That population became acclimatised and, although still subject to racial taunts, a familiar presence in the streets of nineteenth-century London. They had become part of the “underclass” and were scarcely to be differentiated from it; as crossing-sweepers, as vagrants, or as beggars, they had become almost invisible. In the vast city they did not exist in numbers large enough to command public attention or concern; they were not competing for employment and so did not threaten anyone’s livelihood. They rarely appear in novels or narratives, except as occasional grotesques, and their general fate seems to have been one of settlement among the urban poor.
Yet the beginning of immigration from the Caribbean islands in the late 1940s set off a litany of familiar fears, among them the prospect of white unemployment, of intermarriage, and of general overpopulation. In the summer of 1948 the SS Empire Windrush brought 492 young migrants from Jamaica. It marked the beginning of a process which would alter the demography of London and affect all aspects of communal life. The West Indians were in turn followed by immigrants from India, Pakistan and East Africa so that, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is estimated that London harbours almost two million non-white ethnic minorities. Despite occasional racially motivated attacks, and despite the anxiety felt by certain minorities at the behaviour of the police, there is striking evidence that the egalitarian and democratic instincts of London have already marginalised fear and prejudice. Immigration is so much part of London that even its latest and most controversial manifestations eventually become a settled part of its existence. This became clear even in the aftermath of the Notting Hill riots of 1958, and in particular after the murder of a young Antiguan carpenter named Kelso Cockrane. An essential element of London life returned. “Normally, in the early days, you know,” one young West Indian informed the authors of Windrush, a study of twentieth-century immigrants from the Caribbean, “whenever something appeared in the papers, you could always test the temperature by going on the bus. People would be very hostile. And in this instance, after that funeral, there was a turning point. You could sense a change. People were more friendly. People began to react and respond in a different way.” There have been riots, and murders, in the course of the last twenty years but no one can doubt that the central and essential movement within London has been one of absorption and assimilation. It is an intrinsic aspect of its history.
The city itself, in the process, has also changed. The authors of Windrush, Michael and Trevor Phillips, provide an interesting context for this alteration. They suggest that workers from Jamaica, Barbados and elsewhere, were not simply “migrating to Britain.” They were in effect migrating to London because “it was the life of the city which called to them and which they had begun to crave.” In the twentieth century the city had effectively created the conditions of modern industrial and economic life; thus for the new settlers the journey to London was the only way “to engage with the broad currents of modernity.” It is a significant observation in itself, and one that throws a suggestive light upon all immigrant transactions over the last thousand years. They were drawn to the city itself. London called them. To settle there was, in some oblique and intuitive way, to be part of the present moment moving into futurity. The importance of time within the city has already been outlined but, for the first generations of the immigrant population, the city represented the movement of time itself.
Yet their vitality and optimism in turn brought energy back into the city. Throughout the 1960s, for example, it is claimed that the immigrants themselves assisted the “process of remodelling and modernising” the streets and houses in which they lived. Areas like Brixton and Notting Hill had been “declining and rundown since the nineteenth century,” but the new arrivals “revalued huge swathes of the inner city.” The use of the word “revalued” suggests the economic effectiveness of the settlers, but the transition from black immigrant to black Londoner also called upon different resources. Caribbeans “had to go through a fundamental series of changes in order to live and flourish in the city”; like the Jews or the Irish before them, they had to acquire an urban identity which maintained their inheritance while at the same time allowing its smooth passage into the huge, complex but generally welcoming organism of London. That urban environment might have seemed anonymous, or hostile, or frightening, but in fact it was the appropriate arena for the Caribbeans and other immigrants to forge a new identity.
So it is that the authors of Windrush suggest that “the instinct of the city was to … equalise choices” and “to level out differences between consumers and producers.” This is the new egalitarianism which in turn equalises the differences between the various races which comprise it, since “the essential job of the city was to put people together.” Yet in turn “the character of the city … came to define the identity of the nation,” and the existence of a various and heterogeneous London has helped to redefine the notion or nature of Englishness itself. Now there are Montserratians in Hackney and Anguillians in Slough, Dominicans in Paddington and Grenadians in Hammersmith. Where once there were Swiss in Soho, and Cypriots in Holborn, there are now Barbadians in Notting Hill and Jamaicans in Stockwell. There are Punjabis in Southall and Bangladeshis in Tower Hamlets, Turks in Stoke Newington and Pakistanis in Leyton. Each community has replicated its independence within the larger context of London, so that once more the city takes on the aspects of a world in itself. The city, that “globe of many nations,” acts as a paradigm and forerunner in the great race of life.
CHAPTER 74. Empire Day
By the last decades of the nineteenth century London had become the city of empire; the public spaces, the railway termini, the hotels, the great docks, the new thoroughfares, the rebuilt markets, all were the visible expression of a city of unrivalled strength and immensity. It had become the centre of international finance and the engine of imperial power; it teemed with life and expectancy. Some of its gracefulness and variety had now gone; its Georgian compactness and familiarity had also disappeared, replaced by the larger scale of neo-classical or neo-Gothic architecture which somehow matched the aspirations of this larger and more anonymous city. Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square, erected in 1843, was conceived upon the model of a column in the temple of Mars the Avenger, in imperial Rome, while a revised classicism was employed for the new buildings along Whitehall; the architecture of London, according to Jonathan Schneer in London 1900, celebrated “British heroism on the battlefield, British sovereignty over foreign lands, British wealth and power, in short, British imperialism.” If it was a more public and more powerful city, it had also become a less human one. Tower Bridge, which took some thirteen years to build and was eventually completed in 1894, was a representative emblem; it was an extraordinary feat of engineering, but it seems deliberately to have been built upon an impersonal and somewhat forbidding scale. In its immensity and complexity, it reflected the workings of the city itself.
Late nineteenth-century London was established upon money. The City had acquired the historic destiny that it had been pursuing for almost two thousand years. It had become the progenitor of commerce, and the vehicle of credit, throughout the world; the City maintained England, just as the riches of the Empire rejuvenated the City. The sea trade of the earliest settlers had over the centuries borne unexpected fruit since by the turn of the century almost one half of the world’s merchant shipping was controlled, directly or indirectly, by the institutions of the City. In the early decades of the twentieth century new office blocks became a familiar presence; new banks, company headquarters, insurance offices were built upon a massive scale, with intense and dramatic architectural effects. The latest edition of Pevsner’s Buildings of England for the City of London notes, for example, how the Bank of England acted as a field of force for other commercial enterprises. “Around it are clustered the headquarters and major branches of the main clearing banks, many of which had grown enormously by merger and acquisition at the end of the 1910s. They were built to impress, inside and out.” Here the element of London’s essential theatricality once more emerges, but strangely mingled with the principles of profit and of power. The tendency towards “merger and acquisition” among banking institutions was reflected in a general movement towards the creation of greater and greater organisations; the newspaper industries, the enormous growth of the Post Office, the vast expansion of insurance companies, all contributed to the sense of a city growing quickly and almost unnaturally.