London: The Biography

If you stand on Bankside today you will see in alignment the 1963 power station of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott transformed into the new Tate Modern, opened in 2000, beside the seventeenth-century house on Cardinal’s Wharf reputed to have been the lodging of Christopher Wren in the 1680s while he superintended the construction of St. Paul’s Cathedral across the river; beside that, in turn, is the Globe recreated in its sixteenth-century form. A short distance away, in Borough High Street, the remnants of the George Inn evoke the atmosphere of Southwark during those centuries when it was a staging post and haven for travellers on their journeys towards or away from the great city. Close by, in St. Thomas’s Street, an old operating theatre has been discovered in the attic of the eighteenth-century parish church. An account of this strange relic, dating from 1821, notes that “many of the surgical instruments were still very similar to those used in Roman times.” Trepanning, a procedure in use three thousand years ago, was still one of the most common operations on this site. So when the patients were brought in blindfolded, and strapped to the small wooden table, and when the doctor raised his knife, perhaps they were participating in rites which had taken place on the same ground since the time of the neolithic and Roman settlements.

These tokens or emblems of the past have retained their power as a consequence of the relative isolation or insularity of south London; even in the 1930s according to A.A. Jackson’s Semi-Detached London, “it was rare for a Londoner to cross the river” because it remained “foreign territory, with a quite unfamiliar, distinctively different transport system.” Of course much has been demolished-a row of Elizabethan houses in Stoney Street, Southwark, was torn down in order to make way for the bridge into Cannon Street Railway Station-but much survives in a different aspect. Where once in the seventeenth century Thomas Dekker observed so many taverns that the high street became “a continued ale house with not a shop to be seen,” the public houses still cluster together on the way leading to London Bridge. Even in the early nineteenth century the Talbot Inn, once called the Tabard, could still be inspected by the curious antiquarian as well as the nightly visitor; above its gateway was the inscription “This Is The Inn Where Geoffrey Chaucer, Knight, And Nine and Twenty Pilgrims, Lodged in Their Journey to Canterbury in 1383.” Neither fashion nor pressing commercial need affected the fabric of South London. This accounts for its charm, and its desolation.

Yet the revival of the South Bank in particular, with a new footbridge erected in 2000 in order to span the river from St. Peter’s Hill to Bankside, will lead to a great change. South London has been underdeveloped, in past centuries, but this neglect has allowed it effortlessly to reinvent itself. The point can be made by looking at the stretch of the Thames where much redevelopment is taking place. On the northern bank the streets and lanes are filled to bursting with business premises, so that no further alteration in its commercial aspect or direction is possible without more destruction. The relatively undeveloped tracts south of the Thames are in contrast available for a spirited and imaginative transformation.

To walk along the north bank of the river between Queenhithe and Dark House Walk is an experience in isolation; there is no sense of any connection with people, or with the city, along the “Thameside Walk” which winds between the old quays and jetties. These wharves exist as little more than the disconnected riverside terraces of various company headquarters, including one bank and a depot of the corporation of London. The northern bank of the Thames, to use a contemporary expression, has been “privatised.” To the south, however, there is interchange and animation; from the new Tate Modern to the Globe, and then to the Anchor public house, the broad walkway is commonly filled with people. The ancient hospitality and freedom of the South are emerging once more; in the twenty-first century it will become one of the most vigorous and varied, not to say popular, centres of London life. So the South Bank has been able triumphantly to reassert its past. The restored Bankside Power Station, with its upper storey resembling a box filled with light, is aligned with Cardinal’s Wharf and the newly constructed Globe in a triune invocation of territorial spirit. This is surely a cause for wonder, when five centuries are embraced in a single and simple act of recognition. It is part of London’s power. Where the past exists, the future may flourish.

The Centre of Empire

A detail from Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress showing a small black servant; black slaves were often employed in the more affluent London households of the eighteenth century.