At the end of the eighteenth century the largest map ever printed in England conveyed what seemed to be, even then, the immensity of London. Richard Horwood’s map was ninety-four feet square, and contained street numbers as well as names and houses. The project continued for nine years but four years after its publication Horwood, tired and careworn, died at the age of forty-five. Some of the inevitable difficulties he encountered can be measured by changes in four different editions. Within the space of thirteen years the fields adjacent to Commercial Road were gradually filled with houses and terraced streets. In the space of twenty years the number of houses in Mile End had tripled. The persistent and steady growth of London, in a sense, had killed its map-maker.
Horwood’s aim was largely utilitarian. The enterprise was sponsored by the Phoenix Fire Insurance office, one of the city’s most significant institutions, and was advertised as indispensable “in bringing Ejectments or Actions, in leasing or conveying Premises etcetera.” In that, it proved successful, if only because every subsequent attempt at conveying the specific houses or buildings of the city was engulfed by its sheer immensity. The first Ordnance Survey of London completed in 1850, for example, comprised some 847 sheets; it was greatly reduced for publication but then proved to be on too small a scale to be useful for travellers and inhabitants alike. This and later maps of mid-and late Victorian London simply display lines of streets linked together, with shading used indiscriminately to represent the shops, offices, houses, tenements and public buildings.
These are the direct predecessors of the contemporary A to Z gazetteer in which hundreds of pages are needed to chart a city which cannot be recognised or understood in terms of one central image. The begetter of the A to Z, Phyllis Pearsall, entranced by London’s immensity, compiled the first edition in the mid-1930s by “rising at five and walking for 18 miles per day.” She covered 3,000 miles of streets, and completed 23,000 entries which she kept in shoeboxes beneath her bed. Michael Hebbert, the author of London, has revealed that the maps “were drawn by a single draughtsman, and Pearsall herself compiled, designed and proof-read the book.” No publisher was interested, however, until she delivered copies on a wheelbarrow to a W.H. Smith buyer. By the time of her death, in 1996, the number of London streets had risen to approximately 50,000.
The nineteenth-century city, already seeming too vast for comprehension, was sometimes plotted in terms of theme or subject. There were “cab-fare maps” outlining the distance which could be travelled for a certain fare, maps of street improvements with the renovated thoroughfares outlined in vivid red, maps of the “modern plague of London” which marked each public house with a red spot, and maps displaying the incidence of death by cholera. Maps of the underground railway, of trams, and of other forms of modern transport soon followed so that London became a city of maps, one laid upon another like an historical palimpsest. It never ceased to grow and, in the process, glowed perpetually with various colours-those of death, alcohol and poverty competing with those of improvements and railways.
“Up to this time,” Henry James wrote in 1869, “I have been crushed under a sense of the mere magnitude of London-its inconceivable immensity-in such a way as to paralyse my mind for any appreciation of details.” Yet for the true antiquarian of London those details live and survive within the memory, beyond the reach of any plan or survey. “In my youth,” John Stow wrote in the sixteenth century, “I remember, devout people, as well men as women of this city, were accustomed oftentimes, especially on Fridays, weekly to walk that way [to Houndsditch] purposely there to bestow their charitable alms; every poor man or woman lying in their bed within their window, which was towards the street, open so low that every man might see them.” It is a distinct and striking image, in a city of spectacle and ritual. And then again: “I remember within this fifty four years Malmsey not to be sold more than one penny halfpenny the pint.” Memory here must complete the task of observation, if only “to stop the tongues of unthankful men, such as used to ask, Why have ye not noted this, or that? and give no thanks for what is done.”
Stow remains the guardian spirit of all those Londoners who came after him, filled with their own memories of time passing and time gone. There is Charles Lamb wandering through the Temple in the early 1820s, noting “what an antique air had the now almost effaced sun-dials, with their moral inscriptions, seeming coevals with that Time which they measured”; these were “my oldest recollections.” A decade later Macaulay spoke of a coming time when the citizens of London, “ancient and gigantic as it is, will in vain seek, amidst new streets, and squares, and railway stations for the site of that dwelling” which was in their youth the centre of their lives or destinies. Leigh Hunt, in The Town of 1848, observed of the city, “nor perhaps is there a single spot in London in which the past is not visibly present to us, either in the shape of some old buildings or at least in the names of the streets.” At the very beginning of the nineteenth century a London journalist known as “Aleph” wandered down Lothbury, recalling its previous “tortuous, dark vista of lofty houses” lit only by oil-lamps; since Aleph’s journey it has changed many times, yet it still remains unique and identifiable, most particularly with its recurrent “darkness” and “loftiness.”
It has been said that no stone ever leaves London but is reused and redeployed, adding to that great pile upon which the city rests. The paradox here is of continual change and constant underlying identity; it is at the core of the antiquarian passion for a continually altering and expanding city which nevertheless remains an echo chamber for stray memories and unfulfilled desires. That is perhaps why, as V.S. Pritchett noted in the late 1960s, “London has the effect of making one feel personally historic.” “It is strange,” he once wrote, “that although London wipes out its past, the Londoner does not quite forget.” Every journey through the streets of London can then become a journey into the past, and there will always be Londoners who thrill to that past like an obsession. In the early 1920s another London visionary, Arthur Machen, walked through Camden Town and found himself witnessing like a revenant the city of 1840, with pony gigs and dimly lit interiors, all of it conjured up by the sudden glimpse of a “little coach-house and the little stables; and all a vision of a mode of life that has passed utterly away.”
Until recent years it was possible to find inhabitants of Bermondsey who were, in the words of one reporter, “enthralled by the history of their borough.” It is a genuine London passion. Where Thomas Hardy could hear “the voice of Paul” in ancient stones exhibited within the British Museum, Londoners hear the voices of all those who came before them in the smallest houses and meanest streets. Charles Lamb remembered a cashier in the South-Sea House, Mr. Evans, who was eloquent “in relation to old and new London-the site of old theatres, churches, streets gone to decay-where Rosamond’s pond stood-the Mulberry Gardens-and the Conduit in Cheap.” The author of Highways and Byways in London, Mrs. E.T. Cook, stood upon Westminster Bridge in a winter’s twilight, when “as the light faded, and the mist rose, I seemed to lose the forms of the modern buildings, and to see, as though in a vision, the ‘Thorney Isle’ of the dim past.” Yet even as this early twentieth-century observer sees intimations of the eighth century, her meditations are broken by a beggarwoman’s plea for money. “I ain’t got a place ter sleep in this night. Gawd knows I ain’t, dear lydy.” Past and present collide in a thousand different forms. When Rose Macaulay visited the wilderness of a bomb-site in the Second World War, she had an intimation of “the primeval chaos and old night which had been before Londinium was.” In the preceding century Leigh Hunt observed that St. Paul’s Churchyard was “a place in which you may get the last new novel, and find remains of the ancient Britons and of the sea.” Despite his fear of the city’s immensity Henry James himself experienced “the ghostly sense, the disembodied presences of the old London.” There is a foot-tunnel under the Thames, linking Greenwich with the Isle of Dogs, which seems to harbour something of its mystery; for Stephen Graham, the author of the lachrymose London Nights, it “told of an enigma which would never be solved; the enigma of London’s sorrow, her burden, her slavery.”