the first thing that impresses me as i begin this short book on london is the large number of subjects of which i will say nothing. there are many reasons for this. one is that a title such as a london mosaic is as difficult to compose to as life or love. (two novels are still on sale under these somewhat atlasian titles, but as an author does not wish to be unkind in the first paragraphs of a book, they need not be reviewed.) another reason is that mr e. v. lucas, mrs e. t. cook, john o’ london, mr g. r. sims, have compiled various volumes of passionate baedeker, and i hesitate to set my feet in their mighty footprints. for so much of this london is unknown to me, and i have learnt little of her, indeed, learned little except to love her. thus, in this book, you will find no lists of houses where famous people lived. this may seem strange, but it wakes in me no thrill to see a circular plate of debased wedgwood imposed by a maternal l.c.c. upon a wall of innocent stucco coated with eternal dirt. to read that william hazlitt died here, or lived there, does not add much to the fact that william hazlitt lived. it may be interesting to know that hazlitt chose that sort of house, though it is likely that he did not choose it, but accepted it; a house does not define a man of worth, for men of worth are mostly poor, and their houses reflect them not. many must have hated them. yet, i happen to know huxley’s house in st john’s wood, and carlyle’s house in chelsea (there is no getting over that one when friends arrive from america), but it is not exciting knowledge, and i incline to rejoice with kingsley that it is not the house one lives in matters, but the house opposite. unfortunately, the house opposite is generally just as bad: the only thing that reconciles one to one’s house is that the people opposite see most of it.
i shall not tell you anything of ‘quaint corners,’ or ‘picturesque bits.’ i will not cut up and pickle london. ever since the days of dickens (or is it since those of dr syntax?) people have ranged4 our unfortunate town armed with a butterfly-net: swoop! caught cloth fair! another swoop! staple inn lies in the butterfly-net. quick, into the pickle-jar. now for the cyanide. here they are, london butterflies, ready for delineation by mr hugh thompson. no, i will pickle you no living strips of london town, and i promise that not once will i portray a humorous bus-conductor. one reason is that there are no humorous bus-conductors; there are only raucous brutes, working long hours, and maintained in a state of pessimism because these long hours separate them from the public-house. they do not, however, separate them enough.
there will be no east in the west, nor west in the east. there will be no list of statues, for nobody ever looks at statues. there is a statue of george stephenson at euston, and one of william pitt in hanover square. that is very interesting, isn’t it? it is a terrible commentary upon fame that when you erect a statue to a man he becomes invisible. you pass a statue every day, but you never look at it, you pass it. nobody cares for statues, except the birds, who make them a venue for love and war. christopher wren did say that if you required a monument you should look about you; thus does the london population. those who have noticed mr peabody, miraculously encased in a frock coat several sizes too small, mr huskisson stark naked, and one of the georges on his little horse, trotting to nowhere in particular, as was the way of his dynasty, will agree that it is no wonder statues fail to arouse even merriment.
no, there are no statues in this book. there are no pictures either. i shall not tell you how to find the madonna degli ansidei in the national gallery, nor direct you to the flaxmans of university college. the catalogues can do that. that is, if you want to know, and are not one of the ordinary beings who use the museums to get out of the rain or for the innocent purposes of courtship. (i recommend the geological; chilly, but leads to concentration). sometimes, in remorseful mood, when the word ‘ought,’ which as a rule means little to me, suddenly assumes material shape to the extent of a faint mist, i tell myself that i am5 very uneducated, and regrettably unrepentant, that i ‘ought’ to care that swift lived in bury street and sir isaac newton in jermyn street, and that i ‘ought’ to find desecration in the fact that where the dog diamond barked, the plates of jules’s balkan waiters clatter. and i go to jules’s to lunch and to meditate on gravitation. but jules can cook, and while eating his meats you do not meditate; and he is so popular that as soon as you have finished those meats, you are driven out by the eyes of some young couple, beaming with love and appetite. nor may you meditate opposite the houses of the great; it annoys the police. so, after this faint attempt, the slender ‘ought’ evaporates. perhaps because of that i have not yet succeeded in visiting the tower, the roman bath, the foundling, the soane museum, the mint, and many other places which doubtless would improve my mind.
i am not a student, but a lover of london; it amuses me much more to notice that one man shouts: ‘paw maw! exper! paw maw!’ while another does it like this: ‘per mer! gateshpozervenment!’ than to bask in the knowledge that johnson lived in gough square. this arises, i suppose, from having taken london as i found her, and from not being a londoner. the first twenty years of my life having been spent in another country, i did not treat london as a relation, but as some one whom i liked. everything of her was interesting, and there is to-day no mews where i cannot hear the footsteps of her smutty nymphs. the entry into london is such a romantic march; i say march because it is worth doing on foot. but as i speak to londoners, we had better do it by train, for they would grow tired of her. when londoners say ‘london,’ they mean piccadilly, selfridges, covent garden, that sort of thing, and that is not london. london is tottenham and chiswick, the ‘paragon,’ mile end, walker’s court and what it sells, and the black doss places under the railway arches. london is houndsditch, where everybody looks bad, and cornwall gardens where everybody looks good. london is a congress-house of emotions.
when one looks at the map, particularly if it is on a large6 scale, london looks like a splash, rather longer than it is broad, with railway lines radiating in all directions, rather like a spider’s web, the centre being tenanted by whoever you like. and one thinks of dick whittington gaily treading in the spider’s web. but, in fact, one does not come out of the everywhere into the here of london. one melts into london, and one hardly knows how one comes to abandon the rest of the world. there is a moment when the essex or kentish marsh ceases to lap so uniformly against medway or thames. one has a sense of population, of rather large houses set rather far apart, but not yet so far apart as in the counties; of grounds less richly endowed with the high walls crowned with broken glass which announce that respectable people live inside. one reads names on the platforms: ‘brentwood,’ or ‘malling,’ and there is a sprinkling of villas, with plenty of white paint and concrete, and red roofs and leaded panes. one glimpses cerise curtains, and one knows with painful accuracy where to look for the back of the swing mirror. then, again, gaps, cows. it must have been a mistake, it is not london after all! but there come more platforms and more villas, then a row of shops, shops not branded with the names one would expect to find, such as ‘boots’ or ‘home and colonial,’ but brisk, individual little shops belonging to smith, and to jones, yet strangely alike in build, furnished by the same shopfitter, just as the owners will be buried by the same undertaker. (he is quite ready, for he owns one of the shops.) that is individualism, which, like the camomile plant, is ever bruised and ever arises.
the train rumbles on, and the houses change. they are still detached, but less detached: they are separated by privet hedges over which a man can look, and so they have an air of fellowship. suddenly, one enters a little colony of houses; one sees a postman on foot instead of on a bicycle, a horse omnibus and no carrier’s cart; one sees a policeman too: the world is growing less respectable; it must be london after all. but again come gaps and cows, except that now the gaps are described as ‘desirable freehold sites’ with loudly advertised frontages. the earth is already torn up, and excavations are turning into roads; one observes a solitary7 gas-lamp, and on a board the words ‘macedonia avenue.’ no avenue is built yet, but it is foredoomed to macedonia.
the regent canal
at maida hill
all that is the overflow of london; it is the fugitive london which has no love or understanding of the town. the movement of a londoner who rises in life seems to follow a definite curve; if he begins in whitechapel the wheel of fortune may take him to streatham; after a while he will dream of a place in the country and realise his dream perhaps at purley oaks; by the time his son has come back from oxford, his wife will have been ambitious enough to remove him to south kensington; thence, the last step, to god’s quadrilateral between oxford street and piccadilly, regent street, and park lane. after the bankruptcy the process is reversed. outward, then inward, and outward again. it is like the tide.
but the train goes on, and unexpectedly, we find age after youth, croydon, sydenham, edmonton, places where again the walls are high, the oaks thick, where are deep lawns, heavy stucco fronts, little crowded streets with spreading market places. we breathe the air of genteel sleep. genteel, perhaps, but restless sleep, for these are old villages made into islands.
they seem vaguely annoyed among the trams; they blink at the sky-signs and the objurgations of bovril. but it is too late; round each little group run fifty streets, each one comprising a hundred houses or so, all complete, with nottingham lace curtain and virginia creeper. the old house may call itself ‘the lodge,’ but ‘chatsworth’ and ‘greville towers’ are round the corner. indeed, we forget them as we go on, for now, as the train roars over railway bridges, through cuttings, we look down on the endless congestion of suburban roofs, each one separated from its neighbour by what the builder regrettably calls a ‘worm.’
and yet it is not london. for london has yet to burst upon our eyes, in the shape of strident clapham road, or brixton road, true london of the black, greasy pavement and the orange peel of which private ortheris babbled in his delirium. we have still to come to the giant warehouses and their ambitious grayness, to the flat mass of gray, yellow, and black, broken only8 by the washing that hangs to dry, and the narrow gardens where droops the nasturtium. at last here is working london, little, nestling, hard, grimy london, gritty, troglodyte london, london of crowded shop and public-house, of tramway and clotted traffic, and yelping children. that is london of many heads and, to me, all smiling.
it is only later, when at last we reach the river that is gray as a cygnet, and see london rising in a hundred solemn spires, that we come to understand london, to feel the use of that white, central pomp; as well of that opulence as of the smiling cleanliness of the outer ring, of the blackness of the inner ring. for all that is part of london’s world, and it is well that she should, within herself, comprise all ugliness and all beauty. for this makes her worth exploring.
the secret of a city’s exploration does not lie in the dutiful following of itineraries, but rather in a lover-like submission to its moods. one should eat in various places, not only within the stereotyped square mile which, in london, in paris, or in petrograd, is loudly labelled as the foreigner’s restaurant. one must seek culinary adventure far afield, at harrow, and at tulse hill, in piccadilly and norton folgate; and let me assure you that there exists a subtle difference between the cooking at the cheapside a.b.c. and its fellow in the brixton road.
also one should readily cede to the fancy that is bred by a beautiful place name. it is true that, as a rule, the most attractive names lead to the least attractive places, but on the way one touches singularity often, and beauty sometimes. my baedeker has always been kelly’s directory; that is one of the books i should like to find in my restricted library if i were wrecked on a desert island. for, sitting under my bread-fruit tree, warm in my garment of yakskin, and smoking an earthen pipe of dried i don’t know what leaf, kelly’s directory would bring up dreams, dreams such as these: seven sisters’ road, satchwell rents, beer lane, and whetstone park. all those dreams have come true, and thus a little of my fervour has been abated by their materialisation; by the discovery of seven sisters’ road as gray, refuse-strewn, rich9 in victorian goodness and in modern slum; of satchwell rents as a dusty affluent into bethnal green road, shuttered, and locked, and suspicious. whetstone park, of course, is not at whetstone, but just off new oxford street, and there is no park there. but still, those names, like orme square, that secludes itself from the bayswater road behind its column and its defiant eagle, like cumberland market, hanoverian, naked, whose many iron posts await cattle that never come, contain the seed of romance because they induce quest. and so i will not be discouraged yet, but soon must discover what stones have wrought jedburgh street and parsifal road.
cumberland
hay-market
yet those streets, and roads, and squares that have their place in kelly are, after all, only the outer shell which the true lover must break through. if he is a true lover, he will soon understand that london lies behind the streets. he will realise that between two streets there is often more than two rows of houses and of gardens or yards. he will have discovered that in the core of those blocks of masonry lives an inner london. into that core there is but one way, which i will call the slits. we all know slits, little spaces between houses, that lead inwards, you know not whither. you pass them every day, perhaps, and never turn aside, yet through those slits is the way in. there is one, for instance, near notting hill gate. they call it bulmer place, though it is only six feet broad and is buried under an archway. enter; ten yards lead you to an old cottage settlement, where no house exceeds two floors, where each has its garden, its creeper and its cat, where washing floats undisturbed, and, on fine afternoons, public beanoes take place. this is an old london village, caught between the warehouses and shops, yet maintained by the magic law of ancient lights.
there is another slit, less well known, quite near kensington square. to the ordinary eye, kensington square is entirely civilised, and none live there unless they have both money and good taste. in the far south-west corner stands a convent, that stares forth blankly upon this world. but walk south-east and turn to the right, and go on until, past low, white cottages grown10 with sterile vine, you meet a brick wall. on the way, small houses, well locked, that are quiet and green, will have seen you pass without approval. if adventure is not for you, you will turn back on seeing the brick wall; if, however, it is, you will go on, and, on your right, find a slit so small that you may not open your umbrella in it. this they call south end; if you persevere you shall come to rustic cottages of plaster, and at last discover, single-floored against the side of a great block of flats, the cottage and garden where rot two old green, painted figure-heads. there live prunella, mityl, selysette, and their tribe. but go carefully to south end, for the road is fugitive, and i cannot always find it myself. i think i find it only on the days when i am not too impure in heart.
wherever flows london stone the slits exist. a deep, dark archway out of surrey street dives under the norfolk hotel; follow it, go down surrey steps, and you shall come to a water-gate, on which you may yet lean and smell the tar of henry fitz alwyn’s barge. another slit, behind the alexandra hotel, will lead you through old barrack yard (i do not know what barrack) and past low, industrial cottages, to the petrified splendours of belgravia. i wish i knew them all, for i discovered yet another last week, after overlooking it for over sixteen years. it is called st james’s market, and leads off the haymarket, towards the neat elegancies of jermyn street. that does not sound promising; yet, lost among the backs of warehouses and restaurants, there stands a long, low house coated with green plaster; it is a workshop, but some sense of fitness had bidden the workers relieve its green walls with claret curtains. i choose to be sure that in this house axford tried to imprison hannah lightfoot, until the fair quakeress fled to her georgian lover.
and follow the green spot on the map, on the borough map, that cares so much for the borough, so little for the town. the borough map will lead you to green fields where flourish the sardine tin and the wild hyacinth. it will lead you to a churchyard, itself buried between theatres and shops, behind st ann’s,11 soho, where king theodore of corsica has laid his insurgent bones. it will lead you behind the solemnities of south paddington into the vast churchyard behind the little chapel of the ascension. this is open to you all day; there you will find sparse graves, vast lawns and, under the trees, friendly seats where you may dream of death, or, if you prefer, of loves that will companion you to that bourne.
