London

by Peter Ackroyd

  Towards the end of the eighteenth century Horace Walpole described a traveller from Lima marvelling at the ruins of St. Paul’s. Shelley looked towards that far-off time when “St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey shall stand, shapeless and nameless ruins in the midst of an unpeopled marsh.” In his imagination Rossetti destroyed the British Museum and left it open for the archaeologists of a future race. Ruskin envisaged the stones of London crumbling “through prouder eminence to less pitied destruction.” The vision is of a city unpeopled, and therefore free to be itself; stone endures, and, in this imagined future, stone becomes a kind of god. Essentially it is a vision of the city as death. But it also represents the horror of London, and of its teeming life; it is a cry against its supposed unnaturalness, which can only be repudiated by a giant act of nature such as a deluge. There may then come a time when London is recognisable only by “grey ruin and … mouldering stone,” sunk deep into “Night, Gothic night.”

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  Yet the term “Gothic” has associations of its own which are no less powerful than those of Rome or Babylon, Nineveh or Tyre. The author of The London Perambulator, James Bone, has suggested that the shapes and textures of London stones might reveal “a Gothic genius loci of London fighting against the spirit of the classic.” But what, then, is this spirit of London place? It brings with it suggestions of excess and overpowering amplitude, of religious yearning and monumentality; it suggests ancient piety and vertiginous stone. In the eighteenth century Gothic acquired connotations of horror, then horror combined with hysterical comedy. All this the city can encompass.

  Nicholas Hawksmoor, the great builder of London churches, defined a style which he termed “English Gothick”: it was marked by dramatic symmetries and sublime disproportion. When George Dance designed the Guildhall in the late 1780s with an elegant amalgam of Indian and Gothic elements, he was restoring a form of extravagance and vitality in homage to the great age of the city. But if Gothic was an intimation of antiquity, it was also an aspect of veneration. That is why the churches of Hawksmoor provide such a powerful statement in the places where they are located, among them the City, Spitalfields, Limehouse and Greenwich. As one eighteenth-century artist, Flaxman, remarked of the tombs within Westminster Abbey, they are “specimens of magnificence … which forcibly direct the attention and turn the thoughts not only to other ages but to other states of existence.” There is that within London which compels recognition as not of this earth.

  Its most extravagant and notable manifestations were in the nineteenth century, however, when the spirit of neo-Gothic infused London. It found its first significant incarnation in the rebuilding of the Houses of Parliament after the great fire of 1834, but by 1860 “Gothic was the recognised language of all leading architects.” It has been suggested that the Gothic style embodied “the influence of London’s past.” That is why the Law Courts were constructed in Gothic style as a way of instilling the authority of time upon the judicial deliberations of the present; it is also the reason why London churches of the mid-nineteenth century were invariably in the Gothic style. Ironwork was fashioned in the same manner, and suburban villas were rendered in what was known as “Wimbledon Gothic”; the area of St. John’s Wood, in particular, is known for its toy or ornamental Gothic. Anything which might be considered too recent, or too newly made, was covered with a patina of false age.

  So, in the nineteenth-century city, Gothic possessed the consolation of supposed antiquity; in a city which seemed to be careering beyond all familiar or predictable bounds, it offered the reassurance of some theoretical or presumed permanence. But sacred images have the strangest way of showing another face. The power of Gothic originals can also be associated with the presence of the pagan or the barbaric. That is why the city of empire was also known as a city of savages.

  CHAPTER 62

  Wild Things

  As there is a darkest Africa, is there not also a darkest England … May we not find a parallel at our own doors, and discover within a stone’s throw of our cathedrals and palaces similar horrors to those which Stanley has found existing in the great Equatorial forest?” These are the words of William Booth in the 1890s. He notes in particular “dwarfish dehumanised inhabitants, the slavery to which they are subjected, their privation and their misery.” In this sense the city has created and nurtured a wild population. The poor of the slums and tenements were characteristically described by other observers as “savages” and even at the time of great national religious revival among the middle classes, when England was supposed to be the quintessentially Christian nation, the working class of London remained outside the Church. A report of 1854 concluded that the poor of London were “as utter strangers to religious ordinances as the people of a heathen country” or, as Mayhew put it, “religion is a regular puzzle to costers.” How could there be devotion, or piety, in such an oppressive commercial city where there was little chance of beauty or dignity, let alone worship?

  The city of empire and commerce contained dens and lodging-houses “in the midst of a dense and ignorant population” where “the most diabolical practices were constantly perpetrated.” “I have seen the Polynesian savage in his primitive condition,” Thomas Huxley wrote, “before the missionary or the blackbirder or the beachcomber got at him. With all his savagery he was not half so savage, so unclean, so irreclaimable, as the tenant of a tenement in an East London slum.” The paradox here is that the imperial city, the city which maintained and financed a world empire, contained within its heart a population more brutish and filthy than any of the races it believed itself destined to conquer. “He thought he was a Christian,” Mayhew wrote of a young “mudlark” or river scavenger, “but he didn’t know what a Christian was.”

  The poorest Irish immigrants sensed the atmosphere. “The Irish coming to London seem to regard it as a heathen city,” according to Thomas Beames in The Rookeries of London, “and to give themselves up at once to a course of recklessness and crime.” So the savagery was endemic, and also contagious; the inhabitants of the city were brutalised by its conditions.

  Verlaine believed that, after Paris, in London he was living “among the barbarians,” but his commentary is on a wider scale; he is referring to the fact that in the alien city the only worship was that of money and power. Again the name of Babylon emerges to encompass this great pagan host. As Dostoevsky expressed it in 1863, on his journey to London, “It is a biblical sight, something to do with Babylon, some prophecy out of the Apocalypse being fulfilled before your very eyes. You feel that a rich and ancient tradition of denial and protest is needed in order not to yield … and not to idolise Baal.” He concluded that “Baal reigns and does not even demand obedience, because he is certain of it … The poverty, suffering, complaints and torpor of the masses do not worry him in the slightest.” His heathen slaves and worshippers are in that sense powerless as, with the break of each day, “the same proud and gloomy spirit once again spreads its lordly wings over the gigantic city.”

  If mid-Victorian London was indeed a city of heathenism and pagan apocalypse, as Dostoevsky suggests, then what more appropriate monument for it than the one erected in 1878? An obelisk, dating from the Egyptian pharaohs of the eighteenth dynasty, was brought in a sealed ship to London; it had previously stood before the Temple of the Sun in On, or Heliopolis, where it had remained for 1,600 years. “It looked down upon the meeting of Joseph and Jacob, and saw the boyhood of Moses.” In 12 BC it had been moved to Alexandria but was never erected there, lying prone in the sand until its removal to London. The monolith of rose-coloured granite, hewn in the quarries of southern Egypt by bands of slaves, now stands beside the Thames guarded by two bronze sphinxes; on its side are hieroglyphics naming Thothmes III and Rameses the Great. This stone, known as Cleopatra’s Needle, has become a tutelary presence. As one French traveller noted of the Thames at this point, “the atmosphere is heavy; there is a conscious weight around, above, a weight that presses down, penetrates into e
ars and mouth, seems even to hang about the air.” Tennyson, on contemplating the pagan monument of a pagan London, gave it a voice. “I have seen the four great empires disappear! I was when London was not! I am here!” The granite has slowly disintegrated through the perpetual influence of fog and smoke, and the hieroglyphics have begun to fade; there are “chips and gashes” where a bomb fell in the autumn of 1917. Yet it has survived. Still buried beneath it, in jars sealed in 1878, are a man’s suit and a woman’s costume, illustrated newspapers and children’s toys, cigars and a razor; most significant, however, for the imperial obelisk, is a complete set of Victorian coinage embedded in its base.

  Other pagan associations are intimately linked with the nineteenth-century city. Here the Minotaur made its appearance. In pagan myth the monster in the labyrinth was each year given seven youths and seven maidens, both as food and tribute. So Victorian crusaders against poverty and prostitution were, in the public prints, given the name of Theseus who killed the monster. Yet it did not wholly die. One journalist in the Pall Mall Gazette of July 1885 compared “the nightly sacrifice of virgins in London to the victims of the Athenian tribute to the Minotaur,” and it seemed that the “appetite of the minotaur of London is insatiable.” It was also described as the “London Minotaur … moving about clad as respectably in broad cloth and fine linen as any bishop.” This indeed is a vision of horror, worthy of Poe or De Quincey, but the suggestion of a pagan beast alive and rampant is one curiously aligned to the nineteenth-century perception that the city had indeed become a labyrinth to rival anything upon the Cretan island. In response to these articles on child prostitution in London George Frederic Watts depicted the horned beast, half man and half bull, gazing over a parapet of stone across the city.

  In his Remaines of 1686 John Aubrey wrote that “on the south side of Tooley Street, a little westward from Barnaby Street, is a street called the Maes or Maze, eastward from the Borough (another name for labyrinth). I believe we received these mazes from our Danish ancestors.” Less than two hundred years later, however, new labyrinths emerged. Arthur Machen, reaching what he believed to be the outskirts of the city, “would say ‘I am free at last from this mighty and stony wilderness!’ And then suddenly, as I turned a corner the raw red rows of houses would confront me, and I knew that I was still in the labyrinth.” Of the labyrinth as a device the architectural theorist Bernard Tschumi has stated: “One can never see it in totality, nor can one express it. One is condemned to it and cannot go outside and see the whole.” This is London. When De Quincey wrote of searching for the young prostitute Ann whom he had befriended, he described their passing “through the mighty labyrinths of London; perhaps, even within a few feet of each other— a barrier no wider than a London street, often amounting in the end to a separation for eternity!” This is the horror of the city. It is blind to human need and human affection, its topography cruel and almost mindless in its brutality. The fact that the young girl will almost certainly be betrayed into prostitution once more conjures up the beast at its centre.

  For De Quincey Oxford Street was made up from “never-ending terraces” and “innumerable groans.” Here the streets tease and bewilder. Of the City it has been written that a “stranger would soon lose his way in such a maze” and in fact the old centre is characterised by its curious serpentine passages, its secluded alleys and its hidden courts. H.G. Wells noted that if it were not for the cabs “in a little while the whole population, so vast and incomprehensible is the intricate complexity of this great city, would be hopelessly lost for ever.” This is curiously suggestive—a population lost in its own city, as if it had been swallowed up by the streets and the stone. A writer at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Robert Southey, had a similar vision with his realisation that “It is impossible ever to become thoroughly acquainted with such an endless labyrinth of streets; and, as you may well suppose, they who live at one end know little or nothing of the other.” The image is of a labyrinth which is constantly expanding, reaching outwards towards infinity. On the maps of England it is seen as a dark patch, or stain, spreading slowly but inexorably outwards.

  CHAPTER 63

  If It Wasn’t for the ’ouses in Between

  In many works of nineteenth-century fiction, characters stand upon an eminence, such as Primrose Hill or Fish Street Hill, and are struck into silence by the vision of the city’s immensity. Macaulay acquired the reputation of having walked through every street in London but by the year of his death, in 1859, it was unlikely that anyone would have been able to reproduce that feat of pedestrianism. Here was a source of anxiety for an indigenous Londoner. He or she would never know all of the city thoroughly; there would always be a secret London in the very act of its growth. It can be mapped, but it can never be fully imagined. It must be taken on faith, not on reason.

  It grew so large in the nineteenth century that Donald Olsen has remarked in The Growth of Victorian London that “Most of the London we enjoy is Victorian either in its fabric or its layout, or at least its inspiration.” And what is that inspiration? A passage in Building News of 1858 put the case that “It is the duty of our architecture to translate our character into stone.” The great rebuilding and extension heralded an equally great destruction of the past; that, too, was part of the Victorian “character.” Its improvements destroyed “the old gabled shops and tenements, the quaint inns and galleried court-yards, the churches and the curious streets that were the existing records of the life of another century.” Yet just as the Church yielded to commerce so the narrow streets gave way to wide and ever wider thoroughfares lined by new dwellings; great hotels, office buildings and blocks of flats, in brilliant limestone or burnished brick or terracotta, rose above the city. Shaftesbury Avenue, Northumberland Avenue, Holborn Viaduct, Queen Victoria Street, Charing Cross Road, all were driven through the capital so that a reporter in 1873 could observe that “old London … the London of our youth … is becoming obliterated by another city which seems rising up through it.” There was a disconcerting sensation, much remarked upon, that a strange city was emerging ineluctably like a phantom in a mist. And it was changing everything that it touched. The concerted impulse to create a gigantic London—to widen streets, to put up great monuments, to create museums and law courts, to drive huge new thoroughfares from one part of the capital to another—meant a chaos of demolition and reconstruction, with entire areas becoming building sites complete with hoardings and heavy machinery. The Holborn Viaduct was built to span the valley of the Fleet, linking Holborn Circus with Newgate Street; the great enterprise of the Victoria Embankment transformed the northern bank of the river and was extended into the heart of the city by Queen Victoria Street; Victoria Street transformed all of Westminster, while Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road created the “West End” as it is commonly understood. The City itself was steadily being depopulated, as bankers and merchants moved out to Kensington or Belgravia, until it became nothing but a counting-house. “This monster London is really a new city,” Charles Eliot Pascoe wrote in 1888, “new as to its life, its streets and the social conditions of the millions who dwell in them, whose very manners, habits, occupations and even amusements have undergone as complete change within the past half-century as the great city itself.” This is one aspect of London which the nineteenth century thoroughly revealed; the city itself changes its inhabitants, for better or worse, and actively intervenes in their lives. From that, of course, may spring a sense of oppression or imprisonment.

  Yet there was a genuine feeling of awe concerning the vast extent of the city, as if a quite new thing had been created in the world. Where some saw only poverty and deprivation, others saw intelligence and industry; where some recognised only shabbiness and ugliness, others noted the blessings of trade and commerce. In effect London was now so large that practically any opinion could be held of it, and still be true. It was the harbinger of a consumer society. It represented energy, and zeal, and inventiveness. But it was also
the “Great Wen,” a monstrous growth filled with “the bitter tears of outcast London.”

  Another aspect of its size, therefore, was the fact that it contained everything. When Henry Mayhew ascended above London in a balloon he observed “that vast bricken mass of churches and hospitals, banks and prisons, palaces and workhouses, docks and refuges for the destitute” all “blent into one immense black spot … a mere rubbish heap” containing “vice and avarice and low cunning” as well as “noble aspirations and human heroism.” But in such a vast metropolis, forever growing, “vice” and “heroism” become themselves unimportant; the sheer size of London creates indifference. This, in a sensitive mind such as that of Henry James, can lead to acute depression or feelings of estrangement. “Up to this time,” he wrote to his sister in 1869, “I have been crushed under a sense of the sheer magnitude of London—its inconceivable immensity—in such a way as to paralyse my mind … The place sits on you, broods on you, stamps on you.” That is another aspect of its unimaginable size; it acts as a giant weight or burden upon each individual life and consciousness. It is not simply that the citizens were literally dwarfed by the huge blocks and intricate machinery of the Victorian city, but rather that the sheer scale of London haunted its inhabitants. No one could ever memorise a map of Victorian London with its streets packed so tightly together that they could hardly be made out; it was beyond human capacity. But a place of such vastness, without limit, is also horrifying. It weighs upon the mind. It may lead to desperation, or release energy.