London: The Biography

At the end of the eighteenth century the largest map ever printed in England conveyed what seemed to be, even then, the immensity of London. Richard Horwood’s map was ninety-four feet square, and contained street numbers as well as names and houses. The project continued for nine years but four years after its publication Horwood, tired and careworn, died at the age of forty-five. Some of the inevitable difficulties he encountered can be measured by changes in four different editions. Within the space of thirteen years the fields adjacent to Commercial Road were gradually filled with houses and terraced streets. In the space of twenty years the number of houses in Mile End had tripled. The persistent and steady growth of London, in a sense, had killed its map-maker.

Horwood’s aim was largely utilitarian. The enterprise was sponsored by the Phoenix Fire Insurance office, one of the city’s most significant institutions, and was advertised as indispensable “in bringing Ejectments or Actions, in leasing or conveying Premises etcetera.” In that, it proved successful, if only because every subsequent attempt at conveying the specific houses or buildings of the city was engulfed by its sheer immensity. The first Ordnance Survey of London completed in 1850, for example, comprised some 847 sheets; it was greatly reduced for publication but then proved to be on too small a scale to be useful for travellers and inhabitants alike. This and later maps of mid-and late Victorian London simply display lines of streets linked together, with shading used indiscriminately to represent the shops, offices, houses, tenements and public buildings.

These are the direct predecessors of the contemporary A to Z gazetteer in which hundreds of pages are needed to chart a city which cannot be recognised or understood in terms of one central image. The begetter of the A to Z, Phyllis Pearsall, entranced by London’s immensity, compiled the first edition in the mid-1930s by “rising at five and walking for 18 miles per day.” She covered 3,000 miles of streets, and completed 23,000 entries which she kept in shoeboxes beneath her bed. Michael Hebbert, the author of London, has revealed that the maps “were drawn by a single draughtsman, and Pearsall herself compiled, designed and proof-read the book.” No publisher was interested, however, until she delivered copies on a wheelbarrow to a W.H. Smith buyer. By the time of her death, in 1996, the number of London streets had risen to approximately 50,000.

The nineteenth-century city, already seeming too vast for comprehension, was sometimes plotted in terms of theme or subject. There were “cab-fare maps” outlining the distance which could be travelled for a certain fare, maps of street improvements with the renovated thoroughfares outlined in vivid red, maps of the “modern plague of London” which marked each public house with a red spot, and maps displaying the incidence of death by cholera. Maps of the underground railway, of trams, and of other forms of modern transport soon followed so that London became a city of maps, one laid upon another like an historical palimpsest. It never ceased to grow and, in the process, glowed perpetually with various colours-those of death, alcohol and poverty competing with those of improvements and railways.

“Up to this time,” Henry James wrote in 1869, “I have been crushed under a sense of the mere magnitude of London-its inconceivable immensity-in such a way as to paralyse my mind for any appreciation of details.” Yet for the true antiquarian of London those details live and survive within the memory, beyond the reach of any plan or survey. “In my youth,” John Stow wrote in the sixteenth century, “I remember, devout people, as well men as women of this city, were accustomed oftentimes, especially on Fridays, weekly to walk that way [to Houndsditch] purposely there to bestow their charitable alms; every poor man or woman lying in their bed within their window, which was towards the street, open so low that every man might see them.” It is a distinct and striking image, in a city of spectacle and ritual. And then again: “I remember within this fifty four years Malmsey not to be sold more than one penny halfpenny the pint.” Memory here must complete the task of observation, if only “to stop the tongues of unthankful men, such as used to ask, Why have ye not noted this, or that? and give no thanks for what is done.”