London: The Biography

by Peter Ackroyd

  Distilling was highly profitable. The trade was “thrown open” and protected from excessive excise; so the great destroyer of the poor and disadvantaged was actually created by those who wished to make a quick and easy profit. Only belatedly did the authorities respond to crimes of violence against property, fuelled by the demand for gin, and to the number of “weak and sickly” children who were proving a burden upon the parish authorities. Some gin-shops were suppressed in 1751. This measure seemed to work. Improvements in the distilleries, closer inspection of gin-shops and increase in taxes eventually resulted in the observation of 1757 that “We do not see the hundredth part of poor wretches drunk in the street since the said qualifications.” The fever passed. The rage for gin subsided as quickly as it had arisen, leading to the surmise that it was some climacteric of the city’s history as if London itself had been seized by sudden frenzy and burning thirst.

  Yet gin and ale were not considered to be the only addictive and dangerous liquids. There was also tea.

  The grocer Daniel Rowlinson was the first man to sell a pound of tea, in the 1650s; fifty years later Congreve described the “auxiliaries to the tea-table” as “orange brandy, aniseed, cinnamon, citron, and Barbadoes water.” J. Ilive, author of A New and Compleat Survey of London in 1762, also blamed the “excessive drinking of Tea” for enervating “the Stomachs of the Populace, as to render them incapable of performing the offices of Digestion; whereby the Appetite is so much deprav’d.” A pamphleteer in 1758 declared tea-drinking to be “very hurtful to those who work hard and live low” and condemned it as “one of the worst of habits, rendering you lost to yourselves, and unfit for the comforts you were first designed for.” William Hazlitt was popularly supposed to have died in Frith Street, Soho, in 1830 from the excessive drinking of that plant infusion. The emphasis once again is on the tendency of Londoners-even imported citizens such as Hazlitt-to obsession and excess, so that an apparently harmless cordial can become dangerous. That is also why London tea gardens soon acquired a dubious reputation. Suburban retreats with agreeable names such as White Conduite House, Shepherd and Shepherdess, Cuper’s Gardens, Montpelier and Bagnigge Wells, devoted to the drinking of tea and other pleasant pastimes, became associated “with loose women and with boys whose morals are depraved, and their constitutions ruined” and were well known “for the encouragement of luxury, extravagance, idleness and other wicked illegal purposes.” It is as if the opportunity for pleasure, or leisure, in London was immediately transformed into excess, viciousness and immorality; the city can never be at peace.

  Tea and gin are still with us, but one eighteenth-century drink has utterly disappeared. Saloop was a hot, sweet beverage made from a decoction of sassafras wood, milk and sugar, and sold for three halfpence a bowl; the name is supposed to have been derived from the slopping sound of those drinking it in the street. Coffee and tea were expensive, so stalls selling saloop were found in the poorer areas of London. In summer saloop was sold from an open table on wheels; in winter from a kind of tent made from a screen and an old umbrella. It was considered to be the best possible cure for a hangover, and Charles Lamb recalled the artisan and the chimney-sweep mingling with “the rake” at dawn around the saloopian stalls; “being penniless,” the young sweeps “will yet hang their black heads over the ascending steams, to gratify one sense if possible.” The spectacle prompted Lamb to reflection upon a city where “extremes meet.”

  In the same period as Lamb wrote his reflections, designed for the London Magazine, the young Charles Dickens entered a public house in Parliament Street and ordered “your very best-the VERY best-ale.” It was called the Genuine Stunning and the twelve-year-old boy said, “Just draw me a glass of that, if you please, with a good head to it.” The spectacle of children drinking in the streets and alehouses was familiar, if not common, in the early years of the nineteenth century. “The girls, I am told,” wrote Henry Mayhew as late as the 1850s, “are generally fonder of gin than the boys.” They took it “to keep the cold out.”

  Verlaine (1873) considered Londoners to be “noisy as ducks, eternally drunk,” while Dostoevsky (1862) noted that “everyone is in a hurry to drink himself into insensibility.” A German journalist, Max Schlesinger (1853), saw the inhabitants of a public house “standing, staggering, crouching, or lying down, groaning, and cursing, drink and forget.” An observer closer to home, Charles Booth, noticed that drinking among women in the 1890s had materially increased. “One drunken woman in a street will set all the women in it drinking,” he quotes one male inhabitant of the East End as saying. Nearly all women “get drunk of Monday. They say “we have our fling; we like to have a little fuddle on Monday.’” All classes of London women seem to have been drinking, largely because it was no longer considered wrong for a female to enter a public house for a “nip.” In the evening, children of the poorer classes were sent around to the local public house to have a jug filled with ale; as Booth reported, “it was constant come and go, one moment to go in and get the jug filled, and out again the next; none of the children waited to talk or play with one another, but at once hurried home.”

  Gentlemen drank as deeply and freely as the poor. Thackeray noted those “who glory in drinking bouts” with “bottle-noses” and “pimpled faces.” “I was so cut last night” is one of the phrases he recalled.

  In each year of the nineteenth century, approximately 25,000 people were arrested for drunkenness in the streets. Yet the conditions of life often drove poorer Londoners into their condition. One of them, a collector of “pure” (dog excrement) told Mayhew that he had often been drunk “for three months together”-he had “bent his head down to his cup to drink, being utterly incapable of raising it to his lips.”

  So even though the gin fever had subsided, and its shops closed down, its spirit-we might say-was continued in the “gin palaces” of the nineteenth century. These large establishments, clad in shining plate-glass windows with stucco rosettes and gilt cornices, were resplendent with advertisements lit by gas-lamps announcing “the only real brandy in London” or “the famous cordial, medicated gin, which is so strongly recommended by the faculty.” The fine lettering reveals the attractions of “The Out and Out!,” “The No Mistake,” “The Good for Mixing” and “The real Knock-me-down.” Yet the exterior brightness was generally deceptive; the scene within these “palaces” was a dismal one, almost reminiscent of the old gin-shops. There was characteristically a long bar of mahogany, behind which were casks painted green and gold, with the customers standing-or sitting on old barrels-along a narrow and dirty area beside it. It might be noted here, too, that social observers believed drink to be “at the root of all the poverty and distress with which they came into contact.” Again the emphasis is upon the unhappy conditions of the city itself, literally driving men and women to drink with its relentless speed, urgency and oppression. Of the skeletons investigated in St. Bride’s Lower Churchyard, “just under 10 per cent had at least one fracture.” It is also revealed, in the fascinating London Bodies compiled by Alex Werner, that “almost half of these were rib fractures, commonly caused by stumbling or brawling.”

  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-ni
ne 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.