London: The Biography

There were the “Argyll Rooms,” Laurent’s Dancing Academy, the Portland Rooms, and a score of other venues. The night-houses and flash-houses changed into nightclubs, the penny gaffs and cheap theatres into striptease joints, the gaming clubs into bars, but despite the external alterations governed by time and fashion the essential atmosphere and purpose of Soho have remained the same. It was estimated that in 1982 there were some 185 premises used as part of the sex industry; more recent legislation has attempted to mitigate the business but, at the beginning of a new century, Soho remains the centre of a flourishing trade in prostitution. The spirit of the area has also asserted itself in another guise, with Old Compton Street becoming in the 1980s and 1990s a centre of “gay” pubs and clubs. The narrow thoroughfares of Soho are always crowded now, with people in search of sex, spectacle or excitement; it has retained its “queer adventurous” spirit and seems a world away from the clubs of Pall Mall or the shops of Oxford Street which lie respectively to its south and north.

This is only to be expected, however. Each area of London has its own unmistakable character, nurtured through time and history; together they resemble a thousand vortices within the general movement of the city. It is impossible to look at them all steadily, or envisage them as a whole, because the impression can only be one of opposition and contrast. Yet out of these oppositions and contrasts London itself emerges, as if it sprang into being out of collision and paradox. In that sense its origins are as mysterious as the beginning of the universe itself.

London’s Rivers

An engraving by Charles Grignion, after Francis Hayman, of the insalubrious Fleet River; since it was the last resting place of dead dogs, corpses, human waste and noxious refuse, it is hard to believe that anyone actually swam in it.

CHAPTER 57

You Cannot Take the Thames with You

It has always been the river of commerce. The watercress-growers of Gravesend, the biscuit-bakers and store-shippers of Tooley Street, the ship-chandlers of Wapping, the block-makers and rope-makers of Limehouse, all owe their trades to the Thames. The great paintings of its business, with its warehouses, refiners, breweries and builders’ yards, all bear testimony to its power and authority. Its predominance within the city was understood long before the Romans came. Copper and tin were transported along it as early as the third millennium BC; as a result of commerce upon the river the area comprising London acquired, by 1500 BC, supremacy over the region of Wessex. That is perhaps why ceremonial objects were thrown into its waters, where they lay hidden until recent archaeological discoveries.

The city itself owes its character and appearance to the Thames. It was a place of “crowded wharfs and people-pestered shores,” the water continually in motion with “shoals of labouring oars.” The movement and energy of London were the movement of horses and the energy of the river. The Thames brought in a thousand argosies. Venetian galleys and three-masted ships from the Low Countries vied for position by the riverside, while the water itself was crowded with wherries and ferries transporting the citizens from one shore to the other.

The other great commercial value of the Thames lay in its fish, and in the fifteenth century we read of “barbille, fflounders. Roaches. dace. pykes. Tenches,” all caught in nets with baits of cheese and tallow; there were eels and kipper salmon, mullet, lamprey, prawn, smelt, sturgeon and “white bayte.” A vast range of vessels also plied their trades upon the water. Barges and barks sailed beside chalk-boats; they were joined by cocks, or small work boats, by pikers, rush-boats, oyster-boats and ferry-boats, by whelk-boats and tide-boats.

Most Londoners earned their living directly off the river, or by means of the goods which were transported along it. Documents of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries reveal a host of Thames employees, from the “conservators” who were in charge of river safety to the “tidemen” whose work on embanking or building upon the river depended upon the state of the tide. There were boatmen and chalkmen, eelmen and baillies, gallymen or garthmen, ferriers and lightermen, hookers and mariners, petermen and palingmen, searchers and shipwrights, shoutmen and piledrivers, trinkers and water-bailiffs and watermen. There are recorded no fewer than forty-nine ways of trapping or catching fish, from nets and weirs to enclosures and wicker-baskets. But there were many other activities such as the erection of dams and barriers, the construction of landing-stages and jetties, the repairing of watergates and causeways, quays and stairs. We may call this the early stage of the Thames when it remained the living centre of the city’s development and trade.