1986
London
London is too big, too sprawling and attenuated, to be encompassed or defined, to be fixed on the page in one or many identities. The city spreads itself out generously, expanding north, south, east and west from its brown river looping lazily through its shallow limestone valley. I live near its centre, a hundred metres from the Thames in Chelsea. I have friends who live in Hampstead and Crouch End to the north, Barnes and Richmond to the west, Streatham and Tooting Bec in the south, Greenwich and the Isle of Dogs in the east, but they feel so far away, as if they were inhabitants of other towns, in other counties. If I were to visit them, for example, for lunch or dinner, I would think nothing of allotting an hour or more for the journey, or even longer, depending on the time of day. These are vast distances for a city dweller and they affect our perceptions of the place radically. To a very real extent it is quicker for me to go to Oxford than it is to Stoke Newington in north London, easier to travel to Cambridge than visit a colleague who works on a newspaper in Wapping in the city’s east end. Oxford and Cambridge, provincial towns a hundred kilometres away, feel more accessible than districts of the city I inhabit. What does that tell me about London? What kind of Londoner does that make me? And I am not alone. No matter where you live in the city the same sense of isolation, the same alienation from other areas of the place affect you. We live so close and yet we feel so far apart, with such a long journey to make from district to district. And with these fraught trajectories across the city it is no wonder that we draw in on ourselves, create zones and parameters, homelands and reservations, beyond which we are reluctant to go. If Los Angeles can be defined as ninety suburbs in search of a city the same can be said of London too. There is no one London, there is no one place, one entity, it is a congregation, a plurality, the sum of its many and disparate parts.
Broadly speaking, the city is made up of two dozen or so villages, each geographically distinct and each with its own character. When I spread a map of London in front of me and look at those areas I know well, where I regularly frequent and visit, I am astonished at how much of the place is still terra incognita. I live in Chelsea, I know the neighbouring “villages” of Fulham, South Kensington and Knightsbridge well, very well indeed. A little further beyond and things begin to grow hazy: Hammersmith and Belgravia, Pimlico and Westminster, Notting Hill and Bayswater, Mayfair and Bloomsbury are familiar but I can easily get lost in them. I look at the map and I see I have barely strayed beyond London’s south-west quadrant. To the south, just across the bridges over the river, lie Battersea, Wandsworth and Clapham — barely explored. To the north, north of Regent’s Park, lie places that are wholly alien and strange. From time to time my work takes me to Camden Town. And beyond Regent’s Park, north of the great railway termini of Euston, St Pan-cras and King’s Cross, I feel I cross an invisible boundary. Here in north London the buildings look darker, sootier, in less good repair. The streets seem more narrow, the people scruffier, the pavements littered and soiled. Yet I have travelled barely two miles from my home. It is not so much that I have crossed a topographical frontier, it is more of a psychological barrier that separates me from these other areas. I feel different here in north London, just as I do in the east or south of the river, and because I feel different everything about these places — the buildings, the denizens, the atmosphere — is subtly altered as well.
So we cling to our familiar territories and venture forth with a bizarre reluctance. Everyone judges the other districts of London in unconscious comparison with their own. I have no desire to live anywhere else in the city so for me “London” is to a significant degree Chelsea and its immediate environs. I don’t drive either so my local streets possess a familiarity denied the motorist. I walk for miles through south-west London, in ever widening loops that take me to regular points of reference — bookshops, cafes, restaurants, cinemas, auction houses, newsagents. Here they make the best cappuccinos in town; here I can buy a complete copy of the Sunday edition of The New York Times on a Monday; here I can sit and read in a garden by a fountain. My portion of the city is exhaustively mapped, it is known intimately, but its grid references remain private and subjective.
Chelsea, of course, is a famous place and has been a haunt of artists and writers for two hundred years: Carlyle, Oscar Wilde, George Eliot, Whistler, Rossetti, Henry James, Swinburne, Henry Moore, Francis Bacon… From my bedroom window I can see the spire of the church Dickens was married in. In a house in the little square around the corner Mark Twain stayed, and so on. It is a district of narrow streets and stuccoed houses, of secret tree-filled squares and back-street pubs, of Georgian terraces and Victorian public buildings, all loosely held together by the winding ribbon that is the King’s Road. Cyril Connolly (1903-74), writer, critic and bon viveur, in many ways the quintessential Chelsea dweller, developed a potent nostalgia for the place. He called it “that leafy tranquil cultivated spielraum where I worked and wandered.” It is an enchanted place and there is a quality about the light too that appears different: perhaps it is the gleaming stucco that reflects back with extra force what little sun we receive in London, or perhaps it is the river — so close, but always out of sight — the air above and around it washed twice a day by its tidal ebb and flow, a conduit of freshness running through the grime of the city.
So much else of London suffers by comparison with Chelsea (or so Chelsea dwellers would have you believe): elsewhere seems less fun, less heterodox, less green, less refulgent, but Chelsea shares one quality with the other districts that makes London different from almost any other city one can imagine. Chelsea’s winding, narrow streets are lined with houses, small cottages and mews, Georgian crescents, Victorian terraces, and when one reflects further one realizes that London is in essence a city of houses, of single homes with small gardens with a single front door. There are a few areas of flats and apartments, but the overriding impression is of one family unit, one house. This seems to me to explain much about London, and not just the city’s sprawling, generous, unstructured size but also its particular atmosphere and ambience. The house becomes the centre of the city dweller’s universe, social life takes place behind the curtained windows of the dining room and sitting room, not in the streets, or squares or great public meeting places. In fact there are no real public areas in London, no great squares, no spacious boulevards. At night the vast majority of the population are back in their homes, enclosed and self-sufficient and indifferent to the life beyond their front door.
This has, it seems to me, two obvious effects that make London unusual, given its size and renown and that it is one of the great capitals of the world. First, the pace and energy of the city seem to quieten spontaneously at around eleven o’clock at night. It is as if there is a kind of tacit curfew, a feeling that to be out in the city after midnight is — if not illicit — not exactly normal. Leave a cinema or a show at the end of the evening and try to find somewhere congenial for a drink or a coffee or a meal and you are severely tested. The pubs are closed or closing, only a handful of restaurants serve meals after 11 p.m., public transport winds down, taxis disappear. The city is going to bed and those who want to stay up a little later are going to have their ingenuity and their wallets stretched to the full.