London: The Biography

“Metroland beckoned us out to lanes in beechy Bucks,” according to John Betjeman who had a tenacious if ambiguous affection for the suburban terrain-for “gabled gothic” and “new-planted pine,” for the “Pear and apple in Croydon gardens” and “the light suburban evening” where a vast and welcoming security is so much to be hoped for. In a poem entitled “Middlesex” Betjeman invoked another form of permanence-“Keep alive our lost Elysium-rural Middlesex again”-and the advertisers of the Metropolitan Railway and the Underground exploited this ache, or longing, for continuity and predictability. According to the brochures-displaying, once more according to Betjeman, “sepia views of leafy lanes in Pinner”-the new inhabitant of the suburbs will dwell beside “brambly wildernesses where nightingales sing.” One advertisement prepared by the London Underground showed three rows of grey and mournful terraces, with the words “Leave This and Move to Edgware.” A sylvan scene presents itself accompanied by a quotation from the seventeenth-century poet Abraham Cowley, who himself retired to Chertsey after the Restoration in 1660. In a single sentence he expresses the wish that “I might be Master of a small House and a Large Garden, with moderate conveniences joined to them.” Once more the new suburban vision, in accordance with the implicit antiquarianism of London itself, took refuge in an appeal to an ill-defined and ill-explained past.

The same form of cultural nostalgia was evident in the architectural style of the new suburbs, the dominant model being “mock Tudor” or what became known as “Stockbroker Tudor” or “Tudorbethan.” The desire was to combine the sense of continuity with the satisfaction of traditional workmanship and design. It was a way of conveying substantiality, and a measure of dignity, to these new Londoners who had exiled themselves from the central core of the city. The city can transform and regenerate itself in unanticipated ways. Thus the suburban Gardens, Drives, Parks, Ways and Rises are now as much a part of London as the old Rents and Lanes and Alleys.

London had created, and harboured, a new kind of life. Once more it happened unpredictably, with no concerted or centralised planning, and was directed by short-term commercial demands. So the suburbs became the home of shopping parades and imposing cinemas, of aesthetically pleasing Underground stations and ornate railway stations. It was the age of the Morris and the Ford. The factories which lined the new dual carriageways were now manufacturing the domestic items of this new civilisation-the washing machines and the refrigerators, the electric cookers and the wirelesses, the processed food and the vacuum cleaners, the electric fires and the leatherette furniture, the “reproduction” tables and the bathroom fittings.

In a novel entitled Invisible Cities (1975), the Italian writer Italo Calvino reflects upon the nature of the suburbs under the assumed names of the cities of Trude and Penthesilea. We may substitute Acton and Wembley Park. The narrator is told that he may travel wherever he chooses “but you will arrive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end.” But this was always the definition of London, that it had no beginning and no ending. In that sense its suburbs simply partake of its endless nature. The gin palaces of the old city gave way to the glittering cinemas of the 1930s, the hostelries were replaced by “roadside inns” or mock-Tudor pubs located on significant crossroads, and the street-markets by shopping parades and department stores. The suburbs of the inter-war years significantly extended the life and reach of London, but essentially they elaborated upon it. In Calvino’s novel the narrator asks for the location of Penthesilea, and the inhabitants “make a broad gesture which may mean ‘Here’ or else ‘Farther on’ or ‘All around you’ or even ‘In the opposite direction.’” So for Calvino the visitor begins to ask “whether Penthesilea is only the outskirts of itself. The question that now begins to gnaw at your mind is more anguished: outside Penthesilea does an outside exist? Or, no matter how far you go from the city, will you only pass from one limbo to another, never managing to leave it?”

London is so ubiquitous that it can be located nowhere in particular. The extraordinary growth of its suburbs emphasised the fact that, since it has no defined or definite centre, its circumference is everywhere.

Blitz

A famous photograph of St. Paul’s cathedral; miraculously the church survived the depredations of the bombs of the Second World War, but it rose over a blasted and wasted city.

CHAPTER 76. War News