London: The Biography

The point of rhymes and riddles was to train the perceptions of small children, so that they might learn how to survive in a difficult environment. That is why there is a tradition of sharpness and impertinence among young Londoners. When Winston Churchill met a boy outside Downing Street and asked him to stop whistling, the child replied: “Why should I? You can shut your ears, can’t you?” Aubrey and Swift collected examples of wit and sallies from street children, as have other compilers from Dickens and Mayhew to the Opies. The “artful dodger” is perhaps only a slightly dramatised version of any “street-wise” London child, that imp of the perverse who seems somehow to have inherited all the levelling and egalitarian spirit of the city in his or her own small person.

There was a film made just after the Second World War, entitled Hue and Cry, in which a boy’s quick-witted observations thwart a criminal gang. He is asked, “So you’re the boy who sees visions in the streets of London?” It is a question which might have been posed in the early medieval city. In a climactic scene of the same film the criminals are pursued by a gang of children across the bomb-sites and ruined buildings of the Blitz; here again is an eternal image of urban childhood. There are many pictures and descriptions of the London child against a background of flames, of the child carried to safety during the incursions of Boudicca or the depredations of the Great Fire, yet somehow the image of children clambering over ruins is more poignant. Whether it be Saxon children playing among the vestiges of Roman London, or twentieth-century children leaping among the bomb-sites of the Second World War, it summons up associations of eternal renewal and invincible energy which are precisely the characteristics of London itself.

Boys and girls come out to play,

The moon doth shine as bright as day.

Leave your supper and leave your sleep,

And join your playfellows in the street.

This mysterious image of streets filled with play is amplified by Zechariah VIII: 5-“And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the street thereof.” Children can be found clustering in certain areas for play, among them Exmouth Market, the Commercial Road, south and east of the Elephant and Castle, along the Goswell Road, and of course the scores of small parks and recreation grounds which echo across the capital. Certain areas seem to draw them towards games, as if the presence of the children will soften them and render them inhabitable. Children, for example, always congregated east of Aldgate Pump.

In 1931 Norman Douglas published a scholarly volume entitled London Street Games, perhaps in order to preserve the memory of a world which he sensed to be in some kind of transition. But it is also a vivid memorial to the inventiveness and energy of London children, and an implicit testimony to the streets which harboured and protected their play. There were girls’ games such as “Mother I’m Over the Water” or “Turning Mother’s Wringer” and skipping-rope games such as “Nebuchadnezzer” and “Over the Moon.” Their voices rose to the tapping of their feet upon the pavement.

Charlie Chaplin, meek and mild,

Stole a sixpence from a child,

When the child began to cry,

Charlie Chaplin said goodbye.

The texture of the city itself can create opportunities for play. Marbles were rolled in the gutters, and the paving stones were marked with chalk for a hopping game. Children made use of walls, against which “fag-cards” were flicked in games such as “Nearest the Wall Takes” or “Nearest the Wall Spins Up.” It was remarked that these games “make the boys uncommonly nimble with their hands, and this must help them later on, if they go in for certain trades like watch-making.” Then there were the “touch” games, one entitled “London.” The game of “Follow My Leader” was popular in the streets of London, particularly in the suburbs: it included crossing the road at precarious moments, following the route of railway lines, or knocking upon street-doors. And there was an evening game called “Nicho Midnight” or “Flash Your Light”; as one Cockney boy put it, “You have to play in the dark because torches are no good in the daytime.” Street games can be played in the darkness of London because “sport is sweetest when there be no spectators.” That is why old tunnels, disused railways lines, dilapidated parks and small cemeteries have become the site of games. It is as if the children are hiding themselves from London. From that secluded vantage, the boisterous may jeer or throw missiles at passing adults, or shout insults such as “I’ll punch your teeth in!” An instinctive savagery and aggression often seem to be at work in the city air.