London opens to you like a novel itself. Those who prefer Paris or Rome complain that the English capital has no precise center, that there is no spot in the city that could be considered the hub around which the wheel revolves. There is some truth to that. St. Paul’s is an enormous visual marker from above, like a stern presence looking down and around on all. The string of parks—Hyde, Green, St. James’s—make a sort of central hub that enables newcomers to find their way around some of the most important landmarks and some of the prettiest neighborhoods. Piccadilly Circus seems more important than it is mainly because of the street bustle its tortured topographical layout foments.
But the truth is that that is not really how London is apprehended. It is divided into chapters, the chapters into scenes, the scenes into sentences; it opens to you like a series of rooms, door, passage, door. Mayfair to Piccadilly to Soho to the Strand. Or, on a more intimate scale, the narrow little maze of Shepherd Market, with its ethnic restaurants and small spare trendy shops, to the wider but still quiet length of Curzon Street, to the full-on cacophony and traffic, both foot and auto, of Park Lane, and hence into the more quiet embrace of Hyde Park.
It is as though four different landscapes, histories, ways of living, can be encapsulated in a walk around the corner—almost any corner. One moment, the throng and the lowering office building. The next, quiet, isolation, and the window eyes of a mews house. London has nearly as many residents as New York has, yet even its most central locations never feel overwhelming in the way much of Manhattan does, mainly because of this effect, this ability to step within minutes from tumult into peace. In its variety—architectural, historical, topographical—London holds as unique and singular a place in the world as the glory of its literary legacy would suggest.
In Howards End, which despite being named for a country house is often a poetic, even elegiac tribute to the great city, E. M. Forster speaks of this:
“Their house was in Wickham Place, and fairly quiet, for a lofty promontory of buildings separated it from the main thoroughfare. One had the sense of a backwater, or rather of an estuary, whose waters flowed in from the invisible sea, and ebbed into a profound silence while the waves without were still beating. Though the promontory consisted of flats—expensive, with cavernous entrance halls, full of concierge and palms—it fulfilled its purpose, and gained for the older houses opposite a certain measure of peace.”
Anyone who has passed from the busy Brompton Road to the lanes and streets behind it understands this description; it holds true over much of London, which is a city of neighborhoods, and within the neighborhoods a place of discreet areas, each with its own atmosphere, its own feeling, its own story. It is also a city of houses. All cities are, of course, but while other European capitals are most often thought of in terms of their grand public buildings—and Paris in terms of its pale apartment buildings, Rome its sun-colored palazzos wrapped around an atrium of garden—the essential London scene is a row of low identical houses set around a square.
Many, if not most, London novels are set in such single-family buildings, upstairs and down. It took me a long time to figure out that the terrace house I encountered in so many novels is what we in the United States call a row house, in New York, no matter its material, a brownstone. (It also took me a long time to figure out that the council flats on estates that made an appearance in many modern novels were not grand places to live. They certainly didn’t sound like public housing projects. Bedsits, on the other hand, were pretty self-explanatory.)
London is also a city of parks, gardens, and squares, so that much more of it is green and verdant than visitors initially suspect. (A third of London, according to one estimate, is grass or gardens. “Nothing to see but streets, streets, streets,” writes Dickens in Little Dorrit. “Nothing to breathe but streets, streets, streets.” But that was only in Southwark, around the debtors’ prisons.) Whole blocks of London in the springtime smell rich and musky; while a stroller moves in minutes from bustle to quiet, she may also pass through successive waves of perfume, lilacs, roses, syringa, even the stew-like scent of good rich loamy soil. A reader understands this coming into the city for the first time simply because so much of the action of so many novels has taken place in these hidden spots, only steps from busy roads, in the squares and parks. Eaton Square. Regent’s Park. They have come to have a mellifluous, slightly mysterious sound, even though in reality they prove to be more ordinary than their names. They could easily be the titles of books, not simply their settings.
“I love walking in London,” says the title character of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, perhaps the perfect twentieth-century London novel. “Really it’s better than walking in the country.” When the destitute protagonist of Trollope’s The Prime Minister is in despair and deciding on a course of action, he walks the streets of London, despite nasty weather: “He went round by Trafalgar Square, and along the Strand, and up some dirty streets by the small theaters, and so on to Holborn and by Bloomsbury Square up to Tottenham Court Road, then through some unused street into Portland Place, along the Marylebone Road, and back to Manchester Square by Baker Street.” Unlike cities that have been modernized, renovated, changed, a visitor could walk precisely this walk today, including those “dirty streets by the small theaters,” and wind up as Ferdinand Lopez eventually does, at the great junction where trains go in and out of London. From there, onto the tracks.
Of course, walking in London frequently includes getting lost in London, even for some longtime residents. A city first founded in Roman times and eventually encompassing a string of outlying villages has streets that could, most kindly, be classified as organic. In other words, once upon a time they were cow paths and the crossroads stiles. Any reader of Dickens knows the maze of narrow back streets that enables pickpockets to melt into a crowd and young orphans to disappear without a trace, ideal “for the very purpose of concealment,” wrote Henry Fielding, the author of Tom Jones. Any reader of history knows how stubbornly Londoners have held onto a street grid that seems to have been based on the children’s printed puzzles of trying to get from one side of a square to another. “Right lines have hardly ever been considered,” complained an architect in 1766. For a writer, of course, this polyglot landscape is irresistible, right lines not being the purview of the novelist or poet.