London: The Biography

In this context the dominance of clock time in the city can be understood. Wren’s London churches have clocks designed within them; no doubt the dials are a substitute for the bells which once rang out, but there is also a suggestion that time itself has somehow become a deity to be venerated. When in the early eighteenth century Bennett’s Clock Shop, at 65 Cheapside, set up images of Gog and Magog above its frontage the shop’s owner was expressing a general truth; these tutelary deities of London were used to strike the hour, confirming the identity of time and the city. For a city based upon work and labour, upon power and commerce, time becomes an aspect of mercantilism.

That is why the city became famous for its clocks, from that upon St. Paul’s to that of “Big Ben” on St. Stephen’s tower at Westminster, and renowned for its clock-makers. Artificers such as Charles Gretton and Joseph Antram of Fleet Street, John Joseph Merlin of Hanover Place and Christopher Pinchbeck of St. John’s Lane, were often visited by foreign travellers and were themselves notable London figures; Pinchbeck opened a clock-making and clockwork gallery to display his skills, while Merlin had his own Mechanical Museum. The measurement of time, and the ingenuity of its artificial instruments, fascinated Londoners; in a city always moving and always making, the attention to the process of measuring was also an attention to its own energy and greatness. That is why London also became the world centre of watch-making. By the end of the eighteenth century, for example, there were more than seven thousand workmen in Clerkenwell assembling watches at a rate of 120,000 a year, 60 per cent of which were exported. It is almost as if London was manufacturing time itself, and then distributing it to the rest of the world. The nature of its manufacture, with different artisans in different districts making one small part of the assembly, means that Clerkenwell itself could be seen as a clockwork mechanism with its face to the sky.

The position of Greenwich upon the meridian is well known but on this famous site was also erected the time signal ball, a wood or leather sphere five feet in diameter, which was raised and dropped by a galvanic motor clock; this device was considered to be “the most wonderful clock in the world” regulating “the time of all the clocks and watches in London.” In particular “a very small outlay … will secure true Greenwich time to every City establishment.” So time and trade ran together. Another great clock was established at the post office of St. Martin’s le Grand in the 1870s; it was known as the “chronopher” and by means of a “time current” running along the electric telegraph it controlled the time of “sixteen of the most important cities in the kingdom.” London set up and dominated the time of the entire country. With the central position of Greenwich, it might even be said to have controlled the time of the world. There was also the phenomenon of “railway time,” so that the locomotives speeding out of London set the time for the provincial stations through which they passed.

In twenty-first-century London too, time rushes forward and is everywhere apparent; it hangs upon neon boards, and is illuminated on the front of office buildings. Clocks are everywhere, and most citizens have the image of time strapped to their wrists. It might even be suggested that the general and characteristic obsession of London is with time itself. That is why all of its commercial operations are designed to be conducted and monitored in the shortest possible time, just as information is only important when it is of instantaneous access. The faster an action or a dealing can be reported, the more significance it acquires. The affluent Londoners of the fourteenth century who first displayed the counterpoise clock in their households were at the beginning of a process in which London would capture and market time. The city oppresses its inhabitants, and the evidence of that oppression can be found in the time it imposes; there is a time for eating, a time for working, a time for travelling to work, a time for sleeping. It represents the great triumph of materialism and commerce within the city.

The consequences emerge in the activity and imagery of London over a long period. One eighteenth-century observer remarked that in London they “talk little, I suppose, that they may not lose time.” Similarly there is no bargaining, and the custom of having fixed prices “is not the product solely of competition and confidence, but also of the necessity of saving time.” It has often been noted how quickly Londoners walk. If there is a cause for this anxious speed it may lie in the deeply inherited instinct that time is also money.