LAMBETH – SOMEWHERE ELSE LONDON
ADAM SCOTT
Having harboured a number of villains in her time, one would have thought that sly old Lady London would have picked up a few tips when it comes to concealing the city’s history and modus operandi. There have been tutors enough, surely. From John Christie to the Krays to Professor Moriarty, the Napoleon of crime, the metropolis has played home, backdrop, hideout and perhaps even muse to the world’s most notorious criminals. But the clues to London’s whereabouts over the centuries gone by lie strewn throughout the city. Nowhere is the half-forgotten, line-drawn and sepia city more poorly concealed than in the part of town where angels – and intransigent taxi drivers – fear to tread: south of the river, down Lambeth way. Lambeth, the southeastern quadrant of central London, remains for many an undiscovered country – ‘Somewhere Else London’.
IF YOU COMMUTE south and east, you may have caught a glimpse of the jewel in the crown of Lambeth as you travel out of Charing Cross on the main line through London Bridge via Waterloo. A flash-frame view of London of 1818, glimpsed at Waterloo East Station in a gap between the red-brick railway wall and the structure of Platform A. It is a view so brief that, if the train has built up any head of speed to speak of, it leaves you wondering if it wasn’t just some trick of the light. It is a view so thrilling, with such a true feeling of having seen back through time, that when one calls it up in the mind’s eye to cherish it again, one inadvertently fills in the blanks: the chimneys, smokeless now some fifty years since the Clean Air Act of 1956, seem to once more be belching forth their sooty breath, casting that famous grey pall over the city. Present-day, watercolour London is once again, if only in the imagination, the charcoal smudge of yore.
WHERE TO READ THIS
The bar of the Olivier Theatre at the National, particularly in summer on the terrace, affords a marvellous view of the north bank of the river. And while the show is up and running it is deserted, giving it a delicious, clandestine, secret London feel. A little further upstream at the Royal Festival Hall, the public viewing gallery, while having no immediate liquid refreshment outlet, is, to all intents and purposes, a public space. Drag a chair out there and enjoy the commotion of architectural styles over on the Embankment. Traditionalists should head for the King’s Arms on Roupell Street. Deep in the heart of Somewhere Else country, this scrubbed and cosy corner boozer was once an undertakers. With an open fire, sofas for lounging and a serious respect for real ale, this is a bright star in the ever-dwindling firmament of London corner pubs.
From ground level, down in the streets themselves, the railway above lends its rumbling soundtrack. Half-closing the eyes, the picture is completed by adding the gaseous, lung-clogging emissions from the long-gone ghost trains of the ‘Golden Age of Steam’. Along Roupell and Brad Streets and along Windmill Walk, those pretty details that many a preservationist Londoner cherishes along with their Routemasters and red phone boxes, have their underbelly exposed in this original context. Those oh-so-collectible fire plaques hint here at tales of private fire brigades leaving numberless souls to perish because the residents hadn’t paid the insurance premium. The ornate tiles of a corner pub – made so often right here in Lambeth, the birthplace of Royal Doulton– so shiny, such a stamp of authenticity, were placed there not merely for dressing, but to allow the piss of the punters to cascade down the wall and into the open sewer that was the street.
On nearby Cornwall Road, that picturesque little Franciscan chapel of St Patrick marks not only the Catholic Emancipation Act of the late 1700s, but also the ever-present Irish diaspora, fleeing poverty and starvation in Ireland only to wash up in the far from fecund pastures of Lambeth. In 1800 the Catholic population of London was around 40,000. By 1840 it was nearer 300,000, many of those the Irish navigators – ‘navvies’ – who carved out the roads and railways out of this transient London enclave so associated with travel. While those highways and railroads afforded those Londoners with sufficient disposable cash access to the coast and the countryside, the navvies and their families were left behind in the smog of their tawdry Promised Land.
Lambeth is also where London chose to hide the body of post-war Utopian architecture. And in true cack-handed London style, the corpse was not weighted and dropped into our ‘dirty old river’, as the The Kinks sang in ‘Waterloo Sunset’ (only songwriter Ray Davies could have called it a dirty old river and meant it as a loving compliment). Nope, the cadaver was dumped on the riverbank, in plain sight of the well-heeled denizens of the north bank. And it is in this brutalist relic, within the walkways and wide-open concrete spaces of the National Theatre, that we find the link between the dingy riverside Lambeth of the early nineteenth century and the shiny Londoner’s playground of the twenty-first.
The Old Vic
Cesspits. Smoke. Murk. Smog. It is perhaps a strange place to find another of the world’s most renowned theatres. But that is exactly what can be found nearby. Built in 1818 as the Coburg Theatre, renamed the Royal Victoria in 1833, it has been known officially this past century and a half by what was once its affectionate nickname – the Old Vic, to be found on The Cut.
The clamour for a British national theatre had rung out from the early 1700s. The cast list of movers and shakers central to the plan through the ages reads like a who’s who of British theatre: Garrick, Irving and Granville-Barker among them, merely the more garlanded of the players. Sites were mooted in Bloomsbury and Kensington, but as the plan limped through the centuries, our nearest neighbouring republics of Ireland and France beat us to the punch, establishing fine theatres in Dublin and Paris. It wasn’t until 1963 that the National Theatre of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was established at the Old Vic, under the auspices of Sir Laurence Olivier, and took up residence – where else? – in unlovely Lambeth. Olivier’s legendary National Theatre company … with Kenneth Tynan as literary manager and a cast of legends: O’Toole, Redgrave, Jacobi, Plowright and, of course, ‘Sir’ himself. (For a portrait, slightly veiled, of Olivier in his pomp, rummage the bookstalls beneath Waterloo Bridge for Michael Blakemore’s shamefully out-of-print Next Season.)
It was an outing to this very theatre that inspired Kevin Spacey as a boy to become an actor, and he is on record as counting it a privilege to be its Artistic Director. Amid the slings and arrows of critical misfortune, Spacey has also returned the traditional pantomime to the old house. This populist move echoes the spirit of Lilian Baylis, the mighty A.D. of the O.V. from 1912 to 1937, whose first act as boss of the theatre was to stage a barnstorming programme of affordable Shakespeare – ‘Shakespeare for the People’.
Up close – Lambeth
Slowing down for long enough to safely look up is just one of the great advantages of walking. Look up in Cornwall Road, and you will see that the bell tower at St Patrick’s Franciscan church has space for only one bell. Following the Catholic Emancipation Act (which began its protracted journey into law in 1780 – see Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge), Roman Catholics were allowed to worship openly in their own churches. Hitherto, their masses had taken place literally underground, in such covert locations as the basements of the embassies of the great Catholic powers. Due to financial constraints, many of the churches were small and the bell towers unable to bear the weight of more than one bell. Glance up here, or in Hampstead at St Mary’s, or listen out for Corpus Christi on Maiden Lane chiming the Angelus at 6.00 p.m. daily (eighteen single tolls) or standing up gamely to the bells of St Martin’s every Sunday morning.
The National Theatre
Prince Charles said of the National Theatre that it was a clever way of building a nuclear power station in the middle of London without anyone objecting. The other side of the coin was presented passionately and poetically by Sir Richard Eyre in his BBC television series and book Changing Stages. Focusing on Lasdun’s concrete walkways, with their angular split levels, Eyre likened them to the prow of a ship pointing down the River Thames. In this take, the National becomes not a landlocked and parochial institution, but a mighty vessel firing down the river and out into the wider world, there to retrieve theatrical gems and return them to London for our delectation. Eyre cites particularly the great Irish plays of which this building has seen many a landmark production. Appropriate, this, given the strong Irish flavour of the local population and that Ireland played home to the first subsidised theatre in the English-speaking world. The circle is completed by the benefaction of a noted Southeast Londoner, Forest Hill’s Annie Horniman, daughter of the tea merchant and a major influence in the founding of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre.
In the interests of impartiality, however, I am compelled to look from the Prince Charles side of things. To do so, I will draw a quote from the manifold London wags who have turned their wit southward to Upper Ground, Lambeth over the last thirty years: the great thing about being inside the National Theatre, is that you don’t have to look at the outside of the National Theatre. A rather cheap and harsh assessment for my money, but it does reveal a hidden London truth. Of a summer’s evening, one of the finest secret pleasures of the capital is to sip at something long, cold and inspiring on the NT’s terrace while the show is up and running. A peaceful central London bar is a rarity indeed. And the view – that of the most readable section of the River Thames, from Parliament to Somerset House – is certainly worthy of a toast. Or two.
The OXO Tower
Another London ‘secret’ is but a few steps downstream. At the top of the OXO Tower – the O-X-O-shaped windows of which form an ingenious circumvention of a riverbank advertising ban – is the Harvey Nichols-owned restaurant. Head for the cocktail bar at the rear. There you will find not only a bar staff as knowledgeable as any in the metropolis, but a view to rekindle your passion for London all over again. Being on the south-facing side of the building, the vista is both seldom seen and epic. Eschewing the spires and domes of postcard London, what unfolds before you is best described as backstage London – where all the London players prepare for their turn on the main stage of the West End and the City. It is the view that also brings us full circle in Somewhere Else London, as we gaze down on the ranks of chimney pots of the workers’ houses of 1818, now so desirable as central city homes complete, as they are, with indoor toilets, the Lavender Men long gone. Named for the bunches of lavender tied around their necks, these public servants emptied the cesspits of human waste once a week.
But for all its current movie-star glamour and upward mobility, Lambeth by dusk can still be dark and dank – and deliciously so. Indeed when Beat Generation writer and erstwhile Londoner William Burroughs described London on a wet, smoggy day as resembling ‘an attic full of mildewed old trunks’, he could still be describing this very place. This Lambeth of the mind’s eye, still evoked in these secret streets at the fag-end of a winter’s day, dark, tough, straight-talking, what-are-you-looking-at-guv London, can be found in the pages of arguably George Orwell’s best novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying. In that paean to the pains of nonconformity and poverty, when respectable, aspiring poet Gordon Comstock falls from middle-class grace, it is in the murky streets of Lambeth where Orwell has him land. And, just as when Dickens wrote of poverty on the south bank, Orwell too is writing from painful experience, the bleak colours of that novel drawn from a palette assembled during the writing of his Down and Out in Paris and London, set both in Lambeth and in her sister manor of Whitechapel.
The final cameo, unlikely as it may seem, goes to William Burroughs’s compadre, Jack Kerouac. As detailed in the all-too-brief London pages of his Lonesome Traveller anthology, Kerouac made a pilgrimage to the Old Vic at Easter 1957, leaving the brouhaha of his On the Road to rage through the US in his absence. Inspired to travel – as was Orwell – by the works of Jack London, Kerouac had taken in the St Matthew Passion at St Paul’s, eaten Welsh rarebit at the King Lud Pub (now a branch of Abbey bank) and headed to ‘see Shakespeare as it should be performed’ at the grand old theatre on The Cut. There, he saw a production of Antony and Cleopatra which would have featured a future luminary of British stage and screen at the dawn of her career in a play-as-cast role: the young Judi Dench.