by Bill Bryson
I had two weeks at my disposal, at least notionally. Both of my daughters had contrived to get pregnant simultaneously (though in separate buildings) and were scheduled to give birth at roughly the same time in different London hospitals, and I was under strict instructions to be nearby in order to – well, I don’t know what. Boil water perhaps. Stand around in a willing but useless manner. Who knows? But in the meantime I had two weeks that I could fill in any way I wished so long as I stayed sober enough to drive and didn’t stray too far.
I decided, impulsively, to start with a trip to Leighton House, home of the Victorian artist Frederic Leighton, on Holland Park Road in west Kensington. I didn’t know a thing about Leighton, and I wasn’t at all sure if that was my fault or his. It turns out he was the most famous artist of his age. Who’d have thought? I had walked past the house several times and always thought it looked intriguing – it’s big and has an air of solemn importance, as if this is a house and a person you really ought to know about – so I had put it on my Things to Get Around to Eventually (But Probably Won’t) list. It isn’t often I knock something off this list, so I was rather pleased with myself just for thinking to go there. Besides, it was a rainy day: a good day for a museum.
I liked Leighton House immediately, not least because my ticket price was reduced from £10 to £6 on account of my great age. The house is gloomy and grand, but interestingly eccentric; it has, for instance, just one bedroom. In terms of decor it feels a little like a cross between a pasha’s den and a New Orleans bordello. It is full of Arabic tiles, silk wallpapers, colourful ceramics and lots of art, much of it involving bare-breasted young women, which I am always up for.
Leighton isn’t terribly well remembered now, in part because many of his pictures ended up in odd places like the Baroda Museum in Gujarat, India, and Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia, where not many of us go to look at pictures, and in part because his paintings are in any case a little overwrought for modern tastes. Most involve a lot of upstretched arms and pleading faces, and have titles like ‘And the Sea Gave Up the Dead Which Were in It’ and ‘Perseus, on Pegasus, Hastening to the Rescue of Andromeda’.
But Leighton was hugely esteemed in his own lifetime. He was elected President of the Royal Academy in 1878, and in the New Year’s honours list of 1896 he became the first – and so far still only – artist to be ennobled. He didn’t get to enjoy the privilege long. He died less than a month later, and was interred in St Paul’s Cathedral as a national treasure, with great pomp. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, always eager to be at least fifty years out of touch, gives him 8,200 words, a thousand more than it gives almost any of his contemporaries.
Leighton lived alone in Leighton House for thirty years. His sexuality was always something of a mystery to those who were interested enough to think about it. After decades of apparent celibacy, he seems to have stirred to frisky life after he discovered a young beauty from the East End named Ada Pullen (who subsequently, for reasons unknown to me, changed her name to Dorothy Dene). Leighton scrubbed her up, bought her a fine wardrobe, schooled her in elocution and other cultural refinements, and introduced her into high society. If all that brings to mind Prof Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle, it is no accident. George Bernard Shaw is said to have modelled Pygmalion on their relationship. Whether Leighton knew Ms Dene in the full, biblical sense isn’t known, but he certainly enjoyed painting her without clothes on, as the Leighton House collection enthusiastically attests.
Leighton’s possessions were auctioned off straight after his death and the house itself was knocked about by subsequent owners and then wrecked by a German bomb during the war, so that almost nothing worth seeing was left by the early post-war years, but little by little over a period of decades the house has been put back together so that it is now much as it was in Leighton’s day, and it is quite splendid. I can’t say that a great deal of the artwork was entirely to my taste, but I did enjoy the experience very much and when I stepped outside the rain had stopped, the sun was shining and London looked awfully fine, its streets glistening and cleansed (sort of).
So each day, without a great deal of thought beforehand, I did things that I had never done at all or hadn’t done in years. I strolled through Battersea Park and then along the river to the Tate Modern. I went to the top of Primrose Hill to take in the view. I explored Pimlico and the lost world of Westminster around Vincent Square. I went to the National Portrait Gallery and had tea in the crypt of St Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square. I walked through all the Inns of Court and visited the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons just because I happened to pass it. These are all wonderful things. You should do them, too.
I went to Southall one day to go to lunch with my friend Aosaf Afzal, who grew up near there and offered to show me around. Southall is the most overwhelmingly Asian place in Britain. For a long time, it even had a Punjabi pub, the Glass Junction, where you could pay for drinks in pounds or rupees, but that closed in 2012.
‘A lot of Asians don’t have a great pub-going culture,’ Aosaf explained.
It was certainly the liveliest and most colourful place I had ever seen in Britain, with shops stacked to the ceilings and spilling out on to the pavements with the most extraordinary range of wares – buckets, mops, saris, tiffin containers, brooms, sweets, you name it. Every shop seemed to sell exactly the same crazy range of items. Each appeared to be doing good business, but all that activity masks considerable deprivation, not only in Southall, but also in neighbouring Hounslow, where Aosaf grew up and still lives. The town of Hounslow (as opposed to the much larger borough of Hounslow, which includes some wealthy spots like Chiswick) is the second most rapidly degentrifying community in Britain, however exactly that is measured, Aosaf told me. ‘Hounslow town has a population of 50,000 but no bookshop and no cinema,’ he said.
‘Then why do you live here?’ I asked.
‘Because it is my home,’ he said simply. ‘It’s where I am from, where my family is. And I like it.’
It struck me that when I think of London and Aosaf thinks of London we think of two quite different cities, but this comes back to my earlier point. London isn’t a place at all. It’s a million little places.
Sometimes during this happy fortnight I just went about my business. I was walking down Kensington High Street one day when I remembered that my wife had instructed me to get some grocery items, so I popped into Marks and Spencer’s. It had evidently undergone a big refurbishment since I was last there. In the middle of the main floor, where there used to be an escalator, there was now a staircase, which I thought odd – why replace an escalator with stairs? – but the really big surprise was when I went down to the basement and discovered that the food hall was gone. I walked all over, but there was nothing for sale down there but clothes.
I went up to a young sales assistant who was folding T-shirts and asked him where the food hall was.
‘Don’t have a food hall,’ he said without looking up.
‘You got rid of the food hall?’ I said in astonishment.
‘Never had one.’
Now I have to say right here that I didn’t like this young man already because he had a vaguely insolent air. Also, he had a lot of gel in his hair. My family tell me that you can’t dislike people just because they have gel in their hair, but I think it is as good a reason as any.
‘That’s nonsense,’ I said. ‘There’s always been a food hall here.’
‘Never been one here,’ he responded blandly. ‘There’s no food halls in any of our stores.’
‘Well, pardon me for saying so, but you’re an idiot,’ I said matter-of-factly. ‘I have been coming here since the early 1970s, and there’s always been a food hall. Every Marks and Spencer’s in the country has a food hall.’
He looked at me for the first time, with a kind of unfolding interest. ‘This isn’t a Marks and Spencer’s,’ he said with something like real pleasure. ‘This is H&M.’
I
stared at him for a long moment as I adjusted to this new intelligence.
‘Marks and Spencer’s is next door,’ he added.
I was quiet for about fifteen seconds. ‘Well, you’re still an idiot,’ I said quietly and turned on my heel, but I don’t think it had the devastating effect I was hoping for.
After that, I resumed walking, on account of it involves little contact with strangers. One afternoon, taking a short cut between the Euston Road and Tottenham Court Road, I chanced upon Fitzroy Square, a large open space enclosed by cream-coloured houses, nearly every one of which had a blue plaque on it. At various times, Fitzroy Square has been home to George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf, James McNeill Whistler, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, Ford Madox Brown, and the German-born chemist August Wilhelm von Hofmann, who did novel and transformative things with isomeric orthotoluidines and triphenyl derivatives. That may not mean anything to you or me, but there are chemists reading this page right now who are having orgasms. In one corner of the square was an Indian YMCA – a YMCA just for people from India; how splendid! – and opposite it was a statue to Francisco de Miranda, liberator of Venezuela, who also lived here. A later resident, it appears, was L. Ron Hubbard, beloved father of Scientology. Goodness me, what a city.
Just beyond Fitzroy Square was a quiet, anonymous-looking road called Cleveland Street. I couldn’t think why the name was familiar until I looked it up afterwards and then it all came back. Cleveland Street was the scene of one of the great scandals of the nineteenth century. In the summer of 1889, a policeman stopped a telegraph boy and found that he had a suspiciously large amount of money in his pocket. The boy confessed that he had earned it working in a homosexual brothel at 19 Cleveland Street. The police investigated and found it full of men of superior rank, including the sons of two dukes. But what made the story particularly juicy was the widespread belief, hinted at in all the papers, that one of the other Cleveland Street regulars was Prince Albert Victor, son of the Prince of Wales and second in line to the throne. Later, this same Albert would be proposed (on scanty evidence, it must be said) as a possible Jack the Ripper, which must set some kind of record for least salubrious royal personage. At all events, with telling swiftness the prince was dispatched on a lengthy tour of the empire, and on his return was summarily betrothed, whether he wished it or not, to Princess Victoria Mary of Teck. Just over a month after the engagement was announced, however, the hapless prince caught pneumonia and, to the relief of nearly everyone, died. Amazingly – well, amazingly to me – Princess Victoria Mary thereupon married his brother, who went on to become King George V, our old friend of ‘bugger Bognor’ fame. And all that, I think, may go some way to explaining why the royal family is occasionally just a trifle strange and emotionally challenged.
Now I am not saying that London is the world’s best city because it had a homosexual brothel scandal or because Virginia Woolf and L. Ron Hubbard lived around the corner, or anything like that. I am just saying that London is layered with history and full of secret corners in a way that no other city can touch. And it has pubs and lots of trees and is often quite lovely. You can’t beat that.
My two dear, pregnant daughters live in Putney and Thames Ditton, by Hampton Court, about ten miles apart, and I decided one day to walk from one to the other after I realized that you can do so mostly through parkland. West London is extraordinarily well endowed with open spaces. Putney Heath and Wimbledon Common cover 1,430 acres between them. Richmond Park has 2,500 acres more, Bushy Park 1,100 acres, Hampton Court Park 750 acres, Ham Common 120 acres, Kew Gardens 300 more. Looked at from above, west London isn’t so much a city as a forest with buildings.
I had never been on Putney Heath or Wimbledon Common – they run seamlessly together – and they were splendid. They were not at all like the manicured parks I had grown used to in London, but were untended and rather wild, and all the more agreeable for that. I walked for some time over heath and through woods, never very sure where I was despite having an Ordnance Survey map. The further I walked, the more isolated things felt.
At one point it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen anybody for about half an hour, couldn’t hear traffic, had no idea where I would be when I next saw civilization. I had set off with the vague thought of walking past the site of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s home during the Second World War, which I had by chance recently discovered lay more or less along the route I was taking today. I had read at the library about Eisenhower’s domestic arrangements during the war. He could have had a stately home like Syon House or Cliveden, but instead he chose to live alone without servants in a simple dwelling called Telegraph Cottage on the edge of Wimbledon Common. The house was up a long driveway, the entrance guarded by a single soldier standing beside a pole barrier. That was all the security the Supreme Allied Commander enjoyed. German assassins could have parachuted on to Wimbledon Common, entered Eisenhower’s property from the rear and killed him in his bed. I think that’s rather wonderful – not that Germans could have done that, but that they didn’t.
Although the Germans missed their chance to assassinate Eisenhower, they might easily have bombed him. Unbeknownst to Eisenhower or evidently anyone else on the Allied side, civil defence forces had erected a dummy anti-aircraft gun in a clearing just the other side of a hedge from Eisenhower’s cottage. Dummy guns were put up all around London in an effort to fool German reconnaissance and trick their planes into wasting bombs. Fortunately for Eisenhower, the Luftwaffe seem to have overlooked this one.
Bearing in mind that I was largely lost, you may imagine my delight when I emerged from the common through the grounds of a rugby club, and discovered that I had more or less blundered on to the site of Eisenhower’s cottage, though there is no telling the exact spot any more. Telegraph Cottage burned down some years ago, and today the site is covered with houses, but I had a good stroll around and was satisfied that I had more or less hit my target, which is more than the Germans managed to do, thank goodness.
Buoyed up by my discovery, I carried on to Thames Ditton by way of Richmond Park and a long walk along the Thames. It was a very nice day. I had two weeks of very nice days and got to pretend it was work. That’s why I do this for a living.
Of course not everything is ideal in London. About twenty years ago, my wife and I bought a small flat in South Kensington. At the time it seemed the wildest extravagance, but now after two decades of property price inflation we look like financial geniuses. But the neighbourhood has changed. The gutters are permanently adrift in litter, some of it dragged there by foxes, most of it left by people who have neither brains nor pride (nor any fear of punishment). Workmen for some years have been quietly painting the street white one bucket at a time. The most dismaying loss, I think, is of front gardens. People seem strangely intent on getting their cars as close to their living rooms as possible, and to that end have been ripping out their little front gardens and replacing them with service areas so that there is always a place for their cars and wheelie bins. I don’t quite understand why they are permitted to do this since nothing more obviously ruins a street. Not far from us is a street called Hurlingham Gardens, which should really be called Hurlingham Bin Storage Areas since nearly every owner has removed any trace of attractiveness from in front of their houses. The absence of any feeling of aesthetic obligation to one’s own street is perhaps the saddest change in Britain in my time here.
On the larger scale, however, things have improved enormously in London. In the space of twenty years or so, London has acquired an interesting skyline, for one thing. It isn’t that it has a huge number of tall buildings, but that the tall buildings it has are distributed over a wide area. They don’t jostle for attention, as in most cities, but stand alone so that you can admire them in isolation, like giant pieces of sculpture. It’s a brilliant stroke. Now you get memorable views from all kinds of places – from Putney Bridge, from the Round Pond at Kensington Gardens, from platform 12 at Clapham Junction – where there never used to b
e views at all. Scattered skyscrapers also have the incidental benefit of spreading prosperity. A new skyscraper in central London just adds more bodies to crowded streets and Underground stations, but a big new building in Southwark or Lambeth or Nine Elms gives a jolt of economic input that can lift whole neighbourhoods, create demand for bars and restaurants, make them more desirable places to live or visit.
None of this was precisely intended. It is the by-product of something called the London Plan, which decrees that tall buildings may not impinge on protected views. One such view is from a certain oak tree on Hampstead Heath. (Well, why not?) No one can build anything that interrupts the view from the tree to St Paul’s Cathedral or the Houses of Parliament. There is a similar view from Richmond Park, miles from the city – so far out that I didn’t even know you could see any of central London from there. London is criss-crossed by protected sightlines, which effectively requires tall buildings to be spaced out. It is a happy accident. But then that is London. It is centuries of happy accidents.