London: The Biography

In Wyngaerde’s map of 1558 the area south of the Thames is intimately connected with that of the north by various lines of harmony, rather like the contemporary map of the Underground, flowing towards and over the bridge. A continuous row of houses stretches for almost a mile along the southern bank of the Thames, from Paris Garden Stairs to the great “Beere Howse” just east of Tooley Street beside Pickle Herring Stairs. It is perhaps worth noting that over a century before Shakespeare’s Falstaff appeared at the Globe, a short distance away, his namesake Sir John Falstolfe owned “four messuages called beer houses here.” In similar fashion Harry or “Herry” Bailey of the Tabard Inn was a real and familiar Southwark figure before he entered Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; perhaps there is something in the air of Southwark which encourages the transaction between reality and imagination. On the “Agas map” of the 1560s are shown ponds, water mills, smoky industries, bear pits, pleasure gardens and “stewhouses” like the celebrated “Castle upon the Hope Inn” which still survives as the Anchor.

The city, in a sense, feared the contagion of these pleasurable haunts. A civic edict of the sixteenth century ordered the wherrymen, who were customarily employed to row citizens across the river to the brothels, to moor their boats at night by the northern stairs in order to ensure that “thieves and other misdoers shall not be carried” to the southern bank. Another form of civic displeasure is exemplified in the fact that although “Bridge Without” had become the twenty-sixth ward of the city “its inhabitants were not allowed to elect their own aldermen” who were in effect imposed upon them. Southwark had become a kind of satrapy, thus ensuring that almost to the end of the twentieth century it remained a relatively undeveloped and ill-regarded place. Yet it was not necessarily poorly administered. The rich or “middling class,” as always, superintended the poor and ensured that travelling paupers were discouraged. The parish vestry collected the rates and distributed poor relief, while the local court supervised all aspects of trade. These suggestions of a relatively self-sufficient community have been amplified in a recent historical survey which concludes that the population of this particular suburb, and by extension of others like it, was relatively stable. The inhabitants of Southwark maintained residence in the same houses and intermarried in the same neighbourhood, as was characteristic of the city in general.

These conclusions tend to support the notion that, throughout the whole of London and its outlying districts, there was a vital and recognisable communal spirit. This spirit has survived over so many centuries that the present neighbourhood of Rotherhithe, for example, is still distinct from those of Deptford and Bermondsey. There is an indigenous or native spirit which animates a particular area. In contemporary south London there are a number of different areas, among them Lambeth and Brixton, Camberwell and Peckham, which have developed beside one another and by some form of symbiosis make up a recognisable atmosphere.

Yet the South remained relatively unknown to other Londoners, except as a source of disquiet. The southern bank fulfilled some of the functions of the “Eastern pyle,” as a boundary zone to which London could consign its dirt and its rubbish. Hence in the early eighteenth century it became the repository for some of the “stink industries” which had been banished from the City proper. The tanneries were consigned to Bermondsey, for example, while Lambeth became the site for noisy timber yards, vinegar-makers, dye manufactories and the makers of soap and tallow. It was reported in the local press that “a society of persons did exist at Lambeth … who made a trade of digging up the bodies of the dead: they made candles of the fat, extracted volatile alkali from the bones, and sold the flesh for dog’s meat.” This sounds sufficiently alarmist to be apocryphal, but there is no doubt that south London already had a difficult reputation. One market gardener of the area decided in 1789 to set up his business elsewhere because “the smoke … constantly enveloped my plants … the obscurity of the situation, the badness of the roads leading to it, with the effluvia of surrounding ditches being at times highly offensive.” South London, or at least those parts of it which were in immediate relation to the rest of the city and could be seen from it, was considered as a poor and disreputable appendage. There was always a form of urban discrimination.