The eighteenth-century “improvements” within the capital were also an aspect of that power and wealth. Lincoln’s Inn Fields was enclosed in 1735 and, four years later, the increasingly squalid Stocks Market was removed from the centre of the city. In 1757 the houses upon London Bridge were demolished and, in the same year, the noisome Fleet Ditch was filled and covered and the Fleet River itself embanked. Four years later, the City gates were removed in order to encourage freer access into the centre of London. As the gates went, so did the street-signs, making the thoroughfares “more airy and wholesome” but also divesting London of its old identity. All these measures were designed to encourage the traffic of goods as well as of people, allowing a freer circulation throughout the urban body with a novel emphasis placed upon speed and efficiency.
In this spirit, too, the Westminster Paving Act of 1762 inaugurated legislation for lighting and paving throughout the city, and thus initiated a general cleansing and clearing of the civic thoroughfares. And, in a city which brought in silk and spice, coffee and bullion, why should not light also be imported? In the 1780s a German visitor wrote that “In Oxford Road alone there are more lamps than in all the city of Paris.” They represented more illumination for the burgeoning centre of world commerce. These measures had, according to Pugh’s Life of Hanway, altogether “introduced a degree of elegance and symmetry into the streets of the metropolis, that is the admiration of all Europe and far exceeds anything of the kind in the modern world.” “Symmetry” is another expression of uniformity and in the Building Act of 1774 there was a further attempt at standardisation; it categorised the types of London houses in a series of “grades” or “rates” so that the city might become as infinitely reproducible and as uniform as its currency. This was the age of stucco, or white light.
The public monuments were also a credit to commerce, with such homages to trade as the new Custom House, the Excise Office in Old Broad Street, the Corn Exchange in Mark Lane and the Coal Exchange in Lower Thames Street. South Sea House in Threadneedle Street and East India House in Leadenhall Street vied with one another for magnificence, while the Bank of England in 1732 rose to be continually embellished and enlarged. The livery halls of the various trades, too, were constructed in terms of munificent display.
And then there was Westminster Bridge, opened in the winter of 1750 to the accompaniment of trumpets and kettledrums. Its fifteen arches of stone spanned the river to create “a bridge of magnificence.” It had a decisive effect upon the appearance of the city in another sense, since its commissioners persuaded Giovanni Canaletto to visit London in order to paint it. It was still in the course of construction when he depicted it in 1746, but already his vision of London was tempered by his Venetian practice. London became subtly stylised, Italianate, stretching out along the Thames in a pure and even light. A city aspiring to fluency and grace had found its perfect delineator.
Yet the diversity and contrast of London are nowhere better exemplified than in the fact that at the same time the city was being celebrated by William Hogarth. In the foreground of a “new improved” street, Hogarth shows a beggar child scoffing pieces of a broken pie.
CHAPTER 33
A Cookery Lesson
One of the most cheerful origins of “Cockney” is coquina, the Latin term for cookery. London was once seen as a vast kitchen and “the place of plenty and good fare.” Thus, as has already been observed, it became “Cockaigne” or the fabled land of good living.
In one year, 1725, it consumed “60,000 calves, 70,000 sheep and lambs, 187,000 swine, 52,000 sucking pigs” as well as “14,750,000 mackerel … 16,366,000 lb of cheese.” The Great Fire began in Pudding Lane and ended at Pie Corner, where the golden figure of the fat boy still occupies a site; he was once accompanied by an inscription noting “This boy is in memory put up of the late fire of London, occasioned by the sin of gluttony, 1666.”
Pie Corner itself was known for its cook-shops and, in particular, its dressed pork. Shadwell writes of “meat dressed at Pie Corner by greasy scullions” while Jonson describes a hungry man there “taking his meal” by sniffing the steam from the stalls. The steam of cooked meat drifted just a few yards from Smithfield, where the cooked flesh of the saints once also rose in smoke. A twenty-first century restaurant, beside Smithfield, offers spleen and tripe, pig’s head and veal hearts, as part of its menu.
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A kitchen of the second century AD has been reconstructed in the Museum of London; it shows a large stove upon which were cooked portions of beef and pork, duck and goose, chicken and deer. Such was the profusion of wild life in the neighbouring woods and forests that London became a meat-eater’s haven. And so it has remained.
In recent years deep excavation of Roman London has also revealed evidence of scattered oyster shells, the stones of cherries and of plums, the remnants of lentils and cucumbers, peas and walnuts. One surviving beaker or amphora from Southwark bears the advertisement: “Lucius Tettius Aficanus supplies the finest fish sauce from Antipolis.”
The diet of the Saxon Londoner was less exotic. At the times of “noon-meat” and “even-meat,” a staple diet of flesh was enlivened by leeks, onions, garlic, turnips and radishes. An ox had a value of six shillings, a pig one shilling, but there is also evidence that at a slightly later date Londoners demanded a plentiful supply of eels. At various spots along the Thames there were eel fisheries which date back at least as far as the eleventh century. From this century, too, excavations beneath St. Pancras have uncovered more plum-stones and cherry-stones.
Bread was the most important commodity throughout London’s history. There are many city regulations of the thirteenth century concerning the conduct of bakers, whose profession was divided into those who made “white bread” and those who made “tourte bread.” “Pouffe” was French bread; “simnel” or “wastel,” white bread, fine as well as common; “bis,” brown bread; and “tourte,” the inferior bread. The principal bakers were situated to the east, in Stratford, and the loaves were carried by long carts to the various shops and stalls within the city. Bread was indeed the staple of life. Scarce supplies in 1258, for example, had the direct consequence that “fifteen thousand of the poor perished.” Shiploads of wheat and grain were imported from Germany, and certain London nobles distributed bread to the crowd, but “innumerable multitudes of poor people died, and their bodies were all lying about swollen from want.” The permanent contrast in London, between need and abundance, has taken many different forms. In the more prosperous years of the thirteenth century, however, the diet of the citizen included beef, mutton and pork together with lampreys, porpoise and sturgeon. Vegetables were not greatly in demand but there was a particular delicacy known as “soup of cabbage.” Londoners had also invented a kind of mixed meat dish, created by pounding together pork and poultry into one concoction. A household book at the end of the thirteenth century reveals that on fish days there was also a choice of “herrings, eels, lampreys, salmon” and on meat days a similar variety of “pork, mutton, beef, fowls, pigeons and larks” together with “eggs, saffron and spices.”