London: The Biography полностью

Yet all the fashions of London are transitory. Chateaubriand noticed this in 1850 when he remarked upon “The fashions in words, the affectations of language and pronunciation, changing, as they do, in almost every parliamentary session in high society in London.” He remarked how the vilification and celebration of Napoleon Bonaparte succeeded each other with extraordinary swiftness in London, and concluded that “All reputations are quickly made on the banks of the Thames and as quickly lost.” “A catch word in every one’s mouth one winter,” wrote Mrs. Cook in her Highways and Byways in London, (1902), “is quite forgotten by next summer.” Horace Walpole remarked, on the same subject, that “Ministers, authors, wits, fools, patriots, whores, scarce bear a second edition. Lord Bolingbroke, Sarah Malcolm and old Marlborough, are never mentioned but by elderly folk to their grandchildren, who had never heard of them.” To be “out of sight” in London was to be “forgotten.” In 1848 Berlioz wrote that in London there were a great many “whom the sight of novelties only makes more stupid.” They watch the trajectory of events and careers “with the eye of a postilion at the side of the railway track reflecting on the passing of a locomotive.”

And so the history of London is also the history of forgetting. In the city there are so many strivings and impulses which can only momentarily be entertained; news, rumour and gossip collide so quickly that attention to any of them is swift but short-lived. One craze or fashion follows another, as the city talks endlessly to itself. This transitoriness of urban affairs can be traced back to the medieval period. “Certainly by the fourteenth century,” G.A. Williams noted in Medieval London, “nothing lasted long in London.” And forgetfulness itself can become a tradition; on the first Tuesday of June, ever since a benefaction in the late eighteenth century, a sermon is preached at the church of St. Martin within Ludgate upon the theme that “Life is a bubble.” It is highly appropriate that London should celebrate its transience in a permanent fashion. It is a city endlessly destroyed and endlessly restored, vandalised and renewed, acquiring its historical texture from the temporary aspirations of passing generations, an enduring myth as well as a fleeting reality, an arena of crowds and rumour and forgetfulness.

The Natural History of London

A Cockney flower-seller dressed in the traditional accoutrements of her trade. Flower-sellers congregated around Eros in Piccadilly Circus, and were last seen in the early years of the twentieth century. They were generally poor and dishonest.

CHAPTER 45

Give the Lydy a Flower

It may come as a surprise to those who see nothing but narrow streets and acres of rooftops that, according to the latest Land Cover Map taken from the Landsat satellite, “over a third” of London’s total land area “is semi-natural or mown grass, tilled land and deciduous woodland.” It has always been so. One of the first delineators of London, Wenceslaus Hollar, was surprised by the contiguity of city and country. His London, Viewed from Milford Stairs, View of Lambeth from Whitehall Stairs and Tothill Fields, all dated 1644, show a city encompassed within trees and meadows and rolling hills. His “river views” also suggest the presence of open countryside just beyond the frame of the engraving.

In the first years of the eighteenth century, pastures and open meadows began by Bloomsbury Square and Queens Square; the buildings of Lincoln’s Inn, Leicester Square and Covent Garden were surrounded by fields, while acres of pasture and meadow still survived in the northern and eastern suburbs outside the walls. Wigmore Row and Henrietta Street led directly into fields, while Brick Lane stopped abruptly in meadows. “World’s End” beside Stepney Green was a thoroughly rural spot, while Hyde Park was essentially part of the open countryside pressing upon the western areas of the city. Camden Town was well known for its “rural lanes, hedgeside roads and lovely fields” where Londoners sought “quietude and fresh air.” Wordsworth recalled the song of blackbirds and thrushes in the very heart of the city and De Quincey found some consolation, on moonlit nights, in walking along Oxford Street and gazing up each street “which pierces northwards through the heart of Marylebone to the fields and woods.”