London: The Biography

In the nineteenth century the connotations of wilderness changed from unconstrained and uncurtailed life to one of barren desolation. The city is what Mayhew called “a bricken wilderness,” and the image of dense cover is replaced by one of hard stone with “its profuse rank undergrowth of low, mean houses spreading in all directions.” This is the nineteenth-century desert, far larger and far more desolate than that of the eighteenth century. It is what James Thomson, in “The Doom of a City” published in 1857, described as the “desert streets” within “a buried City’s maze of stone.” The endlessness of the city streets, so well evoked by Engels, is here associated with the coldness and hardness of stone itself; it represents not the wilderness of burgeoning life but the wilderness of death without sorrow or pity. “Wilderness! Yes, it is, it is,” a character says in Nicholas Nickleby. “It is a wilderness,” says the old man with such animation. “It was a wilderness to me once. I came here barefoot-I have never forgotten it.” And Little Dorrit cries out, “And London looks so large, so barren and so wild.”

So in turn London has recalled Pompeii, another wilderness of stone. After the bombardments of the Second World War, for example, it was remarked that London already looked “as ancient as Herculaneum.” But London has not been buried or overwhelmed by the lava-flow of time. All the constituents of its life return. An Italian visitor, perhaps more astute than those who preferred the conventional analogies, described London as “the Land of the Cyclops.” In a survey of late twentieth-century Docklands we find a great “Cyclops Wharf.” There is a photograph of South Quay in the same vicinity, where the tower of South Quay Waterside is surmounted by a pyramid. The great tower of Canary Wharf is adorned with a pyramid in similar fashion, suggesting that the associations with that empire have never really faded. Even the pumping station for storm water in the Docklands has been constructed, like some guardian of the waters, in the image of an Egyptian monument.

Yet there is one more salient aspect to this continual analogy of London with ancient civilisations: it is the fear, or hope, or expectation that this great imperial capital will in its turn fall into ruin. That is precisely the reason for London’s association with pre-Christian cities; it, too, will revert to chaos and old night so that the condition of the “primeval” past will also be that of the remote future. It represents the longing for oblivion. In Doré’s vivid depiction of nineteenth-century London-London, essentially, as Rome or Babylon- there is an endpiece. It shows a cloaked and meditative figure sitting upon a rock beside the Thames. He looks out upon a city in awful ruin, the wharves derelict, the dome of St. Paul’s gone, the great offices simply piles of jagged stone. It is entitled “the New Zealander” and derives its inspiration from Macaulay’s vision of a “colonial” returning to the imperial city after its destiny and destruction were complete; he wrote of the distant traveller as one “who shall take his stand on the broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.” It is a vision which, paradoxically, emerged during the period of London’s pride and greatness.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century Horace Walpole described a traveller from Lima marvelling at the ruins of St. Paul’s. Shelley looked towards that far-off time when “St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey shall stand, shapeless and nameless ruins in the midst of an unpeopled marsh.” In his imagination Rossetti destroyed the British Museum and left it open for the archaeologists of a future race. Ruskin envisaged the stones of London crumbling “through prouder eminence to less pitied destruction.” The vision is of a city unpeopled, and therefore free to be itself; stone endures, and, in this imagined future, stone becomes a kind of god. Essentially it is a vision of the city as death. But it also represents the horror of London, and of its teeming life; it is a cry against its supposed unnaturalness, which can only be repudiated by a giant act of nature such as a deluge. There may then come a time when London is recognisable only by “grey ruin and … mouldering stone,” sunk deep into “Night, Gothic night.”

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