London

by Peter Ackroyd

  In the nineteenth century, the history of city refuse became part of the history of city finance. The dust-heap in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, modelled upon a real and ever more offensive pile off the King’s Cross Road, was believed to contain buried treasure and had already made a fortune for its owner. “I’m a pretty fair scholar in dust,” Mr. Boffin explains, “I can price the Mounds to a fraction, and I know how they can be best disposed of.” There were “Mounds” or “Mounts” of refuse in various parts of London. One immediately to the west of the London Hospital was known as “Whitechapel Mount,” and from its summit could be seen “the former villages of Limehouse, Shadwell and Ratcliffe.” Another was situated at Battle-bridge and was known to the author of Old and New London as a mountain with “heaped hillocks of horse-bones” together with cinders, rags and ordure. It became the resort of “innumerable pigs” but its true commercial worth was proved in a remarkable manner when, in the first years of the nineteenth century, the Russians purchased all the ashes from that site to assist in the rebuilding of Moscow after its burning by the French. The area itself, just north of the present King’s Cross Station, had become the quarters of “dustmen and cinder-sifters” as well as more general scavengers, or, in other words, all those who lived upon the refuse of the city. In that sense it was a benighted place and, even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is characterised by its bleakness and ugliness. The atmosphere of dereliction hangs over it still.

  At Letts Wharf, on the southern bank of the Thames near the Shot Tower at Lambeth, another band of Londoners used to sift and pick through the refuse. Most of them were women, who smoked short pipes and wore “strawboard gaiters and torn bonnet boxes for pinafores.” Theirs was an old profession, passed from mother to daughter, generation after generation. “The appearance of these women is most deplorable,” one medical officer wrote, “standing in the midst of fine dust piled up to their waists, with faces and upper extremities begrimed with black filth, and surrounded by and breathing a foul, moist, hot air, surcharged with the gaseous emanations of disintegrating organic compounds.” The dust was sifted into its coarse and fine components, while old pieces of tin were salvaged together with old shoes and bones and oyster shells. The tin often went to make “clamps” for luggage, while the oyster shells were sold to builders; old shoes went to the manufacturers of the famous dye, “Prussian blue.” Nothing was wasted.

  It was once rumoured that the streets of London were paved with gold and so it is perhaps no surprise that, in the nineteenth century, the refuse “daily swept up and collected from the streets … is turned into gold to the tune of some thousands of pounds a year.” In photographs of the Victorian city, the gutters are filled with litter and street-sweepings with the added nuisance of multifarious orange peel. The rewards of the city sweepers were based entirely upon locality, but the most obvious product was “street mud” which was sold to farmers or market gardeners. The thoroughfares most highly prized were those where “locomotion never ceases”—Haymarket being “six times in excess of the average streets,” followed by Watling Street, Bow Lane, Old Change and Fleet Street. So even movement itself creates profit in a city based upon speed and productivity.

  “Street orderlies” swept the streets and crossings. Some were “pauper labourers” set to the task as a convenient method of combining discipline with efficiency, while others were “philanthropic labourers” who were paid by various charitable concerns. By the middle of the century, all were in competition with the new “street-sweeping machines” which had a mechanical power “equal to the industry of five street-sweepers.”

  The industry was complex, however, and different forms of scavenging were specific. Horse manure was collected by boys in red uniforms, who ran among the traffic shovelling it up and placing it in receptacles by the side of the road; this represented yet more London “gold,” at least to farmers in dire need of fertiliser. There were bone-pickers and rag-gatherers, cigar and cigarette pickers, old wood collectors, sweeps and dredgermen, dustmen and “mud larks,” all intent upon collecting up “the most abject refuse” of the city in case it might become “the source of great riches.”

  From one owner of a beer-shop on the Southwark Bridge Road Henry Mayhew, who chronicled the street-finders as a different class of city dwellers, learned how the bone-grubbers took their bags of bones to his establishment. Here they received payment and “sat … silently looking at the corners of the floor, for they rarely lifted their eyes up.” The rag-finders had their own separate “beats.” The “pure” finders took up dog excrement from the street; in the early nineteenth century it had been the profession of women who were known as “bunters” but the increasing demands of the tanning trade, for which the excrement was used as an astringent, meant that male workers were also in demand.

  In the hope of “finding fitting associates and companions in their wretchedness … or else for the purpose of hiding themselves and their shifts and struggles for existence from the world” the “pure” finders tended to congregate within tenements in the east of the City, just past the Tower of London, between the docks and Rosemary Lane. This was an area, according to Mayhew, “redolent of filth and pregnant with pestilential disease.” The inadvertent use of “pregnant” suggests here the general association of dirty people with sexual depravity. Indeed the attempt to take prostitution off the streets of London was itself linked with the removal of excrement for the cleanness of the city. In a similar spirit there were also warnings concerning the revolutionary potential of the poor, with their “fevers and … filth.” Once more is made the implicit connection between poverty, disease and excrement. It was an association which occurred to the “pure” finders themselves. “There’s such a dizziness in my head now,” one told Mayhew, “I feel as if it didn’t belong to me. No, I have earned no money to-day. I have had a piece of bread that I steeped in water to eat. I could never bear the thought of going into the great house [the workhouse]; I’m so used to the air that I’d sooner die in the street, as many I know have done. I’ve known several of our people, who have sat down in the street with their basket alongside them, and died.”

  And thus the dead in turn became rubbish to be removed by the parish and swept away. The cycle of life was completed.

  The outlines of age may be seen in the features of the very young. The youthful collectors of river refuse, known as “mud larks,” scavenged for pieces of coal or wood which they would then put in kettles, baskets, or even old hats. Many of them were small children, approximately seven or eight years old, and Mayhew questioned one of them. “He had heard of Jesus Christ once … but he never heard tell of who or what he was and didn’t ‘particular care’ about knowing … London was England and England, he said, was in London but he couldn’t tell in what part.” For him the condition which made up “London” was everywhere, therefore; and, as Mayhew observed, “there was a painful uniformity in the stories of all the children” of the city.

  Another group of scavengers were known as “toshers,” hence the pejorative expression “tosh.” They were the sewer hunters, burrowing beneath the surface of the city in search of valuable waste. In the early part of the nineteenth century they could enter by the holes along the Thames, braving the crumbling brickwork and rotten stone, in order to creep along the underground labyrinth. But then, in the 1850s and 1860s, everything changed as a result of what was called London’s “sanitation revolution.”

  It is a curious fact of city life that the sanitation of the early nineteenth century did not differ materially from that of the fifteenth century. There had been attempts at superficial improvement, with efforts to maintain the cleanliness of the Kilbourne and the Westbourne, the Ranelagh and the Fleet, the Shoreditch and the Effa, the Falcoln Brook and the Earl, all important rivers and streams. But the central feature of London’s sanitation remained its greatest disgrace; there were still cesspools beneath some 200,000 houses. Effluent was forced upwards through the wooden
floors of the poorer households.

  The solution of the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers in 1847, that all privy refuse was to be discharged directly into the sewers, seemed convincing at the time. But the effect was that the effluent was transported straight into the central reaches of the Thames. As a result the swan and the salmon, together with other fish, vanished in an open sewer. In the words of Disraeli, the river had become “a Stygian pool reeking with ineffable and unbearable horror.” Where once rose petals had been papered across the windows of the Westminster Parliament building, now sheets soaked with chlorine were used instead. The problem was compounded by the fact that the water supply for many Londoners was taken directly from the Thames, and from this time forward it was often described as of a “brownish” colour. The prevalence of cholera in the same period, when it was believed that “all smell is disease,” only increased the noxious horror of the city where the discharges of three million people were running through its midst. The concentration of people seeking work in the capital, and the rising consumption of the Victorian middle class, had led to a complementary rise in effluence. The pervasive smell may in that sense be regarded as the odour of progress. These were the conditions of London as late as 1858, the year of the “Great Stink.”

  In 1855, under the pressure of extreme circumstances, a Metropolitan Board of Works had been established to remedy the unhappy situation. Three years later, during a long and hot summer, Joseph Bazalgette began his scheme to divert all sewage from the Thames through different types of sewer (main line and intercepting, storm relief and outfall) to outfalls at Barking and Crossness; it was described by the Observer as “the most extensive and wonderful work of modern times,” and by the end of this great engineer’s ministrations 165 miles of main sewers had been reconstructed in Portland cement with a further 1,100 miles of new local sewers. For all practical purposes, large parts of Bazalgette’s system remain in place at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It was a signal example of public health enterprise in the face of a rapidly deteriorating urban environment; characteristic of London administration, however, was that it occurred very quickly and in conditions of near panic. All the great works of the city seem to be in one sense improvised and haphazard.

  · · ·

  By the early twentieth century the dust mounds and open ash-pits were removed from the capital, and most of the rubbish was pulverised, burned or treated with chemicals; the environmental theory of disease, which simply prescribed that waste should be removed to as distant a point as possible, was replaced by the “germ” theory, which meant that waste had effectively to be neutralised. So changes in epidemiological research can affect the topography of the city. The fabric of London is susceptible to theory, therefore, and in the previous century huge areas of sewage purification were complemented by vast incineration plants. The enormous Solid Waste Transfer Station by Smugglers Way in Wandsworth and the great Sewage Works of Beckton are largely unseen; they are monuments to the city’s secret industry.

  There are still rubbish tips located in various parts of the capital and, although gulls and pigeons have now taken the place of ravens and kites, the vagrant scavenger (once known as a “totter”) is still to be seen in the streets of London searching through bins and garbage for cigarette ends, food or drink. The ability—in fact the necessity—of the city to discharge its own rubbish continues in various guises. The quantity of waste in the ever-increasing city has risen higher than any nineteenth-century dust mound, with an average of ten million tonnes produced by the capital each year, among it almost one and a half million tonnes of scrap metal, and half a million tonnes of paper. It is only to be expected, too, that the history of modern effluent is still part of the history of commerce. In the sixteenth century it was discovered that the nitrogen from excreta could be used in the manufacture of gunpowder, but in the twentieth century human faeces yielded a different form of power. Incineration plants, like that at Edmonton, produce hundreds of thousands of megawatts of electricity each year. Gold and platinum are being emitted by the catalytic converters fitted to cars and deposited within exhaust fumes; soon, according to one scientist reported in The Times of 1998, “it will make economic sense to pan the deposits” along the city thoroughfares. So London’s streets are also now truly paved with gold.

  CHAPTER 37

  A Little Drink or Two

  And, with the food, arrives the drink. The inhabitants of the London region, some four thousand years ago, imbibed a variety of beer or mead. Londoners have been drinking it ever since. Close to the Old Kent Road a Roman brooch of jasper was recently uncovered. Engraved upon it was the head of Silenus, the drunken satyr who was tutor to Bacchus; no better divinity of London could have been discovered. Thomas Brown noted of London, in 1730, that “to see the Number of Taverns, Alehouses etc. he would imagine Bacchus the only God that is worshipp’d there.”

  In the thirteenth century London was already notorious for “the immoderate drinking of the foolish.” The wines of the Rhineland and of Gascony, of Burgundy and Maderia, the white wine of Spain and the red wine of Portugal, flooded in, but the less affluent drank ale and beer; the hop seems to have been cultivated by the beginning of the fourteenth century, but most ale was spiced with pepper and known as “stingo.” This again suggests the partiality of Londoners for highly flavoured comestibles, perhaps as a fitting adjunct to their energetic and competitive lives in the city. In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c. 1387–1400) the Cook is well aware of the requirements for what the poet elsewhere calls “a draught of moist and corny ale,” while his Miller, an ale-drinker, “far-dronken was all pale.” In the same period Glutton, in William Langland’s Piers the Plowman (c. 1362), “yglubbed a galon and a gille” of ale. Certainly there were many establishments for that purpose. By the early fourteenth century there were in London “354 taverns and 1,334 breweries,” more familiarly known later as boozing kens or tippling offices. Early in the fifteenth century it was recorded that there were some 269 brewers and in 1427 the London Company of Brewers was incorporated with its own coat of arms. Already it had composed rules for its members, such as that in 1423 which ordered that “retailers of ale should sell the same in their houses, in pots of peutre, sealed; and that whoever carried ale to the buyer should hold the pot in one hand and a cup in another, and that all who had pots unsealed should be fined.” A similar respect for quality was imposed upon the vintners who by city statute in the early fifteenth century were forbidden to “colaire ne medle” with their wine. One William Harold was, in 1419, sentenced to the pillory for an hour on the charge of “contrefetyng of old and feble spaynissh wyn for good & trewe Romeney, in the parisshe of seynt Martyns in the vyntry.”

  By the sixteenth century, according to John Stow, the problems of drunkenness had become so acute that two hundred London alehouses were suppressed in 1574. There were some twenty-six brewers in London by that time, and their produce was variously known as Huffe Cup, Mad Dog, Angels’ Food, Lift Leg and Stride Wide. The ingredients seem to have varied, with constituents including broom, bay-berries and ivy-berries, together with malt and oats, although only the concoction brewed from hops was given the name of true beer. The Elizabethan chronicler William Harrison noted the drunkards in the streets and remarked that “our malt bugs lie in a row lugging at their dames teats, till they lie still againe, and not be able to wag.” Certain alehouses of the period were so identified with London itself, both in ballad and in drama, that they became representative of the city. The Boar’s Head in Eastcheap was the vivid setting of Falstaff and Pistol, Doll Tearsheet and Mistress Quickly, and so impressed itself upon the folk memory of Londoners that it was generally agreed that Shakespeare himself must have drunk on the premises. In the eighteenth century members of a literary club assembled there in order to assume Shakespearean roles, and such was the power of its associations that it attracted pilgrims to its site long after its destruction in 1831. There is, however, one specific remembrance. Rober
t Preston “late Drawer at the Boar’s head Tavern” departed this life at the age of twenty-seven on 16 March 1730; he “drew good Wine, took care to fill his Pots” and his headstone lay against the wall of St. Magnus the Martyr.

  “The Myter in Cheape,” the Mitre of Cheapside, was a haunt of locals where according to Ben Jonson if “any stranger comes in amongst ‘em, they all stand up and stare at him, as he were some unknown beast brought out of Africk.” The drawer here, George, attained immortality when named in 1599 by Jonson in Every Man Out of His Humour—“Where’s George? call me George hither quickly”—and in 1607 by Dekker and Webster in Westward Ho!—“O, you are George the drawer at the Mitre.” It is evidence of the way in which a particular Londoner can become fixed as a type or character in the eyes of his contemporaries. The peculiar and persistent connection of alehouses with drama was also maintained by the memory of the Mermaid.

  What things have we seen

  Done at the Mermaid; heard words that have been

  So nimble and so full of subtle flame

  wrote Beaumont to Jonson. Keats, echoing the sentiment two hundred years later, knew no

  Happy field or mossy cavern

  Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern

  The poet, himself a Londoner who as a child lived on the premises of the Swan and Hoop in Moorgate, had migrated in imagination to the junction of Friday Street and Bread Street where the Mitre was consumed in the Great Fire.