London: The Biography полностью

But all colour was not lost. The passion for street art simply changed its form, with the expansion of advertising. There had always been posters wrapped around the wooden posts of the street to publicise the latest auction or the latest play, but only after the demise of street signs did other forms of public art properly emerge. By the early nineteenth century London had “grown wondrously pictorial” with a variety of papier-mâché ornaments or paintings placed in shop windows to denote the trade of the occupant. An essay in The Little World of London, entitled “Commercial Art,” lingers pleasurably on these objets d’art. Many coffee houses had a symbol of loaf and cheese together with cup; fishmongers painted the walls of their premises with “a group of fish in the grand style” all variously and picturesquely coloured, while grocers specialised in “conversation pieces” which portrayed various benevolent London matrons “assembled round the singing kettle or the simmering urn.” Boots, cigars and sealing wax, in gigantic form, were also suspended over the doors of various premises, while the destruction of Pompeii seemed a fitting advertisement for a patent cockroach exterminator.

One great innovation of the nineteenth century was the advertising hoarding, and in some of the earliest photographs of London they can be seen lining the streets and the new railway stations offering everything from Pear’s Soap to the Daily Telegraph. Advertising was in that sense very much part of the ideal of “progress,” since the hoardings themselves had first been erected to protect the streets from the myriad building sites and railway improvements. Once posters had been enlarged to cover these wooden frames, then advertising images appropriate to the city itself-large, gaudy, colourful- began to emerge. There were certain popular sites, among them the north end of Waterloo Bridge and the dead wall beside the English Opera House in North Wellington Street. Here, according to Charles Knight’s London, could be found “rainbow-hued placards vying in gorgeous extravagance of colour with Turner’s last new picture … pictures of pens, gigantic as the plumes in the casque of the Castle of Otranto … spectacles of enormous size … Irishmen dancing under the influence of Guinness’s Dublin Stout.”

“A London Street Scene,” painted by J.O. Parry in 1833, could serve as an introduction to any street scene over the last two centuries. A small blackened sweep-boy looks up in admiration as a poster for a new performance of Otello is placed over one advertising John Parry in The Sham Prince; there is a bill proclaiming “Mr. Matthews-At Home,” “Tom amp; Jerry-The Christening-!!!!!!” and a narrow strip asking “Have You Seen The Industrious Fleas?” Thus the walls of the city become a palimpsest of forthcoming, recent and old sensations.

On a dead wall today, close to where I am now writing this book, and not far from the site of the 1833 painting, can be seen posters for “Armageddon,” “To Heathrow in Fifteen Minutes,” “Mr. Love Pants Is Coming,” “Meltdown ’98 Festival,” “Drugstore-Sober-New Single Available,” “Apostle” and “The Girl With Brains In Her Feet.” More mysterious advertisements suggest that “There’s A Revolution In Sight,” that “The Magic Is Closer Than You Think,” and that “Nothing Else Moves Me.”

“Peripatetic placards” appeared on the streets in the 1830s. These were such a novel phenomenon that Charles Dickens interviewed one and, by describing him as “a piece of human flesh between two slices of pasteboard,” created the phrase “sandwich man.” George Scharf drew many of them, from a small boy in surtout overcoat holding a barrel inscribed “Malt Whiskey John Howse” to an old woman holding up a sign for “Anatomical Model of the Human Figure.”

Then in characteristic London fashion the single placard-carriers were put together in order to create a kind of pageant or pantomime; a group of them were placed inside paste models of blacking pots, for example, and paraded in line to advertise the efficacy of “Warrens Blacking, 30 Strand,” the very place where Dickens himself began his tortuous London childhood. Then arrived the advertisement as the horse-drawn gig, surmounted by an enormous hat or an Egyptian obelisk. The search for novelty was always intense and the passion for posters blossomed into the “electric advertisements” of the 1890s when “Vinolia Soap” was hailed in illuminated letters above Trafalgar Square.