London: The Biography полностью

immediately setting up a contrast between the quiet presence of pine, elm and chestnut, “amid the city’s jar.” The paradox is that London contains this peace within itself, that Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens are as much a part of the city as Borough High Street or Brick Lane. The city moves slowly, as well as quickly; it provides a history of silence as well as of noise.

There were also once oases of the countryside to be found in Clerkenwell and Piccadilly, Smithfield and Southwark; here the trades included threshing and milking. The names of the streets bear evidence of London’s hitherto rural nature. Cornhill, by obvious derivation, is a token of a “hill where corn was grown,” according to Ekwall’s Street Names of the City of London, and Seething Lane is to be interpreted as “where chaff was plentiful … the chaff came from corn threshed and winnowed in the lane.” Oat Lane and Milk Street speak of the countryside. Cow Lane was not a place where cows were kept but a “lane along which cows were driven to or from pasture.” Addle Street, off Wood Street, and a few yards up from Milk Street, is derived from Old English adela or stinking urine and eddel or liquid manure; so we derive from it “lane full of cow dung.” The Huggin Lanes in Cripplegate and Queenhithe were both known as Hoggenlane in early transcripts. There were no fewer than three Hog Lanes-in East Smithfield, Norton Folgate and Portsoken. Chicken and Chick Lanes occur, together with Duck Lane, Goose Lane and Honey Lane-the latter indicating “that bees were formerly kept in the street.” The name of Blanch Appleton, a district of Aldgate, comes from appeltun, Old English for orchard.

The natural life of London deserves, then, to be celebrated. There are photographs of horse chestnuts in Watford and of cedars in Highgate, woodpigeons nesting by the Bank of England and of hay-making in Hyde Park. Insects innumerable and other invertebrates have made their homes in the stones of London while various wild plants such as charlock and mayweed, broad dock and sun spurge, grow luxuriously in the natural habitat of the capital. While the rook and the jackdaw have been slowly driven outside the range of the city, the woodpigeon and the martin have moved in to take their place. The canals intersecting London have preserved territory for aquatic birds as have large water reservoirs. The development of sewage farms in the 1940s, recreated the conditions of the primeval Thames marshes with such inadvertent skill that many thousands of migrating birds descend upon London each year.

There are more than two hundred different species and sub-species of birds in the London area, ranging from the magpie to the greenfinch, but perhaps the most ubiquitous is the pigeon. It has been suggested that the swarms of feral pigeons are all descended from birds which escaped from dovecotes in the early medieval period; they found a natural habitat in the crannies and ledges of buildings as did their ancestors, the rockdoves, amid the sea-girt cliffs. “They nest in small colonies,” one observer has written, “usually high up and inaccessible” above the streets of London as if the streets were indeed a sea. A man fell from the belfry of St. Stephen’s Walbrook in 1277 while in quest of a pigeons’ nest, while the Bishop of London complained in 1385 of “malignant persons” who threw stones at the pigeons resting in the city churches. So pigeons were already a familiar presence, even if they were not treated with the same indulgence as their more recent successors. A modicum of kindness to these creatures seems to have been first shown in the late nineteenth century, when they were fed oats rather than the now customary stale bread.

From the end of the nineteenth century woodpigeons also migrated into the city; they were quickly urbanised, increasing both in numbers and in tameness. “We have frequently seen them on the roofs of houses,” wrote the author of Bird Life in London in 1893, “apparently as much at home as any dovecote pigeon.” Those who look up today may notice their “fly-lines” in the sky, from Lincoln’s Inn Fields over Kingsway and Trafalgar Square to Battersea, with other lines to Victoria Park and to Kenwood. The air of London is filled with such “fly-lines,” and to trace the paths of the birds would be to envisage the city in an entirely different form; then it would seem linked and unified by thousands of thoroughfares and small paths of energy, each with its own history of use.