If you stand on Bankside today you will see in alignment the 1963 power station of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott transformed into the new Tate Modern, opened in 2000, beside the seventeenth-century house on Cardinal’s Wharf reputed to have been the lodging of Christopher Wren in the 1680s while he superintended the construction of St. Paul’s Cathedral across the river; beside that, in turn, is the Globe recreated in its sixteenth-century form. A short distance away, in Borough High Street, the remnants of the George Inn evoke the atmosphere of Southwark during those centuries when it was a staging post and haven for travellers on their journeys towards or away from the great city. Close by, in St. Thomas’s Street, an old operating theatre has been discovered in the attic of the eighteenth-century parish church. An account of this strange relic, dating from 1821, notes that “many of the surgical instruments were still very similar to those used in Roman times.” Trepanning, a procedure in use three thousand years ago, was still one of the most common operations on this site. So when the patients were brought in blindfolded, and strapped to the small wooden table, and when the doctor raised his knife, perhaps they were participating in rites which had taken place on the same ground since the time of the neolithic and Roman settlements.
These tokens or emblems of the past have retained their power as a consequence of the relative isolation or insularity of south London; even in the 1930s according to A.A. Jackson’s Semi-Detached London, “it was rare for a Londoner to cross the river” because it remained “foreign territory, with a quite unfamiliar, distinctively different transport system.” Of course much has been demolished-a row of Elizabethan houses in Stoney Street, Southwark, was torn down in order to make way for the bridge into Cannon Street Railway Station-but much survives in a different aspect. Where once in the seventeenth century Thomas Dekker observed so many taverns that the high street became “a continued ale house with not a shop to be seen,” the public houses still cluster together on the way leading to London Bridge. Even in the early nineteenth century the Talbot Inn, once called the Tabard, could still be inspected by the curious antiquarian as well as the nightly visitor; above its gateway was the inscription “This Is The Inn Where Geoffrey Chaucer, Knight, And Nine and Twenty Pilgrims, Lodged in Their Journey to Canterbury in 1383.” Neither fashion nor pressing commercial need affected the fabric of South London. This accounts for its charm, and its desolation.
Yet the revival of the South Bank in particular, with a new footbridge erected in 2000 in order to span the river from St. Peter’s Hill to Bankside, will lead to a great change. South London has been underdeveloped, in past centuries, but this neglect has allowed it effortlessly to reinvent itself. The point can be made by looking at the stretch of the Thames where much redevelopment is taking place. On the northern bank the streets and lanes are filled to bursting with business premises, so that no further alteration in its commercial aspect or direction is possible without more destruction. The relatively undeveloped tracts south of the Thames are in contrast available for a spirited and imaginative transformation.
To walk along the north bank of the river between Queenhithe and Dark House Walk is an experience in isolation; there is no sense of any connection with people, or with the city, along the “Thameside Walk” which winds between the old quays and jetties. These wharves exist as little more than the disconnected riverside terraces of various company headquarters, including one bank and a depot of the corporation of London. The northern bank of the Thames, to use a contemporary expression, has been “privatised.” To the south, however, there is interchange and animation; from the new Tate Modern to the Globe, and then to the Anchor public house, the broad walkway is commonly filled with people. The ancient hospitality and freedom of the South are emerging once more; in the twenty-first century it will become one of the most vigorous and varied, not to say popular, centres of London life. So the South Bank has been able triumphantly to reassert its past. The restored Bankside Power Station, with its upper storey resembling a box filled with light, is aligned with Cardinal’s Wharf and the newly constructed Globe in a triune invocation of territorial spirit. This is surely a cause for wonder, when five centuries are embraced in a single and simple act of recognition. It is part of London’s power. Where the past exists, the future may flourish.
The Centre of Empire
A detail from Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress showing a small black servant; black slaves were often employed in the more affluent London households of the eighteenth century.
CHAPTER 73. Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner
London has always been a city of immigrants. It was once known as “the city of nations,” and in the mid-eighteenth century Addison remarked that “when I consider this great city, in its several quarters, or divisions, I look upon it as an aggregate of various nations, distinguished from each other by their respective customs, manners, and interests.” The same observation could have been applied in any period over the last 250 years. It is remarked of eighteenth-century London in Peter Linebaugh’s The London Hanged that “here was a centre of worldwide experiences” with outcasts, refugees, travellers and merchants finding a “place of refuge, of news and an arena for the struggle of life and death.” It was the city itself which seemed to summon them, as if only in the experience of the city could their lives have meaning. Its population has been likened to the eighteenth-century drink “All Nations,” made up of the remains at the bottoms of various bottles of spirit; but this is to do less than justice to the energy and enterprise of the various immigrant populations who arrived in the city. They were not dregs or leftovers; in fact the animation and enterprise of London often seemed to invade them and, with one or two exceptions, these various groups rose and prospered. It is the continuing and never-ending story. It has often been remarked that, in other cities, many years must pass before a foreigner is accepted; in London, it takes as many months. It is true, too, that you can only be happy in London if you begin to consider yourself as a Londoner. It is the secret of successful assimilation.
Fresh generations, with their songs and customs, arrived at least as early as the time of the Roman settlement, when London was opened up as a European marketplace. The working inhabitants of the city might have come from Gaul, from Greece, from Germany, from Italy, from North Africa, a polyglot community all speaking a variety of rough or demotic Latin. By the seventh century, when London rose again as an important port and market, the native and immigrant populations were thoroughly intermingled. There was also a more general change. It was no longer possible to distinguish Britons from Saxons and, after the northern invasions of the ninth century, the Danes entered the city’s racial mixture. By the tenth century the city was populated by Cymric Brythons and Belgae, by the remnants of the Gaulish legions, by East Saxons and Mercians, by Danes, Norwegians and Swedes, by Franks and Jutes and Angles, all mingled and mingling together to form a distinct tribe of “Londoners.” A text known as IV Aethelred mentions that those who “passed through” London, in the period before the Norman settlement, were “men from Flanders, Pontheiu, Normandy and the Ile de France” as well as “men of the emperor: Germans.”