Turn off Oxford Street, that most generic of London thoroughfares, chockablock with the kind of dime-a-dozen tourist shops you can find in any American and most European cities: cheap luggage emporiums, bureaus de change, narrow stores that sell tee shirts and backpacks and the occasional hash pipe. Turn off Oxford Street, since there is really no reason to stay on it, and you will eventually find yourself on Baker Street. The simple utilitarian name produces a faint frisson of excitement, and your step quickens as you read the house numbers. Eventually there it is: 221.
Oh, my. A large office block called Abbey House stands on the spot, with a sign that reads: “Flexible lease available on first floor.” Next to it is a small metal plaque, much less handsome or compelling than the literary plaques on other buildings around town, with the bas-relief of a well-known profile. Note to those who have never read the books that detail the exploits of Sherlock Holmes: He didn’t actually wear a deerstalker hat. Although his image on the sign does.
Every once in a while a literary location in London is so deeply disappointing that it is scarcely tenable. Dickens’s house may be a little overwrought, and unless I read addresses very badly, the rooms in which Lord Peter Wimsey set up housekeeping before he married Harriet Vane are in fact precisely on the site of the Park Lane Hotel, which I suppose is as fitting a fictional bait and switch as you could imagine.
But the Baker Street location is probably the most disappointing in the city. It is not only that the apartments the legendary detective kept at 221b Baker Street, the most famous address in the mystery genre, no longer stand, those rooms presided over by the landlady Mrs. Hudson where, according to Watson, the great man kept “his cigars in the coal scuttle, his tobacco in the toe end of a Persian slipper, and his unanswered correspondence transfixed by a jack knife into the very center of his wooden mantelpiece.” (And where the great man also “in one of his queer humors, would sit in an armchair with his hair-trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges, and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V. R. done in bullet-pocks.”)
It is that, tragically, they have been phonied up farther down the street. Somehow, between numbers 237 and 241, in a gerrymander worthy of an old Chicago politician, a 221b has sprung up, complete with a young man in an ill-fitting bobby’s uniform outside. (No Lestrade, this, even on his worst days!) The Sherlock Holmes food and beverage and a Sherlock Holmes memorabilia shop stand between the Beatles Store and Elvisly Yours. Across the street is another Holmes store, this one with a variety of mugs, pitchers, and a chess set with, among its pieces, a black dog that is clearly meant to be the menacing Hound of the Baskervilles but looks more like a fat lab, begging.
It’s not simply that I find all of this dispiriting, but that Holmes himself, who is as vivid a character as we will find in fiction and who loathed sentiment, much less pretense, would have found it an outrage.
Luckily there are also times and places in which London is vividly, completely that place that you’ve encountered dozens of times in books. And it’s not at the palaces, or staring at diadems in the Tower jewelry exhibition, or even listening to some cabbie do a little mock cockney act because he’s come to believe that’s the sure way to get stupid Americans to ante up a big tip.
But when you’ve cut through one of the narrow alleys that leads from Green Park to Pall Mall, skirting the majestically restored Spencer House, wandering out onto St. James’s Street, it’s rather clear that you’re not in Kansas, or even Manhattan, anymore. The shopwindow of Williams Evans, “gun and rifle makers,” is filled with hunting paraphernalia of the most tasteful and arcane sort, shooting coats and moleskin plus 2s and the House Tweed laird’s jacket. Just up the street, a store with a beautiful assortment of top hats and bonnets trimmed with feathers and ribbons has a sign displayed near the front door: “Now Taking Orders For Ascot.”
Up on Piccadilly, the shopping arcades are as Victorian as anyone could want, with their ivory-handled shaving brushes and handmade boots. The one between Albemarle and Bond Streets is particularly atmospheric, with its enormous bay windows and gilded signs. Queen Victoria bought her riding habits in one of the shops, and it looks and feels as if the servant sent on the task had only lately left.
But perhaps it is in Simpson’s-in-the-Strand that I felt most definitely ensconced in the London I’d learned to love through books, a stage-set London that is only a highly colored, largely antiquated facsimile of the real thing. That feeling may have been inevitable, since English food plays such a central part in how Americans see England, and also how they see it in a way that is painfully out-of-date. It exists, as does so much else in English novels, in a completely foreign argot: even such a thing as tea, which we assume to be a simple beverage, turns out upon further reading to be something more, and more mysterious, perhaps with cakes, perhaps with cucumber sandwiches, perhaps with some mysterious element called clotted cream or mysterious side dish called digestive biscuits. And that is quite apart from completely foreign dishes like toad-in-the-hole or bangers and mash.
An acquaintance of mine once wrote a cookbook entitled Great English Food, and she said that not a single person to whom she had given it or spoken of it in the United States could keep a straight face, and some actually believed that the entire book was a joke. But it was in fact filled with the sort of food that is served at Simpson’s-in-the-Strand, and was served there before any current Londoner was actually alive. (Although by London standards it is considered quite a baby; Simpson’s was founded in the early nineteenth century.) You know what you’re going to get when you enter its dining room, called the Grand Divan, which features paneling as dark and glossy and plaster ceilings as richly ornamented as those in a Victorian novel of the upper classes. And if you didn’t apprehend the menu from your surroundings, you can intuit it from the 1910 novel Howards End, in which the heroine has “humourously lamented” that she has never been there—even then, it was a bit of an old fogy spot—and is taken to lunch by the older man she will later marry. “What’ll you have?” he asks.
“Fish pie,” said she, with a glance at the menu.
“Fish pie! Fancy coming for fish pie to Simpson’s. It’s not a bit the thing to go for here.”
And finally he concludes, “Saddle of mutton, and cider to drink. That’s the type of thing. I like this place, for a joke, once in a way. It is so thoroughly Old English.”
And it still is. Most of the wait staff spends the lunch hours pushing around silver-domed trolleys under which are enormous joints of meat and side portions of Yorkshire pudding. It is also possible to order potted shrimps, steak-and-kidney pudding, treacle sponge, and a savoury of Welsh rarebit—in short, an English meal impervious to the passage of time or culinary fashion. Very little on the menu would be available, or even desirable, in any New York City restaurant I know. “It’s a pity, really,” said one of my London book editors. “At lunch in New York no one eats, no one smokes, and no one drinks.”
That about covers it.
Most of my London acquaintances were quick to remind me that Simpson’s, although it has long had a reputation for literary lunches, was now serving them mostly to editors preparing to retire to a cottage in the Cotswolds, and that there were plenty of restaurants in Notting Hill or even around the Inns of Court that served rare tuna and mesclun salads to the younger, hipper set. But I reminded them right back that it is often at the flagrant margins that we learn to first attach ourselves to a place. That’s why many of us who become Anglophiles in absentia, as it were, did so originally not through great literature, Defoe or Dr. Johnson, but through mystery stories and romantic novels, through manservants like Bunter and Lugg and heroes who gambled at Boodles and bought their boots in Bond Street.
For many Americans of a certain age, that Technicolor London first presented itself in the form of a big book about the glories of the city written by a woman who had never actually been there. Forever Amber was published in 1944, when the war had made satins and velvets an impossible luxury and the real world a sad, gray, and tattered place. It sold 100,000 copies in its first week and was the bestselling book in the United States during the decade after its publication. This despite—or perhaps because of—the widespread denunciations of the novel by religious and civic leaders as obscene and immoral, a denunciation that seems quaint in light of today’s standards for sex scenes and language.
Nominally, Forever Amber is a story set during the Restoration about a courtesan with the overwrought name of Amber St. Clare. Charles II is an important character, and so are a number of actual nobleman from his court. Amber is not only impregnated by the king and imprisoned in Newgate (like her more moral, more realistic fictional sister Moll Flanders); she also survives both the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London.
Like most bodice rippers, Forever Amber may smell of sex, but it’s really about love, the undying love Amber feels, even while married to a succession of husbands and entertaining a succession of lovers, for a buff guy named Bruce, or, as she likes to call him, “Lord Carlton.” It’s also about a great love affair with a great city, the city of London. Unlike the denizens of London described by Dickens, who are trapped in its narrow and filthy streets as surely as if they were behind prison walls, or those of Evelyn Waugh, who unthinkingly pass through town on their way to one social event or another, the heroine of Kathleen Winsor’s novel is beside herself with emotion whenever she considers her adopted home. “Oh, London, London, I love you,” she cries on her first day there. And that’s on page fifty-three of a nearly thousand-page novel.
And the London she describes is a place worthy of that love, and still visible in spots today. There’s a nice description of Amber riding out of town to snare an unsuspecting dupe in the village of Knightsbridge. While Knightsbridge is now as much a part of the main body of London as London Bridge, it is possible to walk through its side streets and small squares and understand how the great swathe of green designated for hunting by the king, later to become Green Park—not to mention the torturous horseback travel of the day—would have relegated it to village status. Amber takes up lodgings at a house called The Plume of Feathers: “A large wooden sign swung out over the street just below Amber’s parlour windows—it depicted a great swirling blue plume painted on a gilt background, and was supported by a very ornate wrought-iron frame, also gilded.” Of course, any London visitor can see a similar sign hanging from any one of a dozen pubs. And the shops where Amber is seen with Bruce by his wife sound remarkably like the shopping arcades—odd, because the action of the novel takes place years before those arcades were built.
Or not so odd, perhaps. While I was on a trip to London, the author of Forever Amber, Kathleen Winsor, died at the age of eighty-three, and in a lively obituary in the Guardian a writer described her book thus: “It was a love letter to a London she had read about in Defoe and Pepys, but had never seen.” He went on to describe how the twenty-four-year-old American had been inspired by her husband’s thesis on Charles II and had written her spectacular maiden success with the help of years of research and an enormous map of Restoration London. How odd it was to know that one of the writers who had first taught me to love London—because, given all the talk about how dirty Amber was, it was a must-read for teenage girls even twenty years after its publication—was also a writer who had fallen for the city at a distance, created it in her mind’s eye, as well as on the page.