London: The Biography

by Peter Ackroyd

  This was nowhere more evident than in the conception and creation of “Docklands.” The Docklands Development Corporation was established in 1981 to restore or renew the wasteland left by the closure of the London Docks; Wapping, Rotherhithe, the Isle of Dogs, Silvertown, north Woolwich and Beckton were within its boundaries and a number of enterprise zones-rate-free and tax-free catchment areas-were marked out for especial attention. The London City Airport, the Docklands Light Railway, and an extended Jubilee Line, were the designated means of transport. But, as in most London developments, the results were largely unplanned and unpredictable. The fate of Canary Wharf was in that sense emblematic. Its central feature was an 800-foot tower surmounted by a pyramid (which might provoke thoughts of imperial destiny) with approximately ten million square feet of office space. The original developers withdrew from the scheme and their replacement, the firm of Olympia amp; York, was reduced to bankruptcy even as the tower was nearing completion. A third consortium took over the project, even though a surplus of office space in the rest of the capital mitigated against early success. And yet, somehow, it worked. Tenants were found, and the whole of Canary Wharf flourished.

  Docklands itself experienced a similar fate. Wild fluctuations in the urban economy left it balancing between triumph and disaster on a number of occasions; its apartment blocks were fashionable one year, and unfashionable the next; there were complaints about rudimentary transport facilities as well as the absence of shops, but nevertheless there was continual development. Michael Hebbert, in London, has remarked that there were “few preconceptions as to what should occur,” and that this “hands-off approach produced a curiously piecemeal environment.” Yet in that respect it followed the pattern of most London growth, which is no doubt the reason for its success. Docklands “had no overall philosophy for the massing and scale of buildings, or for the layout of public spaces,” but that is why it has become a natural and recognisable extension of London. The entire area was accused of “aesthetic incoherence” and a “market-driven disregard of social policy” but these are precisely the conditions and circumstances in which the city has expanded and flourished; it understands no other principles of life.

  That is the context in which the great tower of Canary Wharf, which dominates the London skyline, has won in Hebbert’s words “immediate acceptance and affection.” This great shaft, so in tune with the alignment of the city, now rivals the Monument and Big Ben as the symbol of London. It represents, too, the single most important shift in urban topography for many centuries; the commercial and social pressures had always edged westwards, but the development of Docklands has opened up what has been called London’s “eastward corridor” which in historical and structural terms offers passage and access to Europe at a time when London’s economy is becoming more closely associated with the continent. There is a suspicion that the City of London-as well as the banks and brokers newly moved to Docklands- will come to dominate the financial markets of the European Community. Here, in this steady progress eastwards, we may be able to sense London’s instinctive and almost primordial reaching towards money and trade.

  It is appropriate to mention here the “Big Bang” which transformed the City in the autumn of 1986; that explosion turned the Stock Exchange into the International Stock Exchange, enabled the merger of banking and brokerage houses, finished the system of fixed commissions and introduced “electronic dealing.” It was not the beginning of the City’s triumphalism; the phenomenon of young urban professionals named “yuppies” had been first noticed in 1984: a group who, in the phrases of the period, wished to “get rich quick” before “burn-out.” But the events of 1986 heralded a sea-change in the position of the City of London. Its foreign exchange market is now the most advanced and elaborate in the world, handling approximately one-third of the world’s dealings; with 600,000 employed in banking and allied services it has become the largest exchange in the world. Once more London was fulfilling its historical destiny, and recovering the pre-eminence which it had achieved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is an historical achievement in more than one sense since, as Hebbert has explained, “The compactness of a 2000-year old urban core is fortuitously well suited to the operation of a globalised financial service centre.” Whether it is entirely “fortuitous” is another matter, however, since the actual nature of that square mile seems uniquely possessed by the spirit of commerce. There have been booms and busts, but it has maintained its ascendancy.

  A new type of commercial activity, however, demanded new forms of building. That is how the City changes, while keeping its identity intact. The demand was for large open spaces which could accommodate the miles of cables attached to electronic activity and which could harbour thousands of employees working under consistent pressure. There was, after all, a human cost to this fresh access of trade. In the late 1980s some four million square metres of office space were added to the stock of the City, not least with the development of the Broadgate complex. Light-sensitive blinds and prismatic blue-green glass shielded the devotees of finance as they continued, night and day, with their dealings and transactions. All the gods and griffins of the City protected them.

  What gods were these? Who can say? In 1986 Faith in the City, a report sponsored by the archbishop of Canterbury, noted that it was “the poor who have borne the brunt of the recession, both the unemployed and the working poor. Yet it is the poor who are seen by some as ‘social security scroungers,’ or a burden on the country, preventing economic recovery. This is a cruel example of blaming the victim.” It is one of the great and continuing paradoxes of London life that the rich global city contains also the worst examples of poverty and deprivation. But perhaps that comprises the “meaning” of London. Perhaps its destiny is to represent the contradictions of the human condition, both as an example and as a warning.

  The report also described those council estates which “have a quite different social and economic system, operating almost entirely at subsistence level, dependent entirely on the public sector … the degeneration of many such areas has now gone so far that they are in effect ‘separate territories’ outside the mainstream of our social and economic life.” These sentiments will be familiar to those who have studied the social topography of London over the centuries; Charles Booth’s “Poverty Map” of 1889 might provoke a similar analysis, for example, with the proviso that there was then no public sector to support the indigent and the unfortunate. Once more it is the condition of London itself which is being described. If the city had a voice it might be saying: There will always be those who fail or who are unfortunate, just as there will always be those who cannot cope with the world as presently constituted, but I can encompass them all.

  The decade which saw the emergence of the “yuppies,” for example, also witnessed the revival of street-beggars and vagrants sleeping “rough” upon the streets or within doorways; Lincoln’s Inn Fields was occupied once more by the homeless, after an interval of 150 years, while areas like Waterloo Bridge and the Embankment became the setting for what were known as “cardboard cities.” The Strand, in particular, became a great thoroughfare of the dispossessed. Despite civic and government initiatives, they are still there. They are now part of the recognisable population; they are Londoners, joining the endless parade. Or perhaps, by sitting upon the sidelines, they remind everyone else that it is a parade.

  And yet what is it, now, to be a Londoner? The map of the city has been redrawn to include “Outer Metropolitan Areas” as well as “Greater” and “Inner” London; the entire south-east of England has-willingly or unwillingly-become its zone of influence. Is London, then, just a state of mind? The more nebulous its boundaries, and the more protean its identity, has it now become an attitude or set of predilections? On more than one occasion, in its history, it has been described as containing a world or worlds within itself. Now it has been classified as a “global city,” and in Hebbert’s words as “a universe with its own rules, wh
ich has genuinely burst out of national boundaries.” So it does truly contain a “universe,” like some dense and darkly revolving cloud at its centre. But this is why so many millions of people describe themselves as “Londoners,” even if they are many miles from the inner city. They call themselves Londoners because they are pervaded by a sense of belonging. London has been continuously inhabited for over two thousand years; that is its strength, and its attraction. It affords the sensation of permanence, of solid ground. That is why the vagrant and the dispossessed lie in its streets; that is why the inhabitants of Harrow, or Croydon, call themselves “Londoners.” Its history calls them, even if they do not know it. They are entering a visionary city.

  Cockney Visionaries

  A fantastical “tribute to Christopher Wren” outlining the spires and vistas of the great and powerful city which he helped to create. Much of his work has gone but the power and energy remain.

  CHAPTER 78. Unreal City

  It has always been a city of vision and prophecy. It is supposed to have been founded after a prophetic dream vouchsafed to Brutus, and the vision of a great city in “a strange yet greener country” haunts the imaginations of the classical poets. As Ovid wrote in his Metamorphoses,

  Even as I speak I see our destiny

  The city of our sons and sons of sons,

  Greater than any city we have known,

  Or has been known or shall be known to men.

  Its visionary or mythic status has rendered it provisional and impalpable. It has become an “Unreal city,” in the phrase of T.S. Eliot, which throughout its history has been populated by the creatures of mythology. Nymphs have been seen along the banks of its rivers, and minotaurs within its labyrinths of brick. It has been aligned with Nineveh and Tyre, Sodom and Babylon, and at times of fire and plague the outlines of those cities have risen among its streets and buildings. The city’s topography is a palimpsest within which all the most magnificent or monstrous cities of the world can be discerned. It has been the home of both angels and devils striving for mastery. It has been the seat of miracles, and the harbour of savage paganism. Who can fathom the depths of London?

  Chaucer’s prophetic dream in the House of Fame-“I dreamt I was within a temple made of glass” with “many a pillar of metal”-has been applied to many of London’s edifices but the most formidable prophecies are of revelation and apocalypse. On the north side of Aldersgate were inscribed the words: “Then shall enter into the gates of the city kings and princes sitting upon the throne of David … and the city shall remain forever.” Even to its inhabitants, it was a biblical city; its history, “beyond the memory of man,” verified its sacredness. Yet its inhabitants have also been touched by other forms of vision. Of Chaucer’s pilgrims, on their way to Canterbury along Borough High Street, William Blake said that they “compose all ages and nations.” Every race or tribe or nation, every faith or form of speech, have been comprehended within the city. The whole universe may be found within a grain of London’s life. The “gate of heaven,” in St. Bartholomew the Great, was located beside the shambles of Smithfield. But if it is a sacred city, it is one which includes misery and suffering. The bowels of God have opened, and rained down shit upon London.

  The most abject poverty or dereliction can appear beside glowing wealth and prosperity. Yet the city needs its poor. What if the poor must die, or be deprived, in order that the city might live? That would be the strangest contrast of all. Life and death meet and part; misfortune and good fortune shake hands; suffering and happiness inhabit the same house. “Without Contraries,” Blake once wrote, “is no progression.” He reached this truth by steady observation of the city. It is always ancient, and forever new, that disparity or disjunction itself creating a kind of ferment of novelty and inventiveness. It may be that the new protects the old, or the old guards the new, yet in the very fact of their oneness lies the secret of London’s identity shining through time.

  Yet wherever you go in the city you are continually being assaulted by difference, and it could be surmised that the city is simply made up of contrasts; it is the sum of its differences. It is in fact the very universality of London that establishes these contrasts and separations, it contains every aspect of human life within itself, and is thus perpetually renewed. Yet do the rich and the poor inhabit the same city? It may be that each citizen has created a London in his or her own head, so that at the same moment there may exist seven million different cities. It has sometimes been observed that even native Londoners experience a kind of fear, or alarm, if they find themselves in a strange part of the city. It is partly the fear of becoming lost, but it is also the fear of difference. And yet is a city so filled with difference, also, therefore filled with fear?

  This vision of totality, of fullness of life, may be cast in an optimistic sense. Boswell suggested that “the intellectual man is struck with London as comprehending the whole of human life in all its variety, the contemplation of which is inexhaustible.” It is the vision which was imparted to him as he was driven along the Haymarket in the early days of 1763: “I was full of rich imagination of London … such as I could not explain to most people, but which I strongly feel and am ravished with. My blood glows and my mind is agitated with felicity.” It is the fullness of London which prompts his happiness; the congregation of people, of all races, of all talents, of all fortunes, releases a massive air of expectancy and exhilaration.

  London manifests all the possibilities of humankind, and thus becomes a vision of the world itself. Steele was a “great Lover of Mankind”; and by Cornhill “at the sight of a prosperous and happy Multitude … I cannot forbear expressing my Joy with Tears that have stoln down my Cheeks.” A century later Charles Lamb wrote that “I often shed tears in the motley Strand, for fulness of joy at such a multitude of life.” The multitudes induce wonder; they are not an incoherent mass, or a heap of irreconcilable elements, but a flowing and varied multitude.

  English drama, and the English novel, spring out of the very conditions of London. In Jonson, and Smollett and Fielding, the poetry of the streets finds its fulfilment. Theirs is a visionary imagination as rich as that of Chaucer or of Blake, but it is a peculiarly London vision filled with images of the theatre and the prison-house, of commerce and of crowds, of fullness and rapacity and forgetfulness.

  From a London vision springs a distinctive sensibility. All of these writers-and many more are numbered with them-were preoccupied with light and darkness, in a city that is built in the shadows of money and power. All of them were entranced by the scenic and spectacular, in a city that is continually filled with the energetic display of people and institutions. They understood the energy of London, they understood its variety, and they also understood its darkness. So they tended to favour spectacle and melodrama. As city artists they are more concerned with the external life, with the movement of crowds, with the great general drama of the human spirit. They have a sense of energy and splendour, of ritual and display, which may have very little to do with ethical judgement or the exercise of moral consciousness. In part they share the sublime indifference of London, where the multitudes come and go. However hard and theatrical it may seem, it is a true vision of the world. In the famous phrase, London made me. But then it cannot be altogether hard; it reduced Steele and Lamb to tears.

  It is appropriate, then, that there should also have been visions of disaster; of London in ruins or choked to death upon its own smoke and dirt. The French writer Mirbeau invoked a city “of the nightmare, of dream, of mystery, of the conflagration, of the furnace, of chaos, of floating gardens, of the invisible, the unreal … this special nature of the prodigious city.” An image of the furnace often emerges in London visions. In Blake’s Jerusalem “Primrose Hill is the mouth of the Furnace amp; of the Iron Door,” and in Arthur Machen’s “When I Was Young in London” there was a moment when, “looking back one could see all the fires of London reflected dimly in the sky, as if far away awful furnace doors were opened.�
�� It has been known as “the Oven,” as if that sense of unnatural heat provokes strange images of its inhabitants being cooked and eaten. Yet it has also been called “a temple of Fire-worshippers,” so perhaps the citizens venerate the agents of their destruction.

  A nineteenth-century observer of the fog noticed the sun as a “mysterious and distant gleam which seemed to be trying to penetrate to this immobile world.” This is another true vision of the city, when all its noise and bustle have disappeared; when it lies silent and peaceful, all of its energy momentarily suspended, it seems like some natural force that will outlast all the activity of humankind. It is gigantic, monstrous, and, by the very fact of its enormity, somehow primeval. The poet, Tom Moore, had a refrain:

  Go where we may, rest where we will,

  Eternal London haunts us still.

  Eternity may have many aspects. One is that of eternal recurrence, so that the people of the city will say the same things or use the same gestures upon the same streets. Since no one may watch a corner or a stretch of thoroughfare over hundreds of years, the truth of this will never be discovered. Yet perhaps it has become clear that certain activities seem to belong to certain areas, or neighbourhoods, as if time itself were moved or swayed by some unknown source of power. Yet if this seems too fanciful, there may be another aspect of “Eternal London.” It is permanent. It is unceasing. Of its essence, it is unchanged. It is a condition of the universe. As the author of London Nights has put it, “London is every city that ever was and ever will be.” Thus Wordsworth saw by Ludgate Hill