It represents a great change in the nature of city life which over the years spread wider and wider beyond the old City; that which was most populous during the day is now the least populated at night. Few people lived in the City-and fewer now, at the start of the twenty-first century-and the old centres of habitation have been steadily abandoned for life upon the perimeters. It is the single most important reason for the relative silence and peace-fulness of London over the last century.
This mid-nineteenth-century pedestrian anticipated the later environment and atmosphere of London, when he observed “the apparently numberless and interminable rows of streets lying in the voiceless silence, and distinctly mapped out by the long and regular lines of lamps on either side of the way.” This is a vision of the city as part of an inhuman, mechanical alignment. “There is no other spectacle, that we know of that intimates so significantly the huge extent of this overgrown metropolis. The dead dumbness that reigns in these long, empty avenues appals the mind, and sends the imagination of the pedestrian wandering for ever onwards and onwards.” So at night London becomes a city of the dead, the silence of the nineteenth century continuing through the twentieth into the twenty-first.
In London Nights, published in 1925, it is remarked that “the past has a stronger hold on the night than it has on the day”; while walking beneath the Thames in the tunnel which connects the north and south banks, for example, “you might be exploring the tombs of buried London thousands of years hence.” In this sense it then becomes an infinite city-“London is every city that ever was and ever will be”-which in its illimitable regions manifests the true nature of the human community. That is why at night the most visible inhabitants of the city are those without a home. In “all manner of holes and corners the homeless may be found sleeping in winter nights; ’mid the ruin of half-demolished houses, on the stairs leading from viaducts, in corners of the Blackwall Tunnel, in recesses in massive buildings, in porches of churches.” That reality has not changed in the intervening years. Then, as now, the Embankment remains a central place for the vagrants to gather despite the cold and damp air coming from the Thames. It is almost as if, at night, the river calls them.
There are certain streets which in the present century seem never entirely empty at night-one may name Old Compton Street in Soho, Upper Street in Islington and Queensway in Bayswater as examples-and there are, as there have been over the centuries, all-night restaurants such as those in St. John Street and in the Fulham Road. But the general impression of contemporary London at night is of a dull silence. There is no feeling of real danger, only the awareness that one can walk until dawn, and then a further dawn, without coming to the end of interminable streets with houses on either side. The shopping malls and some of the thoroughfares are monitored by surveillance cameras, so that it is impossible ever to feel completely alone.
The cameras represent one way in which modern London has changed. It has become self-conscious, forever watchful of its own citizens, almost daring them to manifest the energy and violence of their predecessors. There is never complete silence, however; it is punctuated by the humming of neon lamps and by the sirens of police cars or ambulances. That low and remote sound is of the traffic perpetually passing through, while in the east the glow of the lamps becomes paler with the approaching dawn.
CHAPTER 50
A City Morning
God give you good morrow, my master, past five o’clock and a fair morning”: that is how the watchman of the seventeenth century heralded the dawn, the time when most of the citizens were waking and preparing for the work of the day.
Then as now the eastern suburbs of the city went to bed earlier, and rose earlier, than their western counterparts. The markets were busy and the produce had already been brought from the surrounding countryside in wagons. One of the complaints of Londoners was that they were perpetually being woken, while it was still dark, by the clatter of the wheels and the neighing of the horses as fruits and vegetables were transported to Leadenhall or Covent Garden. The essayist Richard Steele has a fine description (11 August 1712) of the gardeners who sailed down the river with their produce to the various markets of the city: “I landed with Ten Sail of Apricock Boats at Strand-Bridge, after having put in at Nine-Elms, and taken in Melons, consigned by Mr. Cuffe of that Place, to Sarah Sewell and Company at their stall in Covent-Garden.” They unloaded the cargo at Strand-Bridge at six that morning, at the time when the hackney-coachmen of the previous night were just going off duty. Some passing sweeps engaged in “Raillery” with the fruit girls “about the Devil and Eve.” The details of the wit are not recorded. There are other descriptions of the cart-horses steaming and stamping in the market as the dawn breaks, of the carters sleeping upon their sacks, of the lines of porters carrying fruits and vegetables to their various stalls.
By six o’clock the apprentices were already pulling up the shutters, lighting the fires, or putting out the wares for sale and display. They washed down the pavement outside, while the maids swept the steps of the more fashionable houses. The street vendors, and sweeps, and other itinerants, were soon making their way through the thoroughfares which grew more crowded as the day advanced. And, as the years progressed, the street activity seemed to increase. In the eighteenth century it was suggested that cheesemongers “should not set out their butter and cheese so near the edge of their shop-windows, nor put their firkins in the path-ways, by which many a good coat and silk gown may be spoiled.” Here was one indication of the general lack of room. The sheer crowdedness of the daytime city is always a paramount feature of its life, and there were remarks that “barbers and chimney sweepers have no right by charter to rub against a person well-dressed, and then offer him satisfaction by single combat.” There were other traders whom it was wise to avoid including the baker with his apron covered in flour and paste, the small-coal man, the butcher with his bloody leather apron and the chandler from whose basket spots of tallow might fall. There were constant complaints about car-men using the pavement rather than the road to carry their charges, and about workmen carrying ladders or pieces of timber upon their shoulders in the middle of crowded thoroughfares.
So there was of necessity an art of walking the streets by day, as well as by night. There were certain rules which were generally observed. The wall was “surrendered” to females, so that they would not be jostled on to the road, while it was considered a duty to direct “the groaping Blind.” Never ask directions from an apprentice, because these young and lively Londoners were known to delight in sending any stranger in the wrong direction; it was always best to ask assistance from a shopkeeper or tradesman. If you wished to urinate go into some court or “secret corner.” Avoid Watling Street and Ludgate Hill because of the crowds that throng there; much better to walk along the broader pavements of the Strand or Cheapside, but in every main street, nevertheless,
Full charg’d with News the breathless Hawker runs,