The sound of voices, once such an intrinsic aspect of the street, has now been marginalised-except for the individual voice responding to the call of the mobile telephone, in a manner louder and more abrupt than that of ordinary conversation. Yet two aspects of these changing soundscapes have remained constant. Native Londoners have for many centuries been known to talk louder than their contemporaries, with a marked tendency towards shouting. London has become one unyielding and unending shout. There is a second characteristic noise. If you stand in Lombard Street at any time of the day, for example, that narrow thoroughfare like others in the vicinity echoes to hurrying footfalls. It has been a continuous sound for many hundreds of years, in the very centre of the City, and it may be that the perpetual steady echo of passing footsteps is the true sound of London in its transience and in its permanence.
CHAPTER 6. Silence Is Golden
Yet, on Sundays and public holidays, Lombard Street falls quiet. Throughout the old City, silence returns.
The history of silence is one of London’s secrets. It has been said of the city that its most glorious aspects are concealed, and that observation is wonderfully well fitted to account for the nature of silence in London. It comes upon the pedestrian, or traveller, suddenly and unexpectedly; it momentarily bathes the senses, as if going from bright light into a darkened room. Yet if London sound is that of energy and animation, silence must therefore be an ambiguous presence within city life. It may offer peace and tranquillity, but it may also suggest absence of being. It may be a negative force. The city’s history is striated with moments of silence: the silence of the surrounding country when the anonymous poet of London Lickpenny leaves Cheapside in 1390, the silence of the civic assembly when Richard III was first proposed as king in 1483, the silence of desolation after the Fire in 1666.
There was the silence of sixteenth-century London, after the day’s last cry at the stroke of midnight:
Looke well to your locke,
Your fier and your light,
And so good-night.
Of course the London night was not wholly quiet. What London night ever is, or ever will be? It is the contrast that is significant, in an almost theatrical sense, because it marks an interdiction upon the natural ardour of the citizens. In that sense the silence of London is indeed unnatural. There is a mid-seventeenth-century poem by Abraham Cowley which intimates that, on the departure of all the wicked and the foolish, the city would become “a solitude almost,” the implied silence suggesting here that noise and bustle are indistinguishable from sinfulness or folly. In that sense London could never be a silent city.
The absence of noise has also been marked as yet another contrast in an endlessly contrasting place. An eighteenth-century traveller observed that in the smaller streets off the Strand, running down to the Thames, there was “so pleasing a calm” that it struck the senses. This is a constant refrain. When the American connoisseur of antiquity, Washington Irving, wandered through the grounds of the Temple, off Fleet Street, “strangely situated in the very centre of sordid traffic,” he entered the silence of the chapel of the Knights Templar. “I do not know a more impressive lesson for the man of the world,” he wrote, “than thus suddenly to turn aside from the high way of busy money seeking life and sit down among these shadowy sepulchres, where all is twilight, dust and forgetfulness.” Here silence becomes an intimation of eternity, with the suggestion that London once emerged from a great silence and will one day return to it.
The great locus solus of silence, amid the overbearing noise of nineteenth-century London, acquired therefore an almost sacred status. Another American writer of that century, Nathaniel Hawthorne, entered it, having gone astray in Holborn. He walked “through an arched entrance, over which was ‘Staple Inn’ … but in a court opening inwards from this was a surrounding seclusion of quiet dwelling houses … there was not a quieter spot in England than this. In all the hundreds of years since London was built, it has not been able to sweep its roaring tide over that little island of quiet.” Silence has derived its power here by being able to withstand the sound of London, and in the process has itself acquired a kind of immensity-“there was not a quieter spot in England.”
Dickens knew the same courtyard well and employed it in The Mystery of Edwin Drood. “It is one of those nooks, the turning into which out of the clashing street imparts to the relieved pedestrian the sensation of having put cotton in his ears and velvet soles on his boots. It is one of those nooks where a few smoky sparrows twitter in smoky trees, as though they called to one another, ‘Let’s play at country.’” There is almost a theatrical aspect to this silence, therefore, as if it had been tainted by the artificiality of London. It is not a natural silence but a “play,” one of a series of violent contrasts which the inhabitants of London must endure. It is in that sense wholly ambiguous; it may provoke peaceful contemplation, or it may arouse anxiety.
When Hawthorne continued his pilgrimage to the centres of silence-a journey by an antiquarian determined to prove that “modern” London had not obtained full mastery over the silent past-he entered the precincts of Gray’s Inn. “It is very strange to find so much of ancient quietude right in the monster city’s very jaws,” he wrote, confirming his intuition that noise is a consequence of inattention or ignorance. It is silence which partakes of the past, and redeems the present. “Nothing else in London is so like the effect of a spell, as to pass under one of these archways, and find yourself transported from the jumble, rush, tumult, uproar, as if an age of weekdays condensed into the present hour, into what seems an eternal Sabbath.” So silence is the equivalent of the holy days of rest. Silence is the sound of not working, not making money.
But this again is ambiguous since the Sunday of London was known for its altogether dismal aspect, gloomy and generally disheartening. So does silence itself partake of this dreariness? In London the absence of noise, and activity, may be peculiarly enervating. Gabriel Mourey, a French traveller of the nineteenth century, remarked that on a Sunday “it is like a dead city; all trace of life and activity of the past six days has vanished.” Everyone noticed the change. It was “horrible,” and manifested a contrast which no other place on earth could afford. Once more the uniqueness of this sudden transition is being emphasised, so that even silence itself reflects the magniloquence of nineteenth-century London.
Yet there are other forms of silence which seem to presage activity. The author of The Little World of London recognised, and heard, them all. There was the moment of early dawn, a brief period of stillness before the distant noise “of horses’ hooves and grinding wheels” marked the awakening of the city into life. And then, at night, “a dead sepulchral silence seems to reign in the deserted thoroughfares, where but a few hours ago the ear was distracted by every variety of sounds.” This “stillness so sudden and complete … has a solemn suggestiveness,” containing within itself the idea of death as the “sudden and complete” surcease. The nature of the nineteenth-century city was such that it invited and provoked such “solemn” contemplation, precisely because it included the elements of life and death within itself. This is not the silence of the countryside, in other words, where repose seems natural and unforced. The silence of London is an active element; it is filled with an obvious absence (of people, of business) and is therefore filled with presence. It is a teeming silence.