In the middle of the nineteenth century there came a vogue for “night walks”: sketches or essays in which the solitary pedestrian made his way across the dark city, marking significant moments and scenes in a journey of unknown destination. For Charles Dickens, walking at night was a way of allaying private miseries; as a child he had walked through the city, and even in its nocturnal aspect it offered him a strange comfort and reassurance. It was if, whatever his own personal unhappiness, “it,” the thing known as London, would always be there both solid and tangible. It was his true home, after all, and somehow it was incorporated within his own being. So Dickens walked “under the pattering rain … walk and walk and walk, seeing nothing but the interminable tangle of streets save at a corner, here and there, two policemen in conversation.” This was now a guarded and supervised city, its corners manned by officers of the law; no longer the anarchy and exuberance recorded by John Gay in the 1770s. The silence is the silence of its vastness. Dickens crossed Waterloo Bridge, paying a halfpenny to the toll-keeper wrapped up in his booth, where the Thames had an “awful look” of blackness and reflected light and where “the very shadow of the immensity of London seemed to be oppressively upon the river.” This is what is most noticeable about the nineteenth-and twentieth-century city at night: its “immensity,” a vast capital stretching outwards into the darkness. Having crossed the bridge Dickens passed the theatres of Wellington Street and the Strand, “with the rows of faces faded out, the lights extinguished and the seats all empty.” Here is a representation of London in miniature as one great darkened theatre. It is significant that Charles Dickens next made his way to Newgate Prison in order to touch “its rough stone.” London is both theatre and prison. At night its true aspects are outlined clearly, shorn of the vagaries of the day.
He visited the Courts of Law, then at Westminster, before moving on to the abbey where it became for him “a solemn consideration what enormous hosts of dead belong to one old great city and how if they were raised while the living slept, there would not be the space of a pin’s point in all the streets and ways for the living to come out into. Not only that, but the vast armies of dead would overflow the hills and valleys beyond the city, and would stretch away all round it, God knows how far.” This is perhaps what one inheritor of Dickens’s urban vision, George Gissing, meant when he exclaimed “London by night! Rome is poor by comparison.” It is the presence of the past, or the presence of the dead, which lends the night images of London their peculiar intensity and power. Of all cities London seems most occupied by its dead, and the one which most resounds to the tread of passing generations. It is not as if the physical fabric of the old city has survived intact. Gissing’s comparison with Rome is again appropriate here; the “eternal city” has so many ruins of its greatness that the spirit of the past has had no room in which to flourish. In London the past is a form of occluded but fruitful memory, in which the presence of earlier generations is felt rather than seen. It is an echoic city, filled with shadows, and what better time to manifest itself than at night?
Another night voyager of the mid-nineteenth century, Charles Manby Smith, noticed, in an essay entitled “Twenty Four Hours of London Streets,” that the slightest sound reverberated between the great walls of houses and public buildings, with his own footsteps echoing as if “some invisible companion dogged our march.” He heard the silence in the old walled City, which is all the more fearful and oppressive after the “humming, booming surge-like sound” of the day.
It represents a great change in the nature of city life which over the years spread wider and wider beyond the old City; that which was most populous during the day is now the least populated at night. Few people lived in the City-and fewer now, at the start of the twenty-first century-and the old centres of habitation have been steadily abandoned for life upon the perimeters. It is the single most important reason for the relative silence and peace-fulness of London over the last century.
This mid-nineteenth-century pedestrian anticipated the later environment and atmosphere of London, when he observed “the apparently numberless and interminable rows of streets lying in the voiceless silence, and distinctly mapped out by the long and regular lines of lamps on either side of the way.” This is a vision of the city as part of an inhuman, mechanical alignment. “There is no other spectacle, that we know of that intimates so significantly the huge extent of this overgrown metropolis. The dead dumbness that reigns in these long, empty avenues appals the mind, and sends the imagination of the pedestrian wandering for ever onwards and onwards.” So at night London becomes a city of the dead, the silence of the nineteenth century continuing through the twentieth into the twenty-first.
In London Nights, published in 1925, it is remarked that “the past has a stronger hold on the night than it has on the day”; while walking beneath the Thames in the tunnel which connects the north and south banks, for example, “you might be exploring the tombs of buried London thousands of years hence.” In this sense it then becomes an infinite city-“London is every city that ever was and ever will be”-which in its illimitable regions manifests the true nature of the human community. That is why at night the most visible inhabitants of the city are those without a home. In “all manner of holes and corners the homeless may be found sleeping in winter nights; ’mid the ruin of half-demolished houses, on the stairs leading from viaducts, in corners of the Blackwall Tunnel, in recesses in massive buildings, in porches of churches.” That reality has not changed in the intervening years. Then, as now, the Embankment remains a central place for the vagrants to gather despite the cold and damp air coming from the Thames. It is almost as if, at night, the river calls them.
There are certain streets which in the present century seem never entirely empty at night-one may name Old Compton Street in Soho, Upper Street in Islington and Queensway in Bayswater as examples-and there are, as there have been over the centuries, all-night restaurants such as those in St. John Street and in the Fulham Road. But the general impression of contemporary London at night is of a dull silence. There is no feeling of real danger, only the awareness that one can walk until dawn, and then a further dawn, without coming to the end of interminable streets with houses on either side. The shopping malls and some of the thoroughfares are monitored by surveillance cameras, so that it is impossible ever to feel completely alone.
The cameras represent one way in which modern London has changed. It has become self-conscious, forever watchful of its own citizens, almost daring them to manifest the energy and violence of their predecessors. There is never complete silence, however; it is punctuated by the humming of neon lamps and by the sirens of police cars or ambulances. That low and remote sound is of the traffic perpetually passing through, while in the east the glow of the lamps becomes paler with the approaching dawn.
CHAPTER 50
A City Morning
God give you good morrow, my master, past five o’clock and a fair morning”: that is how the watchman of the seventeenth century heralded the dawn, the time when most of the citizens were waking and preparing for the work of the day.
Then as now the eastern suburbs of the city went to bed earlier, and rose earlier, than their western counterparts. The markets were busy and the produce had already been brought from the surrounding countryside in wagons. One of the complaints of Londoners was that they were perpetually being woken, while it was still dark, by the clatter of the wheels and the neighing of the horses as fruits and vegetables were transported to Leadenhall or Covent Garden. The essayist Richard Steele has a fine description (11 August 1712) of the gardeners who sailed down the river with their produce to the various markets of the city: “I landed with Ten Sail of Apricock Boats at Strand-Bridge, after having put in at Nine-Elms, and taken in Melons, consigned by Mr. Cuffe of that Place, to Sarah Sewell and Company at their stall in Covent-Garden.” They unloaded the cargo at Strand-Bridge at six that morning, at the time when the hackney-coachmen of the previous night were just g
oing off duty. Some passing sweeps engaged in “Raillery” with the fruit girls “about the Devil and Eve.” The details of the wit are not recorded. There are other descriptions of the cart-horses steaming and stamping in the market as the dawn breaks, of the carters sleeping upon their sacks, of the lines of porters carrying fruits and vegetables to their various stalls.
By six o’clock the apprentices were already pulling up the shutters, lighting the fires, or putting out the wares for sale and display. They washed down the pavement outside, while the maids swept the steps of the more fashionable houses. The street vendors, and sweeps, and other itinerants, were soon making their way through the thoroughfares which grew more crowded as the day advanced. And, as the years progressed, the street activity seemed to increase. In the eighteenth century it was suggested that cheesemongers “should not set out their butter and cheese so near the edge of their shop-windows, nor put their firkins in the path-ways, by which many a good coat and silk gown may be spoiled.” Here was one indication of the general lack of room. The sheer crowdedness of the daytime city is always a paramount feature of its life, and there were remarks that “barbers and chimney sweepers have no right by charter to rub against a person well-dressed, and then offer him satisfaction by single combat.” There were other traders whom it was wise to avoid including the baker with his apron covered in flour and paste, the small-coal man, the butcher with his bloody leather apron and the chandler from whose basket spots of tallow might fall. There were constant complaints about car-men using the pavement rather than the road to carry their charges, and about workmen carrying ladders or pieces of timber upon their shoulders in the middle of crowded thoroughfares.
So there was of necessity an art of walking the streets by day, as well as by night. There were certain rules which were generally observed. The wall was “surrendered” to females, so that they would not be jostled on to the road, while it was considered a duty to direct “the groaping Blind.” Never ask directions from an apprentice, because these young and lively Londoners were known to delight in sending any stranger in the wrong direction; it was always best to ask assistance from a shopkeeper or tradesman. If you wished to urinate go into some court or “secret corner.” Avoid Watling Street and Ludgate Hill because of the crowds that throng there; much better to walk along the broader pavements of the Strand or Cheapside, but in every main street, nevertheless,
Full charg’d with News the breathless Hawker runs,
Shops open, Coaches roll, Carts shake the Ground,
And all the Streets with passing Cries resound.
In the early nineteenth century, as occupations and areas began to be differentiated on social lines, various formal urban types appear. At eight o’clock and ten o’clock the postman, in scarlet tunic, made his deliveries in the West End, while the “musicians” and old-clothes-sellers made their way from the East End towards the centre. The commercial clerks walked down the Strand towards the Admiralty and Somerset House, while the government clerks tended to ride down to Whitehall and Downing Street in broughams.
This was the morning tide of the citizens. The nineteenth-century journalist G.A. Sala knew them well. “You may know the cashiers in the private banking houses by their white hats and buff waistcoats; you may know the stock-brokers by their careering up Ludgate Hill in dog-carts, and occasionally tandems … you may know the Jewish commission agents by their flashy broughams … you may know the sugar-bakers and soap-boilers by the comfortable double-bodied carriages,” and the warehousemen only “by their wearing gaiters.”
Between nine and ten the omnibuses arrived at the Bank with thousands of occupants, while on the Thames itself a large number of “swift, grimy little steamboats” had picked up passengers from the piers at Chelsea and Pimlico, Hungerford Bridge and Southwark, Waterloo and Temple, before disgorging them to the piers by London Bridge. Thames Street, both Upper and Lower, was “invaded by an ant-hill swarm of spruce clerks, who mingle strangely with the fish-women and the dock-porters.”
The London morning “hungered” for its crowds and, equally voracious, “the insatiable counting houses soon swallow them.” Not just the counting-houses were filled, but also all the workshops, warehouses and factories of the metropolis. The bars of the public houses were opened. The baked-potato men and the owners of coffee stalls were engaged in their brisk business. In the West End the shoe-cleaners and commercial travellers were already at their work, while in the adjacent courts and alleys the vast army of the poor swarmed out of doors. There was a nineteenth-century phrase that “you can hardly shut the street door for them” and, even in the poor quarters, the morning brought “a desperate, ferocious levity” as if the opening of each day’s misery could elicit only an hysterical response.
There is indeed an insistent rhythm to the routine of London. The Exchange opens and closes its gates, the banks of Lombard Street are filled with and then emptied of customers, the glare of the shops brightens and then fades. In the later decades of the nineteenth century the trains as well as the omnibuses brought in the multitudes from the suburbs. But what the city takes in during the morning it spews forth at evening, so that there is a general pulse of people and power which keeps its heart beating. This is what Charlotte Brontë meant when she recorded that “I have seen the West End, the parks, the fine squares; but I love the City far better. The City seems so much more in earnest; its business, its rush, its roar, are such serious things, sights, sounds … At the West End you may be amused; but in the City you are deeply excited.” She was “deeply excited” by the process of urban life itself, fulfilling in its own fashion the rhythms of night and day.
By the time the Post Office had barred up its letter boxes on the stroke of six o’clock, the businessmen and their clerks had left the City to its shopkeepers and dwindling number of householders. The full tide of the citizens ebbed and, through a thousand different streets, returned homeward. And, at the close of Dickens’s Little Dorrit, “as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted and chafed, and made their usual uproar,” all to return on the following morning.
And if they had woken up fifty, or a hundred, years later no doubt they would still have been able to follow the instinctive movement of the rush hour. Yet there is one distinction. If a nineteenth-century Londoner were to be set down in the City of the twenty-first century, perhaps at twilight in Cheapside when the office workers and computer operators are returning homeward, he would be astonished by the orderliness and uniformity of their progress. He might recognise a type, or an expression of thoughtfulness or anxiety-he might also be familiar with those who mutter to themselves- but the general quietness, together with a lack of human contact and of friendly exchange, might be unnerving.
London’s Radicals
The Sessions House on Clerkenwell Green, part of the ritual of riot and punishment which has marked this small area for many hundreds of years.
CHAPTER 51
Where Is the Well of Clerkenwell?
There is a story by Arthur Machen in which he describes an area in Stoke Newington where, on occasions, an enchanted landscape can be glimpsed and sometimes even entered; perhaps we may locate it near Abney Park, a somewhat desolate cemetery beside Stoke Newington High Street. This is the street where Defoe lived and where Edgar Allan Poe went unwillingly to school. Few people have seen this visionary place, or even know how to see it; but those who have can speak of nothing else. Machen wrote this story, “N,” in the early 1930s, but as the century progressed other enchanted areas of London have emerged into the light. These remain powerful and visible to anyone who cares to look for them. One of these districts finds its centre upon Clerkenwell Green.
It is not “green” at all; it is a small area enclosed by buildings with a disused public lavatory in the middle. On both sides are narrow streets which in turn lead off into alleys or other streets. The green has its restaurants, two public houses, commerci
al premises and offices for architects or public relations consultants. It is, in epitome, a typical area of central London. But there are other signs and tokens of a different city. Just beyond the green are the relics of the eleventh-century church and hospital of St. John, where the Knights Templar and Knights Hospitaller had their headquarters; the crypt survives intact. A few yards to the south of the crypt, in the early sixteenth century, was erected St. John’s Gate; this also still remains. Just on the northern edge of the green itself can be found the original site of the medieval well from which the district derives its name; in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it was simply a broken iron pump let into the front wall of a tenement building but, since that time, it has been restored and preserved behind a thick glass wall. It marked the site of the stage where mystery plays were performed for centuries “beyond the memory of man,” and in fact for many hundreds of years Clerkenwell was notorious for its dramatic representations. The yard of the Red Bull Inn, to the east of the green, is reputed to be the first theatrical venue where women appeared on stage. It is one example of the many continuities that charge Clerkenwell and its environs with an essential presence. But perhaps it is best to begin at the beginning.
On Clerkenwell Green the remains of a prehistoric settlement or encampment have been discovered, suggesting that this area of London has been continuously inhabited for many thousands of years. Perhaps the melancholy or ancientness which writers as diverse as George Gissing and Arnold Bennett have intuited, in this location, derives from the weariness of prolonged human settlement with all the cares and woes which it brings.
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