London: The Biography

It is possible, however, to see among them the passing generations. London is “eternal” because it contains them all. When Addison visited the tombs of Westminster Abbey he was moved to reflect that “When I read the several dates of the tombs, of some that died yesterday, and some six hundred years ago, I consider that great day when we shall all of us be contemporaries and make our appearance together.” It may be that London, uniquely among cities, prompts such considerations since the dead seem to be pursuing at the heels of the living. For some this is a hopeful vision; it suggests reconciliation where all the manifest differences of the city, riches and poverty, health and sickness, will find their quietus. One cannot be separated from the other. So Turner saw “the most angelic beings in the whole compass of the London world” in the squalor and filth of the London Docks.

There are those who have been possessed by a different vision. According to Geoffrey Grigson, London “stood for doing, at least, it stood for beginning.” Branwell Brontë, in the parsonage at Haworth, collected all the maps of London he could find depicting “its alleys, and back slums and short cuts”; according to Juliet Barker in The Brontës he “studied them so closely that he knew them all by heart” so that he appeared to be an “old Londoner” who “knew more about the ins and outs of the mighty Babylon than many a man who had passed his life within its walls.” This intense reading of London was, for him, a form of liberation; the maps represented all the hopes for, and aspirations towards, a new life. It was as if he were studying his own destiny. But for others the dream may become feverish, when the whole weight of London presses down. At the end of Bleak House, that threnody among the labyrinths of London, Richard Carstone towards the close of his wretched life asks, “It was all a troubled dream?” For many, that is also a true vision of the city.

The elements of innovation and of change are subtly mingled, together with the sheer exhilaration of being one among a numerous company. One could become anybody. Some of the great stories of London concern those who have taken on new identities, and new personalities; to begin again, to renew oneself, is one of the great advantages of the city. It is part of its endlessly dramatic life. It is possible, after all, to enter if only for a moment the lives and emotions of those who pass by. This collective experience can, in turn, be a source of exhilaration. It was what Francis Thompson perceived in his vision of

the traffic of Jacob’s ladder

Pitched between Heaven and Charing Cross.

It is the enchantment of a million golden souls moving back and forth between heaven and the city, all singular and all blessed. It is the same vision vouchsafed to those who have heard the music of London, a pattern of notes rising and falling in some great melody to which all the streets and avenues move in unison. The city then forms “a geography passing beyond the natural to become metaphysical, only describable in terms of music or abstract physics”: thus writes Michael Moorcock in Mother London. Some inhabitants hear the music-these are the dreamers and the antiquarians-but others perceive it only fitfully and momentarily. It may be in a sudden gesture, in a sentence overheard, in an instant of memory. London is filled with such broken images, laughter which has been heard before, a tearful face which has been seen before, a street which is unknown and yet familiar.

CHAPTER 79. Resurgam

If you were to walk across the Isle of Dogs, where the Canary Wharf tower itself is to be found, past the enamel panels and the jet mist granite, past the silver cladding and the curved glass walls, you might come across other realities. Here and there still stand late Victorian pubs, marking the corners of otherwise shattered roads. There are council blocks from the 1930s, and council-house estates from the 1970s. Occasionally a row of nineteenth-century terraced houses will emerge like an apparition. The Isle of Dogs represents, in other words, the pattern of London. Certain of the new developments are themselves decked out as if they were Victorian warehouses, or Georgian terraces, or twentieth-century suburban dwellings, thus intensifying the sense of heterogeneity and contrast. This, too, is part of London. This is why it has been said that there are in reality hundreds of Londons all mingled.