London: The Biography

by Peter Ackroyd

  But a larger pattern has also been introduced. Where there was once a rooted and identifiable community in Islington, there is now a greater sense of transience. Like the rest of London it has grown more mobile but also more impersonal. Another paradox has emerged in the process, however, emphasising the unique conditions of each urban area. In the course of its present changes, Islington has reacquired its principal or original identity. Where once it was known for its inns and tea gardens, it is now celebrated for its bars and restaurants. Along the central highway of Upper Street there are now proportionally more restaurants than in any other part of London, with the possible exception of Soho, and so the area has regained its reputation for hospitality and conviviality which it possessed long before it ever became part of London. The old presence lingers beneath every change of appearance.

  The City Road, emanating from Islington, directly approaches the site of London’s old wall. Before its arrival there it crosses Old Street, where to the east Shoreditch and Spitalfields beckon. These once forlorn areas still bear the marks of their past. In the mid-seventeenth century Shoreditch “was a disreputable place, frequented by courtesans.” The female prostitutes still ply their trade at the upper end of Commercial Street, a dismal thoroughfare between the two areas, while Shoreditch High Street is notorious for its strip pubs catering for local residents as well as gentlemen from the City who symbolically pass beyond the old walls of London, through Bishopsgate, in order to indulge themselves. In the late nineteenth century violent street gangs issued out of the slums of “Old Nichol,” a congerie of streets around Old Nichol Street which might have been named after Old Nick himself. Violence flares still; a murder, or a suicide, awakens memories of the not so recent past.

  The name itself derives from Soerditch, a ditch issuing into the Thames, but the idea of a sour ditch is suggestive. The later addition of Shore suggests something stranded or laid up. In turn the name Spitalfields, detached from its origin in “spital,” a house for the sick, suggests spittle-something spat out, violently ejected. Thus it became a haven for refugees. The wrong etymology is often accurate about the nature of an area.

  So we may move on to the hunting grounds of Soho, “So-ho” or “So-hoe” being the call of the huntsmen who originally rode across its fields. Now, with its sex shops and strip clubs, the hunt is on for another kind of game. Of all the regions of London, this is the one that has most fully preserved its appearance. Gerrard Street may have been transformed into the centre of Chinatown, but the house in which John Dryden lived is still recognisable. In Soho every street is a memorial; here is where Marx lived, here Casanova, here Canaletto, and here De Quincey.

  There are deeper continuities, too, since the area had a reputation for its cuisine long before it was ever populated. In 1598 Stow wrote of the conduit in Soho Fields that “The Lord Mayor, aldermen, and many worshipful persons rode to the conduit … according to custom, and then they went and hunted a hare before dinner and killed her; and thence went to dinner at the banqueting house at the head of the conduit, where a great number were handsomely entertained by the chamberlain.” So the air of dining and conviviality has always been part of the neighbourhood. On the same patch of ground where sixteenth-century dignitaries ate, the modern traveller can still dine at the Gay Hussar, Quo Vadis or L’Escargot.

  There was a parish located here by 1623, and in 1636 certain people were described as living at “the brick kilns near Soho,” but the area first began to flourish in the 1670s when Gerrard Street, Old Compton Street, Greek Street and Frith Street emerged as part of a development north of Leicester Fields. A proclamation from the Court, dated as early as April 1671, forbade the erection of “small cottages and other tenements” in “the windmill Fields, Dog Fields and the fields adjoining So-Hoe” but, as usual, the social and commercial imperatives of the city over-ruled royal proclamations.

  How Soho itself acquired its “raffish” flavour is obscure. The area just to its east, beside St. Martin’s Lane, was already inhabited by artists or artisans who catered to the rich or the fashionable. Art studios and art schools also began to cluster there, alongside the inevitable taverns and coffee houses. But they did not directly affect Soho itself. A sudden influx of French residents was of more consequence. In the area of Newport Market and Old Compton Street it was remarked by Maitland that “many parts of the parish abound with French, so that it is an easy matter for a stranger to fancy himself in France.” By 1688 over eight hundred of the empty and newly built houses had been filled with Huguenots, who characteristically transformed the ground floors into “genuine French shops,” cheap cafés and restaurants “like those near ‘the barrier’ in Paris.” So by degrees this emerging region of London came to be compared with the French city. It maintained that ambience for more than 150 years, and as late as 1844 Soho was still being described as “a sort of petty France.” It was recorded that “Most of the shops are thoroughly French, and they evidently have been established solely for the supply of the foreign colony. Here are French schools for the education of the young, and wine-shops and restaurants where an Englishman who entered would be looked on with surprise.” Perhaps the most notable institution, in the early days of twenty-first-century Soho, is the York Minster or French Pub known colloquially as “the French”; it is said to have been the meeting-place of the French Resistance during the Second World War. Again a small area of London, no more than a few streets and a market, has retained its traditional culture for more than three hundred years.

  But the presence of the French immigrants in a place where the arrival of an Englishman would be a “surprise,” in turn created an odd air of strangeness or unfamiliarity which encouraged natives of other countries to feel more secure in its environs. In certain respects it was not English. “Of all quarters in the queer adventurous amalgam called London,” Galsworthy wrote in The Forsyte Saga, “Soho is perhaps least suited to the Forsyte spirit… Untidy, full of Greeks, Ishmaelites, cats, Italians, tomatoes, restaurants, organs, coloured stuffs, queer names, people looking out of upper windows, it dwells remote from the British Body Politic.” From the start it was a mixed area, both in terms of demography and of trade. “This district,” according to one Handbook, “is also a principal rendezvous for foreigners in London, many of whom here ply their avocations as artists and mechanics.” There were emporia of furniture acquired from various eras and various cultures, curiosity shops filled with multifarious relics of the Romans or the Habsburgs, musical-instrument makers and print-sellers, china manufacturers, booksellers and taverns where artists and literary gentlemen gathered. Modern institutions, such as the French Pub and the Colony Room Club, still attract poets and painters.

  The phenomenon of transference from age to age is in certain respects inexplicable. It may be that the previous reputation of an area attracts its new residents, so that there is a kind of advertised continuity; but this does not apply to other districts which simply flare and fade away. Or is it that an atmosphere of freedom and unfamiliarity, first created by the Huguenots liberated from the cruelty of their compatriots, has continued to linger? Certainly immigrants arrived in their wake, from Russia and from Hungary, Italy and Greece. In the churchyard of St. Anne’s, Soho, there was a tablet with the following inscription: “Near this place is interred Theodore, King of Corsica, who died in this parish, December 11, 1756, immediately after leaving the King’s Bench Prison by the benefit of the Act of Insolvency; in consequence of which he registered his kingdom of Corsica for the benefit of his creditors.” He had accepted his crown in March 1736, but could not raise enough money to pay for his army; so he travelled to London where, finding himself in debt, he was soon arrested and consigned to prison. On his release on 10 December 1756, he took a sedan chair to the house of a tailor and acquaintance in Little Chapel Street Soho. But he died the next day, and his funeral expenses were paid by an oil-man in Old Compton Street. So a foreign king is buried in the middle of Soho, thus emphasising its reputat
ion as a foreign land in the heart of London. This penniless exile might almost be considered the true monarch of the area.

  Its reputation for heterogeneity and freedom was also associated with liberties of another sort, and by the end of the eighteenth century it was notorious for courtesans. A celebrated member of that order, Mrs. Cornelys, arranged weekly assemblies in Carlisle House on the south side of Soho Square. There was a notice outside in which she “begs the chairmen and hackney-coach drivers not to quarrel, or to run their poles through each other’s windows,” which suggests that the spirit of disorder affected anyone who came within the parish. In Carlisle House were held masquerades and promenades which featured scantily dressed ladies “in violation,” according to one observer, “of the laws, and to the destruction of all sober principles.” Mrs. Cornelys was one of those redoubtable London characters holding court to thieves and nobility alike, who dominated all company with a quick wit and a loud if vulgar manner. She was enterprising, irrepressible, charming and scathing in equal measure; she created a great stir in the 1760s and 1770s until after the failure of one of her fashionable schemes she “retired into private life.” She started selling asses’ milk in Knightsbridge, and in 1797 died in the Fleet Prison.

  She was the very type of the London club hostess, a figure so much larger than life that no one-not even the most drunken or aristocratic customer- would dare to cross her. Kate Hamilton and Sally Sutherland both managed dubious “night-houses” of the 1860s, and Kate was described as “presiding as a sort of Paphian queen” over her scantily clad dancers. There is a wonderful description of her “weighing some twenty stone, with a countenance that had weathered countless convivial nights. Mrs. Hamilton presented a stupendous appearance in the low cut evening dresses which she always wore. From midnight to dawn she sipped champagne [and] with her foghorn voice, knew how to keep her clients of both sexes in order.” Her establishment was in Leicester Square, which by the mid-nineteenth century had become associated with the delinquencies of neighbouring Soho, and her twentieth-century successor was Muriel Belcher who ran the Colony Room Club, a drinking room in Dean Street. She also kept her clients in order with a voice as piercing, if not as loud, as a foghorn, and specialised in a form of obscene badinage which only the vulgar mistook for wit.

  From its beginning, in fact, Soho has been associated with demonstrative and sometimes difficult women. In 1641 “a lewd woman,” Anna Clerke, was bound over for “threteninge to burne the houses at Soho” for reasons unknown. A once famous inn known as the Mischief, in Charles Street, had as its sign a drunken courtesan straddling a man’s back while holding a glass of gin with the legend “She’s as Drunk as a Sow” inscribed beside her. The female, and male, prostitutes of the area were well known by the middle of the nineteenth century; once more the relative “foreignness” of the neighbourhood ensured that it would be the context for more relaxed sexual behaviour than in Lombard Street, for example, or in Pimlico. The proximity of the rookeries, in St. Giles and elsewhere, also meant that there was no shortage of fresh bodies for the clients. Only the recommendations of the Wolfenden Report, in 1957, managed to keep “the girls” off the streets; but they migrated instead to small rooms and attic spaces in the same area.

  There were the “Argyll Rooms,” Laurent’s Dancing Academy, the Portland Rooms, and a score of other venues. The night-houses and flash-houses changed into nightclubs, the penny gaffs and cheap theatres into striptease joints, the gaming clubs into bars, but despite the external alterations governed by time and fashion the essential atmosphere and purpose of Soho have remained the same. It was estimated that in 1982 there were some 185 premises used as part of the sex industry; more recent legislation has attempted to mitigate the business but, at the beginning of a new century, Soho remains the centre of a flourishing trade in prostitution. The spirit of the area has also asserted itself in another guise, with Old Compton Street becoming in the 1980s and 1990s a centre of “gay” pubs and clubs. The narrow thoroughfares of Soho are always crowded now, with people in search of sex, spectacle or excitement; it has retained its “queer adventurous” spirit and seems a world away from the clubs of Pall Mall or the shops of Oxford Street which lie respectively to its south and north.

  This is only to be expected, however. Each area of London has its own unmistakable character, nurtured through time and history; together they resemble a thousand vortices within the general movement of the city. It is impossible to look at them all steadily, or envisage them as a whole, because the impression can only be one of opposition and contrast. Yet out of these oppositions and contrasts London itself emerges, as if it sprang into being out of collision and paradox. In that sense its origins are as mysterious as the beginning of the universe itself.

  London’s Rivers

  An engraving by Charles Grignion, after Francis Hayman, of the insalubrious Fleet River; since it was the last resting place of dead dogs, corpses, human waste and noxious refuse, it is hard to believe that anyone actually swam in it.

  CHAPTER 57

  You Cannot Take the Thames with You

  It has always been the river of commerce. The watercress-growers of Gravesend, the biscuit-bakers and store-shippers of Tooley Street, the ship-chandlers of Wapping, the block-makers and rope-makers of Limehouse, all owe their trades to the Thames. The great paintings of its business, with its warehouses, refiners, breweries and builders’ yards, all bear testimony to its power and authority. Its predominance within the city was understood long before the Romans came. Copper and tin were transported along it as early as the third millennium BC; as a result of commerce upon the river the area comprising London acquired, by 1500 BC, supremacy over the region of Wessex. That is perhaps why ceremonial objects were thrown into its waters, where they lay hidden until recent archaeological discoveries.

  The city itself owes its character and appearance to the Thames. It was a place of “crowded wharfs and people-pestered shores,” the water continually in motion with “shoals of labouring oars.” The movement and energy of London were the movement of horses and the energy of the river. The Thames brought in a thousand argosies. Venetian galleys and three-masted ships from the Low Countries vied for position by the riverside, while the water itself was crowded with wherries and ferries transporting the citizens from one shore to the other.

  The other great commercial value of the Thames lay in its fish, and in the fifteenth century we read of “barbille, fflounders. Roaches. dace. pykes. Tenches,” all caught in nets with baits of cheese and tallow; there were eels and kipper salmon, mullet, lamprey, prawn, smelt, sturgeon and “white bayte.” A vast range of vessels also plied their trades upon the water. Barges and barks sailed beside chalk-boats; they were joined by cocks, or small work boats, by pikers, rush-boats, oyster-boats and ferry-boats, by whelk-boats and tide-boats.

  Most Londoners earned their living directly off the river, or by means of the goods which were transported along it. Documents of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries reveal a host of Thames employees, from the “conservators” who were in charge of river safety to the “tidemen” whose work on embanking or building upon the river depended upon the state of the tide. There were boatmen and chalkmen, eelmen and baillies, gallymen or garthmen, ferriers and lightermen, hookers and mariners, petermen and palingmen, searchers and shipwrights, shoutmen and piledrivers, trinkers and water-bailiffs and watermen. There are recorded no fewer than forty-nine ways of trapping or catching fish, from nets and weirs to enclosures and wicker-baskets. But there were many other activities such as the erection of dams and barriers, the construction of landing-stages and jetties, the repairing of watergates and causeways, quays and stairs. We may call this the early stage of the Thames when it remained the living centre of the city’s development and trade.

  But then it first touched the imagination of poets and chroniclers. It became the river of magnificence, used as a golden highway by princes and diplomats. Barges were “freshly furnished with banners
and streamers of silk” while other boats were “richly beaten with the arms or badges of their craft”; there were many covered with awnings of silk and silken tapestry, while around them the wherries took their course heavily weighted with merchants or priests or courtiers. This was a time when, in the early years of the sixteenth century, the oars of the London watermen might become entangled in water lilies while they kept stroke “to the tune of flutes” which made “the water which they beat to follow faster.” The Thames has always been associated with song and music, beginning with the watermen’s chant of “Heare and how, rumblelow” or “Row, the boat, Norman, row to thy lemen” dated respectively to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

  More formal music, beating not to the ebb and flow of the current but rather to its history, could be heard on diplomatic or nuptial occasions. When in 1540 Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves, his fourth wife, removed to Westminster by water on their bridal day they were accompanied by “instruments sweetly sounding” in barges “gorgeously garnished with banners, pennons and targets richly covered.” On the previous ceremonial entrance of Henry’s second wife Anne Boleyn from Greenwich into London in 1533, “there were trumpets, shawms, and other divers instruments, all the way playing and making great melody.” Her welcome provided one of the richest pageants upon the Thames ever recorded, with the state barge of the mayor leading the procession “adorned by flags and pennons hung with rich tapestries and ornamented on the outside with scutcheons of metal, suspended on cloth of gold and silver.” It was preceded by a flat vessel, rather like a floating stage, upon which “a dragon pranced about furiously, twisting his tail and belching out wildfire.” Here the freedom of the river inspires extravagance as well as music. The barge of the mayor was followed by fifty other barges belonging to the trades and guilds, “all sumptuously decked with silk and arras, and having bands of music on board.” Here commerce makes its own music upon the water, which was itself the conduit of its wealth.