London: The Biography

The vicinity of Old St. Pancras, with the graveyard as its centre, has been an area of dereliction for many centuries. Norden, in the sixteenth century, cautioned “Not to walk there late”; in the early years of the twenty-first century it is encompassed by railway arches within which small garages and car repairers have set up their trades. Much of it remains waste ground. Swain’s Lane, leading down to the great mound known as “Parliament Hill” on Hampstead Heath from the walls of Highgate Cemetery, is considered to be unfortunate. The local press and local historians have investigated the condition of the place without notable success, except for certain inexplicable or at least unexplained “sightings”: “I have seen what appeared to be a ghost like figure inside the gates at the top of Swains Lane.” In the weeks after this report appeared in the Hampstead and Highgate Express, in February 1970, other local correspondents conveyed their apprehension: “My fiancee and I spotted a most unusual form about a year ago. It just seemed to glide across the path. I am glad somebody also has spotted it … To my knowledge the ghost always takes the form of a pale figure and has been appearing for several years … a tall man in a hat who walks across Swains Lane … Suddenly from the corner of my eye I saw something move … which seemed to be walking towards us from the gates, sent us running up Swains Lane as fast as we could … I have also had a strange happening at the lower end of Swains Lane … My advice is to avoid Swains Lane during dark evenings, if at all possible.”

· · ·

Yet there are also areas of peacefulness and care. The old Foundling Hospital in Coram Fields has long been demolished, but on the perimeter of its site is now the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children. Wakley Street, a short and narrow thoroughfare between Goswell Road and the City Road, has on one side the headquarters of the National Children’s Bureau and on the other the National Canine Defence League.

In another context it is perhaps encouraging to note that the pitches of puppet-shows were set upon a fixed local abode for decades, and that together they form a kind of charmed circle around the centre of London-Holborn Bridge, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Covent Garden, Charing Cross, Salisbury Change and the Fleet Bridge.

On the perimeter of this circle lies Fountain Court, amid the buildings of the Temple; there has been a small fountain there for three hundred years, commemorated by writers as diverse as Dickens and Verlaine, while the softness and serenity of this small spot have been experienced by many generations. The fountain and its pool were once square-fenced with palisades, then encircled by iron railings, but now stand unbarred; whether in a square, or a round, or open on all sides, the fountain plays on, and its atmosphere has remained constantly evocative. One Londoner came here as a schoolboy, with no knowledge of its history or its associations, and immediately fell under the spell of its enchantment; it was as if innumerable good acts or kind words had emerged here as calmly and as quietly as the little fountain itself. At last, in these pages, he has the chance of recording his debt.

If persistence through time can create harmony and charity, then the church of St. Bride’s-only a few yards from Fountain Court-has some claim to good fortune. A prehistoric ritual site, as well as evidence of a Roman temple and wooden Saxon church, have been found within its grounds. So the various forms of divinity have been venerated on one spot for many thousands of years. London is blessed as well as cursed.

CHAPTER 54

Knowledge Is Power

There was, in the city, another way of opening the gate of heaven. The pursuit of knowledge has always been one of the city’s defining characteristics, even though it may take unfamiliar forms. In the reign of Edward III a man was taken “practising with a dead man’s head, and brought to the bar at the King’s Bench, where, after abjuration of his art, his trinkets were taken from him, carried to Tothill, and burned before his face.” During the reign of Richard I one Raulf Wigtoft, chaplain to the archbishop of York, “had provided a girdle and ring, cunningly intoxicated, wherewith he meant to have destroyed Simon [the dean of York] and others, but his messenger was intercepted, and his girdle and ring burned at this place before the people.” “This place” was again Tothill which is supposed to have been the site of druid worship; the tools of conjurors and alchemists were no doubt traditionally destroyed here because it was considered an area of more powerful magic.