The docks had long seethed with union activity: I will never forget the bitterness of the late and great Bill Deedes, MP and editor of the Telegraph, who told me how the dockers had refused to load his landing craft for D-Day, because they “hadn’t got the rate” for the job; and how his men had been obliged—with fatal consequences—to do the job themselves. The 1947 Dock Labour Scheme had introduced rigidities not shared by other competitor ports. Flexibility was essential, because what did in the docks in the end was not the contraction of world trade but its expansion.
The 1960s saw the dawn of containerisation, as goods started to arrive in London in metal cuboids 8 feet high, 8 feet wide and 40 feet long. The ships that brought these goods needed berths of 25 acres each. They didn’t need legions of dockers and porters and stevedores and warehousemen with their complicated demarcations about who was allowed to do what. They just needed people who could drive the juggernauts. The old docks of London were immediately outgrown. London dock and St. Katharine dock were sold to developers, and even the great sea-trenches of the late Victorians were finally obsolete by 1981. As Professor Jeremy Black has put it in his summary of postwar London history, “The decline of London’s relative position in recent years has been in part matched by the decline of London’s docks.”
In obedience to economic necessity and the will of the planners, people left for Essex, St. Albans and other peripheral towns. From the mid-1960s onwards, the population of London was falling quite steeply. In millions, the 1939 population was 8.7. In 1951 it was 8.19; in 1961 it was 7.99; in 1971 it was 7.45; in 1981 it was 6.80; in 1991 it was 6.89 and in 1993 it was 6.93. Today there are about 7.6 million Londoners, and it will be a long time before we get back up to prewar levels. With all this destruction of traditional employment and disruption of old and settled communities, it was perhaps not surprising that crime began to rise—trebling between 1955 and 1967—and continued to rise in the 1970s.
Radical plans to solve London’s transport problems were shelved amid protest from residents. So with rising crime, sclerotic transport, an official hostility to new office space and a declining docks, business and industry started to take flight.
I remember some wonderful things about being a kid in London in the 1970s: paying two pennies for an ice cream cone or a popsicle, and endless mucking around with other children in the park and by the canal, where we set planks on a milk crate to do Evel Knievel jumps on our chopper bikes and tried to avoid the oddly bleached white dog turds.
But I also remember the chronic sense of economic crisis, the lights flickering and the pointless war between government and unions. I remember one dark afternoon going past King’s Cross, and looking up from the backseat of our Renault Four at St. Pancras and the morose Transylvanian mass of the former Midland Grand Hotel, and asking what it was.
Oh, it was Victorian, said someone scathingly. In those days Victorian meant stuffy, risible, out-of-date. Had I gone inside, I would have found it even more pitiable than when Mark Girouard had entered twenty years before. The carpets had gone. The paint had peeled, and the floorboards had spanged up, and doors had come off their hinges. In those few rooms occupied by British Rail the chandeliers had been replaced by dangling fluorescent bars and the walls had been repainted that shade of municipal green favoured by primary schools and loony bins.
No one would take it off British Rail’s hands; and though the poet John Betjeman and others had heroically saved it from being destroyed—and even secured its landmark status—there was no particular use for it, and certainly no demand from the hotel trade. For years the ex–Midland Grand Hotel stood on that corner as a memento mori, a reminder that great cities can go down as well as up.
Go to Detroit, which lost 58 percent of its population between 1950 and 2008, and you will find plenty of bashed-up ballrooms in the tumbledown relics of formerly grand hotels. Go to Baghdad, and it seems hard to believe that it was once the most powerful and populous city on Earth. Seges est ubi Troia fuit, as Ovid put it. There’s a cornfield where Troy was.
The Midland Grand was passed desultorily from one agency to another; and then in the 1980s something happened. The decline of London began to be reversed. The population started to creep back up. Deserted dockland dumps became desirable waterside residences. Someone or something was responsible for helping to turn London around; and I know that any analysis of this phenomenon will be controversial.
The easiest way to get booed on the BBC’s Question Time is to mention Margaret Thatcher, or the 1980s spirit of enterprise, or the boom in financial services. Her critics will certainly point out that whatever London experienced on her watch, it was not unique. New York went through a very similar resurgence, from a port to an economy reliant on banking and other service industries. Thatcher’s supporters might say that London did even better than New York, and that the British government was even bolder in helping to create the conditions for one of the most extended periods of growth and dynamism that London has ever seen.
The government got rid of restrictions on high-rise office blocks, reversing the ban first imposed by Labour’s George Brown. They promoted the 1986 Big Bang, and so created in London a new breed of powerful financial conglomerate. They unleashed the animal spirits of London’s yuppies, with all their appalling vulgarity and greed and teddy bear braces. By 1996, London was back on the map, with New York and Tokyo, as one of the world’s great financial capitals. Half of the trade in French and Italian shares took place in London, and 90 percent of all European cross-border share trading. Half the world’s shipbroking and half the mergers and acquisitions business was done in London. The growth of the City, and allied services such as law, accountancy and insurance, put more pressure on office space; and as values started to rise, people began to look around for bargains on brownfield sites.
In 1989 the former Midland Grand Hotel was finally bought by a bona fide developer, and a plan was put forward to turn it back into a hotel. Alas the business proposal, even then, did not quite add up. There was one more change that needed to be introduced, and for that I believe the Thatcher government can surely take the credit, or at least some of it. It was transport infrastructure that had made sense of the new financial district they conceived in the docklands at Canary Wharf—the Docklands Light Railway and then the Jubilee Line Extension. And it was Thatcher who agreed with François Mitterrand that there should be a fixed link, under the Channel, between Britain and France; and in 1996 the Major government took the inspired decision to send the high-speed route from Europe, via Stratford, to St. Pancras.
It was the new railway—and the total renovation of the station—that transformed the economics of the hotel. The catastrophe of 1921, when so many trains were routed to Euston, was reversed. Now St. Pancras is the station of international romance, complete with a large glutinous bronze of a couple embracing. It is the gateway to Paris, and the Eurostar has helped to make London the fifth or sixth biggest French city in the world, with so many voters that the French presidential candidates deem it prudent to go to London to canvas.
Looking back now, it is clear that the middle years of the twentieth century were lost decades, not just for the Midland Grand Hotel. With world trade continuing to rise throughout the 1970s, London could conceivably have retained its position as a seaport, an entrepôt like Felixstowe in Suffolk, or Rotterdam. But its docks were too small for containerisation; it was a question of infrastructure. As London lost out, there was a domino effect on manufacturing, investment, employment and confidence.
Transport investment declined as well. The Tube decayed. After the great Victorian spate of bridges, the only new crossing was at Chiswick in 1933, and nothing east of Tower Bridge until Dartford. With the population of London now climbing quite fast, these are not mistakes we can make again.
It is about one hundred years since Winston Churchill horrified his wife by getting up in a plane, then regarded as
a new and insanely dangerous way to get around. Aviation is now not just crucial for business travel, but for the transport of goods, more than a third of which now goes by air. London became successful in the Middle Ages because of the port and the bridge, and because water offers less resistance than land to the moving of heavy loads. Air offers less resistance still. It is the transport mode of the twenty-first century. London suffered from having an aquatic port too small for its needs; and it is time to think big—to think neo-Victorian—about its airports today; not just because it is a good idea to import and export loads of club-class business folk and Chinese tourists, but because mass transit improvements benefit the entire population.
I have stressed the importance of transportation because at the end of this meditation on the lives of Londoners, I am struck by the huge importance of infrastructure of all kinds. If Aulus Plautius had not built that bridge, the city would not even have existed. It was the Norman keep of William the Conqueror that told the Saxons the facts of life—they were beaten—and created the peace and stability that led to the rise of medieval London.
Victorian trains and Tube trains turned London into the world’s first great commuter city, and the imperial scale of Bazalgette’s drains made it possible for large numbers of Londoners to live together without giving each other terrible diseases. In a cold economic climate, such as today’s, that strikes me as an important lesson for the future, and there are plenty of others.
You can see from the story that London has exhibited constant tension for thousands of years, between the moneybags and the politicians. Sometimes that tension has been creative, sometimes destructive; but it has always been important that London from very early on has been two cities—the City of London and the City of Westminster.
It is frankly hardly surprising that Londoners, among others, are now going through a period of bitterness towards the bankers and others whom they blame for the crash; and the story of London tells you that this is nothing new. History is littered with examples of resentment at the success of rich merchants, and especially foreigners. You can see it in the hostility towards the Rothschilds; you can see it in the murder of the Flemings and the Italian bankers in 1381. You could even argue that this animus against the moneymen is detectable in the Boudican rebellion, and the slaughter of an entire immigrant town. London has been a success because politicians have on the whole understood that they have to manage this conflict, and to do their best to bridge the eternal gap between rich and poor.
Sometimes the politicians have been on the side of the people, like Alderman Tonge allowing the peasants to cross the bridge and take the town. Sometimes they have been on the side of the merchants against the prerogatives of the King, like John Wilkes. Sometimes the merchants have behaved with selfishness and stupidity; and sometimes you have a banker who behaves with such wisdom and far-sightedness that his acts of charity have turned him into a name that echoes down the ages—like Dick Whittington. To anyone anxious about the future of western economies, the story of these Londoners seems to offer so many obvious consolations and points of encouragement.
It is plainly a city that can come back from almost anything—massacre, fire, plague, blitz—and it is clear that the genius of Londoners can sprout anywhere, like buddleia in a bomb site. There was no reason to think that the son of a Covent Garden barber would revolutionise painting and become the inspiration of the Impressionists. Sidcup railway station has many good points, but if you go there you wouldn’t immediately finger it for the birthplace of one of the world’s greatest rock and roll bands.
What changes the lives of these people, what sparks them off, is the proximity of other people. London’s extreme talents flourished because of the stimulus of other talent—the exchange, inspiration and competition you find in a great city. Shakespeare was a genius, but he surely wrote his King Lear with an awareness of the King Leir of Thomas Kyd, just as he wrote his Merchant of Venice with an awareness of Marlowe’s Jew of Malta.
There is also something special about the environment of the city, the way London looks, and the way it works. I think back to that vision you would have seen, if you had ascended to the top of St. Paul’s in 1700—a collection of villages—and I think of some wise words of India’s great leader Mahatma Gandhi. “The true India is not to be found in its few cities, but in its 700,000 villages,” he said. “The growth of the nation depends not on cities but its villages.” This is a romantic and appealing sentiment, and as anyone who has lately been to India can testify, it is completely wrong. People who live in Indian cities have better health care, better education, higher per capita GDP and a lower carbon footprint than people who live in Indian villages, and that’s why Indians are flocking to their cities. The same point can be made about Londoners, certainly in relation to productivity, which is about 30 percent higher than in the rest of the country. But Gandhi’s saying still appeals to something in our souls, doesn’t it?
We yearn for the idea of the village, that Eden from which we were all expelled, a community of prelapsarian innocence and beauty. When we walk around London we can see that it is still a collection of 150 villages and town centres, now more or less effectively linked by public transport.
Cities are wonderful places to be anonymous, to seek pleasure, to make money; but sometimes there is something to be said for putting the village back into the city.
When you look at London in the early twenty-first century it is hard to resist the conclusion that previous generations have done it proud. I know people would expect me to say this, and indeed it is my job to say it; but I also happen to believe it to be true, that a city with an illustrious past can have an extraordinary future.
Bygone Londoners have created this garden city, with its parks and plane trees and intricate solutions for bringing millions of people together and moving them around as quickly and comfortably as possible. Some of them were men and women of genius, whose ideas helped to shape the world. Most of them were obscure.
They have left us much more than a precious inherited conglomerate of buildings and views and mass transit systems. They have created that thing the Romans understood so well: a global brand. They have left the city with a reputation that makes people want to come here and tramp over London Bridge in search of money, food, fame, companionship—all the things that make a human being tick.
In the end, it is that two-thousand-year procession of Londoners that has created the city’s worldwide brand and appeal. Or, as London’s most famous poet and playwright put it, “What is a city but the people?”
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Acknowledgments
This book could not have been written without the generosity of Stephen Inwood, who has produced far and away the most readable, thoughtful and interesting one-volume book about London and its development. In the course of a quick (vaguely Moroccan) lunch and a ramble around Cheapside he made all sorts of excellent suggestions—like the best sort of tutor—and sent me on my way. He also kindly agreed to speed-read the draft, though I should stress that any errors of fact, taste, judgment, etc., are entirely my own. Huge thanks to my fellow Brackenbury scholar.
I have truffled through far too many books to list them or acknowledge their authors, though it is only fair to direct readers to some that have provided particular pleasure or interest.
Anyone wishing to know more about Boudica should look at the work of Miranda Aldhouse-Green.
Richard Abels has written the most helpful and amusing book about Alfred the Great.
If your appetite has been whetted to discover more about John Wilkes, you should immediately get hold of the utterly brilliant biography by Arthur Cash.
Jack Lohman of the Museum of London allowed me to come at very weird hours to look at the books in his library, and I am most grateful to him and his staff for all their patience.
The
polymath David Jeffcock once again supplied all kinds of tips and corrections. Andrew Roberts very kindly read the chapter on Churchill. Vicky Spratt did excellent research into many of the characters. Daniel Moylan pointed out the alleged connexion between Magnus Martyr and Magna Mater. Lara Johnson supplied some interesting tips about the origins of the police, and Gina Miller helped with Ping-Pong.
Jonathan Watt did heroic work throughout, and I am especially indebted to his compendious knowledge of medieval guild structures and bridge finance. Once again I am thankful that Natasha Fairweather is my agent, and above all I want to thank my publisher, Susan Watt, without whose enthusiasm and sheer maieutic drive this project could not have happened.
ALSO BY BORIS JOHNSON
The Dream of Rome
Lend Me Your Ears
Have I Got Views for You
Life in the Fast Lane
Friends, Voters, Countrymen
Seventy-two Virgins (Fiction)
The Perils of the Pushy Parents (Poetry)
Johnson's Life of London Page 35