London: The Biography

by Peter Ackroyd

  In 1904 the county council assumed control of elementary education in London, and funded a system of scholarships whereby clever children might move on from board schools to grammar schools. Such innovations directly affected the lives of Londoners. A city government impinged upon the citizens for the first time in living memory. The administration of London was no longer some distant and almost unrecognisable presence, characterised by what Matthew Arnold described in another context as a “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar”; it had become a force for change and improvement.

  London once more embodied a young and energetic spirit, with a curious acquisitive atmosphere which floods the pages of urban chroniclers such as H.G. Wells. The laborious and intricate city of the fin-de-siècle seems to have vanished, together with that heavy and lassitudinous atmosphere so peculiar to the memoirs of the period; it is as if the city had come alive with the new century. It was the first age of the mass cinema, too, with the advent of the Moving Picture Theatre and the Kinema. The Underground lines had abandoned their steam trains, and the whole network was electrified by 1902. Motor buses, tram-cars, lorries and tricycles added to the general momentum. London was, in a phrase of the period, “going ahead.” Where in the late nineteenth century, wrote the author of The Streets of London, “it had been rich and fruity, it was becoming slick and snappy.” One of the permanent, and most striking, characteristics of London lies in its capacity to rejuvenate itself. It might be compared to some organism which sloughs off its old skin, or texture, in order to live again. It is a city which has the ability to dance upon its own ashes. So, in the memoirs of Edwardian London, there are accounts of thés dansants, tangos and waltzes and Blue Hungarian bands. There were twelve music halls and twenty-three theatres in the central area, with another forty-seven just outside. The shops and restaurants grew in size, while the tea shops became “corner houses” and “maisons.” There were picture domes and prizefights and soda fountains and cafés and revues, all compounding the atmosphere of a “fast” city.

  The Great War of 1914-18 cannot be said to have impeded the city’s growth or its essential vitality. London has always been energetic and powerful enough to buttress itself against distress and disaster. Herbert Asquith heard a “distant roaring” on the final day of peace at the beginning of August 1914. He wrote that “War or anything that seems likely to lead to war is always popular with the London mob. You remember Sir R. Walpole’s remark, ‘Now they are ringing their bells; in a few weeks they’ll be wringing their hands.’” London was accustomed to violence and to latent savagery, not least in the manifestations of the mob, and for many the vision of chaos and destruction acted as a restorative. The inhabitants of a large city are always the most sanguineous. It is true, also, that London expanded during the years of war. Just as in earlier centuries it had killed more than it cared for, so in the present conflict it seemed to thrive upon slaughter. The city’s economy was fuelled by full employment, with so many of its young males detained elsewhere, and as a result the standard of living improved. Of course there were local hazards and difficulties. Building work was suspended, and at night the city was only partly illuminated by lamps which had been painted dark blue as a precaution against the raids of Zeppelin warships. Parks and squares were used as kitchen-gardens, while hotels became government offices or hostels. But there were more foreign restaurants and pâtisseries than ever, as a result of the presence of émigrés, while the dance halls and music halls were full. There was a loss of life in the capital-it is still not unusual to find plaques upon the walls of long-since renovated buildings, commemorating a Zeppelin raid upon the site-with approximately seven hundred killed in the four years of war. In contrast it has been estimated that almost 125,000 Londoners died in battle. Yet London is prodigal of life.

  The close of the war in November 1918 was greeted with scenes of revelry and enthusiasm which have always punctuated the city’s history. Stanley Weintraub has depicted the occasion in A Stillness Heard Around the World: The End of the Great War. “The street was now a seething mass of humanity. Flags appeared as if by magic. Streams of men and women flowed from the Embankment … Almost before the last stroke of the clock had died away, the strict, war-straitened, regulated streets of London had become a triumphant pandemonium.” This is a description of the city stirring into life again, with the “streams” of its citizens like the blood once more racing through its arteries. Pedestrians “were dancing on the sidewalks” and vast crowds gathered in all the public places in order to experience that inchoate sense of collective feeling which is one aspect of urban identity on these occasions; the citizens do indeed become one body and one voice. George V drove “through waves of cheering crowds,” with the image of the sea once more invoking the strange impersonality and inexorability within this expression of mass emotion. Osbert Sitwell recollected that the last time he had seen such a crowd “was when it was cheering for its own death outside Buckingham Palace on the evening of August 4, 1914; most of the men who composed it were now dead.”

  Here the exultation comes very close to savagery, and a kind of barbaric triumph is let loose upon the streets of London. “The God of Herds” had taken over as the people “sometimes joining up, sometimes linking hands, dashed like the waves of the sea against the sides of Trafalgar Square.” The celebrations there would continue for three days without ceasing. Paradoxically there was a certain amount of violence and riot to celebrate this peace, while one observer described it “as a sort of wild orgy of pleasure: an almost brutal enjoyment. It was frightening. One felt that if there had been any Germans around, the women would have advanced upon them and torn them to pieces.” The same cruelty had of course been visible in the crowd’s delight at the beginning of the war. In one novel relating these events, James Hilton’s Random Harvest, the scenes represent “a common earth touch-a warm bawdy link with the mobs of the past.” The frenzy spread in unexpected directions. There is the story of the famous parrot in the Cheshire Cheese Public House who with his beak “drew a hundred corks without stopping amid the din of Armistice Night 1918 and then fell down in a faint.” It may seem perverse to pay more attention to the celebrations of a few days in winter than to the whole course of a war, but in that shorter period the city became more intensely itself.

  Out of that conflict, too, emerged dynamic movement and a fresh sense of purpose. By 1939 the population of Greater London had risen to 8,600,000; it was the largest level it had ever attained, and is perhaps ever likely to attain. One in five of the British population had become a Londoner. The city had expanded in every sense, with new dual carriageway roads and radial highway schemes which reached out to Cheshunt and Hatfield, Chertsey and Staines. Just as it grew outwards, so its interior fabric was renewed. New banks and office blocks arose in the city, while the Bank of England itself was rebuilt. A new Lambeth Bridge was being constructed. With new initiatives in education and welfare, as well as schemes for the redevelopment of housing and of parks, the London County Council sustained the momentum of the city’s development. H.P. Clunn, writing The Face of London in 1932, suggested that “the new London is rising, with irresistible energy, on time-honoured sites.” It was not the first, nor the last, period of restoration; London is perpetually old, but always new. It was an appropriate sign of renovation, however, that in the autumn of 1931 the most significant public and commercial buildings of the capital were for the first time illuminated by floodlighting.

  Its novel brightness attracted powerful forces; the process of what has often been called “metropolitan centralisation” attracted politicians, trade unionists and broadcasters; thus the BBC, ensconced in the heart of London, also became the “voice of the nation.” The film and newspaper industries, together with the myriad advertising companies, migrated to the metropolis, in the process helping to spread images and visions of the capital throughout the entire country. Industry, too, was part of this mass migration. The authors of the County of London Plan noted that many com
mercial leaders were attracted by “the sight of numerous flourishing factories and the general air of prosperity associated with Greater London.” Once more London had reverted to type and become Cockaigne or the city of gold.

  The 1930s have in particular been anatomised as the age of anxiety, when economic depression, unemployment and the prospect of another world war materially affected the general disposition of the city. Yet the historians and reporters bring their own preoccupations to the subject; London is large enough, and heterogeneous enough, to reflect any mood or topic. It can hold, or encompass, anything; in that sense it must remain fundamentally unknowable.

  J.B. Priestley, for example, saw evidence of a giant transition. He described a new urban culture, growing up all around him, as one “of arterial and by-pass roads, of filling stations and factories that look like exhibition buildings, of giant cinemas and dance halls and cafes, bungalows with tiny garages, cocktail bars, Woolworths, motor coaches, wireless.” The familiar London sensation, of everything growing too large, once more emerged. It was reported in 1932 that Dagenham, for example, had within ten years increased its population by 879 per cent. In 1921 it had been a small village, complete with cottages and fields of corn; within a decade 20,000 houses had been erected to sustain a working-class population. George Orwell had mentioned Dagenham in his account of a new city where the citizens inhabit “vast new wildernesses of glass and brick,” where “the same kind of life … is being lived at different levels, in labour-saving flats or council houses, along the concrete roads.” He was describing the same reality as Priestley, with “miles of semi-detached bungalows, all with their little garages, their wireless sets.” They were both reacting to the single most important change in London life within the last 150 years. They were talking about the suburbs.

  After the Great War

  One of many posters from the London Underground-this one dates from 1929-extolling the virtues of suburbia or “Metroland.” The retreat into suburbia in fact marked the greatest change in London’s topography since the estates of the eighteenth century.

  CHAPTER 75. Suburban Dreams

  The suburbs are as old as the city itself; they were once the spillings and scourings of the city, unhappy and insalubrious. The “subarbes” contained precisely that which had been banished from the town- the “stink” industries, brothels, leper hospitals, theatres-so that the area beyond the walls was in some way deemed threatening or lawless. It was neither city nor country; it represented London’s abandoned trail across the earth.

  Nevertheless by the sixteenth century such diverse extramural areas as Wapping and Holborn, Mile End and Bermondsey, began to manifest all the signs of burgeoning population, trade and housing. The author of Londinopolis wrote, in 1657, that “’tis true that the suburbs of London are much broader than the body of the city, which make some compare her to a Jesuit’s hat whose brims are far larger than the block.” In the same period the Spanish ambassador remarked, “I believe there will be no City left shortly, for it will all have run out of the gates to the suburbs.” Yet the process was as inevitable as it was inexorable. London could no more cease growing than a lava flow can stop its irruption.

  But the process was complex and unpredictable. London did not extend itself ever outwards in all directions, like some blocked-in mass perpetually extending its perimeter; it spiralled out in various directions, making use of existing roads or trade routes and testing the capacity of various villages or parishes to sustain its weight. The south of Stepney, for example, seemed like a “city by the river,” one of the earliest industrial suburbs, but to its north still “this Parish has the face of the country.” London moved organically, in other words, always finding the right ecology in which it might exist and flourish. Spitalfields expanded fivefold in less than sixty years, and the derivation of these fields of spittle might have been taken from the fluffy white excreta of the spider continually expanding its web.

  Yet of course this natural glut of buildings and of people provoked sensations of disgust or dismay. It seemed to threaten the identity of the city itself. On a technical level the authorities could no longer supervise trade, or working practices, or prices; in a less palpable sense the guardians of law and of authority were gradually losing control. That loss of power induced anxiety. So, for example, Charles I blamed mob riots in Whitehall upon “the meane and unrulie people of the suburbs,” and the suburbs themselves have been described in Stephen Inwood’s A History of London as “a nether world of dung heaps, stinking trades, bloodsports, gallows, low taverns, prostitutes, foreigners, thieves, the poor and the mob.”

  Yet for a while it still seemed possible to escape from the blight of the city. By the end of the eighteenth century there were in Peckham “many handsome houses … most of which are the country seats of wealthy citizens of London.” In Kentish Town “the air being exceedingly wholesome, many of the citizens have built houses; and such whose circumstances will not admit of that expense, take ready furnished lodgings for the summer.” In Fulham, also, were “many good buildings belonging to the gentry and citizens of London.” The process here was not one of confused inchoate growth, but one of deliberate colonisation of the surrounding countryside. Villages such as Clapton and Hampstead and Dulwich became, in the nomenclature of a later period, “suburban villages.”

  As early as 1658, beside Newington Green, terraced houses appeared on the model of London terraces. Thirty years later Kensington Square was similarly laid out, while according to Chris Miele in Suburban London, “making no apparent concession to the rural character of the place.” By some strange alchemy the city had reassembled itself in a distant spot, as a silent token of that which was to come. By a similar process suburban estates emerged in previously rural areas, closely modelled upon the estates which had already been constructed in the western quarters of London; Kensington New Town, Hans Town and Camden Town were cities in miniature, laid down at convenient and profitable sites beside the main roads. The suburbs, like the rest of London, were established upon the principles of commercial gain.

  Just as areas such as Hammersmith and Camberwell could no longer be described as either town or country, but were now something partaking of both, so their inhabitants were mixed and ambivalent. Defoe had already noticed the emergence of “the Middle sort of Mankind, grown Wealthy by Trade, and who still taste of London; some live both in the City, and the Country at the same time.” Hybrid forms of architecture, too, began to emerge in these mingled landscapes. In the 1750s and 1760s, for example, villas emerged as standard suburban dwellings. They were soon visible in Islington and Muswell Hill, Ealing and Clapham, Walthamstow and South Kensington. It has been said that their example directly affected the appearance of a later and more extensive suburbia, with what John Summerson described as “the flood of Victorian house-building, that torrent of ‘villadom.’” This description may itself be said to partake of the somewhat dismissive attitude still adopted towards the suburbs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, yet the villas of the mid-eighteenth century anticipated the atmosphere and texture of later suburban life in more than an architectural sense. They embodied, for example, that privacy which was instinctive to the London character but which the city could no longer provide. One of the motives behind the movement towards the suburbs, both in its early and late forms, was to escape the sheer proximity of other people and other voices; the quietness of a modern suburban street may not equal the silence of villa grounds in Roehampton or Richmond, but the principle of exclusion remains the same. The villas were originally designed as dwellings for one family, of course, surrounded and protected from the depredations of the city. The notion of one unit as one family is indeed central to the later development of suburban life, where the yearning for safety and the relative anonymity of isolation have been equally powerful. The villas were “detached.” Cheaper versions for the more populous areas were in turn established upon semi-detachment.

  There are social, and aesth
etic, consequences attendant upon what some might see as retreat or regression. The original villas were a highly visible token of respectability-“of cheerfulness, elegance and refinement,” to quote a brochure of the period-and this vision of respectability sustained the suburbs for the next two centuries. The phrase “keeping up appearances” might have been coined for suburban living. But the original villas themselves introduced a form of artifice; they were not “villas” in any classical sense (certainly nothing like the Roman variant which would once have been seen all over southern England), and the illusion of country living was sustained only with a great amount of determination and ingenuity. The nineteenth-and twentieth-century suburbs were also involved in an elaborate game of make-believe, with the implicit assumption that they were not part of the city at all. In reality they were as much an aspect of London as Newgate or the Tottenham Court Road, but their principal attraction was still based on the assumption that they were free of the city’s noxious and contaminating influences.

  This happy fiction could not be sustained for long, however, with the emergence of mass transport expediting the greatest exodus in London’s history. Soon the pattern became clear, with the more prosperous citizens moving further out to more extensive grounds and eminences even as they were being displaced by new arrivals. The phenomenon is as old, and as new, as the city itself. Charles Manby Smith in The Little World of London, observed the progress over the 1820s to 1850s of one fictional street, which he named Strawberry Street, in suburban Islington. It was two or three years in building, with “a double row of two-storied dwellings,” and at first “clung with considerable tenacity to rural associations and characteristics” in order to avoid “being swallowed up in Babylon’s bosom.” It was genteel, the abode of professional gentlemen and their families, “clerks, managers, and responsible persons employed in the city.” But then it began to change. “The professional ladies and gentlemen moved by degrees further north, and their places were supplied by a new class-by tradesmen’s clerks, by foremen, and overseers of workshops” who worked all hours and who “let lodgings to help pay the rent.” Soon enough “long ranks of cottages, not twenty feet apart, sprang up like mushrooms in the waste ground on the eastern side. They were inhabited as soon as built.” A saw-mill was erected in the vicinity, and in the street itself there appeared a variety of shops; a carpenter, a joiner, a greengrocer joined the older residents so that “in a couple of years … the whole street on both sides of the way, with the exception of a very few houses, was transformed into a third-rate business street.” The saw-mill itself prospered and “gathered round it a host of industrial processors.” Beer-shops and public houses and coffee shops emerged, alongside workshops and work-yards. So within thirty years the street had been transformed “from the abode of quiet and ease-loving competence to that of the toiling and struggling mass.”