London: The Biography

by Peter Ackroyd

  There was another characteristic urban process, too, with development along the lines of the main roads followed by a consolidation of the areas between the thoroughfares so that, as The Builder of 1885 put it, “the growth of the solid nucleus, with but few interstices left open, has been nothing less than prodigious.” By the 1850s the city began to lose its population to areas such as Canonbury to the north, and Walworth to the south. The advent of cheap “workmen’s fares” meant that areas close to a railway station could be quickly inhabited; thus there emerged “working-class” suburbs such as Tottenham and East Ham. The drift was gathering pace and by the 1860s the clerk and the shopkeeper desired nothing but a little villa “out of town.” An observer perched on top of Primrose Hill, in 1862, noted that “the metropolis has thrown out its arms and embraced us, not yet with a stifling clutch, but with ominous closeness.” The metaphors here suggest some alien threat or invasion, and of course they represent a familiar if unimaginative attitude towards London. The city’s expansion over the countryside was noisy, noxious and destructive. Yet it could equally be argued that the city brought energy and activity to those areas which it covered, and that in the creation of suburbia it fashioned a new kind of life. It brought prosperity and, for those who settled on the new estates, a kind of contentment.

  In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, therefore, there was endless building activity in all the environs of London. “Let as fast as built” was one slogan, yet it would be a mistake to characterise all suburbs as examples of shoddy architecture or improvised planning. The informal St. John’s Wood Estate and those of Wimbledon Common or Hampstead Garden Suburb, for example, were quite distinct from the working-class terraces of Walthamstow or Barking. The rows of small houses that comprised Agar Town differed from the more genteel avenues of Brixton. The Eton College Estate, covering the district known as Chalk Farm, was very different from the Seven Sisters Estate. Dreary Islington was not the same as leafy Crouch End. H.G. Wells reacted with dismay to the suburbia of Bromley, where he had grown up, and denounced its “jerry built unalterable houses” as well as the “planlessness of which all of us who had to live in London were the victims.” Yet only a decade after the young Wells was unhappily ensconced in Bromley, the young W.B. Yeats was enjoying the relatively sylvan delights of Bedford Park. Both were London suburbs.

  The broadest view, however, might identify three separate types of suburb. There were those still on the very outer limits of the city; areas like Surbiton, Sidcup and Chislehurst were characterised by the grander villas with large gardens built on high ground. There was a sprinkling of “cottages” and shops by the nearest railway station, but the rural illusion could still be maintained. In the second degree of suburbs, in areas such as Palmers Green and Crouch End, dwelled the “middle managers, supervisors and better paid clerks” who benefited from the low fares of the surface railways to find a safe and relatively quiet retreat from the roar of “Babylon.” The third level catered for the working class and, in estates like Leyton and East Ham, undistinguished and indistinguishable terraces of low-cost housing covered every available open space. These latter were generally located in the east of the city. The ancient territorial imperatives were, after all, also a determining factor in the character and quality of the suburbs, those to the east and north-east being obviously inferior to those of the west. The suburbs to the south were more expansive, and more sedate, than those to the north.

  By the 1880s it was agreed that London was “as to its greater part, a new city.” It had become, in the words of Building News in 1900, a “huge overgrown Metropolis” largely comprised of a “tide of small houses.” This was the paradox-that a vast capital could be constructed out of small individual units. It was almost as if London had, by some strange act of intuition, taken on the visible shape of burgeoning social democracy. New forms of mass transportation, such as the deep-level Underground system, had helped to create a new city; in turn that city was now creating the context for evolutionary social change. “Where will London end?” asked The Builder in 1870, to which the only reply was, “Goodness knows.” The question might have been asked at any time over the last six centuries, and received a similar answer. In 1909 C.F.G. Masterman also described the growth of the suburbs-as a London topic, it was on everyone’s mind-as “miles and miles of little red houses in little silent streets, in numbers defying the imagination.” For him it represented “a life of Security, a life of Sedentary Occupation; a life of Respectability.” At a later date, in Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell in similar vein remarked upon “the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London … sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England.”

  Yet the denigration and the tone of limited contempt, implicit in these descriptions, were not shared by those who lived in the suburbs. Sleep and respectability may have been precisely the conditions required by succeeding generations of new Londoners; the population of the city had for many centuries been characterised by its violence and impetuosity, its drunkenness and ill health. The suburbs represented a new urban civilisation which would flourish without any of the familiar urban attributes. When Ilford was developed in the 1900s as a middle-range suburb for clerks and skilled workers, the speculators refused to permit the construction of any pubs in the vicinity. Their concern was to render the new suburb as little like London as possible. In the same period the London County Council shifted its emphasis from the refurbishment or redevelopment of “inner-city” areas to the erection of “cottage estates” on the fringes of London. The idea of the cottage was itself much abused in the process, but the introduction of two-storey terraced houses with small rear gardens changed the reputation of council housing and in fact changed the image of the Londoner. The Cockney need not necessarily be a product of the slums.

  In the mid-1930s it was estimated that, each day, two and a half million people were on the move in London. That is why there was a large increase in private, as well as public, suburbia. It was the age of “Metroland,” which began life with the Cedars Estate in Rickmansworth and spread outwards to include Wembley Park and Ruislip, Edgware and Finchley, Epsom and Purley. The importance of transport in effecting this mass dispersal is emphasised by the fact that the very notion of Metroland was created by the Metropolitan Railway Company, and heavily endorsed by the London Underground. Their booklets and advertisements emphasised the resolutely non-urban aspects of what were effectively great housing estates.

  “Metroland beckoned us out to lanes in beechy Bucks,” according to John Betjeman who had a tenacious if ambiguous affection for the suburban terrain-for “gabled gothic” and “new-planted pine,” for the “Pear and apple in Croydon gardens” and “the light suburban evening” where a vast and welcoming security is so much to be hoped for. In a poem entitled “Middlesex” Betjeman invoked another form of permanence-“Keep alive our lost Elysium-rural Middlesex again”-and the advertisers of the Metropolitan Railway and the Underground exploited this ache, or longing, for continuity and predictability. According to the brochures-displaying, once more according to Betjeman, “sepia views of leafy lanes in Pinner”-the new inhabitant of the suburbs will dwell beside “brambly wildernesses where nightingales sing.” One advertisement prepared by the London Underground showed three rows of grey and mournful terraces, with the words “Leave This and Move to Edgware.” A sylvan scene presents itself accompanied by a quotation from the seventeenth-century poet Abraham Cowley, who himself retired to Chertsey after the Restoration in 1660. In a single sentence he expresses the wish that “I might be Master of a small House and a Large Garden, with moderate conveniences joined to them.” Once more the new suburban vision, in accordance with the implicit antiquarianism of London itself, took refuge in an appeal to an ill-defined and ill-explained past.

  The same form of cultural nostalgia was evident in the architectural style of the new suburbs, the dominant model being “mock Tudor” or what became known as “Stockbroker Tudor” or “Tudorbethan.” The
desire was to combine the sense of continuity with the satisfaction of traditional workmanship and design. It was a way of conveying substantiality, and a measure of dignity, to these new Londoners who had exiled themselves from the central core of the city. The city can transform and regenerate itself in unanticipated ways. Thus the suburban Gardens, Drives, Parks, Ways and Rises are now as much a part of London as the old Rents and Lanes and Alleys.

  London had created, and harboured, a new kind of life. Once more it happened unpredictably, with no concerted or centralised planning, and was directed by short-term commercial demands. So the suburbs became the home of shopping parades and imposing cinemas, of aesthetically pleasing Underground stations and ornate railway stations. It was the age of the Morris and the Ford. The factories which lined the new dual carriageways were now manufacturing the domestic items of this new civilisation-the washing machines and the refrigerators, the electric cookers and the wirelesses, the processed food and the vacuum cleaners, the electric fires and the leatherette furniture, the “reproduction” tables and the bathroom fittings.

  In a novel entitled Invisible Cities (1975), the Italian writer Italo Calvino reflects upon the nature of the suburbs under the assumed names of the cities of Trude and Penthesilea. We may substitute Acton and Wembley Park. The narrator is told that he may travel wherever he chooses “but you will arrive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end.” But this was always the definition of London, that it had no beginning and no ending. In that sense its suburbs simply partake of its endless nature. The gin palaces of the old city gave way to the glittering cinemas of the 1930s, the hostelries were replaced by “roadside inns” or mock-Tudor pubs located on significant crossroads, and the street-markets by shopping parades and department stores. The suburbs of the inter-war years significantly extended the life and reach of London, but essentially they elaborated upon it. In Calvino’s novel the narrator asks for the location of Penthesilea, and the inhabitants “make a broad gesture which may mean ‘Here’ or else ‘Farther on’ or ‘All around you’ or even ‘In the opposite direction.’” So for Calvino the visitor begins to ask “whether Penthesilea is only the outskirts of itself. The question that now begins to gnaw at your mind is more anguished: outside Penthesilea does an outside exist? Or, no matter how far you go from the city, will you only pass from one limbo to another, never managing to leave it?”

  London is so ubiquitous that it can be located nowhere in particular. The extraordinary growth of its suburbs emphasised the fact that, since it has no defined or definite centre, its circumference is everywhere.

  Blitz

  A famous photograph of St. Paul’s cathedral; miraculously the church survived the depredations of the bombs of the Second World War, but it rose over a blasted and wasted city.

  CHAPTER 76. War News

  It began with attacks upon outer London. Croydon and Wimbledon were hit and, at the end of August, there was a stray raid upon the Cripplegate area. Then, at five p.m. on 7 September 1940, the German air force came in to attack London. Six hundred bombers, marshalled in great waves, dropped their explosive and high incendiary devices over east London. Beckton, West Ham, Woolwich, Millwall, Limehouse and Rotherhithe went up in flames. Gas stations, and power stations, were hit; yet the Docks were the principal target. “Telegraph poles began to smoke, then ignite from base to crown, although the nearest fire was many yards away. Then the wooden block road surface ignited in the searing heat.” The firemen had to race, through fire and perpetual explosion, to reach conflagrations which were almost “out of hand.” “The fire was so huge that we could do little more than make a feeble attempt to put it out. The whole of the warehouse was a raging inferno, against which there were silhouetted groups of pigmy firemen directing their futile jets on walls of flame.” These reports come from Courage High, a history of London fire-fighting by Sally Holloway. One volunteer was on the river itself where “half a mile of the Surrey shore was ablaze … burning barges were drifting everywhere … Inside the scene was like a lake in Hell.” In the crypt of a church in Bow “people were kneeling and crying and praying. It was a most terrible night.”

  The German bombers came back the next night, and then the next. The Strand was bombed, St. Thomas’s Hospital was hit together with St. Paul’s Cathedral, the West End, Buckingham Palace, Lambeth Palace, Piccadilly, the House of Commons. Truly to Londoners it seemed to be a war on London. Between September and November almost 30,000 bombs were dropped upon the capital. In the first thirty days of the onslaught almost six thousand people were killed, and twice as many badly injured. On the night of the full moon, 15 October, “it seemed as if the end of the world had come.” Some compared London to a prehistoric animal, wounded and burned, which would disregard its assailants and keep moving massively onward; this was based on the intuition of London as representing some relentless and ancient force which could withstand any shock or injury. Yet other metaphors were in use-among them those of Jerusalem, Babylon and Pompeii-which lent a sense of precariousness and eventual doom to the city’s plight. When in the first days of the Blitz Londoners saw the ranks of German bombers advancing without being hindered by anti-aircraft fire, there was an instinctive fear that they were witnessing the imminent destruction of their city.

  The earliest reactions were, according to the reports of Mass Observation and other interested parties, mixed and incongruous. Some citizens were hysterical, filled with overwhelming anxiety, and there were several cases of suicide; others were angry, and stubbornly determined to continue their ordinary lives even in the face of extraordinary dangers. Some tried to be jovial, while others became keenly interested spectators of the destruction all around them, but for many the mood was one of spirited defiance. As one anthologist of London history, A.N. Wilson, has put it, the records of the time reveal “the perkiness, the jokes, the songs” even “in the immediate and garish presence of violent death.”

  It is difficult fully to define that particular spirit, but it is of the utmost interest in attempting to describe the nature of London itself. In his definitive study, London at War, Philip Ziegler has suggested that “Londoners made a deliberate effort to seem nonchalant and unafraid,” but this self-control may have been a necessary and instinctive unwillingness to spread the contagion of panic. What if this city of eight million people were to regress into hysteria? It was precisely that fate which Bertrand Russell had predicted in a pamphlet, Which Way to Peace?, in which he anticipated that London would become “one vast bedlam, the hospitals will be stormed, traffic will cease, the homeless will shriek for peace, the city will be a pandemonium.” It is possible that ordinary citizens, with instincts finer than those of their erstwhile “betters,” knew that this could not be allowed to happen. So the “calmness, the resigned resolution of the Londoner” was the quality which impressed those coming from outside. In all of its periodic crises, and riots, and fires, London has remained surprisingly stable; it has tipped, and tilted, before righting itself. This may in part be explained by the deep and heavy presence of trade and commerce within its fabric, the pursuit of which rides over any obstacle or calamity. One of Winston Churchill’s wartime phrases was “Business as usual,” and no slogan could be better adapted to the condition of London.

  Yet there was another aspect of the calmness and determination of Londoners in the autumn and winter of 1940, springing from some deep sense that the city had suffered before and had somehow survived. Of course nothing could equal the fury and destruction of the Blitz, but the sheer persistence and continuity of London through time lent an intimate yet perhaps at the time unidentifiable reassurance. There was always the intimation of eventual renewal and reconstruction. The poet Stephen Spender, in north London in the aftermath of one raid, related: “I had the comforting sense of the sure dark immensity of London.” Here is another source of consolation; the city was too large, too complex, too momentous,
to be destroyed. Then he recognised that “The grittiness, stench and obscurity of Kilburn suddenly seemed a spiritual force-the immense force of poverty which had produced the narrow, yet intense, visions of Cockneys living in other times.” This has the “spiritual force” of revelation, since Spender seems to have concluded that poverty and suffering had somehow produced a kind of invulnerability to even the worst onslaughts which the world can unleash. “We can take it” was one of the often recorded comments by those who had been bombed out of their homes, with the unspoken addition that “we have taken everything else.”