Peter ackroyd london a biography (v5 0)

List of IllustrationsBLACK-AND-WHITE INSERT I Early Londoner admiring London Stone Guildhall Library, Corporation ofLondon John Stow Guildhall Library, Corporation of London Charter of W

Acclaim for Peter Ackroyd’sLondon: The Biography

“The book requires a leisurely pace; anything quicker would endanger the pleasure to be had from the variety on offer… There is nothing quite like it.”

—The Boston Globe

“Ackroyd gives London a gift, the likes of which more callow cities can only hope, one day, to get.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

“Invariably exciting and immensely enjoyable… Ackroyd coruscates with ideas and fancies… The total e ect is spectacular and vastly stimulating ‘When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.’ The same could be said with equal justice of any reader who nds no pleasure or instruction in Ackroyd’s books.”

—The Spectator

“Ackroyd writes in a wonderfully graphic style that carries the reader through historical byways effortlessly.”

—The Denver Post

“A tour de force by a writer of immense skill… A treasure of information and anecdote about one

of the world’s great cities, a book to be taken up again and again for the pleasures that lie within.”

—The Seattle Times

“Ackroyd deserves great praise for writing a book equal to its gargantuan subject… [It] succeeds on the most expansive and most intimate levels.”

— The Orlando Sentinel

“Packed with strange delights and bizarre occurrences… Ackroyd is a writer of memorable, eccentrically rhythmic sentences that one wants to quote at length.”

—Newsday

“Enthralling… Witty and imaginative.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred)

“Wonderful and weighty… Ackroyd has created a rich celebration of a unique city.”

—The Wall Street Journal

By the same author

FICTION The Great Fire of London The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde

POETRY The Diversions of Purley

CRITICISM Notes for a New Culture

Peter Ackroyd

London

Peter Ackroyd is a bestselling writer of both ction and non ction His most recent books include the biographies

Dickens, Blake, and Thomas More and the novels The Trial of Elizabeth Cree, Milton in America, and The Plato Papers He has won the Whitbread Biography Award, the Royal Society of Literature’s William Heinemann Award

(jointly), the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and The Guardian fiction prize He lives in London.

For Jain Johnston

and

Frederick Nicholas Robertson

3 Holy! Holy! Holy!

The Early Middle Ages

4 You Be All Law Worthy

Onward and Upward

8 Rather Dark and Narrow

9 Packed to Blackness

10 Maps and Antiquarians

Trading Streets and Trading Parishes

11 Where Is the Cheese of Thames Street?

A London Neighbourhood

12 The Crossroads

London as Theatre

13 Show! Show! Show! Show! Show!

14 He Shuld Neuer Trobell the Parish No More

15 Theatrical City

16 Violent Delights

17 Music, Please

18 Signs of the Times

19 All of Them Citizens

Pestilence and Flame

20 A Plague Upon You

21 Painting the Town Red

After the Fire

30 Raw Lobsters and Others

31 Thereby Hangs a Tale

38 Clubbing

39 A Note on Tobacco

40 A Bad Odour

41 You Sexy Thing

42 A Turn of the Dice

London as Crowd

43 Mobocracy

44 What’s New?

The Natural History of London

45 Give the Lydy a Flower

46 Weather Reports

47 A Foggy Day

Night and Day

48 Let There Be Light

49 Night in the City

Black Magic, White Magic

53 I Met a Man Who Wasn’t There

54 Knowledge Is Power

A Fever of Building

55 London Will Soon Be Next Door to Us

56 Nothing Quite Like It

London’s Rivers

57 You Cannot Take the Thames with You

58 Dark Thames

59 They Are Lost

Under the Ground

60 What Lies Beneath

64 They Are Always with Us

65 Can You Spare a Little Something?

66 They Outvoted Me

Women and Children

67 The Feminine Principle

68 Boys and Girls Come Out to Play

Continuities

69 Have You Got the Time?

70 The Tree on the Corner

East and South

71 The Stinking Pile

72 The South Work

The Centre of Empire

73 Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner

74 Empire Day

After the Great War

75 Suburban Dreams

76 War News

Refashioning the City

77 Fortune not Design

Cockney Visionaries

78 Unreal City

79 Resurgam

An Essay on Sources

List of Illustrations

BLACK-AND-WHITE INSERT I

Early Londoner admiring London Stone (Guildhall Library, Corporation ofLondon)

John Stow (Guildhall Library, Corporation of London)

Charter of William I (Corporation of London Records Office)

Marcellus Laroon, Street merchants

Aerial sketch of London, 1560 (Guildhall Library, Corporation of London)

View of London Bridge by Anthonis van den Wyngaerde (Ashmolean Museum,Oxford)

Panorama of London by Hollar (Guildhall Library, Corporation of London)View of Old St Paul’s by Hollar (Guildhall Library/Corporation of London,UK/Bridgeman Art Library)

The Royal Exchange by Hollar (Courtesy of the Museum of London)

Detail of map charting the Great Fire of London, 1666 (Royal Academy of ArtsLibrary, London, UK/Bridgeman Art Library)

17th c remen (Royal Academy of Arts Library, London, UK/Bridgeman ArtLibrary)

Hanging outside of Newgate Prison by Rowlandson (Courtesy of the Museum

of London)

Moll Cut-Purse (Courtesy of the Museum of London)

Newgate Prison (Courtesy of the Museum of London)

National Temperance map of London (Courtesy of the Museum of London)Café Monico, Piccadilly Circus (Courtesy of the Museum of London)

Detail of the City from Braun and Hogenberg’s map of London, 1572(Guildhall Library, Corporation of London, UK/Bridgeman Art Library)

Johann B Homann’s map and prospect of London, 1730 (British Library,London, UK/Bridgeman Art Library)

The Great Fire of London, 1666 aquatint after Philippe de Loutherbourg

(Guildhall Library, Corporation of London, UK/Bridgeman Art Library)

The Burning of the Houses of Parliament, 16th October 1834, J.M.W Turner

(Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA, USA/Bridgeman ArtLibrary)

Jack Sheppard, William Thornhill (Courtesy of the Museum of London)

Tom, Jerry and Logic Visiting Condemned Prisoners of Newgate Prison, George and

Isaac Cruikshank (Guildhall Library, Corporation of London, UK/BridgemanArt Library)

The Curds and Whey Seller, Cheapside, c 1730, British School (Courtesy of the

Museum of London)

The Meat Stall from The London Markets, engraved by M Dubourg after James

Pollard (Guildhall Library, Corporation of London, UK/Bridgeman ArtLibrary)

Smith eld Market, engraved by R.G Reeve after James Pollard (British

Museum, London, UK/Bridgeman Art Library)

The Frozen Thames, c.1677, Abraham Hondius (Courtesy of the Museum of

London)

Punch or May Day, Benjamin Haydon (Tate Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY)

A Rake’s Progress IV: The Arrested, Going to Court, William Hogarth (Courtesy of

the Trustees of Sir John Soane’s Museum, London/Bridgeman Art Library)

The Four Times of Day: Morning, William Hogarth (Upton House, Oxfordshire,

UK/Bridgeman Art Library)

Whitehall and the Privy Gardens from Richmond House, Canaletto (By courtesy of

the Trustees of the Goodwood Collection)

View of the Adelphi from the River Thames, William Marlow (Christie’s Images,

London, UK/Bridgeman Art Library)

COLOR INSERT II

The Laying of the Water Main in Tottenham Court Road, George Scharf (British

Museum, London, UK/Bridgeman Art Library)

The Scavenger’s Lamentation, engraved by A Sharpshooter (Guildhall Library,

Corporation of London)

The Enraged Musician, William Hogarth (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford,

UK/Bridgeman Art Library)

The Railway Station, William Frith (Royal Holloway and Bedford New College,

Surrey, UK/Bridgeman Art Gallery)

The Crowd, Robert Buss (Guildhall Art Gallery, Corporation of London)

Piccadilly Circus, Charles Ginner (Tate Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY)

Hammersmith Bridge on Boat Race Day, Walter Greaves (Tate Gallery,

London/Art Resource, NY)

Noctes Ambrosianae, Walter Sickert (Castle Museum and Art Gallery,

Nottingham, UK/Bridgeman Art Library/© 2001 Artists Rights Society[ARS], New York, NY/DACS, London)

Hammersmith Palais de Danse, Malcolm Drummond (Plymouth City Museum

and Art Gallery)

A Coffee Stall, Chas Hunt (Courtesy of the Museum of London)

The Co ee House, William Ratcli e (Southampton City Art Gallery,

Hampshire, UK/Bridgeman Art Library)

Allen’s Tobacconist Shop, Hart Street, Grosvenor Square, Robert Allen (Courtesy

of the Museum of London)

House, Rachel Whiteread (Anthony d’Offay Gallery)

Two Sleepers, Henry Moore (The Henry Moore Foundation/Walter Hussey

Bequest, Pallant House, Chichester, UK/Bridgeman Art Library)

Devastation, 1941: An East End Street, Graham Sutherland (Tate Gallery,

London/Art Resource, NY)

Canary Wharf, Isle of Dogs, 1991, Alan Delaney (Courtesy of the Museum of

London)

BLACK-AND-WHITE INSERT II

Regent Street in 1886, London Stereoscopic Company (Courtesy of the Museum

of London)

Covent Garden Porters, John Thomson (Courtesy of the Museum of London)

Old houses in Bermondsey

Clerkenwell Green

River scavengers

Women sifting through dust mounds

The Great Wheel, Earl’s Court Exhibition, 1890, Charles Wilson (Courtesy of the

Museum of London)

Children Following a Water Cart, William Whi n (Tower Hamlets Local History

Library)

Boy selling matches

Children Playing Cricket in Alpha Road, Millwall, 1938, Fox Photos

(Hulton/Archive)

A Thoroughbred November and London Particular, engraved by George Hunt

after M Egerton (Guildhall Library/Corporation of London)

Car in smog, Henry Grant (Courtesy of the Museum of London)

A Paraleytic Woman, Géricault (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris)

Protein Man (Davidson/Evening Standard/Hulton/Archive)

Bomb damage in Paternoster Row, 1940 (Cecil Beaton photograph, courtesy

of Sotheby’s London)

Near Spitalfields Market (© Don McCullin/Contact Press)

PART OPENERS

Plan of remains of Roman ship (Courtesy of the Museum of London)

Matthew Paris map of London, 1252 (By permission of the British Library[ROY.14.C.VII f2])

Dore, Ludgate Hill

Tudor depiction of the market at Eastcheap (By permission of the FolgerShakespeare Library)

Mid-16th c map of Moorfields (Courtesy of the Museum of London)

Marcellus Laroon, The Merry Milkmaid

The Rookery of St Giles (Courtesy of the Museum of London)

Punch and Judy puppet show (Courtesy of the Museum of London)

Great Plague of 1665 (Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge)

Christopher Wren and John Evelyn plan of London after the Great Fire, 1666(Courtesy of the Museum of London)

Rowlandson depiction of hanging (Courtesy of the Museum of London)

Rowlandson, Revellers at Vauxhall (Courtesy of the Museum of London)

Gillray caricature of Sheridan as Punch (Guildhall Library, Corporation ofLondon)

Cockney flower seller in Covent Garden (Courtesy of the Museum of London)Dore, vagrants huddled on Westminster Bridge

The Sessions House on Clerkenwell Green (Guildhall Library, Corporation ofLondon)

The burning of Newgate Prison, 1780, Gordon Riots (Guildhall Library,Corporation of London)

Title page of Astrologaster of the Figure Caster by John Melton

Scharf, the building of Carlton House Terrace, c 1830

Girgnion engraving of the Fleet River (Guildhall Library, Corporation ofLondon)

Mayhew, The Sewer Hunter (Courtesy of the Museum of London)

Dore, Seven Dials Slum

Géricault, Pity the Sorrow of a Poor Old Man (Bibliothèque Nationale de France,

Paris)

The Mud-lark (Courtesy of the Museum of London)

Scharf, The Original Oyster Shop

Whistler, Billingsgate (Courtesy of the Museum of London)

Hogarth, A Harlot’s Progress

London Underground poster, 1929

St Paul’s Cathedral (Imperial War Museum, London)

Poster for the Lansbury Council Estate in Poplar (Courtesy of the Museum ofLondon)

Tribute to Christopher Wren (Guildhall Library, Corporation of London)

BC

54 Caesar’s first expedition to Britain

AD

41 The Roman invasion of Britain

43 The naming of Londinium

60 The burning of London by Boudicca

61–122 The rebuilding of London

120 The Hadrianic fire of London c.

c 190 The building of the great wall

407 The Roman withdrawal from London

457 Britons flee London to evade the Saxons

490 Saxon domination over London

587 Augustine’s mission to London

604 Foundation of a bishopric, and St Paul’s, in London

672 Reference to “the port of London.” The growth of Lundenwic

851 London stormed by Vikings

886 Alfred retakes and rebuilds London

892 Londoners repel Danish invasion fleet

959 A great fire in London: St Paul’s burned

994 Siege of London by Danish forces

1013 The second siege of London, by conquering Sweyn

1016 Third siege of London by Cnut, repulsed

1035 Harold I elected king by Londoners

1050 The rebuilding of Westminster Abbey

1065 Dedication of Westminster Abbey

1066 The taking of London by William the Conqueror

1078 The building of the White Tower

1123 Rahere establishes St Bartholomew’s

1176 The building of a stone bridge

1191 The establishment of a London commune

1193–1212 The first mayor of London, Henry Fitz-Ailwin

1220 Rebuilding of Westminster Abbey

1290 Expulsion of the Jews; Eleanor Crosses set up at Chepe and CharingCross

1326 The London revolution: deposition of Edward II

1348 The Black Death kills one-third of London’s population

1371 Charterhouse founded

1373 Chaucer living above Aldgate

1381 Wat Tyler’s revolt

1397 Richard Whittington first elected mayor

1406 Plague in London

1414 The Lollard revolt

1442 The Strand is paved

1450 Jack Cade’s revolt

1476 The establishment of Caxton’s printing press

1484 The sweating sickness in London

1485 Henry VII enters London in triumph after the Battle of Bosworth

1509 Henry VIII ascends the throne

1535 Execution of Thomas More on Tower Hill

1535–9 The spoilation of London’s monasteries and churches

1544 Wyngaerde’s great panorama of London

1576 The building of the Theatre in Shoreditch

1598 Publication of Stow’s Survey of London

1608–13 The construction of the New River

1619–22 The building of Inigo Jones’s Banqueting House

1642–3 The construction of earthen walls, and forts, against the king’s army

1649 Execution of Charles I

1652 The emergence of the coffee house

1663 The building of a theatre in Drury Lane

1665 The Great Plague

1666 The Great Fire

1694 The foundation of the Bank of England

1733 The covering of the Fleet River

1750 The building of Westminster Bridge

1756 The construction of the New Road

1769 The building of Blackfriars Bridge

1769–70 Wilkite agitation in London

1774 The London Building Act

1780 The Gordon Riots

1799 The establishment of the West India Dock Company

1800 The foundation of the Royal College of Surgeons

1801 London’s population reaches one million

1809 Gas-lighting instituted in Pall Mall

1816 Radicals meet at Spa Fields: riots in Spitalfields

1824 National Gallery founded

1825 Nash rebuilds Buckingham Palace

1829 London Metropolitan Police Force founded

1834 Houses of Parliament destroyed by fire

1836 University of London established

1851 The Great Exhibition opened in Hyde Park

1858 The “great stink” leads to Bazalgette’s sanitary engineering

1863 The opening of the world’s first underground railway

1878 The advent of electric lighting

1882 The emergence of the electric tram-car

1887 “Bloody Sunday” demonstrations in Trafalgar Square

1888 The appearance of Jack the Ripper in Whitechapel

1889 The establishment of the London County Council

1892 The beginning of the Blackwall Tunnel under the Thames

1897 The emergence of the motor-omnibus

1901 Population of London reaches 6.6 million

1905 Epidemic of typhus Aldwych and Kingsway opened to traffic

1906 Suffragettes demonstrate in Parliament Square

1909 The opening of Selfridge’s department store

1911 The siege of Sidney Street

1913 The inauguration of the Chelsea Flower Show

1915 The first bombs fall on London

1926 The General Strike

1932 The building of Broadcasting House in Portland Place for the BBC

1935 The inauguration of the Green Belt

1936 The battle of Cable Street

1940 The beginning of the London Blitz

1951 The Festival of Britain on the South Bank

1952 The great smog

1955 The opening of Heathrow Airport

1965 The abolition of the London County Council; creation of the GreaterLondon Council

1967 The closure of the East India Dock; the building of Centre Point

1981 The Brixton riots; the establishment of the London DocklandsDevelopment Corporation

1985 Broadwater Farm riots

1986 Completion of M25 ringway; abolition of GLC; the “big bang” in theStock Exchange

1987 The building of Canary Wharf

2000 Mayoral elections

The author and publisher are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce illustrative material which appears in the text pages: Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, 587; British Library, 43; Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C., 81; Guildhall, 383, 455, 471, 529, 751; Imperial War Museum, 721; Magdalene College, Cambridge, 191; Museum of London, 5, 89, 121, 135, 219, 237, 297, 403, 551, 613, 661, 735.

The author and publisher are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce copyright material: Italo

Calvino, Invisible Cities (Secker & 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 ap: 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 Maccles eld Street, Soho, 1883, by Henry Dixon; Su ragette Demonstration in Trafalgar

Square, c.1908, © Museum of London; Simpson’s of Piccadilly; John Lewis, Oxford Street © Matthew Weinreb;

inside ap: 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 e ort to trace the owners of copyright, they will be happy to rectify any errors or omissions in further editions.

The City as Body

he 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 con dence 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 re engines spouted water like blood from a cut artery Metaphorical images of the Cockney body have circulated for many hundreds of years: “gob” was rst 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.

Some will object that such a biography can form no part of a true history I admit the fault and plead in my

defence that I have subdued the style of my enquiry to the nature of the subject London is a labyrinth, half of stone and half of esh It cannot be conceived in its entirety but can be experienced only as a wilderness of alleys and passages, courts and thoroughfares, in which even the most experienced citizen may lose the way; it is curious, too, that this labyrinth is in a continual state of change and expansion.

The biography of London also de es chronology Contemporary theorists have suggested that linear time is itself a gment of the human imagination, but London has already anticipated their conclusions There are many

di erent forms of time in the city, and it would be foolish of me to change its character for the sake of creating a conventional narrative That is why this book moves quixotically through time, itself forming a labyrinth If the history of London poverty is beside a history of London madness, then the connections may provide more significant information than any orthodox historiographical survey.

Chapters of history resemble John Bunyan’s little wicket-gates, while all around lie sloughs of despond and valleys of humiliation So I will sometimes stray from the narrow path in search of those heights and depths of urban experience that know no history and are rarely susceptible to rational analysis I understand a little, and I trust that it will prove enough I am not a Virgil prepared to guide aspiring Dantes around a de ned and circular kingdom I am only one stumbling Londoner who wishes to lead others in the directions which I have pursued over a lifetime.

The readers of this book must wander and wonder They may become lost upon the way; they may experience moments of uncertainty, and on occasions strange fantasies or theories may bewilder them On certain streets various eccentric or vulnerable people will pause beside them, pleading for attention There will be anomalies and contradictions—London is so large and so wild that it contains no less than everything—just as there will be irresolutions and ambiguities But there will also be moments of revelation, when the city will be seen to harbour the secrets of the human world Then it is wise to bow down before the immensity So we set o in anticipation,

with the milestone pointing ahead of us “To London.”

Peter Ackroyd London March 2000

From Prehistory to 1066

The relics of past ages have been found beneath many areas of London; they are the

foundations upon which it rests

CHAPTER 1

The Sea!

f you were to touch the plinth upon which the equestrian statue of King Charles I is

placed, at Charing Cross, your ngers might rest upon the projecting fossils of sealilies, star sh or sea urchins There is a photograph of that statue taken in 1839;with its images of hackney cabs and small boys in stove-pipe hats the scene alreadyseems remote, and yet how unimaginably distant lies the life of those tiny marinecreatures In the beginning was the sea There was once a music-hall song entitled “WhyCan’t We Have the Sea in London?,” but the question is redundant; the site of thecapital, fifty million years before, was covered by great waters

The waters have not wholly departed, even yet, and there is evidence of their life inthe weathered stones of London The Portland stone of the Customs House and St.Pancras Old Church has a diagonal bedding which re ects the currents of the ocean;there are ancient oyster shells within the texture of Mansion House and the BritishMuseum Seaweed can still be seen in the greyish marble of Waterloo Station, and theforce of hurricanes may be detected in the “chatter-marked” stone of pedestriansubways In the fabric of Waterloo Bridge, the bed of the Upper Jurassic Sea can also beobserved The tides and storms are still all around us, therefore, and as Shelley wrote ofLondon “that great sea … still howls on for more.”

London has always been a vast ocean in which survival is not certain The dome of St.Paul’s has been seen trembling upon a “vague troubled sea” of fog, while dark streams

of people ow over London Bridge, or Waterloo Bridge, and emerge as torrents in thenarrow thoroughfares of London The social workers of the mid-nineteenth centuryspoke of rescuing “drowning” people in Whitechapel or Shoreditch and Arthur Morrison,

a novelist of the same period, invokes a “howling sea of human wreckage” crying out to

be saved Henry Peacham, the seventeenth-century author of The Art of Living in London,

considered the city as “a vast sea, full of gusts, fearful-dangerous shelves and rocks,”while in 1810 Louis Simond was content to “listen to the roar of its waves, breakingaround us in measured time.”

If you look from a distance, you observe a sea of roofs, and have no more knowledge

of the dark streams of people than of the denizens of some unknown ocean But the city

is always a heaving and restless place, with its own torrents and billows, its foam and

spray The sound of its streets is like the murmur from a sea shell and in the great fogs

of the past the citizens believed themselves to be lying on the oor of the ocean Evenamid all the lights it may simply be what George Orwell described as “the ocean bottom,among the luminous, gliding shes.” This is a constant vision of the London world,particularly in the novels of the twentieth century, where feelings of hopelessness anddespondency turn the city into a place of silence and mysterious depths

Yet, like the sea and the gallows, London refuses nobody Those who venture upon itscurrents look for prosperity or fame, even if they often founder in its depths JonathanSwift depicted the jobbers of the Exchange as traders waiting for shipwrecks in order tostrip the dead, while the commercial houses of the City often used a ship or boat as aweather-vane and as a sign of good fortune Three of the most common emblems inurban cemeteries are the shell, the ship and the anchor

The starlings of Trafalgar Square are also the starlings who nest in the cli faces ofnorthern Scotland The pigeons of London are descended from the wild rock-doves wholived among the steep cli s of the northern and western shores of this island For themthe buildings of the city are cli s still, and the streets are the endless sea stretchingbeyond them But the real con uence lies in this—that London, for so long the arbiter oftrade and of the sea, should have upon its fabric the silent signature of the tides andwaves

And when the waters parted, the London earth was revealed In 1877, in a

characteristically grand example of Victorian engineering, a vast well was taken down1,146 feet at the southern end of Tottenham Court Road It travelled hundreds ofmillions of years, touching the primeval landscapes of this city site, and from itsevidence we can list the layers beneath our feet from the Devonian to the Jurassic andthe Cretaceous Above these strata lie 650 feet of chalk, outcrops of which can be seenupon the Downs or the Chilterns as the rim of the London Basin, that shallow saucer-likedeclivity in which the city rests On top of the chalk itself lies the thick London claywhich is in turn covered by deposits of gravel and brick-earth Here, then, is the making

of the city in more than one sense; the clay and the chalk and the brick-earth have foralmost two thousand years been employed to construct the houses and public buildings

of London It is almost as if the city raised itself from its primeval origin, creating ahuman settlement from the senseless material of past time

This clay is burned and compressed into “London Stock,” the particular yellow-brown

or red brick that has furnished the material of London housing It truly represents the

genius loci, and Christopher Wren suggested that “the earth around London, rightly

managed, will yield as good brick as were the Roman bricks … and will endure, in ourair, beyond any stone our island a ords.” William Blake called the bricks of London

“well-wrought a ections” by which he meant that the turning of clay and chalk into thefabric of the streets was a civilising process which knit the city with its primeval past.The houses of the seventeenth century are made out of dust that drifted over the London

region in a glacial era 25,000 years before.

The London clay can yield more tangible evidence, also: the skeletons of sharks (inthe East End it was popularly believed that shark’s teeth might cure cramp), the skull of

a wolf in Cheapside, and crocodiles in the clay of Islington In 1682 Dryden recognisedthis now forgotten and invisible landscape of London:

Yet monsters from thy large increase we find

Engender’d on the Slyme thou leav’st behind.

Eight years later, in 1690, the remains of a mammoth were found beside what has sincebecome King’s Cross

London clay can by the alchemy of weather become mud, and in 1851 Charles Dickensnoted that there was so “much mud in the streets … that it would not be wonderful tomeet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard upHolborn Hill.” In the 1930s Louis-Ferdinand Céline took the motor buses of PiccadillyCircus to be a “herd of mastodons” returning to the territory they had left behind In

Mother London Michael Moorcock’s late twentieth-century hero sees “monsters, by mud

and giant ferns” while crossing the footbridge alongside the Hungerford railway bridge.The mammoth of 1690 was only the first primeval relic to be discovered in the Londonregion Hippopotami and elephants lay beneath Trafalgar Square, lions at CharingCross, and bu aloes beside St Martin-in-the-Fields A brown bear was discovered innorth Woolwich, mackerel in the old brick elds of Holloway and sharks in Brentford.The wild animals of London include reindeer, giant beavers, hyenas and rhinoceri whichonce grazed by the swamps and lagoons of the Thames And that landscape has notentirely faded Within recent memory the mist from the ancient marshes of Westminsterdestroyed the frescoes of St Stephen’s It is still possible, beside the National Gallery, todetect the rise of ground between the middle and upper terraces of the Thames in thePleistocene era

This was not, even then, an unpeopled region Within the bones of the King’s Crossmammoth were also found pieces of a int hand-axe which can be dated to thePalaeolithic period We can say with some certainty that for half a million years therehas been in London a pattern of habitation and hunting if not of settlement The rstgreat re of London was started, a quarter of a million years ago, in the forests south ofthe Thames That river had by then taken its appointed course but not its laterappearance; it was very broad, fed by many streams, occluded by forests, bordered byswamps and marshes

The prehistory of London invites endless speculation and there is a certain pleasure to

be derived from the prospect of human settlement in areas where, many thousands ofyears later, streets would be laid out and houses erected There is no doubt that theregion has been continually occupied for at least fteen thousand years A greatgathering of int tools, excavated in Southwark, is assumed to mark the remains of aMesolithic manufactory; a hunting camp of the same period has been discovered upon

Hampstead Heath; a pottery bowl from the Neolithic period was unearthed in Clapham.

On these ancient sites have been found pits and post-holes, together with humanremains and evidence of feasting These early people drank a potion similar to mead orbeer Like their London descendants, they left vast quantities of rubbish everywhere.Like them, too, they met for the purposes of worship For many thousands of years theseancient peoples treated the great river as a divine being to be placated and surrendered

to its depths the bodies of their illustrious dead

In the late Neolithic period there appeared, from the generally marshy soil on the

northern bank of the Thames, twin hills covered by gravel and brick-earth, surrounded

by sedge and willow They were forty to fty feet in height, and were divided by avalley through which owed a stream We know them as Cornhill and Ludgate Hill, withthe now buried Walbrook running between Thus emerged London

The name is assumed to be of Celtic origin, awkward for those who believe that therewas no human settlement here before the Romans built their city Its actual meaning,

however, is disputed It might be derived from Llyndon, the town or stronghold (don) by the lake or stream (Llyn); but this owes more to medieval Welsh than ancient Celtic Its provenance might be Laindon, “long hill,” or the Gaelic lunnd, “marsh.” One of the more

intriguing speculations, given the reputation for violence which Londoners were later to

acquire, is that the name is derived from the Celtic adjective londos meaning “fierce.”

There is a more speculative etymology which gives the honour of naming to King Lud,who is supposed to have reigned in the century of the Roman invasion He laid out thecity’s streets and rebuilt its walls Upon his death he was buried beside the gate which

bore his name, and the city became known as Kaerlud or Kaerlundein, “Lud’s City.”

Those of sceptical cast of mind may be inclined to dismiss such narratives but thelegends of a thousand years may contain profound and particular truths

The origin of the name, however, remains mysterious (It is curious, perhaps, that thename of the mineral most associated with the city—coal—also has no certainderivation.) With its syllabic power, so much suggesting force or thunder, it has

continually echoed through history—Caer Ludd, Lundunes, Lindonion, Lundene, Lundone,

Ludenberk, Longidinium, and a score of other variants There have even been suggestions

that the name is more ancient than the Celts themselves, and that it springs from someNeolithic past

We must not necessarily assume that there were settlements or defended enclosuresupon Ludgate Hill or Cornhill, or that there were wooden trackways where there arenow great avenues, but the attractions of the site might have been as obvious in thethird and fourth millennia BC as they were to the later Celts and Romans The hills werewell defended, forming a natural plateau, with the river to the south, fens to the north,marshes to the east, and another river, later known as the Fleet, to the west It wasfertile ground, well watered by springs bubbling up through the gravel The Thames waseasily navigable at this point, with the Fleet and the Walbrook providing natural

harbours The ancients trackways of England were also close at hand So from earliesttime London was the most appropriate site for trade, for markets, and for barter TheCity has for much of its history been the centre of world commerce; it is perhapsinstructive to note that it may have begun with the transactions of Stone Age people intheir own markets.

All this is speculation, not altogether uninformed, but evidence of a more substantialkind has been discovered in later levels of London earth In those long stretches of timedesignated as the “Late Bronze Age” and the “Early Iron Age”—a period spanningalmost a thousand years—shards and fragments of bowls, and pots, and tools, were leftall over London There are signs of prehistoric activity in the areas now known as St.Mary Axe and Gresham Street, Austin Friars and Finsbury Circus, Bishopsgate andSeething Lane, with altogether some 250 “ nds” clustered in the area of the twin hillstogether with Tower Hill and Southwark From the Thames itself many hundreds ofmetal objects have been retrieved, while along its banks is to be found frequentevidence of metal-working This is the period from which the great early legends ofLondon spring It is also, in its latter phase, the age of the Celts

In the rst century BC, Julius Caesar’s description of the region around Londonsuggests the presence of an elaborate, rich and well-organised tribal civilisation Itspopulation was “exceedingly large” and “the ground thickly studded with homesteads.”The nature and role of the twin hills throughout this period cannot with certainty begiven; perhaps these were sacred places, or perhaps their well-de ned position allowedthem to be used as hill-forts in order to protect the trade carried along the river There isevery reason to suppose that this area of the Thames was a centre of commerce and ofindustry, with a market in iron products as well as elaborate workings in bronze, withmerchants from Gaul, Rome and Spain bringing Samian ware, wine and spices inexchange for corn, metals and slaves

In the history of this period completed by Geo rey of Monmouth in 1136, theprincipal city in the island of Britain is undoubtedly London But according to modernscholars his work is established upon lost texts, apocryphal embellishments anduninformed conjecture Where Geo rey speaks of kings, for example, they prefer thenomenclature of tribes; he dates events by means of biblical parallel, while they provideindicators such as “Late Iron Age”; he elucidates patterns of conflict and social change interms of individual human passion, where more recent accounts of prehistory rely uponmore abstract principles of trade and technology The approaches may be contradictorybut they are not necessarily incompatible It is believed by historians of early Britain,for example, that a people known as the Trinovantes settled on territory to the north ofthe London region Curiously enough, Geo rey states that the rst name of the city wasTrinovantum He also mentions the presence of temples within London itself; even ifthey had existed, these palisades and wooden enclosures would since have been lostbeneath the stone of the Roman city as well as the brick and cement of succeedinggenerations

But nothing is wholly lost In the rst four decades of the twentieth century there was

a particular e ort by prehistorians to discover something of London’s supposedly hidden

past In books such as The Lost Language of London, Legendary London, Prehistoric London and The Earlier Inhabitants of London, tokens and traces of a Celtic or Druidic London

were thoroughly examined and were found signi cant These studies were e ectivelykilled o by the Second World War, after which urban planning and regenerationbecame more important than urban speculation But the original works survive, and stillrepay close study The fact that existing street names may betray a Celtic origin—ColinDeep Lane, Pancras Lane, Maiden Lane, Ingal Road among them—is, for example, asinstructive as any of the material “ nds” recorded on the site of the ancient city Long-forgotten trackways have guided the course of modern thoroughfares; the crossroads atthe Angel, Islington, for example, marks the point where two prehistoric British roadsintersected We know of Old Street leading to Old Ford, of Maiden Lane crossingthrough Pentonville and Battle Bridge to Highgate, of the route from Upper Street toHighbury, all following the same ancient tracks and buried paths

Yet there is no more suspect or di cult subject, in the context of this period, than

Druidism That it was well established in Celtic settlements is not in doubt; JuliusCaesar, who was in a position to speak with some authority on the subject, stated that

the Druid religion was founded (inventa) in Britain and that its Celtic adherents came to

this island in order to be educated in its mysteries It represented a highly advanced, ifsomewhat insular, religious culture Of course we might speculate that the oak woodland

to the north of the twin hills provided a suitable site for sacri ce and worship; oneantiquary, Sir Laurence Gomme, has envisaged a temple or sacred space upon LudgateHill itself But there are many false trails It was once generally agreed that ParliamentHill near Highgate was a place for religious assembly, but in fact the remnants whichhave been discovered there do not date from prehistory The Chislehurst caves in southLondon, once reputed to be of Druid origin connected in some fashion with theobservation of the heavens, are almost certainly of medieval construction

It has been suggested that the London area was controlled from three sacred mounds;they are named as Penton Hill, Tothill and the White Mound, otherwise known as TowerHill Any such theory can readily be dismissed as nonsense, but there are curiousparallels and coincidences which render it more interesting than the usual fantasies oflatter-day psychogeographers

It is known that in prehistoric worship a holy place was marked by a spring, a groveand a well or ritual shaft

There is a reference to a “shrubby maze” in the pleasure gardens of White ConduitHouse, situated on the high ground of Pentonville, and a maze’s avatar was a sacred hill

or grove Close at hand is the famous well of Sadlers Wells In recent days the water ofthis well owed under the orchestra pit of the theatre but, from medieval times, it wasconsidered holy and was tended by the priests of Clerkenwell The site of the high

ground in Pentonville was also once a reservoir; it was until recently the headquarters

of the London Water Board

Another maze was to be found in the area once known as Tothill Fields inWestminster; it is depicted in Hollar’s view of the area in the mid-seventeenth century.Here also is a sacred spring, deriving from the “holy well” in Dean’s Yard, Westminster

A fair, similar to the pleasure gardens upon White Conduit Fields, was established here

at an early date; the first extant reference is dated 1257

The sites are, therefore, comparable There are other suggestive coincidences On oldmaps, “St Hermit’s Hill” is a noticeable feature of the area beside Tothill Fields To thisday, there is a Hermes Street at the top of the Pentonville Road It is perhaps alsointeresting that in a house on this site dwelled a physician who promoted a medicineknown as the “Balsam of Life”; the house was later turned into an observatory

On Tower Hill there was a spring of clear bubbling water, reputed to possess curativeproperties A medieval well exists there, and traces of a Late Iron Age burial have beenuncovered There is no maze but the place has its own share of Celtic legends; according

to the Welsh Triads the guardian head of Bran the Blessed is interred within the White

Hill to safeguard the kingdom from its enemies London’s legendary founder Brutus,also, was supposed to have been buried on Tower Hill, in sacred ground that was used

as an observatory until the seventeenth century

The etymology of Penton Hill and Tothill is reasonably certain Pen is the Celtic signi er for head or hill, while ton is a variant of tor/tot/ twt/too, which means spring or rising ground (Wycli e applies the words tot or tote, for example, to Mount Zion.) Those of a more romantic disposition have suggested that tot is derived from the

Egyptian god Thoth who is of course reincarnated in Hermes, the Greek personi cation

of the wind or the music of the lyre

Here, then, is the hypothesis: London mounds, which bear so many similarcharacteristics, are in fact the holy sites of Druid ritual The maze is the sacredequivalent of the oak grove, while the wells and springs represent the worship of thegod of the water The London Water Board was, then, well situated Pleasure gardensand fairs are more recent versions of those prehistoric festivals or meetings which wereheld upon the same ground So antiquaries have named Tothill, Penton and Tower Hill

as the holy places of London

It is generally assumed, of course, that Pentonville is named after an century speculator, Henry Penton, who developed the area Can one place assume

eighteenth-di erent identities, existing in eighteenth-di erent times and in eighteenth-di erent visions of reality? Is it

possible that both explanations of Pentonville are true simultaneously? Might

Billingsgate be named after the Celtic king Belinus or Belin, as the great century antiquary John Stow would have it, or after a Mr Beling, who once owned theland? Can Ludgate really bear the name of Lud, a Celtic god of the waters? Certainlythere is room for contemplation here

sixteenth-It is equally important to look for evidence of continuity sixteenth-It is likely that there was

antiquity of worship among the Britons long before the Druids emerged as the highpriests of their culture, and in turn Celtic forms of ritual seem to have survived theRoman occupation and subsequent invasions by the Saxon tribes In the records of St.

Paul’s Cathedral the adjacent buildings are known as “Camera Dianae.” A

fteenth-century chronicler recalled a time when “London worships Diana,” the goddess of thehunt, which is at least one explanation for the strange annual ceremony that took place

at St Paul’s as late as the sixteenth century There, in the Christian temple erected onthe sacred site of Ludgate Hill, a stag’s head was impaled upon a spear and carriedabout the church; it was then received upon the steps of the church by priests wearinggarlands of owers upon their heads So the pagan customs of London survived intorecorded history, just as a latent paganism survived among the citizens themselves

One other inheritance from prehistoric worship may also be considered The sense ofcertain places as being powerful or venerable was taken over by the Christians in therecognition of “holy wells” and in such ceremonies of territorial piety as “beating thebounds.” Yet the same sensibility is to be found in the writings of the great Londonvisionaries, from William Blake to Arthur Machen, writings in which the city itself isconsidered to be a sacred place with its own joyful and sorrowful mysteries

In this Celtic period, which lurks like some chimera in the shadows of the knownworld, the great legends of London nd their origin The historical record knows only ofwarring tribes within a highly organised culture of some sophistication They were notnecessarily savage, in other words, and the Greek geographer Strabo describes oneBriton, an ambassador, as well dressed, intelligent and agreeable He spoke Greek withsuch uency that “you would have thought he had been bred up in the lyceum.” This isthe proper context for those narratives in which London is accorded the status of aprincipal city Brutus, in legend the founder of the city, was buried within London’swalls Locrinus kept his lover, Estrildis, in a secret chamber beneath the ground Bladud,who practised sorcery, constructed a pair of wings with which to y through the air ofLondon; yet he fell against the roof of the Temple of Apollo situated in the very heart ofthe city, perhaps on Ludgate Hill itself Another king, Dunvallo, who formulated theancient laws of sanctuary, was buried beside a London temple From this period, too,came the narratives of Lear and of Cymbeline More powerful still is the legend of thegiant Gremagot who by some strange alchemy was transformed into the twins Gog andMagog, who became tutelary spirits of London It has often been suggested that each ofthis characteristically ferocious pair, whose statues have stood for many centuries withinthe Guildhall, guards one of the twin hills of London

Such stories are recorded by John Milton in The History of Britain, published a little more than three hundred years ago “After this, Brutus in a chosen place builds Troia

nova, chang’d in time to Trinovantum, now London: and began to enact Laws; Heli beeing

then high Priest in Judaea: and having govern’d the whole Ile 24 Years, dy’d, and was buried in his new Troy.” Brutus was the great-grandson of Aeneas who, some years after

the fall of Troy, led the exodus of Trojans from Greece; in the course of his exilicwanderings he was granted a dream in which the goddess Diana spoke words of

prophecy to him: an island far to the west, beyond the realm of Gaul, “ tts thy people”;you are to sail there, Brutus, and establish a city which will become another Troy “And

Kings be born of thee, whose dredded might shall aw the World, and Conquer Nations

bold.” London is to maintain a world empire but, like ancient Troy, it may su er someperilous burning It is interesting that paintings of London’s Great Fire in 1666 makespeci c allusion to the fall of Troy This is indeed the central myth of London’s originwhich can be found in the sixth-century verses of “Tallisen,” where the British arecelebrated as the living remnant of Troy, as well as in the later poetry of EdmundSpenser and of Alexander Pope Pope, born in Plough Court beside Lombard Street, was

of course invoking a visionary urban civilisation; yet it is one highly appropriate for acity first vouchsafed to Brutus in a dream

The narrative of Brutus has been dismissed as mere fable and fanciful legend but, asMilton wrote in the judicious introduction to his own history, “oft-times relationsheertofore accounted fabulous have bin after found to contain in them many foot-steps,and reliques of something true.” Some scholars believe that we can date the wanderings

of the apparently legendary Brutus to the period around 1100 BC In contemporaryhistoriographical terms this marks the period of the Late Bronze Age when new bands ortribes of settlers occupied the area around London; they constructed large defensiveenclosures and maintained an heroic life of mead-halls, ring-giving and furious ghtingwhich found expression in later legends Segmented glass beads, like those of Troy, havebeen discovered in England In the waters of the Thames was found a black two-handledcup; its provenance lies in Asia Minor, with an approximate date of 900 BC So there issome indication of trade between western Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, andthere is every reason to suppose that Phrygian or later Phoenician merchants reachedthe shores of Albion and sailed into the market of London

Material evidence of an association with Troy itself, and with the region of AsiaMinor in which that ancient doomed city resided, can be found elsewhere DiogenesLaertius identi ed the Celts with the Chaldees of Assyria; indeed the famous Britishmotif comprising the lion and the unicorn may be of Chaldean origin Caesar noted,

with some surprise, that the Druids made use of Greek letters In the Welsh Triads there

is a description of an invading tribe who have travelled to the shores of Albion, orEngland, from the region of Constantinople It is suggestive, perhaps, that the Franksand Gauls also claimed Trojan ancestry Although it is not altogether out of the questionthat a tribe from the region of fallen Troy migrated to western Europe, it is more likely,perhaps, that the Celtic people themselves had their origins in the easternMediterranean The legend of London, as a new Troy, is therefore still able to claimsome adherents

At the beginning of any civilisation there are fables and legends; only at the end arethey proved to be accurate

One token of Brutus and his Trojan eet may still remain If you walk east downCannon Street, on the other side from the railway station, you will nd an iron grille set

within the Bank of China It protects a niche upon which has been placed a stoneroughly two feet in height, bearing a faint groove mark upon its top This is LondonStone For many centuries it was popularly believed to be the stone of Brutus, brought

by him as a deity “So long as the stone of Brutus is safe,” ran one city proverb, “so longshall London ourish.” Certainly the stone is of great antiquity; the rst reference to itwas discovered by John Stow in a “fair written Gospel book” once belonging toEthelstone, an early tenth-century king of the West Saxons, where certain lands and

rents are “described to lie near unto London stone.” According to the Victorian County

History it originally marked the very centre of the old city, but in 1742 was taken from

the middle of Cannon Street and placed within the fabric of St Swithin’s Churchopposite There it remained until the Second World War; although a German bombentirely destroyed the church in 1941, London Stone remained intact It is constructed ofoolite which, as a perishable stone, cannot be assumed to have survived since prehistorictimes Yet it has been granted a charmed life

There is a verse by the fteenth-century poet, Fabyan, which celebrates the religioussigni cance of a stone so pure that “though some have it thrette … Yet hurte had none.”Its actual significance, however, remains unclear Some antiquaries have considered it to

be a token of civic assembly, connected with the repayment of debts, while others

believe it to be a Roman milliarium or milestone Christopher Wren argued, however,

that it possessed too large a foundation for the latter purpose A judicial role is more

likely In a now forgotten play of 1589, Pasquill and Marfarius, a character remarks: “Set

up this bill at London Stone Let it be doone sollemly with drom and trumpet” and thenagain “If it please them these dark winter nights to stikke uppe their papers upponLondon Stone.” That it became a highly venerated object is not in doubt William Blakewas convinced that it marked the site of Druid executions, whose sacri cial victims

“groan’d aloud on London Stone,” but its uses were perhaps less melancholy

When the popular rebel Jack Cade stormed London in 1450, he and his followersmade their way to the Stone; he touched it with his sword and then exclaimed: “Now isMortimer”—this was the name he had assumed—“lord of this city!” The rst mayor ofLondon, in the late twelfth century, was Henry Fitz-Ailwin de Londonestone It seemslikely, therefore, that this ancient object came somehow to represent the power andauthority of the city

It sits now, blackened and disregarded, by the side of a busy thoroughfare; over andaround it have owed wooden carts, carriages, sedan chairs, hansom cabs, cabriolets,hackney cabs, omnibuses, bicycles, trams and cars It was once London’s guardian spirit,and perhaps it is still

It is at least a material remnant from all the ancient legends of London and of itsfoundation For the Celtic people these narratives comprised the glory of a city onceknown as “Cockaigne.” In this place of wealth and delight the traveller might nd richesand blessed happiness This is the myth that established the context for later legends,such as those of Dick Whittington, as well as those unattributable proverbs whichdescribe London’s streets as “paved with gold.” Yet London gold has proved more

perishable than London Stone.

CHAPTER 2

The Stones

section of the original London Wall, with medieval additions, can still be seen by

Trinity Place just north of the Tower of London; part of the Tower itself wasincorporated within the fabric of the wall, demonstrating in material formWilliam Dunbar’s claim that “Stony be thy wallys that about thee standis.” It wasalmost ten feet wide at its base, and more than twenty feet in height; besides these relics

of the wall by Trinity Place can be seen the stone outline of an inner tower whichcontained a wooden staircase leading to a parapet which looked east across themarshes

From here the spectral wall, the wall as once it was, can be traversed in theimagination It proceeds north to Cooper’s Row, where a section can still be seen in thecourtyard of an empty building; it rises from a car park in the basement It goes throughthe concrete and marble of the building, then on through the brick and iron of theFenchurch Street Station viaduct until an extant section rises again in America Square It

is concealed within the basement of a modern building which itself has parapets, turretsand square towers; a strip of glazed red tiling bears more than a passing resemblance tothe courses of at red tiles placed in the ancient Roman structure For a moment it isknown as Crosswall and passes through the headquarters of a company named Equitas

It moves through Vine Street (in the car park at No 35 is a security camera on theancient line of the now invisible wall), towards Jewry Street, which itself follows theline of the wall almost exactly until it meets Aldgate; all the buildings here can be said

to comprise a new wall, separating west from east We nd Centurion House and Boots,the chemist

The steps of the subway at Aldgate lead down to a level which was once that of latemedieval London but we follow the wall down Duke’s Place and into Bevis Marks; nearthe intersection of these two thoroughfares there is now part of that “ring of steel”which is designed once more to protect the city On a sixteenth-century map Bevis Markswas aligned to the course of the wall, and it is so still; the pattern of the streets here hasbeen unchanged for many hundreds of years Even the lanes, such as Heneage Lane,remain At the corner of Bevis Marks and St Mary Axe rises a building of white marblewith massive vertical windows; a great golden eagle can be seen above its entrance, as

if it were part of some imperial standard Security cameras once more trace the line ofthe wall, as it leads down Camomile Street towards Bishopsgate and Wormwood Street.

It drops beneath the churchyard of St Botolph’s, behind a building faced with whitestone and curtain-walling of dark glass, but then fragments of it arise beside the church

of All Hallows-on-the-Wall, which has been built, in the ancient fashion, to protect andbless these defences The modern thoroughfare here becomes known, at last, as LondonWall A tower like a postern of brown stone rises above 85 London Wall, very close tothe spot where a fourth-century bastion was only recently found, but the line of the wallfrom Blom eld Street to Moorgate largely comprises late nineteenth-century o ceaccommodation Bethlehem Hospital, or Bedlam, was once built against the north side ofthe wall; but that, too, has disappeared Yet it is impossible not to feel the presence orforce of the wall as you walk down this straightened thoroughfare which can be dated tothe later period of the Roman occupation A new London Wall then opens up afterMoorgate, built over the ruins of the Second World War The bombs themselves

e ectively uncovered long-buried remnants of the ancient wall, and stretches both ofRoman and medieval origin can still be seen covered with grass and moss But these oldstones are anked by the glittering marble and polished stone of the new buildings thatdominate the city

Around the site of the great Roman fort, at the north-west angle of the wall, therenow arise these new fortresses and towers: Roman House, Britannic Tower, City Tower,Alban Gate (which by the slightest substitution might be renamed Albion Gate) and theconcrete and granite towers of the Barbican which have once more brought a sublimebareness and brutality to that area where the Roman legions were sequestered Even thewalkways of this great expanse are approximately the same height as the parapets ofthe old city wall

The wall then turns south, and long sections of it can still be seen on the western sidesloping down towards Aldersgate For most of its course from Aldersgate to Newgateand then to Ludgate, it remains invisible, but there are suggestive tokens of its progress.The great beast of classical antiquity, the Minotaur, has been sculpted just to its north inPostman’s Park The mottled and darkened blocks of the Sessions House beside the OldBailey still mark the outer perimeter of the wall’s defences, and in Amen Court a laterwall looking on the back of the Old Bailey is like some revenant of brick and mortar.From the rear of St Martin’s Ludgate we cross Ludgate Hill, enter Pilgrim Street andwalk beside Pageantmaster Court, where now the lines of the City Thames Link parallelthose once made by the swiftly moving River Fleet, until we reach the edge of the waterwhere the wall once abruptly stopped

The wall enclosed an area of some 330 acres To walk its perimeter would have takenapproximately one hour, and the modern pedestrian will be able to cover the route inthe same time The streets beside it are still navigable and, in fact, the larger part of thewall itself was not demolished until 1760 Until that time the city had the appearance of

a fortress, and in the sagas of Iceland it was known as Lundunaborg, “London Fort.” Itwas continually being rebuilt, as if the integrity and identity of the city itself depended

upon the survival of this ancient stone fabric; churches were erected beside it, andhermits guarded its gates Those with more secular preoccupations built houses, orwooden huts, against it so that everywhere you could see (and perhaps smell) thepeculiar combination of rotten wood and mildewed stone A contemporary equivalentmay be seen in the old brick arches of nineteenth-century railways being used as shopsand garages.

Even after its demolition the wall still lived; its stone sides were incorporated intochurches or other public buildings One section in Cooper’s Row was used to line thevaults of a bonded warehouse while, above ground, its course was used as a foundationfor houses The late eighteenth-century Crescent by America Square, designed by GeorgeDance the Younger in the 1770s, for example, is established upon the ancient line of thewall So later houses dance upon the ruins of the old city Fragments and remnants ofthe wall were continually being rediscovered in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,when the succeeding phases of its existence were rst seen steadily and as a whole Onthe eastern side of the wall were found in 1989, for example, eight skeletons of lateRoman date turned in di erent directions; there were also unearthed the skeletons ofseveral dogs This is the area known as Houndsditch

It is often believed that the Roman wall rst de ned Roman London, but the invaders were

in command of London for 150 years before walls were built and, during that longstretch of time, the city itself evolved in particular— sometimes bloody, sometimes ery

—stages

In 55 BC a military force under the command of Caesar invaded Britain, and within ashort time compelled the tribes around London to accept Roman hegemony Almost ahundred years later the Romans returned with a more settled policy of invasion andconquest The troops may have crossed the river at Westminster, or Southwark, orWallingford; temporary encampments may have been established in Mayfair, or at theElephant and Castle It is important for this account only that the administrators andcommanders nally chose London as their principal place of settlement because of thestrategic advantages of the terrain, and the commercial benefits of this riverine location.Whether the Romans occupied an abandoned settlement, its tribal occupants having ed

on wooden trackways into the swamps and forests, is not known It seems likely, in anyevent, that the invaders understood the signi cance of the site from the beginning oftheir occupation Here was an estuary, served by a double tide So it became the centralpoint for seaborne trade in the south of Britain, and the focus for a network of roadswhich have survived for almost two thousand years

The outlines of that rst city have been revealed by excavation, with two principalstreets of gravel running parallel to the river on the eastern hill One of these streetsskirted the bank of the Thames, and can still be traced in the alignment of CannonStreet and Eastcheap; the second road, some hundred yards to the north, comprises theeastern stretch of Lombard Street as it approaches Fenchurch Street Here are the true

origins of the modern city.

And then there was the bridge The wooden Roman bridge was located approximatelyone hundred yards east of the rst stone London Bridge, spanning the area west of St.Olav’s Church in Southwark and the foot of Rederes (Pudding) Lane upon the northernbank; the exact date of its foundation cannot now be known but it would have seemed amajestic and even miraculous construction, not least to the native peoples who hadsettled under the Romans Half the legends of London arose upon its foundations;miracles were performed, and visions seen, upon the new wooden thoroughfare Sinceits sole purpose was to tame the river, it may then have harnessed the power of a god.Yet that god may have been enraged at the stripping of its riverine authority; thus allthe intimations of vengeance and destruction invoked by the famous rhyme “LondonBridge is broken down.”

It is not clear whether Londinium was rst used as a Roman military camp Certainly

it soon became a centre of supplies In its rst stages we must imagine a cluster of smalldwellings with clay walls, thatched roofs and earthen oors; narrow alleys ran betweenthem, with a series of streets connecting the two main thoroughfares, lled with thesmells and noises of a busy community There were workshops, taverns, shops andsmithies crowded together while, beside the river, warehouses and workshops weregrouped around a square timber harbour Evidence for such a harbour has been found inBillingsgate Along the thoroughfares, which every traveller to London used, there weretaverns and tradesmen Just beyond the city were round huts, in the old British style,which were used as places for storage, while on the perimeter of the city were woodenenclosures for cattle

Only a few years after its foundation, which can be approximately dated between AD

43 and 50, the Roman historian, Tacitus, could already write of London as lled with

negotiatores and as a place well known for its commercial prosperity So in less than a

decade it had progressed from a supply base into a flourishing town

Negotiatores are not necessarily merchants but men of negotium; business and

negotiation They can be described as traders and brokers Thus the line of continuity—

it might almost be called the line of harmony—can still be traced The shining buildingswhich now stand upon the Roman wall contain brokers and dealers who are thedescendants, direct or indirect, of those who came to London in the rst century TheCity has always been established upon the imperatives of money and of trade That iswhy the headquarters of the procurator, the high Roman o cial who controlled thefinances of the province, were erected here

London is based upon power, therefore It is a place of execution and oppression,where the poor have always outnumbered the rich Many terrible judgements of re anddeath have visited it Barely a decade after its foundation a great re of London utterlydestroyed its buildings In AD 60 Boudicca and her tribal army laid waste the city withame and sword, wreaking vengeance upon those who were trying to sell the womenand children of the Iceni as slaves It is the rst token of the city’s appetite for human