Ford Madox Ford in The Soul of London, published in the first years of the twentieth century, remarked that in the capital “you must know the news, in order to be a fit companion for your fellow Londoner. Connected thinking has become nearly impossible, because it is nearly impossible to find any general idea that will connect into one train of thought.” So the consciousness of the Londoner is composed of a thousand fragments. Ford recalled that, as a child, “the Sunday paper … was shunned by all respectable newsagents” and that he had to walk two miles to pick up an Observer from “a dirty, obscure and hidden little place.” But Sunday sales soon became as large as, if not larger than, daily sales. The hegemony of “news” in London was maintained and increased throughout the century as new techniques of printing and lithography were introduced. Perhaps the most significant transition, however, took place in 1985 when News International moved its production of the Sun and The Times to Wapping. This sudden and clandestine operation destroyed the restrictive “Spanish practices” of London printers, while the employment of new technology facilitated the expansion of other newspaper organisations which moved from Fleet Street to sites south of the river and to Docklands itself. The echoic force of Fleet Street has gone for ever. But “London news” is still paramount. As one twentieth-century social observer, Lord Dahren-dorf, puts it, Britain “is run from London in virtually all respects.”
To the history of rumour and of news must be added that of craze and of cheats, again mediated by the collective agency of the crowd. The popularity of fashions and delusions and false prophecies has always been most intense in the capital. The gullibility of the citizens is perpetual. The various bubbles of the eighteenth century encompassed the South Sea financial disaster as well as a fashion for Italian music; “how ill a taste for wit and sense prevails in the world,” Swift wrote, “which politicks and South-sea, and party and Operas and Masquerades have introduced.” When Mary Tofts was believed to have given birth to a succession of rabbits, in the autumn of 1726, “every creature is in town, both men and women have been to see and feel her … all the eminent physicians, surgeons and man-midwives in London are there Day and Night to watch her next production.” The seventeenth- and nineteenth-century craze for tulips in the West End was rivalled only by that for the aspidistra in the East End of the early twentieth century. In the early part of that century, too, there was a fashion for china cats “and forthwith no home was complete without a cat.” A living cat caught “the news” in 1900: it was the cat that licked a stamp at Charing Cross Post Office, which then attracted crowds wanting it to perform the same feat over and over again. The cat became a “stunt” which, in the words of one journalistic practitioner, represented “the creation of the temporary important.” A captured elephant called Jumbo was responsible for songs, stories and a range of sweets known as “Jumbo’s chains” before fading out of public memory.
Yet all the fashions of London are transitory. Chateaubriand noticed this in 1850 when he remarked upon “The fashions in words, the affectations of language and pronunciation, changing, as they do, in almost every parliamentary session in high society in London.” He remarked how the vilification and celebration of Napoleon Bonaparte succeeded each other with extraordinary swiftness in London, and concluded that “All reputations are quickly made on the banks of the Thames and as quickly lost.” “A catch word in every one’s mouth one winter,” wrote Mrs. Cook in her Highways and Byways in London, (1902), “is quite forgotten by next summer.” Horace Walpole remarked, on the same subject, that “Ministers, authors, wits, fools, patriots, whores, scarce bear a second edition. Lord Bolingbroke, Sarah Malcolm and old Marlborough, are never mentioned but by elderly folk to their grandchildren, who had never heard of them.” To be “out of sight” in London was to be “forgotten.” In 1848 Berlioz wrote that in London there were a great many “whom the sight of novelties only makes more stupid.” They watch the trajectory of events and careers “with the eye of a postilion at the side of the railway track reflecting on the passing of a locomotive.”
And so the history of London is also the history of forgetting. In the city there are so many strivings and impulses which can only momentarily be entertained; news, rumour and gossip collide so quickly that attention to any of them is swift but short-lived. One craze or fashion follows another, as the city talks endlessly to itself. This transitoriness of urban affairs can be traced back to the medieval period. “Certainly by the fourteenth century,” G.A. Williams noted in Medieval London, “nothing lasted long in London.” And forgetfulness itself can become a tradition; on the first Tuesday of June, ever since a benefaction in the late eighteenth century, a sermon is preached at the church of St. Martin within Ludgate upon the theme that “Life is a bubble.” It is highly appropriate that London should celebrate its transience in a permanent fashion. It is a city endlessly destroyed and endlessly restored, vandalised and renewed, acquiring its historical texture from the temporary aspirations of passing generations, an enduring myth as well as a fleeting reality, an arena of crowds and rumour and forgetfulness.
The Natural History of London
A Cockney flower-seller dressed in the traditional accoutrements of her trade. Flower-sellers congregated around Eros in Piccadilly Circus, and were last seen in the early years of the twentieth century. They were generally poor and dishonest.
CHAPTER 45
Give the Lydy a Flower
It may come as a surprise to those who see nothing but narrow streets and acres of rooftops that, according to the latest Land Cover Map taken from the Landsat satellite, “over a third” of London’s total land area “is semi-natural or mown grass, tilled land and deciduous woodland.” It has always been so. One of the first delineators of London, Wenceslaus Hollar, was surprised by the contiguity of city and country. His London, Viewed from Milford Stairs, View of Lambeth from Whitehall Stairs and Tothill Fields, all dated 1644, show a city encompassed within trees and meadows and rolling hills. His “river views” also suggest the presence of open countryside just beyond the frame of the engraving.
In the first years of the eighteenth century, pastures and open meadows began by Bloomsbury Square and Queens Square; the buildings of Lincoln’s Inn, Leicester Square and Covent Garden were surrounded by fields, while acres of pasture and meadow still survived in the northern and eastern suburbs outside the walls. Wigmore Row and Henrietta Street led directly into fields, while Brick Lane stopped abruptly in meadows. “World’s End” beside Stepney Green was a thoroughly rural spot, while Hyde Park was essentially part of the open countryside pressing upon the western areas of the city. Camden Town was well known for its “rural lanes, hedgeside roads and lovely fields” where Londoners sought “quietude and fresh air.” Wordsworth recalled the song of blackbirds and thrushes in the very heart of the city and De Quincey found some consolation, on moonlit nights, in walking along Oxford Street and gazing up each street “which pierces northwards through the heart of Marylebone to the fields and woods.”
From the early medieval period onward, almshouses and taverns, schools and hospitals, had their own gardens and private orchards. The city’s first chronicler, William Fitz-Stephen, noted that “the citizens of London had large and beautiful gardens to their villas.” Stow recorded that the grand houses along the Strand had “gardens for profit” while within the city and its liberties there were many “working gardeners” who produced “sufficient to furnish the town with garden ware.” In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries gardens occupied the area between Cornhill and Bishopsgate Street while the Minories, Goodman’s Fields, Spitalfields and most of East Smithfield were comprised of open meadows. Gardens and open ground were to be found from Cow Cross to Grays Inn Lane, as well as between Shoe Lane and Fetter Lane. Milton, born and educated in the very centre of the city, always professed an affection and admiration for the “garden houses” of London. His own houses in Aldersgate Street and Petty France were fine examples of that construction, and it is sai
d that at Petty France the poet planted a cotton-willow tree in the garden “opening into the Park.”
Today there are many “secret gardens” within the City itself, those remnants of old churchyards resting among the burnished buildings of modern finance. These City gardens, sometimes comprising only a few square yards of grass or bush or tree, are unique to the capital; they have their origin in the medieval or Saxon period but, like the city itself, they have survived many centuries of building and rebuilding. Seventy-three of them still exist, gardens of silence and easefulness. They can be seen as territories where the past may linger—among them, St. Mary Aldermary, St. Mary Outwich, and St. Peter’s upon Cornhill—or perhaps their lesson can be adduced from the open Bibles in the hands of sculpted monks in the church of St. Bartholomew in Smith-field. The page to which they attend, as they congregate around the recumbent figure of Rahere, reveals the fifty-first chapter of Isaiah. “For the Lord shall comfort Zion: He will comfort all her waste places; and He will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord.”
The image of the garden haunts the imaginations of many Londoners. Among the first painted London gardens is Chiswick from the River by Jacob Knyff. This urban garden is small in scale, and set among other houses. It is dated between 1675 and 1680; a woman walks along a gravelled path, while a gardener bends down towards the earth. They might have appeared in the twentieth century. Albert Camus wrote, in the middle of that century, “I remember London as a city of gardens where the birds woke me in the morning.” In the western areas of London of the twenty-first century almost every house either has its own garden or shares a community garden; in northern areas such as Islington and Canonbury, and in the southern suburbs, gardens are an integral feature of the urban landscape. In that sense, perhaps, a Londoner needs a garden in order to maintain a sense of belonging. In a city where speed and uniformity, noise and bustle, are characteristic, and where many houses are produced to a standard design, a garden may afford the only prospect of variety. It is also a place for recreation, contemplation and satisfaction.
The man known as “the father of English botany,” William Turner, lived in Crutched Friars and was buried in Pepys’s church of St. Olave’s, Hart Street, in 1568. It is not at all paradoxical that the first established botanist should be a Londoner, since the extensive fields and marshes beyond the walls were fertile ground. Turner followed the intellectual practice of his time in not giving locations “for the 238 British plants he records for the first time”—this is noted in the indispensable Natural History of the City by R.S. Fitter—but it has been revealed that one of them, the field pepperwort, was found in a garden in Coleman Street. Another sixteenth-century botanist, Thomas Penny, lived for twenty years in the parish of St. Andrew Undershaft and collected many of his specimens in the area beside Moorfields. The Tower ditch was also famed for its “aquatic” or water-loving plants such as flote grass and wild celery, while a naturalist of Holborn registered wild celery from “the fields of Holburne, neere unto Graies inn” and vernal whitlow-grass from “the brick wall in Chauncerie Lane, belonging to the Earl of Southampton.”
If the suburbs of the west were good hunting-places for naturalists, the unlikely areas of Hoxton and Shoreditch became known for their nursery gardens. A native of Hoxton in the late seventeenth century, Thomas Fairchild, introduced “many new and curious plants”; and wrote a treatise on how best to order “such evergreens, fruit trees, flowering shrubs, flowers, ex-otick plants etc as will be ornamental and thrive best in the London gardens.” He entitled his book the City Gardener and by that name he was always afterwards known. Another native of Hoxton, who lived just outside Bishopsgate, George Ricketts, brought into the area trees such as the myrtle, the lime and the cedar of Lebanon. But there were many other gardeners in this strangely fruitful area amid the mud and rubble of the northern suburbs, where grew the buddleia, the anemone and the striped phillyrea.
It has always been said that Londoners love flowers; the craze for “window gardening” in the 1880s represented only the most prominent manifestation of the window boxes or window pots to be seen in almost all prints of the London streets from generation to generation. But the most striking sign of the London passion for flowers comes with the London flower-seller. Scented violets were sold upon the streets, while in early spring primroses were “first cried.” To the Cockney, wrote Blanchard Jerrold in London: a Pilgrimage, “the wall-flower is a revelation; the ten-week stock a new season; the carnation, a dream of sweet Arabia.” They are all part of a busy London trade which began in the 1830s. Before that time the only visible London flowers— or, rather, the only flowers on display—were the myrtle, the geranium and the hyacinth.
Then as the taste for floral decoration extended, particularly among middle-class Londoners, flowers, like everything else in the city, became a commercial proposition, and many of the outlying suburbs began production and distribution on a large scale. The entire north-western corner of Covent Garden Market was given over to the wholesale vendors of roses and geraniums and pinks and lilacs, which were then sold on to shops and other dealers. Very quickly, too, flowers became the object of commercial speculation. The fuchsia arrived in London in the early 1830s, for example, and the traders prospered. The interest in flowers spread ineluctably down to the “humbler classes” with hawkers at street corners selling a bunch of mixed flowers for a penny, while in the market were sold basket-loads of cabbage roses and carnations. Female vendors at the Royal Exchange or the Inns of Court hawked moss-roses; the violet girl was to be seen on every street and the “travelling gardener” sold wares which were notorious for their short lives. The price of commerce, in London, is often death and the city became nature’s graveyard. Many millions of flowers were brought into London only to wither and expire. The establishment of large extra-mural public cemeteries, located in the suburbs, in turn led to an enormous increase in the demand for flowers to place upon the newly laid tombs.
The trees of London may also become a token. “We may say,” Ford Madox Ford has observed, “that London begins where tree trunks commence to be black.” That is why the plane tree is London’s own; because of its power to slough off its sooty bark it became a symbol of powerful renewal within the city’s “corrupted atmosphere.” There was a plane tree growing some forty feet high in the churchyard of St. Dunstan’s in the East, but the oldest are those planted in Berkeley Square in 1789. Curiously enough, like many Londoners themselves, the London plane tree is a hybrid: an example of successful intermarriage between the oriental plane introduced into London in 1562 and the western plane of 1636, it has remained the tree of central London. It is the single most important reason why London has been apostrophised as a “City of Trees” with “solemn shapes” and “glooms Romantic.”
That gloom may also descend upon London’s parks, from Hyde Park in the west to Victoria Park in the east, from Battersea to St. James’s, from Blackheath to Hampstead Heath. No other city in the world seems to possess so many green and open spaces. For those in love with the hardness and brilliancy of London, they are an irrelevance. But they call to others—to vagrants, to office workers, to children, to all those who seek relief from life “on the stones.”
When the horse-drawn omnibuses, going from Notting Hill Gate to Marble Arch, travelled beside Hyde Park “hands on the upper deck would greedily snatch at a twig to take to the City” to be met with “the cries of nuthatch and reed-warbler, cuckoo or nightingale.” This observation is taken from Neville Braybrook’s London Green. Matthew Arnold suggested in “Lines Written in Kensington Gardens,” that
The birds sing sweetly in these trees
Across the girdling city’s hum
immediately setting up a contrast between the quiet presence of pine, elm and chestnut, “amid the city’s jar.” The paradox is that London contains this peace within itself, that Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens are as much a part of the city as Borough High Street or Brick Lan
e. The city moves slowly, as well as quickly; it provides a history of silence as well as of noise.
There were also once oases of the countryside to be found in Clerkenwell and Piccadilly, Smithfield and Southwark; here the trades included threshing and milking. The names of the streets bear evidence of London’s hitherto rural nature. Cornhill, by obvious derivation, is a token of a “hill where corn was grown,” according to Ekwall’s Street Names of the City of London, and Seething Lane is to be interpreted as “where chaff was plentiful … the chaff came from corn threshed and winnowed in the lane.” Oat Lane and Milk Street speak of the countryside. Cow Lane was not a place where cows were kept but a “lane along which cows were driven to or from pasture.” Addle Street, off Wood Street, and a few yards up from Milk Street, is derived from Old English adela or stinking urine and eddel or liquid manure; so we derive from it “lane full of cow dung.” The Huggin Lanes in Cripplegate and Queenhithe were both known as Hoggenlane in early transcripts. There were no fewer than three Hog Lanes—in East Smithfield, Norton Folgate and Portsoken. Chicken and Chick Lanes occur, together with Duck Lane, Goose Lane and Honey Lane—the latter indicating “that bees were formerly kept in the street.” The name of Blanch Appleton, a district of Aldgate, comes from appeltun, Old English for orchard.
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