London: The Biography

by Peter Ackroyd

  A visionary scene-a length of street

  laid open in its morning quietness,

  Deep, hollow, unobstructed, vacant, smooth …

  The silence is the silence of permanence. When all the passing generations have sung their songs and departed, the city continues its quiet life. To see London without its inhabitants is indeed a “visionary scene,” because another presence then reveals itself. That is why there have been so many visions of London in ruins. In drawings and in engravings-even in images of film-it resembles some lost continent, or a city lately risen from the sea. These are not the ruins of Babylon or Rome, but of Atlantis or some other mythological landscape. They are emblems of some undying need or aspiration.

  It is possible, however, to see among them the passing generations. London is “eternal” because it contains them all. When Addison visited the tombs of Westminster Abbey he was moved to reflect that “When I read the several dates of the tombs, of some that died yesterday, and some six hundred years ago, I consider that great day when we shall all of us be contemporaries and make our appearance together.” It may be that London, uniquely among cities, prompts such considerations since the dead seem to be pursuing at the heels of the living. For some this is a hopeful vision; it suggests reconciliation where all the manifest differences of the city, riches and poverty, health and sickness, will find their quietus. One cannot be separated from the other. So Turner saw “the most angelic beings in the whole compass of the London world” in the squalor and filth of the London Docks.

  There are those who have been possessed by a different vision. According to Geoffrey Grigson, London “stood for doing, at least, it stood for beginning.” Branwell Brontë, in the parsonage at Haworth, collected all the maps of London he could find depicting “its alleys, and back slums and short cuts”; according to Juliet Barker in The Brontës he “studied them so closely that he knew them all by heart” so that he appeared to be an “old Londoner” who “knew more about the ins and outs of the mighty Babylon than many a man who had passed his life within its walls.” This intense reading of London was, for him, a form of liberation; the maps represented all the hopes for, and aspirations towards, a new life. It was as if he were studying his own destiny. But for others the dream may become feverish, when the whole weight of London presses down. At the end of Bleak House, that threnody among the labyrinths of London, Richard Carstone towards the close of his wretched life asks, “It was all a troubled dream?” For many, that is also a true vision of the city.

  The elements of innovation and of change are subtly mingled, together with the sheer exhilaration of being one among a numerous company. One could become anybody. Some of the great stories of London concern those who have taken on new identities, and new personalities; to begin again, to renew oneself, is one of the great advantages of the city. It is part of its endlessly dramatic life. It is possible, after all, to enter if only for a moment the lives and emotions of those who pass by. This collective experience can, in turn, be a source of exhilaration. It was what Francis Thompson perceived in his vision of

  the traffic of Jacob’s ladder

  Pitched between Heaven and Charing Cross.

  It is the enchantment of a million golden souls moving back and forth between heaven and the city, all singular and all blessed. It is the same vision vouchsafed to those who have heard the music of London, a pattern of notes rising and falling in some great melody to which all the streets and avenues move in unison. The city then forms “a geography passing beyond the natural to become metaphysical, only describable in terms of music or abstract physics”: thus writes Michael Moorcock in Mother London. Some inhabitants hear the music-these are the dreamers and the antiquarians-but others perceive it only fitfully and momentarily. It may be in a sudden gesture, in a sentence overheard, in an instant of memory. London is filled with such broken images, laughter which has been heard before, a tearful face which has been seen before, a street which is unknown and yet familiar.

  CHAPTER 79. Resurgam

  If you were to walk across the Isle of Dogs, where the Canary Wharf tower itself is to be found, past the enamel panels and the jet mist granite, past the silver cladding and the curved glass walls, you might come across other realities. Here and there still stand late Victorian pubs, marking the corners of otherwise shattered roads. There are council blocks from the 1930s, and council-house estates from the 1970s. Occasionally a row of nineteenth-century terraced houses will emerge like an apparition. The Isle of Dogs represents, in other words, the pattern of London. Certain of the new developments are themselves decked out as if they were Victorian warehouses, or Georgian terraces, or twentieth-century suburban dwellings, thus intensifying the sense of heterogeneity and contrast. This, too, is part of London. This is why it has been said that there are in reality hundreds of Londons all mingled.

  There are different worlds, and times, within the city; Whitehall and West Ham, White City and Streatham, Haringey and Islington, are all separate and unique. Yet in the last years of the twentieth century they participated in the general brightness of London. If light travels in waves then it may be described as a rippling effect, as the renovation or rejuvenation of the inner core has spread outwards. London has opened up; there seems to be more space and more air. It has grown in lightness. In the City towers are clad in silver-blue reflective glass, so that the difference between the sky and the building is effaced; in Clapton and Shepherd’s Bush, houses are being repaired and repainted.

  If London were a living thing, we would say that all of its optimism and confidence have returned. It has again become “the capital of all capitals” in every cultural and social sense. The world flocks to it and once more it has become a youthful city. That is its destiny. Resurgam: “I will arise.” It was the word found upon a piece of stray and broken stone just when Wren began his work upon St. Paul’s Cathedral; he placed it at the centre of his design.

  In Exchange Square of the Broadgate Development, in the last autumn of the twentieth century, a calypso band was playing in an open space designed for performance; some City workers, before their journey homewards, were drinking in a public house close by. A man and woman were dancing, to the rhythm of the music, in the shadow of the great arch of Exchange House. In an area below them a shallow cascade of water ran continually, while to one side reclined a statue entitled “The Broadgate Venus.” Below the square I could see the platforms of Liverpool Street Station, with the trains moving inwards and outwards, while on the horizon behind Exchange House the spire of St. Leonard, Shoreditch, could plainly be discerned. It was a matter of conjecture how many different times inhabited this small area; there was a nineteenth-century railway time, but also the time of the music. There was the endless movement of water, but also the rhythm of the dancing. The great statue of the reclining nude seemed almost preternaturally still amid all this activity, enjoining a quietness not unlike that of St. Leonard in the distance. And then there were the office-workers with glasses in their hands who were, at that moment, like their ancestors, wandering out of time. So Broadgate, in the early evening, contained many times, like currents of air invisibly mingling.

  On that same evening, I walked perhaps two hundred yards to the east, and I came across another London site. Just beyond the old market of Spitalfields archaeologists have discovered an area where the medieval hospital of St. Mary Spital once stood. On this small spot were found the stone sarcophagus of a fourth-century Roman female; a fourteenth-century charnel house and graveyard; a fifteenth-century gallery from which civic dignitaries listened to the “Spital sermon”; evidence of a sixteenth-century artillery ground; London fortifications of the seventeenth century; eighteenth-century dwellings; and part of a nineteenth-century street. More will emerge in time, although time itself has a thicker and more clouded atmosphere in such a place. The levels of the centuries are all compact, revealing the historical density of London. Yet the ancient city and the modern city literally lie beside each other;
one cannot be imagined without the other. That is one of the secrets of the city’s power.

  These relics of the past now exist as part of the present. It is in the nature of the city to encompass everything. So when it is asked how London can be a triumphant city when it has so many poor, and so many homeless, it can only be suggested that they, too, have always been a part of its history. Perhaps they are a part of its triumph. If this is a hard saying, then it is only as hard as London itself. London goes beyond any boundary or convention. It contains every wish or word ever spoken, every action or gesture ever made, every harsh or noble statement ever expressed. It is illimitable. It is Infinite London.

  An Essay on Sources

  If London is endless and illimitable, so are the books and essays devoted to it. The Bibliography of Printed Works on London History, edited by Heather Creaton (London, 1994), lists 21,778 separate publications from London History Periodicals to Service War Memorials. No scholar of the city, however eager or ambitious, can hope to assimilate all this material. My own thread through the labyrinth has been twined out of enthusiasm and curiosity, coarse enough in the circumstances but serviceable.

  Of the general studies I can recommend The Future of London’s Past by M. Biddle and D. Hudson (London, 1977); The Stones of London by J.V. Elsden and J.A. Howe (London, 1923); The Soul of London by F.M. Ford (London, 1905); Street Names of the City of London by E. Ekwall (Oxford, 1954); The Lost Language of London by H. Bayley (London, 1935); London in Song by W. Whitten (London, 1898); London Echoing and The London Perambulator, both by James Bone (London, 1948 and 1931); Historians of London by S. Rubinstein (London, 1968); Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions by C. Mackay (London, 1841); The Synfulle Citie by E.J. Burford (London, 1990); London Mystery and Mythology by W. Kent (London, 1952). Note that these books are in no particular order, chronological or thematic, and in that sense they act as an image of the city itself where stray impressions leave their mark. In turn we have The Streets of London Through The Centuries by T. Burke (London, 1940); They Saw it Happen edited in four volumes by W.O. Hassall, C.R.N. Routh, T. Charles-Edwards, B. Richardson and A. Briggs (Oxford, 1956-1960); The Ghosts of London by J.A. Brooks (Norwich, 1982); Characters of Bygone London by W. Stewart (London, 1960); The Quack Doctors of Old London by C.J. Thompson (London, 1928); London As It Might Have Been by F. Barker and R. Hyde (London, 1982); Queer Things About London by C. Harper (London, 1923). The Geology of London and South-East England by G.M. Davies (London, 1939) is matched by London Illustrated Geological Walks by E. Robinson (Edinburgh, 1985); The Curiosities of London by J. Timbs (London, 1855) can similarly be placed beside Literary and Historical Memorials of London by J.H. Jesse (London, 1847), London Rediscoveries by W.G. Bell (London, 1929), and Old Customs and Ceremonies of London by M. Brentnall (London, 1975).

  The Londoner’s Almanac by R. Ash (London, 1985) contains peculiar and sometimes interesting facts such as “Twenty Slang Words Used by London Taxi-Drivers”; W. Kent’s London in The News Through Three Centuries (London, 1954) contains astonishing stories of hauntings, body-snatchings and deaths by lightning. The Aquarian Guide to Legendary London edited by J.M. Matthews and C. Potter (Wellingborough, 1990) is indispensable reading for those who are interested in the occluded aspects of the city’s history, while London Bodies by A. Werner (London, 1998) is a fascinating exercise in comparative physiology. The Building of London by J. Schofield (London, 1984) offers many valuable perceptions into the fabric and texture of the developing city while The City of London by C.H. Holden and W.G. Holford (London, 1947) is concerned with the task of reconstruction after the Second World War. Lost London by H. Hobhouse (London, 1971) is necessary if poignant reading on all that has been destroyed or vandalised by generations of London’s builders, and it is complemented by G. Stamp’s The Changing Metropolis (London, 1984) which contains many fascinating photographs of the vanished or forgotten city. Studies in London History edited by A.E.J. Hollaender and W. Kellaway (London, 1969) is a collection of essays which has the virtue of appealing to every literate Londoner, with articles ranging from the real Richard Whittington to the pre-Norman London Bridge. Invaluable, too, is London in Paint edited by M. Gallinou and J. Hayes (London, 1996) which moves from the earliest oil painting of London to the latest emanation of what might loosely be termed “The School of London.” In a similar spirit The Image of London: Views by Travellers and Emigrés 1550-1920 edited by M. Warner (London, 1987) collects the compositions of, among others, Whistler, Monet and Canaletto to provide a pictorial synopsis of the city. London on Film by C. Sorensen (London, 1996) performs a similar feat with the cinema. Curious London by R. Cross (London, 1966) is filled with, well, curiosities; and with a sigh we may finish this intricate selection with Where London Sleeps by W.G. Bell (London, 1926).

  It would be out of place here to list the literature of London, simply because to a large extent it also represents the literature of England; few novelists, poets or dramatists have not been touched or moved by London. I might also name Chaucer, Shakespeare, Pope, Dryden, Johnson and the myriad other writers who comprise a distinct and distinctive London world. That is the matter for another book. All I can do here is list specific debts and allegiances, especially to those writers and books which emerge in the course of my narrative. I feel of course an obligation to T.S. Eliot, Thomas More, William Blake and Charles Dickens who have helped to fashion my vision of London; to Thomas De Quincey, Charles Lamb, George Gissing, Arthur Machen, and the other urban pilgrims, I owe an especial debt. I have alluded in this biography particularly to Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Aldous Huxley, Joseph Conrad, George Orwell, H.G. Wells and G.K. Chesterton; from other centuries, the urban works of Tobias Smollett, Daniel Defoe, Ben Jonson and Henry Fielding have been a perpetual comfort and reward. Specific references are made to Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (London, 1955), Michael Moorcock’s Mother London (London, 1988), Iain Sinclair’s Downriver (London, 1991), Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago (London, 1896) and Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (London, 1949). Certain literary studies have also been immensely helpful. There are many general works, such as W. Kent’s London for the Literary Pilgrim (London, 1949), Andrew Davies’s Literary London (London, 1988), W.B. Thresshing’s The London Muse (Georgia, 1982) and The Book Lover’s London by A. St. John Adcock (London, 1913). Of more specific import are Henry James and London by J. Kimmey (New York, 1991) and Virginia Woolf’s London by D. Brewster (London, 1959). London Transformed by M. Byrd deals primarily with the literary territory of the eighteenth century. I owe an especial debt to J. Wolfreys’s Writing London (London, 1998), particularly for his perceptive remarks on Carlyle and Engels.

  The early history of London is marked by speculation and controversy. Much of it is veiled in myth or legend, and the enchantment can be glimpsed in Legendary London: Early London in Tradition and History by L. Spence (London, 1937) and Prehistoric London: Its Mounds and Circles by E.O. Gordon (London, 1914). The Holy Groves of Britain by F.J. Stuckey (London, 1995) is also of absorbing interest. A more sober account is provided by N. Merriman in Prehistoric London (London, 1990) which is complemented by F.G. Parsons’s The Earlier Inhabitants of London (London, 1927). The great antiquarian and scholar, Laurence Gomme, a true successor of John Stow, has written The Governance of London (London, 1907) and The Making of London (London, 1912) as well as The Topography of London (London, 1904). For the deeper background I recommend Celtic Britain by C. Thomas (London, 1986) and The Druids by S. Piggott (London, 1968). For the city of later date, London: City of the Romans by R. Merrifield (London, 1983) is essential reading together with a shorter study by R. Merrifield and J. Hally entitled Roman London (London, 1986); a more speculative account can be found in The London That Was Rome by M. Harrison (London, 1971). Then, later still, The Anglo-Saxons edited by J. Campbell (London, 1982) is the best general account. The essays and articles in The Journal of the London Society are of great importance in the study of early London
, but the major source of archaeological information remains The London Archaeologist. The articles and site reports in that periodical are invaluable.

  The medieval city has been the object of much study, and all general histories of England survey its conditions. Contemporary documents sometimes provide haunting detail, and they can be found in The Chronicles of London edited by C.L. Kingsford (Oxford, 1905), The Chronicles of Richard of Devizes edited by J.T. Appleby (London, 1963), Fifty Early English Wills edited by F.J. Furnivall (London, 1882), The London Eyre of 1244 edited by H.M. Chew and M. Weinbaum (London, 1970), Calendar of Pleas and Memoranda Rolls of the City of London edited by A.H. Thomas and P.E. Jones, (London, 1924-1961) and Liber Albus of 1417 edited by H.T. Riley (London, 1861). Later historical studies include G.A. Williams’s indispensable Medieval London: From Commune to Capital (London, 1963), E. Ekwall’s Studies on the Population of Medieval London (Stockholm, 1956), S. Thrupp’s The Merchant Class of Medieval London (London, 1948), London 800-1216: The Shaping of a City by C.N.L. Brooke (London, 1975), London Life in the Fourteenth Century by C. Pendrill (London, 1925) and G. Home’s Medieval London (London, 1927). Especial mention must be made of L. Wright’s Sources of London English: Medieval Thames Vocabulary (Oxford, 1996) which brings the reader right down to the reeking waterside.

  Accounts of sixteenth-century London are of course dominated by Stow’s A Survey of London; the edition by C.L. Kingsford (London, 1908) is still the most authoritative. More recent studies include Elizabethan London by M. Holmes (London, 1969), Worlds Within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century London by S. Rappaport (Cambridge, 1989), Trade, Government and Economy in pre-Industrial England edited by D.C. Coleman and A.H. John (London, 1976), London and the Reformation by S. Brigden (Oxford, 1989) and The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London by I.W. Archer (Cambridge, 1991).