London: The Biography полностью

There were nineteenth-century alleys and courts which gave an immediate sensation of penury and wickedness. The air was “poisonous with miasma and nauseous with dank and dismal stenches,” remarked Charles Manby Smith in The Little World of London. “Rags and brown paper substitute half the glass of the windows, and what is left is so crusted with dirt that it shuts out the light it was intended to admit.” Andrew Mearns, in his Bitter Cry of Outcast London, records that “You have to ascend rotten staircases, which threaten to give way beneath every step … You have to grope your way along dark and filthy passages swarming with vermin.” Who can say what mark such places leave upon the city? “In that close corner where the roofs shrink down and cower together as if to hide their secrets from the handsome street hard by, there are such dark crimes, such miseries and horrors, as could hardly be told in whispers.”

The area in the vicinity of prisons has a strangely oppressive and clandestine atmosphere. This is perhaps why the entire area of Southwark and the Borough has for centuries conveyed an impression of meanness and mournfulness. There have been many prisons in the vicinity, the Marshalsea and the King’s Bench among them, and “there is no place like this in the suburbs of London,” according to Walford’s Old and New London, “a spot that looks so murderous, so melancholy and so miserable … There is a smell of past ages about these ancient courts, like that which arises from decay-a murky closeness … and all old things had fallen and died just as they were blown together and left to perish.” And so it remains today, with an atmosphere quite unlike that of any other part of London. The area of East Acton, beside the prison of Wormwood Scrubs, is an example of a modern neighbourhood that is enveloped by the shadow of the gaol.

Death can cast its own shadow over a specific locale. Viaducts and crossroads can also be objects of inexplicable gloom. One young Londoner of the early twentieth century, Richard Church, recalled a crossroads south of the river near the Battersea Road, “a crossroads called The Latchmere, a sinister junction that always filled me with dread.”

There are other streets and areas that seem to emanate misery. Along the Embankment there have always been iron seats at regular intervals, and here in the evening or at night you will find solitary figures sitting and looking down at the river or up at the sky. In 1908 H.G. Wells walked beside them and noticed “a poor old woman with a shameful battered straw hat awry over her drowsing face, now a young clerk staring before him at despair; now a filthy tramp, and now a bearded frock-coated collarless respectability; I remember particularly one ghastly long white neck and white face that lopped backward, choked in some nightmare.” The tramps are still there but more disquieting are the young who often sit in some daze of not belonging anywhere. There are middle-aged men in respectable clothes so worn down that their compulsion to wear them provokes pity; and there are old women with their worldly possessions in plastic carrier bags. The Embankment is a haven for them all, and will no doubt continue to be so for many centuries.

The small streets beside Drury Lane were renowned for their misery. Summer Gardens, in winter, was a picture of urban desolation with its gutters filled with frozen dirt. It was the abode of costers, and the narrow road was littered with paper wrappings from the oranges upon their barrows. Charles Booth noted that “In one street is the body of a dead dog and near by two dead cats which lie as though they had slain each other. All three had been crushed flat by the traffic which has gone over them and they, like everything else, are frozen and harmless.” There was also a great quantity of scraps and bread crumbs strewn over the road which, according to Booth, is “the surest sign of extreme poverty all over London.”

There was also the notorious Whitecross Street, once Whitecross Place, with its gaol blighting the vicinity. “It is said, God made everything. I don’t believe it; He never made Whitecross Place.” And if God did not, who did? Who is the “author of filthy lanes and death-breeding alleys?” Of Clifford’s Inn, in Chancery Lane, long known for its legal obfuscation and delay, Walford states: “I should say that more misery has emanated from this small spot than from any one of the most populous counties in England.” Only a gate and passage now remain; some flats were built over the ancient quadrangle which, in 1913, Virginia and Leonard Woolf found to be “incredibly draughty and dirty … and all night long there fell a slow gentle rain of smuts so that, if you sat writing by an open window, a thin veil of smuts covered the paper before you had finished a page.”