Engel's England

by Matthew Engel

  Even London will soon be throwing up new rivals. My own favourite view comes entirely free of charge. It is the scale model of the capital in the foyer of the Building Centre in Store Street, just off Tottenham Court Road. This was an ill-starred project: its opening party was scheduled for 7 July 2005, the day of the London bombings. But it has survived, and been regularly updated: the older buildings in grey; the newest, like the Shard, and the forthcoming in gleaming white. On the model big white ones are everywhere. This is the brave new city, where additions are invariably described as ‘iconic’ or ‘world-class’, even if, like the height of the Shard, they palpably are not. Their architects promote themselves like TV chefs and are treated solemnly by the media on their own terms.

  In London beautiful old buildings are not normally knocked flat: they have too many staunch allies. They just get bullied until they are left cowering, like St Andrew Undershaft (a largely redundant church, not a character in a Restoration comedy), which has survived the Fire and the Blitz and everything else to eke out a continuing but purposeless existence in the shadow of the Gherkin.

  Barely visible from the Shard or on the scale model is St Mary-le-Bow, perhaps Wren’s second most famous creation, close to his most famous, and in the very heart of one of the world’s great financial centres. This church is the home of Bow Bells, within the sound of which all Cockneys are meant to be born. This would be difficult these days, since St Bart’s Hospital no longer has a maternity unit, and it would probably need to be Christmas morning with a favourable wind for the bells to be heard at the Royal London or St Thomas’s. By this definition any new Cockney would have to be born in a pew, or maybe at a trading desk, to a mother who was much too busy to take an hour off. That assumes the bells are working properly. I arrived at 6 p.m., just as I swear I heard the clock strike four. ‘Am I going mad?’ I asked a man in a dog collar. ‘Ah, I think one of the hammers is broken,’ he replied.

  The occasion was a lecture given by the biblical scholar Dr Jules Gomes entitled ‘Prophets of Justice Challenge Profits of Injustice’. Dr Gomes had come down from the Isle of Man, where he lives, presumably obeying the call of God rather than the advice of his accountant. ‘The God of the Bible is the polar opposite of this goddess of the markets,’ he proclaimed. And he called in aid Isaiah, Amos and Ecclesiastes: ‘I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit. That which is crooked cannot be made straight.’

  His interpretation was very clear: ‘I don’t think I want to throw out capitalism entirely. It is unbridled capitalism that is the problem.’ And this he told to an audience of two dozen, while outside the hundreds of thousands who form the rest of the City’s workforce made their way home on a winter’s night after another day of unbridled capitalism.

  I love London. I always have loved London. It is so ingrained that I have probably never, until now, thought about how much I loved London. In the school holidays, I would come down from Northampton to stay with my grandmother in her flat in Temple Fortune where the trolley buses ran past the window. And from the age of eleven or twelve I wandered off alone from Golders Green station and met friends from boarding school or just explored. It wasn’t that Nana didn’t worry – she was worrying about Vietnam before Lyndon Johnson could find it on a map. But she didn’t worry about me. Adults were adults and children were children, and they didn’t get in each other’s way: ‘Bye, darling.’ It was marvellous.

  And so I was an Underground boy. At twelve, I could tell you exactly how to get from Bayswater to Queensway (Circle or District to Notting Hill Gate, then take the Central). It was many years later, when I actually lived in London, that I realised the smarter answer was to walk a few yards down the street. I don’t know exactly when it was that I was in Soho gazing into a strip club with my friend John, and he wanted to go in and nervy little me said I would rather stick to the plan and go to the Oval; it might have been last week.

  Nana died, and I lost my freedom pass. But years later I came back and settled in Islington. Peter Ackroyd, author of London: A Biography, is very good on the sense of London as a palimpsest. Other cities cannot compare: New York is too new, Paris too planned, Berlin too jerky in its history. In London the gentle dust of time accretes and settles; every brick, every inch has an amazing story, usually untold. And nowhere exemplifies this more than Islington: a site where Boadicea fought the Romans, which became a resort, beyond the City boundary. Generations of citizens would come to ride, drink, play ball and you know what. This was where Raleigh first sampled tobacco. ‘A haven of carelessness’, in Ackroyd’s phrase. Then the pace of history quickened. It was built up to become a home for Pooterish clerks, then degenerated into a slum. Next, the old houses were either demolished to become council flats or gentrified to provide houses fit for the likes of the young Tony Blair.

  When I arrived, its current incarnation was still in a relatively early phase. Islington was trendy all right, but still more shabby than chic. Ten years after the abolition of shillings and pence, two establishments on Upper Street refused to deal in decimal currency: one was the King’s Head theatre-pub, which thought it was a cool gimmick and, with beer still well under a pound a pint, a viable one; the other was an old draper’s shop whose owner simply couldn’t be bothered to change her ways. There were almost no chain stores or restaurants. Now there is little else. But, as Ackroyd says: ‘The area has regained its reputation for hospitality and conviviality which it possessed long before it ever became part of London. The old presence lingers beneath every change of appearance.’

  And there I was: young, single, not poor, living in the most exciting district of the most exciting city on earth. Did I take full advantage? Did I explore this great megalopolis? Who does? It was only now, with a book to write and a deadline to keep, that I reverted to being a twelve-year-old and wandered again. In a city that seems so expensive, it is amazing how much you can do free of charge if you put your mind to it. I have an inflexible rule that, with half an hour to spare in the West End, I always go into the National Gallery, pick a room at random and immerse myself. I had a spare half-hour as recently as 2006, I’m sure of it.

  You can tiptoe into the Supreme Court; you can go to Evensong at St Paul’s; indeed, on a Sunday in South Kensington you can attend seven different masses at Brompton Oratory (choosing between English, Solemn Latin and Tridentine Latin) and pop next door for any or all of four more with the vibrant Anglicans of Holy Trinity, Brompton; you can stand on a platform at Waterloo and watch the sinuous progress of the colour-coded South West trains; you can see what’s on the Fourth Plinth (a striking blue cockerel last time I looked); you can see the Hogarths at Sir John Soane’s Museum or the skeletons at the Grant.

  With notice, you can observe the London Metal Exchange, the last ‘open outcry’ exchange in Europe and certainly the best free theatre in London: a group of young men in jackets and ties with furious energy and no self-consciousness setting prices in a glorious flurry of signals that brings together the atmosphere of Speakers’ Corner, a confrontation between football fans, Prime Minister’s Questions, a West End musical and a Victorian Derby Day.

  Though it’s a pig to find by land, there is the Thames Barrier, which is all that stands between the city and inundation from the North Sea. It is not exactly Sydney Opera House, which is said to resemble nuns playing leapfrog, but the Barrier does look like a line of mummy nuns and baby nuns (clearly from a very liberal nunnery) playing on see-saws.

  Within the square mile of the City there are half a dozen churches dedicated to Marian devotion alone. Besides the aforementioned St Maryle-Bow, there is St Mary Abchurch, St Mary Aldermanbury, St Mary Aldermary, St Mary-at-Hill, all built by Wren, and St Mary Woolnoth, by Hawksmoor. With a little forethought and luck you can get yourself into the sumptuous Guildhall for the Silent Ceremony, which marks the inauguration of each new Lord Mayor (686 so far), not to be confused with the upstart Mayor of the whole of London (ju
st two). This brings out of the woodwork the Remembrancer, the Common Serjeant, the Common Cryer, the Ward Beadles, the Aldermen below the Chair, the Aldermen above the Chair, and a bloke in a ludicrous furry hat who turns out to be the Swordbearer.

  And there is the sheer serendipity of the streets, where you come across such oddities as the grave of Giro the Nazi dog, tucked away by Carlton House Terrace; he belonged to the German ambassador and fatally chewed through a live wire left by builders in 1934 to be buried with full Nazi honours. The Nazis were far more sentimental about animals than people, just like the English.

  There are pockets of quite improbable rusticity. I love the pretty Keeper’s Cottage in St James’s Park, whose occupant could have popped into his nearest neighbours, the Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer, to borrow a cup of sugar in the days before Downing Street was turned into a fortress. There is East Acton station, on the Central Line but with the look of a halt on a long-closed branch: alight here for Wormwood Scrubs, known to non-locals for its prison but, beyond the high wall, one of the largest and most unexpected (if litter-strewn) open spaces in London.

  It is a city of endless mysteries and anomalies. As even novice tourists know, London traffic goes on the left (except in Savoy Yard as they may not know). And, as they soon discover, you stand on the right on a tube escalator or risk curses and humiliation. But no one knows what to do on the stairs leading to and from the escalators: the rules, where they exist, vary from station to station.

  Some things you really cannot spot by chance, like 23–24 Leinster Gardens, Bayswater, where, between two hotels, in the midst of a stuccoed terrace, is a house that does not exist. It was knocked down when the Metropolitan Line was pushed through in a cutting in the nineteenth century and then rebuilt as a dummy. Andrew Martin, in his book Underground, Overground, tells how he confronted the staff of both hotels, who had no idea, and soon had them standing outside saying to each other, ‘But we thought it was part of your hotel.’

  Still, the more you walk the more you allow for delightful happenstance. Outside one nonconformist chapel I saw a group of men dressed for a funeral unloading a car full of things that did not look corpse-shaped: they were crates of champagne. Walking down Victoria Street, with storm clouds building to the south-west, I caught a shaft of sunlight illuminating the towers of Westminster Abbey with a violet sky behind. What a fabulous, golden, mysterious treasure house of surprises and pleasures this place is. I had forgotten that London had such a thing as weather; I think most Londoners have also forgotten. That is because they lead the life of Londoners.

  Back in the days when I travelled the Underground for a half-fare of tuppence, the tubes were dominated by adverts for temp agencies, and something called the Location of Offices Bureau, which encouraged employers and workers to migrate to cheaper, less crowded places where commuting might not be so stressful. It is said that 24,000 jobs a year moved out of London in the 1960s.

  The population of London was declining, which was assumed to be a good thing, leading to a more sensible and equitable distribution of the nation’s population and its diminishing share of global wealth. The bureau continued to assist the process through the 1970s until Margaret Thatcher came to power and axed it. In the thirty-five years of right-wing government since Mrs Thatcher’s accession (including the thirteen when Labour was in power) the wealth has gone both up and down, but no one in authority has given a damn about whether it was spread fairly.

  In that time, London’s status has risen again, both globally and nationally. Unquestionably, this is a world city, maybe the world city, whatever that might mean exactly. Within England, it has been the unrivalled dominant force for a millennium, and over the past couple of decades it has extended its lead further and further over its toiling rivals. I now realise that in a sense this entire book has been about London. Every county can be defined by its distance from the capital, not just geographically – though someone could probably construct a workable algorithm using mileage and transport links – but economically, culturally, spiritually, even linguistically.

  In those years, British industry (concentrated in the North and Midlands) has declined massively, while finance and tourism (concentrated in London) have grown to compensate. Though political power has been devolved to Scotland and Wales, and given away upwards to Brussels, England has become ever more London-centric. No major country is as centralised as this one. Many countries – the US, Canada, Australia, Brazil … – do not have their largest city as the capital. German finance is centred on Frankfurt, not Berlin. Even once-monolithic France has been devolving; and in any case the south is a long way from Paris. In little England, the pinnacle of excellence in almost every single field of endeavour is in London. The only obvious exceptions are academe and football. And, frankly, Oxford and Cambridge are now pretty much outer suburbs. And in most recent seasons London’s top football teams have been pretty much equal to Manchester’s and superior to Liverpool’s.

  In many fields the path of ambition leads only through London. And so do the transport links. In late 2013 and early 2014, as the banker-induced slump gave way to recovery just in time for the next election, the statistics of those years constantly exemplified the extent of London’s overlordship. Some 80 per cent of UK private sector jobs between 2010 and 2012 were created in London; the overall growth rate in London in the planned preelection boom year of 2014 was expected to be twice as high as in the rest of the country; and – a splendid stat, this – 80 per cent of all the cranes operating in the UK in 2013 were in London and the South-East. England is not so much a country as a solar system, in which a searing sun is surrounded by frigid little asteroids and then reverses the law of physics by drawing the heat out of them.

  The mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has a riff when he speaks to the Conservative conference whereby he lists all the provincial nowheretowns that have made small contributions to his city’s grands projets – the Olympics, Crossrail, Thameslink, the new sewer – by providing some of the rivets or widgets. This draws cheers from the local delegates. It is like listening to a billionaire detailing the coins he has put into charity boxes.

  The relationship between London and the provinces (that telling word) has always been domineering; it has now become abusive, and one senses it in all kinds of strange ways. Journalists always had a rough idea of what a life was worth in news terms: one Briton dead = ten Americans = twenty Europeans = 500 Africans = 1,000 Bangladeshis, something like that. Now it needs amending: maybe one Londoner = five provincials. It is astonishing how much more solemnly a storm is treated if, by a rare mischance, it should brush the South-East instead of merely attacking the periphery.

  As a visitor to the city, I always bought Time Out, with its comprehensive listings of all the plays, concerts and exhibitions: a range of culture and entertainment matched nowhere else on earth, so vast no individual can do more than skim the surface. Now Time Out is given away free and imposes its own choices, merely picking out the newest and what it considers the best: the metropolitan elite imposing its own criteria about what to see and do. Non-Londoners get this sense even at home when they are bombarded with news of London events.

  In the wonderful London Library (note the name), books about London are not housed with those on the rest of England but as a separate country, between Lithuania and Luxembourg. The three main countries of Western Europe might be considered as Germany, France and London, and the best illustration of this comes from the Olympic Games.

  In the late 1980s Britain felt self-confident enough to start bidding to host the Olympics again. But the Games are awarded to cities, not to nations. Birmingham put in a bid once and Manchester twice; every time they got a derisory number of votes among the members of the International Olympic Committee, the self-appointed body that decides these matters. The late John Rodda, the Guardian journalist who understood the Olympics better than anyone, just laughed; he said repeatedly that Britain could only hold them in London ‘
because it goes where the wives of IOC members want to go shopping’. The rest is history.

  London was a pretty frantic city in the 1980s, but it had its down times: before dawn; around 9 a.m. on Saturday, which was a wonderful time to whizz round in a car and do jobs; Sunday afternoon, when the shops were shut. Now it never ceases. It is a marvellous place to be young and rich: I was told that German bankers have to be not merely bribed to be posted back to Frankfurt but offered free tickets to London at the weekends.

  Most Londoners experience life differently, even those who work in the City. The crushiest moment of the London rush twenty-four hours is said to come at 8.25 a.m. on the narrow northbound platform of the Northern Line at Bank. The passengers there do not look like masters of the universe in either dress – between the smartly suited, the smart casuals and the scruffs, the scruffs have a slight edge – or demeanour. They look cowed, put upon, heading through the throng for a few moments in the half-light before entering whatever building offers them the next phase of their half-life.

  Recent London novels, even from really good writers, seem to reflect this by being deeply depressing: Ian McEwan’s Solar; Zadie Smith’s NW, John Lanchester’s Capital. At the launch of the Labour manifesto in 2010 I sat by one of London’s most famous and successful journalists. The backdrop on the stage was a clever-clogs computer graphic of a field of waving barley. ‘Look at that grass,’ said my neighbour. Perhaps he had never seen any real grass, let alone barley.

  A well-judged career in London offers three stages: a joyous single life; then perhaps thirty years on the hamster wheel, coping with the job, the children, the commute and everything else, above all the thumping mortgage; but then, for those who bought their houses a boom or two or three or four earlier, there comes the payout. The payout!