London: The Biography

What gods were these? Who can say? In 1986 Faith in the City, a report sponsored by the archbishop of Canterbury, noted that it was “the poor who have borne the brunt of the recession, both the unemployed and the working poor. Yet it is the poor who are seen by some as ‘social security scroungers,’ or a burden on the country, preventing economic recovery. This is a cruel example of blaming the victim.” It is one of the great and continuing paradoxes of London life that the rich global city contains also the worst examples of poverty and deprivation. But perhaps that comprises the “meaning” of London. Perhaps its destiny is to represent the contradictions of the human condition, both as an example and as a warning.

The report also described those council estates which “have a quite different social and economic system, operating almost entirely at subsistence level, dependent entirely on the public sector … the degeneration of many such areas has now gone so far that they are in effect ‘separate territories’ outside the mainstream of our social and economic life.” These sentiments will be familiar to those who have studied the social topography of London over the centuries; Charles Booth’s “Poverty Map” of 1889 might provoke a similar analysis, for example, with the proviso that there was then no public sector to support the indigent and the unfortunate. Once more it is the condition of London itself which is being described. If the city had a voice it might be saying: There will always be those who fail or who are unfortunate, just as there will always be those who cannot cope with the world as presently constituted, but I can encompass them all.

The decade which saw the emergence of the “yuppies,” for example, also witnessed the revival of street-beggars and vagrants sleeping “rough” upon the streets or within doorways; Lincoln’s Inn Fields was occupied once more by the homeless, after an interval of 150 years, while areas like Waterloo Bridge and the Embankment became the setting for what were known as “cardboard cities.” The Strand, in particular, became a great thoroughfare of the dispossessed. Despite civic and government initiatives, they are still there. They are now part of the recognisable population; they are Londoners, joining the endless parade. Or perhaps, by sitting upon the sidelines, they remind everyone else that it is a parade.

And yet what is it, now, to be a Londoner? The map of the city has been redrawn to include “Outer Metropolitan Areas” as well as “Greater” and “Inner” London; the entire south-east of England has-willingly or unwillingly-become its zone of influence. Is London, then, just a state of mind? The more nebulous its boundaries, and the more protean its identity, has it now become an attitude or set of predilections? On more than one occasion, in its history, it has been described as containing a world or worlds within itself. Now it has been classified as a “global city,” and in Hebbert’s words as “a universe with its own rules, which has genuinely burst out of national boundaries.” So it does truly contain a “universe,” like some dense and darkly revolving cloud at its centre. But this is why so many millions of people describe themselves as “Londoners,” even if they are many miles from the inner city. They call themselves Londoners because they are pervaded by a sense of belonging. London has been continuously inhabited for over two thousand years; that is its strength, and its attraction. It affords the sensation of permanence, of solid ground. That is why the vagrant and the dispossessed lie in its streets; that is why the inhabitants of Harrow, or Croydon, call themselves “Londoners.” Its history calls them, even if they do not know it. They are entering a visionary city.

Cockney Visionaries

A fantastical “tribute to Christopher Wren” outlining the spires and vistas of the great and powerful city which he helped to create. Much of his work has gone but the power and energy remain.

CHAPTER 78. Unreal City

It has always been a city of vision and prophecy. It is supposed to have been founded after a prophetic dream vouchsafed to Brutus, and the vision of a great city in “a strange yet greener country” haunts the imaginations of the classical poets. As Ovid wrote in his Metamorphoses,

Even as I speak I see our destiny

The city of our sons and sons of sons,

Greater than any city we have known,

Or has been known or shall be known to men.