London: The Biography

The author and publisher are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce copyright material: Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (Secker amp; Warburg and the Wylie Agency (UK) Ltd.); Sally Holloway, Courage High (HMSO); Mike and Trevor Phillips, Windrush: the Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain (HarperCollins); Virginia Woolf, The Diaries, ed. Anne Oliver Bell (the Executors of the Estate of Virginia Woolf, The Hogarth Press and Harcourt Brace).

The jacket and endpapers show details from the following paintings and photographs:

Front cover: London from Southwark, c.1630, British School; The Great Wheel, Earl’s Court Exhibition, 1890, by Charles Wilson; Curds and Whey Seller, Cheapside, c.1730, British School; Coombe and Co’s Brewer’s, St. Giles, c.1875, by Alfred and John Bool © Museum of London; Canary Wharf from the Isle of Dogs; Thames Barrier © Matthew Weinreb; inside flap: The Crawlers, c.1876, by John Thomson © Museum of London; Lloyds of London © Matthew Weinreb; back cover: May Morning, c.1760, by John Collet; Allen’s Tobacconist Shop, c.1841, by Robert Allen; A Shop in Macclesfield Street, Soho, 1883, by Henry Dixon; Suffragette Demonstration in Trafalgar Square, c.1908, © Museum of London; Simpson’s of Piccadilly; John Lewis, Oxford Street © Matthew Weinreb; inside flap: Westminster Bridge from the River Looking South, c.1750, British School; Railway Maintenance Gang, St. Pancras, c.1900, by Rev. John Galt © Museum of London; spine: Regent Street, c.1886, anon. © Museum of London; endpapers: Seven Phases in the Evolution of Old London Bridge © Museum of London.

Cartography on pages xxvi-xxix by Pamela Talese.

While the publishers have made every effort to trace the owners of copyright, they will be happy to rectify any errors or omissions in further editions.

The City as Body

The image of London as a human body is striking and singular; we may trace it from the pictorial emblems of the City of God, the mystical body in which Jesus Christ represents its head and the citizens its other members. London has also been envisaged in the form of a young man with his arms outstretched in a gesture of liberation; the figure is taken from a Roman bronze but it embodies the energy and exultation of a city continually expanding in great waves of progress and of confidence. Here might be found the “heart of London beating warm.”

The byways of the city resemble thin veins and its parks are like lungs. In the mist and rain of an urban autumn, the shining stones and cobbles of the older thoroughfares look as if they are bleeding. When William Harvey, practising as a surgeon in St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, walked through the streets he noticed that the hoses of the fire engines spouted water like blood from a cut artery. Metaphorical images of the Cockney body have circulated for many hundreds of years: “gob” was first recorded in 1550, “paws” in 1590, “mug” in 1708 and “kisser” in the mid-eighteenth century.

Harvey’s seventeenth-century hospital was beside the shambles of Smithfield, and that conjunction may suggest another image of the city. It is fleshy and voracious, grown fat upon its appetite for people and for food, for goods and for drink; it consumes and it excretes, maintained within a continual state of greed and desire.

For Daniel Defoe, London was a great body which “circulates all, exports all, and at last pays for all.” That is why it has commonly been portrayed in monstrous form, a swollen and dropsical giant which kills more than it breeds. Its head is too large, out of proportion to the other members; its face and hands have also grown monstrous, irregular and “out of all Shape.” It is a “spleen” or a great “wen.” A body racked with fever, and choked by ashes, it proceeds from plague to fire.

Whether we consider London as a young man refreshed and risen from sleep, therefore, or whether we lament its condition as a deformed giant, we must regard it as a human shape with its own laws of life and growth.

Here, then, is its biography.