The consequences emerge in the activity and imagery of London over a long period. One eighteenth-century observer remarked that in London they “talk little, I suppose, that they may not lose time.” Similarly there is no bargaining, and the custom of having fixed prices “is not the product solely of competition and confidence, but also of the necessity of saving time.” It has often been noted how quickly Londoners walk. If there is a cause for this anxious speed it may lie in the deeply inherited instinct that time is also money.
There is an old London inscription: “As every thread of Gold is valuable/So is every minute of Time.” Time must not be “wasted.” Chateaubriand noticed that Londoners were impervious to art and general culture precisely because of this obsession; “they chase away the thought of Raphael as liable to make them lose time and nothing more.” Significantly he associates this with the need to work; they are “for ever on the brink of the abyss of starvation if for a moment they forget work.” Time and work are indeed intimately mingled within the consciousness of London; they cannot be separated, not even for a moment, and out of this conflation emerges frantic and continuous activity. Like automata, the citizens become the components of the monstrous clock that is London. Then time indeed becomes a prison. A riddle in a London chapbook asked the question, What am I?
Close in a cage a bird I’ll keep
That sings both day and night,
When other birds are fast asleep,
Its notes yield sweet delight.
And the answer? “I am a clock.” Even the gallows was wreathed with the implication of time. One victim of the rope declared in his last speech: “Men, Women, and Children, I come hither to hang like a Pendulum to a Watch, for endeavouring to be Rich too Soon.” The clock of Holy Sepulchre, Newgate, in turn regulated the times of hanging.
It is of course possible to control time; Ned Ward noticed an assistant, in an early seventeenth-century “Musick-shop,” “beating Time upon his Counter” while his customers danced to the sound of pipes and fiddles. This is an ancient yet still familiar scene, of course, and suggests that the permanent refuge of Londoners from the claims of clock-time may lie in song and dance; that is one way, at least, to “beat Time.” And there are also places where time may cease to exist. Among the prison inmates of London, for example, “day after day rolled on, but their state was immutable … every moment was a moment of anguish, yet did they wish to prolong that moment, fearful that the coming period would bring a severer fate.” During the Second World War, Harold Nicolson noted, “one lives in the present. The past is too sad a recollection and the future too sad a despair. I go up to London. After dinner I walk back to the Temple.” He is walking through a timeless city, abandoned to darkness during the black-out, and there are still areas of London where time seems to have come to an end or ceaselessly to repeat itself.
The phenomenon can be particularly noted in Spitalfields, where the passing generations have inhabited the same buildings and pursued the same activities of weaving and dyeing. It may be noticed that by the market of Spitalfields archaeologists have recovered successive levels of human activity dating back to the time of the Roman occupation.
But time also moves slowly in Shoreditch and Limehouse; these areas have acquired a finality, in which nothing new seems able to prosper. The time of Cheapside and Stoke Newington is rapid and continuous, whereas that of Holborn and Kensington is fitful. Jonathan Raban, in Soft City, has noted that “Time in Earl’s Court is quite different from time in Islington,” by which he is suggesting that the rhythms imposed upon the inhabitants of these areas are particular and identifiable. There are streets in which the presence of old time is familiar; the area of Clerkenwell, and the passages off Maiden Lane, are notable in that respect. But there are other places, such as Tottenham Court Road and Long Acre, which seem to exist in a continual state of novelty and unfamiliarity.
There are also forms of timelessness. Neither vagrants nor children are on the same journey as those whom they pass on the crowded thoroughfares.
CHAPTER 70. The Tree on the Corner
Consider the plane tree at the corner of Wood Street and Cheapside. No one knows how long it has existed on that spot-once the old churchyard of St. Peter’s, which was destroyed during the Great Fire of 1666-but in extant documents it is termed “ancient,” and for centuries it has been a familiar presence. In 1799, for example, the sight of this tree in the centre of London inspired Wordsworth to compose a poem in which the natural world breaks through Cheapside in visionary splendour:
At the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears,
Hangs a Thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years:
Poor Susan has pass’d by the spot, and has heard
In the silence of morning the song of the Bird.
Then enchantment holds her, and she witnesses
A mountain ascending, a vision of trees;
Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide,
And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.
This might be construed as an example of Wordsworth’s disenchantment with the city, and his wish to obliterate it in the interests of “nature,” but it might also represent his vision of a primeval past. The tree conjures up images of its distant predecessors. Everything about this corner of Wood Street suggests continuity. Even its name is connected with the tree; wood was indeed once sold here, but the tree itself is protected and can never be cut down. In the spring of 1850 rooks came to rest in its branches, re-establishing the ancient association between London and those dark birds. The London plane flourishes in the smoke and dust of London, and the tree at the corner of Wood Street has become an emblem of the city itself. It has now reached a height of approximately seventy feet, and is still thriving.
Beneath it nestle the small shops which have been an aspect of this corner for almost six hundred years. In 1401 a shop known as the Long Shop was first built here against the churchyard wall, and others followed; after the Fire, they were rebuilt in 1687. The site is only a few feet in depth, and each small shop still consists of a single storey above and a box-front below. The trades which have passed through them were various-silver-sellers, wig-makers, law stationers, pickle-and sauce-sellers, fruiterers-all of them reflecting the commercial life of the capital. Appearances may change, but form remains constant. In more recent years there was a shirt-maker and a music warehouse, a sweet-shop and a gown-maker. A florist, Carrie Miller, who was born in St. Pancras, and had never left London, was interviewed here in the years immediately following the Second World War: “I was fortunate enough to find this little shop under the famous tree in Wood Street. Before I came it was a toy shop. The City is in my blood now. I would not be anywhere else in the whole world.” So this tiny spot, this corner, provides evidence of continuity on every level, human, social, natural, communal. There exists on the site today a shirt-maker’s, L. and R. Woodersen, which advertises itself as “under the tree,” a newsagent’s with the shop sign “Time Out. London’s Living Guide,” and a sandwich bar called “Fresh Options.”
Such lines of continuity are to be found everywhere within London, some of great antiquity. The fact that Heathrow Airport is built upon the site of an Iron Age camp is suggestive, with the evidence of a neolithic track or cursus extending two miles on the western side of the “runways” of the present airport. The original Roman street pattern of London has survived, unchanged, in certain parts of the city; Cheapside, Eastcheap and Cripplegate still follow the ancient lines. In Milk Street and Ironmonger Lane, seven successive waves of building have employed exactly the same sites, despite the fact that during this period the street-level itself rose some three feet three inches.