London

by Peter Ackroyd

  Of vegetable markets, there is no end. Borough Market in Southwark can claim to be the first ever recorded, having its origins at some time before the eleventh century, but Covent Garden remains the most illustrious. Once it was truly a garden, filled with herbs and fruit which seem uncannily to anticipate their later profusion on the same spot; then it was the kitchen garden of Westminster Abbey, contiguous with the garden of Bedford House erected at the end of the sixteenth century. But the market itself sprang from the Earl of Bedford’s proposals to build an ornamented and ornamental piazza as part of his grand scheme of Italianate suburban development; the plaza and adjoining houses began to rise in 1630, and very soon afterwards the trade of the populace began to flow towards the area. On the south side of the square, beside the garden wall, sprang up a number of sheds and stalls selling fruit and vegetables; it was a local amenity which had the additional merit of being financially successful, and in 1670 the estate obtained a charter authorising a market “for the buying and selling of all manner of fruits flowers and herbs.” Thirty-five years later, permanent single-storey shops were set up in two rows. Gradually, inexorably, the market spread across the piazza.

  It became the most famous market in England and, given its unique trading status in the capital of world trade, its image was endlessly reproduced in drawings and in paintings. It was first limned in an etching by Wenceslaus Hollar in 1647, which work, according to the editors of London in Paint, has the merit of being “the first close-up depiction of one of London’s quarters.” Another work, of the early eighteenth century, shows a group of early morning shoppers making their way between lines of wooden shops and open stalls; fresh fruit and vegetables can be seen in wicker baskets, while a horse and cart are driving away from the main scene. Twenty years later, in 1750, the painted image has entirely changed; instead of ramshackle sheds there are now two-storey buildings, and the market activity stretches over the entire square. Everything is in life and motion, from the young boy struggling with a basket of apples to the middle-aged female trader who portions out some herbs. Here are cabbages from Battersea and onions from Deptford, celery from Chelsea and peas from Charlton, asparagus from Mortlake and turnips from Hammersmith; carts and sedan chairs jostle, while the covered wagons from the country make their way through the crowds. This picture depicts the very essence of a trading city, while another painting of slightly later date betrays the evidence of pickpockets and street musicians among the assembly.

  The drawings of George Scharf, dated 1818 and 1828, depict in minute and various detail the life of the market. The shop of J.W. Draper “Orange Merchant” has a sign painted “yellow and green,” according to Scharf’s notes, while there are drawings of the shops of “Potatoe Salesman Whitman” and of “Butler,” seller of herbs and seeds. There are wheelbarrows filled with cabbages and turnips and carrots and cocoa nuts, alongside mobile stalls with apples and pears and strawberries and plums. One young costermonger’s barrow has a red, white and blue flag flying from it, with the sign that four oranges will cost a penny.

  In 1830 a permanent market, with avenues and colonnades and conservatories in three parallel ranges, was completed; it gave the market an institutional aspect, as well as confirming its status as an emporium of world trade. “There is more certainty of purchasing a pineapple here, every day in the year,” John Timbs’s Curiosities of London declares, “than in Jamaica and Calcutta, where pines are indigenous.” Steam boats carried articles from Holland, Portugal and the Bermudas.

  Order was introduced to the market, also, with vegetables to the south, fruit to the north, and flowers to the north-west. It became customary for Londoners to come and look upon the cut flowers, stealing “a few moments from the busy day to gratify one of the purest tastes.” They gazed at the daffodils, roses, pinks, carnations and wallflowers before once again withdrawing into the usual noise and uproar of the city.

  The New Market, as it was called, continued for more than a century until in 1974 it was moved to a site in Battersea. The spirit of Covent Garden has of course changed since that removal, but it is still a centre of noise and bustle; the hucksters and hawkers are still there, but the sounds of the basket-sellers have changed into those of travelling musicians and the agile porters have turned into a different kind of street artist.

  The great markets—Smithfield, Billingsgate, Covent Garden, the Stocks— were seen as central to London life, and somehow emblematic of it. Charles Booth, in his Life and Labour of the People in London (1903), revealed that in Petticoat Lane, on Sunday morning, could be found “cotton sheeting, old clothes, worn-out boots, damaged lamps, chipped china shepherdesses, rusty locks,” together with sellers of “Dutch drops” and Sarsaparilla wine, bed knobs, door knobs and basins of boiled peas. Here, in the early twentieth century, Tubby Isaacs set up his stall selling bread and jellied eels: the same small firm remains there at the beginning of the next century. In nearby Wentworth Street there were bakers and fishmongers. In Brick Lane were sold “pigeons, canaries, rabbits, fowls, parrots or guinea pigs.” Hungerford Market was known for its vegetables, Spitalfields for its potatoes, and Farringdon for its watercress. In Goodge Street there was a market for fruit and vegetables, while in Leather Lane tools, appliances and peddlers’ wares were sold together with “old bed knobs, rusty keys or stray lengths of iron piping.” Leadenhall Market, established since the thirteenth century, was first known for its supply of woollen cloths while its main courtyard was used alternately by butchers and tanners. Clare Market, off Lincoln’s Inn Fields, was notorious for its butchers. Bermondsey Market was known for hide and skin, Tattersall’s for horses. Fish-wives held their own market along the Tottenham Court Road “with paper-lanthorns stuck in their baskets on dark nights.” The litany of markets is a litany of London itself—Fleet Market, Newgate Market, Borough Market, Lisson Grove Market, Portman Market, Newport Market, Chapel Market in Islington.

  The metaphor of the market has now spread all over London, and across its trading systems, and yet it springs from places such as Brick Lane, Petticoat Lane, Leather Lane, Hoxton Street and Berwick Street. All these, and almost a hundred others, survive still as street-markets, the majority of them on sites where they first flourished centuries before. Here the poor buy at fifth hand what the rich bought at first hand. Some street-markets, however, have vanished. Rag Fair, by Tower Hill, has gone: a woebegone place, where “raggs and old clothes” were sold beside rotten vegetables, stale bread and old meat, it disappeared beneath its own waste.

  CHAPTER 36

  Waste Matter

  What the voracious city devours, it must eventually disgorge in rubbish and excrement. Thomas More, who as under-sheriff knew the malodorous and insanitary conditions of London at first hand, decided that in his Utopia (1516) anything sordidum (dirty) or morbum (diseased) should be forbidden within the walls. In the early sixteenth century, this was indeed a utopian state.

  The sanitary conditions of London in the centuries of Roman civilisation, when a system of public baths and latrines helped actively to promote urban cleanliness, were as good as anywhere within the empire. Yet it would be unwise to depict a marbled city without stain; refuse heaps, containing the bones of oxen, goats, pigs and horses, were found in the open areas of the city still within the walls, although it is likely that semi-domesticated ravens were always ready to consume offending garbage littered upon the street. The practice of throwing the contents of urine jars out of the window is well known, as is attested by numerous court cases. In the entrance to Roman taverns and workshops, however, have been uncovered large stone vessels which can best be described as urinals. Here is the first physical evidence of London’s toilet facilities (in one such site, along Fish Street Hill, was found a bag of cannabis which also testifies to the longevity of the drug culture of the city).

  In the period of Saxon and Viking occupation there is evidence of excrement dropped anywhere and everywhere, even within the houses, which suggests a deterioration in hea
lthy practice. In turn we may imagine the medieval town littered with horse dung and cesspools, strewn with the offal of butchers, with wooden chips and kitchen refuse, human excrement and daily rubbish, generally impeding the “channels” which ran down both sides of the street. Regulations of the thirteenth century ordained that “no one shall place dung or other filth in the streets or lanes, but cause the same to be taken by the rakers to the places ordained”; these “places” were an early version of the rubbish tip from which the contents were taken by cart or boat to outlying areas where the dung could be used as manure for the fields. Pigs were allowed to roam through the streets as natural consumers of rubbish, but they proved a considerable nuisance with their custom of blocking narrow lanes and straying into houses; their place after a cull was taken by kites who performed the same function as ravens in first-century London. Indeed there were laws that forbade on pain of death the killing of kites and ravens, which became so tame that they would snatch a piece of bread and butter from a child’s hands.

  In 1349 Edward III wrote to the mayor, complaining that the thoroughfares were “foul with human faeces, and the air of the city poisoned to the great danger of men passing.” As a result the civic authorities issued a proclamation denouncing the “grievous and great abomination” to be found in filth, dung and other nuisances obstructing the streets. From entries in the Letter Books and the Plea and Memoranda Rolls it is clear that the city leaders, fearing epidemic disease, accepted the need for sanitary legislation. Four scavengers (scawageours) were to be held responsible for rubbish in each ward, and each householder had a duty to ensure that the street outside his door was cleared of noisome waste. There were fines for any citizen found dumping refuse into the Fleet or Walbrook, and a “serjeant of the channels” was appointed to ensure that the rivulets of street and stream remained unimpeded. But old habits persisted. Households overlooking the Walbrook paid a tax or toll in order to build their latrines over the running water of the river, and upon London Bridge itself there were 138 houses as well as a public latrine which showered down upon the Thames.

  Public places, in that capacity, were used more often than private spaces. Pissing Lane, later known as Pissing Alley, “leadinge from Paules Church into Pater Noster Rowe,” may be mentioned, along with two other alleys of the same name dating variously from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries. Similarly there were Dunghill Lanes beside Puddle Dock and Whitefriars as well as Queenhithe, while Dunghill Stairs was located to the front of Three Cranes Wharf.

  The first public lavatories, since the urns of Roman London, were constructed in the thirteenth century. The new bridge across the river was equipped with one of these modern conveniences, which had two entrances, while the smaller bridges across the Fleet and the Walbrook also made provision for them. Against the streams and tributaries there were “houses of office,” too, although many consisted simply of wooden planks with holes carved out of them. More elaborate public privies were constructed, some with four or more holes, culminating in Richard Whittington’s fifteenth-century “House of Easement” or “Long House” over the Thames at the end of Friar Lane. It contained two rows of sixty-four seats, one row for men and the other for women, while the refuse dropped into a gully washed with the tides. Public exposure in the city’s privies, however, could be dangerous. A quarrel between two men in a privy beside the wall of Ironmonger Lane ended in murder. Death came in other forms from the same source. The privy above the Fleet, near the mouth of the Thames, caused much discomfort to the monks of White Friars who in 1275 declared to Edward I “that the putrid exhalations there from overcame even the frankincense used in their Services and had caused the death of manie Brethren.”

  Certain other parts of London were renowned, and arraigned, for their dirtiness—Farringdon Without and Portsoken were known for their dung-heaps and rubbish dumps while the inhabitants of Bassinghall Ward and Aldrich Gate [Aldersgate] Ward were fined for “casting out of ordure and urine.” One may add to this noisome list the place known as Moorfields which, before being drained in 1527, was said to be “a melancholy region, with raised paths and refuse-heaps, deep black ditches, not unodourous and detestable open sewers.” It was a walk, according to one city history, suitable for London suicides and London philosophers.

  The London memoranda (court records) of the fourteenth century are filled with complaints and exhortations. A wall “fallith down gobet-mele into the hie strete, and makith the wey foule … the commin privey of ludgate is full difectif and perlus, and the ordur thereof rotith the stone wallys.” In the parish of St. Sepulchre one Halywell was indicted “for anoyng the feld with donge on both sides horspole,” and one Norton for a similar offence “that there may neythir hors ne cart pas for his dong.” Fourteen households in Foster Lane were indicted “for castyngh out of ordour & vrine,” and in the parish of St. Botolph a nuisance was created by “stuppyng of the water, for by cause that the dunghe and the Robous that is dreuen doune ther-to.” All the cooks of Bread Street were arraigned for keeping their “dung and garbage” under their stalls, while a dung-hill in Watergate Street was deemed to create “ordour of Prevees and other orrible sigtis.” We can hear the voice of Londoners in these denunciations, and join in their very local vision of the “filth that cometh doun be Trinite Lane and Cordwanerstrete by Garlekhith and goth doun in the lane by twix John Hatherle shop and Rick Whitman shop, of whiche dong moche goth in to Thamise.”

  The same kind of complaint emerges in every century, and there is a plaintive echo of these London memoranda in Samuel Pepys’s words from Seething Lane: “Going down to my cellar, I put my foot in a great heap of turds, by which I find that Mr. Turners house of office is full and comes into my cellar.”

  Londoners are fascinated by excrement. Sir Thomas More, in the early sixteenth century, uses five names of shit—cacus, merda, stercus, lutum, co-enum—in his polemical work. These are Latin terms but in the English of the same century homage was paid to human excrement with the nickname of “Sirreverence.” In the late twentieth century those quintessentially London artists, “Gilbert and George” of Spitalfields, arranged large exhibitions of their Shit Paintings.

  The very houses of London are built upon refuse. Discarded and forgotten objects, left among old foundations, help to support the weight of the modern city, so that beneath our feet are copper brooches and crucibles, leather shoes and lead tokens, belts and buckles, broken pottery and sandals and figurines, tools and gloves, jars and pieces of bone, shoes and oyster shells, knives and toys, locks and candlesticks, coins and combs, plates and pipes, a child’s ball and a pilgrim’s amulet, all spreading their silent ministry through the earth. But the city is built upon remains and ruins in a more literal sense. In Chick Lane, in 1597, it was discovered that thirty tenements and twelve cottages had been erected upon a great dump of public refuse, while Holywell Street was built upon a site of rubbish and waste which had accumulated for a hundred years after the Great Fire. Even the pavements of the modern city are made, according to The Stones of London by Elsden and Howe, “with slabs produced from clinkered household refuse by the municipal authorities.”

  The streets also bear the marks of waste. Maiden Lane is named after middens, Pudding Lane after the “pudding” sent down it to the dung boats moored on the Thames. Public dumps were also known as laystalls and there is still a Laystall Street in Clerkenwell. Sherborne Lane was once known as Shiteburn Lane.

  In the period when Pepys was complaining about the substances in his cellar, the privy was being used in most households for kitchen and domestic as well as human refuse. The streets, despite all the prohibitions and regulations, were still offensive “with dust and unwholesome stenches in summer and in wet weather with dirt.” This passage occurs in a report of 1654, and eight years later the city made one of its periodic efforts to cleanse itself with injunctions that householders on Wednesdays and Saturdays should put their refuse in “basket tubs or other vessels ready for the Raker or Scavenge
r”; the approach of his cart or carriage was meant to be heralded by “a bell, horn, clapper or otherwise,” thus alerting the inhabitants to bring out their rubbish. Excrement itself was removed from the cesspits by “night-soil men,” whose carts were notoriously leaky; they dropped “near a quarter of their dirt” and the great eighteenth-century philanthropist Jonas Hanway remarked that they subjected “every coach and every passenger, of what quality whatsoever, to be overwhelmed with whole cakes of dirt at every accidental jolt of the cart, of which many have had a most filthy experience.” It might be thought the Great Fire would bring a speedy and fiery end to the city’s problems of waste, but the habits of the citizen were not to be easily changed. The novels of the eighteenth century pay horrified, if somewhat oblique, attention to the malodorous and generally offensive conditions of the capital.

  Yet if the Great Fire did not cleanse London, it is appropriate that commerce should do so instead. Improved methods of agriculture meant that, by 1760, manure had become a valuable commodity. Since household ash and cinders also began to be employed in brick-making, a whole new market for refuse emerged. Now there came new dealers, competing upon the exchange of the streets. In 1772 a city scavenger of St. James, Piccadilly, reported that he was “greatly injured by a set of Persons called Running Dustmen who go about the streets and places of this Parish and collect the Coal Ashes.” He begged the parishioners only “to deliver their Coal Ashes but to the Persons employed by him the said John Horobin who are distinguished by ringing a Bell.” One eighteenth-century advertisement parades the benefits of Joseph Waller, residing by the Turnpike at Islington, who “keeps Carts and Horses for emptying Bog-Houses.” When rubbish became part of commerce, the conditions of the city were improved more speedily than by any Paving Acts or Cleansing Committees.