London: The Biography

CHAPTER 73. Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner

London has always been a city of immigrants. It was once known as “the city of nations,” and in the mid-eighteenth century Addison remarked that “when I consider this great city, in its several quarters, or divisions, I look upon it as an aggregate of various nations, distinguished from each other by their respective customs, manners, and interests.” The same observation could have been applied in any period over the last 250 years. It is remarked of eighteenth-century London in Peter Linebaugh’s The London Hanged that “here was a centre of worldwide experiences” with outcasts, refugees, travellers and merchants finding a “place of refuge, of news and an arena for the struggle of life and death.” It was the city itself which seemed to summon them, as if only in the experience of the city could their lives have meaning. Its population has been likened to the eighteenth-century drink “All Nations,” made up of the remains at the bottoms of various bottles of spirit; but this is to do less than justice to the energy and enterprise of the various immigrant populations who arrived in the city. They were not dregs or leftovers; in fact the animation and enterprise of London often seemed to invade them and, with one or two exceptions, these various groups rose and prospered. It is the continuing and never-ending story. It has often been remarked that, in other cities, many years must pass before a foreigner is accepted; in London, it takes as many months. It is true, too, that you can only be happy in London if you begin to consider yourself as a Londoner. It is the secret of successful assimilation.

Fresh generations, with their songs and customs, arrived at least as early as the time of the Roman settlement, when London was opened up as a European marketplace. The working inhabitants of the city might have come from Gaul, from Greece, from Germany, from Italy, from North Africa, a polyglot community all speaking a variety of rough or demotic Latin. By the seventh century, when London rose again as an important port and market, the native and immigrant populations were thoroughly intermingled. There was also a more general change. It was no longer possible to distinguish Britons from Saxons and, after the northern invasions of the ninth century, the Danes entered the city’s racial mixture. By the tenth century the city was populated by Cymric Brythons and Belgae, by the remnants of the Gaulish legions, by East Saxons and Mercians, by Danes, Norwegians and Swedes, by Franks and Jutes and Angles, all mingled and mingling together to form a distinct tribe of “Londoners.” A text known as IV Aethelred mentions that those who “passed through” London, in the period before the Norman settlement, were “men from Flanders, Pontheiu, Normandy and the Ile de France” as well as “men of the emperor: Germans.”

In fact London has always been a hungry city; for many centuries it needed a permanent influx of foreign settlers in order to compensate for its high death-rate. They were also good for business, since immigration has characteristically been associated with the imperatives of London trade. Foreign merchants mingled here, and intermarried, because it was one of the principal markets of the world. On another level, immigrants came here to pursue their trades when denied commercial freedom in their native regions. And, again, other immigrants arrived in the city ready and able to take on any kind of employment and to perform those tasks which “native Londoners” (given the relative nature of that phrase) were unwilling to perform. In all instances immigration corresponded to employment and profit; that is why it would be sentimental and sanctimonious to describe London as an “open city” in some idealistic sense. It has acquiesced in waves of immigration because, essentially, they helped it to prosper.