London: The Biography

This unseen world exists still in the early twenty-first century, although it has changed its outward form. The close-packed tenements of Stepney have gone, but the high-rise estates have taken their place. The “hereditary casuals” have been replaced by those seeking “benefit.” The shelters of London have become the homes of the dispossessed, marked by what Honor Marshall describes in Twilight London as “mental disorder, family disruption, in particular the broken marriage; chronic ill health, recidivism, prostitution, alcoholism.” In Wellclose Square there was a mission designed to harbour “the people nobody wants,” the rejected and the discarded who would otherwise simply fade into the streets. They fade because nobody sees them. There are certain busy places of London, like the forecourt of Charing Cross Station, where lines of people queue for soup from a Salvation Army mobile canteen; but for the crowds hurrying past them, it is as if they were not there at all. A beggar can lie immobile among happy crowds of people drinking outside a pub, unacknowledged and unregarded. In turn these dispossessed people gradually lose all contact with the external world; and in London it is easier to go under than in any other part of the country. A recent survey of a night shelter in central London, reported in No Way Home by S. Randall, revealed that “four fifths of young people … were from outside London and most were recent arrivals”; the city is, as ever, voracious. A quarter had been “in care,” half had already “slept rough,” and nearly three-quarters “did not know where they were going next.” They were characteristically in ill health, with inadequate clothing and no money. This night shelter was at Centre-point, beside the site of the old rookery of St. Giles where previous migrants to London had lived in rags.

CHAPTER 66. They Outvoted Me

London drives some of its citizens mad. A psychiatric survey in the 1970s revealed that cases of depressive illness were three times higher in the East End than in the rest of the country. Schizophrenia was also a common condition.

As early as the fourteenth century the hospital of St. Mary of Bethlem had begun to care for those sick in mind. “Pore naked Bedlam, Tom’s a-cold.” “God Almighty bless thy five wits-Tom’s a-cold!” Their cries might also have been heard in St. Mary, Barking, “a hospital for priests and inhabitants of London, both male and female, who were inflicted with insanity.” Yet it is through Bethlem that London has always been associated with insanity. Thomas More asked if the city itself were not a great madhouse, with all its afflicted and distracted, so that Bethlem became the epitome or little world of London. In 1403 the records suggest that there were nine inmates supervised by a master, a porter and his wife, as well as a number of servants. But the number of patients steadily increased. In the Chronicles of London, dated 1450, there is a reference to “A Church of Our Lady that is named Bedlam. And in that place be found many men that be fallen out of their wit. And full honestly they be kept in that place; and some be restored unto their wit and health again. And some be abiding therein forever, for they be fallen so much out of themselves that is incurable to man.”

Some were allowed to leave the “madman’s pound,” as it was known, in order to wander the streets as mendicants; a tin badge on the left arm signified their status, and they were variously known as “God’s minstrels” or “anticks.” There was dread and superstition, as well as pity, surrounding them; in the streets of the city they might be regarded as tokens of the city’s madness. They were wandering spirits-sometimes abject and sometimes prophetic, sometimes melancholy and sometimes denunciatory-calling attention to the naked human condition in a city that prided itself upon its artifice and civilisation.

Early sixteenth-century maps show “Bedlame Gate” beside the highway of Bishopsgate. You opened this gate and walked into a courtyard with a number of small stone buildings; here was a church and a garden. There were thirty-one of the insane crowded into a space designed for twenty-four, where “the cryings, screechings, roarings, brawlings, shaking of chains, swearings, frettings, chafings are so many, so hideous, so great; that they are more able to drive a man that hath his wits rather out of them.” The usual treatment was the whip and the chain. In an inventory are mentioned “six chains with locks and keys belonging to them, four pairs of iron manacles, five other chains of iron, and two pairs of stocks.” Thomas More writes in that century of a man who had “ben put uppe in bedelem, and afterward by betyinge and correccyon gathered hys remembraunce to hym,” so it can be assumed that punishment or “correction” was considered efficacious. You had to be brave to be mad.