· · ·
But the prospect of dirt, or dilapidation, did not materially affect the growth of London in that direction; like the beetle which lives upon dung, the “offensive” smells and sounds might even arouse its powers into further expenditures of energy. The erection of Westminster Bridge in 1750, and the completion of Blackfriars Bridge nineteen years later, marked the real development of south London. Highways led from the newly established bridges, and moved towards Kennington and the Elephant and Castle; in addition roads were laid across open fields to join these major thoroughfares. The new roads led to fresh industrial development, so that the vinegar-and dye-works were complemented by potteries, lime kilns and blacking factories. By 1800, Lambeth had assumed all the characteristics of a slum.
Yet the area still grew; it expanded and developed, acquiring its shape along with the other ribbon developments which snaked southwards. The process acquired resistless momentum in the first decade of the nineteenth century when three toll bridges were completed. Southwark Bridge, Waterloo Bridge and Vauxhall Bridge opened the way for the extensive building programmes which created south London in its present form. The increase in London’s population, and the exertion of the new industrial forces, drew the city over the Thames at an ever increasing rate. The streets around St. George’s Circus were soon thickly inhabited, with houses covering all the adjacent fields, but soon the shops and houses and businesses began to travel down the roads which radiated from that neighbourhood. Newington, Kennington and Walworth were directly affected and by the 1830s the whole area of the present South was being covered in roads and houses. The suburban development soon expanded to include Peckham and Camberwell, Brixton and Clapham, even so far as Dulwich and Herne Hill. It was not long before Sydenham and Norwood, Forest Hill and Honor Oak, became part of the same urban diaspora.
Those who have recorded their impressions of coming into London by the railway from the south, have remarked upon the apparently endless vista of red and brown roofs, dead walls, and little streets which flashed by. The prospect has been compared to that of a sea, or a desert, both images invoking the power of some remorseless force which cannot be withstood. A character in H.G. Wells’s Tono Bungay travelling in the early 1900s on the South-Eastern Railway, “marked beyond Chislehurst the growing multitude of villas, and so came stage by stage through multiplying houses … the congestion of houses intensified and piled up presently into tenements: I marvelled more and more at this boundless world of dingy people.” One of the principal sensations was also that of fear. It was the instinctive fear of uniformity, as well as fear of the approaching capital which had engendered it.
As the railway carriage travelled closer to its destination at Cannon Street, “whiffs of industrial smell, of leather, of brewing” circulated like the odours of sulphur from some unseen inferno. Since the colonisation of the southern bank was entirely driven by the need for industrial expansion and exploitation, it is appropriate that the smell of industry itself should permeate the territory. There were glue factories and wool warehouses, while Charles Knight’s Encyclopaedia of London notes that “chimneys shot up at intervals of a few yards, towering above a very maze of red roofs, and furnishing their contribution to the smoky atmosphere of the neighbourhood.” The district, once characterised by its priory, was now celebrated for its protean quality; it “may be regarded as a region of manufacturers, a region of market-gardeners, a region of wholesale dealers, and a maritime region, according to the quarter where we take our stand.” Just as there were various trades in Bermondsey, so there were heterogeneous odours. “In one street strawberry jam is borne in upon you in whiffs, hot and strong; in another, raw hides and tanning; in another, glue; while in some streets the nose encounters an unhappy combination of all three.” Between 1916 and 1920 the London novelist and essayist V.S. Pritchett worked for a leather manufacturer; he also recalled the odours of Bermondsey. “There was a daylight gloom in this district of London. One breathed the heavy, drugging beer smell of hops and there was another smell of boots and dog dung … the stinging smell of vinegar from a pickle factory; and smoke blew down from an emery mill … from the occasional little slum houses, the sharp stink of poverty.” That last is of course the most penetrating and significant odour of them all, compounding the noisome reputation of south London in general.
The similarities between the East and the South are apparent, but there were also significant disparities. The East End offered a more intense kind of community than the South; it possessed more open markets, for example, and more music halls. In the South, also, there was less contact with the rest of London. By sheer proximity the East End could share some of the energy and animation of the old City; it had, after all, existed against its walls for many centuries. But the great swathe of the river had always isolated the South, lending it a somewhat desolate quality. It is reflected in those comments about south London which render it a distinct and alien place.
George Gissing, for example, depicted Southwark in terms of its unpleasant odours. “An evil smell hung about the butchers’ and the fish shops. A public-house poisoned a whole street with alcoholic fumes; from sewer-grates rose a miasma that caught the breath.” A London reporter, writing in 1911, remarked that to pass over London Bridge was to cross “that natural dividing line of peoples”; it is an interesting remark, suggesting an almost atavistic reverence for the natural boundary of the river which changes the essence of the territory on either bank. He then asked whether, having crossed that significant line, “the very streets changed in some subtle and unconscious manner, to a more sordid character; the shops to a more blatant kind-even the people to a different and lower type?”
If London contains the world, then there is a world of meaning here. The distinction between the “northern” and “southern” races is of ancient date, the North being considered more ascetic and more robust than the effete and sensual South. It was a distinction emphasised by Darwin who, in the context of that theory of natural selection which he developed in London, declared that “the northern forms were enabled to beat the less powerful southern forms.” The “southern forms” may be weaker because they come from too attenuated an origin, perhaps stretching back to the great tracts of mesolithic and neolithic time. Those noisome smells may in part include the odour of ancient history. And what of their pleasures? According to the London reporter of 1911, “even the dramatic tastes of the people ‘over the water’ are now supposed to be primitive; and ‘transpontine’ is the adjective applied to melodrama that is too crude for the superior taste of northern London.” Yet the sensational and spectacular aspects of the theatre of the South may be a refraction of those sixteenth-century tastes which the South Bank once satisfied.