London: The Biography

by Peter Ackroyd

  There were nineteenth-century alleys and courts which gave an immediate sensation of penury and wickedness. The air was “poisonous with miasma and nauseous with dank and dismal stenches,” remarked Charles Manby Smith in The Little World of London. “Rags and brown paper substitute half the glass of the windows, and what is left is so crusted with dirt that it shuts out the light it was intended to admit.” Andrew Mearns, in his Bitter Cry of Outcast London, records that “You have to ascend rotten staircases, which threaten to give way beneath every step … You have to grope your way along dark and filthy passages swarming with vermin.” Who can say what mark such places leave upon the city? “In that close corner where the roofs shrink down and cower together as if to hide their secrets from the handsome street hard by, there are such dark crimes, such miseries and horrors, as could hardly be told in whispers.”

  The area in the vicinity of prisons has a strangely oppressive and clandestine atmosphere. This is perhaps why the entire area of Southwark and the Borough has for centuries conveyed an impression of meanness and mournfulness. There have been many prisons in the vicinity, the Marshalsea and the King’s Bench among them, and “there is no place like this in the suburbs of London,” according to Walford’s Old and New London, “a spot that looks so murderous, so melancholy and so miserable … There is a smell of past ages about these ancient courts, like that which arises from decay-a murky closeness … and all old things had fallen and died just as they were blown together and left to perish.” And so it remains today, with an atmosphere quite unlike that of any other part of London. The area of East Acton, beside the prison of Wormwood Scrubs, is an example of a modern neighbourhood that is enveloped by the shadow of the gaol.

  Death can cast its own shadow over a specific locale. Viaducts and crossroads can also be objects of inexplicable gloom. One young Londoner of the early twentieth century, Richard Church, recalled a crossroads south of the river near the Battersea Road, “a crossroads called The Latchmere, a sinister junction that always filled me with dread.”

  There are other streets and areas that seem to emanate misery. Along the Embankment there have always been iron seats at regular intervals, and here in the evening or at night you will find solitary figures sitting and looking down at the river or up at the sky. In 1908 H.G. Wells walked beside them and noticed “a poor old woman with a shameful battered straw hat awry over her drowsing face, now a young clerk staring before him at despair; now a filthy tramp, and now a bearded frock-coated collarless respectability; I remember particularly one ghastly long white neck and white face that lopped backward, choked in some nightmare.” The tramps are still there but more disquieting are the young who often sit in some daze of not belonging anywhere. There are middle-aged men in respectable clothes so worn down that their compulsion to wear them provokes pity; and there are old women with their worldly possessions in plastic carrier bags. The Embankment is a haven for them all, and will no doubt continue to be so for many centuries.

  The small streets beside Drury Lane were renowned for their misery. Summer Gardens, in winter, was a picture of urban desolation with its gutters filled with frozen dirt. It was the abode of costers, and the narrow road was littered with paper wrappings from the oranges upon their barrows. Charles Booth noted that “In one street is the body of a dead dog and near by two dead cats which lie as though they had slain each other. All three had been crushed flat by the traffic which has gone over them and they, like everything else, are frozen and harmless.” There was also a great quantity of scraps and bread crumbs strewn over the road which, according to Booth, is “the surest sign of extreme poverty all over London.”

  There was also the notorious Whitecross Street, once Whitecross Place, with its gaol blighting the vicinity. “It is said, God made everything. I don’t believe it; He never made Whitecross Place.” And if God did not, who did? Who is the “author of filthy lanes and death-breeding alleys?” Of Clifford’s Inn, in Chancery Lane, long known for its legal obfuscation and delay, Walford states: “I should say that more misery has emanated from this small spot than from any one of the most populous counties in England.” Only a gate and passage now remain; some flats were built over the ancient quadrangle which, in 1913, Virginia and Leonard Woolf found to be “incredibly draughty and dirty … and all night long there fell a slow gentle rain of smuts so that, if you sat writing by an open window, a thin veil of smuts covered the paper before you had finished a page.”

  The vicinity of Old St. Pancras, with the graveyard as its centre, has been an area of dereliction for many centuries. Norden, in the sixteenth century, cautioned “Not to walk there late”; in the early years of the twenty-first century it is encompassed by railway arches within which small garages and car repairers have set up their trades. Much of it remains waste ground. Swain’s Lane, leading down to the great mound known as “Parliament Hill” on Hampstead Heath from the walls of Highgate Cemetery, is considered to be unfortunate. The local press and local historians have investigated the condition of the place without notable success, except for certain inexplicable or at least unexplained “sightings”: “I have seen what appeared to be a ghost like figure inside the gates at the top of Swains Lane.” In the weeks after this report appeared in the Hampstead and Highgate Express, in February 1970, other local correspondents conveyed their apprehension: “My fiancee and I spotted a most unusual form about a year ago. It just seemed to glide across the path. I am glad somebody also has spotted it … To my knowledge the ghost always takes the form of a pale figure and has been appearing for several years … a tall man in a hat who walks across Swains Lane … Suddenly from the corner of my eye I saw something move … which seemed to be walking towards us from the gates, sent us running up Swains Lane as fast as we could … I have also had a strange happening at the lower end of Swains Lane … My advice is to avoid Swains Lane during dark evenings, if at all possible.”

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  Yet there are also areas of peacefulness and care. The old Foundling Hospital in Coram Fields has long been demolished, but on the perimeter of its site is now the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children. Wakley Street, a short and narrow thoroughfare between Goswell Road and the City Road, has on one side the headquarters of the National Children’s Bureau and on the other the National Canine Defence League.

  In another context it is perhaps encouraging to note that the pitches of puppet-shows were set upon a fixed local abode for decades, and that together they form a kind of charmed circle around the centre of London-Holborn Bridge, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Covent Garden, Charing Cross, Salisbury Change and the Fleet Bridge.

  On the perimeter of this circle lies Fountain Court, amid the buildings of the Temple; there has been a small fountain there for three hundred years, commemorated by writers as diverse as Dickens and Verlaine, while the softness and serenity of this small spot have been experienced by many generations. The fountain and its pool were once square-fenced with palisades, then encircled by iron railings, but now stand unbarred; whether in a square, or a round, or open on all sides, the fountain plays on, and its atmosphere has remained constantly evocative. One Londoner came here as a schoolboy, with no knowledge of its history or its associations, and immediately fell under the spell of its enchantment; it was as if innumerable good acts or kind words had emerged here as calmly and as quietly as the little fountain itself. At last, in these pages, he has the chance of recording his debt.

  If persistence through time can create harmony and charity, then the church of St. Bride’s-only a few yards from Fountain Court-has some claim to good fortune. A prehistoric ritual site, as well as evidence of a Roman temple and wooden Saxon church, have been found within its grounds. So the various forms of divinity have been venerated on one spot for many thousands of years. London is blessed as well as cursed.

  CHAPTER 54

  Knowledge Is Power

  There was, in the city, another way of opening the gate of heaven. The pursuit of knowledge has a
lways been one of the city’s defining characteristics, even though it may take unfamiliar forms. In the reign of Edward III a man was taken “practising with a dead man’s head, and brought to the bar at the King’s Bench, where, after abjuration of his art, his trinkets were taken from him, carried to Tothill, and burned before his face.” During the reign of Richard I one Raulf Wigtoft, chaplain to the archbishop of York, “had provided a girdle and ring, cunningly intoxicated, wherewith he meant to have destroyed Simon [the dean of York] and others, but his messenger was intercepted, and his girdle and ring burned at this place before the people.” “This place” was again Tothill which is supposed to have been the site of druid worship; the tools of conjurors and alchemists were no doubt traditionally destroyed here because it was considered an area of more powerful magic.

  But in London it is impossible to distinguish magic from other versions of intellectual and mechanical aptitude. Dr. Dee, the great Elizabeth magus of Mortlake, for example, was an engineer and a geographer as well as an alchemist. In 1312, Raymond Lully, attracted by its scientific reputation, came to London, where he practised alchemy both in Westminster Abbey and the Tower. The magician Cornelius Agrippa arrived in the city at the end of the fifteenth century, in order to associate with the great divines and philosophers of the period; he struck up a particular friendship with John Colet, dean of St. Paul’s and founder of St. Paul’s school, who had become interested in magic during his Italian travels. An alchemist named Hugh Draper was imprisoned within the Salt Tower of the Tower of London for sorcery and magic; he inscribed upon his cell wall a great horoscope, which he dated on 30 May 1561, and then added that he had “MADE THIS SPHEER” with his own hands.

  By chance, or coincidence, many astrologers came to inhabit Lambeth. The name itself, however, may have drawn them. Beth-el was in Hebrew the name for a sacred place, here fortuitously connected with the Lamb of God. At Tradescant’s house in south Lambeth dwelled Elias Ashmole, who convinced John Aubrey of the powers of astrology. The interment of Simon Forman, the great Elizabethan magus, is entered within the Lambeth parish registers. Lully stated that Forman wrote in a book, found among his possessions, “this I made the devil write with his own hand in Lambeth Fields, 1569, in June or July, as I now remember.” Captain Bubb, who was a contemporary of Forman, dwelled in Lambeth Marsh where he “resolved horary questions astrologically,” a pursuit which led him eventually to the pillory. At the north-east corner of Calcott Alley, in Lambeth, lived Francis Moore, an astrologer and physician, who has now entered the realm of the immortals as the author of the almanac which bears his name. In Lambeth there were many rare devices. In the collection of Tradescant, later to become a museum in the area, were gathered salamanders and “Easter egges of the Patriarchs of Jerusalem,” dragons two inches long and two feathers from a phoenix, a piece of stone from the tomb of John the Baptist and “Blood that rained in the Isle of Wight, attested by Sir Jo. Oglander,” a white blackbird and “halfe a hasle-nut with seventy pieces of household stuffe in it.” Those were once the sights of Lambeth.

  The close associations between alchemy and the beginnings of science were also present in the very heart of London. When Newton came up to the city in order to purchase the material for his researches, he took the coach to the Swan Tavern in Grays Inn Lane before walking or riding to Little Britain. Here, through a bookseller called William Cooper, he bought such texts of alchemical knowledge as Zetner’s Theatrum Chemicum, and Ripley Reviv’d by the London alchemist George Starkey. In the process, Newton became acquainted with a secret group of London magicians and astrologers. Many of the original founders of the Royal Society, which in later days was explicitly associated with “modern” scientific research and knowledge, were in fact part of the “Invisible College” of adepts who practised alchemy as well as mechanical philosophy. They were part of that tradition adumbrated by John Dee which saw no necessary disparity between the various forms of occult and experimental understanding. Samuel Hartlib was the prime mover among a group of London experimenters who wished to marry rationality and system with alchemy in order to create a practical magic; among his friends and supporters were Robert Boyle, Kenelm Digby and Isaac Newton himself. They corresponded by means of codenames, and used pseudonyms in the publication of their work; that of Newton was “Jeova Sanctus Unus.”

  Yet there emerged out of this a society which was, in the words of Macaulay, “destined to be a chief agent in a long series of glorious and salutary reforms.” The Royal Society held its first meetings in Gresham House in Bishopsgate before removing to Crane Court off Fleet Street and beside Fetter Lane; on the nights upon which the members met, a lamp was hung out over the entrance to the court from Fleet Street. The pragmatism and energy of their consultations are evident in some of their earliest labours-“to promote inoculation … electrical experiments on fourteen miles of wire near Shooters Hill … ventilation apropos of gaol feaver … discussion on Cavendish’s improved thermometers.” Not all the experimenters were of London, and not all of them lived in London, but the city became the chief centre of that empirical philosophy and practical experiment which developed out of alchemical research. The pragmatic spirit of London science must be emphasised in all these varied and various areas; it is the spirit that has pervaded its learning ever since.

  There were experiments in agriculture and in horticulture; medicine “became an experimental and progressive science,” and the example of the pestilence of 1665 led the members of the society to examine “the defective architecture, draining and ventilation of the capital.” Sir William Petty created the science of political arithmetic, so that we might plausibly suggest London as the nurse of statistical enquiry. It was another form of understanding, and controlling, the population. Yet in a city of commerce the introduction of statistics also had a financial advantage; the Board of Customs in 1696 represented to the Treasury “the need they felt to collect certain basic material if they were able ‘to make a balance of the trade between this Kingdom and any part of the world.’” Newton himself spent many of his latter years as Warden of the Mint, in which capacity he refined and ordered the currency of the kingdom. He brought to the manufacture of coin all the precision and thoroughness of his experimental work, thus creating the scientific economy which exists still. In turn he became the prosecutor of anyone who defied his inexorable laws, despatching to the gallows all who clipped the coins or counterfeited the currency. Science, in London, truly was power.

  In the fields of induction and mathematical demonstration, both relying upon a close observation of particulars, the London genius was most successful. John Wallis “placed the whole system of statics on a new foundation,” again according to Macaulay, while Edmond Halley investigated the principles of magnetism and the flow of the sea. So from Crane Court in the city issued lines of thought which connected the earth to the sea and the sky. It may seem fanciful to suggest that any one city can affect the cast of thought, or the science, of its inhabitants but Voltaire himself announced that “A Frenchman arriving in London finds things very different, in natural science as in everything else … In Paris they see the universe as composed of vortices of subtle matter, in London they see nothing of the kind … For a Cartesian light exists in the air, for a Newtonian it comes from the sun in six and a half minutes. Your chemist performs all its operations with acids, alkalis and subtle matters.” Once more the theoretical spirit of Parisian enquiry is implicitly opposed to the practical bent of London science. “Where finds philosophy her eagle eye?” Cowper wrote, and then answered his own question:

  In London: where her implements exact,

  With which she calculates, computes, and scans,

  All distance, motion, magnitude, and now

  Measures an atom and now girds a world.

  It is sometimes suggested that, by the end of the eighteenth century, the climate and pace of industrial development had shifted away from London to the manufacturing towns of the north. But this is to misu
nderstand, and certainly to underestimate, the force of practical intelligence within the capital. One of the founders of the Royal Society, Robert Hooke, was the direct inspiration behind advances in the technology of time, while Henry Maudslay’s exceedingly accurate machine tools were produced in Lambeth. In 1730 John Harrison came to London in order to develop his marine chronometer which for the first time fixed degrees of longitude. That spirit was maintained by the mechanical engineers of the nineteenth century who in the workshops of Lambeth produced the steam-hammer and the automatic spinning mule. Lambeth was, then, still a centre of transformation.

  Yet in London the pursuit of knowledge was not confined to the search for technical proficiency. From his lodgings in Great Marlborough Street, after his famous voyage, Charles Darwin wrote that “It is a sorrowful but I fear too certain truth that no place is at all equal, for aiding one in Natural History pursuits, to this dirty smokey town.” After travelling around the world Darwin considered London to be the most appropriate place for his research, as if the whole of evolutionary nature could be viewed and studied there. He wrote this in 1837 and his insight was confirmed, forty-seven years later, when the prime meridian of zero degrees longitude was established upon a brass rail in Greenwich.

  In true London tradition, science also was turned into theatre, with lectures and demonstrations all over the capital. The early nineteenth century in particular witnessed a great public demand for scientific knowledge; the London Institution of Moorfields, the Surrey Institution of Blackfriars Bridge, the Russell Institution in Bloomsbury and the City Philosophical Society in Dorset Street were only some of the many clubs and societies devoted to disseminating the new understanding. There were societies all over the city, founded in the 1820s and 1830s, among them Geological, Astronomical, Zoological, Medico-Botanical, Statistical, Meteorological and British Medical. In the capital there were also many inventors and theorists who were able to meet and to work together. The contributors to “Scientific London” in London World City remark that “London was a crucial instrument for forging new specialist disciplines.” It was as if new commodities were being produced and traded in this intensely heated atmosphere. Bessemer developed his steel-making process in St. Pancras, while Hiram Maxim invented the machine-gun in his Clerkenwell workshop.