London: The Biography

A recent study of London demography, London: a New Metropolitan Geography by K. Hoggart and D.R. Green, concluded that “several of London’s population characteristics have been present for five hundred years or more,” among them the creation of suburbs, the “over-representation of adolescents and young adults” as well as “the presence of a marginalised and destitute underclass” and “the exceptional representation of overseas migrants, and religious, cultural and ethnic minorities.” Any slice or slide of London life, in other words, would broadly mirror that of previous and succeeding centuries. There has been no fundamental change.

The work of London is also consistent. The preponderance of finishing trades and what have become known as the service industries affords one example, while another continuity is to be found in the reliance upon small workshop, rather than factory, production. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries aldermen complained about lack of public money; the complaint has been repeated in almost every decade of every century. Stephen Inwood, in A History of London, has remarked that “For a city that is the home of national government, London has often been a surprisingly poorly governed place.” Perhaps it is not a surprise, after all; it may be part of its nature and organic being.

These are all large concerns with which to demonstrate the essential continuities of the city’s life. But they can also be glimpsed in local and specific ways, where a stray object or perception can suddenly manifest the deep history of London being. It was in the early fifteenth century that Richard Whittington built near the mouth of the Walbrook in the Vintry the huge public privy that was known as “Whittington’s Longhouse.” John Schofield, in The Building of London, has noted that “centuries later the offices of the Public Cleansing Department now cover the site.”

In Endell Street there was once found an “ancient bath” of unknown date “fed by a fine spring of clear water, which was said to have medicinal qualities.” In the nineteenth century the lower parts of the bath-house were filled with lumber and rubbish so that “the spring no longer flows.” But it did not disappear; it simply emerged in different form. There is a sauna in Endell Street, and on the corner a public swimming bath known as “The Oasis.”

The site of the curative wells in Barnet, where people gathered for healing in the seventeenth century, is now occupied by a hospital. At the foot of Highgate Hill, where it inclines gently into Holloway, a great lazarhouse or leper hospital was established in the 1470s. It had fallen into decay by the middle of the seventeenth century. But the spirit of the place was not diminished. In 1860 the Small Pox and Vaccination Hospital was erected there. The site is now the Whittington Hospital. Almshouses for the frail or feeble were erected in Liquorpond Field; the Royal Free Hospital now covers the area. There was an old poorhouse on Chislehurst Common, erected in 1759; it is now the site of St. Michael’s Orphanage.

Once a famous maypole was set up at the crossing of Leadenhall Street and Gracechurch Street; it towered above the city, and in the fifteenth century the church of St. Andrew Cornhill was rededicated as St. Andrew Undershaft because it was, physically, under the shaft. The great maypole itself was stored along the side of Shaft Alley. This might seem an exercise in medieval nostalgia, were it not for the fact that on this very same spot now rises the tall and glittering Lloyds Building.

The history of a structure on the corner of Fournier Street and Brick Lane is also curiously suggestive; it was built in 1744 as a church for the Huguenot weavers of the period, but was used as a synagogue for the Jewish population of Spitalfields between 1898 and 1975; now it is a mosque, the London Jamme Masjid, for the Muslim Bengalis who succeeded the Jews. Succeeding waves of immigrants have chosen to maintain this place as a sacred spot.