Peter Preston London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd (Chatto & Windus)
What is London? The disaster of the Dome, the grunge of traffic, the cost, the crime, the desolation living rough beneath its arches. Familiar fodder from familiar headlines. Moan, moan, moan (as my Spanish grandson says when he comes to visit). But here, by way of antidote, is something wonderful “the London of labyrinth, half of stone and half of flesh”, the London Peter Ackroyd was born to write about.
He calls it a “biography” because there can be no steady march of history to “this wilderness of alleys and passages”: London is simply too various, too impossible to define, unless given half-human character. Yet in truth that formulation does not quite fit either. What we really have here are about 800 pages of excavation, anecdote, explanation and observation by a man who has come to cherish every sight and sound of the great metropolis that enfolds him. Variations on a theme called London.
Does it always work? Inevitably not, especially in the earlier reaches when information itself is hard to come by. If you do not know where the very name of London came from maybe Llyndon, the town by the stream; Laindon, the long hill; londos, the Celtic for “fierce”? you’re doomed to patrol through the years of the Romans, Danes and Saxons in occasionally lumpen travelogue mode, making much out of little. Persevere, though, for as soon as Ackroyd sets foot in the past four centuries he is instantly at home, the master of diverting detail.
Do you fancy a steak at Dolly’s Chop-house in Paternoster Row, or a pie in the cook-shops of Porridge Island? A coffee with the artists at Old Slaughter’s in St Martin’s Lane, or with Tories and Jacobites at the Cocoa-Tree in Pall Mall? And as for blowzabellas, drabs, mawkes and trugmoldies (all London names for the ubiquitous whore) then off we go to Madame Cresswell’s in Clerkenwell unless, that is, you’re gay and fancy a mollie house like Mother Clap’s in Holborn.
Ackroyd is the most effortless guide. You wander by his side through the streets of the old city, savouring its bustle, colours and its smells, the stink of living. Yet he also makes the connections. “I used to pass a dwarf, dressed in old clothes and with wizened features, who in a hoarse voice would direct the traffic at the crossroads of Theobalds Road and Grays Inn Road; he was there every day and then, suddenly, in the summer of 1978, he was gone.”
I, too, remember that dwarf, and people gingerly crossing the road to give him wide berth, caught between amusement and embarrassment; but I could not for the life of me recall the time of his vanishing. Yet here he is again, returned as a part of the quintessential London, a memory to stand alongside those of Boswell, Hogarth or Defoe. Past and present conjoin.
Could such love letters be written to any city, anywhere in the world? Perhaps, in some measure: wherever there are throngs of humanity there is the richness of city life. But Ackroyd aims to go much further than that, to define London’s uniqueness. “It is not civilised or graceful … but tortuous, inexact and oppressive … It is a city built upon profit and speculation, not upon need, and no mayor or sovereign could withstand its organic will.” There you have it. Not Paris, grandly all of a piece. Not New York, where concrete is king, nor Los Angeles, where the freeways are arteries. The world is full of great cities, but London is different. It possesses that organic will.
Take the South Bank in the past 10 years. Has central authority decreed the Tate Modern, the Globe, the wharfs and walkways of regeneration and reclamation right along the Thames? Hardly. Most of it happened when there was no such authority just as old London once crossed the bridges from the north and swarmed into Southwark and Peckham and Brixton and Camberwell, creating not suburbs without soul the Paris model but villages with their own character and peopling. (Read Ackroyd on the Brixton way of murder and the Camberwell way with poison.)
This isn’t, for good or ill, a city for city planners. It shuns even after the disasters of the Great Fire or the Blitz the grand dream as solution: and where there is a small, mistaken dream, like the tower block, it soon shrugs it off. London believes in muddling through, making up its own destiny as it goes along. That’s why, alas, its traffic will never flow smoothly, nor its spread of central areas become a precinct to warm Ken Livingstone’s heart.
‘The South Bank”, Ackroyd writes, “has been able triumphantly to re-assert its past. The restored Bankside power station, with its upper storey resembling a box filled with light, is aligned with Cardinal’s Wharf and the newly constructed Globe in a triune invocation of territorial spirit … five centuries embraced in a single and simple act of recognition. It is part of London’s power. Where the past exists, the future may flourish.”
You will not find a better, more visionary book about a place taken for granted, despised, envied, seen without eyes properly open. Coming, like so many of its merchant class of long ago, from the East Midlands, I used to resent London’s power, and the way it drained the rest of England. I resent it no longer: not because the influence is in all respects healthy it isn’t but because the power comes naturally, from the first descriptions of what Julius Caesar found.
London is what was meant to be, secured across the centuries in a multiplicity of races, ways and tongues. You could not recreate it; you cannot destroy it. And if you want to know it better, to see it with eyes wide open, then Ackroyd is an indispensable companion.