by Tim Moore
The first electrically lit hoardings appeared in Piccadilly Circus in 1893, and by the time neon arrived in the thirties, almost every edifice around its circumference was already plastered ground to rafters with slogans and logos. ‘For your throat’s sake smoke Craven A’; ‘Persil oxygen eats up the dirt’ – you could say what you wanted, and say it wherever you wanted to. It wasn’t just Piccadilly Circus: every major London thoroughfare hosted an unruly jostle of billboards and hoardings; every bus bristled with strident slogans. Look into the capital’s heavens on any clear and calm summer’s day in the thirties and you’d be presented with the fluffy evidence of the sky-writer’s art. One Old Kent Roader recalled a squadron of biplanes tagging the entire south London firmament with a chain of mile-wide OXOs.
Most creative energy, though, went into the promotion of health and hygiene. The discovery of vitamins in 1912 had kick-started an industry founded on the public’s hope that all manner of conditions could be remedied by a pill or tonic, particularly as this presented an economic alternative to the often prohibitive cost of healthcare in the pre-NHS era (it’s no accident that half the Community Chest penalties are related to medical bills). When you wanted to shift laxative pills in the twenties, you stuck your brand-name under the slogan ‘Civilisation’s curse can be conquered’; Horlicks wasn’t just a nice bedtime drink but a cure for ‘night starvation’. The genre reached its joyous zenith with a campaign for Scott’s loo paper: concerned surgeons bend over a patient on the operating table above the catchline ‘. . . and the trouble began with barsh toilet tissue’.
By the thirties this medical paranoia had evolved into a rather dubious Nazi-style obsession with national wholesomeness. In 1936 the King and Queen attended a huge Festival of Youth at Wembley, watching massed displays by the Women’s League of Health and Beauty and thirty other hiking, cycling and gymnastic organisations. The Times correspondent all but burst into a chorus of ‘Tomorrow Belongs To Me’. ‘The young people were clad as for the day,’ he frothed, ‘and in their flimsy array they marched forth to greet the sun and to gambol in its radiance.’ It could so easily have led to a ruthlessly inhuman quest for a British master race, but in the event we got the Community Chest beauty contest and a complex about personal hygiene. In common with Elvis and my parents, the phrase ‘BO’ is the same age as Monopoly, coined in a campaign to promote Lifebuoy soap. ‘Why is he always alone?’ hissed a snide billboard for Listerine, before answering its own question: ‘HALITOSIS IS RUINING HIS CAREER.’
No one seemed to mind any of this, but what they did mind was neon illumination. ‘Evil red and blue . . . a frightful corpselight,’ shuddered George Orwell; Harold Clunn pompously decried neon’s vanguard role in ‘the uglification of the Capital of the Empire’. Well, you can call me a country cousin if you like, but I love neon adverts. In my ideal urban residence there would be at least one room ethereally lit by a restless animated slogan flashing and buzzing outside the window.
There is something childishly appealing about those luridly over-coloured sixties postcards of Piccadilly Circus, the painfully yellow Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit arrow, the gaudy striptease of those disappearing wavy Coke lines. Whenever we had foreign visitors my father used to drive them up to town for an after-dark sightseeing trip, and I always went along for Piccadilly Circus and those great walls of colour. It was like being in the title credits for the sort of film which would end with a blearily smiling dollybird slowly disappearing down a cobbled mews on the back of a milk float. It was a part of Swinging London that still swung.
Looking up and about me at the large, dark gaps in what used to be a glorious arena of light, it was clear that if Messrs Orwell and Clunn were around today they’d have to go spleen-venting elsewhere. There was a glib McDonald’s arch, a half-hearted Coke roundel and the pixellated simulacrum of Martin Clunes puckering horribly up to a cup of Nescafé. The electric tickertape that had enthralled the crowd on Mass Observation day had been superseded by a punny digital readout so transfixed by the temperature in Caracas that it couldn’t talk about anything else. And that was it.
Piccadilly Circus at night used to be like standing inside a giant pinball machine with three balls on the go and Roger Daltrey battering the flippers. Now it’s like watching a kid over the road turn his PlayStation on. More than anywhere else in London, Piccadilly Circus represented the boisterous commercialised mayhem that was and still is the capital’s defining feature – cluttered, unplanned, perhaps slightly seedy, but as unavoidably alluring as a free funfair. It brought out the country cousin in all of us.
It’s all rather a shame. People – tourists or anyone else – come to Piccadilly Circus to stand dwarfed beneath buzzing towers of electrically charged gas, their faces lit by glowing molecules and childish glee. Without the gaudy vigour, the place has no unique selling point. Like the Criterion’s, the Trocadero’s stuccoed exterior has been stripped of hoardings and banners, but if people want to see a nice clean building with columns on the front, they can walk down the road and check out Buckingham Palace. I can only suppose it’s all to do with this Florentine-style piazza fixation, the concept that anything that brash, that flash is by definition an offence against . . . well, against what, precisely? Let’s get this straight: the Trocadero does not house a museum of rare antiquities, or a children’s hospice, or the tomb of Queen Victoria. No. The Trocadero houses Madam Tussaud’s Rock Circus.
‘I’ll fuck you over! BASTARD!’
When you’re alone after midnight there’s nothing worse than hearing precisely that sort of terrible bellow slur raggedly out behind you. On the other hand, when you hazard a nervy half-glance backwards and note that it is being directed up at the digitised leer of Martin Clunes, there’s nothing better. I had a look up at the illuminated billboard, and was certain I saw that famously fleshy lower lip jabber with poorly restrained fury and frustration. Clunes was taking it, but he couldn’t dish it out.
‘You want a real fucking up? I’ll fucking fuck you up!’
The relevant orator was clearly a straggler from an after-office drink that had taken a drastic wrong turn, his untucked shirt flapping beneath unbuttoned jacket, tie at half-mast. he was red of hair, redder of face, with an empty pint glass in one fist and an abused McDonald’s bag in the other. Hardly a figure to arouse the envy of fellow pedestrians, but watching his right foot comfortably fail to connect with a litter bin I knew that here was a man doing what I should have been, the roaring drunk’s roaring drunk, off on a solo debauch. It was nearly 2 o’clock and I’d managed a single glass of champagne; time, perhaps, to accept that I might have paced myself a little too conservatively. In sadly muted homage I flicked a quick V sign at Martin Clunes and undid the top button of my shirt.
‘Men Behaving . . . FUCKLY!’
I could still hear him at it as I set off into the classy darkness of Piccadilly. Before me the facing ranks of regal buildings – the Deco might of Simpson’s, the balconied magnificence of the Meridien Hotel – tapered distantly to a point a mile away. Any road in London that for more than 200 yards resists the temptation to flail about like a tortured earthworm is very likely Roman; Piccadilly did indeed once resound to the massed slap of sandal on flagstone as legionaries set off towards the road’s far-flung terminus, possibly muttering to each other ‘Silchester?’.
The one-way stream of taxis speeding towards me out of the gloom somehow suggested that everyone else was heading to the light at the end of the tunnel whereas I was off to, well, to Silchester, but having experienced the empty and emasculated thrills of the Circus I knew the tunnel would be more fun than the light. Besides, I’ve always held a torch for Piccadilly. I think it’s the name more than anything. Just as Coventry Street and Leicester Square both slump from the lips with as much élan as anywhere inadvertently twinned with a decaying centre of Midlands industry, so Piccadilly sparks excitingly off the tongue like space dust. It is at once urbane and inane; so suave, yet so silly.
If you don
’t know how it got the name, don’t waste your time guessing. What happened was that in the early seventeenth century the land near what is now the Circus was bought and developed by a tailor who had made a fortune from the manufacture of pickadills – spiked metal collars employed to support the elaborate ruffs popular at the time. See what I mean? It’s like a risibly transparent false definition in Call My Bluff.
As the fields along the ancient road disappeared beneath grand mansions, so repeated attempts were made to endow the street with a more appropriately stately name. For a few years it was Portugal Street, honouring the nationality of Charles II’s missus, but Piccadilly was just too good to waste and by the end of the eighteenth century it had stuck fast. Dozens of dukes and earls built or acquired large and plush residences all the way up to Hyde Park Corner – for a hundred years until the 1850s, Piccadilly was the grandest address in London.
It hasn’t slipped far. Distanced from the slums and rookeries gathered around and within the City’s square mile, Piccadilly was able to avoid the fate of Leicester Square. It was bordered by royal Green Park; the air was clean – the nobs stayed put. Even when shopkeepers inevitably moved in, they were of the fancier variety: Swan and Edgar, the bookseller Hatchard’s, Fortnum and Mason. Alight here for gilt candelabras and sugared swan beaks only, please; next stop, some bird whipping bunnies out of her chuff. Interesting, then, that less than a minute after entering Piccadilly proper I had been mistaken for a newspaper vendor and seen a tramp’s penis. A blow to my preconceptions, but not a fatal one, and confident that these were exceptions to the Piccadilly rule on I strode, along broad and sparsely populated pavements, nosing into the window of J.C. Cording, tweedy shirewear kings of long standing, and getting lightly sprinkled by an unseen hand watering the Meridien Hotel’s lofty window boxes.
Partly due no doubt to its unforgettably foolish name, Piccadilly’s fame is global. I well remember a Soviet border guard happily trilling ‘Peeka-deal-ee, Peeka-deal-ee’ over mine and Birna’s passports as his mate stripped bare our Saab’s door panels, and when in 1992 Hasbro released European Union Monopoly, Piccadilly was one of the three streets selected for the UK’s entry, along with Park Lane and Oxford Street (we made it as the red set; no prizes for guessing who got up early and laid their towels across the dark blues). Global fame attracts global companies, in particular airline offices, and, in Piccadilly’s case, Japanese retailers. For a solid 100 yards the windows promised slim pickings to anyone whose shopping lists didn’t feature a large plastic Boeing or spinach-flavoured lollipops.
Then came a great rush of vintage Piccadilly – the alluring old ‘bachelor chambers’ of Albany, through whose sentry-boxed entrance have passed men-about-town from Lord Byron to Terence Stamp; the columns and courtyards of Burlington House, last of the Piccadilly mansions and home to the Royal Academy; the somewhat overbearingly twee Burlington Arcade, its chocolate-box Regency booths gated shut at night and thronged by day with cashmere-hungry Japanese tourists and silly looking warders known unfortunately as Beadles.
It was gone 3 now. Looking ahead along the cultured frontages and the expansive pavements laid at their feet, I realised what it was that set Piccadilly apart – though so definitively British that it had been the childhood home of our present monarch, the street was also somehow uniquely Continental. Piccadilly is one of the few places in London where the hotels and shops convincingly swank it up big time, perhaps the only street built on a style and scale to warrant an Italianesque twilight promenade. Line Piccadilly with trees and you’d have a boulevard, I thought, and give me a silver-topped cane and some spats and you’d have a boulevardier. You can still feel a chipper dandy strolling down Piccadilly at night, just as you can down Pall Mall by day.
On cue a silver Aston Martin pulled up at a casino over the road and collected a towering blonde in black. As it throbbed gracefully away, four seventy-year-olds in immaculate evening dress strode merrily past with arms linked, blowing cigar smoke lustily up to the streetlights. Piccadilly’s party was almost over, and though I’d predictably arrived too late to gatecrash, what a party it must have been. I wasn’t nearly as surprised as I might have expected when moments later a gold-lipsticked transvestite with improbably prodigious knocker padding and a huge cold sore wiggled to a halt right in front of me.
‘Happy evening,’ he announced in unplaceable Eurotrash, and after a forthright wink embarked on a candid up-and-down sartorial assessment. ‘Trouser . . . gay, jacket-coat . . . boring, oh, and thees, thees . . .’
With painted features puckered in a cheerily impertinent parody of disgust he waggled the luminous fingertips of one hand across his own throat area while directing his gaze at mine. He was of course passing defamatory judgement on my tie, but because those fingers occasionally waggled towards his own lower lip I felt justified in nodding with priestly concern and helpfully finishing the sentence.
‘This cold sore?’
‘Eh?’
‘That mark on your face – the very large red one,’ I said, smiling gently. After my King’s Cross experience this was a mere bagatelle. He looked at me carefully, then with camp malice sparkling in his eyes opened up again.
‘You are . . . coat-pizza homo-trouser man.’
For a while we stood there, toe to stiletto, jovially damning each other’s appearance. Old-lady tights, old-man coat, Dana International’s mum, Sacha Distel’s son . . . if he remembered the word for tie I’d had it, but to his evident frustration it never came to him.
‘OK, OK,’ I said, holding up a stop-this-nonsense hand, then pressing it against my chest. ‘Handsome devil,’ I concluded, before boldly transferring the hand to the yielding mass of his chest. ‘Spot-face lady-boy.’ I tried to walk past but he was never going to let me have the last word.
‘Is very ugly,’ he barked. ‘Next!’ And after a winsome pout he poked a tongue through those gold lips and wiggled off.
Oddly delighted to be playing even a bit part in this peculiar late-night production, I marched smartly on with a wide smile. Something important had happened: I was getting a funny feeling inside of me, just walking up and down. And yet though this was London, at the same time it was not London as I knew it. It was somehow like being on holiday. Striding past the shambolic Iran Air offices, clearly feeling the effects of that fatwah on office cleaners, I wasn’t even troubled to glance across at the Ritz’s invitingly fairy-lit Frenchiness and ponder that I still had – let’s see – three and a half hours to kill before they’d let me in for breakfast.
Past the Ritz everything got quieter: I was into that short hour of sleep London snatches between the departure of those who keep the city up past its bed time and the arrival of those waking it for the new day. But then from here down to Hyde Park Corner, Piccadilly was traditionally seen but not heard, Green Park and its distantly bleating sheep backing one pavement and aristocratic residences set regally back from the other.
The Piccadilly palaces held out longer than most. Last to go was Devonshire House, the opulent ducal residence where the fêted Georgiana entertained Charles James Fox and the Prince of Wales, where later Dickens performed comedies for Queen Victoria, where footmen with solid silver epaulettes ferried guests through the gates. Looking up at the Devonshire House that replaced it in 1921 I surveyed what Harold Clunn described as ‘a very stately edifice built in the American style . . . and erected in the record time of less than two years’.
I think Harold’s praise damns this structure more effectively than any criticism. I promise not to do this too often – try to mourn the loss of every fine old building in London and you’ll end up with a loyalty card at Sackcloth Supplies – but there is something particularly poignant about this case.
No one’s crying for the Duke of Devonshire – he flogged the place to the developers for £1 million, enough in 1921 not just to keep the wolf from the door, but to have the hapless beast dragged howling over a distant horizon by his tail. It isn’t even that the old Devonsh
ire House could have been preserved as another Royal Academy or museum or something – although of course it could have – or even that the new Devonshire House is in any way evil or hideous. Actually, it’s just boring: a car showroom with what looks like a six-floor telephone exchange on top. It adds nothing to London, but doesn’t in itself take much away.
What upset me was a photograph I’d seen of the old mansion in mid-demolition. Partly because of the rubble chute smashed so eagerly through its two-hundred-year-old portico, but mainly because of the proud hoarding that informed passers-by of the ‘MAGNIFICENT building to be erected on this site – SHOPS, RESTAURANTS AND FLATS’. I read that and thought: they really didn’t have a clue.
From just before Monopoly’s birthday until the game was almost old enough to blag early retirement, a lot of important people in London allowed some extraordinarily wrongheaded things to occur. How could anyone genuinely have imagined the new Devonshire House would be an improvement on the old? And yet they clearly did – why else keep the same name? Out with the old, in with the new: that was all that mattered. Everything had been happening so fast up to the thirties – Londoners who were born into a horse-drawn city without electricity or telephones or automatic doors on the Tube were now utterly in the thrall of technology and whatever might be considered progress. There was a genuine feeling that machines were helping mankind build a Utopia, and if the new Devonshire House had lifts and entryphones and car showrooms on the ground floor then the destruction of its predecessor represented a bold step in the right direction. Greed and incompetence were unfortunate enough, but there was something particularly heartbreaking about this catastrophically misjudged idealism.
