London: The Biography

As the railway carriage travelled closer to its destination at Cannon Street, “whiffs of industrial smell, of leather, of brewing” circulated like the odours of sulphur from some unseen inferno. Since the colonisation of the southern bank was entirely driven by the need for industrial expansion and exploitation, it is appropriate that the smell of industry itself should permeate the territory. There were glue factories and wool warehouses, while Charles Knight’s Encyclopaedia of London notes that “chimneys shot up at intervals of a few yards, towering above a very maze of red roofs, and furnishing their contribution to the smoky atmosphere of the neighbourhood.” The district, once characterised by its priory, was now celebrated for its protean quality; it “may be regarded as a region of manufacturers, a region of market-gardeners, a region of wholesale dealers, and a maritime region, according to the quarter where we take our stand.” Just as there were various trades in Bermondsey, so there were heterogeneous odours. “In one street strawberry jam is borne in upon you in whiffs, hot and strong; in another, raw hides and tanning; in another, glue; while in some streets the nose encounters an unhappy combination of all three.” Between 1916 and 1920 the London novelist and essayist V.S. Pritchett worked for a leather manufacturer; he also recalled the odours of Bermondsey. “There was a daylight gloom in this district of London. One breathed the heavy, drugging beer smell of hops and there was another smell of boots and dog dung … the stinging smell of vinegar from a pickle factory; and smoke blew down from an emery mill … from the occasional little slum houses, the sharp stink of poverty.” That last is of course the most penetrating and significant odour of them all, compounding the noisome reputation of south London in general.

The similarities between the East and the South are apparent, but there were also significant disparities. The East End offered a more intense kind of community than the South; it possessed more open markets, for example, and more music halls. In the South, also, there was less contact with the rest of London. By sheer proximity the East End could share some of the energy and animation of the old City; it had, after all, existed against its walls for many centuries. But the great swathe of the river had always isolated the South, lending it a somewhat desolate quality. It is reflected in those comments about south London which render it a distinct and alien place.

George Gissing, for example, depicted Southwark in terms of its unpleasant odours. “An evil smell hung about the butchers’ and the fish shops. A public-house poisoned a whole street with alcoholic fumes; from sewer-grates rose a miasma that caught the breath.” A London reporter, writing in 1911, remarked that to pass over London Bridge was to cross “that natural dividing line of peoples”; it is an interesting remark, suggesting an almost atavistic reverence for the natural boundary of the river which changes the essence of the territory on either bank. He then asked whether, having crossed that significant line, “the very streets changed in some subtle and unconscious manner, to a more sordid character; the shops to a more blatant kind-even the people to a different and lower type?”

If London contains the world, then there is a world of meaning here. The distinction between the “northern” and “southern” races is of ancient date, the North being considered more ascetic and more robust than the effete and sensual South. It was a distinction emphasised by Darwin who, in the context of that theory of natural selection which he developed in London, declared that “the northern forms were enabled to beat the less powerful southern forms.” The “southern forms” may be weaker because they come from too attenuated an origin, perhaps stretching back to the great tracts of mesolithic and neolithic time. Those noisome smells may in part include the odour of ancient history. And what of their pleasures? According to the London reporter of 1911, “even the dramatic tastes of the people ‘over the water’ are now supposed to be primitive; and ‘transpontine’ is the adjective applied to melodrama that is too crude for the superior taste of northern London.” Yet the sensational and spectacular aspects of the theatre of the South may be a refraction of those sixteenth-century tastes which the South Bank once satisfied.