London: The Biography

by Peter Ackroyd

  A typical journey around an East End neighbourhood will disclose one or two Georgian houses with perhaps some large mid-Victorian establishments, now turned into council offices or social security centres; there will be remnants of late nineteenth-century housing together with council housing of the 1920s and 1930s; pubs and betting offices, together with the ubiquitous small general store and newsagent; mini-cab offices, as well as shops specialising in long-distance telephone calls to Africa or India; a variety of council blocks, the oldest estates alongside low-rise estates of the 1980s and the nineteen-storey tower blocks of the same period. There will be an open space, or a park. In some parts of the East, the arches beneath the innumerable railway bridges will be used for car-maintenance or for storage.

  Yet there have of course been changes. Poplar High Street was a crowded thoroughfare, with a plethora of shops and stalls and grimy buildings on either side; now it is an open street bordered by five-storey council-house estates, pubs and shops of yellow brick. The sound of people thronging, buying and selling has now been replaced by the intermittent noise of traffic. Much of the East End has followed that example. Where there was once a collection of shops and houses in a variety of styles, there will now be a “block” of uniform texture and dimensions; as a substitute for rows upon rows of terraced houses, there are major roads. The altered neighbourhoods seem somehow lighter, perhaps because they have lost touch with their history. At the extreme western end of Poplar High Street, just beyond Pennyfields, Joseph Nightingale’s coffee rooms, with signs for steak and kidney or liver and bacon, used to adjoin the horseflesh shop of James McEwen which in turn was next to George Ablard the hairdresser; the buildings had different frontages and were of varying height. In recent years that corner has been taken up by three-storey red-brick council dwellings and a small thoroughfare, Saltwell Street, runs by it. The opium quarter of Limehouse is now represented by a Chinese take-away. Here was once a street known as Bickmore Street and an extant photograph, taken in 1890, shows crowds of children posed outside a number of bow-windowed shopfronts; in its place today stands part of a recreation ground.

  It might be concluded that the clutter and clatter of life have gone from these areas, even if they exist elsewhere in the East End. It could also be suggested that the rebuilt or renovated neighbourhoods resemble those within other areas of London; the council estates of Poplar, for example, are not so very different from those of Southall or Greenford. So the aspiration towards civic contentment has led to a diminution of local identity. The greatest contrast of all, evinced in photographs taken from 1890 to 1990, lies in the diminution of people in the streets. The life of the East End has gone within. Whether the telephone or television has effected this change is not the question; the salient fact remains that the human life of the streets has greatly diminished in exuberance and in intensity. Yet it is important not to sentimentalise this transition. If the East seems a more denuded place, it is also a less impoverished one; if it is more remote, or less human, it is also healthier. No one would willingly exchange a council flat for a tenement slum, even if the slums were filled with a communal spirit. You cannot go back.

  CHAPTER 72. The South Work

  That was how Southwark received its name, from the “south work” of a river wall to match its northern counterpart. Its origins, however, remain mysterious. Along the Old Kent Road, at the junction with Bowles Road, were discovered the remnants of an ancient settlement which manufactured flint tools. “Within the weathered sands,” reported one investigator in the London Archaeologist, “were many finds associated with the activities of prehistoric people.” No doubt it would be fanciful to connect this long history of human settlement with the air of exhaustion, of spent life, which seems to pervade the vicinity. There is, after all, another explanation: the roads of the south were decorated with funereal monuments, and the memory of these important emblems may in part account for the sense of transience associated with the neighbourhood. Three inhumation burial sites have been found close to each other, the first along the present Borough High Street. Their significance lies in their rarity, the only other burial of an equivalent date being close to the Tower of London, but also in the fact that two Roman burials of a similar nature were found a few yards to the south-east. The whole area of Southwark is in fact rich in Roman burial sites, with a cluster of inhumations in the area where Stane Street and Watling Street once diverged from what is now Borough High Street; the lines of the streets still exist under the names of Newington Causeway and the Old Kent Road. Another cluster of burial sites can be found to the north-west, beside another great Roman road leading from the bridge across the river. That is why travellers met in Southwark, in order to continue their journeys southward, and of course it represents the starting point of the Canterbury pilgrimage narrated by Chaucer. There have always been taverns and inns here for the welfare of those passing through; hospitals congregated here, also, perhaps in some atavistic homage to transitoriness.

  The Roman settlement left another legacy. A gladiator’s trident was discovered in Southwark, prompting speculation that an arena may have been constructed in the vicinity where, in the late sixteenth century, the Swan and the Globe theatres flourished. The South Bank has always been associated with entertainment and pleasure, therefore, and its most recent incarnations encompass the newly thriving Globe Theatre as well as the whole area dominated by the Royal Festival Hall, the National Theatre and the Tate Modern.

  St. Mary Overie, later St. Saviour, later Southwark Cathedral, became a favoured place of sanctuary for those fleeing from the city’s justice. So Southwark acquired an ill-favoured reputation. There were seven prisons in the area by the seventeenth century (its most famous, the Clink, gave its name literally to other such institutions) and yet there was continual riot and disorder. The neighbourhood was owned by various religious authorities, among them the archbishop of Canterbury and the Cluniac Order which inhabited the priory at Bermondsey, and yet it was known for its licentiousness. The prostitutes of the Bankside, practising their trade within the “Liberty” of the bishop of Winchester, were known as “Winchester Geese.” So there existed a strange oscillation between freedom and restraint which is, perhaps, not so strange after all, in the general pattern of contraries which covers the whole of London.

  In Wyngaerde’s map of 1558 the area south of the Thames is intimately connected with that of the north by various lines of harmony, rather like the contemporary map of the Underground, flowing towards and over the bridge. A continuous row of houses stretches for almost a mile along the southern bank of the Thames, from Paris Garden Stairs to the great “Beere Howse” just east of Tooley Street beside Pickle Herring Stairs. It is perhaps worth noting that over a century before Shakespeare’s Falstaff appeared at the Globe, a short distance away, his namesake Sir John Falstolfe owned “four messuages called beer houses here.” In similar fashion Harry or “Herry” Bailey of the Tabard Inn was a real and familiar Southwark figure before he entered Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; perhaps there is something in the air of Southwark which encourages the transaction between reality and imagination. On the “Agas map” of the 1560s are shown ponds, water mills, smoky industries, bear pits, pleasure gardens and “stewhouses” like the celebrated “Castle upon the Hope Inn” which still survives as the Anchor.

  The city, in a sense, feared the contagion of these pleasurable haunts. A civic edict of the sixteenth century ordered the wherrymen, who were customarily employed to row citizens across the river to the brothels, to moor their boats at night by the northern stairs in order to ensure that “thieves and other misdoers shall not be carried” to the southern bank. Another form of civic displeasure is exemplified in the fact that although “Bridge Without” had become the twenty-sixth ward of the city “its inhabitants were not allowed to elect their own aldermen” who were in effect imposed upon them. Southwark had become a kind of satrapy, thus ensuring that almost to the end of the twentieth century it remained a r
elatively undeveloped and ill-regarded place. Yet it was not necessarily poorly administered. The rich or “middling class,” as always, superintended the poor and ensured that travelling paupers were discouraged. The parish vestry collected the rates and distributed poor relief, while the local court supervised all aspects of trade. These suggestions of a relatively self-sufficient community have been amplified in a recent historical survey which concludes that the population of this particular suburb, and by extension of others like it, was relatively stable. The inhabitants of Southwark maintained residence in the same houses and intermarried in the same neighbourhood, as was characteristic of the city in general.

  These conclusions tend to support the notion that, throughout the whole of London and its outlying districts, there was a vital and recognisable communal spirit. This spirit has survived over so many centuries that the present neighbourhood of Rotherhithe, for example, is still distinct from those of Deptford and Bermondsey. There is an indigenous or native spirit which animates a particular area. In contemporary south London there are a number of different areas, among them Lambeth and Brixton, Camberwell and Peckham, which have developed beside one another and by some form of symbiosis make up a recognisable atmosphere.

  Yet the South remained relatively unknown to other Londoners, except as a source of disquiet. The southern bank fulfilled some of the functions of the “Eastern pyle,” as a boundary zone to which London could consign its dirt and its rubbish. Hence in the early eighteenth century it became the repository for some of the “stink industries” which had been banished from the City proper. The tanneries were consigned to Bermondsey, for example, while Lambeth became the site for noisy timber yards, vinegar-makers, dye manufactories and the makers of soap and tallow. It was reported in the local press that “a society of persons did exist at Lambeth … who made a trade of digging up the bodies of the dead: they made candles of the fat, extracted volatile alkali from the bones, and sold the flesh for dog’s meat.” This sounds sufficiently alarmist to be apocryphal, but there is no doubt that south London already had a difficult reputation. One market gardener of the area decided in 1789 to set up his business elsewhere because “the smoke … constantly enveloped my plants … the obscurity of the situation, the badness of the roads leading to it, with the effluvia of surrounding ditches being at times highly offensive.” South London, or at least those parts of it which were in immediate relation to the rest of the city and could be seen from it, was considered as a poor and disreputable appendage. There was always a form of urban discrimination.

  That is why there were so many prisons in the vicinity, as well as institutions for female orphans and asylums for the poor; Bethlem, too, was erected in Lambeth (1815). London was consigning all its difficult or problematic citizens to the South. The area also acquired a reputation for dubious taverns and doubtful pleasure gardens. Establishments such as the Apollo Gardens were under civic scrutiny, and were on occasions closed down by the authorities for “disorderliness.” The whole of Lambeth became known as a “louche and even disreputable quarter.” The Temple of Flora and the Dog and Duck Tavern, situated where the path across St. George’s Fields met the Lambeth Road, was “certainly the most dreadful place in or about the metropolis … the resorts of women, not only of the lower species of prostitution, but even of the middle classes.” South London had once more manifested its ancient status as a haven of sexual freedom. The philanthropist Francis Place recalled highwaymen of the 1780s claiming their horses in these southern fields where “flashy women come out to take leave of the thieves at dusk and wish them success.” It is known that radical insurrectionaries were hunted down in the area, since they were believed to plot and plan in various decaying public houses; just as the music-hall stars of the mid-nineteenth century moved south to Brixton, so those of dubious public reputation like the transvestite Chevalier d’Eon had moved to Lambeth a century before. It was, in every sense, a dumping ground.

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  But the prospect of dirt, or dilapidation, did not materially affect the growth of London in that direction; like the beetle which lives upon dung, the “offensive” smells and sounds might even arouse its powers into further expenditures of energy. The erection of Westminster Bridge in 1750, and the completion of Blackfriars Bridge nineteen years later, marked the real development of south London. Highways led from the newly established bridges, and moved towards Kennington and the Elephant and Castle; in addition roads were laid across open fields to join these major thoroughfares. The new roads led to fresh industrial development, so that the vinegar-and dye-works were complemented by potteries, lime kilns and blacking factories. By 1800, Lambeth had assumed all the characteristics of a slum.

  Yet the area still grew; it expanded and developed, acquiring its shape along with the other ribbon developments which snaked southwards. The process acquired resistless momentum in the first decade of the nineteenth century when three toll bridges were completed. Southwark Bridge, Waterloo Bridge and Vauxhall Bridge opened the way for the extensive building programmes which created south London in its present form. The increase in London’s population, and the exertion of the new industrial forces, drew the city over the Thames at an ever increasing rate. The streets around St. George’s Circus were soon thickly inhabited, with houses covering all the adjacent fields, but soon the shops and houses and businesses began to travel down the roads which radiated from that neighbourhood. Newington, Kennington and Walworth were directly affected and by the 1830s the whole area of the present South was being covered in roads and houses. The suburban development soon expanded to include Peckham and Camberwell, Brixton and Clapham, even so far as Dulwich and Herne Hill. It was not long before Sydenham and Norwood, Forest Hill and Honor Oak, became part of the same urban diaspora.

  Those who have recorded their impressions of coming into London by the railway from the south, have remarked upon the apparently endless vista of red and brown roofs, dead walls, and little streets which flashed by. The prospect has been compared to that of a sea, or a desert, both images invoking the power of some remorseless force which cannot be withstood. A character in H.G. Wells’s Tono Bungay travelling in the early 1900s on the South-Eastern Railway, “marked beyond Chislehurst the growing multitude of villas, and so came stage by stage through multiplying houses … the congestion of houses intensified and piled up presently into tenements: I marvelled more and more at this boundless world of dingy people.” One of the principal sensations was also that of fear. It was the instinctive fear of uniformity, as well as fear of the approaching capital which had engendered it.

  As the railway carriage travelled closer to its destination at Cannon Street, “whiffs of industrial smell, of leather, of brewing” circulated like the odours of sulphur from some unseen inferno. Since the colonisation of the southern bank was entirely driven by the need for industrial expansion and exploitation, it is appropriate that the smell of industry itself should permeate the territory. There were glue factories and wool warehouses, while Charles Knight’s Encyclopaedia of London notes that “chimneys shot up at intervals of a few yards, towering above a very maze of red roofs, and furnishing their contribution to the smoky atmosphere of the neighbourhood.” The district, once characterised by its priory, was now celebrated for its protean quality; it “may be regarded as a region of manufacturers, a region of market-gardeners, a region of wholesale dealers, and a maritime region, according to the quarter where we take our stand.” Just as there were various trades in Bermondsey, so there were heterogeneous odours. “In one street strawberry jam is borne in upon you in whiffs, hot and strong; in another, raw hides and tanning; in another, glue; while in some streets the nose encounters an unhappy combination of all three.” Between 1916 and 1920 the London novelist and essayist V.S. Pritchett worked for a leather manufacturer; he also recalled the odours of Bermondsey. “There was a daylight gloom in this district of London. One breathed the heavy, drugging beer smell of hops and there was another smell of bo
ots and dog dung … the stinging smell of vinegar from a pickle factory; and smoke blew down from an emery mill … from the occasional little slum houses, the sharp stink of poverty.” That last is of course the most penetrating and significant odour of them all, compounding the noisome reputation of south London in general.

  The similarities between the East and the South are apparent, but there were also significant disparities. The East End offered a more intense kind of community than the South; it possessed more open markets, for example, and more music halls. In the South, also, there was less contact with the rest of London. By sheer proximity the East End could share some of the energy and animation of the old City; it had, after all, existed against its walls for many centuries. But the great swathe of the river had always isolated the South, lending it a somewhat desolate quality. It is reflected in those comments about south London which render it a distinct and alien place.

  George Gissing, for example, depicted Southwark in terms of its unpleasant odours. “An evil smell hung about the butchers’ and the fish shops. A public-house poisoned a whole street with alcoholic fumes; from sewer-grates rose a miasma that caught the breath.” A London reporter, writing in 1911, remarked that to pass over London Bridge was to cross “that natural dividing line of peoples”; it is an interesting remark, suggesting an almost atavistic reverence for the natural boundary of the river which changes the essence of the territory on either bank. He then asked whether, having crossed that significant line, “the very streets changed in some subtle and unconscious manner, to a more sordid character; the shops to a more blatant kind-even the people to a different and lower type?”