London: The Biography

Images of Babel and Sodom abound, therefore, yet there is a more profound sense in which the city represents hell. It is the ultimate place of degradation and despair, where solitude is sought as an escape from the exactions of pity or compassion and where the only fellowship found is the fellowship of misery. Of all writers perhaps George Orwell possessed that sense of the city most strongly and, in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Gordon Comstock, surveying the brightness of Piccadilly Circus in 1936, remarks that “The lights down in hell will look just like that.” Often “The fantasy returned to him that he was a damned soul in hell … Ravines of cold evil-coloured fire, with darkness all above. But in hell there would be torment. Was this torment?”

There are still, in this city, places where suffering seems to linger. On a small garden or patch of waste ground, near the intersection of Tottenham Court Road and Howland Street, solitary people sit in postures of despair. It was close by, at 36 Howland Street, that Verlaine composed his wonderful poem “Il pleure dans mon coeur/Comme il pleut sur la ville.” “It weeps in my heart just as it rains upon the city,” all the loneliness and sorrow of London are caught in this image of the grey and falling rain. The cemetery garden behind the Hawksmoor church of St. George’s-in-the-East, beside Wapping, attracts the lonely and the unhappy. The garden of another church, Christ Church, Spitalfields, by chance by the same architect, was for many years a resting place for the vagrant and the deranged; it was known as “Itchy Park.” There was a famous area known as “Poverty Corner” along the Waterloo Road, by the corner of York Road; here out-of-work actors, artistes and music-hall “turns” used to wait in the generally forlorn hope of being seen or chosen by the music-hall agents. That corner has remained an anonymous and transient locale, between the bridge and the station, with its own peculiar sense of desolation.

Whole areas can in their turn seem woeful or haunted. Arthur Machen had a strange fascination with the streets north of Grays Inn Road-Frederick Street, Percy Street, Lloyd Baker Square-and those in which Camden Town melts into Holloway. They are not grand or imposing; nor are they squalid or desolate. Instead they seem to contain the grey soul of London, that slightly smoky and dingy quality which has hovered over the city for many hundreds of years. He observed “those worn and hallowed doorsteps,” even more worn and hallowed now, and “I see them signed with tears and desires, agony and lamentations.” London has always been the abode of strange and solitary people who close their doors upon their own secrets in the middle of the populous city; it has always been the home of “lodgings,” where the shabby and the transient can find a small room with a stained table and a narrow bed.

A true Londoner will tell you that there is no need to travel when you have the unexplored mysteries of the city all about you; a walk down Farringdon Road, or Leather Lane, will give you as much cause for wonder and surprise as any street in Paris or Rome. “I do not understand my own city,” you might say, “so why travel elsewhere in search of novelty?” There is always a sense of strangeness in London, to be experienced around unexpected corners and in unknown streets. As Arthur Machen said, “it is utterly true that he who cannot find wonder, mystery, awe, the sense of a new world and an undiscovered realm in the places by the Grays Inn Road will never find those secrets elsewhere, not in the heart of Africa.”

It has often been observed that certain streets or neighbourhoods carry with them a particular atmosphere over many generations. An air of emptiness or ennui, for example, can be sensed along those thoroughfares that have been created by municipal edict and have taken away much of older London in their construction-Victoria Street and New Oxford Street, artificial creations of the nineteenth century, remain anonymous unhappy places. Kingsway, cut through ancient dwellings in the early twentieth century, is merely dull. The Essex Road and the unluckily named Balls Pond Road are areas of manifest greyness and misery. Another cold spot, over many years, has been Shepherd’s Bush Green; it was described as “bald, arid, detestable” at the beginning of the twentieth century and has remained thus ever since.