These are all large concerns with which to demonstrate the essential continuities of the city’s life. But they can also be glimpsed in local and specific ways, where a stray object or perception can suddenly manifest the deep history of London being. It was in the early fifteenth century that Richard Whittington built near the mouth of the Walbrook in the Vintry the huge public privy that was known as “Whittington’s Longhouse.” John Schofield, in The Building of London, has noted that “centuries later the offices of the Public Cleansing Department now cover the site.”
In Endell Street there was once found an “ancient bath” of unknown date “fed by a fine spring of clear water, which was said to have medicinal qualities.” In the nineteenth century the lower parts of the bath-house were filled with lumber and rubbish so that “the spring no longer flows.” But it did not disappear; it simply emerged in different form. There is a sauna in Endell Street, and on the corner a public swimming bath known as “The Oasis.”
The site of the curative wells in Barnet, where people gathered for healing in the seventeenth century, is now occupied by a hospital. At the foot of Highgate Hill, where it inclines gently into Holloway, a great lazarhouse or leper hospital was established in the 1470s. It had fallen into decay by the middle of the seventeenth century. But the spirit of the place was not diminished. In 1860 the Small Pox and Vaccination Hospital was erected there. The site is now the Whittington Hospital. Almshouses for the frail or feeble were erected in Liquorpond Field; the Royal Free Hospital now covers the area. There was an old poorhouse on Chislehurst Common, erected in 1759; it is now the site of St. Michael’s Orphanage.
Once a famous maypole was set up at the crossing of Leadenhall Street and Gracechurch Street; it towered above the city, and in the fifteenth century the church of St. Andrew Cornhill was rededicated as St. Andrew Undershaft because it was, physically, under the shaft. The great maypole itself was stored along the side of Shaft Alley. This might seem an exercise in medieval nostalgia, were it not for the fact that on this very same spot now rises the tall and glittering Lloyds Building.
The history of a structure on the corner of Fournier Street and Brick Lane is also curiously suggestive; it was built in 1744 as a church for the Huguenot weavers of the period, but was used as a synagogue for the Jewish population of Spitalfields between 1898 and 1975; now it is a mosque, the London Jamme Masjid, for the Muslim Bengalis who succeeded the Jews. Succeeding waves of immigrants have chosen to maintain this place as a sacred spot.
It is possible, too, that an unpleasant or unhappy atmosphere may persist like some noisome scent in the air. It has been noted of certain streets such as Chick Lane, Field Lane or Black Boy Alley, all in the vicinity of the present Farringdon Road, that “a curious fact about these places is that their bad character began so early and persisted so long.” Of Coventry Street, off Piccadilly, it was stated in 1846 that “there is a considerable number of gaming houses in the neighbourhood at the present time, so that the bad character of the place is at least two centuries old, or ever since it was built upon.” The act of building may itself determine the character of an area for ever, in other words; it is as if the stones themselves carried the burden of their own destiny. So we may see the passage of time through stone, but that vision of unbroken continuity is essential to the vision of London itself. This is not the eternity vouchsafed to the mystic, who ascends from the body to glimpse the soul of things, but one immured in sand and stone so that the actual texture or process of life is afforded a kind of grace. The continuity of London is the continuity of life itself.
East and South
An etching of Billingsgate by James McNeill Whistler, executed in 1859; it shows something of the animation of the docksides, with many boats engaged in trade upon the ever commercial Thames.
CHAPTER 71. The Stinking Pile
It has often been suggested that the East End is a creation of the nineteenth century; certainly the phrase itself was not invented until the 1880s. But in fact the East has always existed as a separate and distinct entity. The area of Tower Hamlets, Limehouse and Bow rests upon a separate strip of gravel, one of the Flood Plain gravels which were created at the time of the last glacial eruption some 15,000 years ago. Whether this longevity has played any part in creating the unique atmosphere of the East End is open to question, perhaps, but the symbolic importance of east versus west must not be ignored in any analysis of what became known in the late nineteenth century as “the abyss.” The Roman burials of Londinium, some of them within the very area now known as the East End, were so conducted that the heads of those interred were inclined towards the west; the same practice can be found in early Christian burial rituals, again in the territory of London, which suggests some profound affinity. It seems also to have been an instinctive one, part of a territorial spirit that emerges in the earliest recorded periods of London’s history. Archaeological evidence suggests, for example, that the invading Saxons of the fifth and sixth centuries settled to the west of the River Walbrook while the defeated and demoralised Romano-British natives dwelled upon the east bank. This pattern of habitation has been consistent and profound.
There is one interesting and significant feature of the eastern area which suggests a living tradition stretching back beyond the time of the Romans. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there was found evidence of a great “wall” running along the eastern portion of the Thames, down the river bank and along the Essex shores, to protect the land from the depredations of the tidal river; it was constituted of timber banks and earthworks. At the end of the wall in Essex, close to the area now known as Bradwell Waterside-which may plausibly be translated, even after two thousand years of transition, as Broad Wall-were discovered the earthworks of a Roman fortress as well as the ruins of a later chapel, St. Peter-on-the-Wall, which had become a barn. Other local antiquarians have also found small churches or chapels placed beside what might be called this great eastern wall. It is quite forgotten, save by a few local historians, but by keeping at bay the water, and by helping to drain the marshland of the eastern areas, it created the East End or London’s dark side. Every city must have one.
And where does the “East” begin? According to certain urban authorities the point of transition was marked by the Aldgate Pump, a stone fountain constructed beside the well at the confluence of Fenchurch Street and Leadenhall Street; the existing pump lies a few yards to the west of the original. Other antiquaries have argued that the real East End begins at the point where Whitechapel Road and Commercial Road meet. The taint of poverty, already apparent in the late medieval period, was in any case gradually extended. Stow observed that between 1550 and 1590 there was “a continual street or filthy strait passage with alleys of small tenements or cottages built … almost to Ratcliffe.” The road from the pump of Aldgate to the church at Whitechapel was by this date also lined with shops and tenements, while the adjoining field to the north was “pestered with cottages and alleys.” In similar manner there was “a continuous building of small and base tenements for the most part lately erected” from Bishopsgate to Shoreditch, and even beyond that there were mean buildings “a good flight shot” as far out as Kingsland and Tottenham. By the end of the sixteenth century the eastern portions of the city were being defined as “base” and “filthy,” their squalor and stench emerging despite proclamations and parliamentary Acts. The area of Spitalfields, laid out along more regular lines between 1660 and 1680, also soon acquired a reputation for poverty and overcrowding. The houses were small and narrow, while the streets themselves were often only fifteen feet wide. That sense of diminution, or of constriction, exists still. As the houses, so their inhabitants. A report of 1665 described the overcrowding created by “poor indigent and idle and loose persons.” So the “filthy cottages” of Stow’s report were being filled with “filthy” persons. It is the story of London.