jewry and Gresham Street were clubbed or beaten to death. There was another pogrom in 1215, and on certain occasions the Jews took refuge in the Tower in order to escape the depredations of the mob. They suffered from the noble families who were indebted to them, also, and in strange anticipation of a later destiny they were obliged to wear a sign upon their clothes in recognition of their race. It was not the Star of David, but a tabula or depiction of the stone tablets upon which the Ten Commandments were supposed to have been miraculously inscribed.

In 1272 hundreds of Jews were hanged on suspicion of adulterating the coinage, and then eighteen years later-their usefulness at an end after the arrival of Italian and French financiers-all were expelled, beaten, spat upon or killed in a mass exodus from the city. It would have seemed that the wandering race could find no permanent haven even in the cosmopolitan and commercial city of London. London, instead, had become the very pattern of urban exploitation and aggression. But some returned, quietly and almost invisibly, over the next two or three centuries under the guise of Christians; in the seventeenth century Charles I made use of their financial skills and resources but it was Cromwell who, with a more profound biblical knowledge, allowed the right of settlement after a “Humble Petition of the Hebrews at Present Residing in this city of London.” They requested that “wee may therewith meete at our said private devotions in our Particular houses without feere of Molestation either to our persons famillys or estates.” These were Sephardic Jews who, like Isak Lopes Chillon, one of the signatories to the petition, came out of Spain and Portugal; but in the latter part of the seventeenth century, from central and eastern Europe, arrived the Ashkenazi Jews who were less affluent, less well educated, and variously depicted as “down-trodden” and “poverty-stricken.” Charles Booth has described how “the old settlers held aloof from the newcomers, and regarded them as a lower caste, fit only to receive alms.”

And here emerges the other face of the immigrant population. The newcomers were not necessarily the accepted and acceptable, not merchants and doctors, but the wandering alien, the lowly refugee, the poor unskilled migrant fit only for the “sale of old clothes or in peddling goods such as fruit, jewellry and knives.” The Ashkenazim were representative of an entire impoverished and wandering population, alternately exploited and abused by the native residents.

More Ashkenazi Jews arrived at various notable occasions in the eighteenth century; there were persecutions, and partitions, and sieges, which sent them flocking to their co-religionists already in London where the first Ashkenazi synagogue had been established in Aldgate in 1722. But they were not welcomed, principally because they were poor. It was suggested that they would “deluge the kingdom with brokers, usurers and beggars”; once more emerges the irrational but instinctive fear of being “swamped.” They were also accused of taking jobs from native Londoners, although, since they could not be apprenticed to Christian masters, the fear of their usurping available employment was a false one. But, in London, such fears have always been widely advertised and believed; in a society where financial want and insecurity were endemic among the working population, any suggestion of unfair labouring practices could arouse great discontent. Thus in the 1750s and 1760s Jew-baiting became a “sport, like cock-throwing, or bull-baiting, or pelting some poor wretch in the pillory.”

There is another problem, evinced as early as the seventeenth century, whereby immigrants are lent distinct and opprobrious identities. “As the Frenchmen love to be bold, Flemings to be drunken,” Thomas Dekker wrote in 1607, so “Irish [love] to be costermongers” or street pedlars. It is a question, in the modern term, of “stereotyping” which afflicts all migrant populations. The irony, of course, is that certain groups seem unable to escape this matrix of false expectations and misperceptions. The London Irish, for example, had always been typecast as the poorest of the poor. By 1640 parish records note the presence of “a poor Irishman … a poore distressed man from Ireland … a shroude for an Irishman that dyed … a poore gentleman vndone by the burning of a cittie in Ireland … his goods cast away comeing from Ireland … four poore women and sixe children that came oute of Ireland … poor plundered Irish.” All these instances, and more, come from the registers of St. Giles-in-the-Fields and evoke the first steps in a sad history of migration. Yet it was not quite the beginning. Eleven years before, an edict had declared that “this realm hath of late been pestered with a great number of Irish beggars, who live here idly and dangerously, and are of ill-example to the natives.” This has always been one of the cries against the immigrants of London: that they are lazy, living off hand-outs like beggars, and thus demoralising the resident population. The assumption here must be that immigrants are a threat because they undermine the will to work, and provide examples of successful idleness; they are also receiving help or charity which, paradoxically, the native population claims by right to itself. The same complaints have been levelled in recent years against the Bangladeshi population of Whitechapel, and of Tower Hamlets in general.

There were riots against the Irish, too, once more on the prevailing assumption that they were allowing themselves to be used as cheap employment-“letting themselves out to all sorts of ordinary labour,” Robert Walpole wrote, “considerably cheaper than the English labourers have.” There were masters who took them in “for above one-third less per day.” Few observers stopped to consider the measure of poverty and desperation which would encourage them to accept almost starvation wages; instead there was open hostility and violence directed against them, committed by mobs which “arose in Southwark, Lambeth and Tyburn Road.” There were assaults upon the Irish in Tower Hamlets, Clare Market and Covent Garden. During the Gordon Riots, in 1780, under the lambent cry of “No Popery!,” Irish dwellings and public houses were indiscriminately attacked and pulled down. Another familiar component of these actions against the immigrants was the prevailing belief that many of them were criminals come to prey upon unsuspecting Londoners. One city magistrate, in 1753, argued that “most of the robberies, and the murders consequent upon them, have been committed by these outcasts from Ireland.” Just as the Jews were receivers, so the Irish were thieves. London was “the refuge” where dangerous or depraved immigrants “seek shelter and concealment.” The meaning of “refuge,” then, can subtly change from haven to lair.

Among these riots and alarms there was another group of immigrants who, if they stirred little outrage, excited even less sympathy. They were the Indians, the forgotten ancestors of the twentieth-century arrivals, who came to London as servants or slaves; some remained in employment, while others were summarily dismissed or ran away to a vagrant life. There were “hue and cry” advertisements in the public prints-a guinea for the recapture of “a black boy, an Indian, about thirteen years old run away the 8th ins. from Putney with a collar about his neck with this inscription, ‘The Lady Bromfield’s black, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.’” Other advertisements were placed to discover an “East India Tawney Black” or a “Run-away Bengal Boy.” Other Asian servants were “discharged” or “dumped,” having attended their employers on their passage from India, so that they were reduced to a life upon the streets. One Indian visitor wrote to The Times in order to complain about the presence of Indian beggars who were “a great annoyance to the Public, but more so to the Indian gentlemen who visit England.” The Public Advertiser in 1786 observed that “those poor wretches who are daily begging for a passage back, proves that the generality of those who bring them over leave them to shift for themselves the moment they have no further occasion for their services.” These were the unwilling immigrants.

Although the general number of European immigrants increased throughout the nineteenth century, the Jews and the Irish remained the targets of public opprobrium. They were the object of derision and disgust because they lived in self-contained communities, popularly regarded as squalid; it was generally assumed, too, that they had somehow imported their disorderly and insanitary conditions with them. Philanthropic visitors to the Irish rookeries discovered such scenes “of filth and wretchedness as cannot be conceived.” Somehow these conditions were considered to be the fault of the immigrants themselves, who were accustomed to no better in their native lands. The actual and squalid nature of London itself, and the social exclusion imposed upon the Irish or the Jews, were not matters for debate. The question-where else are they to go?-was not put. Similarly the fact that immigrants were willing to accept the harshest and most menial forms of employment was also used as another opportunity for clandestine attack, with the implied suggestion that they were good for nothing else. Yet the Jews became part of the “sweated” system, in order to make enough money to move out of the unhappy situation in which they were placed. They no more appreciated the noisome conditions of Whitechapel than did philanthropic visitors. Their poverty became the object of pity and disgust, while their attempts to transcend it were met with hostility or ridicule.

The popular prejudice against another Asian group is representative. By the late nineteenth century the Chinese, of Limehouse and its environs, were considered to be a particular threat to the native population. In the newspapers they were portrayed as both mysterious and menacing, while at a later date the dangerous fumes of opium rose in the pages of Sax Rohmer, Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde. A cluster of associations was then reinforced. These particular immigrants were believed to “contaminate” the surrounding urban population, as if the presence of aliens might be considered a token of disease. Throughout the history of London there has run an anxious fear of contagion, in the conditions of an overpopulated city, and that fear simply changed its form; the fear of pollution had become moral and social rather than physical or medical. In fact the Chinese were a small and generally law-abiding community, certainly no more lawless than the residents by whom they were surrounded. They were also disparaged because of their “passivity”; the spectre of the eastern habit of opium-smoking was resurrected, but in fact the Jews had also been characterised as the “passive” recipients of scorn and insult. It was as if the native London tendency towards violence were somehow provoked or inflamed by those who eschewed violence in their daily intercourse. The enclosed nature of the Chinese community in turn provoked a sense of mystery, and suspicions of evil; there was particular concern about the possibility of sexual licence in their “dens of iniquity.” Once more these are characteristic of more general fears about immigration and resident aliens. They emanate in hostile attacks upon Russian Jews at the start of the twentieth century, against Germans during the world wars, against “coloureds” in 1919. These anxieties were directed against Commonwealth immigrants in the 1950s and 1960s, and were in turn followed by hostility against Asian and African migrants in the 1980s and 1990s. The pattern changes its direction, but it does not change its form.

Yet with fear, on certain occasions, comes respect. This is nowhere more evident than in the sometimes grudging attention paid to the fact that a variety of immigrants retained their fidelity to a particular religion or orthodoxy. Their imported faith was in such contrast to the generally disaffiliated or frankly pagan inclinations of London’s native population that it was often a matter of remark. The faith of the Jews, for example, was regarded as providing a strong moral presence and continuity in the East End; ironically it was seen as one method with which they withstood assault and opprobrium from other Londoners. The Protestant faith of the Huguenots, the Catholic faith of the Irish and of the Italians in Clerkenwell, the Lutheran faith of the Germans: such religious practices were also considered a redeeming feature. “Then he would catch sight of one of the old, Jewish black garbed men, venerable and bearded”-so runs one narrative of the East End, The Crossing Point by G. Charles-“now so few in the quarter but occasionally to be seen, and his heart would lift with a kind of passionate nostalgia as if through such men he could still touch the certainty, the vitality, the rough, innocent, ambitious, swarming life of those early immigrants with so much before them of promise.” This passage evokes those other aspects of immigrant life which, in the context of great and overwhelming London, are often disregarded; there is “nostalgia” for the certainties of an old faith, but also a fascinated attention to that “vitality” and “ambition” which have helped to create the contemporary multiracial city.

The Notting Hill Carnival, of Trinidadian origin, takes place in mid to late August, exactly as the old Bartholomew Fair at Smithfield did. It is an odd coincidence which emphasises the equally curious continuities of London life, but it throws into relief one of the strangest stories of urban immigration when black and white confronted the mystery of each other’s identity within the context of the city. In sixteenth-century drama “the Moor,” the black, tends to be lascivious, prone to irrational feeling, and dangerous. His appearance upon the stage is of course a consequence of his entry into London, where colour became the most visible and most significant token of difference. There were Africans during the long existence of Roman London, and no doubt their successors by intermarriage continued to live in the city during its Saxon and Danish occupations. But sixteenth-century trade with Africa, and the arrival of the first black slaves in London in 1555, mark their irruption into the city’s consciousness. If they were heathen, did they possess souls? Or were they somehow less than human, their skin the mark of a profound abyss which set them apart? That is why they became the object of fear and curiosity. Although relatively few in number, most of them watched and controlled as domestic slaves or indentured servants, they were already a source of anxiety. In 1596 Elizabeth I despatched a letter to the civic authorities complaining that “there are of late diverse blackamoores brought into these realms, of which kinde there are already here too manie,” and a few months later the queen reiterated her sentiment “that these kinde of people may be well spared in this realme, being so populous.” Five years later a royal proclamation was announced, in which “the great number of begars and Blackamoores which are crept into this realm” were ordered to leave.

Yet, like all such proclamations touching upon London and London’s population, it had little effect. The imperatives of trade, particularly with the islands of the Caribbean, were more powerful. Africans arrived as the slaves of plantation owners, or as sailors free and unfree, or as “presents” for affluent Londoners. In addition the increase of traffic with Africa itself afforded open access to the ports of London where many black crews found temporary homes in the eastern suburbs. Black servants also became popular, and fashionable, in the households of the nobility. So the population grew and, by the mid-seventeenth century, blacks had become unremarkable if still unfamiliar members of the urban community. Most of them were still indentured or enslaved and, according to James Walvin’s The Black Presence, “consigned to the status of sub-human property”; the evidence of their existence in London is thereby confined to “decaying headstones, crude statistics in crumbling parish registers, cryptic advertisements.” This of course is also the destiny of most Londoners, and it might be said that these black immigrants-seen, as it were, by a reverse image-represent in emblematic form the inflictions of London itself.

On 11 August 1659, an advertisement in Mercurius politicus concerned “A Negro boy, about nine years of age, in a gray Searge suit, his hair cut close to his head, was lost on Tuesday last, August 9, at night, in St. Nicholas Lane, London.” Those who were “lost,” or ran away, found themselves upon the mercy of the streets. One German observer noted, in 1710, that “there are in fact such a quantity of Moors of both sexes … that I have never seen so many before. Males and females frequently go out begging.” The most significant abuses occurred, however, among those who were in more orthodox employment; until a famous trial in 1772, the Somerset case, established that the English courts would not recognise slave status, they were still slaves labouring for their masters. The London Sessions reported a case, in 1717, of a black immigrant, John Caesar, who with his wife had worked as a slave “without wages for fourteen years” for a company of printers in Whitechapel. As late as 1777 an advertisement appeared concerning a “black servant man about twenty-four years of age named William of a brown or tawney complexion” wearing “a parson’s great coat, blue breeches, white Bath flannel waistcoat, yellow gilt shoe buckles, and a beaver hat with a white lining.” He had run away and, although his appearance seemed fashionable and exemplary, the advertisement noted that “He is also the property of his master, and has a burnt mark L.E. on one of his shoulders.” This was the brand not of infamy but of inhumanity; it was a way in which the blacks could be marked out as something less than human. In a commercial city, they became part of its movable property. Thus in the eighteenth century there were a large number of notices advertising their sale-“To be sold a negro boy aged eleven years Enquire at the Virginia Coffee House in Threadneedle Street … his price is £25, and would not be sold but the person he belongs to is leaving off business.”

And yet the condition of London bears another witness to their fate. These commercial transactions were undertaken by the wealthy or the well connected; there can be little doubt that the “gentlemen” who purchased and sold their little slaves would have been quite happy to see the “lower orders” of London generally consigned to such servitude. In that sense the fate of the black slave was representative of civic and administrative oppression on a larger scale. That is why the London crowd treated the black population with a certain amount of sympathy and fellow-feeling. It is a manifest expression of that native egalitarianism which has already been defined as one of the moving spirits of London life. That egalitarianism, to be seen at its most profound among the poor and wretched, is evinced in the life of a “black one-legged violinist” named Billy Walters who was nicknamed “the King of the Beggars.” It was said that “every child in London knew him.” It has often been observed how the prophets of racial conflict in London have been proved false; the voices crying doom, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, have since fallen quiet. We may find the causes of that relative harmony and tolerance, between black and white, in the general urban sympathy for the mistreated black immigrants of the eighteenth century.

Yet as their presence grew, even very slightly, so did the anxieties about the “blackness” in the midst of London. John Fielding, a London magistrate in the mid-eighteenth century, suggested that they became a subversive element almost as soon as they arrived in the city, particularly when they realised that white servants performed the same functions as themselves. To be black, in other words, was not a unique or an inalienable mark of servitude. So “they put themselves on a footing with other servants, became intoxicated with their liberty, grew refractory … so as to get themselves discharged.” And when they were “discharged” into London, what then? They “corrupt and dissatisfy the mind of every black servant that comes to England.” Others made their way to the retired streets and alleys where a black community had established itself. So for the civic authorities “the black presence,” as it has been called, posed a double threat. Those in habitual servitude were being aroused to anger or complaint, while small clusters of immigrants were to be found in the “low” districts of Wapping, St. Giles and elsewhere.

The number of “destitute negroes” had also increased by the end of the eighteenth century; in particular black recruits who had fought for the English during the American War of Independence fell into dereliction on their arrival. This was another aspect of immigration, where the influx was the direct result of the actions of the host country; in that sense these black ex-soldiers created a recognisable line of descent to those twentieth-century migrants who left the ruins of empire. A pamphlet issued in 1784 stated that thousands of blacks “traversed the town, naked, pennyless, and almost starving.” As a result they were believed to threaten social order. The African, Afro-American or West Indian-as long as his or her skin was of the appropriate hue-was always and instinctively considered a “threat.” With that fear came also the prospect of miscegenation, since mixed marriages were not unusual in the poorer areas of London. Here the sixteenth-century connection of the “Moor” with lasciviousness was once more revived, as if a black skin were a token of “black” desires lying just beneath the surface of the human order. “The lower classes of women in England are remarkably fond of the blacks,” it was reported, “for reasons too brutal to mention.” A Committee for Relieving the Black Poor was set up with the sole purpose of assisting in expatriation. It was not a success. Less than five hundred, out of a population estimated between 10,000 and 20,000, embarked upon the emigrant ships-an indication, perhaps, of the fact that London remained their chosen city. However dolorous or impoverished their lives, the majority of black immigrants wished to remain in a place which in its daily commerce remained one of opportunity and diversion.

That population became acclimatised and, although still subject to racial taunts, a familiar presence in the streets of nineteenth-century London. They had become part of the “underclass” and were scarcely to be differentiated from it; as crossing-sweepers, as vagrants, or as beggars, they had become almost invisible. In the vast city they did not exist in numbers large enough to command public attention or concern; they were not competing for employment and so did not threaten anyone’s livelihood. They rarely appear in novels or narratives, except as occasional grotesques, and their general fate seems to have been one of settlement among the urban poor.

Yet the beginning of immigration from the Caribbean islands in the late 1940s set off a litany of familiar fears, among them the prospect of white unemployment, of intermarriage, and of general overpopulation. In the summer of 1948 the SS Empire Windrush brought 492 young migrants from Jamaica. It marked the beginning of a process which would alter the demography of London and affect all aspects of communal life. The West Indians were in turn followed by immigrants from India, Pakistan and East Africa so that, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is estimated that London harbours almost two million non-white ethnic minorities. Despite occasional racially motivated attacks, and despite the anxiety felt by certain minorities at the behaviour of the police, there is striking evidence that the egalitarian and democratic instincts of London have already marginalised fear and prejudice. Immigration is so much part of London that even its latest and most controversial manifestations eventually become a settled part of its existence. This became clear even in the aftermath of the Notting Hill riots of 1958, and in particular after the murder of a young Antiguan carpenter named Kelso Cockrane. An essential element of London life returned. “Normally, in the early days, you know,” one young West Indian informed the authors of Windrush, a study of twentieth-century immigrants from the Caribbean, “whenever something appeared in the papers, you could always test the temperature by going on the bus. People would be very hostile. And in this instance, after that funeral, there was a turning point. You could sense a change. People were more friendly. People began to react and respond in a different way.” There have been riots, and murders, in the course of the last twenty years but no one can doubt that the central and essential movement within London has been one of absorption and assimilation. It is an intrinsic aspect of its history.

The city itself, in the process, has also changed. The authors of Windrush, Michael and Trevor Phillips, provide an interesting context for this alteration. They suggest that workers from Jamaica, Barbados and elsewhere, were not simply “migrating to Britain.” They were in effect migrating to London because “it was the life of the city which called to them and which they had begun to crave.” In the twentieth century the city had effectively created the conditions of modern industrial and economic life; thus for the new settlers the journey to London was the only way “to engage with the broad currents of modernity.” It is a significant observation in itself, and one that throws a suggestive light upon all immigrant transactions over the last thousand years. They were drawn to the city itself. London called them. To settle there was, in some oblique and intuitive way, to be part of the present moment moving into futurity. The importance of time within the city has already been outlined but, for the first generations of the immigrant population, the city represented the movement of time itself.

Yet their vitality and optimism in turn brought energy back into the city. Throughout the 1960s, for example, it is claimed that the immigrants themselves assisted the “process of remodelling and modernising” the streets and houses in which they lived. Areas like Brixton and Notting Hill had been “declining and rundown since the nineteenth century,” but the new arrivals “revalued huge swathes of the inner city.” The use of the word “revalued” suggests the economic effectiveness of the settlers, but the transition from black immigrant to black Londoner also called upon different resources. Caribbeans “had to go through a fundamental series of changes in order to live and flourish in the city”; like the Jews or the Irish before them, they had to acquire an urban identity which maintained their inheritance while at the same time allowing its smooth passage into the huge, complex but generally welcoming organism of London. That urban environment might have seemed anonymous, or hostile, or frightening, but in fact it was the appropriate arena for the Caribbeans and other immigrants to forge a new identity.

So it is that the authors of Windrush suggest that “the instinct of the city was to … equalise choices” and “to level out differences between consumers and producers.” This is the new egalitarianism which in turn equalises the differences between the various races which comprise it, since “the essential job of the city was to put people together.” Yet in turn “the character of the city … came to define the identity of the nation,” and the existence of a various and heterogeneous London has helped to redefine the notion or nature of Englishness itself. Now there are Montserratians in Hackney and Anguillians in Slough, Dominicans in Paddington and Grenadians in Hammersmith. Where once there were Swiss in Soho, and Cypriots in Holborn, there are now Barbadians in Notting Hill and Jamaicans in Stockwell. There are Punjabis in Southall and Bangladeshis in Tower Hamlets, Turks in Stoke Newington and Pakistanis in Leyton. Each community has replicated its independence within the larger context of London, so that once more the city takes on the aspects of a world in itself. The city, that “globe of many nations,” acts as a paradigm and forerunner in the great race of life.

CHAPTER 74. Empire Day

By the last decades of the nineteenth century London had become the city of empire; the public spaces, the railway termini, the hotels, the great docks, the new thoroughfares, the rebuilt markets, all were the visible expression of a city of unrivalled strength and immensity. It had become the centre of international finance and the engine of imperial power; it teemed with life and expectancy. Some of its gracefulness and variety had now gone; its Georgian compactness and familiarity had also disappeared, replaced by the larger scale of neo-classical or neo-Gothic architecture which somehow matched the aspirations of this larger and more anonymous city. Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square, erected in 1843, was conceived upon the model of a column in the temple of Mars the Avenger, in imperial Rome, while a revised classicism was employed for the new buildings along Whitehall; the architecture of London, according to Jonathan Schneer in London 1900, celebrated “British heroism on the battlefield, British sovereignty over foreign lands, British wealth and power, in short, British imperialism.” If it was a more public and more powerful city, it had also become a less human one. Tower Bridge, which took some thirteen years to build and was eventually completed in 1894, was a representative emblem; it was an extraordinary feat of engineering, but it seems deliberately to have been built upon an impersonal and somewhat forbidding scale. In its immensity and complexity, it reflected the workings of the city itself.

Late nineteenth-century London was established upon money. The City had acquired the historic destiny that it had been pursuing for almost two thousand years. It had become the progenitor of commerce, and the vehicle of credit, throughout the world; the City maintained England, just as the riches of the Empire rejuvenated the City. The sea trade of the earliest settlers had over the centuries borne unexpected fruit since by the turn of the century almost one half of the world’s merchant shipping was controlled, directly or indirectly, by the institutions of the City. In the early decades of the twentieth century new office blocks became a familiar presence; new banks, company headquarters, insurance offices were built upon a massive scale, with intense and dramatic architectural effects. The latest edition of Pevsner’s Buildings of England for the City of London notes, for example, how the Bank of England acted as a field of force for other commercial enterprises. “Around it are clustered the headquarters and major branches of the main clearing banks, many of which had grown enormously by merger and acquisition at the end of the 1910s. They were built to impress, inside and out.” Here the element of London’s essential theatricality once more emerges, but strangely mingled with the principles of profit and of power. The tendency towards “merger and acquisition” among banking institutions was reflected in a general movement towards the creation of greater and greater organisations; the newspaper industries, the enormous growth of the Post Office, the vast expansion of insurance companies, all contributed to the sense of a city growing quickly and almost unnaturally.

It was unnatural in other respects. The advent of electric light in the 1890s-its first interior use occurred, in 1887, in the premises of Lloyds Bank along Lombard Street-inevitably meant that natural light was no longer necessary to work indoors. So arrived those great waves of City workers who indeed might have been dwelling beneath the sea; they came to work in the darkness of a winter morning, and departed in the evening without once seeing the sun. So London helped to instigate one of the great disasters for the human spirit. In addition the use of new building technologies, particularly those of reinforced concrete and steel, and the introduction of passenger lifts, led inexorably to the erection of ever higher buildings. By that strange symbiotic process which has always marked the development of London, the expansion of the available space was matched only by the increase of the number of people ready to inhabit it. It has been estimated that the working population of the city numbered 200,000 in 1871, but 364,000 in 1911. Charles Pooter, of “The Laurels,” Brickfield Terrace, Holloway, is a fictional variant of one of the thousands of clerks who comprised what one guidebook terms “a very city of clerks.” “My boy, as a result of twenty-one years’ industry and strict attention to the interests of my superiors in office, I have been rewarded with promotion and a rise in salary of £100.” The fact that the Grossmiths’ comic creation has endured in public affection for more than a hundred years is testimony, perhaps, to the instinctive accuracy of their account; the ordinariness of Pooter’s life was seen as emblematic of the new type of urban, or suburban man. In his loyalty, and in his naïveté, he was the kind of citizen whom London needed in order to sustain itself.

But it was not only a city of clerks. London had become the workplace of the new “professions,” as engineers and accountants and architects and lawyers moved ineluctably towards the city of empire. In turn these affluent “consumers” created a market for new “department stores” and new restaurants; there arose a revived and more salubrious “West End” of theatres under such actor-managers as Irving and Beerbohm Tree. There were also more refined delights. The parks, the museums and the galleries of mid-Victorian London were discovered by a new and more mobile population of relatively affluent citizens. There were better libraries, and a plethora of distinguished or specialised exhibitions to satisfy a new urban taste for instruction compounded by enjoyment. It was also the city of Fabians, and of the “new woman”; it was the home of the fin-de-siècle, most readily associated in the public mind with the spectacular London career of Oscar Wilde.

But the old city never went away. In the 1880s approximately four hundred people of both sexes used to sleep in Trafalgar Square among the fountains and the pigeons. As H.P. Clunn noted in The Face of London (1932), “only about one-third of these people had any regular calling or occupation, and the rest simply lived from day to day as best they could from childhood, and could hardly explain how they had managed to exist for so long.” In any one year of that decade approximately “twenty-five thousand people were charged with being drunk and disorderly in the streets,” in part because the public houses were allowed to remain open all night; perhaps the strain of being the richest and most powerful city in the world had some effect upon the citizens themselves. It was a city of contrast. Until the late 1870s, Leicester Square was littered with “tin pots, kettles, old clothes, cast-off shoes, dead cats and dogs.”

The streets were filled with the ceaseless and incessant stream of horse-drawn, motor-driven and steam-propelled traffic; the average speed of the hansoms and the growlers and the vans and the “bumpers” or buses remained approximately twelve miles per hour. Old women squatted in the streets selling herbs, apples, matches and sandwiches. There was a floating population of ragged barefoot children who slept in alleys or beneath bridges. There were costermongers with their carts selling anything from coals to flowers, fish to muffins, tea to crockery. There were also epidemics of surprising speed and savagery which passed through the floating urban population. But somehow, perhaps only with the benefit of hindsight, the lives and roles of the poor seem diminished within the immensity and complexity of late nineteenth-century London; their voices are heard less easily amid the incessant traffic, and their struggles are lost among the army of clerks and “professions” and the whole multiplying population of the city.

This immensity and complexity, the emanations of so much wealth and power, created problems for the authorities themselves. How could the Metropolitan Board of Works, together with all the vestries and parishes, supervise or control the largest and most important city in the world? As a result, in 1888, the London County Council (LCC) was established to administer an area of approximately 117 square miles. It covered the whole of London, inner and outer, from Hackney in the north to Norwood in the south. There had always been unstated fears concerning an over-mighty and overweening city, so the LCC was granted no powers over the police or the public utilities: yet even at the time its inauguration was considered an event of great significance in the development of London. Sidney Webb described it as a movement towards a “self-governing community,” which indirectly aroused memories of the medieval “commune” with its wall and its army. The great constitutional historian of London, Laurence Gomme, became Clerk of the LCC which for him represented “the reincarnation of the democratic spirit of the medieval charters, and traditions of citizenship as ancient as the Saxon and Roman origins of the city.” In 1899, in a further act of reorganisation, twenty-eight Metropolitan Boroughs were created out of the vestries and district boards of the preceding century; although these were designed to impede any centralising impulses of the LCC they, too, had a somewhat atavistic air. At a “royal review” in the summer of 1912, each borough mustered a battalion to march before King George V; it may have been a harbinger of the Great War but the troops from Fulham and Wandsworth, Stepney and Camberwell, Poplar and Battersea, were a reminder of old territorial loyalties issuing from the earliest days of the burg and the soke.

The LCC embarked upon its municipal duties with enthusiasm and animation. The earliest priority was that of slum clearance and the development of public housing. What might seem, in retrospect at least, a symbolic gesture claimed the area of the “Jago” in Bethnal Green; the squalid alleys and tenements immortalised by Arthur Morrison were swept away in the late nineteenth century, and in their place was erected the Boundary Green Estate. Other areas of inner London were cleared but, in deference to the prevailing taste for “expansion” as a physical and mental imperative, “cottage estates” were erected in places like East Acton and Hayes.

In 1904 the county council assumed control of elementary education in London, and funded a system of scholarships whereby clever children might move on from board schools to grammar schools. Such innovations directly affected the lives of Londoners. A city government impinged upon the citizens for the first time in living memory. The administration of London was no longer some distant and almost unrecognisable presence, characterised by what Matthew Arnold described in another context as a “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar”; it had become a force for change and improvement.

London once more embodied a young and energetic spirit, with a curious acquisitive atmosphere which floods the pages of urban chroniclers such as H.G. Wells. The laborious and intricate city of the fin-de-siècle seems to have vanished, together with that heavy and lassitudinous atmosphere so peculiar to the memoirs of the period; it is as if the city had come alive with the new century. It was the first age of the mass cinema, too, with the advent of the Moving Picture Theatre and the Kinema. The Underground lines had abandoned their steam trains, and the whole network was electrified by 1902. Motor buses, tram-cars, lorries and tricycles added to the general momentum. London was, in a phrase of the period, “going ahead.” Where in the late nineteenth century, wrote the author of The Streets of London, “it had been rich and fruity, it was becoming slick and snappy.” One of the permanent, and most striking, characteristics of London lies in its capacity to rejuvenate itself. It might be compared to some organism which sloughs off its old skin, or texture, in order to live again. It is a city which has the ability to dance upon its own ashes. So, in the memoirs of Edwardian London, there are accounts of thés dansants, tangos and waltzes and Blue Hungarian bands. There were twelve music halls and twenty-three theatres in the central area, with another forty-seven just outside. The shops and restaurants grew in size, while the tea shops became “corner houses” and “maisons.” There were picture domes and prizefights and soda fountains and cafés and revues, all compounding the atmosphere of a “fast” city.

The Great War of 1914-18 cannot be said to have impeded the city’s growth or its essential vitality. London has always been energetic and powerful enough to buttress itself against distress and disaster. Herbert Asquith heard a “distant roaring” on the final day of peace at the beginning of August 1914. He wrote that “War or anything that seems likely to lead to war is always popular with the London mob. You remember Sir R. Walpole’s remark, ‘Now they are ringing their bells; in a few weeks they’ll be wringing their hands.’” London was accustomed to violence and to latent savagery, not least in the manifestations of the mob, and for many the vision of chaos and destruction acted as a restorative. The inhabitants of a large city are always the most sanguineous. It is true, also, that London expanded during the years of war. Just as in earlier centuries it had killed more than it cared for, so in the present conflict it seemed to thrive upon slaughter. The city’s economy was fuelled by full employment, with so many of its young males detained elsewhere, and as a result the standard of living improved. Of course there were local hazards and difficulties. Building work was suspended, and at night the city was only partly illuminated by lamps which had been painted dark blue as a precaution against the raids of Zeppelin warships. Parks and squares were used as kitchen-gardens, while hotels became government offices or hostels. But there were more foreign restaurants and pâtisseries than ever, as a result of the presence of émigrés, while the dance halls and music halls were full. There was a loss of life in the capital-it is still not unusual to find plaques upon the walls of long-since renovated buildings, commemorating a Zeppelin raid upon the site-with approximately seven hundred killed in the four years of war. In contrast it has been estimated that almost 125,000 Londoners died in battle. Yet London is prodigal of life.

The close of the war in November 1918 was greeted with scenes of revelry and enthusiasm which have always punctuated the city’s history. Stanley Weintraub has depicted the occasion in A Stillness Heard Around the World: The End of the Great War. “The street was now a seething mass of humanity. Flags appeared as if by magic. Streams of men and women flowed from the Embankment … Almost before the last stroke of the clock had died away, the strict, war-straitened, regulated streets of London had become a triumphant pandemonium.” This is a description of the city stirring into life again, with the “streams” of its citizens like the blood once more racing through its arteries. Pedestrians “were dancing on the sidewalks” and vast crowds gathered in all the public places in order to experience that inchoate sense of collective feeling which is one aspect of urban identity on these occasions; the citizens do indeed become one body and one voice. George V drove “through waves of cheering crowds,” with the image of the sea once more invoking the strange impersonality and inexorability within this expression of mass emotion. Osbert Sitwell recollected that the last time he had seen such a crowd “was when it was cheering for its own death outside Buckingham Palace on the evening of August 4, 1914; most of the men who composed it were now dead.”

Here the exultation comes very close to savagery, and a kind of barbaric triumph is let loose upon the streets of London. “The God of Herds” had taken over as the people “sometimes joining up, sometimes linking hands, dashed like the waves of the sea against the sides of Trafalgar Square.” The celebrations there would continue for three days without ceasing. Paradoxically there was a certain amount of violence and riot to celebrate this peace, while one observer described it “as a sort of wild orgy of pleasure: an almost brutal enjoyment. It was frightening. One felt that if there had been any Germans around, the women would have advanced upon them and torn them to pieces.” The same cruelty had of course been visible in the crowd’s delight at the beginning of the war. In one novel relating these events, James Hilton’s Random Harvest, the scenes represent “a common earth touch-a warm bawdy link with the mobs of the past.” The frenzy spread in unexpected directions. There is the story of the famous parrot in the Cheshire Cheese Public House who with his beak “drew a hundred corks without stopping amid the din of Armistice Night 1918 and then fell down in a faint.” It may seem perverse to pay more attention to the celebrations of a few days in winter than to the whole course of a war, but in that shorter period the city became more intensely itself.

Out of that conflict, too, emerged dynamic movement and a fresh sense of purpose. By 1939 the population of Greater London had risen to 8,600,000; it was the largest level it had ever attained, and is perhaps ever likely to attain. One in five of the British population had become a Londoner. The city had expanded in every sense, with new dual carriageway roads and radial highway schemes which reached out to Cheshunt and Hatfield, Chertsey and Staines. Just as it grew outwards, so its interior fabric was renewed. New banks and office blocks arose in the city, while the Bank of England itself was rebuilt. A new Lambeth Bridge was being constructed. With new initiatives in education and welfare, as well as schemes for the redevelopment of housing and of parks, the London County Council sustained the momentum of the city’s development. H.P. Clunn, writing The Face of London in 1932, suggested that “the new London is rising, with irresistible energy, on time-honoured sites.” It was not the first, nor the last, period of restoration; London is perpetually old, but always new. It was an appropriate sign of renovation, however, that in the autumn of 1931 the most significant public and commercial buildings of the capital were for the first time illuminated by floodlighting.

Its novel brightness attracted powerful forces; the process of what has often been called “metropolitan centralisation” attracted politicians, trade unionists and broadcasters; thus the BBC, ensconced in the heart of London, also became the “voice of the nation.” The film and newspaper industries, together with the myriad advertising companies, migrated to the metropolis, in the process helping to spread images and visions of the capital throughout the entire country. Industry, too, was part of this mass migration. The authors of the County of London Plan noted that many commercial leaders were attracted by “the sight of numerous flourishing factories and the general air of prosperity associated with Greater London.” Once more London had reverted to type and become Cockaigne or the city of gold.

The 1930s have in particular been anatomised as the age of anxiety, when economic depression, unemployment and the prospect of another world war materially affected the general disposition of the city. Yet the historians and reporters bring their own preoccupations to the subject; London is large enough, and heterogeneous enough, to reflect any mood or topic. It can hold, or encompass, anything; in that sense it must remain fundamentally unknowable.

J.B. Priestley, for example, saw evidence of a giant transition. He described a new urban culture, growing up all around him, as one “of arterial and by-pass roads, of filling stations and factories that look like exhibition buildings, of giant cinemas and dance halls and cafes, bungalows with tiny garages, cocktail bars, Woolworths, motor coaches, wireless.” The familiar London sensation, of everything growing too large, once more emerged. It was reported in 1932 that Dagenham, for example, had within ten years increased its population by 879 per cent. In 1921 it had been a small village, complete with cottages and fields of corn; within a decade 20,000 houses had been erected to sustain a working-class population. George Orwell had mentioned Dagenham in his account of a new city where the citizens inhabit “vast new wildernesses of glass and brick,” where “the same kind of life … is being lived at different levels, in labour-saving flats or council houses, along the concrete roads.” He was describing the same reality as Priestley, with “miles of semi-detached bungalows, all with their little garages, their wireless sets.” They were both reacting to the single most important change in London life within the last 150 years. They were talking about the suburbs.