The city is more beautiful than the country because it is rich in human history. Milton, in his blindness, remarked sadly that he was destined never more to look upon the sights “of this fair city.” Here he anticipated Wordsworth’s famous reflection upon London, from the vantage of Westminster Bridge in 1802: “Earth has not any thing to shew more fair.” The great poet of the nineteenth-century natural world wonders upon “the beauty of the morning” as it irradiates “Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples”:
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendor valley, rock, or hill.
It is a vivid, urban testimony from one whose poetic vision is always associated with landscape. The London suburbs, too, “can be so beautiful,” Vincent van Gogh wrote in the 1880s, “When the sun is setting red in the thin evening mist.”
The beauty and symmetry of the city are manifest in another sphere, also, as exemplified by Aristotle’s remark that “a man that is by nature and not merely by fortune citiless is either low in the scale of humanity or above it,” which is to say that humankind belongs to the city as much as fish belong to water. The city is the natural element for all those people who feel a compulsion to look upon the earth for contemporaries and companions. If the city is not “natural” then let us say, with Henry James, that it has recreated nature. “As the great city makes everything,” he wrote, “it makes its own system of weather and its own optical laws.”
The city is hotter, and dryer, than other parts of the country because the pollution that it creates has the effect of trapping warmth within the streets and buildings while, paradoxically, at the same time obscuring the sun’s rays. Many dark buildings retain their heat, and the vertical surfaces of the rising city are also better equipped to catch the low-lying sun; the materials of which London is made also retain the circumambient warmth.
Yet another explanation for the perceptible increase of heat in the capital may be found in the sheer congregation of people within so relatively small an area. The body heat of the citizens pushes up the temperature so that, on modern satellite maps, the city is a pale island among the brown and the green. Two hundred and fifty years ago a seventeenth-century observer made the same point. “The torrent of men, women and children, carts, carriages and horses from the Strand to the Exchange is so strong that it is said that in winter there are two degrees of Fahrenheit difference between this long line of street, and that of the west end.”
London’s weather shows other variations. Much of Westminster and the adjacent areas are built upon primeval swamps, and in these quarters the exhalation of damp and mist seems more palpable than elsewhere; Cornhill, built upon a summit, seems crisper and drier.
In the sixteenth century the London climate impressed itself upon the scholar and alchemist Giordano Bruno as “more temperate than anywhere else beyond and on this side of the equinoctial, snow and heat being banished from the subjacent earth as well as the excessive heat of the sun, which the perpetually green flowery ground witnesses, and so enjoys a perpetual spring.” There is an alchemical, or magical, tendency within his vocabulary which points to the image of London as embodying a mild chemical flame.
But then there was the rain.
Now in contiguous drops the flood comes down
Threatening with deluge this devoted Town.
Thus Jonathan Swift celebrates a “city shower” in the autumn of 1710. Annual amounts of rainfall were calculated from 1696, and they demonstrate that London’s showers and deluges declined in frequency towards the end of the eighteenth century only to rise again in the period from 1815 to 1844. Even in 1765, however, a French traveller noted the humidity of the city climate, which required fires to be lit “when it might be most easy to do without one”; he noted that as late as May all the apartments of the British Museum had fires within them “to preserve from damps and humidity the books, the manuscripts, the maps.”
But there have also been great floods. In 1090 London Bridge was carried away by a tumultuous river, and in 1236 the waters rose so high that boats could be rowed in the middle of Westminster Hall; there, too, in 1579, “a number of fish were left stranded after a flood.” The Walbrook became a rushing torrent in the autumn of 1547, sweeping away a young man attempting to cross it, and in 1762 the waters of the Thames were so raised “that the like had never been known in the memory of man.” “In less than five hours,” the contemporary report goes, “the water rose twelve feet in vertical height” and “people were lost in the high roads.” Even at the beginning of the twentieth century Lambeth was so inundated by the waters of the Thames that the houses of the area had to be visited by boats. So the air of London has always been laden with vapours and rains.
