London: The Biography полностью

Yet not all the forces at work there were violently libertarian. John Stuart Mill was one of a number of subscribers who set up a fund to endow “a place for political lectures and discussions independent of coerced tavern keepers and licensing magistrates”; a location was chosen, “in a neighbourhood well known to the democracy of London,” and the hall was established at 37a Clerkenwell Green which had once been a school for the children of Welsh Dissenters. It became known as the London Patriotic Club and its history of twenty years “is a history of radical issues”; Eleanor Marx Aveling, Bradlaugh and Kropotkin all used it as a centre for demonstrations and mass meetings. But perhaps the most interesting occupant was one of the last. A socialist press had been founded at the premises in the 1880s, and in 1902 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin walked every day from his lodgings in Percy Circus to Clerkenwell Green in order to edit an underground revolutionary journal entitled Iskra, “The Spark,” which was meant to ignite Russia. It might be mentioned here that in the seventeenth century the printers of Clerkenwell were denounced for issuing “Blasphemous and seditious” literature. That prolonged pattern or alignment of activities continued well into the twentieth century when the Communist newspaper, the Morning Star, had its offices just west of the green in Farringdon Road. In the 1990s the magazine for the homeless and the unemployed, the Big Issue, took up residence a few yards south of the green in the same area where Wat Tyler had led his army of radical protesters more than six hundred years before.

So over a period of time, in one tiny part of the city, at first outside “the bars” and then within the ever expanding capital, the same forms of activity have taken place. It may simply be coincidence that Lenin followed in the path of the seventeenth-century printers. It may have been in conformity to habit, custom, or some kind of communal radical memory that the Chartists, the London Corresponding Society and the unions chose the same area for their meetings and demonstrations. It may be chance that the nineteenth-century affrays took place in the same vicinity as those of the fourteenth century. The editor of the Big Issue has assured the present author that he had no notion of Clerkenwell’s radical history when he decided to situate the office of his magazine in the area.

But other territorial clusters abound. The emergence of Clerkenwell as an instigator or abettor of radical activity is paralleled, for example, by the gradual identification of Bloomsbury with occultism and marginal spiritualism. When the great London mythographer William Blake was completing his apprenticeship in Great Queen Street, an elaborate Masonic lodge was being constructed opposite his employer’s workshop. It was the first city headquarters for what was then a controversial occult order of adepts who believed that they had inherited a body of secret knowledge from before the Flood. Before the erection of their great hall they had congregated at the Queen’s Head in Great Queen Street, and, in the same street less than a century later, the occult Order of the Golden Dawn held their meetings. The Theosophical Society met in Great Russell Street while around the corner, opposite Bloomsbury Square, exists the Swedenborg Society. Two occult bookshops can be found in the vicinity, while the Seven Dials close by marks the convergence of astrologers in the seventeenth century. So here again there seems to be a congregation of aligned forces, by coincidence or design, remaining active within the neighbourhood of a very few streets.

One street, and a particular church, also throw a suggestive light upon London itself. According to Stephen Inwood in A History of London, St. Stephen’s, Coleman Street, was “an old Lollard stronghold”; in the early sixteenth century it became a centre of incipient Lutheranism where heretical texts were placed on sale. In 1642 the five Members of Parliament whom Charles I rashly tried to arrest on charges of treason took refuge in Coleman Street-“a loyal street to the Puritan party”-which was “their stronghold.” Six years later Oliver Cromwell met with his supporters in the same street, as can be gathered in the trial of Hugh Peters after the Restoration.

COUNSEL: Mr. Gunter, what can you say concerning meeting and consultation at the “Star” in Coleman Street?

GUNTER: My lord, I was a servant at the “Star” in Coleman Street … that house was a house where Oliver Cromwell, and several of that party, did use to meet in consultation.