London: The Biography

Within that City, the administrative network of the wards is of ancient date; these units of local government can be traced back to the early ninth century, and their exact alignments are still employed at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This is perhaps so familiar a concept that its striking singularity is often missed. There is no other city on earth which manifests such political and administrative continuity; its uniqueness is one of the tangible and physical factors that render London a place of echoes and shadows.

The texture of the city is also remarkably consistent. Peter’s Hill and Upper Thames Street were laid out in the twelfth century. Other street-surfaces and frontages have a similar history, with property divisions remaining intact for many hundreds of years. Even the devastation of the Great Fire could not erase the ancient lanes and boundaries. In a similar pattern of continuity those streets which were newly laid out after the Fire also showed tenacity of purpose. Ironmonger Lane, for example, has had the same width for almost 335 years. That width was and is fourteen feet, originally sufficient to allow two carts to pass each other without hindrance or blockage. It is another aspect of this continuous London history that its structure can accommodate itself to quite different modes of transport.

When George Scharf drew an early nineteenth-century oyster-shop on the corner of Tyler Street and King Street, just east of Regent Street, its shallowness was explained by Scharf’s latest editor, Peter Jackson-“all the houses on the north side of Tyler Street followed a medieval building line which ran at an angle making them progressively shallower.” The streets have been renamed as Foubert’s Place and Kingly Street but even now “the building on this spot still has the same proportions.”

An even more remarkable physical token of the past lies a little further west in Park Lane. The lower end of that street, from Wood’s Mews down to Stanhope Gate, is marked by irregularity; the streets are set back a few feet from each other, so that the “front” is never in a straight line. This is not an accidental or architectural arrangement, however, since the “map or plott of the Lordship of Eburie” reveals that those streets were in fact laid down upon the pattern of the old acre strips of the farmland which once covered the site. These acre strips belonged to the village community system of the Saxon period, and the irregularity of Park Lane is a token of their continuing presence and influence. Just as the Saxon wards maintain their energy and power within the city, so the Saxon farming system has helped to create the structure and topography of the modern city. In similar fashion the curve of West Street, where the Ivy restaurant is now situated, exactly imitates the curve of the country lane which once existed there.

A sixteenth-century surveyor named Tiswell drew up a map of the land which is now occupied by the West End. At that time it consisted of farmland with lanes winding between the villages of St. Giles and Charing. Yet a modern map superimposed upon the Elizabethan plan coincides with its principal thoroughfares and most notable topographical features. It may be a cause of surprise, but it should be one of wonder. Once the city is seen in this light, then it begins to reveal its mysteries. The persistent echoic effect can be recognised everywhere. Thus one of the great twentieth-century writers upon London, Steen Eiler Rasmussen, has noted of standard London dwellings in London: The Unique City that the “little house, of which there have been thousands and thousands, is only sixteen feet broad. It has probably been the ordinary size of a site since the Middle Ages.” He adds that “the uniformity of the houses is a matter of course, and has not been forced upon them.” These houses emerge as a matter of instinct, therefore, deriving from some ancient imperative; it is as if they were similar to the cells that cluster in a human body. When in 1580 Elizabeth I declared by edict that one house should belong to one family, she was giving expression to another great truth about London life; and, as Rasmussen suggests, her proclamation or programme “has been repeated over and over again through the centuries.” The names of the streets, in which many of these houses are to be found, also prove to be of ancient provenance. In similar fashion the squares of London can be associated with the courtyards of the medieval city. The so-called “ribbon development” along the Western Avenue in the 1930s obeys the same process of growth as the ribbon development along Whitechapel High Street in the 1530s. The passage of four hundred years means very little in the workings of London’s inexorable laws.