The decade which saw the emergence of the “yuppies,” for example, also witnessed the revival of street-beggars and vagrants sleeping “rough” upon the streets or within doorways; Lincoln’s Inn Fields was occupied once more by the homeless, after an interval of 150 years, while areas like Waterloo Bridge and the Embankment became the setting for what were known as “cardboard cities.” The Strand, in particular, became a great thoroughfare of the dispossessed. Despite civic and government initiatives, they are still there. They are now part of the recognisable population; they are Londoners, joining the endless parade. Or perhaps, by sitting upon the sidelines, they remind everyone else that it is a parade.
And yet what is it, now, to be a Londoner? The map of the city has been redrawn to include “Outer Metropolitan Areas” as well as “Greater” and “Inner” London; the entire south-east of England has-willingly or unwillingly-become its zone of influence. Is London, then, just a state of mind? The more nebulous its boundaries, and the more protean its identity, has it now become an attitude or set of predilections? On more than one occasion, in its history, it has been described as containing a world or worlds within itself. Now it has been classified as a “global city,” and in Hebbert’s words as “a universe with its own rules, which has genuinely burst out of national boundaries.” So it does truly contain a “universe,” like some dense and darkly revolving cloud at its centre. But this is why so many millions of people describe themselves as “Londoners,” even if they are many miles from the inner city. They call themselves Londoners because they are pervaded by a sense of belonging. London has been continuously inhabited for over two thousand years; that is its strength, and its attraction. It affords the sensation of permanence, of solid ground. That is why the vagrant and the dispossessed lie in its streets; that is why the inhabitants of Harrow, or Croydon, call themselves “Londoners.” Its history calls them, even if they do not know it. They are entering a visionary city.
Cockney Visionaries
A fantastical “tribute to Christopher Wren” outlining the spires and vistas of the great and powerful city which he helped to create. Much of his work has gone but the power and energy remain.
CHAPTER 78. Unreal City
It has always been a city of vision and prophecy. It is supposed to have been founded after a prophetic dream vouchsafed to Brutus, and the vision of a great city in “a strange yet greener country” haunts the imaginations of the classical poets. As Ovid wrote in his Metamorphoses,
Even as I speak I see our destiny
The city of our sons and sons of sons,
Greater than any city we have known,
Or has been known or shall be known to men.
Its visionary or mythic status has rendered it provisional and impalpable. It has become an “Unreal city,” in the phrase of T.S. Eliot, which throughout its history has been populated by the creatures of mythology. Nymphs have been seen along the banks of its rivers, and minotaurs within its labyrinths of brick. It has been aligned with Nineveh and Tyre, Sodom and Babylon, and at times of fire and plague the outlines of those cities have risen among its streets and buildings. The city’s topography is a palimpsest within which all the most magnificent or monstrous cities of the world can be discerned. It has been the home of both angels and devils striving for mastery. It has been the seat of miracles, and the harbour of savage paganism. Who can fathom the depths of London?
Chaucer’s prophetic dream in the House of Fame-“I dreamt I was within a temple made of glass” with “many a pillar of metal”-has been applied to many of London’s edifices but the most formidable prophecies are of revelation and apocalypse. On the north side of Aldersgate were inscribed the words: “Then shall enter into the gates of the city kings and princes sitting upon the throne of David … and the city shall remain forever.” Even to its inhabitants, it was a biblical city; its history, “beyond the memory of man,” verified its sacredness. Yet its inhabitants have also been touched by other forms of vision. Of Chaucer’s pilgrims, on their way to Canterbury along Borough High Street, William Blake said that they “compose all ages and nations.” Every race or tribe or nation, every faith or form of speech, have been comprehended within the city. The whole universe may be found within a grain of London’s life. The “gate of heaven,” in St. Bartholomew the Great, was located beside the shambles of Smithfield. But if it is a sacred city, it is one which includes misery and suffering. The bowels of God have opened, and rained down shit upon London.
The most abject poverty or dereliction can appear beside glowing wealth and prosperity. Yet the city needs its poor. What if the poor must die, or be deprived, in order that the city might live? That would be the strangest contrast of all. Life and death meet and part; misfortune and good fortune shake hands; suffering and happiness inhabit the same house. “Without Contraries,” Blake once wrote, “is no progression.” He reached this truth by steady observation of the city. It is always ancient, and forever new, that disparity or disjunction itself creating a kind of ferment of novelty and inventiveness. It may be that the new protects the old, or the old guards the new, yet in the very fact of their oneness lies the secret of London’s identity shining through time.
Yet wherever you go in the city you are continually being assaulted by difference, and it could be surmised that the city is simply made up of contrasts; it is the sum of its differences. It is in fact the very universality of London that establishes these contrasts and separations, it contains every aspect of human life within itself, and is thus perpetually renewed. Yet do the rich and the poor inhabit the same city? It may be that each citizen has created a London in his or her own head, so that at the same moment there may exist seven million different cities. It has sometimes been observed that even native Londoners experience a kind of fear, or alarm, if they find themselves in a strange part of the city. It is partly the fear of becoming lost, but it is also the fear of difference. And yet is a city so filled with difference, also, therefore filled with fear?
This vision of totality, of fullness of life, may be cast in an optimistic sense. Boswell suggested that “the intellectual man is struck with London as comprehending the whole of human life in all its variety, the contemplation of which is inexhaustible.” It is the vision which was imparted to him as he was driven along the Haymarket in the early days of 1763: “I was full of rich imagination of London … such as I could not explain to most people, but which I strongly feel and am ravished with. My blood glows and my mind is agitated with felicity.” It is the fullness of London which prompts his happiness; the congregation of people, of all races, of all talents, of all fortunes, releases a massive air of expectancy and exhilaration.
London manifests all the possibilities of humankind, and thus becomes a vision of the world itself. Steele was a “great Lover of Mankind”; and by Cornhill “at the sight of a prosperous and happy Multitude … I cannot forbear expressing my Joy with Tears that have stoln down my Cheeks.” A century later Charles Lamb wrote that “I often shed tears in the motley Strand, for fulness of joy at such a multitude of life.” The multitudes induce wonder; they are not an incoherent mass, or a heap of irreconcilable elements, but a flowing and varied multitude.