Soft City

by Jonathan Raban

  Perhaps Orwell himself was the first of these people, when he moved to Islington in the 1940s (though Canonbury Square, where he took a house, has always remained expensively sedate and leafy despite the fluctuations of the neighbourhood around it). The movement really started in London in the late 1950s and early 1960s, with the colonisation of the western side of Camden Town (the ‘NW1’ of Boxer’s cartoon), between Regents Park and the Roundhouse, a great locomotive shed which has since been converted into a vast draughty theatre. Then they went steadily eastwards; across Camden, into Islington, Lower Holloway and Barnsbury; now they are working in a pincer movement south of the Thames, through New Cross, Camberwell, Clapham and Battersea.

  This burrowing out of new postal districts inside the city is like a drive into a new frontier. Like a frontier, it produces edgy and painful encounters with the indigenous population (the sitting tenants, some of whom are immigrants, some Cockneys), who are alternately harassed with eviction notices and raised rents, and romanticised, like Fenimore Cooper Indians, as ‘real’ people. Like a frontier, it offers ennobling privations: few restaurants, poor recreation areas, no delicatessens or antiques shops. Like the telegraph and the barber’s saloon, these first signs of civilisation follow a year or two after the establishment of a new township, when property prices have already begun to rise steeply. Like a frontier, this move is at once a dramatic rejection of an old soft world, and an embrace of an idealised future. Its inconveniences are proudly worn as badges. Its new perspectives alert the frontiersmen to sights they have been blind to for decades. Enervated Georgian architecture suddenly becomes beautiful, after every architectural writer since their erection has glossed over them with a yawn. (Pevsner, writing about Islington in the London volume of the Penguin Buildings of England, sounds antediluvian today; he is bored by the most lovely and desirable squares in the whole city . . .) The Victorian public lavatory, the horseshoe pub bar, the railed verandah, the Edwardian gilt shop sign, the heavy portico, even sheet-metal advertisements for cocoa and cigarettes, turn into prized antiques at the same time as they are being torn down or covered over as vulgar objects in other quarters of the city. The frontiersmen want to conserve the working-class past at the very moment when the working class themselves are trying to escape it. The frontiersmen’s own future, spiritedly antibourgeois, at least in the parental sense, lies in the recreation of a pastoral world in which the trappings of the industrial revolution (for whose attendant miseries many of their own ancestors have been immediately responsible) can be hung as ironic ornaments. The pocky Gold Flake advertisement hangs in the hall, grandly outdoing the framed Whistler reproduction and the 1908 Variety Theatre playbill.

  But decoration is the least important part of the style, and it is done with caution and embarrassment. Its dominant features are bare rectangles and circles, natural materials, a colour scheme in white paint and unstained wood surfaces, a lust for light and air, and a horror of fuss, embellishment and chi-chi. A house converted on these principles has an atmosphere of passionate neutrality; it is a controlled projection of negative attitudes – idealistic, spartan, scrupulous to the point of vulgarity. Destruction is its whole point. The first stage of conversion is ‘knocking through’; tearing down internal walls so that each room is turned into an extended patio, hardly a room at all, except insofar as it is protected (by double-glazed picture windows) from the weather. Out come staircases and balustrades; in go feathery key-hole steps in white wrought-iron. Wallpaper is stripped and replaced by white paint. The floorboards are sanded free of varnish, then sealed and left uncarpeted, save for the odd goatskin rug. Tasselled and richly coloured lampshades are thrown out, and vast Japanese plain paper globes are hung up in their stead.

  The furniture is stripped pine; tables are sheets of smoky glass supported on bare wooden legs and frames; hessian sag-bags are scattered on the floor instead of armchairs. Bedspreads are Indian prints or Moroccan weaves, echoing some distant peasant culture, like the pottery, rough under a thick glaze, looking and feeling like the warty skin of a toad. In a period when technology has been capable of unprecedented, euphoric flights from the structural limitations of natural forms of materials, a period of day-glo defiant fantasy, here is a style which seeks to reproduce the do-it-yourself, Woodcraft-and-Survival air of a boy scouts’ summer camp.

  The clothes favoured by these new frontiersmen are oddly outdoor, more suited to a desert tribe than to the tight spaces of a modern city. They are loose and flowing . . . smocks, caftans, ponchos . . . or exaggeratedly functional (but for what function?) . . . denims, jeans, corduroys. Their cars are grimly economic and ecological, as near to bicycles as four wheels and the internal combustion engine will allow – the Deux Chevaux, the Renault 4L, the baby Fiat and the Volkswagen. Here children play with chunky all-wood Abbatt toys; here girl-wives grill anaemic escalopes of veal; everyone takes the Guardian; everywhere one senses that continuous, mild ironic encounter between the preserved self and the excesses of the loud carnival beyond the white-painted housefront.

  This style is a strategy of urban disengagement; it is a deliberate renunciation of almost every possibility afforded by the city. At the same time it is a wholly urban phenomenon, a case of city people exercising a series of negative options which are options only because they exist in the city. The fluid movement of city life is rejected in favour of the firm anchorage of property, of the house as a machine for believing in. (Significantly, London is unique amongst capital cities in that its middle class regard it as a right to live in a whole house and not in an apartment.) The card-deck of roles and identities exploited by the Krays, the Beerbohms, the Rineharts is held in fear and contempt, as the frontiersmen stubbornly substitute a single style of back-to-first-principles honesty. Here people try to live like Orwell writes: bluntly, earnestly, truthfully. Their style is hatched in anxiety and elaborated in scruples. Its first obvious sign – white paint – stands as a symbol for the rest: white is not a colour, can’t be in bad taste; white is the hue of minimum risk, as near to being discreetly transparent as solid objects can become.

  If the style itself is anxiously regressive, its means of production are emphatically urban and industrial. The demand for plain wood furniture and glass and paper accessories has led to a small revolution in the furnishing industry. Large stores are being outnumbered by furniture boutiques which, like their counterparts in clothing, offer a range of designs within a single broad style. Shops like Habitat, Casa Pupo, and David Bagott Design sell homemade-looking tables and chairs in bulky stripped pine which are actually mass-produced and mass-marketed. All over Kensington, Primrose Hill, and Islington, there are small ‘craftsmen’s’ shops selling roughly identical lines in clear-varnished wood. Stereo units which, a decade ago, used to be displayed in all their technological glory of gunmetal and knurled silver knobs, now go into grainy deal cabinets; and I have seen a stripped-pine fridge, mutedly humming in its mesalliance between nature and culture. Such gestures of simplicity come very expensive; it is only the affluent who can afford to be so loudly inconspicuous. In the unconverted houses down the street or across the square, the working class have to manage as best they can, lumbered with boastful gew-gaws and the arrogantly, complacently de luxe.

  It is a determinedly monist way of living in a city, this style of minimum inflection and display. In a situation where discontinuity is an automatic condition of existence, these are people who have chosen to assert continuity in the face of all forces to the contrary and their attempt has some of the strained air of a moral exemplum. In Boxer’s strip-cartoon, one of the central charms of life in NW1 was its back-door and back-garden neighbourliness, and this has a real basis in social fact – even though, as long ago as 1821, Pierce Egan was able to write, in his Life in London, ‘The next door neighbour of a man in London is generally as great a stranger to him as if he lived at the distance of York.’ Such exaggerated estrangement was confined to the middle and upper classes; but our contemporary str
ipped-pine pioneers have recreated a pattern of street life that originally belonged to the old working-class East End, before tower blocks and rehousing tore out its heart. Their crescents and squares are turning into one-class communities of neighbours. (In an updated version of nipping next door for a twist of sugar and a spoonful of flour, people borrow each other’s secretaries in Gloucester Crescent, the real-life stamping ground of the Stringalongs and Touch-Paceys.) In a city, there is always the opportunity, given money and property, to create your own society, to choose a locality and turn it into a village of friends. Inevitably, that is the prerogative only of the wealthy, as estate agents have been quick to see. The easiest way of making house prices soar is for two people to move into a decrepit square and paint their facades white. The point should be taken within a few weeks, when these ghost pioneers should then be able to re-sell their houses at an amazing profit. But the serious point is that working-class life itself has become much too expensive for the working class to live: all over London, they are being ousted from their close-knit networks of terraced houses by well-heeled people who are buying neighbourliness as part of the property. Community is becoming an increasingly expensive commodity.

  Back to nature . . . back, with love, to the proletariat . . . away from the gross comfort and flash of the old bourgeoisie . . . these are all aims which seem to honourably reject style. They have been carried through with great conviction, too, by people acting on the highest motives, in genuine guilt and hope. And they have changed the face of residential London in the last ten years, given it as piously honest an air as the ‘styleless’ writing of recent English and French literature. Yet this changed face bears all the hallmarks of style in its most showy connotations: it has led to the involuntary displacement of a poorer class, it has added to the vast inflation of the property market, it has been at the core of the cyclone of new ancillary industries which manufacture and distribute all the details of a concrete cosmology – the furniture, the decor, the small scrupulous restaurants, the little foreign cars, the bookshops, the delicatessens, the baby-boutiques. Later in the book I want to discuss the impact of the pioneers on one London square. It is enough to say here that, for a way of life which aspires to transparency, this one is extraordinarily colourful. It also, I think, suggests something larger about our involvement in style in general: that we are, in fact, as style-bound as traditional sociologists have found us class-bound. Righteous disdain for show and imposture tends only to lead us to new and more subtle forms of stylistic self-advertisement, and there may well be something spurious about facile condemnations of the metropolis as a temple of spuriousness. We still find it very hard to face the elementary truth of life in big cities: that in them we are necessarily dependent on surfaces and appearances a great deal of the time, and that it is to surfaces that we must learn to attend with greater sympathy and seriousness.

  FIVE

  The Moroccan Birdcage

  The Metropolis is a complete CYCLOPEDIA, where every man of the most religious or moral habits, attached to any sect, may find something to please his palate, regulate his taste, suit his pocket, enlarge his mind, and make himself happy and comfortable.

  Pierce Egan, Life in London, 1821

  One indication of the intense difficulty we experience when we try to perceive the city is the way in which it irritates us into metaphor. I have already noticed some of the Manichean metaphors which writers in the nineteenth century tried to apply to the city – seeing it as a pustular disease, a giant dirt trap, an embodiment of original sin, or a reincarnation of primeval chaos. These are romantic images, and they stem from the passionate English discovery of an idea of Nature which led the most articulate and outspoken members of Victorian society to reject the city at the very time when cities were growing faster and bigger than ever before. It was an unfortunate coincidence, and we are still suffering from its consequences. It is especially ironic, when we remember the temperate affection for and understanding of city life displayed by eighteenth-century writers. Boswell, for instance, remarks in his Life of Johnson:

  I have often amused myself with thinking how different a place London is to different people. They, whose narrow minds are contracted to the consideration of some one particular pursuit, view it only through that medium. A politician thinks of it merely as the seat of government in its different departments; a grazier as a vast market for cattle; a mercantile man, as a place where a prodigious deal of business is done upon ’Change; a dramatick enthusiast, as the grand scene of theatrical entertainments; a man of pleasure, as an assemblage of taverns, and the great emporium for ladies of easy virtue. But the intellectual man is struck with it, as comprehending the whole of human life in all its variety, the contemplation of which is inexhaustible.

  Pierce Egan’s Life in London, a civilised romp through the streets in the company of Tom and Jerry, two gentlemen of leisure, was far behind its times. It is an expression of an eighteenth-century sensibility which happened to be published in the nineteenth century; and Egan’s image of the city as an encyclopedia was already overshadowed by darker, direr notions. In Cruikshank’s illustrations to the book, the foregrounds, depicting scenes from high and low life, are determinedly jolly; but in the background of the sketches we glimpse a dim grey life of poverty and corruption, as if the tenements behind were pressing to have their portraits painted. The book is a nostalgic tribute to an age of the city which was already passing.

  Yet the idea of the city as encyclopedia or emporium is a useful one, and it might have helped the planners, philanthropists and journalists who, during the course of the nineteenth century, resorted to more and more totalitarian metaphors to describe this impossible unnatural entity of metropolitan life. The image of the encyclopedia suggests the special randomness of the city’s diversity; it hints that, compared with other books or communities, the logic of the city is not of the kind which lends itself to straightforward narration or to continuous page-by-page reading. At the same time, it does imply that the city is a repository of knowledge, although no single reader or citizen can command the whole of that knowledge. His reading, his living, are necessarily selective and exclusive: it is in the uniquely personal combination of entries with which he alone is familiar that his expertise, his grasp of the larger impersonal wisdom of the encyclopedia or the city is vested. One man’s city is the sum of all the routes he takes through it, a spoor as unique as a fingerprint.

  I think this goes some way towards explaining many of the problems we have had when we have tried to understand the structure of the city. It is not continuous, it does not conform to the shape of smaller, more comprehensible models (New York and London are not simply vast multiplication sums of Middletown and Banbury); the closer we look, the more impenetrable and unprecedented it all seems. We are tempted into extreme metaphors, or, like Wordsworth, into helpless ejaculations (the ‘Residence in London’ section of The Prelude is a long drawn out cry of frustration at the delirious chaos which the city creates in the poet’s head); or we come to realise, numbly, that the social systems we know are of little use when it comes to decoding the city, and we go off to exotic foreign parts in search of systems which seem to make a better fit.

  This is just what Mayhew does in his preface to London Labour and the London Poor (1851), a part of the book which most modern readers skip, to get to the brilliant documentary portraiture in the middle. The theories which Mayhew expounded in his preface, which were intended as a serious contribution to anthropological science, now sound a little dotty, but they are worth looking at. Whatever their intrinsic worth, they formed the conceptual scaffolding of Mayhew’s survey, and enabled him to write the classic book about the city at a time when most observers were only able to work themselves into fits of apoplectic statistics punctuated by intervals of hellfire rhetoric.

  When Mayhew looked at the swarming street-life of nineteenth-century London, he saw that it eluded all traditional western classifications of society. It was not a
proletarian ‘mass’ (even Frederick Engels, in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, failed to make the idea of the ‘mass’ convincing – his cities are populated by conditions rather than people); there were far too many evident distinctions of status and style for that. Nor was it a tidal accumulation of members of the working class, in any sense of the expression which would have been meaningful to, say, George Eliot, Mrs Gaskell or Charles Kingsley: the people Mayhew saw were invincibly alien – untempted by the charms of evening institutes, self-help, union organisation, or edifying talks with missionary clergymen. They were pagan, superstitious, hostile, and fatalist. They spoke in a thieves’ slang which sounded frighteningly like the beginning of some primitive foreign language. They lived, apparently quite contentedly, in areas of the city which were disgusting and taboo to decent people; they collected dogs’ dung off the pavements and tramped in thigh-boots up evil-smelling sewers. They were feckless, without religion, they had lost large parts of their families, they seemed dangerously indifferent to the systems of deference and order by which English society had been traditionally maintained. If the image of the native in the Africa of Empire was of a grinning black simpleton whose worst faults were his laziness and stupidity – or of a crazed Hottentot brandishing a wooden spear – the street people of London presented a face that was more inscrutably foreign, more complex, ultimately more menacing. To talk of ‘Darkest London’ (a phrase used thirty years after Mayhew’s survey) as if it was like an African jungle was more of an understatement than an exaggeration. London was, in many ways, a far darker continent.