London: The Biography

A mid-sixteenth-century map of Moorfields, north of London. Some women dry linen upon the ground, while the citizens engage in archery. The line of Bishopsgate Street marks the accelerating growth of the city.

CHAPTER 8. Rather Dark and Narrow

John Stow, the great sixteenth-century antiquarian, offered the most vivid and elaborate description of Tudor London. He wrote of new streets and new buildings continually springing up beyond the walls and, within the city itself, of “encroachments on the highways, lanes, and common grounds.” Where once there had been sheds or shops, in one of which an old woman used to sell “seeds, roots and herbs,” there were now houses “largely built on both side outward, and also upward, some three, four or five stories high.” Growth is the continual condition of the city, but one which Stow himself lamented when it encroached upon the ancient topography of the place which he had known as a child in Cordwainer Lane.

We can follow John Stow down Butchers’ Alley, beside St. Nicholas Shambles and Stinking Lane, where he discoursed on the rising price of meat. In the old days, he said, a fat ox was sold for 26s 8d “at the most” and a fat lamb for a shilling, but “what the price is now I need not to set down.” In such local touches, Stow stands alone among the chroniclers of the city. It was said that “he reporteth res in se minutas, toys and trifles, being such a smell-feast that he cannot pass by Guildhall, but his pen must taste of the good chear therein.” But that is what makes him such an excellent London surveyor, and such a characteristic Londoner. In his Survey of London, he provides a detailed and immediate account of the lanes and alleys which he had known all his life.

He was born in 1525 and came from at least two generations of tallow chandlers who resided in Threadneedle or Threeneedle Street; Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s familiar councillor, encroached upon his father’s garden there, and Stow ruefully noted “that the sudden rising of some men causeth them in some matters to forget themselves.” Little is known of any formal education which Stow may have received, although it is likely that he attended one of London’s free grammar schools. He himself recalled how he used to walk to a farm belonging to the nuns of the Minories where “I myself have fetched many a halfpenny worth of milk,” thus indicating that there was grazing land by the very walls of the city. But of other juvenile incidents he is silent. It is known that he took up the profession of a tailor, however, and established himself in a house by the well at Aldgate close to the farm where he had bought milk as a child, but his true labours had not yet begun.

Antiquarian studies seem to be an instinctive London passion, and Stow remains their greatest exemplar. It is appropriate that his first work should be an edition of Chaucer; that fine London poet was Stow’s original pursuit before he turned to the city which nourished his genius. He began the study of London records, primarily kept in the Guildhall, as a “fee’d chronicler”; we may imagine him among slips of parchment, manuscript rolls and broken-backed volumes, trying to decipher the history of his city. In one of his first volumes, A Summarie of Englyshe Chronicles, he wrote that “It is now eight years since I, seeing the confused order of our late English Chronicles, and the ignorant handling of ancient affairs, leaving mine own peculiar gains, consecrated myself to the search of our famous antiquities.” This might suggest that he had abandoned his trade as a tailor in order to devote himself to historical study, but extant documents show that he maintained his business for some time. He complained about being called a “prick-louse,” an invidious catchphrase for those who sewed as a profession, and he testified that a neighbour threw stones and tiles at his apprentice.

The “antiquities” were all around him. A few yards from his own house, between Billiter Lane and Lime Street, were buried a wall and gate of stone “about two fathoms deep” under the ground. They had been discovered after demolition work in 1590; Stow investigated the curiosity, and believed the old stonework to date from the reign of King Stephen some 450 years before. The ground of London was always rising, built again and again upon the ash and rubble of its previous incarnations. Stow walked everywhere, and once confessed that his labours “cost many a weary mile’s travel, many a hard-earned penny and pound, and many a cold winter night’s study.” He was tall and lean, “of a pleasant and cheerful countenance; his sight and memory were good; very sober, mild, and courteous to any that required his instructions.”

There was much to instruct since, in the early sixteenth century, London would indeed have been an antiquarian’s delight. Stow often mentions the presence of great houses “of old time built upon arched vaults, and with gates of stone” which date from the eleventh and twelfth centuries; there would still have been extant walls, pillars and pavements from the Roman period. Much of the brick and masonry of that early time had been pillaged for modern rebuilding, but there is no doubt that there would have been evidence of the first century in succeeding periods of London’s history. Yet much also was being destroyed even as Stow continued his survey. The Reformation of faith, inaugurated by Henry VIII, wreaked a sudden transformation upon the buildings as well as the beliefs of London. The fabric of the Roman communion, to which the citizens had so fervently attached themselves, was shattered; the uncertainty and bewilderment of Londoners were in turn embodied in the changing fabric of the city itself where monasteries and chantry chapels and lady chapels were vandalised or broken. The dissolution of the abbeys, churches and monastic hospitals in particular meant that the entire city was in a fevered period of demolition and construction. Parts of it would have resembled a vast building site, while other areas were left to slow neglect and in Stow’s words became “sore decayed.”

London was in many respects a place of ruins. Stow notes the remains of an “old court hall” in Aldermanbury Street, now “employed as a carpenter’s yard.” A mayor’s great house in Old Jewry became in turn a synagogue, a house of friars, a nobleman’s house, a merchant’s house, and then a “wine tavern” known as the Windmill. A chapel became a “warehouse and shops towards the street, with lodgings over them,” bishops’ houses were turned into tenements, and so on. Other documentary sources reveal that a Cistercian house was pulled “clean down” and in its place were erected storehouses, tenements and “ovens for making ship’s biscuit.” The convent of the Poor Clares, known as the Minories, was destroyed to make way for storehouses; the church of the Crutched Friars became a carpenter’s shop and a tennis court; the church of the Blackfriars was turned into a warehouse for the carts and properties of the “pageants.” (It is perhaps appropriate that on this same site rose the Blackfriars Playhouse.) St. Martin’s le Grand was pulled down and a tavern built upon its remains.

There are many other examples, but the salient point remains that after the Reformation much of late Tudor London was in a ruined condition, with walls and gateways and ancient stone windows to be glimpsed among the shops and houses which lined the lanes and thoroughfares. Even in the area outside the walls, where the palaces of the bishops and nobles had led down from the Strand towards the river, the grand houses were, according to the Venetian ambassador, “disfigured by the ruins of a multitude of churches and monasteries.”

Yet even in the midst of lamentation there was also renovation. In Goldsmiths Row, between Bread Street and Cheapside Cross, Stow extols the shops and dwellings-built just thirty-five years before his birth- which are “beautified towards the street with the Goldsmith’s arms … riding on monstrous beasts, all of which is cast in lead, richly painted over and gilt.” A fifteenth-century traveller, Dominic Mancini, noted, in the same area, “gold and silver cups, dyed stuffs, various silks, carpets, tapestry.” These are the true tinctures of Tudor London. An old church may be pulled down, but in its place Stow remarks that there has been erected “a fair strong frame of timber … wherein dwell men of divers trades.” An old cross is removed, and on the same site is constructed a glistening water-conduit. An aristocratic dwelling is converted into a market “for the sale of woollen baize, watmols [coarse wool], flannels and such like.” A stone building of great antiquity is gradually taken down and in its place are erected “divers fair houses.”

This is the trade, and energy, of Tudor London. Stow himself, quintessential Londoner as he is, cannot prevent himself from enumerating the gardens, the mills, the houses of stone and timber, the taverns, the conduits, the stables, the yards, the hostelries, the markets, the tenements and guild halls which comprise the city’s life.

The older versions of the grand London house, established around a separate hall and courtyard, were no longer appropriate to the new conditions of the city; they were built over, or encroached upon, by smaller dwellings in streets which were already acquiring a reputation for being “rather dark and narrow.” Even the mansions of the wealthy merchants were now more compact, with a shop and warehouse on the ground floor, a hall and parlour on the first floor and the other living quarters above; it was not uncommon for such a house to rise to five or six storeys, with two rooms on each level, in the customary timber and mortar fashion. Such was the premium upon space in the bustling city that cellars and garrets were utilised as dwellings for the poor. Estimates of population can only be approximate but there are figures of 85,000 by 1565, rising to 155,000 by 1605; this does not include those who lived in “the liberties” or within “the bars,” which would increase the figures by more than 20,000. It represents, to use a perhaps anachronistic phrase, a population explosion.

The price of property had risen so steeply that no one would willingly demolish even the smallest shop or house. So the growth of the city meant that the ancient ditches, used for both defence and refuse, were now filled in and covered over and became the site of more properties. The main roads leading to the city gates were “improved” and paved, so that within a very short time shops and houses were erected beside them. The road to Aldgate, for example, was, according to Stow, “not only fully replenished with buildings outward” but “also pestered with divers alleys on either side to the bars.” Even the fields beyond the city, where once the younger citizens had shot their arrows or walked among the streams, had “now within a few years made a continual building throughout of garden houses and small cottages, and the fields on either side turned into garden plots, tenter yards, bowling alleys, and such like.”

The overcrowding became so serious that, in 1580, Elizabeth I issued a proclamation “perceiving the state of the city of London (being anciently termed her chamber) and the suburbs and confines thereof to increase slowly, by access of people to inhabit the same” so that there was no chance of sustaining “victual food, and other like necessaries for man’s life, upon reasonable prices, without which no city can long continue.” There was further cause for alarm concerning the overpopulation within the city itself “where there are such great multitudes of people brought to inhabit in small rooms, whereof a great part are seen very poor, yea, such as must live begging, or by worse means, and they heaped up together, and in a sort smothered with many families of children and servants in one house or small tenement.” This is one of the earliest accounts of overcrowding in London, and can be considered the first extended version of a description which has haunted the city ever since. The queen’s remedy was to prohibit “any new buildings of any house or tenement within three miles from any of the gates of the said city of London.” It has been suggested that this was the first venture at a “green belt” around London, a surmise which would at least have the merit of emphasising the historical continuity within all apparently “modern” plans for the city, but it was more likely to be an attempt to protect the trading and commercial monopoly of the citizens within the walls who did not relish the appearances of trades and shops beyond their jurisdiction.

Another aspect of the proclamation is also of some significance, in that passage where the monarch and her city advisers prohibit “any more families than one only to be placed, or to inhabit from henceforth in any house that hereto fore hath been inhabited.” The idea of one family occupying one house was indeed the stated purpose behind much of the city’s development in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; it has even been considered a peculiarly London solution. It is peculiar to the city because it is historical in spirit; as S.E. Rasmussen put it in London: The Unique City, the Elizabethan remedy represented a “conservative clinging to the medieval form of housing.” In a similar spirit new building was only allowed if it were raised “on old foundations.” Here we have an inkling of that continuity, and sense of permanence, which London still exemplifies.

It did not, however, work. Within three years of Elizabeth’s proclamations the city authorities were lamenting the continual increase in sheds, lodgings and tenements outside the walls. There were further edicts and orders issued at regular intervals throughout the reign of her successors; none of them was ever obeyed, and none of them was in the least successful at controlling the growth of the city.

The truth is that the growth of London could not, and cannot, be controlled. It spread to the east along the high street of Whitechapel, and to the west along the Strand. It spread north to Clerkenwell and Hoxton; to the south, Southwark and its environs became “pestered,” to use Stow’s word, with places of popular resort, taverns, brothels, pleasure grounds and theatres. In turn the Inns of Court, clustered in the “suburbs” of Holborn between the city and the royal palaces of Westminster, were extended and embellished.

Yet the quality of transport from suburb to city was not always of the best. In the latter years of the reign of Henry VIII the high road between the Temple “and the village of Charing,” now known as the Strand, was noted in the Rolls of Parliament to be “full of pits and sloughs, very perilous … very noyous and foul, and in many places thereof very jeopardous to all people passing and repassing, as well on horseback as on foot.” More modern forms of transportation, however, were not necessarily welcomed. The introduction of hackney coaches, known as “chariots” or “whirlicotes,” led Stow to reflect that “the world runs on wheels with many whose parents were glad to go on foot.”

The state of traffic in the capital was a source of constant complaint in the sixteenth century, as it has become for each generation. Stow again noted “the number of cars, drays, carts and coaches, more than hath been accustomed, the streets and lanes being straitened, must needs be dangerous, as daily experience proveth”-dangers not tempered when coachmen lashed their horses forward without checking what was behind them and inebriated drivers quarrelled frequently and violently in the street over who had right of passage. And there was the noise “where even the very earth quakes and trembles, the casements shatter, tatter, and clatter.”

There was, however, a significant improvement in the conditions of urban living at least for those who could afford the new “luxuries” of city life. There were pillows and bedding where there had once lain a log and a straw pallet; even the poorer citizens dined off pewter rather than wood and the “middling” households might boast of wall-coverings, brass, soft linen, cupboards garnished with plate, jars and pots made from green glazed earthenware. There was also a fashion for brick and stone chimneys, which in turn had an effect both upon the appearance and atmosphere of London.

The city had forfeited some of its independence to Parliament and to the sovereign, even to the extent of accepting Henry VIII’s recommendations for the mayoralty, but in turn it had become the recognised capital of a unified nation. The municipal ideal had been displaced by a national ideal-and how could it not be so in a city which was now largely populated by immigrants? The new arrivals came from every area of England, Cornwall to Cumberland (it has been estimated that one-sixth of all Englishmen became Londoners in the second half of the sixteenth century), and the number of foreign immigrants rose at an accelerating pace, making the city truly cosmopolitan. So high was the mortality, and so low the birth rate, that without this influx of traders and workers the population would in fact have steadily declined. Yet instead it continued to expand, with brewers and book-binders from the Low Countries, tailors and embroiderers from France, gun-makers and dyers from Italy, weavers from the Netherlands and elsewhere. There was an African or “Moor” in Cheapside who made steel needles without ever imparting the secret of his craft. Fashion followed population, just as the populace followed fashion. In the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603) there was a surfeit of silk shops, selling everything from gold thread to silk stockings, and at the time of her accession it was reported that no country gentleman could “be content to have eyther cappe, coat, doublet, hose or shirt … but they must have their geare from London.”

If London had become the centre of fashion, it had also become the centre of death. Mortality was higher than in any other part of the country, the two great harvesters being the plague and the sweating sickness. In poorer parishes life expectancy was only between twenty and twenty-five years, while in the richer it rose to thirty or thirty-five years. These fatal infections confirm the evident truth that sixteenth-century London remained a city of the young. The greatest proportion of the citizens were under the age of thirty, and it is this actuarial statistic which helps to explain the energy and restlessness of urban life in all its forms.

The most striking example comes from within the turbulent body of the apprentices, a peculiarly London phenomenon of young men who were bound by strict articles of agreement and yet managed to retain a high-spiritedness and almost feverish buoyancy which spilled over into the streets. They “wold ether bee at the taverne, filling their heads with wine, or at the Dagger in Cheapeside cramming their bellies with minced pyes; but above al other times it was their common costome, as London prentises use, to follow their maisters upon Sundays to the Church dore and then to leave them, and hie unto the taverne.” There are reports of various fights and “affrays,” the common victims being foreigners, “night-walkers,” or the servants of noblemen who were considered to take on the airs of their superiors. A declaration, in 1576, warned apprentices not to “misuse, molest, or evil treat any servant, page, or lackey of any nobleman, gentleman, or other going in the streets.” There were often disturbances after football matches and three young men were put in the local prison for “outrageously and riotously behaving themselves at a football play in Cheapside.” But drunken high spirits could turn into something more violent, and threatening. Apprentices as well as artisans and children took part in the “evil May-day” riots of 1517, in which the houses of foreigners were ransacked. In the last decade of the sixteenth century there were still more outbreaks of riot and disorder but, unlike other continental cities, London never became unstable or ungovernable.

The accounts of foreign travellers suggest the unique status of London in this period. A Greek visitor reported that the treasures in the Tower were “said to exceed the anciently famed wealth of Croesus and Midas,” while a Swiss medical student reported that “London is not said to be in England, but rather England to be in London.” There was a standard guided tour for visitors, who were first taken to the Tower and the Royal Exchange before being escorted to the west, with Cheapside, St. Paul’s, Ludgate and the Strand viewed, before a magnificent arrival at Westminster and Whitehall. The roads were unpaved in parts, but a journey on horse was still sometimes preferable to that upon the Thames. Giordano Bruno, spy and magician, has left a graphic account of his attempts to hire the services of a wherry. He and his companions, wishing to travel to Westminster, spent a great deal of time looking for a boat and vainly crying out “Oars!” At last a boat arrived with two elderly boatsmen-“After much question and reply as to whence, where, why, how and when, they brought the prow to the foot of the stairs.” The Italians believed they were at last on their way to the destination but then, after about a third of the journey had been completed, the boatsmen began to row towards the shore. They had reached their “station,” and would go no further. This is a small incident, of course, but it reveals the rudeness and obstinacy which was seen by strangers to be characteristic of London behaviour. Just as typical, perhaps, is Bruno’s arrival on the shore only to find a footpath thick with mud where he was forced to journey through “a deep and gloomy hell.”

Other reports emphasise both the violence and xenophobia of ordinary Londoners. A French physician, in London between 1552 and 1553, observed that “the common people are proud and seditious … these villains hate all sorts of strangers” and even “spit in our faces.” Gangs of apprentices were also likely to set upon foreigners in the street, and one traveller saw a Spaniard being forced to take refuge in a shop from a mob after he dared to wear his national costume. The Swiss medical student was in that respect perhaps too kind when he mentioned that “the common people are still somewhat coarse and uncultured … and believe that the world beyond England is boarded off.”

Yet the city also lives in its details gathered in these foreign accounts. One traveller noted that it was remarkable for the number of kites which were “quite tame” and wandered through the streets as if they owned them; they were the city’s scavengers and the butchers threw out offal for them to consume. The number of butchers’ shops was matched only by the number of taverns. A passion for privacy was also noted, with individual dwellings separated from their neighbours by walls of stone; the same conditions applied in the taverns themselves, where wooden partitions were set up “so that one table cannot overlook the next.” It may be that in a teeming and overcrowded city such attempts at privacy were natural or inevitable, yet they also represent a significant and permanent aspect of the London character.

In other accounts “between meals one sees men, women, and children always munching through the streets.” The same children, when not eating apples and nuts, could be seen “gathering up the blood which had fallen through the slits in the scaffold” after a beheading on Tower Hill. The executioner on this occasion wore a white apron “like a butcher.” We seem to have come full circle in a city dominated by violence, blood, meat and continual consuming appetite.

CHAPTER 9. Packed to Blackness

There was once a Dark Lane, in the medieval city; a tavern was erected there, known as the Darkhouse. That narrow thoroughfare was then renamed Dark House Lane, and is to be seen on eighteenth-century maps of London. On the same site there now stands Dark House Wharf, which is dominated by the headquarters of the Bank of Hong Kong. This building is clad in dark blue steel and dark, tinted glass. So does the city maintain its dark secret life.

Dust, mud, soot, slime and smut were the objects of continual dissatisfaction. “Though a chamber be never so closely locked up,” John Evelyn complained in the seventeenth century, “men find at their return all things that are in it evenly covered with a black thin soot.” In the same century a Venetian chaplain described “a sort of soft and stinking mud which abounds here at all seasons, so that the place more deserves to be called Lorda (filth) than Londra (London).” The “filth of the city” was also depicted as being “rich and black as thick ink.” In the eighteenth century the road outside Aldgate “resembled a stagnant lake of deep mud,” while in the Strand the puddles of filth were three or four inches deep so that they “fill coaches when their windows happen not to be up, and bedaub all the lower parts of the houses.” If they were not strewn with mud, the streets were filled with dust. Even in the mid-nineteenth century, according to the Quarterly Review, there was not a man or woman in London “whose skin and clothes and nostrils are not of necessity more or less loaded with a compound of powdered granite, soot, and still more nauseous substances.” It was said that St. Paul’s Cathedral had a right to be blackened because it was built with a tax upon sea coal, but it was hard upon the animals of the city which were similarly affected by the smoke and dirt; the feathers of the redstarts and the martins were suffused with soot, while the dust of London was believed to clog the breathing and dull the senses of the omnipresent spiders. All creatures were affected and, as a late twentieth-century character in Iris Murdoch’s novel The Black Prince puts it, “I could feel the thick filth and muck of London under my feet, under my bottom, behind my back.”

Yet it is more than material filth. There is a drawing of Fish Street Hill by George Scharf, executed in the late 1830s, as accomplished and as detailed as all his work. But in the foreground a vast shadow obscures the people and the house-fronts; it is in fact the outline of the Monument, otherwise concealed from sight, but in that shadow Scharf has somehow managed to depict something of the nature of London itself. It has always been a shadowy city.

As James Bone, the author of The London Perambulator, remarked in 1931, it resides in “the appearance of great shadows where there can be no shadows, throwing blackness up and down.” This is also the London vision of Verlaine, who writes of “l’odieuse obscurité … quel deuil profond, quelles ténèbres!” within “la monstrueuse cité.” Much of the slate used in London building is striated by what geologists term “pressure shadows” but they are inconspicuous beside the blackened surfaces of Portland stone. One foreign traveller remarked that the streets of London were so dark that the citizenry seemed to delight in playing “hide and seek” with the light, like children in a wood, while in the summer of 1782 Charles Moritz noted that “the houses in general struck me as if they were dark and gloomy.” The gloom affected him profoundly: “At that moment I could not in my own mind compare the external view of London with that of any other city I had ever before seen.”

There were almost a score of Dirty Alleys, Dirty Hills and Dirty Lanes in the medieval city; there were Inkhorn Courts and Foul Lanes and Deadman’s Places. Lombard Street in the City, at the centre of capitalist imperialism, was a notoriously dark street. At the beginning of the nineteenth century its brick was so blackened with smoke that the walls resembled the mud in the road. Today, in the twenty-first century, it is still just as narrow and just as dark, its stone walls constantly echoing to the sound of hurried footsteps. It is still close to what a century ago Nathaniel Hawthorne called “the black heart of London.” Hawthorne’s compatriot Henry James also noticed the “deadly darkness” but he revelled in it as if he were a “born Londoner.” In the 1870s Hippolyte Taine simply found the darkness “horrible”; the houses from a distance looked “like ink-stains on blotting paper” while from a closer vantage the “tall, flat straight façades are of dark brick.” The darkness of London seems to have entered Taine’s soul with his crepuscular invocations of “a bone-black factory” which is a London dwelling, of “porticoes foul with soot … every crevice inked in … long ranks of blind windows … the fluting of the columns full of greasy filth, as if sticky mud had been set flowing down there.”

There were others who were intimate with this darkness. In his account of nineteenth-century Whitechapel, Charles Booth, the sympathetic chronicler of The Life and Labour of the People of London, mentions that the tables of the poor are “fairly black” with thick swarms of flies congregating on every available surface while, in the streets outside, at the level of the hip, “is a broad dirty mark, showing where the men and lads are in the constant habit of standing.”

Charles Booth’s images of disease and torpor somehow increase the darkness of the capital, as the very embodiment of those shadows which the rich and powerful cast upon the dispossessed and the disadvantaged. The effect of the industrial revolution, although less noticeable in London than in some of the northern manufacturing towns, deepened those shadows. The growth of factories as well as small workshops, and the increasing demand for coal in a city which by the beginning of the eighteenth century was already the manufacturing centre of Europe, only intensified London’s characteristic darkness.

In another sense its darkness suggests secrecy, and the titles of many accounts of the city confirm that sense of concealment, among them Unknown London, its Romance and Tragedy, The London Nobody Knows and London in Shadow. And yet that secrecy is of its essence. When Joseph Conrad described the city “half lost in night,” in The Secret Agent (1907), he was echoing Charles Dickens’s remark seventy years before in Sketches by Boz that “the streets of London, to be beheld in the very height of their glory, should be seen on a dark dull murky winter’s night.” The tone is ironic but the meaning is by no means so. In his last completed work Dickens returned to it in his description of “a black shrill city … a gritty city … a hopeless city, with no vent in the leaden canopy of its sky.” Darkness is of the city’s essence; it partakes of its true identity; in a literal sense London is possessed by darkness.

CHAPTER 10. Maps and Antiquarians

The history of London is represented by the history of its maps. They can be seen as symbolic tokens of the city, and as attempts to picture its disorder in terms of fluent and harmonious design. From the first great copperplate map of the mid-sixteenth century to the “Underground” map of the late twentieth century, the mapping of London represents an attempt to understand the chaos and thereby to mitigate it; it is an attempt to know the unknowable.

That is why the first map, from which John Stow himself borrowed, has always been a source of wonder and curiosity. It is inscribed upon copper plates by an unknown hand, but all the evidence suggests that this carefully prepared map was commissioned by Queen Mary I. In its complete form (only three fragments remain) it would have been some eight feet in width and five feet in depth, covering the entire area of city and suburbs. It is in certain respects extraordinarily detailed: the very scales of Leadenhall Market are depicted, together with the dog-kennels in some of the gardens; the position of a tree or the number of buckets by a well are faithfully recorded; shirts and bed linen lie stretched out to dry in Moor Field, while games of musketry and archery are conducted in the neighbouring pastures. The churches and monastic remains are also visible, many of them rendered in such detail that we may distinguish between wood and stone. When Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt compared the sea around England with “a moat defensive to a house,” we now know that his audience, coming to the Theatre, by Shoreditch, had passed just such a moated house on the road out of London through Finsbury Fields. Since this copperplate is also the original upon which most other maps of sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century London are based, in its lineaments we may find the most lucid and significant outline of the city.

In certain respects, however, the map inevitably strays from accuracy. The actual warren of passages and alleyways is ignored in order to display the principal lanes and streets; the city has in that respect been cleansed. The number and variety of houses are also neglected in order to create a more uniform and pleasing appearance. The citizens depicted at work or at play are in turn of an unnatural size, suggesting that the cartographer wished to emphasise the human dimension of the city. Nevertheless it is a beautiful feat of engraving, and it is no accident that it did become the source and inspiration for maps completed some years later.

One coloured map of mid-Tudor London, for example, which is known as the “Braun and Hogenberg,” is a smaller copy of the great original. Here the city is given compact form and, although it is by no means a spiritualised shape, it is in instinctive harmony with its surroundings; the skiffs and wherries ply their river trade in graceful formation, while the main thoroughfares themselves seem to mimic the natural passage of the water. It depicts the “fair city” of contemporary report, but it also has one other significant aspect; in the foreground, quite out of proportion, stand four Londoners. An older man is dressed in the robes of a merchant, with cap and fur-trimmed coat, while upon his right hand stands his apprentice wearing a short coat like a doublet as well as sword and buckler; the merchant’s wife is dressed in a simple blue gown over a Spanish farthingale while her maid is plainly attired in gown and apron. These are modest figures but they stand upon a hill above London as the true representatives of the city. The map itself can be seen as an advertisement of London’s mercantile power, with the vessels on the Thames behind the four Londoners depicting its status as a port.

In similar spirit the two great “panoramas” of London, before the Fire of 1666 utterly destroyed its appearance, take the river as the leading spirit of their design. Anthony van den Wyngaerde’s riverine views of the mid-seventeenth century have been eclipsed by Hollar’s panorama of 1647, but Wyngaerde’s study has the merit of showing the bustling life of the Thames. Some row, while others fish. Travellers wait at Stargate Horse Ferry, while others make their way up Southwark High Street towards London Bridge.

Of course Hollar’s more powerfully executed engraving is perhaps the most beautiful and harmonious of all London panoramas. In his work, London has become a world city of which the horizons are scarcely visible. The artist takes his stand upon the roof of St. Mary Overie by Bankside, so that in the foreground of the engraving are great clusters of roofs and house-fronts by the entrance to London Bridge. The chimneys and windows, the rooftops of tile and wood, suggest the massive presence of a city already congregating by its southern mouth; on the Thames there are almost eighty great vessels as well as innumerable smaller craft, the river itself forming a great sheath of light and space which lends London a monumental aspect. There are more intimate details on the southern bank where, among the throng of roofs and chimneys, Hollar has opened up two short vistas of the streets. A dog can be seen, a man on horseback, couples wandering, here and there a solitary figure, all fixed for ever as part of the pattern of London. From Hollar’s high vantage a walled garden can be observed and, beyond it, two circular buildings labelled “The Globe” and “Beere bayting” respectively. Beyond them lie fields, where horses are grazing. On the other side of the Thames there is a forest of rooftops and church spires; although that of St. Paul’s had been destroyed by a thunderstorm some eighty years before, the cathedral church still dominates the skyline of the city. It rises above the streets and wharves, where people can be seen working or waiting for transport. There is continuous building eastwards from the Tower to Shadwell, while the line of the city is prolonged westward to Whitehall. The effect is that of great activity caught in majestic perspective, with the city arrayed in glory. The panorama is completed by various classical deities who, as it were, introduce and applaud the scene from the wings; the figure of Apollo hovers just above St. Paul’s.

It is perhaps the finest ever representation of London, and certainly the greatest image of the city before the Great Fire of 1666. Later maps by Norden, as well as Newcourt and Faithorne, in style and spirit reflect the first great copperplate map. Similarly, the familiar map of the London Underground today still completes and complements the one first designed with such clarity of purpose in 1933. The original Underground map bears only approximate relation to the location of lines and stations, but it is so aesthetically pleasing that its lineaments have never been changed.

In 1658 Wenceslaus Hollar completed a further etching, of the western aspect of the city. We observe that still more areas of fields and stiles and country lanes have been replaced by squares and piazzas and dwellings. Some of these houses are several storeys high, others on a smaller scale, but all reflect a pleasing symmetry which did not in fact exist. Another theme obtrudes, at least in retrospect. The streets and open areas are devoid of figures or any depiction of active life-the city had already grown too large to register even the symbolic presence of its citizens-and so it seems like some great empty place waiting silently for its destruction in the Great Fire.

The extent of that destruction can be see in another engraving by Hollar; it was completed in 1667, and depicts the razed city as more than four hundred acres of whitened contours. The ruins of the churches, prisons and main public buildings are sketched in, but the rest is empty space encroached upon by dark clusters of building which had escaped the flames.

Within days of that Fire, however, various speculative maps of a new London were being completed. These were visionary schemes. To a certain extent they resemble the structure of planned cities such as Paris and New York which were to be laid out grandly in the nineteenth century. Many of these seventeenth-century designs for London incorporated grid systems of intersecting thoroughfares, with great avenues linking majestic public edifices. Wren and Evelyn conceived of a humane and civilised city built upon a preordained pattern, while some of their contemporaries presented mathematically ingenious systems of roads and squares. These noble plans could not work, and they did not work. The very nature of the city defeated them: its ancient foundations lie deeper than the level at which any fire might touch, and the spirit of the place remained unscathed.

London is not a civilised nor a graceful city, despite the testimony of the maps. It is tortuous, inexact and oppressive. It could never be laid out again with mathematic precision, in any case, because the long history of streets and estates meant that there was a bewildering network of owners and landlords with their own especial claims or privileges. This is a social and topographical fact, but it in turn suggests a no less tangible aspect of London. It is a city built upon profit and speculation, not upon need, and no mayor or sovereign could withstand its essential organic will.

That is why the map of reconstructed London, published ten years after the Fire, shows the city restored approximately to its original state. One new thoroughfare has been built, the new King Street and the new Queen Street leading to the Guildhall from the river, but the congerie of streets around it- Milk Street, Wood Street, Aldermansbury, Old Jewry, and all the rest-have sprung up again. Thoroughfares were widened after more stringent fire precautions and building regulations were applied, but the essential topography of the neighbourhood was revived.

There was one other change. The surveyors of this post-Fire map, John Ogilby and William Morgan, had declared that they would chart “all Bye-streets and Lanes, all Courts and Allies, all Churches and Churchyards” by scientific principles of “Mesuration and Plotting” with theodolites and “circumferentors.” So for the first time the city became susceptible to scientific measurement, with the result that it could no longer be depicted as an aesthetic or harmonious whole. Paradoxically it then became fragmented, chaotic, unknowable. The twenty sheets of this topographical survey are covered by rectangles and numbers-“i 90 … B69 … C54”-which are designed to expedite identification, but the general effect is one of bewildering complexity. When London is seen in terms of abstract size and measurement, it becomes unimaginable.

There was, instead, a vogue for guidebooks which rendered London intimate and identifiable-among them Couch’s Historical Remarques and Observations of 1681, de Laune’s The Present State of London and Colsoni’s Le Guide de Londres of 1693. They were complemented by such volumes as The Antiquities of London and Westminster, with accounts of the town-ditch, the gates, the schools, hospitals, churches and wards.

By the eighteenth century there was an efflorescence of those books which emphasise “whatever is most remarkable for GRANDEUR, ELEGANCE, CURIOSITY OR USE.” There were others designed to aid visitors, or new residents, as to the way in which they should conduct themselves in the city. One, for example, suggests that should a carrier of a sedan chair behave unmannerly, “take the Number of the Chair, as you do of a Hackney Coach, and complaining at the office abovementioned, the Commissioners will correct their Insolence.” The London Adviser and Guide of 1790 offers similar advice, with the note that common people will be charged one shilling for swearing in the street and that every gentleman will face the higher penalty of five shillings. The number of convictions is not mentioned.

The next attempt at a comprehensive cartography, undertaken by John Roque, in 1783, emphasises the problems that were now inevitably encountered; trigonometrical measurements of the streets did not align with actual measurements, and street names were thoroughly confused. The project took seven years to finish and, in the process, Roque himself came close to bankruptcy. The plan itself was of enormous size and the publishers suggested that it be placed on a “Roller” so that “it will not interfere with any other Furniture.” Yet it is by no means a complete survey. It omits certain smaller or inconsiderable features, place names are missing, and there has been no effort to include individual buildings. This is hardly surprising in a map covering some ten thousand acres of built land, and the publishers were tactful enough to encourage subscribers to point out “Inaccuracies and Omissions.” So it remains in many respects an impressionistic survey, with the actual lanes, tenements and shops reduced to a fine grey shading; it has an “enduring enchantment,” according to the authors of The History of London in Maps, but it is the enchantment of distance.

At the end of the eighteenth century the largest map ever printed in England conveyed what seemed to be, even then, the immensity of London. Richard Horwood’s map was ninety-four feet square, and contained street numbers as well as names and houses. The project continued for nine years but four years after its publication Horwood, tired and careworn, died at the age of forty-five. Some of the inevitable difficulties he encountered can be measured by changes in four different editions. Within the space of thirteen years the fields adjacent to Commercial Road were gradually filled with houses and terraced streets. In the space of twenty years the number of houses in Mile End had tripled. The persistent and steady growth of London, in a sense, had killed its map-maker.

Horwood’s aim was largely utilitarian. The enterprise was sponsored by the Phoenix Fire Insurance office, one of the city’s most significant institutions, and was advertised as indispensable “in bringing Ejectments or Actions, in leasing or conveying Premises etcetera.” In that, it proved successful, if only because every subsequent attempt at conveying the specific houses or buildings of the city was engulfed by its sheer immensity. The first Ordnance Survey of London completed in 1850, for example, comprised some 847 sheets; it was greatly reduced for publication but then proved to be on too small a scale to be useful for travellers and inhabitants alike. This and later maps of mid-and late Victorian London simply display lines of streets linked together, with shading used indiscriminately to represent the shops, offices, houses, tenements and public buildings.

These are the direct predecessors of the contemporary A to Z gazetteer in which hundreds of pages are needed to chart a city which cannot be recognised or understood in terms of one central image. The begetter of the A to Z, Phyllis Pearsall, entranced by London’s immensity, compiled the first edition in the mid-1930s by “rising at five and walking for 18 miles per day.” She covered 3,000 miles of streets, and completed 23,000 entries which she kept in shoeboxes beneath her bed. Michael Hebbert, the author of London, has revealed that the maps “were drawn by a single draughtsman, and Pearsall herself compiled, designed and proof-read the book.” No publisher was interested, however, until she delivered copies on a wheelbarrow to a W.H. Smith buyer. By the time of her death, in 1996, the number of London streets had risen to approximately 50,000.

The nineteenth-century city, already seeming too vast for comprehension, was sometimes plotted in terms of theme or subject. There were “cab-fare maps” outlining the distance which could be travelled for a certain fare, maps of street improvements with the renovated thoroughfares outlined in vivid red, maps of the “modern plague of London” which marked each public house with a red spot, and maps displaying the incidence of death by cholera. Maps of the underground railway, of trams, and of other forms of modern transport soon followed so that London became a city of maps, one laid upon another like an historical palimpsest. It never ceased to grow and, in the process, glowed perpetually with various colours-those of death, alcohol and poverty competing with those of improvements and railways.

“Up to this time,” Henry James wrote in 1869, “I have been crushed under a sense of the mere magnitude of London-its inconceivable immensity-in such a way as to paralyse my mind for any appreciation of details.” Yet for the true antiquarian of London those details live and survive within the memory, beyond the reach of any plan or survey. “In my youth,” John Stow wrote in the sixteenth century, “I remember, devout people, as well men as women of this city, were accustomed oftentimes, especially on Fridays, weekly to walk that way [to Houndsditch] purposely there to bestow their charitable alms; every poor man or woman lying in their bed within their window, which was towards the street, open so low that every man might see them.” It is a distinct and striking image, in a city of spectacle and ritual. And then again: “I remember within this fifty four years Malmsey not to be sold more than one penny halfpenny the pint.” Memory here must complete the task of observation, if only “to stop the tongues of unthankful men, such as used to ask, Why have ye not noted this, or that? and give no thanks for what is done.”

Stow remains the guardian spirit of all those Londoners who came after him, filled with their own memories of time passing and time gone. There is Charles Lamb wandering through the Temple in the early 1820s, noting “what an antique air had the now almost effaced sun-dials, with their moral inscriptions, seeming coevals with that Time which they measured”; these were “my oldest recollections.” A decade later Macaulay spoke of a coming time when the citizens of London, “ancient and gigantic as it is, will in vain seek, amidst new streets, and squares, and railway stations for the site of that dwelling” which was in their youth the centre of their lives or destinies. Leigh Hunt, in The Town of 1848, observed of the city, “nor perhaps is there a single spot in London in which the past is not visibly present to us, either in the shape of some old buildings or at least in the names of the streets.” At the very beginning of the nineteenth century a London journalist known as “Aleph” wandered down Lothbury, recalling its previous “tortuous, dark vista of lofty houses” lit only by oil-lamps; since Aleph’s journey it has changed many times, yet it still remains unique and identifiable, most particularly with its recurrent “darkness” and “loftiness.”

It has been said that no stone ever leaves London but is reused and redeployed, adding to that great pile upon which the city rests. The paradox here is of continual change and constant underlying identity; it is at the core of the antiquarian passion for a continually altering and expanding city which nevertheless remains an echo chamber for stray memories and unfulfilled desires. That is perhaps why, as V.S. Pritchett noted in the late 1960s, “London has the effect of making one feel personally historic.” “It is strange,” he once wrote, “that although London wipes out its past, the Londoner does not quite forget.” Every journey through the streets of London can then become a journey into the past, and there will always be Londoners who thrill to that past like an obsession. In the early 1920s another London visionary, Arthur Machen, walked through Camden Town and found himself witnessing like a revenant the city of 1840, with pony gigs and dimly lit interiors, all of it conjured up by the sudden glimpse of a “little coach-house and the little stables; and all a vision of a mode of life that has passed utterly away.”

Until recent years it was possible to find inhabitants of Bermondsey who were, in the words of one reporter, “enthralled by the history of their borough.” It is a genuine London passion. Where Thomas Hardy could hear “the voice of Paul” in ancient stones exhibited within the British Museum, Londoners hear the voices of all those who came before them in the smallest houses and meanest streets. Charles Lamb remembered a cashier in the South-Sea House, Mr. Evans, who was eloquent “in relation to old and new London-the site of old theatres, churches, streets gone to decay-where Rosamond’s pond stood-the Mulberry Gardens-and the Conduit in Cheap.” The author of Highways and Byways in London, Mrs. E.T. Cook, stood upon Westminster Bridge in a winter’s twilight, when “as the light faded, and the mist rose, I seemed to lose the forms of the modern buildings, and to see, as though in a vision, the ‘Thorney Isle’ of the dim past.” Yet even as this early twentieth-century observer sees intimations of the eighth century, her meditations are broken by a beggarwoman’s plea for money. “I ain’t got a place ter sleep in this night. Gawd knows I ain’t, dear lydy.” Past and present collide in a thousand different forms. When Rose Macaulay visited the wilderness of a bomb-site in the Second World War, she had an intimation of “the primeval chaos and old night which had been before Londinium was.” In the preceding century Leigh Hunt observed that St. Paul’s Churchyard was “a place in which you may get the last new novel, and find remains of the ancient Britons and of the sea.” Despite his fear of the city’s immensity Henry James himself experienced “the ghostly sense, the disembodied presences of the old London.” There is a foot-tunnel under the Thames, linking Greenwich with the Isle of Dogs, which seems to harbour something of its mystery; for Stephen Graham, the author of the lachrymose London Nights, it “told of an enigma which would never be solved; the enigma of London’s sorrow, her burden, her slavery.”

There have always been solitary Londoners meditating upon the past, musing, even, upon civilisations which like their own had fallen into decay and dissolution. Edward Gibbon sat alone in his lodgings in Bond Street and, to the sound of rattling coaches, reflected upon the fall of Rome. The young John Milton sat up half the night in his bed-chamber in Bread Street, his candle glimmering at the window, while he dreamed of ancient London and its founders. There have been such men in every generation, men who have spent “their lives in the disquisition of venerable ANTIQUITY concerning this city.” One of the first, Fabyan, a sheriff and alderman of London, wrote a Chronicle or Concordance of Histories of which the first edition was published in 1485. Among other topics he compiled a chronology of the successive weathercocks upon St. Paul’s. Arnold’s Chronicle, or Customs of London appeared in 1521 where among a record of the charters of the city can be found “an estimate of the livings of London” and a recipe “to pickle sturgeon.”

The work of Stow himself was successively edited and corrected by Munday, Dyson and Strype who also considered themselves the faithful recorders of London, “being birthplace and breeder to us.” They were followed by William Stukeley, who found evidence of Julius Caesar’s camp by Old St. Pancras Church and traced the line of Roman roads through eighteenth-century London. He “appears to have had all the quiet virtues and gentle dispositions becoming an antiquarian-one living in the half-visionary world of the past,” as so many other Londoners have done. He died in Queen Square and by his particular direction was buried in the forlorn churchyard of East Ham.

The most elaborate and extensive antiquarian studies, however, can be dated from the middle decades of the nineteenth century. It was the time of encyclopaedic surveys, including the six great volumes of Old and New London edited by W. Thornbury and E. Walford. There are literally hundreds of other volumes chronicling the “curiosities” and “celebrities” of what had become the largest and wealthiest city in the world. This was also the period in which were completed various histories of London, a tradition which was maintained into the early twentieth century by Sir Walter Besant, the founder of “the People’s Palace,” whose memorial can now be viewed beneath Hungerford Railway Bridge. It was Besant who remarked, on his death-bed, “I’ve been walking about London for the last thirty years, and I find something fresh in it every day,” an observation which could be confirmed by almost any admirer of London.

By the 1870s, at the time when urban chroniclers were extolling the size and variety of the new city, there were others who, like their predecessors in earlier centuries, mourned the passing of the old. The Society for Photographing Relics of Old London was established in 1875, as a direct result of the threat of demolition of the Oxford Arms in Warwick Lane, and its work was complemented by such books as London Vanished and Vanishing and Unknown London. There were individual writers, many of them journalists from London newspapers, who explored the vestiges of the past concealed in old courts and antique squares. Their labours were in turn continued in the twentieth century by books such as London’s Secret History, The Vanished City and Lost London. The city has always provoked sensations of loss and transitoriness.

Yet antiquarianism can take many forms. At the turn of the twentieth century Sir Laurence Gomme, a great administrative historian, wrote a series of volumes which suggested, even if they did not entirely prove, that London had retained a territorial and judicial identity since the time of the Roman occupation. The permanent and unchanging nature of London was, thereby, affirmed in the very face of change. Gomme’s work was in a sense complemented by that of Lewis Spence whose Legendary London connected the history of the city with the tribal patterns of the Celts as well as the magic of the Druids.

Their contributions to the history of London have been sadly neglected or derided, partly as a result of the more precise and “scientific” record of the city’s growth maintained by the various London archaeological societies whose own work has proved invaluable. A more fundamental challenge came from the numerous sociologists and demographers who in the postwar years were more concerned with rebuilding and with new forms of urban planning.

Antiquarianism might itself be considered outmoded, therefore, except for one curious ceremony which is conducted every year at the church of St. Andrew Undershaft. Here rests John Stow’s tomb, with a memorial figure of the Tudor antiquarian resting upon it. He holds a quill pen in his hand and every year, at the beginning of April, the Lord Mayor of London and a distinguished historian proceed to the memorial where a new quill is placed in Stow’s stone hand. So the city honours one of its greatest citizens, with the changing of the quill a solemn token of the fact that the writing of London’s history will never come to an end.