London

by Peter Ackroyd

  In the same period the breweries had become one of the wonders of London, one of the sights to which foreign visitors were directed. By the 1830s there were twelve principal brewers, producing, according to Charles Knight’s London, “two barrels, or 76 gallons, of beer per annum for every inhabitant of the metropolis—man, woman and child.” Who would not want to observe all this industry and enterprise? One German visitor was impressed by the “vast establishment” of Whitbread’s brewery in Chiswell Street, with its buildings “higher than a church” and its horses “the giants of their breed.” In similar fashion, in the summer of 1827, a German prince “turned my ‘cab’ to Barclay’s brewery, in Park Street, Southwark, which the vastness of its dimensions renders almost romantic.” He observed that steam engines drove the machinery which manufactured from twelve to fifteen thousand barrels a day; ninety-nine of the larger barrels, each one “as high as a house,” are kept in “gigantic sheds”; 150 horses “like elephants” transport the beer. His awareness of the size and immensity of London are here reflected in its capacity for beer and, in a final parallel, he notes that from the roof of the brewery “you have a very fine panoramic view of London.”

  That emblematic significance was recognised by painters as well as visitors, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century there was established what London art historians have termed “the brewery genre.” Ten years after the prince’s visit, for example, Barclay’s brewery was painted by an anonymous hand; the entrance is depicted, together with the thriving life of London all around it. To the right is the great brewhouse, with a suspension bridge connecting to the other side of the street. In the foreground a butcher’s boy, in the blue apron typical of his trade, stands with another customer beside a baked-potato van; barrels of beer on sleds are being drawn by horses into the yard, passing a dray which is just leaving. In the street, to the right, a hansom cab is bringing in more visitors. It is a picture of appetite, with the meat carried on the shoulders of the butcher’s boy as an apt token of the London diet, as well as of immense energy and industry.

  But there are other ways of conveying the immensity of the city’s drinking. Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Doré visited the same premises for their London: a Pilgrimage—“the town of Malt and Hops” as Jerrold called it in 1871—in order to see the brewing of the beer named Entire which assuaged “Thirsty London.” Jerrold noted that against the great towers and barrels the working men “look like flies,” and indeed in Doré’s engravings these dark anonymous shapes tend to their beer-mashing and beer-making duties like votaries; all is in shadow and chiaroscuro, with fitful gleams illuminating the activities of these small figures in vast enclosed spaces. Here again the life of the city is like that within some great decaying prison, with the metal pipes and cylinders as its bars and gates. Jerrold, like the German visitor before him, looked over London “with St. Paul’s dominating the view from the north,” and apostrophises beer as the city’s sacred drink. “We are,” he remarked, “upon classic ground.”

  The gin palace was supplanted by the public house which was the direct descendant of the tavern and the alehouse. Of course taverns survived in the older parts of London, known to their adherents for privacy and quiet, to their detractors for gloom and silence. Public houses continued the tradition of segregation, with saloon, lounge and private bars being distinguished from public bars and jug and bottle departments. Many pubs were not salubrious, with plain and dirty interiors and a long “zinc-topped” counter where men sat solemnly drinking—“You enter by a heavy door that is held ajar by a thick leather strap … striking you in the back as you go in and often knocking off your hat.” Instead of the gin palace’s long bar, the public house bar was characteristically in the shape of a horseshoe with the variously coloured bottles rising up within its interior space. The furniture was plain enough, with chairs and benches, tables and spittoons, upon a sawdusted floor. By 1870 there were some 20,000 public houses and beer-shops in the metropolis, catering to half a million customers each day, reminiscent of “dusty, miry, smoky, beery, brewery London.”

  A stranger asking directions in 1854, according to The Little World of London, was likely to be told “Straight on till you come to the Three Turks, then to turn to the right and cross over at the Dog and Duck, and go on again till you come to the Bear and the Bottle, then to turn the corner at the Jolly Old Cocks, and after passing the Veteran, the Guy Fawkes, the Iron Duke, to take the first turn to the right which will bring you to it.” In this period there were seventy King’s Heads and ninety King’s Arms, fifty Queen’s Heads and seventy Crowns, fifty Roses and twenty-five Royal Oaks, thirty Bricklayers Arms and fifteen Watermen’s Arms, sixteen Black Bulls and twenty Cocks, thirty Foxes and thirty Swans. A favoured colour in pubs’ names was red, no doubt complementing the analogy in London between drink and fire, while London’s favourite number seemed to be three: the Three Hats, the Three Herrings, the Three Pigeons, and so on. There were also more mysterious signs such as the Grave Maurice, the Cat and Salutation and the Ham and Windmill.

  The variety and plentitude of the nineteenth-century pubs continued well into the twentieth century, with the basic shape and nature changing very little, ranging from the munificent West End establishment to the sawdusted corner pub in Poplar or in Peckham. Then, in one of those paradoxes of London life, public houses became more mixed and lively places during the Second World War. The beer may have run out before the close of proceedings, and glasses may have been in short supply, but Philip Ziegler suggests in London at War that “they were the only places in wartime London where one could entertain and be entertained cheaply, and find the companionship badly needed during the war.” There was an odd superstition that pubs were more likely to be hit by bombs, but this did not seem to affect their popularity; in fact, during the forced absence of men, women once again began to use pubs. A report of 1943 recorded that “they were often to be seen there with other women or even on their own.” “Never had the London pubs been more stimulating,” John Lehmann recalled, “never has one been able to hear more extraordinary revelations, never witness more unlikely encounters.”

  By the end of that war in 1945 there were still some four thousand pubs in the capital, and peace brought a new resurgence of interest. Novels and films have conveyed the atmosphere of pubs in the late 1940s and early 1950s, from the East End, where the men still wore caps and scarves and the girls danced “holding cigarettes in their fingers,” to local saloons where what Orwell described as the “warm fog of smoke and beer” surrounded the “regulars.”

  That emphasis upon conviviality continued into the twenty-first century, with pianos and juke-boxes being steadily supplanted by video games, fruit machines and eventually wide-screen televisions generally devoted to football. With the gradual take-over of public houses by the larger brewers and the establishment of chains in the 1960s and 1970s, however, there emerged a greater degree of standardisation and modernisation from which many London pubs have never recovered. Certain chains, for example, had the ceilings of their public houses smoked or painted brown to mimic the interior of the ancient alehouses, while various nineteenth-century objets and old books were discreetly planted to ensure an air of authenticity. But, of all the cities in the world, artificial history does not work in London.

  Among the 1,500 licensed premises now listed within central London the familiar names still exist. Even if there is no real comparison between “London” of 1857 and “Central London” of 2000, it is at least comforting to find a significant number still of Red Lions and Queen’s Heads and Green Mans. “Three” is still a favourite number, from the Three Compasses in Rotherhithe Street to the Three Tuns in Portman Mews. There are no more Spotted Dogs or Jolly Sailors but instead a number of Slug and Lettuces. There are still Saints’ and Shakespeare’s Heads, but there are now five Finnegans Wakes, a Dean Swift, a George Orwell, an Artful Dodger and a Gilbert and Sullivan. The Running Footman is no more, but there are three Scruffy Murphys.


  Despite justified complaints about the standardisation of both beer and the surroundings in which it is drunk, there is at the beginning of the twenty-first century a great deal more variety of public house than at any time in London’s history. There are pubs with upstairs theatres and pubs with karaoke nights, pubs with live music and pubs with dancing, pubs with restaurants and pubs with gardens, theatrical pubs in Shaftesbury Avenue and business pubs in Leadenhall Market, ancient pubs such as the Mitre in Ely Passage and the Bishop’s Finger in Smithfield, pubs with drag-acts and pubs with striptease, pubs with special beers and theme pubs devoted variously to Jack the Ripper, Sherlock Holmes and other London dignitaries; there are gay pubs for homosexuals and pubs for transvestites. And, in more traditional spirit, bicyclists still meet at the Downs, Clapton, where the Pickwick Bicycle Club first met on 22 June 1870.

  There is another continuity. Recent surveys suggest that, despite varying levels of intoxication through the twentieth century, Londoners have returned to their old habits. It is now recorded that the average consumption in the city is higher than elsewhere so that according to a Survey of Alcohol Needs and Services published in 1991 “one and a half million Londoners may be exceeding recommended ‘sensible’ levels” with “a quarter of a million drinking at a dangerous level.” So the city manifests, as always, the “immoderate drinking of foolish persons.” The names for drunkards and drunkenness in London are many and various—“soaks,” “whets,” “topers,” “piss-heads” and “piss artists” are “boozy,” “fluffy,” “well-gone,” “legless,” “crocked,” “wrecked,” “paralytic,” “ratarsed,” “shit-faced” and “arse-holed.” They are “up the Monument” or “half seas over”; they are “on a bender,” “out of it” or “off their tits.”

  Today’s vagrant drinkers of Spitalfields, Stepney, Camden, Waterloo and parts of Islington, are known as the “death drinkers.” They subsist on a diet of methylated spirits (jake or the blue), surgical spirit (surge or the white) and other forms of crude alcohol. It has been estimated that there are between one and two thousand down-and-out alcoholics in the city; they congregate under arches, in small parks, or on open sites where building has yet to begin; these places are known to their inhabitants by various names such as the Caves, Running Water, or the Ramp. These vagrants themselves have names like No-Toes, Ginger, Jumping Joe and Black Sam; they are covered by scars and sores, blackened by the makeshift fires conjured upon bomb-sites. When they die— as they do relatively quickly—they are interred in the City Cemetery at Forest Gate. London buries them because London has killed them.

  CHAPTER 38

  Clubbing

  On the unhappy night of his drunkenness William Hickey was returning from a drinking club at the Red House. “Clubbing” is first used as a term in the seventeenth century; in July 1660, Pepys wrote that “We went to Wood’s, our old house, for clubbing.” But it was in the succeeding century that a variety of clubs emerged for a variety of members. Addison made the characteristic point that “Man is a sociable animal and we take all occasions and pretences of forming ourselves into those little nocturnal assemblies which are commonly known as clubs.” A club was not very different from a gang, however, a point which the Spectator made on 12 March 1712 in allusion to “a general History of Clubs” then being written. It is suggested that the compendium ought to include a “Set of Men” who have taken “the Title of The Mohock Club” and who set out to terrorise the streets of the city where citizens are “knocked down, others stabbed, others cut and carbonadoed.” In similar vein the Spectator noticed signs of “club” spirit at the opera where the women had placed themselves in opposite boxes with various “Party-signals” to display their loyalty to either Whig or Tory junta.

  This is the context, then, for the drinking clubs of the eighteenth century. Characteristically they met weekly, in a tavern, to eat and sing and debate. There was the Kit-Kat Club of notable Whigs, which met in Shire Lane, and there was the Robin Hood Club in Butcher Row, which included “masons, carpenters, smiths, and others.” The discussions in Shire Lane continued well into the night, but in Butcher Row “each member has five minutes allowed him to speak.” There was the Beefsteak Club, which met in a room in the Covent Garden Theatre, and was devoted to drinking and wit “interspersed with snatches of song and much personal abuse.” The atmosphere of such a place is evoked by Ned Ward in The London Spy: he entered “an old-fashioned room where a gaudy crowd of odoriferous Town-Essences were walking backwards and forwards with their hats in their hands, not daring to convert them to their intended use, lest it should put the foretops of their wigs into some disorder … Bows and crimps of the newest mode were here exchanged … They made a humming like so many hornets in a chimney corner.” In contrast was the poor man’s Twopenny Club where one of the rules declared that “If any neighbour swears or curses, his neighbour may give him a kick upon the shins.” A club known as the House of Lords met at the Three Herrings in Bell Yard; it was made up from “the more dissolute sort of barristers, attorneys and tradesmen.” There were punch clubs, “cutter” clubs for those with boats upon the Thames, and “spouting” clubs for burgeoning public speakers.

  These were centres of argument in the combative London tradition, combining obscene songs and egalitarian speeches in equal measure. They were often known as chair clubs, but there were also card clubs for gamesters and cock and hen clubs for youths and prostitutes. There was a No-Nose Club, and a Farting Club in Cripplegate where the members “meet once a Week to poyson the Neighbourhood, and with their Noisy Crepitations attempt to out-fart one another.” C.W. Heckethorn, in London Souvenirs, intones a litany of other London clubs: a Surly Club at a tavern near Billingsgate, filled with the tradesmen of that quarter who met to sharpen “the practice of contradiction and of foul language”; a Spit-farthing Club, which met weekly at the Queen’s Head in Bishopsgate, and was “composed chiefly of misers and skinflints; and the Club of Broken Shopkeepers, which met at Tumble Down Dick in Southwark and comprised bankrupts and others unfortunate in trade. The Mock Heroes Club met in an alehouse in Baldwin’s Gardens, where each member would assume the name of a “defunct hero,” while the Lying Club congregated at the Bell Tavern in Westminster where “no true word” was to be uttered during its proceedings. A Man-Killing Club which met at a tavern in a back-alley adjoining St. Clement Danes admitted to membership no one “who had not killed his man”; but there was also a Humdrum Club “composed of gentlemen of peaceable dispositions, who were satisfied to meet at a tavern, smoke their pipes and say nothing till midnight” when they went homeward. An Everlasting Club was so called “because its hundred members divided the twenty four hours of day and night among themselves in such a manner that the club was always sitting, no person presuming to rise until he was relieved by his appointed successor.”

  The club tradition continued into the following century with members of the “free and easy” pub institution subscribing a shilling a week; there were also tavern debating clubs, characteristically to be found among such quarters of artisans as Spitalfields, Soho, Clerkenwell, or Finsbury. They were in part derived from the atheistical societies of the previous century, which had met in Wells Street as well as the Angel and St. Martin’s Lane, and were similarly disliked by the civic authorities. Many establishments flourished throughout the early nineteenth century in defiance of official policy, however, among them the Swan in New Street, the Fleece in Windmill Street, the George in East Harding Street and the Mulberry Tree in Moorfields. These taverns became the centre of London radical dissent. In 1817 the Hampden Club met at the Anchor Tavern, for example, from which alehouse issued the first demand for universal male suffrage.

  There is a case for arguing that these societies and tavern debating clubs are associated, in London at least, with the informal debates of the early eighteenth-century coffee house. Such was the formative influence of that institution, however, that it can be held responsible for a club quite different f
rom those which met in Windmill Street or Moorfields. It became known as “the gentleman’s club” which, according to a nineteenth-century account, arose from the “ill-appointed coffee-house or tavern” to effect “a revolution in the constitution of society.” White’s Club, the oldest of these establishments (1736), is the direct descendant of White’s Chocolate-house; Brooks’s and Boodle’s are of eighteenth-century date but the others, including the Athenaeum and the Garrick, are all of nineteenth-century foundation. These more recent establishments combined private associations with buildings which were deemed and planned to be on a public scale. They were designed by architects such as Wilkins and Barry and Smirke, and, with their bas-relief sculpture and elaborate modelling, they resembled large country houses or Italian palaces. They remain impressive principally because of the essential vulgarity of their appearance. In that sense they are very much the stage property of London.

  The endless contrasts of the city can in fact be exemplified by those other gentlemen’s clubs of the nineteenth century, the working men’s clubs, generally held on the first floor of the local public house where the atmosphere was one of unrefined entertainment. Lectures were sometimes given, as in George Gissing’s The Nether World—“What would happen to the landlords of Clerkenwell if they got their due. Ay, what shall happen, my boys, and that before so very long”—but adult education or jolly debate often gave way to “the rattle of bones, the strumming of a banjo, and a voice raised at intervals in a kind of whoop.” In Arthur Morrison’s account (1896) of the Feathers in Bethnal Green, there is a clubroom where “the sing-song began, for at least a score were anxious to ‘oblige,’” although the effect is somewhat diminished by Morrison’s comment that the countenances of those attending were “as of a man betrayed into mirth in the midst of great sorrow.” Here again the importance, indeed the stern necessity, of drink is left unstated.