London: The Biography

by Peter Ackroyd

  Yet as their presence grew, even very slightly, so did the anxieties about the “blackness” in the midst of London. John Fielding, a London magistrate in the mid-eighteenth century, suggested that they became a subversive element almost as soon as they arrived in the city, particularly when they realised that white servants performed the same functions as themselves. To be black, in other words, was not a unique or an inalienable mark of servitude. So “they put themselves on a footing with other servants, became intoxicated with their liberty, grew refractory … so as to get themselves discharged.” And when they were “discharged” into London, what then? They “corrupt and dissatisfy the mind of every black servant that comes to England.” Others made their way to the retired streets and alleys where a black community had established itself. So for the civic authorities “the black presence,” as it has been called, posed a double threat. Those in habitual servitude were being aroused to anger or complaint, while small clusters of immigrants were to be found in the “low” districts of Wapping, St. Giles and elsewhere.

  The number of “destitute negroes” had also increased by the end of the eighteenth century; in particular black recruits who had fought for the English during the American War of Independence fell into dereliction on their arrival. This was another aspect of immigration, where the influx was the direct result of the actions of the host country; in that sense these black ex-soldiers created a recognisable line of descent to those twentieth-century migrants who left the ruins of empire. A pamphlet issued in 1784 stated that thousands of blacks “traversed the town, naked, pennyless, and almost starving.” As a result they were believed to threaten social order. The African, Afro-American or West Indian-as long as his or her skin was of the appropriate hue-was always and instinctively considered a “threat.” With that fear came also the prospect of miscegenation, since mixed marriages were not unusual in the poorer areas of London. Here the sixteenth-century connection of the “Moor” with lasciviousness was once more revived, as if a black skin were a token of “black” desires lying just beneath the surface of the human order. “The lower classes of women in England are remarkably fond of the blacks,” it was reported, “for reasons too brutal to mention.” A Committee for Relieving the Black Poor was set up with the sole purpose of assisting in expatriation. It was not a success. Less than five hundred, out of a population estimated between 10,000 and 20,000, embarked upon the emigrant ships-an indication, perhaps, of the fact that London remained their chosen city. However dolorous or impoverished their lives, the majority of black immigrants wished to remain in a place which in its daily commerce remained one of opportunity and diversion.

  That population became acclimatised and, although still subject to racial taunts, a familiar presence in the streets of nineteenth-century London. They had become part of the “underclass” and were scarcely to be differentiated from it; as crossing-sweepers, as vagrants, or as beggars, they had become almost invisible. In the vast city they did not exist in numbers large enough to command public attention or concern; they were not competing for employment and so did not threaten anyone’s livelihood. They rarely appear in novels or narratives, except as occasional grotesques, and their general fate seems to have been one of settlement among the urban poor.

  Yet the beginning of immigration from the Caribbean islands in the late 1940s set off a litany of familiar fears, among them the prospect of white unemployment, of intermarriage, and of general overpopulation. In the summer of 1948 the SS Empire Windrush brought 492 young migrants from Jamaica. It marked the beginning of a process which would alter the demography of London and affect all aspects of communal life. The West Indians were in turn followed by immigrants from India, Pakistan and East Africa so that, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is estimated that London harbours almost two million non-white ethnic minorities. Despite occasional racially motivated attacks, and despite the anxiety felt by certain minorities at the behaviour of the police, there is striking evidence that the egalitarian and democratic instincts of London have already marginalised fear and prejudice. Immigration is so much part of London that even its latest and most controversial manifestations eventually become a settled part of its existence. This became clear even in the aftermath of the Notting Hill riots of 1958, and in particular after the murder of a young Antiguan carpenter named Kelso Cockrane. An essential element of London life returned. “Normally, in the early days, you know,” one young West Indian informed the authors of Windrush, a study of twentieth-century immigrants from the Caribbean, “whenever something appeared in the papers, you could always test the temperature by going on the bus. People would be very hostile. And in this instance, after that funeral, there was a turning point. You could sense a change. People were more friendly. People began to react and respond in a different way.” There have been riots, and murders, in the course of the last twenty years but no one can doubt that the central and essential movement within London has been one of absorption and assimilation. It is an intrinsic aspect of its history.

  The city itself, in the process, has also changed. The authors of Windrush, Michael and Trevor Phillips, provide an interesting context for this alteration. They suggest that workers from Jamaica, Barbados and elsewhere, were not simply “migrating to Britain.” They were in effect migrating to London because “it was the life of the city which called to them and which they had begun to crave.” In the twentieth century the city had effectively created the conditions of modern industrial and economic life; thus for the new settlers the journey to London was the only way “to engage with the broad currents of modernity.” It is a significant observation in itself, and one that throws a suggestive light upon all immigrant transactions over the last thousand years. They were drawn to the city itself. London called them. To settle there was, in some oblique and intuitive way, to be part of the present moment moving into futurity. The importance of time within the city has already been outlined but, for the first generations of the immigrant population, the city represented the movement of time itself.

  Yet their vitality and optimism in turn brought energy back into the city. Throughout the 1960s, for example, it is claimed that the immigrants themselves assisted the “process of remodelling and modernising” the streets and houses in which they lived. Areas like Brixton and Notting Hill had been “declining and rundown since the nineteenth century,” but the new arrivals “revalued huge swathes of the inner city.” The use of the word “revalued” suggests the economic effectiveness of the settlers, but the transition from black immigrant to black Londoner also called upon different resources. Caribbeans “had to go through a fundamental series of changes in order to live and flourish in the city”; like the Jews or the Irish before them, they had to acquire an urban identity which maintained their inheritance while at the same time allowing its smooth passage into the huge, complex but generally welcoming organism of London. That urban environment might have seemed anonymous, or hostile, or frightening, but in fact it was the appropriate arena for the Caribbeans and other immigrants to forge a new identity.

  So it is that the authors of Windrush suggest that “the instinct of the city was to … equalise choices” and “to level out differences between consumers and producers.” This is the new egalitarianism which in turn equalises the differences between the various races which comprise it, since “the essential job of the city was to put people together.” Yet in turn “the character of the city … came to define the identity of the nation,” and the existence of a various and heterogeneous London has helped to redefine the notion or nature of Englishness itself. Now there are Montserratians in Hackney and Anguillians in Slough, Dominicans in Paddington and Grenadians in Hammersmith. Where once there were Swiss in Soho, and Cypriots in Holborn, there are now Barbadians in Notting Hill and Jamaicans in Stockwell. There are Punjabis in Southall and Bangladeshis in Tower Hamlets, Turks in Stoke Newington and Pakistanis in Leyton. Each community has replicated its independence within the larger context
of London, so that once more the city takes on the aspects of a world in itself. The city, that “globe of many nations,” acts as a paradigm and forerunner in the great race of life.

  CHAPTER 74. Empire Day

  By the last decades of the nineteenth century London had become the city of empire; the public spaces, the railway termini, the hotels, the great docks, the new thoroughfares, the rebuilt markets, all were the visible expression of a city of unrivalled strength and immensity. It had become the centre of international finance and the engine of imperial power; it teemed with life and expectancy. Some of its gracefulness and variety had now gone; its Georgian compactness and familiarity had also disappeared, replaced by the larger scale of neo-classical or neo-Gothic architecture which somehow matched the aspirations of this larger and more anonymous city. Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square, erected in 1843, was conceived upon the model of a column in the temple of Mars the Avenger, in imperial Rome, while a revised classicism was employed for the new buildings along Whitehall; the architecture of London, according to Jonathan Schneer in London 1900, celebrated “British heroism on the battlefield, British sovereignty over foreign lands, British wealth and power, in short, British imperialism.” If it was a more public and more powerful city, it had also become a less human one. Tower Bridge, which took some thirteen years to build and was eventually completed in 1894, was a representative emblem; it was an extraordinary feat of engineering, but it seems deliberately to have been built upon an impersonal and somewhat forbidding scale. In its immensity and complexity, it reflected the workings of the city itself.

  Late nineteenth-century London was established upon money. The City had acquired the historic destiny that it had been pursuing for almost two thousand years. It had become the progenitor of commerce, and the vehicle of credit, throughout the world; the City maintained England, just as the riches of the Empire rejuvenated the City. The sea trade of the earliest settlers had over the centuries borne unexpected fruit since by the turn of the century almost one half of the world’s merchant shipping was controlled, directly or indirectly, by the institutions of the City. In the early decades of the twentieth century new office blocks became a familiar presence; new banks, company headquarters, insurance offices were built upon a massive scale, with intense and dramatic architectural effects. The latest edition of Pevsner’s Buildings of England for the City of London notes, for example, how the Bank of England acted as a field of force for other commercial enterprises. “Around it are clustered the headquarters and major branches of the main clearing banks, many of which had grown enormously by merger and acquisition at the end of the 1910s. They were built to impress, inside and out.” Here the element of London’s essential theatricality once more emerges, but strangely mingled with the principles of profit and of power. The tendency towards “merger and acquisition” among banking institutions was reflected in a general movement towards the creation of greater and greater organisations; the newspaper industries, the enormous growth of the Post Office, the vast expansion of insurance companies, all contributed to the sense of a city growing quickly and almost unnaturally.

  It was unnatural in other respects. The advent of electric light in the 1890s-its first interior use occurred, in 1887, in the premises of Lloyds Bank along Lombard Street-inevitably meant that natural light was no longer necessary to work indoors. So arrived those great waves of City workers who indeed might have been dwelling beneath the sea; they came to work in the darkness of a winter morning, and departed in the evening without once seeing the sun. So London helped to instigate one of the great disasters for the human spirit. In addition the use of new building technologies, particularly those of reinforced concrete and steel, and the introduction of passenger lifts, led inexorably to the erection of ever higher buildings. By that strange symbiotic process which has always marked the development of London, the expansion of the available space was matched only by the increase of the number of people ready to inhabit it. It has been estimated that the working population of the city numbered 200,000 in 1871, but 364,000 in 1911. Charles Pooter, of “The Laurels,” Brickfield Terrace, Holloway, is a fictional variant of one of the thousands of clerks who comprised what one guidebook terms “a very city of clerks.” “My boy, as a result of twenty-one years’ industry and strict attention to the interests of my superiors in office, I have been rewarded with promotion and a rise in salary of £100.” The fact that the Grossmiths’ comic creation has endured in public affection for more than a hundred years is testimony, perhaps, to the instinctive accuracy of their account; the ordinariness of Pooter’s life was seen as emblematic of the new type of urban, or suburban man. In his loyalty, and in his naïveté, he was the kind of citizen whom London needed in order to sustain itself.

  But it was not only a city of clerks. London had become the workplace of the new “professions,” as engineers and accountants and architects and lawyers moved ineluctably towards the city of empire. In turn these affluent “consumers” created a market for new “department stores” and new restaurants; there arose a revived and more salubrious “West End” of theatres under such actor-managers as Irving and Beerbohm Tree. There were also more refined delights. The parks, the museums and the galleries of mid-Victorian London were discovered by a new and more mobile population of relatively affluent citizens. There were better libraries, and a plethora of distinguished or specialised exhibitions to satisfy a new urban taste for instruction compounded by enjoyment. It was also the city of Fabians, and of the “new woman”; it was the home of the fin-de-siècle, most readily associated in the public mind with the spectacular London career of Oscar Wilde.

  But the old city never went away. In the 1880s approximately four hundred people of both sexes used to sleep in Trafalgar Square among the fountains and the pigeons. As H.P. Clunn noted in The Face of London (1932), “only about one-third of these people had any regular calling or occupation, and the rest simply lived from day to day as best they could from childhood, and could hardly explain how they had managed to exist for so long.” In any one year of that decade approximately “twenty-five thousand people were charged with being drunk and disorderly in the streets,” in part because the public houses were allowed to remain open all night; perhaps the strain of being the richest and most powerful city in the world had some effect upon the citizens themselves. It was a city of contrast. Until the late 1870s, Leicester Square was littered with “tin pots, kettles, old clothes, cast-off shoes, dead cats and dogs.”

  The streets were filled with the ceaseless and incessant stream of horse-drawn, motor-driven and steam-propelled traffic; the average speed of the hansoms and the growlers and the vans and the “bumpers” or buses remained approximately twelve miles per hour. Old women squatted in the streets selling herbs, apples, matches and sandwiches. There was a floating population of ragged barefoot children who slept in alleys or beneath bridges. There were costermongers with their carts selling anything from coals to flowers, fish to muffins, tea to crockery. There were also epidemics of surprising speed and savagery which passed through the floating urban population. But somehow, perhaps only with the benefit of hindsight, the lives and roles of the poor seem diminished within the immensity and complexity of late nineteenth-century London; their voices are heard less easily amid the incessant traffic, and their struggles are lost among the army of clerks and “professions” and the whole multiplying population of the city.

  This immensity and complexity, the emanations of so much wealth and power, created problems for the authorities themselves. How could the Metropolitan Board of Works, together with all the vestries and parishes, supervise or control the largest and most important city in the world? As a result, in 1888, the London County Council (LCC) was established to administer an area of approximately 117 square miles. It covered the whole of London, inner and outer, from Hackney in the north to Norwood in the south. There had always been unstated fears concerning an over-mighty and overweening city, so the LCC was granted no p
owers over the police or the public utilities: yet even at the time its inauguration was considered an event of great significance in the development of London. Sidney Webb described it as a movement towards a “self-governing community,” which indirectly aroused memories of the medieval “commune” with its wall and its army. The great constitutional historian of London, Laurence Gomme, became Clerk of the LCC which for him represented “the reincarnation of the democratic spirit of the medieval charters, and traditions of citizenship as ancient as the Saxon and Roman origins of the city.” In 1899, in a further act of reorganisation, twenty-eight Metropolitan Boroughs were created out of the vestries and district boards of the preceding century; although these were designed to impede any centralising impulses of the LCC they, too, had a somewhat atavistic air. At a “royal review” in the summer of 1912, each borough mustered a battalion to march before King George V; it may have been a harbinger of the Great War but the troops from Fulham and Wandsworth, Stepney and Camberwell, Poplar and Battersea, were a reminder of old territorial loyalties issuing from the earliest days of the burg and the soke.

  The LCC embarked upon its municipal duties with enthusiasm and animation. The earliest priority was that of slum clearance and the development of public housing. What might seem, in retrospect at least, a symbolic gesture claimed the area of the “Jago” in Bethnal Green; the squalid alleys and tenements immortalised by Arthur Morrison were swept away in the late nineteenth century, and in their place was erected the Boundary Green Estate. Other areas of inner London were cleared but, in deference to the prevailing taste for “expansion” as a physical and mental imperative, “cottage estates” were erected in places like East Acton and Hayes.