London

by Peter Ackroyd

  Yet in another sense the halls represented the extension and intensification of East End life in the nineteenth century. Many emerged and prospered in the 1850s—the Eagle Tea Gardens, the Effingham and Wilton’s are of that period—by including burletta performances as well as variety acts and orchestral music. Among those who played here were the “lions comiques,” Alfred Vance and George Leybourne, who sang such Cockney songs as “Slap Bang, Here We Are Again” and “Champagne Charlie.” Vance in particular was known for his “coster” songs written in a “flash” or Cockney dialect, among them “Costermonger Joe” and “The Chickaleary Cove” where humour and bravado are easily mingled. Such songs as these became the folk songs of the East End, animated by all the pathos and diversity of each neighbourhood, charged with the circumstances and realities of the entire area. They remain powerful because they are filled with a real sense of place, as tangible as Artillery Lane or Rotherhithe Tunnel. When Charles Coborn sang “Two Lovely Black Eyes” at the Paragon in Mile End, he recalled “parties of girls and lads of the coster fraternity, all of a row, arm in arm, shouting out my chorus at the top of their voices.” The identification of performer and audience was paramount, so that when Lively Lily Burnand sang about the housekeeping of the poor at the Queen’s in Poplar she was touching upon a familiar subject:

  Don’t forget the ha’penny on the jam jar …

  The landlord’s comin’ in the mornin’

  An he’s so par-ti-cu-lar …

  In this instance, it was the importance of earning the halfpenny on the return of the jam jar to the shop. The common elements of privation, and poverty, were lifted into another sphere where they became touched by universal comedy and pity; thus, for a moment at least, was misery transcended. It would not be too much to claim, in fact, that the halls provided a boisterous and necessary secular form of the Mass in which the audience were themselves identified and uplifted as members of a general community.

  In early twentieth-century memoirs of the East End that life is recorded with what, in retrospect, looks like the precision of all lost things. Along Poplar High Street there were, Horace Thorogood wrote in East of Aldgate, once “little shops of various shapes and heights and sizes” interspersed with small houses “with polished brass numbers on the doors.” Here might be found “a parrot-cage shop, a musical instrument shop,” and, characteristically, “rows of little one-storeyed houses standing a few feet back from the pavement behind iron railings.” In Shadwell the children went barefoot and wore rags but “that was just Irish slovenliness, they never wanted for food.” In the East End, in the first decades of the twentieth century, the public houses “were open from early morning till half-past midnight” with gin at fourpence halfpenny a quartern and “beer a penny for a half-pint. Women would come in at seven in the morning and stay till three in the afternoon.” The East End was also famous for its markets—Rosemary Lane, Spitalfields, Chrisp Street, Watney Street—when the thoroughfares “swarmed with people, and at night flared with naphtha light … you could have walked on the people’s heads all the way from Commercial Road to Cable Street.”

  A fierce and protective sense of identity marked out the East End in these decades. The inhabitants of Limehouse called the people to the west those “above the bridges,” and there was a great deal of “inbreeding” which sprang from territorial loyalties. One isolated corner of Poplar, beside the Leamouth Road, in the 1920s had a population “numbering about 200 men, women and children,” according to The East End Then and Now, who were “members of no more than six families, among whom the Lammings, the Scanlans and the Jeffries were the most numerous. These families tended to marry within their own circle … the community had its own school, two pubs and a small general store.” It was noticed, too, that the Chinese residents of Pennyfields married girls from Hoxton rather than those from Poplar. “Poplarites were against mixed marriages,” according to one observer in the 1930s. It might be surmised that since Hoxton is closer to the City, and to the rest of London, it has avoided that peculiar sense of territoriality or insularity.

  When East Enders became more affluent, they moved out. The clerks of the nineteenth century, for example, took advantage of the burgeoning transport system to migrate into the more salubrious areas of Chingford or Forest Gate. The population of Middlesex grew 30.8 per cent in ten years; Wembley grew by 552 per cent and Harrow by 275 per cent. Only the poor remained in the old centres of the East End, their numbers increasing as their fate grew more desperate. This in turn established precisely the sense of separation and grievance which has not yet been dissipated.

  The cost of labour, in human terms, was very high. The East End tended to wake up earlier than the rest of the city, and at dawn the area became a great plain of smoking chimneys. The factories kept on coming, in search of cheap labour, and by 1951 it contained almost 10 per cent of the city’s working population. In the early years of the twentieth century, Horace Thorogood came upon one East End “cottage” under a railway where he “found a family of six living in one upper room, the window of which had to be kept closed, otherwise sparks from the trains flew in and set light to the bedclothes.”

  The effect of the Second World War surpassed those few disagreeable sparks, and great swathes of the East End were destroyed; approximately 19 per cent of the built areas of Stepney, Poplar and Bethnal Green were razed. Once more the East End was adversely affected by its industrial history; the German bombers sought out the ports, and the factory areas close to the Lea Valley, as well as using the inhabitants of the East End as an “example.” It suggests the importance of the East, in the whole process of the war, that the king and queen visited Poplar and Stepney immediately after the celebrations of VE Day in May 1945. It was, perhaps, one method of controlling or ascertaining the mood of a populace which since the nineteenth century had been considered mysterious.

  Even as late as 1950 whole areas were still characterised only as “bomb-sites” where strange weeds grew and where children played. A temporary housing programme authorised the construction of Nissen huts and prefabricated single-storey dwellings, but many of these prefabs were still in use more than twenty years later. There were other schemes to house the residents of the East End, not least the “Greater London Plan” of Professor Abercrombie who wished to relocate many city dwellers in satellite towns beyond the newly established Green Belt. The proposal was to disperse a large number of residents from Hackney and Stepney and Bethnal Green, yet the whole history of London suggests that such exercises in civic engineering are only partially successful. An equivalent emphasis was placed on the rebuilding and replanning of the devastated East, as if its character might be thoroughly changed. But it is impossible to destroy three hundred years of human settlement.

  For all the redevelopments of the East End in the 1950s and 1960s, you had only to turn a corner to encounter a row of terraced housing erected in the 1880s or the 1890s; there were still Georgian houses, as well as laid-out “estates” from the 1920s and the 1930s. The postwar East End was a palimpsest of its past. For those who cared to look for such things, there were the dark canals and the gasworks, old pathways and rusting bridges, all with the exhalation of forgetfulness and decay; there were patches of waste ground covered with weeds and litter, as well as deserted factories and steps seeming to lead nowhere. The old streets of tiny yellow-brick houses were still to be found, with their characteristic pattern of a small front parlour and a passage leading past it from the street door straight into the kitchen, which looked out upon a small yard; two small bedrooms above, and a cellar beneath. Along the Barking Road were scores of side-streets—Ladysmith Avenue, Kimberley Avenue, Mafeking Avenue, Macaulay Road, Thackeray Road and Dickens Road form one sequence—in which row upon row of suburban villas, albeit one grade higher than the terraces of Bethnal Green or Whitechapel, effortlessly retained into the 1960s the atmosphere of the late nineteenth century.

  The borough of Hackney epitomises sprawl and heterog
eneity. One account, evocatively titled A Journey Through Ruins: The Last Days of London, published in 1991, took Dalston Lane as its centre of enquiry; here the author, Patrick Wright, discovered “a street corner of forgotten municipal services” as a token of civic neglect. Yet its old energies remain, and “Dalston Lane is a jumble of residential, commercial and industrial activities” with factories, clothiers, shops and small businesses.

  One of the most surprising aspects of the contemporary East End is the extent to which it has maintained its economic life in the equivalent of the nineteenth-century small workshop; a number of the main thoroughfares, from the Hackney Road to the Roman Road and Hoxton Street, are populated by store-front businesses ranging from television repairers to newsagents, upholsterers to fruiterers, cabinet-makers to money-exchangers. In the East, where historically land and property have been less valuable than in the West, the relics of lost decades linger and are commonly allowed to decay.

  There are curious regions of the East End where other continuities may be glimpsed. In Walthamstow, just beyond the High Street to the east, some spectral image or atmosphere of the countryside suddenly pervades Church Hill; this is indeed a peculiar sensation since all the streets close to it, including the High Street, Markhouse Road and Coppermill Road, embody the characteristic patterns of the East End suburbs. Nevertheless the old presence of a once rural neighbourhood seems to issue from the territory itself. Many areas in that sense preserve their identity. There is a harshness about Barking, for example, which makes it dissimilar from Walthamstow; here a native population seems to have maintained its presence, with a kind of bleakness or hardness of attitude. The survival of part of the ancient abbey in no way diminishes that atmosphere, which is powerfully sustained by the presence of the old creek from which the majority of the population once earned their living. It remains a strangely isolated or self-communing neighbourhood, where the London accent seems peculiarly thick. In Pennyfields, where the Malays and Chinese dwelled more than a century before, there is now a large population of Vietnamese. Second-hand pornography is sold in Sclater Street, Shoreditch, in what has always been a red-light district. The market of Green Street, in East Ham, recalls the energy and spirit of medieval London itself. In fact the ancient mercantile life of the city has been reawakened (if indeed it ever really slept) in areas as diverse as West Ham and Stoke Newington, Spitalfields and Leytonstone.

  A typical journey around an East End neighbourhood will disclose one or two Georgian houses with perhaps some large mid-Victorian establishments, now turned into council offices or social security centres; there will be remnants of late nineteenth-century housing together with council housing of the 1920s and 1930s; pubs and betting offices, together with the ubiquitous small general store and newsagent; mini-cab offices, as well as shops specialising in long-distance telephone calls to Africa or India; a variety of council blocks, the oldest estates alongside low-rise estates of the 1980s and the nineteen-storey tower blocks of the same period. There will be an open space, or a park. In some parts of the East, the arches beneath the innumerable railway bridges will be used for car-maintenance or for storage.

  Yet there have of course been changes. Poplar High Street was a crowded thoroughfare, with a plethora of shops and stalls and grimy buildings on either side; now it is an open street bordered by five-storey council-house estates, pubs and shops of yellow brick. The sound of people thronging, buying and selling has now been replaced by the intermittent noise of traffic. Much of the East End has followed that example. Where there was once a collection of shops and houses in a variety of styles, there will now be a “block” of uniform texture and dimensions; as a substitute for rows upon rows of terraced houses, there are major roads. The altered neighbourhoods seem somehow lighter, perhaps because they have lost touch with their history. At the extreme western end of Poplar High Street, just beyond Pennyfields, Joseph Nightingale’s coffee rooms, with signs for steak and kidney or liver and bacon, used to adjoin the horseflesh shop of James McEwen which in turn was next to George Ablard the hairdresser; the buildings had different frontages and were of varying height. In recent years that corner has been taken up by three-storey red-brick council dwellings and a small thoroughfare, Saltwell Street, runs by it. The opium quarter of Limehouse is now represented by a Chinese take-away. Here was once a street known as Bickmore Street and an extant photograph, taken in 1890, shows crowds of children posed outside a number of bow-windowed shopfronts; in its place today stands part of a recreation ground.

  It might be concluded that the clutter and clatter of life have gone from these areas, even if they exist elsewhere in the East End. It could also be suggested that the rebuilt or renovated neighbourhoods resemble those within other areas of London; the council estates of Poplar, for example, are not so very different from those of Southall or Greenford. So the aspiration towards civic contentment has led to a diminution of local identity. The greatest contrast of all, evinced in photographs taken from 1890 to 1990, lies in the diminution of people in the streets. The life of the East End has gone within. Whether the telephone or television has effected this change is not the question; the salient fact remains that the human life of the streets has greatly diminished in exuberance and in intensity. Yet it is important not to sentimentalise this transition. If the East seems a more denuded place, it is also a less impoverished one; if it is more remote, or less human, it is also healthier. No one would willingly exchange a council flat for a tenement slum, even if the slums were filled with a communal spirit. You cannot go back.

  CHAPTER 72

  The South Work

  That was how Southwark received its name, from the “south work” of a river wall to match its northern counterpart. Its origins, however, remain mysterious. Along the Old Kent Road, at the junction with Bowles Road, were discovered the remnants of an ancient settlement which manufactured flint tools. “Within the weathered sands,” reported one investigator in the London Archaeologist, “were many finds associated with the activities of prehistoric people.” No doubt it would be fanciful to connect this long history of human settlement with the air of exhaustion, of spent life, which seems to pervade the vicinity. There is, after all, another explanation: the roads of the south were decorated with funereal monuments, and the memory of these important emblems may in part account for the sense of transience associated with the neighbourhood. Three inhumation burial sites have been found close to each other, the first along the present Borough High Street. Their significance lies in their rarity, the only other burial of an equivalent date being close to the Tower of London, but also in the fact that two Roman burials of a similar nature were found a few yards to the south-east. The whole area of Southwark is in fact rich in Roman burial sites, with a cluster of inhumations in the area where Stane Street and Watling Street once diverged from what is now Borough High Street; the lines of the streets still exist under the names of Newington Causeway and the Old Kent Road. Another cluster of burial sites can be found to the north-west, beside another great Roman road leading from the bridge across the river. That is why travellers met in Southwark, in order to continue their journeys southward, and of course it represents the starting point of the Canterbury pilgrimage narrated by Chaucer. There have always been taverns and inns here for the welfare of those passing through; hospitals congregated here, also, perhaps in some atavistic homage to transitoriness.

  The Roman settlement left another legacy. A gladiator’s trident was discovered in Southwark, prompting speculation that an arena may have been constructed in the vicinity where, in the late sixteenth century, the Swan and the Globe theatres flourished. The South Bank has always been associated with entertainment and pleasure, therefore, and its most recent incarnations encompass the newly thriving Globe Theatre as well as the whole area dominated by the Royal Festival Hall, the National Theatre and the Tate Modern.

  St. Mary Overie, later St. Saviour, later Southwark Cathedral, became a favoured place of sanctuary for thos
e fleeing from the city’s justice. So Southwark acquired an ill-favoured reputation. There were seven prisons in the area by the seventeenth century (its most famous, the Clink, gave its name literally to other such institutions) and yet there was continual riot and disorder. The neighbourhood was owned by various religious authorities, among them the archbishop of Canterbury and the Cluniac Order which inhabited the priory at Bermondsey, and yet it was known for its licentiousness. The prostitutes of the Bankside, practising their trade within the “Liberty” of the bishop of Winchester, were known as “Winchester Geese.” So there existed a strange oscillation between freedom and restraint which is, perhaps, not so strange after all, in the general pattern of contraries which covers the whole of London.

  In Wyngaerde’s map of 1558 the area south of the Thames is intimately connected with that of the north by various lines of harmony, rather like the contemporary map of the Underground, flowing towards and over the bridge. A continuous row of houses stretches for almost a mile along the southern bank of the Thames, from Paris Garden Stairs to the great “Beere Howse” just east of Tooley Street beside Pickle Herring Stairs. It is perhaps worth noting that over a century before Shakespeare’s Falstaff appeared at the Globe, a short distance away, his namesake Sir John Falstolfe owned “four messuages called beer houses here.” In similar fashion Harry or “Herry” Bailey of the Tabard Inn was a real and familiar Southwark figure before he entered Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; perhaps there is something in the air of Southwark which encourages the transaction between reality and imagination. On the “Agas map” of the 1560s are shown ponds, water mills, smoky industries, bear pits, pleasure gardens and “stewhouses” like the celebrated “Castle upon the Hope Inn” which still survives as the Anchor.