London

by Peter Ackroyd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  CHAPTER 35

  Market Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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