London: The Biography

Lambeth is now, like much of London, quieter than once it was. There seem to be no children on the streets, but a small green named Pedler’s Park in Salamanca Street has been classified as a “children’s play area”; where once all London was a “play area” now zones have been segregated for that purpose. Lambeth Walk, once the centre of Old Lambeth, is now pedestrianised with three-storey council houses of dark brick along it. It leads to a shopping mall, albeit a dilapidated one, down which staggers a drunken man cursing to himself; shops are boarded up, and some are derelict. But above the mall itself have been painted murals of children. One shows Lambeth Ragged School, in Newport Street, and is dated 1851. Another is of children, with their legs bare, exuberantly dancing after a watering cart; the image is taken from a photograph by William Whiffin, dated c. 1910, which showed some small boys playing in the spray. And then suddenly, on 1 July 1999, four young girls bring out a skipping rope and begin to play in the middle of Lambeth Walk.

Continuities

George Scharf ’s drawing of “The Original Oyster Shop” in Tyler Street; the shop itself has gone but all the buildings on the same site have followed its contours.

CHAPTER 69. Have You Got the Time?

The nature of time in London is mysterious. It seems not to be running continuously in one direction, but to fall backwards and to retire; it does not so much resemble a stream or river as a lava flow from some unknown source of fire. Sometimes it moves steadily forward, before springing or leaping out; sometimes it slows down and, on occasions, it drifts and begins to stop altogether. There are some places in London where you would be forgiven for thinking that time has come to an end.

In medieval documents ancient London customs were declared to be “from time out of mind, about which contrary human memory does not exist”; or an object might be classified as standing “where it now stands for a longer time than any of the jurors can themselves recall.” These were ritualised, or standardised, phrases suggesting that the earliest measure of time was human memory itself. In an anonymous medieval poem on the life of St. Erkenwald there are verses which concern the masons rebuilding St. Paul’s Cathedral in the fourteenth century; they discover a great tomb within the ancient foundations of the church, in which rests the unblemished corpse of a pagan judge who speaks thus: “How long I have lain here is from a time forgotten. It is too much for any man to give it a length,” although even in that distant period London was “the metropolis and the master town it evermore has been.” The corpse is baptised, its soul saved, and at the close “all the bells of London rang loudly together.”

Beyond the time measured by human memory there exists, therefore, sacred time invoked by the sound of these bells. The visions of Our Lady in the church of St. Bartholomew, or the miracles surrounding the shrine of Our Lady of Willesden, suggest that London was also the harbour of eternity. The bells provided that sonority where sacred and secular time met. Yet for many centuries a form of communal memory was also commonplace-“In the great hard frost … in the late dreadful storme … ever since the sicknesse yeare … two or three dayes after the great high wind”-when the events of London mark out an imprecise but useful chronology. Public gatherings also measured London time, in “sermon time” or “at Exchange time when the merchants meet at the Royal Exchange.” There was a human scale, also, in the measurement of light and shadow in the city as an index of time: “about candlelighting in the evening” or “when it was duskish.”

The spirit of the city lives, too, in the emblems which adorn it. There were four “wall dials” in the Inner Temple, one of which bore the inscription “Begone About Your Business,” which is a true London apothegm. On the sundial in Pump Court are etched the words, “Shadows we are and like Shadows Depart,” and in Lincoln’s Inn two emblems of sacred time were installed. On the southern gable of the Old Buildings was the motto Ex Hoc Momento Pendet Aeternitas, or “On This Moment Hangs Eternity,” and, beside it, Qua Redit Nescitis Horam or “We Do Not Know the Hour of his Return.” These emblems are the written equivalent of the church bells, resounding through the streets of the city. In the Middle Temple another sundial reasserts the actual nature of London with complementary mottoes. Time and Tide Tarry For No Man and Vestigia Nulla Retrorsum or “No Moment Is Backward.” So even the sun, and the light, are mastered by the urgent rhythm of city activity.