The variety of lighting supplies at first had the effect of turning London into an unevenly lit city; each of its twenty-eight boroughs made their own arrangements with the suppliers of electricity, which means that a car travelling at speed in the 1920s might pass from one street bathed in a very high light intensity to one shrouded in comparative darkness. But this had always been the case, since the city of contrasts had relied upon contrasted light. As Arthur Symons wrote in London: A Book of Aspects, “In London we light casually, capriciously, everyone at his own will, and so there are blinding shafts at one step and a pit of darkness at the next.” The many accidents in the 1920s, however, created a demand for a level standard of illumination, which in turn led to a standardisation of lamp-posts with columns 25 feet high and 150 feet apart. It is one aspect of London life which even the most knowledgeable citizens scarcely notice, and yet the uniformity of lighting in the major streets is perhaps the most significant aspect of the modern city.
In the autumn of 1931 certain public buildings were illuminated by floodlighting for the first time; so great was the interest and excitement that the streets were filled with spectators. It is as if London is always revealing itself anew. Nine years after the floodlighting, however, the night city was plunged into profound darkness during the black-out, when in certain respects it reverted to medieval conditions. In the streets themselves, as reported in Philip Ziegler’s London at War, “It seemed … sinister to have so many people shuffling around in the blackness”; familiar roads became “impenetrable mysteries,” leaving Londoners frightened and confused. One recalled finding her destination but only after becoming “damp with perspiration and quite exhausted.” Storms were welcomed since, in the instantaneous lightning flash, a well-known corner or crossing could be glimpsed. This sense of bewilderment and panic could have emerged in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries no less than during the Second World War, but this latter-day darkness served only to confirm how frightening and mysterious London might still become.
When the black-out was lifted in the autumn of 1944 the relief was palpable. “It is no longer inky black, but all softly lit up and shining, and all the little beams of light are reflected most charmingly in the wet streets.” Those “little beams” in later years gave way to neon, mercury and general fluorescence so that, at the beginning of a new century, the city lights up the sky for many miles around and has become a greater source of brightness than the moon and stars. For some this is a source of anger, as if the artificial city were somehow contaminating the cosmos itself. Yet there are still many streets which are only partly illuminated, and many small passages and byways which are scarcely lit at all. It is still possible to cross from a brightly lit thoroughfare into a dark street, just as it has been for the last three hundred years, and to feel afraid.
But does London have its own natural light? Henry James noted “the way the light comes down leaking and filtering from its cloud ceiling.” There is a sense of damp and misty brightness which other observers have recorded, as if everything were seen through tears. But James also noticed “the softness and richness of tone, which objects put on in such an atmosphere as soon as they begin to recede.” Buildings and streets dissolve into the distance, therefore, without the clarity of the light in Paris or New York. It has been said that nowhere “is there such a play of light and shade, such a struggle of sun and smoke, such aerial gradations and confusions.” Richard Jefferies, who in his apocalyptic novel After London (1885) depicted the city as a miasmic wasteland, had an eye for just such “aerial gradations”-from a yellow sunset to an “indefinite violet” in the south-west, from the dazzling light of summer to the redness of the winter sun when the streets and buildings are suffused with a “fiery glow.” The faint blue-green mist was known as the light “that London takes the day to be,” softening and blending the cityscape while in the parks there hovers “a lovely pearl-grey haze, soft and subdued.” Yet there is also a coldness in the light of the streets which may be glimpsed in the grey of winter and the blue mist of spring, the haze of summer and the “orange sunsets of autumn.” It is derived from the immensity which the light of London reflects so that, as Hippolyte Taine put it, it becomes the emanation of a “huge conglomeration of human creation” when “the shimmering of river waves, the scattering of the light imprisoned in vapour, the soft whitish or pink tints which cover these vastnesses, diffuse a sort of grace over the prodigious city.” That sense of immensity is glimpsed in Virginia Woolf’s account of London as “a swarm of lights with a pale yellow canopy drooping above it. There were the lights of the great theatres, the lights of the long streets, lights which indicated huge squares of domestic comfort, lights that hung high in the air. No darkness would ever settle upon these lamps, as no darkness has settled upon them for hundreds of years.” The lights of London blaze perpetually. From the air the lights shine for miles like a vast web of brightness. The city will never cool down. It will remain incandescent. Yet where there is light there is also shadow, and the darkness of night.
CHAPTER 49
Night in the City
There have been many accounts of the London night. Books entitled City Nights and Night Life have been entirely devoted to the subject. James Thomson called it the city of dreadful night (1874). It may be that the city is truly itself, and becomes truly alive, only at night. That is why it exercises a constant fascination. The effect begins at twilight, in that crepuscular hour with “the dusky multitude of chimney pots and the small black houses,” of “muddy ways and slatternly passages” when, in the words of Julian Wolfreys’s Writing London, “the sinister, the threatening, monstrous inhumanity of the limitless city” becomes apparent. These are all accounts from the nineteenth century, but night terrors of earlier centuries are no less substantial. From earliest times the streets of the city have never been safe at night. Curfew was rung at nine and, in theory, the alehouses were closed and citizens were meant to stay indoors. In the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, however, drama, verse, epistles and satires came to emphasise the nature of the city night with lines such as these quoted in Thomas Burke’s The Streets of London:
Frightening of cullies, and bombastine whores,
Wringing off knockers, and from posts and doors
Rubbing out milk maids’ and some other scores,
Scowring the watch, or roaring in the streets,
Lamp-blacking signs with divers other feats …
These were the pranks of the “roaring boys,” which were juvenile enough compared with the more violent excesses of the gangs, or the thieves, or the rapists, under cover of darkness. Thomas Shadwell, the late seventeenth-century dramatist, remarked how at approximately “two in the morning comes the bell-man, and in a dismal tone repeats worse rhymes than a cast poet of the nursery can make; after him come those rogues that wake people with their barbarous tunes, and upon their tooting instruments make a more hellish noise than they do at a Playhouse when they flourish for the entrance of witches.” From the evidence of the drama, and reports such as this, it seems clear that at night the city was almost as noisy as day, with the difference only that the sounds at night were more frantic and desperate, among yells and screams and shouts and whistles punctuating the early hours with their own uneasy refrain. If you were to listen intently you might hear “Who’s there?” or “Your purse!” or “Dog, are you dumb? Speak quickly!”