There may be other cities that are older.1 But not many. And there may be one across the Atlantic that is larger. But not much.
In fact, no matter how you look at it, London comes pretty high in the respectable upper order of things. It’s got a past as well as a present; and it knows it. And this is odd. Because considering its age it’s had a remarkably quiet history, London. Nothing very spectacular. Nothing exceptionally heroic. Not until 1940, that is. Except for the Great Fire and the Black Death and the execution of a King not very much has ever happened there. It has just gone on prosperously and independently through the centuries – wattle one century, timber the next, then brick, then stone, then brick again, then concrete. Building new foundations on old ruins. And sprawling out across the fields when there haven’t been enough ruins to go round.
In the result it’s been growing‐up as well as growing. And it must be about mature by now. Even a bit past its prime, perhaps. Beginning to go back on itself, as it were. May be. But to see the people, you wouldn’t think so.
Every city has its something. Rome has St Peter’s. Peking has its Summer Palace. Moscow has the Kremlin. In Madrid there’s the Prado. In New York there’s the Empire State. Constantinople has St Sophia. Cairo has Shepheard’s. Paris has got the Eiffel Tower. Sydney has a bridge. Naples is content with its bay. Cape Town has Table Mountain. Benares is famous for its burning ghats. Pisa has a Leaning Tower. Toledo has a bull‐ring. Stockholm has a Town Hall. Vancouver has a view. But London… London … What is it that London’s got?
Well, there’s St Paul’s Cathedral. But St Peter’s could put it into its pocket. There’s Westminster Abbey. But there are Abbeys everywhere; they’re dotted all over Europe. There’s the Tower. Admittedly, the dungeons are convincing, but as a castle it’s nothing. Not beside Edinburgh or Caernarvon. Even Tower Hill isn’t really a hill: it’s only an incline. Then there are the Houses of Parliament and the Law Courts. But they’re merely so much Victorian Gothic – all turrets and arches and railings and things. There’s Buckingham Palace. But that’s too new; it hasn’t toned in yet. It’s just been planted there – a big flat‐fronted palace with a made road leading up to it. No, it’s the smaller, older palace of St James’s, just round the corner, with its grimy red brick and low windows and little open courtyards that is nearer the real thing. Is the real thing in fact. It’s a positively shabby little palace, St James’s. And it’s got London written all over it. And St James’s Palace – brick and soot and age – is written all over London.
Yes, that’s London. Mile upon mile of little houses, most of them as shabby as St James’s. If you start walking westwards in the early morning from somewhere down in Wapping or the Isle of Dogs by evening you will still be on the march, still in the midst of shabby little houses – only somewhere over by Hammersmith by then.
That’s not to say that there aren’t plenty of fine big houses as well. Take Mayfair. But even Mayfair is distinctly Londonish too, when you come to look at it. The mansions are all squeezed up there side by side, and in consequence they are rather poky little mansions, most of them; though the sheer marvel of the address – Mayfair W. 1. – excuses any overcrowding. Not that Mayfair is all mansions or anything like it. It’s Shepherd’s Market, that hamlet of dark shops and crooked alleyways, rather than Bruton Street or Grosvenor Square, that makes Mayfair.
And what’s more it’s Covent Garden Market and Smithfield Market and Billingsgate Fish Market and the Caledonian Market and Peckham Market rather than Shepherd’s Market – which isn’t a real market anyway – that makes London. They are a part of the people, these markets. And London is the people’s city. That is why Petticoat Lane is more London than Park Lane. And that is why London is the Mile End Road and the Walworth Road and the Lambeth Road and the Elephant and Castle. Strange, isn’t it, how much of the real London still lies south of the river, 2 just as it did in Shakespeare’s day, and in Chaucer’s day before him? It is as though across the Thames – in London’s Deep South – times and manners haven’t changed so much as in the Parliamentary North.
But London is more than a collection of streets and markets. It’s Wren Churches and A.B.C. tea‐shops. It’s Burlington Arcade and the Temple. It’s the Athenæum and the Adelphi Arches. It’s Kennington gasometer and the Zoo. It’s the iron bridge at Charing Cross and the statue of Eros at Piccadilly Circus. It’s the Serpentine and Moss Bros. It’s Paddington Recreation Ground, and the Nelson Column. It’s Big Ben and the Horse Guards. It’s the National Gallery and Pimm’s. It’s the Victoria Palace and Ludgate Hill. It’s the second‐hand shops and the undertakers and the cinemas and the obscure back‐street chapels. It’s the Waif‐and‐Stray Societies and the fortune‐tellers and the pub on the corner and the trams. That’s London.
And the people. They’re London, too. They’re the same Londoners that they have always been, except that from time to time the proportion of refugees has altered a little. At one moment the doubtful‐looking newcomers are the Huguenots. At another the Jews and it is the Huguenots who are the Londoners wondering whatever London is coming to. They’re all Londoners – the French and the Italians in Soho, the Chinese in Limehouse, the Scotsmen in Muswell Hill and the Irish round the Docks. And the only way in which modern Londoners differ from the Londoners who have lived there before them is that all the Londoners don’t live in London any more. They simply work there. By 8 p.m. the City is a desert. Round about six o’clock the trouble starts: the deserters leave. Everyone begins shoving and pushing to get out of the metropolis into the estates and suburbs and garden cities. There they sleep, these demi‐Londoners, in their little Tudor dolls’ houses until next morning when they emerge, refreshed ready to play at being real Londoners again.
Perhaps it is simply the size of London that makes its inhabitants seem somehow smaller. Dolls’ houses appear to be the right dwelling places for these thousands, these tens of thousands, these hundreds of thousands, these half‐urban hordes. Stand on the bridge at Liverpool Street Station at a quarter‐to‐nine in the morning and you see the model trains drawing in beneath you one after another, and swarms of toy‐passengers emptying themselves on to the platform to go stumping up to the barrier – toy‐directors, toy‐clerks, toy‐typists, all jerking along to spend the day in toy‐town, earning paper‐money to keep their dolls’ houses going.
Of course, there are still plenty of the other kind, too. Real Londoners who sleep the night in London as well as work the day there. Real Londoners – some in love, some in debt, some committing murders, some adultery, some trying to get on in the world, some looking forward to a pension, some getting drunk, some losing their jobs, some dying, and some holding up the new baby.
This book is about a few of them.