London: The Biography

by Peter Ackroyd

  The German invasion of Russia had indirectly saved the city from more destruction, and there succeeded a relative peace. Then “life” went on. The city seemed to resume its normal course, with its postmen and bus-drivers and milkmen and errand boys, but there was the strangest feeling of ennui or despondency after the spectacular damage of the Blitz. Philip Ziegler in London at War has described it as an “enervating lull.” With the conflict taking place in other cities and over other skies, “Londoners felt that they had been left on the sidelines, they were bored and dejected.” Those who still used the Underground shelters had established a network of friendship and camaraderie but this subterranean spirit was an odd token of London’s general condition, in what Elizabeth Bowen called “the lightless middle of the tunnel,” enduring the discomforts and disadvantages of a war over which it had no control. The citizens were frustrated at, and bored by, the privations of life. And this in turn affected the very atmosphere and character of London itself. The people were shabbily dressed and, in instinctive and intimate sympathy, their houses became shabby. The windows were cracked, the plaster was flaking away, the wallpaper manifested signs of damp. The public buildings of the city were also showing signs of fatigue and depression, as their façades became more grimy and decayed. The atmosphere was woebegone, with a strange symbiosis between the city and its inhabitants which suggests-as Defoe had discovered during the Great Plague-the presence of a living, suffering organism.

  Then, at the beginning of 1944, the bombs returned. But the “little blitz,” as it was called, was the unhappy end of unfinished business; there were fourteen raids in all, the heaviest in February and March, directed against a city which had been wearied and to a certain extent demoralised by the prolonged and uncertain conflict. “London seems disturbed by the raids and less ebullient than in 1940-1,” Jock Colville noted.

  Then something else happened. In June of that year pilotless jet planes carrying a bomb known as the V1, alias doodlebug, alias flying bomb, alias buzz bomb, alias robot bomb, began to appear in the skies above London. They were recognised by the sharp buzzing of the engine followed by sudden silence, as the engine cut out and the bomb fell to earth. They came in daylight, with infrequent intervals between them, and were perhaps the hardest to bear. “One listens fascinated to the Doodle Bugs passing over,” one contemporary wrote, “holding one’s breath, praying that they will travel on … The atmosphere in London has changed. Back into the Big Blitz. Apprehension is in the air. Buses half empty in the evening. Marked absence of people on the streets. Thousands have left, and many go early to the shelters.” The novelist Anthony Powell was on fire duty and watched the V1s travelling through the air to their unknown targets, “with a curious shuddering jerky movement … a shower of sparks emitted from the tail.” He saw them as “dragons” and “In imagination one smelt brimstone,” so that the city under threat becomes once more a place of fantasy and myth. Almost two and a half thousand flying bombs fell upon the capital within ten months-“droning things, mercilessly making for you, thick and fast, day and night.” It was the impersonality of the weapons, often compared with giant flying insects, which compounded the fear. The intended victims themselves became depersonalised, of course, so that the condition of living in the city was the condition of being less than human. Londoners, according to Cyril Connolly, “grow more and more hunted and disagreeable; like toads, each sweating and palpitating under his particular stone.” The general mood was one of “strain, weariness, fear and despondency.” “Let me get out of this” was the unspoken wish visible upon every tired and anxious face, while at the same time the inhabitants of London carried on with their customary work and duties. The mechanism continued to operate, but now in a much more impersonal manner; the whole world had turned into a machine, either of destruction or of weary survival.

  Just as the frequency of the flying bombs began to diminish, in the early autumn of 1944, Vengeance Two-the V2-was targeted upon the capital. For the first time in the history of warfare, a city came under attack from longdistance rockets which travelled at approximately three thousand miles per hour. No warning could be sounded; no counter-attack launched. The first one hit Chiswick and the explosion could be heard at Westminster about seven miles away. Their power was so great that “whole streets were flattened as they landed.” One resident of Islington recorded: “I thought the end of the world had come.” That phrase has been repeated before in the history of London, at moments of crisis or terrible conflagration. Almost a thousand rockets were aimed at the capital, with a half reaching their targets. There were open spaces where streets had been. One rocket hit Smithfield Market, and another a department store in New Cross; the Royal Hospital in Chelsea was struck. “Are we never to be free of damage or death?” one Londoner complained. “Surely five years is long enough for any town to have to suffer?”

  It was the coldest winter for many years, and the bombs continued to fall. Illness was in the air, as it has been throughout London’s troubled history, along with rumours of epidemics and mounting deaths. Yet there was also a certain insouciance abroad; the V2s were so unpredictable and random that they revived the gambling spirit of Londoners who now retired to bed without knowing if they were necessarily going to rise on the following morning.

  And then, suddenly, it was all over. At the end of March 1945 a rocket fell upon Stepney, and another on Whitefield’s Tabernacle on the Tottenham Court Road. But then the raids ceased; the rocket-launching sites had been captured. The skies had cleared. The Battle of London was finally won. Almost 30,000 Londoners had been killed, and more than 100,000 houses utterly destroyed; a third of the City of London had been razed.

  On 8 May 1945 there were the usual celebrations for victory in Europe, VE Day, although by no means as garish or as hysterical as those of 1918. The participants were more weary, after five years of intermittent bombing and death, than their predecessors on the same streets twenty-seven years before; and the war against Japan was continuing (VJ Day was 15 August 1945). Yet something had happened to London, too. In the phrase of the period the “stuffing” had been “knocked out of it,” the metaphor suggesting a thinner and more depleted reality. Certainly it had lost much of its energy and bravura; it had become as shabby as its inhabitants and, like them, it would take time to recover.

  Refashioning the City

  A poster extolling the virtues of the Lansbury council estates in Poplar, built upon the ruins of the old East End. Some of the energy and the animation of the original tenements had gone but the East End was a safer and healthier place.

  CHAPTER 77. Fortune not Design

  How Shall We Rebuild London? This was the title of a book, by C.B. Purdom, which described the postwar city “dulled by such extensive drabness, monotony, ignorance and wretchedness that one is overcome by distress.” That drabness or “greyness,” so characteristic in recollections of London in the 1950s, was a matter of privation; in the years immediately after the Second World War, most commodities were rationed. But in another sense it was the greyness of twilight. If one natural reaction after the war lay in the desire to create a “new world,” as the urban planners wished, then another was to reconstruct the old world as if nothing particular had happened. So when Roy Porter in London: A Social History invokes the 1950s in terms of a “knees-up at the pub” and “contented commuters,” he is remarking upon the atavistic tendency of London to go on doing all the things which it had been doing before the unhappy interruption of hostilities. Yet it could not, and did not, succeed. The desire to impose a set of familiar conditions, in changed circumstances, led only to a vague atmosphere of oppression or constriction.

  The two great set-pieces of London theatre were the Festival of Britain in 1951 and the Coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953. This sense of London as a successful and enthusiastic community, miraculously reassembled after the war, was subtly reinforced by the resurgence of orthodox values and conventional activities. Youth organisations, like the Scou
ts and the Cubs, flourished; it was a great period for Boys Clubs in east and south London. Attendance at football matches rose once again to prewar levels; the cinemas were also crowded, perhaps because, as one Londoner of the period recalled, “there was practically nothing else to do.” This air of mild oppression, like a hangover after the excitement of war, was intensified by a concerted if unspoken desire to redefine sexual and social mores which had been considerably relaxed during the conflict. The relative sexual freedom of women, and the chummy egalitarianism of enforced contact between the classes, were phenomena strictly of the past. And that in turn led to further if ill-defined unease, especially among the younger population. The standards of the 1930s were being reintroduced within a quite different society. The imposition of two years of compulsory military service, known as “National Service,” only served to emphasise the atmosphere of general constriction. It was a less advantageous aspect of the newly formed “welfare state.”

  So London, then, was drab. Compared with other great cities, such as Rome and Paris and New York, it was ugly and forlorn; for the first time in its history it had become something of an embarrassment. And yet there were already stirrings of change, arriving from unexpected quarters. The Teddy boys of Elephant and Castle, and other parts of south London, were joined by the bright young things of the Chelsea set and the beatniks of Soho, as objects of moral outrage. It is perhaps significant that these various groups were closely associated with certain areas of the city, as if local historical forces were also at work. They were all intent upon breaking free from what they considered to be the dreary uniformity of urban life still modelled on outdated systems of class and belief. The dead areas of Walworth or of Acton, of Islington or of Stoke Newington, were a standing reproof. Their territorial spirit, too, was manifest in what they wore; the clothes of the Teddy boy, as well as his successor the Mod, were the single and often only mark of identity. The Teddy boys had in fact borrowed their “look” from the more respectable tailors of Savile Row and Jermyn Street who were trying to promote the images of “Edwardian” refinement among their male customers. Edward became “Teddy,” and a new hybrid was created. Instead of those images of working-class youth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, shabbily dressed and with the uniform cloth cap perched upon their heads, there emerged a picture of boys in velvet jackets and drainpipe trousers. The recklessness and freedom, already evinced by the children of the Blitz, were still apparent. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries clothes were “handed down” from class to class in the spiral of trade, but on this occasion the disadvantaged actively promoted the transaction. It was another feature of native London egalitarianism accompanied by a self-possession and aggression which have been evident in London since the days of the medieval apprentices. In fact many Teddy boys were themselves apprentices.

  But these attitudes were reinforced by the fact that London was becoming once more a young city. The rising birth rate and accelerating prosperity of London in the 1950s helped to create a younger society which wished to divest itself of the limitations and restrictions of the postwar capital. There was no sudden transition, in other words, to the “Swinging Sixties.” There were cafés and coffee bars and jazz-clubs in Soho; there were clothes-shops and small bistros in Chelsea some years before the efflorescence of boutiques and discothèques. London was slowly being rejuvenated, and by the mid-1960s it was suggested that 40 per cent of the general population were under twenty-five. This is approximately the condition of Roman London, when only 10 per cent of the population survived after forty-five, and we may infer a similar sexual energy. It also corresponds to the ratio of the city’s population in the sixteenth century, where all the evidence suggests an earlier resurgence of the London appetite for fashion. If the conditions are approximately the same, then urban attitudes will be repeated.

  “Before the Blitz,”Rasmussen has written in London: The Unique City, “Londoners took their dingy streets as a matter of fact, an unavoidable act of fate.” But when whole terraces could be levelled with one bomb, they came to believe that even London was susceptible to destruction and could be changed. It was dirty, and seedy; it was part of the civilisation which had created two world wars. A London newspaper, the Evening Standard, asked for more dynamite. Even before the war was over a regional planner, Patrick Abercrombie, had prepared two proposals, the County of London Plan and the Greater London Plan, which would lend London “order and efficiency and beauty and spaciousness” with an end to “violent competitive passion.” It is the eternal aspiration, or delusion, that somehow the city can be forced to change its nature by getting rid of all the elements by which it had previously thrived.

  Yet, in topographical terms, the Abercrombie plans were immensely influential. They required a significant shift of population within the city itself in order to “create balanced communities each comprising several neighbourhood units”; the reconstruction of bombed London would proceed on the basis of “density zones” which would disperse hitherto overcrowded neighbourhoods. There would be a balance of housing, industrial development and “open space” with key highways connecting variously integrated communities. Three examples may represent many. Much of the population of Bethnal Green was rehoused in LCC “low-density” estates such as Woodford in Essex; the bombed areas of Poplar were rebuilt as the great Lansbury Estate with a mixed style of block and single dwellings. Within inner London the Loughborough Estate rose in Brixton, its main edifices eleven storeys high. The elements of London were being redistributed, to create more light and air. The old streets, which were variously considered “obsolete” or “outworn,” “narrow” or “confined,” were erased in order to make room for modern, larger and neater estates. The advent of municipal control over large swathes of the city was not, however, without disadvantages. It altered the reality of London, damping down its natural laws of growth and change. Small businesses, the life and blood of the city, could no longer thrive. The “inner London councils” were attempting to ignore, or reverse, the natural tendencies of the city which had been in operation for almost a thousand years. It was inevitable that the old City of London would promote other ideas and in its own plan the planners suggested “the conservation wherever possible of features which are of traditional and archaeological significance” as well as maintaining “the romance and history which the very street names breathe.” But their proposals for careful redevelopment were not in accordance with the modern spirit of innovation and large-scale urban planning; they were rejected by the national administration, and the LCC was invited to redevelop areas around St. Paul’s, the Tower and the present Barbican.

  Other elements of Abercrombie’s plans were also implemented, most notably in the Town and Country Act of 1947. He proposed that London become a “circular inland city” composed of four rings-the Inner Urban Ring, the Suburban Ring, the Green Belt Ring and the Outer Country Ring. It was a way of containing the “inner city,” as if it were some dangerous or threatening organism which could not be permitted to grow. On most maps it is painted black. It was also important to remove industry and people from this inner darkness as if the act of so doing would render it less dangerous. In order to expedite the migration of a million people another part of Abercrombie’s report suggested the development of new “satellite towns” in the Outer Country Ring. Eight of these were built, and prospered, but the effects upon London itself were not exactly as had been anticipated and planned. As any historian of London might have told the various urban boards, neither schemes nor regulations would be able to inhibit the city. It had been proposed to check its industrial and commercial growth, by siting new industries in the “satellite towns,” but London’s commercial prosperity revived after war. The manufacture of cars, buses, trucks and aeroplanes rose to unprecedented levels; the Port of London handled record numbers of goods, and employed 30,000 men; the “office economy” had restored the City of London so that it experienced a property boom. The population
of the capital had dipped slightly, after the dispersal of many of its inhabitants to the suburbs and to the new towns, but the effect was mitigated by sudden and unexpectedly high fertility. Nothing could withstand the ability of the city to rejuvenate itself, and continue its growth.