No street in London changes its name as often in as short a space as the one which starts at the BBC’s overseas broadasting centre Bush House, just around the corner from the Strand. The street begins, below a bad piece of sculpture by the American artist Malvina Hoffman depicting Anglo-American friendship, as the characterless, traffic-despoiled Kingsway. A couple of hundred metres later, at the perma-jammed crossroads with Holborn, it is reborn as Southampton Row. About two hundred metres ahead it becomes the pretty but horribly polluted Russell Square, then turns briefly into Woburn Place, then leafy Tavistock Square, then Upper Woburn Place, shortest-lived of its many names, for a scant hundred metres, before becoming grim Eversholt Street, then manic Camden High Street, then grimy Chalk Farm Road, before growing slowly posher as it climbs Haverstock Hill and becomes Rosslyn Hill and then Hamptstead High Street. Once you’ve noticed this, its hard not to be amused by it, and to take it as an example of the crowded specificity of London — a tribute to the city’s sheer amount of history, of lives, of human density.
One of the most important moments in human history happened in this street, on September 12 1933. The Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard was standing waiting for a light to change at the point where Southampton Row becomes Russell Square. That morning, the papers had reported a British Association speech by Ernest Rutherford, concerning the splitting of atomic nuclei. The 33-year-old Szilard, a friend and colleague of Einstein’s — they had patented an unusable but ingenious new kind of magnet-powered fridge — had been thinking deeply on the subject.
When the green signal came and Slizard moved, something about that moment of stepping off the kerb put an idea into his head: what would happen if neutrons were smashed into the nuclei of atoms in a way that released two neutrons from the second atom? You would get two neutrons for the price of one, and if those two neutrons did the same, then you’d have four, and then four for eight, and so on, and very quickly ”it might be possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction, liberate energy on an industrial scale, and construct atomic bombs”. And all this came to Szilard in one blinding revelation, as he crossed Southampton Row, the street where the atom bomb was born. Whoever it was planted that bomb on the number 30 bus had a terrible idea, one designed to bring nothing but grief. But their visions, however dark, are not as dark as some things that have already come to the world from Southampton Row.
I spent six years working on the long street, in the BMA building on Tavistock Square, and would often think of Szilard when I walked down past Russell Square. There’s no plaque — and I’m not sure that Szilard would have wanted one, given how strongly pacifistic he came to feel once he had worked out, long before anyone else, the moral and political consequences of his own discovery. (He pulled every string he could, unsuccessfully, to try to get a meeting with President Truman to warn him of the inevitability of an arms race if America dropped the bomb.) Szilard was a good man, a utopian well-wisher motivated only by a desire to being peace and prosperity, who learned the hard way that history is dominated by unforeseen consequences.
Iris Murdoch’s great line, in her novel Under the Net, was that ”some parts of London are necessary, others are contingent”. This is still true, I think, with the proviso that the necessary and contingent parts of London can swap roles over time. (Who now would think that Mayfair was necessary?) And anyway, some of us prefer the contingent parts of London. The long street is one of them, full of history but at the same time scrappy-feeling and unplanned and random, and all the better, all the more characteristic of London, for that. On the corner of Eversholt Street and Euston is a St Pancras New Church, a neo-classical kludge which at the time of its construction in 1822 was the most expensive church building since St Paul’s. But the caryatids that hold up the Ionian pillars were ordered the wrong size. To be made to fit they had to have a bit taken out of the waist, making them look, by the general standards of caryatids, unclassically chunky. Once you’ve had it pointed out, it’s unmistakable, and every time you go past the church it makes you smile.
Another of my favourite places is a passageway just off Woburn Place called Woburn Walk, where there was a sandwich bar run by gloomy Italians with a plaque saying that WB Yeats had lived there. What the plaque didn’t tell you was that that was also where Yeats lost his virginity, at the decidedly late-starterish age of 31. He and Olivia Shakespear had to go to Heal’s specially to order a bed before finally consummating the relationship, and he found the experience — that of ordering the bed — deeply traumatic, since ”every inch added to the expense”.
All this is what this street used to mean to me. Everybody has their own version of their own bits of their own towns; history and memory overlap, and they are what make cities liveable; they are the human stuff with which we fight the city’s potentially overwhelming feelings of anonymity, depersonality, and anxiety. They are how we make it human.
Now, though, my and everybody else’s sense of this long street is set to be for ever changed by the fact that the diverted number 30 bus exploded just where Upper Woburn Place becomes Tavistock Square. The sight of the bus was horrible enough, but for me the most indelible image is that of the doorway of the BMA building, splattered with the baked-in blood of the bomb’s victims. That is the doorway I went through every day for those six years, and the London Review of Books’ offices, where I worked, were directly above where the bomb exploded. That doesn’t mean anything or have any consequences but it does make the horror of the moment all too easy to imagine.
It is meant to be easy to imagine. That is part of the terrorists’ intention. When Don DeLillo’s novel Mao II came out 13 years ago I was one of many readers who thought it was, to use a technical term in literary criticism, a howling dog. DeLillo seemed to be making some confused point about the similarity between art and terrorism, and how terrorists now did what artists used to do, or something. Reviewers, myself included, couldn’t get on with it. Now, though, I think I understand what DeLillo meant. His argument was that terrorism is trying to change the world by changing how people see the world. It is trying to get into our heads; to come between our thoughts and memories of the place we live and rewrite them, reorder them. It has designs on our sense of ourselves; it has designs on our memories and our fears. The idea is that when we get on the tube, when we get on a bus, when we see a young man with a beard looking fidgety, the memory of last Thursday will get inside our minds. When the bombers, or someone sympathising with them, said on their website that London is ”burning with fear”, they were expressing their own deepest wish, because if we aren’t then they have failed.
Have they failed? Obviously it’s too early to say. But it doesn’t seem to me as if London is burning with fear. Indeed, the general lack of panic is, it seems to me, extraordinary, remarkable, and deeply moving. Speaking purely for myself, I won’t know whether they have failed or not until the next time I am on a bus, perhaps specifically a bus going up that long street I love; or the next time I am on the tube, perhaps specifically a Piccadilly line train between Russell Square and King’s Cross. But I hope they have failed, and I suspect they have. The length and depth and specificity of London’s history is a source not just of stories and memories but of certain kinds of strength too.
After all, it’s not the first time that street has been bombed. The Luftwaffe blew up Bush house in 1941, and Malvina Hoffman’s dodgy statue had one of its arms replaced as recently as 1977. But we don’t need to go even that far back to encounter a bomb in that road. The last time a bomb went off there was February 18 1996. I remember it vividly because I was there at the time, more or less. My wife and a friend and I were having dinner in a restaurant in Wellington Street when, at about 10.30am, there was a thumping noise. Our friend, who worked in Canary Wharf, which had been attacked by the IRA, eight days previously immediately said, ”That’s a bomb.” We were keen not to be trapped behind a police cordon for the whole night, so we rapidly paid and left. Just outside, in Aldwych, where the Strand feeds round a sweeping half-curve into Kingsway, a bus had been blown up. It was black, still, silent, and windowless. The sense of noiselessness and calm were eerie. Somebody shouted, ”Get back, there could be another bomb.” We got in our car — in those pre-Livingstone days, Londoners sometimes used cars — and drove home.
Later it turned out that a 21-year-old IRA member called Edward O’Brien, on his way to do who knows what, had accidentally blown himself up. No one else died. It seemed terrible, at the time; it was terrible, just as the Docklands bomb was terrible, and the Harrods bomb before that, and all the other bombs too. Another time, only 18 years ago, the King’s Cross fire, 500 metres up the line from last Thursday’s bomb, killed 31 people and made a great many others feel that they were never going to go on the tube again. They did, though. My point is that not only is this not the first time that the long street that includes Woburn Place has been bombed; it is not even the first time it has been bombed by a terrorist on a bus during the last decade. The people who are trying to get inside our heads and rewrite our sense of our city may not realise just how much there is to rewrite.– Guardian Unlimited Â