London: The Biography полностью

Londoners are also more accustomed to the cold than to the heat of summer days. “There’s nothing left but London once it’s winter,” says a character in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1949). London becomes more purely itself in the cold, harder and brighter and far more cruel. In the winter of 1739-40 “Tramps froze to death … Birds dropped stiff from the sky, bread hardened into rocks on market stalls.” Thirty years later, according to the Annual Register of 18 February 1771, “A poor boy who on Tuesday night had crept into a dunghill at a stable yard in London in order to preserve himself from the cold was found dead by the ostler” while “A poor woman also, with a child at her breast, and another about three years old lying by her, was found in Rag Fair.”

The cold weather could be so intense that the Thames itself froze regularly over the centuries, some twenty-three times between 1620 and 1814, because the old London Bridge impeded the movement of the water until it became so sluggish that, in the colder conditions, it could not move. In 1281 “men passed over the Thames, between Westminster and Lambeth,” and in 1410 “Thys yere was the grete frost and ise and the most sharpest wenter that ever man sawe, and it duryd fourteen wekes so that men might in dyvers places both goo and ryde over the Temse.” In 1434, 1506 and 1515 the river was again frozen so that carts and horses and carriages could travel easily from one bank to the other. As early as 1564 such sports as archery and such entertainments as dancing took place at a Frost Fair on the frozen river. Stow and Holinshed record that, on the eve of 1565, “some plaied at the football as boldlie there, as if it had been on the drie land; diverse of the Court being then at Westminster, shot dailie at pricks set upon the Thames; and the people, both men and women, went on the Thames in greater numbers than in anie street of the City of London.” So the Thames becomes a newly populous thoroughfare in the greatly expanding city. The emphasis here is upon excitement and recreation but forty-four years later, in 1608, the general atmosphere of trade and commerce in London had exploited even the weather, and many set up booths “standing upon the ice, as fruitsellers, victuallers, that sold beere and wine, shoe makers and a barber’s tent.” Again in 1684, “The Thames before London was still planted with booths in formal streets, all sorts of trades and shops furnished” so that “another city, as it were, was erected thereon.” The city spawns its own replica, with all the characteristics of its own turbulent life-“bull baiting, horse and coach races, puppet plays and interludes, cookes, tipling and other lewd places, so that it seemed to be a bacchanalian triumph or carnival on the water.” The perilousness of London life, too, was enacted upon the river, when within hours the ice had melted and swept the whole carnival away; a century later, in 1789, a “sudden breaking up of the ice” occasioned a “fearful scene” of damage and fatality.

The cold winters of London impeded the course of trade as well as that of the river. In the winter of 1813-14, the wax and glue froze in their pots, leaving tailors and shoe-makers without the means of work. Silk deteriorated in freezing conditions, so the silk-makers of Spitalfields and elsewhere were also severely affected. Porters and cab-men, street traders and labourers, were unable to pursue their livelihoods. The price of coal and the price of bread were dramatically increased. The master of a school in St. Giles reported “that of the seventy children in his school sixty had not eaten any food that day until he gave them some at noon.” In the severe winters of 1855, 1861, 1869, 1879 and 1886 there were bread riots, and in the latter year mobs of the unemployed looted the shops of central London. In the city there was a direct correlation, then, between weather and social unrest.

There is a connection, too, between outer and inner weather. In the winter “there is a vague smell of alcohol in the streets” since everyone “drinks heavily and incessantly” to combat the aching and intrusive cold. The drink “excites and urges on the rabble to vicious practices.” This account, written in 1879, describes the rain falling like liquid mud, the yellow shadows of the fog which render breathing painful and difficult, and the darkness at midday. The description of a physical fact conveys an immense psychological charge. “Vile” weather at Christmas 1876, according to Henry James, “darkness, solitude and sleet in midwinter” within a “murky Babylon.” November was the worst month for suicides in London and, during the Blitz of the winter of 1940-1, Londoners were more depressed by the weather than by the air-raids.