London: The Biography

There is an old London inscription: “As every thread of Gold is valuable/So is every minute of Time.” Time must not be “wasted.” Chateaubriand noticed that Londoners were impervious to art and general culture precisely because of this obsession; “they chase away the thought of Raphael as liable to make them lose time and nothing more.” Significantly he associates this with the need to work; they are “for ever on the brink of the abyss of starvation if for a moment they forget work.” Time and work are indeed intimately mingled within the consciousness of London; they cannot be separated, not even for a moment, and out of this conflation emerges frantic and continuous activity. Like automata, the citizens become the components of the monstrous clock that is London. Then time indeed becomes a prison. A riddle in a London chapbook asked the question, What am I?

Close in a cage a bird I’ll keep

That sings both day and night,

When other birds are fast asleep,

Its notes yield sweet delight.

And the answer? “I am a clock.” Even the gallows was wreathed with the implication of time. One victim of the rope declared in his last speech: “Men, Women, and Children, I come hither to hang like a Pendulum to a Watch, for endeavouring to be Rich too Soon.” The clock of Holy Sepulchre, Newgate, in turn regulated the times of hanging.

It is of course possible to control time; Ned Ward noticed an assistant, in an early seventeenth-century “Musick-shop,” “beating Time upon his Counter” while his customers danced to the sound of pipes and fiddles. This is an ancient yet still familiar scene, of course, and suggests that the permanent refuge of Londoners from the claims of clock-time may lie in song and dance; that is one way, at least, to “beat Time.” And there are also places where time may cease to exist. Among the prison inmates of London, for example, “day after day rolled on, but their state was immutable … every moment was a moment of anguish, yet did they wish to prolong that moment, fearful that the coming period would bring a severer fate.” During the Second World War, Harold Nicolson noted, “one lives in the present. The past is too sad a recollection and the future too sad a despair. I go up to London. After dinner I walk back to the Temple.” He is walking through a timeless city, abandoned to darkness during the black-out, and there are still areas of London where time seems to have come to an end or ceaselessly to repeat itself.

The phenomenon can be particularly noted in Spitalfields, where the passing generations have inhabited the same buildings and pursued the same activities of weaving and dyeing. It may be noticed that by the market of Spitalfields archaeologists have recovered successive levels of human activity dating back to the time of the Roman occupation.

But time also moves slowly in Shoreditch and Limehouse; these areas have acquired a finality, in which nothing new seems able to prosper. The time of Cheapside and Stoke Newington is rapid and continuous, whereas that of Holborn and Kensington is fitful. Jonathan Raban, in Soft City, has noted that “Time in Earl’s Court is quite different from time in Islington,” by which he is suggesting that the rhythms imposed upon the inhabitants of these areas are particular and identifiable. There are streets in which the presence of old time is familiar; the area of Clerkenwell, and the passages off Maiden Lane, are notable in that respect. But there are other places, such as Tottenham Court Road and Long Acre, which seem to exist in a continual state of novelty and unfamiliarity.

There are also forms of timelessness. Neither vagrants nor children are on the same journey as those whom they pass on the crowded thoroughfares.

CHAPTER 70. The Tree on the Corner

Consider the plane tree at the corner of Wood Street and Cheapside. No one knows how long it has existed on that spot-once the old churchyard of St. Peter’s, which was destroyed during the Great Fire of 1666-but in extant documents it is termed “ancient,” and for centuries it has been a familiar presence. In 1799, for example, the sight of this tree in the centre of London inspired Wordsworth to compose a poem in which the natural world breaks through Cheapside in visionary splendour:

At the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears,

Hangs a Thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years:

Poor Susan has pass’d by the spot, and has heard

In the silence of morning the song of the Bird.

Then enchantment holds her, and she witnesses

A mountain ascending, a vision of trees;

Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide,

And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.