London: The Biography

This might be construed as an example of Wordsworth’s disenchantment with the city, and his wish to obliterate it in the interests of “nature,” but it might also represent his vision of a primeval past. The tree conjures up images of its distant predecessors. Everything about this corner of Wood Street suggests continuity. Even its name is connected with the tree; wood was indeed once sold here, but the tree itself is protected and can never be cut down. In the spring of 1850 rooks came to rest in its branches, re-establishing the ancient association between London and those dark birds. The London plane flourishes in the smoke and dust of London, and the tree at the corner of Wood Street has become an emblem of the city itself. It has now reached a height of approximately seventy feet, and is still thriving.

Beneath it nestle the small shops which have been an aspect of this corner for almost six hundred years. In 1401 a shop known as the Long Shop was first built here against the churchyard wall, and others followed; after the Fire, they were rebuilt in 1687. The site is only a few feet in depth, and each small shop still consists of a single storey above and a box-front below. The trades which have passed through them were various-silver-sellers, wig-makers, law stationers, pickle-and sauce-sellers, fruiterers-all of them reflecting the commercial life of the capital. Appearances may change, but form remains constant. In more recent years there was a shirt-maker and a music warehouse, a sweet-shop and a gown-maker. A florist, Carrie Miller, who was born in St. Pancras, and had never left London, was interviewed here in the years immediately following the Second World War: “I was fortunate enough to find this little shop under the famous tree in Wood Street. Before I came it was a toy shop. The City is in my blood now. I would not be anywhere else in the whole world.” So this tiny spot, this corner, provides evidence of continuity on every level, human, social, natural, communal. There exists on the site today a shirt-maker’s, L. and R. Woodersen, which advertises itself as “under the tree,” a newsagent’s with the shop sign “Time Out. London’s Living Guide,” and a sandwich bar called “Fresh Options.”

Such lines of continuity are to be found everywhere within London, some of great antiquity. The fact that Heathrow Airport is built upon the site of an Iron Age camp is suggestive, with the evidence of a neolithic track or cursus extending two miles on the western side of the “runways” of the present airport. The original Roman street pattern of London has survived, unchanged, in certain parts of the city; Cheapside, Eastcheap and Cripplegate still follow the ancient lines. In Milk Street and Ironmonger Lane, seven successive waves of building have employed exactly the same sites, despite the fact that during this period the street-level itself rose some three feet three inches.

There is a spiritual, as well as a physical, continuity. One historian of the parish of St. Andrew, Holborn, C.M. Barron, has noticed that “along the Roman road leading westwards from Newgate there was a kind of funerary ribbon development,” which in turn coincides with the fatal route taken by the condemned from Newgate to Tyburn; the line of death seems to have been prepared in advance. In a similar spirit we may note that at the same church of St. Andrew, there is evidence of pagan cremation burials, Roman sepulchral building and remnants of early Christian worship; the layers of sacred activity radiate from one to another within what is undoubtedly an holy area. An archaeological investigation of the graveyard of St. Katherine Cree, between Leadenhall Street and Mitre Street, offers interesting evidence of continuous occupation. Here were a series of “patchy Roman surfaces,” according to the London Archaeologist, into which were cut “burials in stone and mortar cists, probably a continuation of the late Saxon graveyard excavated to the east … The area continued to be used as a graveyard to the present day, with burials being made in wooden and lead coffins and the ground level rising steadily.”

Londoners seem instinctively aware that certain areas have retained characteristics or powers. Continuity itself may represent the greatest power of all. The coinage of early tribes in the area of London, particularly that of the Iceni, carried the image of a griffin. The present City of London uses the same miserly and rapacious birds as its emblem. More than two thousand years after their appearance, the griffins still guard the boundaries of the City.