London: The Biography

Yet the term “Gothic” has associations of its own which are no less powerful than those of Rome or Babylon, Nineveh or Tyre. The author of The London Perambulator, James Bone, has suggested that the shapes and textures of London stones might reveal “a Gothic genius loci of London fighting against the spirit of the classic.” But what, then, is this spirit of London place? It brings with it suggestions of excess and overpowering amplitude, of religious yearning and monumentality; it suggests ancient piety and vertiginous stone. In the eighteenth century Gothic acquired connotations of horror, then horror combined with hysterical comedy. All this the city can encompass.

Nicholas Hawksmoor, the great builder of London churches, defined a style which he termed “English Gothick”: it was marked by dramatic symmetries and sublime disproportion. When George Dance designed the Guildhall in the late 1780s with an elegant amalgam of Indian and Gothic elements, he was restoring a form of extravagance and vitality in homage to the great age of the city. But if Gothic was an intimation of antiquity, it was also an aspect of veneration. That is why the churches of Hawksmoor provide such a powerful statement in the places where they are located, among them the City, Spitalfields, Limehouse and Greenwich. As one eighteenth-century artist, Flaxman, remarked of the tombs within Westminster Abbey, they are “specimens of magnificence … which forcibly direct the attention and turn the thoughts not only to other ages but to other states of existence.” There is that within London which compels recognition as not of this earth.

Its most extravagant and notable manifestations were in the nineteenth century, however, when the spirit of neo-Gothic infused London. It found its first significant incarnation in the rebuilding of the Houses of Parliament after the great fire of 1834, but by 1860 “Gothic was the recognised language of all leading architects.” It has been suggested that the Gothic style embodied “the influence of London’s past.” That is why the Law Courts were constructed in Gothic style as a way of instilling the authority of time upon the judicial deliberations of the present; it is also the reason why London churches of the mid-nineteenth century were invariably in the Gothic style. Ironwork was fashioned in the same manner, and suburban villas were rendered in what was known as “Wimbledon Gothic”; the area of St. John’s Wood, in particular, is known for its toy or ornamental Gothic. Anything which might be considered too recent, or too newly made, was covered with a patina of false age.

So, in the nineteenth-century city, Gothic possessed the consolation of supposed antiquity; in a city which seemed to be careering beyond all familiar or predictable bounds, it offered the reassurance of some theoretical or presumed permanence. But sacred images have the strangest way of showing another face. The power of Gothic originals can also be associated with the presence of the pagan or the barbaric. That is why the city of empire was also known as a city of savages.

CHAPTER 62. Wild Things

As there is a darkest Africa, is there not also a darkest England … May we not find a parallel at our own doors, and discover within a stone’s throw of our cathedrals and palaces similar horrors to those which Stanley has found existing in the great Equatorial forest?” These are the words of William Booth in the 1890s. He notes in particular “dwarfish dehumanised inhabitants, the slavery to which they are subjected, their privation and their misery.” In this sense the city has created and nurtured a wild population. The poor of the slums and tenements were characteristically described by other observers as “savages” and even at the time of great national religious revival among the middle classes, when England was supposed to be the quintessentially Christian nation, the working class of London remained outside the Church. A report of 1854 concluded that the poor of London were “as utter strangers to religious ordinances as the people of a heathen country” or, as Mayhew put it, “religion is a regular puzzle to costers.” How could there be devotion, or piety, in such an oppressive commercial city where there was little chance of beauty or dignity, let alone worship?