London: The Biography полностью

The ubiquitous twentieth-century smell, however, has been that of the bus and the motor car. The “air is tainted with their breath,” wrote William Dean Howells in 1905, “which is now one of the most characteristic stenches of ‘civilisation.’” Other persistent presences include the smell of dog excrement upon the pavements, and the greasy savour emanating from fast-food restaurants. And then, too, there is the dull acrid smell of the underground which is also the smell of London dust and burnt London hair. Worse, however, is the clinging odour of the morning rush hour below the ground with lungfuls of morning breath leaving a metallic quality at the back of the throat. It is both human and inhuman, like the smell of London itself.

CHAPTER 41

You Sexy Thing

Sex, in the city, has commonly been associated with dirt and disease; if not with these, then with trade. The resemblance exists even within the language itself; “hard core” is a term conventionally applied to pornography but its original meaning, in a London context, was that of “hard, rock-like rubbish” used in the building of roads and houses. Where there is rubbish, there is also death. The area around the Haymarket, a notorious haunt of prostitutes, encompasses “a march of the dead. It is a plague-spot-the real plague spot.”

From its earliest days London has been the site of sexual activity. A Roman model of a phallus was found in Coleman Street-later, paradoxically, a haven for Lollards and Puritans-as well as an architrave depicting three prostitutes. In the precincts of the Roman temple, where Gracechurch Street and Leadenhall Street now are, there would have been erotic celebrations connected with Saturn or Priapus, and beside the amphitheatre on the present site of the Guildhall we might expect to find a palaestra or promenade frequented by male and female prostitutes. There were brothels licensed by the Roman authorities, as well as “fornixes” or arches beneath which were located “mere dirty shacks” employed for the purposes of fornication. E.J. Burford, in his learned London: the Synfulle Citie, has remarked that on certain street corners a “herm” was placed, “a short stone pillar of Hermes” with an erect penis and “prepuce painted a brilliant red.”

Yet the use of arches and brothels meant that, in this most commercial of cities, sex had itself already been commercialised. In the centuries of Danish and Saxon occupation, young women were bought and sold like any other merchandise. “Gif a man buy a mayden with cattle,” according to one Saxon injunction, “let the bargain stand if it be without guile.” A thousand years later an eighteenth-century nursery rhyme contained the line, “I had to go to London town and buy me a wife.” There are supposed to have been auctions for women in certain secret markets, continuing well into the nineteenth century, and the emphasis upon finance is sustained by the enquiry of the late twentieth-century prostitute, “Do you want any business?” So does the spirit of London imprint itself upon the desires of its inhabitants. London is dedicated to selling. But the poor have nothing to sell, so they sell their bodies. Thus, sexual lust is free to roam down every lane and alley. London has always been the scene of covert debauchery.

Those medieval chroniclers who cited London for its drunkenness and sinfulness also rebuked it for its rapists and its lechers, its harlots and its sodomites. In the twelfth century there is reference to Bordhawe, an area of brothels in the parish of St. Mary Colechurch. In the thirteenth century, and probably much earlier, there was a Gropecuntlane in the two parishes of St. Pancras and St. Mary Colechurch (also known as Groppecountelane, 1276 and Gropecontelane, 1279); the context and meaning here are obvious enough. In the same period there are references to Love Lane “where yonge couples were wont to sport” and Maid Lane “so-called of wantons there.”