London: The Biography

by Peter Ackroyd

  “Peripatetic placards” appeared on the streets in the 1830s. These were such a novel phenomenon that Charles Dickens interviewed one and, by describing him as “a piece of human flesh between two slices of pasteboard,” created the phrase “sandwich man.” George Scharf drew many of them, from a small boy in surtout overcoat holding a barrel inscribed “Malt Whiskey John Howse” to an old woman holding up a sign for “Anatomical Model of the Human Figure.”

  Then in characteristic London fashion the single placard-carriers were put together in order to create a kind of pageant or pantomime; a group of them were placed inside paste models of blacking pots, for example, and paraded in line to advertise the efficacy of “Warrens Blacking, 30 Strand,” the very place where Dickens himself began his tortuous London childhood. Then arrived the advertisement as the horse-drawn gig, surmounted by an enormous hat or an Egyptian obelisk. The search for novelty was always intense and the passion for posters blossomed into the “electric advertisements” of the 1890s when “Vinolia Soap” was hailed in illuminated letters above Trafalgar Square.

  Advertisements in lights soon began to move; at Piccadilly Circus could be seen a red crystal bottle pouring port into a waiting glass, and a car with turning silver wheels. Soon they were everywhere-above the ground, under the ground, and in the sky. The plethora of advertising in London helped fashion Huxley’s vision of the future city in Brave New World where above Westminster “The electric sky-signs effectively shut off the outer darkness. ‘Calvin Stopes and His Sixteen Sexophonists.’” Buses of the twenty-first century, perhaps beyond the purview of dystopian fiction, are now plastered with gaudy images like the pageant wagons of medieval London.

  The pavement artists have had a less glorious career in the city. They commenced their work only when the streets were paved with stone rather than cobbles, and in that sense theirs is a recent London profession. There was a time when beggars scrawled their messages of supplication upon the stones- “Can You Help Me Out” being a favourite expression-but the pavement artist supplied a variant in the 1850s with the chalked words “All My Own Work” or “Every Little Helps. I thank you.” These street artists, or “screevers” as they were once called, had their own particular pitches. The corners of fashionable squares were considered to be ideal territory but Cockspur Street and the site opposite Gatti’s restaurant in the Strand were favoured locales. There was also a line of such street artists along the Embankment, with twenty-five yards between each pitch. Many of these “screevers” were demoralised artists whose orthodox work had not prospered-Simeon Solomon’s career as a Pre-Raphaelite painter had been applauded, for example, but he ended up as a pavement artist in Bayswater. Others were the homeless or unemployed who realised that they had a talent for the job; it required only coloured chalks and a duster, and a scene or portrait could be conjured upon the stone. Some specialised in portraits of contemporary politicians, or of sentimental domestic situations; one artist painted religious scenes along the Finchley Road, while in the Whitechapel Road another specialised in scenes of fire and burning houses. In all cases, however, they satisfied the taste of London by painting in the crudest and most garish tones, although by curious association they are related to the night sky above the city. In The Highways and Byways of London, Mrs. E.T. Cook reported that the sky behind the artists’ lodging houses in Drury Lane or Hatton Garden would often be robed “in intense hues of orange, purple and crimson” as if mimicking their colours. George Orwell, in Down and Out in Paris and London, recalls the conversation of one screever, Bozo, whose pitch was close to Waterloo Bridge. He was walking with Orwell back to his lodgings in Lambeth, but was all the time looking up at the heavens. “Say, will you look at Aldebaran! Look at the colour. Like a-great blood orange … Now and again I go out at night and watch the meteors.” Bozo had even engaged in correspondence with the Astronomer Royal on the subject of the sky above London, so that for a moment the city and the cosmos were intimately connected in the life of one wandering artist of the street.

  But no account of London art can be complete without the history of its graffiti. One of the first is a curse by one Londoner upon two others, written in a Roman hand-Publius and Titus were “hereby solemnly cursed.” It is matched by a late twentieth-century graffito recently recorded by the contemporary London novelist Iain Sinclair, “TIKD. FUCK YOU. DHKP,” and suggests a characteristic of London street-writing. “For the stone shall cry out of the wall,” according to Habakkuk 2:11, and in London the cries are frequently those of anger and hostility. Many are entirely personal, with no meaning except to the one who carved or sprayed the words upon a wall, and remain the most enigmatic features of the city; one moment of anger or loss has been inscribed upon its surface, to become part of the chaos of signs and symbols which exist all around. Outside Paddington station can be found “Fume” everywhere together with “Cos,” “Boz” and “Chop.” “Rava” can be seen upon the bridges of the south bank. “Great Redeemer, People’s Liberator” adorned Kentish Town Station in the 1980s. “Thomas Jordan cleaned this window, and damn the job, I say-1815” was written on an ancient window and on a London wall a Thomas Berry scribbled “Oh Lord, cut them with thy sword.” As one exponent of the art of graffiti put it to Iain Sinclair, “If you’re going to be around the city all the time, you’d better put your name up,” which is the reason why people over many centuries have simply written down their names or initials on any tractable surface with the occasional amendment of “was here” or more frequently “woz ’ere.” It is a way of asserting individuality, perhaps, but it becomes immediately part of the anonymous texture of London; in that sense graffiti are a vivid token of human existence in the city. They may be compared to footprints or handprints, laid into cement, which become part of the city’s fabric. Hand impressions have been found in Fleet Road, Hampstead, as mysterious and poignant as symbols carved on ancient stones.

  Sometimes graffiti have a relevance to the immediate locality-“James Bone is a bad kisser” or “Rose Maloney Is A Thief”-where they serve as silent messages, the written equivalent of drum-taps in the jungle. But there are also more general admonitions. In one of his prose works Thomas More quotes a fifteenth-century slogan written upon many walls-“D.C. hath no P”-which can perhaps be deciphered with the help of More’s summary that it “toucheth the readiness that woman hath to fleshly filth, if she fall in drunkenness.” One may surmise that D.C. denotes “drunken cunts” but the “P” is mysterious.

  Any particular year, over the last thousand, will provide its own litany of curses, execrations and imperatives. In 1792, for example, these were some of the graffiti: “Christ Is God … No Coach Tax! … Murder Jews … Joanna Southcott … Damn the Duke of Richmond! … Damn Pitt!” In 1942 the most prominent graffiti remained “Strike in the West Now!,” and in the later part of the century the two most formidable slogans were “George Davis Is Innocent” and “No Poll Tax.” The city seems almost to be speaking to itself by means of these messages, in a language both vivid and cryptic. Some recent graffiti have been more reflective in tone-“Nothing Lasts” painted upon a brick wall, “Obedience Is Suicide” upon a bridge in Paddington, “The Tigers of Wrath Are Wiser than the Horses of Instruction” inscribed above “Rangers,” “Aggro,” “Boots” and “Rent Revolt” on the corner of Basing Street, Notting Hill Gate-the last being a potent example of the phenomenon of clustering. A wall may remain inviolate for many years but, as soon as one graffito is placed upon it, others ineluctably follow in competitive or aggressive display. Aggression can often be associated with sexuality. Many of these messages have an anonymous sexual intent which suggests isolation as well as desire-“Oh please don’t cane me too hard master … 23/11 I am 30 I have a/place at Victoria SW/I love dressing up I am wearing/pink panties now.”

  The proper locale for these harsh and impersonal messages of love is, naturally enough, the public lavatory. It has become the principal source of all urban graffiti; here, in confinement and s
ecrecy, the Londoner speaks to the entire city with words and signs that are as old as the city itself. One attendant told Geoffrey Fletcher, the author of The London Nobody Knows, that “the lavatory in Charing Cross Road was the place to go if you want the writing on the wall … make your blood run cold, it would.” In fact London lavatories have been notorious for centuries, and in 1732 Hurlo Thrumbo printed at Bethlehem Wall, Moorfields, a compilation entitled The Merry Thought or the Glass window and Bog House Miscellany. We may extract from these some of the more salient and, perhaps, immortal epigrams. From the “bog-houses” of Pancras Wells comes

  Hither I came in haste to shit

  But found such excrements of wit

  That to shew my skill in verse

  Had scarcely time to wipe my arse.

  There then ensues a dialogue or chorus of other costive notes in which “write” is frequently rhymed with “shite” and “London” with “undone.” The anonymous authors’ clothing is “undone,” literally, in the London “bog-house”; but perhaps there is also a more plaintive suggestion that they have themselves been “undone” in London. From the “bog-house” by the Temple comes

  No hero looks so fierce in fight

  As does the man who strains to shite

  and upon a tavern wall in Covent Garden

  There’s nothing foul that we commit

  But what we write and what we shit.

  Sometimes there is a grand riposte to this city scatology. “It is the vanity of degenerates,” one Londoner inscribed, “to write their names here.”

  The other principal source of London graffiti has always been the prison house, from the inscription of Thomas Rose upon the wall of the Beauchamp Tower in the Tower of London-“Kept close/By those to whom he did no wrong. May 8th, 1666”-to the cell of a modern prison where one inmate has written “You may be guilty/But what must this/be like for those/who are not.” These men also have been undone in London. Thomas Mehoe writes in 1581: “bi-tertvre-strange-my-trouth-was-tryed-yet-of-my-libertie-denied,” with words painfully but carefully inscribed with an iron nail. They are still preserved within the Tower, and in that ancient prison are many carvings, crosses, skeletons, death-heads and hour-glasses carved as tokens or symbols of suffering. There are words which are supposed to provide comfort-“Hope to the end and have patience … Spero in Deo … patience shall prevail” which can be contrasted with the graffiti found in the modern London prison-“Home by May … This is where I spent most of my life … It was just one/time I never got away by someone who got caught … Treat me carefully/I’m seven years/bad luck.” In many inscriptions the prison itself seems to be treated as an image of the world, or of the city, which will perhaps lend further significance to another graffito found upon a London wall-“I cant breathe.”

  CHAPTER 19. All of Them Citizens

  There are other kinds of anonymity. Dickens knew of a woman, seen in the streets about the Strand, “who has fallen forward, double, through some affliction of the spine, and whose head has of late taken a turn to one side, so that it now droops over the back of one of her arms at about the wrist. Who does not know her staff, and her shawl, and her basket, as she gropes her way along, capable of seeing nothing but the pavement, never begging, never stopping, for ever going somewhere on no business! How does she live, whence does she come, whither does she go, and why?” Dickens saw her many times; he never knew her name, and she could not have seen the famous novelist as he passed her and, perhaps, looked back.

  I used to pass a dwarf, dressed in old clothes and with wizened features, who in a hoarse voice would direct the traffic at the crossroads of Theobalds Road and Grays Inn Road; he was there every day and then suddenly, in the summer of 1978, he was gone. There was, even more recently, a young West Indian who would walk up Kensington Church Street dressed in silver foil and with balloons tied to his wrists. A gentleman, known colloquially as “The King of Poland,” used to walk barefoot along the Strand in red velvet robes and with a wreath upon his head. He, too, vanished without warning.

  These London particulars have their own locale and are rarely seen beyond it; they are the sprites or spirits of a specific place, and belong exclusively to the city. There was the “musical small-coal man” of Clerkenwell who, after his daily round was over, organised concerts in his lodgings in Jerusalem Passage; he died when as a practical joke a ventriloquist, known as “Talking Smith,” pretended to be the voice of God proclaiming his doom. There was Lord Queensberry, “Old Q,” who every day sat at the window of his house at 138 Piccadilly; although he had only one eye, he leered and winked at every pretty female who passed in the street. And there was “the afflicted girl-white faced and expressionless” who sat for many years close to the Horse-Shoe of Tottenham Court Road, “oblivious of time and inured to suffering through all the noise and tumult.”

  There were always such familiar faces in every locality. Today there are the lollipop men and women, helping children to cross the road, but until the early decades of the twentieth century the best known were the crossing-sweepers. Many crossing-sweepers remained at their posts-or on their particular “property,” as it was called-for thirty or forty years. There was the bearded crossing-sweeper at Cornhill-“Sometimes I get insulted, only in words; sometimes I get chaffed by sober people.” And there, at the corner of Cavendish Square, was Billy who could remember ancient riots-“The mob was carrying a quartern loaf dipped in bullock’s blood, and when I saw it I thought it was a man’s head; so that frightened me, and I run off.” One elderly sweeper “kept” the narrow passage from Berkeley Street into Stratton Street, and wore an old huntsman’s coat and hat. He once came into the police court as a witness, and the following exchange is recorded by Mayhew.

  JUDGE: Are you a field-marshal?

  WITNESS: No, my lord. I am the sweeper of the Lansdowne Passage.

  There was “Sir” Harry Dimsdale of Seven Dials, according to Old and New London, “a poor diminutive creature, deformed and half an idiot” who hawked laces and threads at the turn of the nineteenth century; he followed the same routes, along Holborn or Oxford Street, and suffered the jeers of the children and the watermen who washed down the hackney-coach stands. He had only four or five teeth, but could bend a silver coin with them “when he could induce anybody to trust him with one.” His favourite amusement was to torment children by pinching them or throwing them to the ground, but his chief pleasure was found in drink. He was “helplessly drunk every evening … howling in the frenzy produced by his fiery draughts or uttering the low, dismal plaint caused by hunger or pain.” It is reported that his expression was one of “idiotcy, physical suffering and a propensity to mischief” but the mistress of his wretched lodgings-a back attic laid with straw-reported that at night she heard him praying. “Sir” Harry was known throughout London, and there is an extant engraving of him at the age of thirty-eight; but then he, too, suddenly disappeared. His is a curious story of suffering and isolation, but one with echoes and parallels in the modern city.

  Other eccentric tradesmen led more amiable lives in the street. There was the famous character Peter Stokes, the “flying pie-man” of Holborn Hill in the early nineteenth century; as described by “Aleph” in London Scenes and London People, he “always wore a black suit, scrupulously brushed, dress coat and vest, knee breeches, stout black stockings, and shoes with steel buckles.” This tradesman, with an expression “open and agreeable, expressive of intellect and moral excellence,” would dash out of Fetter Lane on the stroke of twelve noon and run through the streets of the neighbourhood for the next four hours, dodging horses and wagons and coaches, incessantly crying “Buy! Buy! Buy!” He too was famous throughout London, and sat to an engraver with the basket of pies balanced neatly on his right arm.

  Equally notable, in the streets of London, a little more than a century earlier, was “Colly Molly Puffe,” a short hunch-backed man who also sold pastries. He preferred to balance his basket upon his head rather than his arm and,
despite his frail form, he had a stentorian voice with which he sang out his wares. His cry was unmistakable, and he was to be seen at city parades or public hangings, always brandishing a big stick to ward off any thief or urchin who tried to steal his goods.

  Tiddy Doll was a vendor of gingerbread in the Haymarket who wore ornate and brightly coloured dress, complete with feathered cap, and had the distinction of being drawn by Hogarth; he was so well known by Londoners that “once being missed from his usual stand … on the occasion of a visit which he paid to a country fair, a ‘catch-penny’ account of his alleged murder was printed and sold in the streets by thousands.” His actual death was almost equally sensational: during a Frost Fair, when a festival was held upon the iced surface of the Thames, Tiddy Doll plunged through a sudden crack and was drowned.

  There have been any number of London eccentrics and exhibitionists who achieved fame in the streets. There was a celebrated miser, Thomas Cook of Clerkenwell, who on his death-bed demanded his money back from the surgeon who had not cured him. There was a notorious doctor, Martin Van Butchell, who rode around the West End on a pony upon whose flanks he had painted spots. When at home in Mount Street he sold oranges and gingerbread on his doorstep and kept his first wife embalmed in the parlour. “He dressed his first wife in black, and his second in white,” according to Edward Walford in Old and New London, “never allowing either a change of colour.” He astonished his contemporaries by growing a beard-this at the end of the eighteenth century-and, equally astonishing to his fellow citizens, was “one of the earliest teetotallers.”