Tales from the City / Features / Untitled Books

"London has always offered a thrilling muddle of disparate stories where people thrive off each other and opportunities for reinvention abound."

Photograph: © Mawgan Gyles

Tales from the City

For centuries, London has fed literature with some of our most enduring stories. Home to Shakespeare, Dickens and Pepys, and now to Sandhu, Self and Sinclair, Rebecca Yolland explores a capital history of words.

In a dingy doorway beneath a railway arch, on a street flagged for redevelopment, the boldly coloured work of graffiti artist Shepard Fairey has been partially obscured by anti-vandalism notices. The lettering above the door is almost illegible and a street name has been haphazardly superimposed. In the heart of modern Bankside derelict buildings thrust up against the oyster stands and cheesemongers of Borough market; printers' cupboards open for all night trade and municipal art projects revivify Victorian underpasses. This is the London of Blake - where repression, art and rebellion link arms - and equally of Doris Lessing's Good Terrorist, where squatters reclaim abandoned spaces and daub their manifestos across the city's buildings.

The city is a lexicographical repository of words that both annotate and define its nature: old shop signage revealed beneath peeling paint, Biblical bon mots etched on stone facades, illuminated billboards and tattered fly-postings, those surreptitious offers of work and get rich quick schemes found taped to birch saplings and dual carriageway railings, and neat blue plaques distinguishing the chosen few. This vast textual history - endlessly erased and rewritten - strikes at the heart of what London does best: reinvention and self-mythologization and the layering up of different worlds.

Cross the river at London Bridge, past the griffin marking the edge of the City, and step into a world of old stories, the Borough. Historically a place of stews and brothels - where the Regency buck sought thrills at the upriver Vauxhall pleasure gardens and Shakespeare made his name at the Globe - it has always offered a thrilling muddle of disparate stories where people thrive off each other and opportunities for reinvention abound. Much of Borough finds its way into his Dickens' novels. His life in Lant Street while his father was incarcerated at the debtors' prison was a period of significant personal change and new experience. 'Old London' as we understand it now is a world so commensurate with Dickens that many of the streets of Borough have been given the names of his characters - Clennam, Quilp, Copperfield - just as Dickens was inspired by the streets around him.

It is this combination of familiarity and change that continues to entice the London visitor, and the Londoner; its landscapes shift with the Thames. In his Preface to Little Dorrit Dickens recalls returning to the area,

'I found the outer front courtyard ... metamorphosed into a butter-shop; and I then almost gave up every brick of the jail for lost. Wandering, however, down a certain adjacent 'Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey', I came to Marshalsea Place: the houses in which I recognized ...the rooms that arose in my mind's-eye...

Whosoever goes into Marshalsea Place, turning out of Angel Court leading to Bermondsey, will find his feet on the very paving-stones of the extinct Marshalsea jail; will see its narrow yard to the right and to the left, very little altered if at all, except that the walls were lowered when the place got free; will look upon the rooms in which the debtors lived; will stand among the crowding ghosts of many miserable years.'

Those who write about London necessarily encounter such ghosts, and join the throngs whose fascination with the city comes bundled up with their own preconceptions and aspirations. Lovers of J G Ballard find a city of dual carriageways and high-rises; Wodehouse fans find impeccable tailoring and gentlemen's clubs; and then there is the stoicism and suffering of the Blitz as revealed in Atonement or the secret knowledge of taxi drivers found in Self's Book of Dave. For generations, people have travelled across the world in search of new beginnings in the capital, all certain of the city they will discover. Monica Ali's family in Brick Lane is frustrated by its own expectations of a new home and then by its failure to integrate. Others expect the chirruping friendliness of the East End or bankers in bowler hats. London disappoints them all. Then, just when you have given up hope in the myths, up pops a Pearly King or a cockney bus conductor.

Gillian Tindall explores the fantasies we are tempted to impose upon London in her recent book The House by the Thames. Recounting the fortunes and misfortunes of the inhabitants of 'Wren's House, 49 Bankside' it reveals a wonderfully haphazard history of the area, often very much at odds with our current imaginings of squalor and violence. The myth that Wren inhabited the house while St Paul's was built turns out to be a fabrication on the part of a post-war owner. The house had not even been built at the time. Rumours of royal visits and Shakespeare's patronage are equally unfounded and instead a procession of film makers, ambassadors, well-heeled coal merchants, psychiatrists and pastry cooks, all took up residency at 49 Bankside. Their stories (of family rivalries and river drownings and professional struggles) create a world not entirely unlike ours and yet fascinatingly remote.

Like Wren's House, much of the London conjured in literature is still recognizable. The wall of Marshalsea Prison is still visible and newly planted Magnolia trees are growing against St George the Martyr. Photographs displayed in local pubs show several buildings unchanged, but the costumes and habits of the customers have altered radically. Much of what was has disappeared. A plaque serves to remind us where Chaucer's pilgrims started their Canterbury journey 'In Southwerk at the Tabard', while Samuel Pepys charts the wholesale destruction of the entire medieval city. In his diary he describes the experience of watching the Great Fire of London sweep across the whole of central London,

'...to a little ale-house on the Bankside, over against the 'Three Cranes, and there staid till it was dark almost, and saw the fire grow; and, as it grew darker, appeared more and more, and in corners and upon steeples, and between churches and houses, as far as we could see up the hill of the City, in a most horrid malicious bloody flame, not like the fine flame of an ordinary fire'.

Ian Sinclair's crack-toothed compendium, Disappearing London, chronicles tales of missing persons, shifting landscapes, changing vernaculars and all variety of professional and criminal activity inhabiting a dirty jungle of streets. The world of secondhand books on the Charing Cross Road is sadly depleted now, the pamphleteers of Grub Street and the hacks of Fleet Street have moved on, and even the tassle-twirling underbelly of Soho has been anesthetized by the swell of advertising agencies and far uglier enterprises, but Sinclair resurrects these worlds and examines their significance to contemporary writers. Most strikingly, he hints at London as a world of clubs and groups. The Scriblerus Club counted Pope and Swift among its members and 'delighted in the besmirched topography of London', just as writers such as Will Self and Alan Hollinghurst do today. In The Line of Beauty Hollinghurst precisely delineates the shifting and conflicting social worlds of London, his interloping protagonist both part of them and very much excluded:

'The communal gardens were as much a part of Nick's romance of London as the house itself....There were one or two places, in the surrounding streets, where someone who wasn't a keyholder could see through to a glade... There were hidden places, even on the inside'.

This hidden London with its closed ranks is something that can alienate equally the visitor and long term Londoner. The pea soupers so powerfully conjured in the stories of Sherlock Holmes may have vanished with the Clean Air Act, but the feeling of being an onlooker, of struggling for entrance to societies, is something that pervades books such as Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square and The Diary of a Nobody, with the ever-struggling Mr Pooter failing to gain entrance to the middle class society he so reveres.

In other literature however we see how often London society enthusiastically embraces the outsiders and misfits. London Calling, a fantastic collection of descriptions of London by black and Asian writers from the eighteenth century onwards collected by psychogeographer Sukhdev Sandhu, shows exactly that; for example slave-ship born Ignatius Sancho, who became friends with Gainsborough and Sterne. London Calling manages to convey the passion inspired by London and the enthusiasm with which all sorts of characters, both respectable and debauched, become Londoners. For those who find the joy of London, nothing exceeds it for ultimately, as Virginia Woolf enthuses in her diary, 'London is enchanting.'

'I step out upon a tawny coloured magic carpet, it seems, & get carried into beauty without raising a finger. The nights are amazing, with all the white porticoes & broad silent avenues. And people pop in & out, lightly, divertingly like rabbits; & I look down Southampton Row, wet as a seal's back or red & yellow with sunshine, & watch the omnibus going & coming, & hear the old crazy organs. One of these days I will write about London, & how it takes up the private life & carries it on, without any effort.'

Thursday, 19 November, 2009

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Untitled Books

Issue 20 / February - March 2010

"London has always offered a thrilling muddle of disparate stories where people thrive off each other and opportunities for reinvention abound."