London: The Biography

Certainly it entered the postwar era in an impoverished state. It has been recorded that “three quarters of its households did not even have running water, an inside lavatory nor a bath.” One resident recalled that “We had sixteen people using one toilet.” Islington, once a village in the environs of London, had been transformed into a central core of slum conditions. A familiar pattern then reasserted itself. Swathes of Victorian and Georgian terraces were razed in order to accommodate council-house estates and tower blocks; the urge to destroy, however, was quickly succeeded by the need to conserve. Islington may stand as representative of London in this respect, where the fashion for wholesale redevelopment was displaced by a no less urgent desire for preservation and improvement. It is as if an amnesiac had suddenly recovered his memory. A process of gentrification then ensued whereby generally middle-class couples, attracted by the prospect of “improvement grants” from the civic authorities of Islington, settled in the neighbourhood and began to restore or rejuvenate their properties. They were the direct successors of those who had arrived in the 1830s and 1840s, and in fact the newly refurbished streets acquired their original characteristics. There were of course disadvantages. The poorer “locals” were now congregated upon the housing estates of Islington, or had dispersed. What has been lost in the process? Certainly that sense of belonging to a small patch of local territory, however squalid, disappeared. Or perhaps it is better to say that it had changed hands. The poor colonised the area for a hundred years: they had driven out the more affluent residents of Islington in the 1880s and 1890s, but now in turn they were being driven away.

But a larger pattern has also been introduced. Where there was once a rooted and identifiable community in Islington, there is now a greater sense of transience. Like the rest of London it has grown more mobile but also more impersonal. Another paradox has emerged in the process, however, emphasising the unique conditions of each urban area. In the course of its present changes, Islington has reacquired its principal or original identity. Where once it was known for its inns and tea gardens, it is now celebrated for its bars and restaurants. Along the central highway of Upper Street there are now proportionally more restaurants than in any other part of London, with the possible exception of Soho, and so the area has regained its reputation for hospitality and conviviality which it possessed long before it ever became part of London. The old presence lingers beneath every change of appearance.

The City Road, emanating from Islington, directly approaches the site of London’s old wall. Before its arrival there it crosses Old Street, where to the east Shoreditch and Spitalfields beckon. These once forlorn areas still bear the marks of their past. In the mid-seventeenth century Shoreditch “was a disreputable place, frequented by courtesans.” The female prostitutes still ply their trade at the upper end of Commercial Street, a dismal thoroughfare between the two areas, while Shoreditch High Street is notorious for its strip pubs catering for local residents as well as gentlemen from the City who symbolically pass beyond the old walls of London, through Bishopsgate, in order to indulge themselves. In the late nineteenth century violent street gangs issued out of the slums of “Old Nichol,” a congerie of streets around Old Nichol Street which might have been named after Old Nick himself. Violence flares still; a murder, or a suicide, awakens memories of the not so recent past.

The name itself derives from Soerditch, a ditch issuing into the Thames, but the idea of a sour ditch is suggestive. The later addition of Shore suggests something stranded or laid up. In turn the name Spitalfields, detached from its origin in “spital,” a house for the sick, suggests spittle-something spat out, violently ejected. Thus it became a haven for refugees. The wrong etymology is often accurate about the nature of an area.

So we may move on to the hunting grounds of Soho, “So-ho” or “So-hoe” being the call of the huntsmen who originally rode across its fields. Now, with its sex shops and strip clubs, the hunt is on for another kind of game. Of all the regions of London, this is the one that has most fully preserved its appearance. Gerrard Street may have been transformed into the centre of Chinatown, but the house in which John Dryden lived is still recognisable. In Soho every street is a memorial; here is where Marx lived, here Casanova, here Canaletto, and here De Quincey.