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Modern Times in London
By Langdon Jones
At the start of the new
century, London was a larger, busier place than
it had ever been before. One could buy fresh fish
from Billingsgate, meat from Smithfield Market,
flowers and vegetables from Covent Garden, clocks
from Clerkenwell Road, diamonds from Hatton
Garden; all kinds of goods were readily
available. As a thriving centre of trade and
commerce London had become very much the centre
of the world’s largest empire.
Giant liners traversed the
oceans; electric lighting was beginning to
appear, and horseless carriages could
occasionally be seen on the streets. Many of the
things destined to play a major part in
twentieth-century life were here already. But at
the same time for most people there was little
difference between this London and the city of
fifty years previously. Victoria was still on the
throne; there was still dire poverty, and those
who were without work had to survive on charity
and scavenging. The bad winter of 1902 caused
great misery and degradation, and things became
so desperate that an observer of the time might
have felt that such a situation could not
possibly go on for long.
But at the time the only
alleviation remained the institution of
workhouses, although philanthropists were
constructing almshouses, cheap housing for the
poor. Ironically those same almshouses that
survive today are sold for hundreds of thousands
of pounds.
London at the time was a
curious mixture of ostentatious wealth hiding
harrowing poverty. Although this was a period of
extraordinary prosperity, the normal working man
had a hard enough time of it. The music-hall song
whose chorus goes, My old man said
‘Follow the van, and don’t dilly-dally
on the way’ describes the plight of a
couple who are leaving their lodgings owing rent
and making their escape by moonlight - a
predicament which was clearly one familiar to
everybody in the audience.
The music-hall reached its
pinnacle at this time, with many new halls being
built; the performers achieved great fame, but
the life they sang about was the life of the
audience - there was a great sense of shared
experience, the feeling that they had all been
through the bad times.
In the burst of jingoism that
came at the time of the first world war, the
music halls were responsible for recruiting a
large number of the young men who were to
sacrifice their lives on the battlefields of
France and Belgium. It was only as the war
dragged on, and death came in wave after wave
that the war songs of the music halls began to
have a slightly plaintive quality. While the
singers had been exhorting their young men to go
over and do their glorious bit for England, now
they were more likely to tell them to pack up
your troubles in your old kit bag and smile,
smile, smile. People only need to be told to
smile, especially in such an insistent way, when
there is precious little to smile about. Perhaps
the decline of the halls which began in the
twenties was due to the fact that they were seen
to have become the tool of the establishment, the
fact that people felt a sense of betrayal, and
that the performers could no longer count on the
bond of shared experience.
The war was the first in which
civilians had to face directly the blows of the
enemy. Early bombing raids were carried out by
Zeppelins, which had a hard enough time actually
finding the city, and many of their bombs dropped
in the open countryside - casualties were light.
However, Londoners were outraged at this new
aspect of war, and called the Zeppelins the
‘baby killers’. Towards the end of the
war London had to put up with more sustained and
accurate bombing, and this was an early foretaste
of what was to come in a couple of decades.
Public
transport expanded a great deal in the first
quarter of the century, with tramlines being laid
and omnibus routes being established. After the
Great War there was a great expansion, largely
due to the laying of new railway lines, and
‘metroland’, beloved of John Betjeman,
was born, being named after the Metropolitan Line
whose trains entered the Hertfordshire
countryside and brought the suburbs with them.
Following the agonies of the
war, London now became infected with a new
gaiety, as many of the Victorian social
strictures were finally discarded. Perhaps the
shortage of young men had something to do with
it. The era of the ‘flapper’ had begun,
and it was to be nearly half a century before the
same kind of easy-going morality and sense of
hedonistic enjoyment was to be seen again.
In the thirties the depression
and the growing unease about what was happening
in Germany had a sobering effect. Since 1666 the
skyline of London had changed only gradually;
there was a sense of permanence about these
dignified buildings. The first world war had not
had a major impact on London, but the second one
changed the city completely. In 1941 the blitz
took place, and bombs rained down nightly on
London. The East End felt the brunt of it, but
the whole of London suffered. Those people who
had to stay in London during the hours of
darkness were used to the descent into the public
shelters, or into the underground stations,
emerging to streets which were different from the
ones they saw on their way down.
After the destruction of war
came a feeling of optimism and renewal as the
rebuilding began. The London County Council,
formed in the previous century, now worked to
restore services and to exceed what had been
before; to implement new standards of health and
hygiene in an almost Utopian vision of what
London could be. People began to look forward
into an exciting future, rather than back into
the grim past. Although in 1951 there were still
bomb sites to be seen in London and the ration
book was an essential part of shopping, the
Festival of Britain was held, ostensibly to
commemorate the Great Exhibition of a hundred
years previously, but also to express the new
feeling of optimism and resolve, exemplified by
the modernistic design of the Festival Hall. The
most popular exhibits were the Guinness clock - a
mechanical fantasy - and the Skylon, an elegant
tower of metal girders. Londoners had suffered
from the machines of destruction, like the flying
bombs, those pilotless missiles, or their
successors, the V2 rockets which dived at three
times the speed of sound to eradicate complete
streets in an instant. But the Guinness clock was
an endearing and friendly machine, like those
which were building the new London. The Skylon
was a mixture of building and sculpture, a finger
pointing heavenward, apparently suspended in
mid-air, a futuristic and aesthetic object which
expressed the people’s feelings about the
exciting years to come.
But there were still elements
of London that would have seemed very familiar to
any visitors to the original Great Exhibition.
For a long time the chimneys of London had been
pouring sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere, and
during periods of temperature inversion, these
gave rise to fogs, the famous London
‘pea-soupers’. Because of the increase
in industry, and also the larger number of houses
able to afford coal, this problem seemed to be
getting worse all the time. Things reached a
crisis point, and London was subjected to a
series of dense fogs (nicknamed smogs as
they were supposed to be a mixture of smoke and
fog) which began to kill a sizeable proportion of
its inhabitants. So thick were these fogs, that
it became virtually impossible to drive, and
taxis found themselves on pavements, buses needed
men with lanterns walking in front of them to
guide them and the only way that pedestrians knew
there were other people around them was because
they could hear them coughing. Towards the end of
the fifties the smogs were so bad that thousands
of people would die in a single day, usually the
very old and the very young.
The Clean Air Act of 1956,
forbidding the burning of fuel that was not
smokeless, was felt at the time to be
authoritative and unfair by many people. But it
worked, although it took time. The smogs
eventually became a thing of the past, and the
London air no longer smelled of soot.
Ironically, at the time all
this was going on, the trolley bus represented a
very futuristic environmentally-friendly method
of transport, although perhaps it was not seen as
such at the time. They were red, double-decker
buses which ran on electricity, which they picked
up from double poles which engaged overhead
wires. The buses themselves were totally
non-polluting, large and comfortable, very quiet,
and set off with a powerful acceleration. Their
only disadvantage was a distressingly frequent
tendency for the poles to come off the wires, and
it was a common sight to see the conductor with a
long wooden pole trying to hook them on again.
And the busy conductor also had the task of
changing the points, wherever the routes
diverged. Perhaps the trolley bus was ahead of
its time, but it was certainly a non-polluting
form of transport that worked.
A Londoner living at the end of
the fifties and the beginning of the sixties
would have been very conscious of the forest of
television aerials which were springing up,
seemingly overnight. It seemed that every
suburban roof sported its own letter
‘H’. It's unlikely that this Londoner,
who might have heard of a new Liverpool group,
The Beatles, or might have seen a writer called
Jack Kerouac on the bookshelves, or might even
have come across a duplicated amateur magazine
called Private Eye, would have realised that he
was seeing the first rivulets in a flood which
would totally change his city.
Suddenly everybody started
wearing colourful and extravagant clothes, an air
of hedonism and pleasure became apparent, and
London began to ‘swing’. Carnaby
Street, unknown before the sixties, became one of
the most famous streets in London, along with
King’s Road, in Chelsea. The Portobello Road
street market became a centre of music and
fashion, and it was in this area that the first
Notting Hill Carnivals began.
London in the sixties had its
own unique atmosphere, a heady hallucinogenic gas
that induced a feeling of well-being and
sensitivity to colour. People flooded in and the
tourist industry prospered. The sixties saw
people crowding with equal enthusiasm to both
open-air rock concerts and political
demonstrations.
At the beginning of this
decade, the architecture of the city began to
change; and there was a brutalism which was out
of keeping with the general social atmosphere of
the time. Tower blocks were erected all over the
city; St Paul’s became concealed in a
concrete copse and this tendency came to fruition
with the infamous Centre Point.
Since then many of the tower
blocks have mercifully been pulled down, and a
more imaginative approach has been taken with new
buildings. London today has many examples of
interesting and pleasing modern buildings, and
the puritan aesthetic of the 60s architects is
now not so plainly in evidence.
Various groups of immigrants
have come to London in the latter part of the
century, and have made this a very cosmopolitan
city. It is now possible to sample cuisine from
all over the world within a very small area, and
London has benefited from the cultural influences
of India, China, Thailand, Japan and Africa and
many others.
With the decline of the docks,
much building has been going on in the East End
of London, and whole complexes of housing and
commercial buildings have appeared on those sites
which had been virtually unchanged since the days
of Victoria. The most significant of these is the
Canary Wharf development, with its own light
elevated railway.
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It is perhaps significant that
the Millennium Dome is being built at Greenwich;
sitting it in an area of London which is changing
rapidly perhaps symbolises the forward-looking
view which prevails as the century draws to a
close.
London is changing rapidly, is
becoming a more vital, a cleaner, a more
prosperous place. But there are still aspects of
London which would not seem all that unfamiliar
to someone who lived here at the beginning of the
century. The new IMAX cinema at Waterloo
symbolises what is new, but when it was built it
was necessary for the authorities to clear
‘cardboard city’, a small shanty-town
created by the homeless. It is now gone, but its
inhabitants are still here, still to be seen
huddled on the pavements covered by their
blankets.
"The quarters of the
Salvation Army in various parts of London are
nightly besieged by hosts of the unemployed and
the hungry for whom neither shelter nor the means
of sustenance can be provided." This was
Justin McCarthy, writing in 1903, but
unfortunately his words are as apposite at the
end of the century as they were at its beginning.
As always, London is a mixture
of the good and the bad. For the tourist it
remains a safe and a fascinating environment -
providing a unique historical perspective, mixed
with entertainment of the most up-to-date kind.
London will go into the next millennium with the
attributes it has always had - a cosmopolitan
viewpoint, a feeling of optimism and excitement,
the hum of history as its background, the clatter
of commerce and business in the forefront,
changing as it has always changed through the
ages. As a person retains their identity as they
move through a turbulent adolescence towards
adulthood, so London will always remain at heart
the same, despite the outward changes that will
occur as this ancient city prepares to meet yet
another century, another millennium.
Langdon Jones is an experienced writer and
editor. In the early seventies, he published a
collection of short stories which appeared in
both the UK and the USA. He worked with Michael
Moorcock on the magazine, New Worlds, and
edited the anthology, The Nature of the
Catastrophe, with him. A newly-edited edition
was published in 1996. He was responsible for the
reconstructed version of the third book in Mervyn
Peake's Gormenghast trilogy, Titus Alone,
which has appeared in various editions.
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