London: The Biography

There were almost a score of Dirty Alleys, Dirty Hills and Dirty Lanes in the medieval city; there were Inkhorn Courts and Foul Lanes and Deadman’s Places. Lombard Street in the City, at the centre of capitalist imperialism, was a notoriously dark street. At the beginning of the nineteenth century its brick was so blackened with smoke that the walls resembled the mud in the road. Today, in the twenty-first century, it is still just as narrow and just as dark, its stone walls constantly echoing to the sound of hurried footsteps. It is still close to what a century ago Nathaniel Hawthorne called “the black heart of London.” Hawthorne’s compatriot Henry James also noticed the “deadly darkness” but he revelled in it as if he were a “born Londoner.” In the 1870s Hippolyte Taine simply found the darkness “horrible”; the houses from a distance looked “like ink-stains on blotting paper” while from a closer vantage the “tall, flat straight façades are of dark brick.” The darkness of London seems to have entered Taine’s soul with his crepuscular invocations of “a bone-black factory” which is a London dwelling, of “porticoes foul with soot … every crevice inked in … long ranks of blind windows … the fluting of the columns full of greasy filth, as if sticky mud had been set flowing down there.”

There were others who were intimate with this darkness. In his account of nineteenth-century Whitechapel, Charles Booth, the sympathetic chronicler of The Life and Labour of the People of London, mentions that the tables of the poor are “fairly black” with thick swarms of flies congregating on every available surface while, in the streets outside, at the level of the hip, “is a broad dirty mark, showing where the men and lads are in the constant habit of standing.”

Charles Booth’s images of disease and torpor somehow increase the darkness of the capital, as the very embodiment of those shadows which the rich and powerful cast upon the dispossessed and the disadvantaged. The effect of the industrial revolution, although less noticeable in London than in some of the northern manufacturing towns, deepened those shadows. The growth of factories as well as small workshops, and the increasing demand for coal in a city which by the beginning of the eighteenth century was already the manufacturing centre of Europe, only intensified London’s characteristic darkness.

In another sense its darkness suggests secrecy, and the titles of many accounts of the city confirm that sense of concealment, among them Unknown London, its Romance and Tragedy, The London Nobody Knows and

London in Shadow. And yet that secrecy is of its essence. When Joseph Conrad described the city “half lost in night,” in The Secret Agent

(1907), he was echoing Charles Dickens’s remark seventy years before in Sketches by Boz that “the streets of London, to be beheld in the very height of their glory, should be seen on a dark dull murky winter’s night.” The tone is ironic but the meaning is by no means so. In his last completed work Dickens returned to it in his description of “a black shrill city … a gritty city … a hopeless city, with no vent in the leaden canopy of its sky.” Darkness is of the city’s essence; it partakes of its true identity; in a literal sense London is possessed by darkness.

CHAPTER 10. Maps and Antiquarians

The history of London is represented by the history of its maps. They can be seen as symbolic tokens of the city, and as attempts to picture its disorder in terms of fluent and harmonious design. From the first great copperplate map of the mid-sixteenth century to the “Underground” map of the late twentieth century, the mapping of London represents an attempt to understand the chaos and thereby to mitigate it; it is an attempt to know the unknowable.