London: The Biography

by Peter Ackroyd

  The spirit of the city lives, too, in the emblems which adorn it. There were four “wall dials” in the Inner Temple, one of which bore the inscription “Begone About Your Business,” which is a true London apothegm. On the sundial in Pump Court are etched the words, “Shadows we are and like Shadows Depart,” and in Lincoln’s Inn two emblems of sacred time were installed. On the southern gable of the Old Buildings was the motto Ex Hoc Momento Pendet Aeternitas, or “On This Moment Hangs Eternity,” and, beside it, Qua Redit Nescitis Horam or “We Do Not Know the Hour of his Return.” These emblems are the written equivalent of the church bells, resounding through the streets of the city. In the Middle Temple another sundial reasserts the actual nature of London with complementary mottoes. Time and Tide Tarry For No Man and Vestigia Nulla Retrorsum or “No Moment Is Backward.” So even the sun, and the light, are mastered by the urgent rhythm of city activity.

  In this context the dominance of clock time in the city can be understood. Wren’s London churches have clocks designed within them; no doubt the dials are a substitute for the bells which once rang out, but there is also a suggestion that time itself has somehow become a deity to be venerated. When in the early eighteenth century Bennett’s Clock Shop, at 65 Cheapside, set up images of Gog and Magog above its frontage the shop’s owner was expressing a general truth; these tutelary deities of London were used to strike the hour, confirming the identity of time and the city. For a city based upon work and labour, upon power and commerce, time becomes an aspect of mercantilism.

  That is why the city became famous for its clocks, from that upon St. Paul’s to that of “Big Ben” on St. Stephen’s tower at Westminster, and renowned for its clock-makers. Artificers such as Charles Gretton and Joseph Antram of Fleet Street, John Joseph Merlin of Hanover Place and Christopher Pinchbeck of St. John’s Lane, were often visited by foreign travellers and were themselves notable London figures; Pinchbeck opened a clock-making and clockwork gallery to display his skills, while Merlin had his own Mechanical Museum. The measurement of time, and the ingenuity of its artificial instruments, fascinated Londoners; in a city always moving and always making, the attention to the process of measuring was also an attention to its own energy and greatness. That is why London also became the world centre of watch-making. By the end of the eighteenth century, for example, there were more than seven thousand workmen in Clerkenwell assembling watches at a rate of 120,000 a year, 60 per cent of which were exported. It is almost as if London was manufacturing time itself, and then distributing it to the rest of the world. The nature of its manufacture, with different artisans in different districts making one small part of the assembly, means that Clerkenwell itself could be seen as a clockwork mechanism with its face to the sky.

  The position of Greenwich upon the meridian is well known but on this famous site was also erected the time signal ball, a wood or leather sphere five feet in diameter, which was raised and dropped by a galvanic motor clock; this device was considered to be “the most wonderful clock in the world” regulating “the time of all the clocks and watches in London.” In particular “a very small outlay … will secure true Greenwich time to every City establishment.” So time and trade ran together. Another great clock was established at the post office of St. Martin’s le Grand in the 1870s; it was known as the “chronopher” and by means of a “time current” running along the electric telegraph it controlled the time of “sixteen of the most important cities in the kingdom.” London set up and dominated the time of the entire country. With the central position of Greenwich, it might even be said to have controlled the time of the world. There was also the phenomenon of “railway time,” so that the locomotives speeding out of London set the time for the provincial stations through which they passed.

  In twenty-first-century London too, time rushes forward and is everywhere apparent; it hangs upon neon boards, and is illuminated on the front of office buildings. Clocks are everywhere, and most citizens have the image of time strapped to their wrists. It might even be suggested that the general and characteristic obsession of London is with time itself. That is why all of its commercial operations are designed to be conducted and monitored in the shortest possible time, just as information is only important when it is of instantaneous access. The faster an action or a dealing can be reported, the more significance it acquires. The affluent Londoners of the fourteenth century who first displayed the counterpoise clock in their households were at the beginning of a process in which London would capture and market time. The city oppresses its inhabitants, and the evidence of that oppression can be found in the time it imposes; there is a time for eating, a time for working, a time for travelling to work, a time for sleeping. It represents the great triumph of materialism and commerce within the city.

  The consequences emerge in the activity and imagery of London over a long period. One eighteenth-century observer remarked that in London they “talk little, I suppose, that they may not lose time.” Similarly there is no bargaining, and the custom of having fixed prices “is not the product solely of competition and confidence, but also of the necessity of saving time.” It has often been noted how quickly Londoners walk. If there is a cause for this anxious speed it may lie in the deeply inherited instinct that time is also money.

  There is an old London inscription: “As every thread of Gold is valuable/So is every minute of Time.” Time must not be “wasted.” Chateaubriand noticed that Londoners were impervious to art and general culture precisely because of this obsession; “they chase away the thought of Raphael as liable to make them lose time and nothing more.” Significantly he associates this with the need to work; they are “for ever on the brink of the abyss of starvation if for a moment they forget work.” Time and work are indeed intimately mingled within the consciousness of London; they cannot be separated, not even for a moment, and out of this conflation emerges frantic and continuous activity. Like automata, the citizens become the components of the monstrous clock that is London. Then time indeed becomes a prison. A riddle in a London chapbook asked the question, What am I?

  Close in a cage a bird I’ll keep

  That sings both day and night,

  When other birds are fast asleep,

  Its notes yield sweet delight.

  And the answer? “I am a clock.” Even the gallows was wreathed with the implication of time. One victim of the rope declared in his last speech: “Men, Women, and Children, I come hither to hang like a Pendulum to a Watch, for endeavouring to be Rich too Soon.” The clock of Holy Sepulchre, Newgate, in turn regulated the times of hanging.

  It is of course possible to control time; Ned Ward noticed an assistant, in an early seventeenth-century “Musick-shop,” “beating Time upon his Counter” while his customers danced to the sound of pipes and fiddles. This is an ancient yet still familiar scene, of course, and suggests that the permanent refuge of Londoners from the claims of clock-time may lie in song and dance; that is one way, at least, to “beat Time.” And there are also places where time may cease to exist. Among the prison inmates of London, for example, “day after day rolled on, but their state was immutable … every moment was a moment of anguish, yet did they wish to prolong that moment, fearful that the coming period would bring a severer fate.” During the Second World War, Harold Nicolson noted, “one lives in the present. The past is too sad a recollection and the future too sad a despair. I go up to London. After dinner I walk back to the Temple.” He is walking through a timeless city, abandoned to darkness during the black-out, and there are still areas of London where time seems to have come to an end or ceaselessly to repeat itself.

  The phenomenon can be particularly noted in Spitalfields, where the passing generations have inhabited the same buildings and pursued the same activities of weaving and dyeing. It may be noticed that by the market of Spitalfields archaeologists have recovered successive levels of human activity dating back to the time of the Roman occupation.

  But time also moves slowly in Shore
ditch and Limehouse; these areas have acquired a finality, in which nothing new seems able to prosper. The time of Cheapside and Stoke Newington is rapid and continuous, whereas that of Holborn and Kensington is fitful. Jonathan Raban, in Soft City, has noted that “Time in Earl’s Court is quite different from time in Islington,” by which he is suggesting that the rhythms imposed upon the inhabitants of these areas are particular and identifiable. There are streets in which the presence of old time is familiar; the area of Clerkenwell, and the passages off Maiden Lane, are notable in that respect. But there are other places, such as Tottenham Court Road and Long Acre, which seem to exist in a continual state of novelty and unfamiliarity.

  There are also forms of timelessness. Neither vagrants nor children are on the same journey as those whom they pass on the crowded thoroughfares.

  CHAPTER 70. The Tree on the Corner

  Consider the plane tree at the corner of Wood Street and Cheapside. No one knows how long it has existed on that spot-once the old churchyard of St. Peter’s, which was destroyed during the Great Fire of 1666-but in extant documents it is termed “ancient,” and for centuries it has been a familiar presence. In 1799, for example, the sight of this tree in the centre of London inspired Wordsworth to compose a poem in which the natural world breaks through Cheapside in visionary splendour:

  At the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears,

  Hangs a Thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years:

  Poor Susan has pass’d by the spot, and has heard

  In the silence of morning the song of the Bird.

  Then enchantment holds her, and she witnesses

  A mountain ascending, a vision of trees;

  Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide,

  And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.

  This might be construed as an example of Wordsworth’s disenchantment with the city, and his wish to obliterate it in the interests of “nature,” but it might also represent his vision of a primeval past. The tree conjures up images of its distant predecessors. Everything about this corner of Wood Street suggests continuity. Even its name is connected with the tree; wood was indeed once sold here, but the tree itself is protected and can never be cut down. In the spring of 1850 rooks came to rest in its branches, re-establishing the ancient association between London and those dark birds. The London plane flourishes in the smoke and dust of London, and the tree at the corner of Wood Street has become an emblem of the city itself. It has now reached a height of approximately seventy feet, and is still thriving.

  Beneath it nestle the small shops which have been an aspect of this corner for almost six hundred years. In 1401 a shop known as the Long Shop was first built here against the churchyard wall, and others followed; after the Fire, they were rebuilt in 1687. The site is only a few feet in depth, and each small shop still consists of a single storey above and a box-front below. The trades which have passed through them were various-silver-sellers, wig-makers, law stationers, pickle-and sauce-sellers, fruiterers-all of them reflecting the commercial life of the capital. Appearances may change, but form remains constant. In more recent years there was a shirt-maker and a music warehouse, a sweet-shop and a gown-maker. A florist, Carrie Miller, who was born in St. Pancras, and had never left London, was interviewed here in the years immediately following the Second World War: “I was fortunate enough to find this little shop under the famous tree in Wood Street. Before I came it was a toy shop. The City is in my blood now. I would not be anywhere else in the whole world.” So this tiny spot, this corner, provides evidence of continuity on every level, human, social, natural, communal. There exists on the site today a shirt-maker’s, L. and R. Woodersen, which advertises itself as “under the tree,” a newsagent’s with the shop sign “Time Out. London’s Living Guide,” and a sandwich bar called “Fresh Options.”

  Such lines of continuity are to be found everywhere within London, some of great antiquity. The fact that Heathrow Airport is built upon the site of an Iron Age camp is suggestive, with the evidence of a neolithic track or cursus extending two miles on the western side of the “runways” of the present airport. The original Roman street pattern of London has survived, unchanged, in certain parts of the city; Cheapside, Eastcheap and Cripplegate still follow the ancient lines. In Milk Street and Ironmonger Lane, seven successive waves of building have employed exactly the same sites, despite the fact that during this period the street-level itself rose some three feet three inches.

  There is a spiritual, as well as a physical, continuity. One historian of the parish of St. Andrew, Holborn, C.M. Barron, has noticed that “along the Roman road leading westwards from Newgate there was a kind of funerary ribbon development,” which in turn coincides with the fatal route taken by the condemned from Newgate to Tyburn; the line of death seems to have been prepared in advance. In a similar spirit we may note that at the same church of St. Andrew, there is evidence of pagan cremation burials, Roman sepulchral building and remnants of early Christian worship; the layers of sacred activity radiate from one to another within what is undoubtedly an holy area. An archaeological investigation of the graveyard of St. Katherine Cree, between Leadenhall Street and Mitre Street, offers interesting evidence of continuous occupation. Here were a series of “patchy Roman surfaces,” according to the London Archaeologist, into which were cut “burials in stone and mortar cists, probably a continuation of the late Saxon graveyard excavated to the east … The area continued to be used as a graveyard to the present day, with burials being made in wooden and lead coffins and the ground level rising steadily.”

  Londoners seem instinctively aware that certain areas have retained characteristics or powers. Continuity itself may represent the greatest power of all. The coinage of early tribes in the area of London, particularly that of the Iceni, carried the image of a griffin. The present City of London uses the same miserly and rapacious birds as its emblem. More than two thousand years after their appearance, the griffins still guard the boundaries of the City.

  Within that City, the administrative network of the wards is of ancient date; these units of local government can be traced back to the early ninth century, and their exact alignments are still employed at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This is perhaps so familiar a concept that its striking singularity is often missed. There is no other city on earth which manifests such political and administrative continuity; its uniqueness is one of the tangible and physical factors that render London a place of echoes and shadows.

  The texture of the city is also remarkably consistent. Peter’s Hill and Upper Thames Street were laid out in the twelfth century. Other street-surfaces and frontages have a similar history, with property divisions remaining intact for many hundreds of years. Even the devastation of the Great Fire could not erase the ancient lanes and boundaries. In a similar pattern of continuity those streets which were newly laid out after the Fire also showed tenacity of purpose. Ironmonger Lane, for example, has had the same width for almost 335 years. That width was and is fourteen feet, originally sufficient to allow two carts to pass each other without hindrance or blockage. It is another aspect of this continuous London history that its structure can accommodate itself to quite different modes of transport.

  When George Scharf drew an early nineteenth-century oyster-shop on the corner of Tyler Street and King Street, just east of Regent Street, its shallowness was explained by Scharf’s latest editor, Peter Jackson-“all the houses on the north side of Tyler Street followed a medieval building line which ran at an angle making them progressively shallower.” The streets have been renamed as Foubert’s Place and Kingly Street but even now “the building on this spot still has the same proportions.”

  An even more remarkable physical token of the past lies a little further west in Park Lane. The lower end of that street, from Wood’s Mews down to Stanhope Gate, is marked by irregularity; the streets are set back a few feet from each other, so that the “front” is never in a
straight line. This is not an accidental or architectural arrangement, however, since the “map or plott of the Lordship of Eburie” reveals that those streets were in fact laid down upon the pattern of the old acre strips of the farmland which once covered the site. These acre strips belonged to the village community system of the Saxon period, and the irregularity of Park Lane is a token of their continuing presence and influence. Just as the Saxon wards maintain their energy and power within the city, so the Saxon farming system has helped to create the structure and topography of the modern city. In similar fashion the curve of West Street, where the Ivy restaurant is now situated, exactly imitates the curve of the country lane which once existed there.

  A sixteenth-century surveyor named Tiswell drew up a map of the land which is now occupied by the West End. At that time it consisted of farmland with lanes winding between the villages of St. Giles and Charing. Yet a modern map superimposed upon the Elizabethan plan coincides with its principal thoroughfares and most notable topographical features. It may be a cause of surprise, but it should be one of wonder. Once the city is seen in this light, then it begins to reveal its mysteries. The persistent echoic effect can be recognised everywhere. Thus one of the great twentieth-century writers upon London, Steen Eiler Rasmussen, has noted of standard London dwellings in London: The Unique City that the “little house, of which there have been thousands and thousands, is only sixteen feet broad. It has probably been the ordinary size of a site since the Middle Ages.” He adds that “the uniformity of the houses is a matter of course, and has not been forced upon them.” These houses emerge as a matter of instinct, therefore, deriving from some ancient imperative; it is as if they were similar to the cells that cluster in a human body. When in 1580 Elizabeth I declared by edict that one house should belong to one family, she was giving expression to another great truth about London life; and, as Rasmussen suggests, her proclamation or programme “has been repeated over and over again through the centuries.” The names of the streets, in which many of these houses are to be found, also prove to be of ancient provenance. In similar fashion the squares of London can be associated with the courtyards of the medieval city. The so-called “ribbon development” along the Western Avenue in the 1930s obeys the same process of growth as the ribbon development along Whitechapel High Street in the 1530s. The passage of four hundred years means very little in the workings of London’s inexorable laws.