London: The Biography

by Peter Ackroyd

  The very texture and colour of the city carried all the marks of its fog. The author of Letters from Albion, written as early as 1810, noticed that above the level of the ground “you see nothing but the naked brick fronts of the houses all blackened by the smoke of coal,” while an American traveller remarked on the “uniform dinginess” of London buildings. Heinrich Heine was the author of one of the most evocative and instructive remarks upon the city-“this overworked London defies the imagination and breaks the heart” (1828)-and he himself observed that the streets and buildings were “a brown olive-green colour, on account of the damp and coal smoke.” So the fog had become part of the physical texture of the city, this most unnatural of natural phenomena leaving its presence upon the stones. Perhaps in part the city defied the imagination, in Heine’s phrase, because in that darkness “which seems neither to belong to the day nor to the night” the world itself was suspended; in the fog it became a place of concealment and of secrets, of whispers and fading footsteps.

  It can be said that fog is the greatest character in nineteenth-century fiction, and the novelists looked upon fog as might people upon London Bridge, “peering over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.” When Carlyle called the fog “fluid ink” he was rehearsing the endless possibilities of describing London through the medium of the fog, as if only in the midst of this unnatural darkness could the true characteristics of the city be discerned. In the narratives of Sherlock Holmes, written by Arthur Conan Doyle from 1887 to 1927, the city of crime and of unsolved mysteries is quintessentially the city of fog. On one foggy morning in A Study in Scarlet, “a dun-coloured veil hung over the housetops looking like a reflection of the mud-coloured streets beneath.” In “the steamy, vaporous air” of a “dense drizzly fog” in The Sign of Four, Dr. Watson soon “lost my bearings … Sherlock Holmes was never at fault, however, and he muttered the names as the cab rattled through squares and in and out by tortuous by-streets.” London becomes a labyrinth. Only if you “soak up the atmosphere,” in the cliché of travellers and sightseers, will you not become bewildered and lost.

  The greatest novel of London fog is, perhaps, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) in which the fable of changing identities and secret lives takes place within the medium of the city’s “shifting insubstantial mists.” In many respects the city itself is the changeling, its appearance altering when “the fog would be quite broken up, and a haggard shaft of daylight would glance in between the swirling wreaths.” Where good and evil live side by side, and thrive together, the strange destiny of Dr. Jekyll does not seem quite so incongruous. Then for a moment the mist melts and the curtain lifts, revealing a gin palace, an eating-house, a “shop for the retail of penny numbers and two penny salads,” all this life continuing beneath the canopy of darkness like a low murmur of almost inaudible sound. Then once again “the fog settled down again on that part, as brown as umber, and cut him off from his blackguardly surroundings.” This also is the condition of living in London-to be “cut off,” isolated, a single mote in the swirl of fog and smoke. To be alone among the confusion is perhaps the single most piercing emotion of any stranger in the city.

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote of “the great town’s weltering fog” as somehow erasing all the signs and tokens of the city, blurring “Spires, bridges, streets, and squares as if a sponge had wiped out London” (1856). Fear of this invisibility actively assisted the programme of building and decoration that marked the Victorian city. Building News, in 1881, discussed the fact that “the smoky atmosphere has done its best to clothe our most costly buildings in a thin drapery of soot … they soon become dark and sombre masses … all play of light and shade is lost.” That is precisely why architects decided to clothe their buildings in bright red brick and shining terracotta so that they would remain visible; the features of nineteenth-century building, which may seem vulgar or gaudy, were attempts to stabilise the identity and legibility of the city.

  Of course there were some who extolled the virtues of the fog. Dickens, despite his lugubrious descriptions, once referred to it as London’s ivy. For Charles Lamb it was the medium through which his vision, in every sense, was conceived and perfected. Where some saw only the amounts of sulphate deposited in the bowels of the fog, particularly in the City and the East End, others saw the murky atmosphere as clothing the river and its adjacent areas “with poetry, as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanile, and the warehouses are palaces in the night.” This devoted invocation is from Whistler, the painter of mist and smoke at twilight, and it contrasts sharply with a comment about the building of the Embankment in the same period as his atmospheric works of art. “Who would think of promenading along the channel of a great hazy, ague-giving river in any case?” But Whistler’s opinions were shared by other artists who saw the fog as London’s greatest attribute. The late nineteenth-century Japanese artist Yoshio Markino noted that “Perhaps the real colours of some buildings in London might be rather crude. But this crude colour is so fascinating in the mists. For instance that house in front of my window is painted in black and yellow. When I came here last summer I laughed at its ugly colour. But now the winter fogs cover it and the harmony of its colour is most wonderful.” It is sometimes observed that the buildings of London look best in the rain, as if they had been built and coloured especially for the sake of showers. A case can be made, then, that even the private houses of Londoners are designed to be pleasing in the fog.

  When Monet stayed in London between 1899 and 1901, he had come to paint the fogs. “Then, in London, above all what I love is the fog … It is the fog that gives it its magnificent breadth. Those massive, regular blocks become grandiose within that mysterious cloak.” Here he is repeating, in more delicate tones, a conversation which Blanchard Jerrold held with that Gothic delineator of fog, Gustave Doré. “I could tell my fellow traveller that he had at last seen one of these famous darknesses which in every stranger’s mind are the almost daily mantle of the wonderful and wonderworking Babylon.” Here the fog contributes to the city’s splendour and awfulness; it creates magnificence, yet, with the suggestion of Babylon, it represents some primeval and primitive force which has lingered over the centuries. For Monet the London fog became a token, or revelation, of mystery; in his depictions of its subtle atmospheres and ever-changing colours, there is also a strong impression that the city is about to dissolve or be hidden for ever. In that sense he is trying to capture the essential spirit of the place beyond particular epochs and phases. His paintings of Charing Cross Bridge, for example, give it the brooding presence of some elemental force; it might be a great bridge constructed by the Romans or a bridge built in the next millennium. This is London at its most shadowy and powerful, powerful precisely because of the shadows which it casts. Ancient shapes loom out of the foggy darkness or the dim violet light, yet these shapes also change quickly in a sudden shaft of light or movement of colour. This again is the mystery which Monet presents; this shrouded immensity is instinct with light. It is prodigious.

  In the early years of the twentieth century, there was a marked diminution in the frequency and severity of foggy weather. Some attribute this change to the campaigns of the Coal Smoke Abatement Society, and the various attempts to substitute gas for coal, but the very expansion of the capital might paradoxically have lowered its levels of fog. Industries, and people, were now more widely dispersed and the intense heat-laden centre of smoke and fog was no longer burning so brightly. The whole phenomenon has been ably reported in an essay, “The Mysterious Disappearance of Edwardian London Fog,” by H.T. Bernstein, in which it is claimed that coal-burning was not directly related to the incidence of fog. Some of the great London fogs appeared on Sundays, for example, when no factory chimneys were in operation. If fog was in part a meteorological phenomenon, it exhibi
ted local and specific characteristics; it particularly affected parks and riversides, for example, as well as areas with low wind speed. It might swallow up Paddington, where no one could see their way, but leave Kensington less than a mile away to its brightness.

  It has been said that “the last real fog was ‘presented’ on or about December 23, 1904”; it was pure white in colour and “the hansom cabmen were leading their horses, lamps went before the crawling omnibuses and some guests … went past one of the biggest London hotels without seeing it.” In fact, throughout the 1920s and 1930s “pea-soupers” descended without warning. H.V. Morton, in his In Search of London (1951), remembered one such fog “which reduces visibility to a yard, which turns every lamp into a downward V of haze, and gives to every encounter a nightmare quality almost of terror.” Here once more there is intimation of fog carrying fear into the heart of the city; it is perhaps no wonder that, when the easterly wind sent the clouds of yellow haze away from the city, the Berkshire farmers called it “blight.”

  Others, less distant, also suffered from early twentieth-century fogs. The Stoll film studios at Cricklewood had to close during the winter because, according to Colin Sorensen’s London on Film, “The fog got into the studio for about three months.” The element of intrusiveness, or of invasion, also emerges here: many people recall how, upon the opening of a front door, draughts of smoke-laden fog would eddy through a private house and curl up in corners. The “eternal smoke of London” found other pathways, not least through the vent holes of the underground system where Arthur Symons noticed how its “breath rises in clouds and drifts voluminously over the gap of the abyss, catching at times a ghastly colour from the lamplight. Sometimes one of the snakes seems to rise and sway out of the tangle, a column of yellow blackness.”

  But perhaps the worst of all London fogs were the “smogs” of the early 1950s, when thousands died of asphyxiation and bronchial asthma. In some of the theatres the fog was so thick that the actors could not be seen upon the stage. On the afternoon of 16 January 1955 there was “almost total darkness … People who experienced the phenomenon said it seemed as if the world was coming to an end.” A Clean Air Act was passed in 1956, as a result of public disquiet, but in the following year another smog caused death and injury. Then again in the winter of 1962 a lethal smog killed sixty people in three days; there was “nil visibility” on the roads, shipping “at a standstill,” trains cancelled. A newspaper report put the facts plainly: “The amount of smoke in the London air was 10 times higher than normal for a winter day yesterday. The amount of sulphur dioxide was 14 times higher than normal.” Six years later there followed a more extensive Clean Air Act, and this legislation marked the end of London fog in its ancient form. Electricity, oil and gas had largely taken the place of coal, while slum clearance and urban renewal had reduced the level of close-packed housing.

  But pollution has by no means disappeared; like London itself, it has simply changed its form. The city may now be in large part a “smokeless zone” but it is filled with carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons which together with “toxic secondary pollutants” such as aerosols can produce what is known as a “photochemical smog.” High concentrations of lead in the London air and a general increase of sunshine in the cleaner air have in turn inspired more contamination. There is a problem with ozone at ground level and the effects of “temperature inversion” mean that the emissions from traffic and power stations, for example, cannot be released into the upper atmosphere. So they linger at the level of the streets. The fog that Tacitus described in the first century AD still hovers over London.

  Night and Day

  A depiction by Gustave Doré of poor vagrants huddled on Westminster Bridge on a starry night in the 1870s; it was said that the number of such vagrants could fully populate an average city.

  CHAPTER 48

  Let There Be Light

  The high death rate in London has been blamed in part upon the lack of natural light. The prevalence of rickets, for example, has been noted in this connection. It is revealed in Werner’s London Bodies that in St. Bride’s Lower Churchyard over 15 per cent of children’s skeletons, dating from the nineteenth century, showed signs of that disorder, while those who did not succumb spent their lives upon “badly bowed limbs.” So there was a yearning for light, or, rather, an instinctive need for light. If it could not be found naturally, then it must be artificially created to satisfy the appetite of the Londoner.

  As early as the fifteenth century lights were established by statutory decree. In 1405 every house beside the main thoroughfare had to display a light at the Christmas watch and, ten years later, the mayor ordered that the same dwellings bear lamps or lights in the dark evenings between October and February, in the hours from dusk until nine o’clock. These lanterns were of transparent horn, rather than of glass. But medieval London remained in relative obscurity except, perhaps, for the light spread by those who carried torches to guide pedestrians or by servants who used the flare of flaming brands to accompany the passage of some great lord or cleric. In the early years of the seventeenth century “link-boys” bearing lights also became a source of brightness.

  The great change in the street lighting of the capital did not occur, however, until 1685 when a projector named Edward Heming “obtained letters patent conveying to him, for a term of years, the exclusive right of lighting up London.” He stipulated that for a fee he would fit a light in front of every tenth door, from six to twelve, on nights without a moon. Heming’s patent was not ultimately satisfactory, however, and nine years later the aldermanic authorities gave permission to the Convex Light Company to illuminate the city; the name of the company itself suggests the development from the horn lantern to more subtle and sophisticated means of lighting with lenses and reflectors. Light had become fashionable. Indeed in the first decades of the eighteenth century, as part of the general “improvements” in the condition of London, the illumination of the streets became of paramount importance. It was still a matter of security-the Kensington Road, a notorious haunt of highwaymen, was the first to introduce oil-lamps with glazed lights, as early as 1694. In 1736 an Act was passed permitting the city authorities to implement a special lighting rate or lamp rate so that all the streets could be properly illuminated each night; as Stephen Inwood has suggested in A History of London, “this gave the City around 4,000 hours of lighting a year, compared to 300 or 400 before 1694, and 750 from 1694 to 1736.” Suburban parishes also began to levy special rates for lighting; so gradually, and by degrees of illumination, London at night became a different city.

  In the early decades of the eighteenth century observers and strangers remarked upon its glare, and upon its “white ways.” By 1780 Archenholz reported that “As the English are prodigal of their money and attention in order to give everything that relates to the public an air of grandeur and magnificence, we might naturally expect to find London well lighted, and accordingly nothing can be more superb.” It seemed that, as every year passed, the nights of the city became steadily brighter. In 1762 Boswell noted “the glare of shops and signs,” while in 1785 another observed that “Not a corner of this prodigious city is unlighted … but this innumerable multitude of lamps affords only a small quantity of light, compared to the shops.” It is entirely appropriate that in these two accounts of London’s brightness the shops, the centre of trade and commerce, shine brightest of all.

  Yet if it is an attribute of London that it becomes continually brighter- at first starting at a slow pace but then gradually increasing momentum until by the late twentieth century it had become almost over-bright-the brightness of one generation will also be the dimness of a succeeding one: the light of eighteenth-century London, the glory of the world, forty years later was dismissed as little more than a toy. In his Memoirs, published in the middle of the nineteenth century, John Richardson declared that “forty years ago the lighting of the streets was effected by what were called parish lamps. The lamp consisted of a smal
l tin vessel, half filled with the worse train oil … In this fluid fish blubber was a piece of cotton twist which formed the wick.” In those days, therefore, the lamplighter became a familiar figure in the streets of London. There is a portrait of one in Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress lighting a lamp at the corner of St. James’s Street and Piccadilly; his face has an oafish, if not bestial, cast and he is spilling oil on the wig of the rake beneath. This must have been a familiar enough mishap upon the streets. Richardson has his own description of the lamplighters. “A set of greasy fellows redolent of Greenland Dock were employed to trim and light these lamps, which they accomplished by the apparatus of a formidable pair of scissors, a flaming flambeau of pitched rope and a rickety ladder, to the annoyance and danger of all passers-by. The oil vessel and wick were enclosed in a case of semi-opaque glass … which obscured even the little light it encircled.” These lamps were rarely, if ever, cleaned. And so by all accounts the great brightness of eighteenth-century London seemed, at least to later Londoners, to be an illusion. The streets did not seem ill-lit to their inhabitants at the time, however, because the brightness of London exactly conformed to their sense of the social milieu. The light is relative to the expectations and preoccupations of the city.

  That is why the great change came at the beginning of the era of the imperial city when, in 1807, oil gave way to gas. It was first employed in Beech Street and Whitecross Street, where now the Barbican stands, but a year later it was used to light up Pall Mall. There is a cartoon by Rowlandson, dated 1809 and entitled A Peep at the Gas Light in Pall Mall. One gentleman points a cane towards the new lamp and explains that “the Smoke falling thro water is deprivd of substance and burns as you see,” while a less expert citizen protests: “Aarh honey if this man bring fire thro water we shall soon have the Thames burn down.” In the same print a Quaker declares, “What is this to the inward light,” as if the progress of technology were itself a kind of profanity, while a prostitute tells her client, “If this light is not put a stop to-we must give up our business. We may as well shut up shop.” To which he replies, “True my dear not a dark corner to be got for love or money.”