by A. N. Wilson
What Ken Livingstone’s Plan for London is saying, when you translate it into English and study its many tables of statistics, is that London is a city sustained by two economic factors: the City, upon whose financial and civic institutions Livingstone waged unceasing warfare in his GLC days; and tourism, which has changed the character of old London to the point of destroying it. If you add up the numbers of those in useful employment—employment remunerative enough to pay substantial tax, to finance the transport, health, educational, and welfare schemes on an even minimal level—you find that most of the inhabitants of Cool Britannia or Swinging London are drones, being kept by a diminishing group of overpaid businessmen, financiers, journalists, art dealers, and pop musicians. This is the vision which the ever popular Red Ken was able to deliver to an indifferent populace in hundreds of pages of scarcely readable prose.
While giving due attention to the wonders of the Blue Ribbon Network (the London waterways), with an estimated 3 million people and 750,000 tons of household waste being floated at various junctures of the year down the River Thames, Ken hesitates to spell out the implications of global warming, and what provision is to be made against flooding should the ocean and the river rise above the modest levels predicted years ago at the time of the building of the Thames barrier. The Environment Agency believes that it would cost London taxpayers more than £4 billion over the next few years to stop the Thames flooding. In the autumn and winter since their report of 2002, Thamesside areas such as parts of Surrey and Berkshire (for example, Maidenhead) have suffered flooding more severe than ever in their history. Ken has given the go-ahead for 100,000 new properties to be built in the Thames Gateway region, east of London. Sadly, the Association of British Insurers, in the person of their spokesman Mr. Malcolm Tarling, has said, “We would have to start thinking about moving our capital city elsewhere.” This is apocalyptic talk, as is the statement of the aptly named Mike Tempest of Thames Water, who says that it would cost “billions of pounds” to give the capital adequate drainage and sewage.
London certainly faces grave problems, if its population continues to expand and its infrastructure remains underfunded. No doubt there are Jeremiahs who believe that it is ill equipped for the future; and the flood warnings must prompt in some minds the belief that London will itself be swept beneath the waves, to be at one with Nineveh and Tyre.
And yet there is something about modern London which makes one believe that, in spite of all the mistakes made by its administrators, it will meet the challenges of the future. The very fact that so many people want to come to London is a guarantee of its ebullient and irrepressible life.
They do not come simply as spongers and criminals, as pessimists try to make us believe. People are drawn to London, from other parts of the United Kingdom, as from abroad, excited by a collective energy that is palpable, and by the fact that so much of what is going on in modern London is good. Investors show no signs of deserting the City. In spite of the moronization of the capital by publicists and politicians, there has never been a time when the museums and galleries were putting on exhibitions of a higher standard, or when the restaurants were better. The standard of the London theaters, and supremely of the Royal Opera House and Royal Ballet, the quality of concerts in innumerable venues, both for classical and for every other kind of music, can easily rival, and often outstrip Paris, New York, or Milan. Shopping in London could easily be, and for some people is, a full-time occupation. Nightlife caters for every taste, however innocent or dissipated. You feel alive in London, as nowhere else in Britain, surrounded by so much excellence.
Equally, for all the ugliness of buildings and road developments that have been hurled together without thought, London remains a city of great elegance. As you walk from one quarter of it to the next, you pass every few hundred yards what would be, in any other part of the United Kingdom, a townscape to make a fuss about. The medieval buildings of Westminster and of Smithfield are breathtaking, as is the Tower. Despite the frenzy of aerial bombardment and the greed of property developers, there are still beautiful seventeenth- and eighteenth-century churches; there is still an abundance of superb squares and terraces of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Our generation has perhaps not contributed much to the architecture of London of which future generations will be proud, but who knows, the works of Lord Rogers may one day be as revered as Street’s Law Courts, Barry’s Palace of Westminster or Charles Holden’s Senate House.
An architectural tour of London is, in any event, so much more than merely an aesthetic experience. It is a personal encounter with Londoners of the past. Every district of London, whether or not it is on the tourist map, is haunted by memories. The past and the present are always blended here. In the crowds of present-day London, we can see the faces of those who “flowed over London Bridge” in previous generations. In the ever fluctuating population, we sense that the life of the city is a collective experience, partly secret and partly shared. It is shared not just by the living, but also with the dead. The dynamism, its unquenchable life, stretching towards an unseen future, derives largely from the past, and from the multiplicity of human experiences that the streets and rivers of London have witnessed since the Romans first built their makeshift bridge somewhere near modern Westminster.
A CHRONOLOGY OF LONDON HISTORY
A.D. 43 Aulus Plautius, victorious over native forces, built a bridge over the Thames. Encamped near modern Westminster, where he was joined by the Emperor Claudius. Londinium established by the Romans.
60 Rebellion of the Iceni under Queen Boadicea. Huge casualties. The Romans triumphant.
61–122 Londinium built as a great city.
c. 400 Arrival of Germanic tribes in Britain. Gradual withdrawal of Romans and decline of London.
597 St. Augustine’s mission to England.
604 Establishment of Christian bishopric and of the first St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.
1066 Norman Conquest. William I crowned at Westminster. The White Tower built as a Norman keep.
1097–99 Westminster Hall built, center of the royal court.
1189 First mayor of London, Henry FitzAilwin.
1221 Completion of old St. Paul’s Cathedral tower and steeple.
1245–69 Rebuilding of Westminster Abbey by Henry III.
1377–99 Reign of Richard II. London’s heyday, with Chaucer, Gower, and Langland all writing and the Wilton Diptych being painted. Enormous wealth from the wool trade.
1381 Peasant’s Revolt. John Ball leads rebels in a huge crowd over London Bridge. Rebellion suppressed.
1476 Caxton establishes his printing press in London.
1509 St. Paul’s School founded by John Colet.
1535 Three Carthusian friars hanged at Tyburn. London Charterhouse closed in 1537 and later passed to Sir Edward North. It would eventually (1614) house Charterhouse School.
1554–88 More than 200 Protestant martyrs burned at Smithfield.
1561 Merchant Taylor’s School founded in Suffolk Lane.
1570 Royal Exchange opened by Queen Elizabeth I.
1598–99 The Globe Theatre built on Bankside by Cuthbert and Richard Burbage, showing many of Shakespeare’s plays. Closed in 1642 by Puritans.
1615 Inigo Jones surveyor-general of the works. Designed Queen’s House, Greenwich (finished 1635), a new Banqueting House (finished 1622), a new Palace of Whitehall (never built), restorations and changes to St. Paul’s Cathedral, and the rebuilding of Covent Garden (completed 1639).
January 30, 1649 Execution of King Charles I outside the Banqueting House, Whitehall.
November 1660 The Royal Society formally constituted (charter 1662).
September 2, 1666 The Great Fire began in Pudding Lane, just east of London Bridge. Losses include 13,200 houses and many public buildings, including churches, Christ’s Hospital, Newgate Prison, and Baynard’s Castle. The Guildhall was gutted. St. Paul’s a near ruin. A vast rebuilding program is undertaken in the following years.
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1694 The Bank of England Act establishes a national bank and a national debt.
1710 St. Paul’s Cathedral completed.
1720 Westminster Hospital established. Followed by four other general hospitals: Guy’s (1725), St. George’s (1733), the London Hospital (1740), and the Middlesex (1745).
September 1720 The South Sea Bubble bursts, in one of the first major crises of capitalism.
1714–29 Hawkmoor’s magnificent Christ Church Spitalfields erected in an area fast filling with Huguenot weavers. The center of the silk-weaving industry.
June 2, 1780 The riots led by Lord George Gordon in protest against the repeal of anti-Catholic legislation. Several private embassy chapels destroyed and Newgate, Clerkenwell, Fleet, King’s Bench, and Borough Clink prisons burned down.
July 1829 The Metropolitan Police Bill, the brainchild of Sir Robert Peel, introduces a police force for the capital.
April 10, 1848 Chartist rally on Kennington Common. The Royal family sent to the Isle of Wight for their own safety. The Bank of England and Somerset House sandbagged and some 85,000 special constables enlisted against the agitations for one man, one vote. Although 100,000 Chartists were expected, fewer than 20,000 attended.
1851 The Great Exhibition in Hyde Park.
1863 Metropolitan Railway, the first steam-operated Underground, opened. The first electric railway through steel tunnels ran in 1870.
1868 Completion of Joseph Bazalgette’s sewer plan at a cost of £4.6 million; 82 miles of pipes deposit 52 million gallons of rainwater and untreated sewage into the Thames each day.
1880s and 1890s Growth of large West End department stores imitating William Whiteley of Westbourne Grove: Dickins & Jones, Marshall & Snelgrove, Swan & Edgar, Debenham & Freebody.
1889 Sir William Harcourt, Home Secretary in Lord Salisbury’s Conservative government, creates the London County Council (LCC). London is described by Sidney Webb as “a genuine self-governing community.”
August 3, 1914 Last day of peace before the Great War. Large crowds assemble to cheer the King outside Buckingham Palace. The Prime Minsister, Asquith, remarks, “War is always popular with the London mob.”
May 31, 1915 First air raids by Zeppelin airships on the docks and the City.
1931 Royal Commission on Transport declares that trams are “in a state of obsolescence.” They are gradually phased out.
October 1932 The British Union of Fascists hold its first rally in Trafalgar Square. They never win a parliamentary seat.
1939–45 Second World War. Fears on the outbreak of war that hundreds of thousands of Londoners would be killed were exaggerated: 29,890 were killed by air raids and 50,000 badly injured. Inspired by Churchill and the King and Queen, Londoners pluckily survive the years of bombs and blackouts.
1951 The Festival of Britain.
1956 The Clean Air Act. It did not cure the famous London fogs (“pea-soupers”) instantly. In December 1957, fog caused a major rail disaster at Lewisham in which 87 lost their lives.
December 1962 The last real pea-souper.
1958 Notting Hill race riots.
1963 The London Government Bill. GLC bigger, but weaker, than the old LCC. The Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) area defined.
1986 Abolition of GLC by Margaret Thatcher.
October 27, 1986 “Big Bang” abolishes fixed commissions and opens the renamed International Stock Market to foreign companies, allowing the formation of very large merchant banking and brokerage houses and introducing electronic dealing.
1999 Greater London Authority Act creates a framework for an elected mayor and twenty-five elected members of a council. The first elected mayor is Ken Livingstone, an independent candidate who defeats both Tories and Labour.
NOTES
2 NEW TROY OR ROMAN LONDON?
1. William Maitland, The History of London (1775), p. 137.
2. Dictionary of National Biography.
3. Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, trans. Lewis Thorpe (Penguin, 1966), p. 65.
4 CHAUCER’S LONDON
1. City Hustings Roll 110, 5, Richard II membrane 2.
5 TUDOR AND STUART LONDON
1. Katherine Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare (Arden, 2001), p. 58.
2. Roy Porter, London: A Social History, p. 56.
3. Charles Lethbridge Kingsford, introduction to John Stow, A Survey of London (Oxford University Press, 1908).
7 GEORGIAN
1. John Carswell, The South Sea Bubble (Cresset Press, 1960), pp. 198–99.
2. Antonia Fraser, Cromwell (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973), p. 561.
8 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND THE METROPOLIS OF NASH
1. Quoted by Martin Daunton in C. Fox (ed.), London: World City 1800–1840 (Yale University Press with Museum of London, 1992), p. 21.
2. See Andrew Saint, “The Building Art of the First Industrial Metropolis” and Martin Daunton, “London and the World” in C. Fox, op. cit.
3. Susan Lasdun, The English Park (André Deutsch, 1991), p. 177.
10 1900–1939
1. Ruth Guilding, “The Model Traffic Recreation Area at Lordship Lane,” p. 18.
2. Anthony Grenville, Continental Britons: Jewish Refugees from Nazi Europe (The Jewish Museum, London, 2002), p. 30.
3. Harold Nicolson, Diaries, 1930–39 (Collins, 1971), p. 413.
4. Quoted in Philip Ziegler, London at War 1939–1945 (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995), p. 11.
11 WARTIME 1939–1945
1. William Shakespeare, King John, Act V, scene vii, ll. 112–13.
2. Simone Pétrement, Simone Weil (Mowbrays, 1976), p. 511.
3. Alexandra Richie, Faust’s Metropolis (HarperCollins, 1998), p. 496.
4. Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day ( Jonathan Cape, 1949), p. 83.
5. Stephen Inwood, A History of London (Macmillan, 1998), p. 781. Francis Sheppard, London: A History (Oxford, 1998), p. 334.
6. Conversation with the author.
7. Don Juan, Canto IX.iv.
12 POSTWAR
1. See Robert Gray, A History of London, p. 318.
2. William J. R. Curtis, Denys Lasdun: Architecture, City, Landscape (Phaidon, 1994).
3. Mike Pentelow and Marsha Rowe, Characters of Fitzrovia (Chatto, 2001), p. 236.
13 THE END OF THE BOWLER HAT
1. Peter Walker, Staying Power (1991), p. 56. Quoted in David Kynaston, The City of London, vol. 4: A Club No More 1945–2000.
2. Quoted in Kynaston (see note 1, above), p. 696.
3. Gulliver’s Travels, Part III, chapter 5.
4. Jerry White, London in the Twentieth Century, p. 342.
14 LONDON COSMOPOLIS
1. BBC News website, “Immigration: Fact or Hype,” August 2002.
2. The Draft London Plan, p. 15.
15 SILLY LONDON
1. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chapter 52.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
The bibliography of London histories is enormous. What follows is only a selection of works I consulted.
Ackroyd, Peter. London: The Biography. Chatto, 2000
Ashton, John. The Fleet: Its River, Prison and Marriages. T. Fisher Unwin, 1888
Baker, Timothy. Medieval London. Cassell, 1970
Barnett, David. London, Hub of the Industrial Revolution. Tauris Academic Studies, 1998
Barton, N. J. The Lost Rivers of London. Phoenix House, London, Leicester University Press, 1962
Betjeman, John. London’s Historic Railway Stations. John Murray, 1978
———. Metroland. Warren, 1977
———. Summoned by Bells. John Murray, 1966
———. Victorian and Edwardian London from Old Photographs. Portman, 1987
Boswell, James. Life of Johnson. Everyman, 1992
Bowen, Elizabeth. The Heat of the Day. Jonathan Cape, 1949
Brimblecombe, Peter. The Big Smoke: A History of Air Pollution in London Since Medieval Times. Routled
ge, 1988
Byrne, Andrew. London’s Georgian Houses. Georgian Press, 1986
Byrne, Richard. Prisons and Punishments of London. Harrap, 1981
Chapman, Stanley. The Rise of Merchant Banking. Allen and Unwin, 1984
Clark, John. Saxon and Norman London. HMSO, 1989
Clayton, Anthony. Subterranean City. London Historical Publications, 2000
Clout, Hugh, ed. The Times London Atlas. The Times (London), 1991
Cole, Harry. Policeman’s Lot. Fontana, 1981
Cruickshank, Dan, and Neil Burton. Life in the Georgian City. Viking, 1990
Cruickshank, Dan, and Peter Wyld. Georgian Town Houses and Their Details, Butterworth, 1990
———. London: The Art of Georgian Building. Architectural Press, 1975
Dakers, Caroline. The Holland Park Circle. Yale University Press, 1999
De Mare, Eric. Wren’s London. Michael Joseph, 1975
Denton, Pennie, ed. Betjeman’s London. John Murray, 1988
Duffy, Ian. Bankruptcy and Insolvency in London During the Industrial Revolution. Garland, 1985
Elgar, Donald. The Royal Parks. W. H. Allen, 1986
Eliot, T. S. Collected Poems 1909–1962. Faber, 1963