London: The Biography

by Peter Ackroyd

  A recent study of London demography, London: a New Metropolitan Geography by K. Hoggart and D.R. Green, concluded that “several of London’s population characteristics have been present for five hundred years or more,” among them the creation of suburbs, the “over-representation of adolescents and young adults” as well as “the presence of a marginalised and destitute underclass” and “the exceptional representation of overseas migrants, and religious, cultural and ethnic minorities.” Any slice or slide of London life, in other words, would broadly mirror that of previous and succeeding centuries. There has been no fundamental change.

  The work of London is also consistent. The preponderance of finishing trades and what have become known as the service industries affords one example, while another continuity is to be found in the reliance upon small workshop, rather than factory, production. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries aldermen complained about lack of public money; the complaint has been repeated in almost every decade of every century. Stephen Inwood, in A History of London, has remarked that “For a city that is the home of national government, London has often been a surprisingly poorly governed place.” Perhaps it is not a surprise, after all; it may be part of its nature and organic being.

  These are all large concerns with which to demonstrate the essential continuities of the city’s life. But they can also be glimpsed in local and specific ways, where a stray object or perception can suddenly manifest the deep history of London being. It was in the early fifteenth century that Richard Whittington built near the mouth of the Walbrook in the Vintry the huge public privy that was known as “Whittington’s Longhouse.” John Schofield, in The Building of London, has noted that “centuries later the offices of the Public Cleansing Department now cover the site.”

  In Endell Street there was once found an “ancient bath” of unknown date “fed by a fine spring of clear water, which was said to have medicinal qualities.” In the nineteenth century the lower parts of the bath-house were filled with lumber and rubbish so that “the spring no longer flows.” But it did not disappear; it simply emerged in different form. There is a sauna in Endell Street, and on the corner a public swimming bath known as “The Oasis.”

  The site of the curative wells in Barnet, where people gathered for healing in the seventeenth century, is now occupied by a hospital. At the foot of Highgate Hill, where it inclines gently into Holloway, a great lazarhouse or leper hospital was established in the 1470s. It had fallen into decay by the middle of the seventeenth century. But the spirit of the place was not diminished. In 1860 the Small Pox and Vaccination Hospital was erected there. The site is now the Whittington Hospital. Almshouses for the frail or feeble were erected in Liquorpond Field; the Royal Free Hospital now covers the area. There was an old poorhouse on Chislehurst Common, erected in 1759; it is now the site of St. Michael’s Orphanage.

  Once a famous maypole was set up at the crossing of Leadenhall Street and Gracechurch Street; it towered above the city, and in the fifteenth century the church of St. Andrew Cornhill was rededicated as St. Andrew Undershaft because it was, physically, under the shaft. The great maypole itself was stored along the side of Shaft Alley. This might seem an exercise in medieval nostalgia, were it not for the fact that on this very same spot now rises the tall and glittering Lloyds Building.

  The history of a structure on the corner of Fournier Street and Brick Lane is also curiously suggestive; it was built in 1744 as a church for the Huguenot weavers of the period, but was used as a synagogue for the Jewish population of Spitalfields between 1898 and 1975; now it is a mosque, the London Jamme Masjid, for the Muslim Bengalis who succeeded the Jews. Succeeding waves of immigrants have chosen to maintain this place as a sacred spot.

  It is possible, too, that an unpleasant or unhappy atmosphere may persist like some noisome scent in the air. It has been noted of certain streets such as Chick Lane, Field Lane or Black Boy Alley, all in the vicinity of the present Farringdon Road, that “a curious fact about these places is that their bad character began so early and persisted so long.” Of Coventry Street, off Piccadilly, it was stated in 1846 that “there is a considerable number of gaming houses in the neighbourhood at the present time, so that the bad character of the place is at least two centuries old, or ever since it was built upon.” The act of building may itself determine the character of an area for ever, in other words; it is as if the stones themselves carried the burden of their own destiny. So we may see the passage of time through stone, but that vision of unbroken continuity is essential to the vision of London itself. This is not the eternity vouchsafed to the mystic, who ascends from the body to glimpse the soul of things, but one immured in sand and stone so that the actual texture or process of life is afforded a kind of grace. The continuity of London is the continuity of life itself.

  East and South

  An etching of Billingsgate by James McNeill Whistler, executed in 1859; it shows something of the animation of the docksides, with many boats engaged in trade upon the ever commercial Thames.

  CHAPTER 71. The Stinking Pile

  It has often been suggested that the East End is a creation of the nineteenth century; certainly the phrase itself was not invented until the 1880s. But in fact the East has always existed as a separate and distinct entity. The area of Tower Hamlets, Limehouse and Bow rests upon a separate strip of gravel, one of the Flood Plain gravels which were created at the time of the last glacial eruption some 15,000 years ago. Whether this longevity has played any part in creating the unique atmosphere of the East End is open to question, perhaps, but the symbolic importance of east versus west must not be ignored in any analysis of what became known in the late nineteenth century as “the abyss.” The Roman burials of Londinium, some of them within the very area now known as the East End, were so conducted that the heads of those interred were inclined towards the west; the same practice can be found in early Christian burial rituals, again in the territory of London, which suggests some profound affinity. It seems also to have been an instinctive one, part of a territorial spirit that emerges in the earliest recorded periods of London’s history. Archaeological evidence suggests, for example, that the invading Saxons of the fifth and sixth centuries settled to the west of the River Walbrook while the defeated and demoralised Romano-British natives dwelled upon the east bank. This pattern of habitation has been consistent and profound.

  There is one interesting and significant feature of the eastern area which suggests a living tradition stretching back beyond the time of the Romans. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there was found evidence of a great “wall” running along the eastern portion of the Thames, down the river bank and along the Essex shores, to protect the land from the depredations of the tidal river; it was constituted of timber banks and earthworks. At the end of the wall in Essex, close to the area now known as Bradwell Waterside-which may plausibly be translated, even after two thousand years of transition, as Broad Wall-were discovered the earthworks of a Roman fortress as well as the ruins of a later chapel, St. Peter-on-the-Wall, which had become a barn. Other local antiquarians have also found small churches or chapels placed beside what might be called this great eastern wall. It is quite forgotten, save by a few local historians, but by keeping at bay the water, and by helping to drain the marshland of the eastern areas, it created the East End or London’s dark side. Every city must have one.

  And where does the “East” begin? According to certain urban authorities the point of transition was marked by the Aldgate Pump, a stone fountain constructed beside the well at the confluence of Fenchurch Street and Leadenhall Street; the existing pump lies a few yards to the west of the original. Other antiquaries have argued that the real East End begins at the point where Whitechapel Road and Commercial Road meet. The taint of poverty, already apparent in the late medieval period, was in any case gradually extended. Stow observed that between 1550 and 1590 there was “a continual street or filthy strait passage with alleys of small tenem
ents or cottages built … almost to Ratcliffe.” The road from the pump of Aldgate to the church at Whitechapel was by this date also lined with shops and tenements, while the adjoining field to the north was “pestered with cottages and alleys.” In similar manner there was “a continuous building of small and base tenements for the most part lately erected” from Bishopsgate to Shoreditch, and even beyond that there were mean buildings “a good flight shot” as far out as Kingsland and Tottenham. By the end of the sixteenth century the eastern portions of the city were being defined as “base” and “filthy,” their squalor and stench emerging despite proclamations and parliamentary Acts. The area of Spitalfields, laid out along more regular lines between 1660 and 1680, also soon acquired a reputation for poverty and overcrowding. The houses were small and narrow, while the streets themselves were often only fifteen feet wide. That sense of diminution, or of constriction, exists still. As the houses, so their inhabitants. A report of 1665 described the overcrowding created by “poor indigent and idle and loose persons.” So the “filthy cottages” of Stow’s report were being filled with “filthy” persons. It is the story of London.

  The industries of the eastern neighbourhood gradually became filthy, too. Much of its trade and commerce came from the river, but in the course of the seventeenth century the region became steadily industrialised. In the vicinity of the Lea mills, malodorous manufactories were introduced. In 1614 a local court records that “The jury present Lancelot Gamblyn, lately of Stratford Langthorne, starchmaker, because by unlawful making of starch such a stink and ill favour continue and daily arise.” Less than fifty years later Sir William Petty was lamenting “the fumes, steams, and stinks of the whole Easterly Pyle,” and indeed for hundreds of years after that the “Easterly Pyle” became the home of what were known as “the stink industries”; all forms of corruption and noisomeness were fashioned there. It represented the focus for London’s fear of corruption and disease. Nor were these fears entirely ill-founded, either; demographic surveys revealed a remarkably high incidence of consumption and “fever” in the eastern reaches of London.

  So the flight westward continued. From the seventeenth century onward the laying out of streets and squares moved inexorably in that direction; the wealthy and the well-born and the fashionable insisted upon dwelling in what Nash called “the respectable streets at the West end of the town.” The topographical divide, or rather the obsession with the West over the East, could be seen in minute particulars. When Jermyn Street was completed in the 1680s, the London Encyclopaedia observes that “the west end of the street was more fashionable than the east.” Another line of demarcation ran through Soho Square, where “every minute longitude east is equal to as many degrees of gentility minus,” as an American visitor put it, “or towards west, plus.” Of the newly fashioned Regent Street it was noted that “there are many squares on the eastern side of this thoroughfare, and some good streets, but rank and fashion appear to avoid them.”

  It has been observed that the West End has the money, and the East End has the dirt; there is leisure to the West, and labour to the East. Yet in the early decades of the nineteenth century it was not singled out as being the most desperate source of poverty and violence. It was known principally as the centre of shipping, and of industry, and thus the home of the working poor. In fact the industry and the poverty steadily intensified; dye works and chemical works, manure factories and lamp-black factories, manufacturers of glue and of paraffin, producers of paint and bonemeal, all clustered in Bow and Old Ford and Stratford. The River Lea for centuries had been the site of industry, and of transport, but throughout the nineteenth century it was further exploited and degraded. A match factory on its banks lent the water a urinous taste and appearance, while the smell of the whole area became offensive. In all this, of course, we see the condition of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries being expanded and intensified; it is as if the process continued with a momentum of its own. The industrial districts of Canning Town, Silvertown and Beckton were created between the Lea and Barking Creek, Beckton becoming particularly well known for its sewage dispersal system. All the filth of London crept eastwards.

  But then, at some point in the 1880s, it reached what might be called critical mass. It imploded. The East End became “the abyss” or “the nether world” of strange secrets and desires. It was the area of London into which more poor people were crammed than any other, and out of that congregation of poverty sprang reports of evil and immorality, of savagery and unnamed vice. In his essay “On Murder, Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” Thomas De Quincey apostrophised the area of the Ratcliffe Highway Murders of 1812 as one of the “most chaotic” and “a most dangerous quarter,” a “perilous region” replete with “manifold ruffianism.” It is perhaps important that a writer should inscribe the East End in this manner, since its subsequent and lurid reputation was to a large extent established upon the work of journalists and novelists who felt almost obliged to conjure up visions of darkness and horror as a way of describing the shadow which London itself cast. And of course the defining sensation which for ever marked the “East End,” and created its public identity, was the series of murders ascribed to Jack the Ripper between the late summer and early autumn of 1888. The scale of the sudden and brutal killings effectively marked out the area as one of incomparable violence and depravity, but it was equally significant that the crimes should have been committed in the darkness of malodorous alleys. The fact that the killer was never captured seemed only to confirm the impression that the bloodshed was created by the foul streets themselves; that the East End was the true Ripper.

  All the anxieties about the city in general then became attached to the East End in particular, as if in some peculiar sense it had become a microcosm of London’s own dark life. There were books written, the titles of which represented their themes-The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, The People of the Abyss, Ragged London, In Darkest London, The Nether World. In that last novel George Gissing provides a description of “the pest-stricken regions of East London, sweltering in sunshine which served only to reveal the intimacies of abomination; across miles of a city of the damned, such as thought never conceived before this age of ours; above streets, swarming with a nameless populace, cruelly exposed by the unwonted light of heaven.” This is a vision of the East End as the Inferno, the city as hell, and it is not one confined to the novelist. The autobiographical narrative of “John Martin, School Master and Poet” was partly set in the purlieus of nineteenth-century Limehouse. “A mind is needed-black, misanthropic in its view of things, used to fearful visions of the night, to look with comprehensive and unflinching eye upon these scenes of sickly horror and despair.”

  When Jack London first wished to visit the East End in 1902 he had been told by the manager of Thomas Cook’s Cheapside branch that “We are not accustomed to taking travellers to the East End; we receive no call to take them there, and we know nothing whatsoever about the place at all.” They knew nothing about it, perhaps, and yet everyone knew of it. In Tales of Mean Streets (1894) Arthur Morrison declared that “There is no need to say in the East End of what. The East End is a vast city, as famous in its way as any the hand of man has made. But who knows the East End?”

  The presence of 100,000 Jewish immigrants, in Whitechapel and in Spitalfields, only served to emphasise the apparently “alien” quality of the neighbourhood. They served also to reinforce that other territorial myth which clung to the East End. Because it did indeed lie towards the east, it became associated with that larger “east” which lay beyond Christendom and which threatened the borders of Europe. The name given to the dispossessed children of the streets, “street-Arabs,” offers some confirmation of this diagnosis. The East End was in that sense the ultimate threat and the ultimate mystery. It represented the heart of darkness.

  Yet there were some who came as missionaries into that darkness. As early as the 1860s men and women, impelled by religious or philanthropic motives, set
up halls and chapels in the East End. The vicar of St. Jude’s in Whitechapel, Samuel Barnett, was instrumental in what was called “settlement work” where generally idealistic young men and women tried materially to assist the straitened or precarious lives of the East Enders. Arnold Toynbee declared in one of his lectures to the inhabitants of Bethnal Green: “You have to forgive us, for we have wronged you; we have sinned against you grievously … we will serve you, we will devote our lives to your service, and we cannot do more.” Partly as a result of his example, and his eloquence, various “missions” were established, among them Oxford House in Bethnal Green and St. Mildred’s House upon the Isle of Dogs. The tone of supplication in Toynbee’s remarks might also be construed as one of anxiety that those, who had been so grievously treated, might react against the “sinners” who betrayed them.