The London Nobody Knows E-Book

Geoffrey Fletcher

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 177

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Geoffrey Fletcher's off-beat portrayal of London does not focus on the big landmarks, but rather 'the tawdry, extravagant and eccentric'. His descriptions will transport you to an art nouveau pub, a Victorian music hall, a Hawksmoor church and even a public toilet in Holborn in which the attendant kept goldfish in the cisterns. Drawn to the corners where 'the kids swarm like ants and there are dogs everywhere', Fletcher will take you to parts of the city where few outsiders venture. Originally published in 1962, in 1967 The London Nobody Knows was turned into an acclaimed documentary film starring James Mason. This book has been a must-have for anyone with an interest in London ever since, and will surprise even those who think they know it well today. Many of the places written about are sadly no more, but the sights and sounds of Fletcher's London are preserved in this classic book through his beautiful illustrations and eye for the unusual and striking.

Leseprobe

Contents

Foreword by Dan Cruickshank

Introduction

1Streets Broad and Narrow

2Limehouse Views

3Camden Town

4Islington

5Iron and Marble

6London Gothic

7The Mysterious East

8Stucco and Gilt

Copyright

Foreword

By Dan Cruickshank

This splendid and most evocative book offers a window into a world of fifty years ago. In many ways it is a lost world. The book records not only London buildings and places that have gone, but also lost ways of life.

Among the most obvious things to have been lost are the once common and everyday details of London’s streets – such as the ornate Victorian lamp post and drinking trough Geoffrey Fletcher drew in Islington – and the now almost forgotten communities that once gave the city such individual relish, character and vitality. Particularly memorable and moving is Fletcher’s vivid description of the Jewish community in and around Whitechapel Road – long established in the 1960s and now, by one of those strange ironies of history, almost completely replaced by an equally vibrant Muslim Bangladeshi community: ‘This is the place to study the Jewish Butchers and poulterers,’ observed Fletcher, ‘often established in crazy old … close-smelling shops [that] sell Jewish candlesticks, Old Testaments, the Talmud, the Psalms of David and Songs of Zion’ (p. 84).

Also lost since Fletcher’s time is, in some way, London’s innocence. Scanning his drawings and reading his text it’s easy to see that London’s honest eccentricities have been the major victims during the last half century, replaced by chain-retailers and bland, placeless and often cynical international design. Fletcher was a lover of the odd nooks, crannies and the overlooked by-ways of London. As he proclaimed: ‘I have a liking for the tawdry, extravagant and eccentric … the whimsical …’ (p.8, 1962 edition). And it is this London that has largely gone.

Fletcher’s taste for the tawdry and the whimsical of forgotten London was not unique at the time. John Betjeman was also in the early 1960s exploring these aspects of London and its life. And these two men make an odd, and in many ways complimentary and intriguing couple. Both were astute observers and commentators. Betjeman was remarkable because he campaigned in a vigorous and inventive manner to save what was generally deemed to be (and often tragically proved to be) un-saveable – such as the Euston Arch and the splendid Coal Exchange in the City of London, both demolished in 1962. Betjeman expressed his stirred emotions and passions through verse, Fletcher through drawings. But, although similar in many ways, the two men were also very different. Fletcher was more fatalistic. He hated the way London was changing but seems to have accepted the notion of ‘progress’ – which was very much the tone of the early ’60s – believed that remorseless rebuilding was inevitable and that it was not his business to attempt to stop the juggernaut, no matter how rueful and distressing its progress might be. As Fletcher admitted: ‘the newer developments in London – the road widening schemes [are] out of sympathy … Motor traffic is destroying London. Such considerations are not, however, the purpose of this book’ (pp.12–13, 1962 edition).

This, as London was being torn apart in the name of modernisation, now seems a strange position for a historically minded self-proclaimed London ‘obsessive’ to take. But Fletcher was certainly an unusual character. He was not a leading light in campaigning organisations such as the Georgian Group or Victorian Society. He was an un-clubable character – and in that sense the opposite of Betjeman – and something of an outsider who kept himself to himself; significantly he requested that no revealing obituaries should be published after his death.

Fletcher was content to document the odd, idiosyncratic, obscure and changing city – the London ‘nobody’ knew – through his drawings, newspaper articles and numerous books. To be sure he mourned the passing of so much of London’s character, but in a way that sometimes seems peculiarly detached. Indeed, he possessed something of the persona of a traveller in a foreign land – looking, appreciating, recording – but not participating, not actively battling to save those things he loved that he knew were threatened with obliteration.

The story of the Euston Arch offers a good example of Fletcher’s attitude to his subject matter. As he was making his drawings for The London Nobody Knows, the mighty and majestic arch – along with the rest of Euston Station – stood under sentence of imminent demolition. Completed in 1838 and the first great monument of the railway age, the arch became the focus of the still nascent conservation movement with not only Betjeman, but also Sir John Summerson and modernist architects such as Peter and Alison Smithson fighting a finally futile last-ditch battle to save it from the philistinism of British Railways and the then Tory Government. Fletcher’s role in this epic drama was strangely anomalous. A detail of Euston’s Great Hall, Board Room and shed roof appeared on the dust jacket of the 1962 edition of The London Nobody Knows and so were evidently emblematic buildings for Fletcher. Yet inside the book, while praising the terminus in romantic manner, he also accepted its imminent demise. Fletcher’s book was no clarion call to arms. He simply observed that ‘the demolition of the great arch, and the Great Hall, whether they are preserved elsewhere or not, will be a national loss’, with ‘the disappearance of Euston’ being ‘a symbol of the end of the great railway age’ (p. 34).

Fletcher revealed the ‘purpose’ that he hoped The London Nobody Knows would play within the maelstrom of early ’60s London in the last couple of pages of the book. After regretting the approaching demolition of Rosa Lewis’s far-famed Cavendish Hotel in St James’s – ‘no doubt to be replaced by some Grand Babylon Hotel’ (the replacement building was in fact far worse than Fletcher could ever have imagined) – he expressed his fatalistic view of London’s future: ‘most of the things in this book are destined to go … in a London that has become the prey of bureaucrats, developers and destroyers; today the whip, tomorrow the scorpion. Off-beat London is hopelessly out of date, and it simply does not pay. I hope, therefore, this book will be a stimulus to explore the undervalued parts of London before it is too late, before it vanishes as if it had never been’ (pp. 123–4). It now seems odd that Fletcher did not see another purpose for his book – not just to stimulate people to look before all was lost but also to fight to save what was left.

If all but overwhelmed by the brash, modernising spirit of the early ’60s, it must be said that Fletcher played a most important role. As a chronicler of humble London of the 1950s and 1960s – ‘the old London [that] was essentially a domestic city – never a grandiose or bombastic one’ (p. 124) – he created through his well-observed drawings a precious record of a city in transition. In the process of his urban ambles he documented things that no one else bothered to record and, with his inquiring eye, captured extraordinary vignettes of the capital, painted intriguing portraits of its transient nature and captured moments that would, without him, be forever lost to history.

Introduction

I have no hesitation in admitting that the older I get the more London becomes an obsession with me, so much so that I find myself ill at ease elsewhere, a feeling familiar to Dr Johnson. It is a good thing, I think, for artists to have an obsession; more than one, indeed, provided that they can all be pursued. The obsession often supplies the driving force for unusual results. Turner, with his preoccupation with light, is a familiar example. Samuel Palmer, in the Shoreham years, was another. The intensity of the Pre-Raphaelites gave a special feverish poetry even to their hangers-on and imitators. Then there was John Martin, a second-rate artist touched for a moment by a weird genius, Fuseli; and Toulouse-Lautrec whose special obsession was the life of Montmartre. Each had his particular idée fixe, and, declaring mine, I feel myself to be in good company.

When Dr Johnson remarked that, from the variety of diversions available, a man could avoid an unfortunate marriage more easily in London than anywhere else, he was understating the case. It is my belief that a man can do everything better in London – think better, say his prayers better, eat and cheat better, even enjoy the country better. The country can be graceless and dull and tiresome, as Aubrey Beardsley pointed out, and is, I think, best enjoyed in the imagination or in landscape paintings or on Hampstead Heath. I feel sympathetic to those eighteenth-century poets who dwelt on the delights of a rural retreat, enthused over rustic glades, milkmaids, and swains, without leaving St James’s Street and the Mall. It is possible, anyway, to take long country walks in London, through a chain of parkland and open space, and hardly ever take one’s feet off the grass.

You need only visit a second-hand bookshop to be reminded of the innumerable books written about London, and they are still appearing, though how authors continue to find anything new to write about London is a mystery. Many of these books are, however, conventional, even slipshod, affairs, in which the old stuff is brought out time and again for an airing. The old-time Fleet Street journalist I once heard about who made his livelihood solely by retelling old anecdotes and facts about the city culled from Thornbury’s Old and New London was not exactly unusual. I, for one, am tired of books on London composed of descriptions and illustrations of the Horse Guards, the Abbey, Trafalgar Square, and the royal palaces, and although no book can do more than slightly touch on a few aspects of London, I am in this book at least endeavouring to break fresh ground. My theme is off-beat London; the unexplored, unknown-to-the-tourist London. There are whole areas of the capital which are never penetrated except by those who, like myself, are driven on by the mania for exploration: Hoxton, Shoreditch, Stepney, for instance, all of which are full of interest for the perceptive eye, the eye of the connoisseur of well-proportioned though seedy terraces, of enamel advertisements, and cast-iron lavatories.

This does not mean that my concern is entirely with the crummier areas, though these parts of London are given most attention, since they are precisely the ones lacking appreciation; they are, like the rest of London, changing rapidly, and must therefore be enjoyed while still intact. Neither does the title imply that nothing in my book has ever been mentioned before. My object is to encourage an appreciation of those unlooked-for pleasures of the great city which occur in almost every street and alley, to tempt visitors off the beaten track and to create an enthusiasm for the neglected or undervalued, the freakish, even, if you like. I should be glad to see London explorers boarding buses (and quite positively the best way to see London is from the top of a bus – the pity is that the old open-topped ones were withdrawn) simply because they like the look of the name on the indicator, and to give the well-known sights, which we all know about, a well-earned rest. This, then, is the obscure, hardly-to-be-thought-of city; the London, very largely, of the hot August pavement and the pleasures of the mean, interminable streets. Gas lamps, a disappearing feature like the horse-drawn van, figure in this saga. Ancient London women with shapeless hats and big feet mournfully appear in this off-beat guide, and totter with heavy bags down area steps. They have the quick dull look of the true Londoner and a wan gaiety which comes from looking at life at uncomfortably close quarters. It is the London of the sleazy snack bar, where the proprietor is not responsible for the loss of any article and where the cups are thick and stamped with the name of a lunatic asylum or perhaps the Bangkok Railway, the patrons being literary gentlemen with a taste for the greyhound section of one of the London evening papers. It is a city that, besides its great Wren churches, has a wonderful collection of cut-price Classical ones; churches in grimy streets possessing perhaps a Burne-Jones window, paper-thin Gothic churches, and curious chapels of daft religions without number. I shall ask you to share my fondness for forbidding Victorian flats, for dwelling-houses built for the labouring classes, those to which the unforgettable name of Peabody is firmly attached.

Here and there are dark streets where murders most foul were committed and in which, in spite of the passage of time, one can feel a decided atmosphere – that of Jack the Ripper, the mysterious Peter the Painter, or Dr Crippen. In this London are cast-iron balconies, exquisitely designed by early nineteenth-century architects, ironwork on which nobody bestows a second glance.

This is the city where one-man barbers’ shops are guarded at the door by dreadfully badly drawn figures supposed to resemble men; they are quaint and unnerving like the Jacobean familiars, and bear the legend ‘Shave Sir?’ It is the city where the romance of familiar things will be our inexpensive and lasting pleasure, the world of the little shop on the corner, the old-fashioned comfortable restaurant, and individual fruit pies. It is the place of shabby boarding houses and even shabbier bed-sitters, where the plane tree or lilac surprisingly puts out its leaves in dingy backyards.

There are certain unhappy individuals who take no pleasure in London. Such are frightened by its immensity, a magnitude that emphasises the emptiness of the heart. The city is too big for them, a mere desert of bricks and mortar. Or else they are dwellers in dormitory areas, dull grey commuters concerned with buying and selling, typing pools and paperwork. London to them is just a place in which to earn a living, and they rarely contribute much of significant value to the capital. People like this, and there are too many of them, desire only to get out of town as soon as possible, and they are destined all their lives to misunderstand the meaning of the city in which they work. They cannot hear the horns of Elfland faintly blowing in Kensington Gardens, haunt of Peter Pan, neither can they see a gaunt figure in an Inverness cape and deerstalker in full cry in Baker Street, nor hear the thrilling command, ‘Follow that cab, driver – a life may depend on it!’

In the following pages, we shall embark on unusual wanderings – strange adventures in this reserved, esoteric city, which discloses its secrets only to those worthy of its regard.

Geoffrey Fletcher

1

Streets Broad and Narrow

One of the many curious things about London is that, whilst it has been well served by poets and artists, it has not been intimately associated with the work of a great artist or poet in the way that Paris of the 1850s is synonymous with Meryon and with Baudelaire. For some reason, no one has dreamed out of London those memorable subjects of architecture, troubled and solemn, fixed unerringly by these artists – Meryon in his etchings, Baudelaire in verse:

Souvent, à la clarté rouge d’un réverbère

Dont le vent bat la flamme et tourmente le verre,

Au cœur d’un vieux faubourg, labyrinthe fangeux

Où l’humanité grouille en ferments orageux,

On voit un chiffonnier qui vient, hochant la tête,

Buttant, et se cognant aux murs comme un poëte;

Et, sans prendre souci des mouchards, ses sujets,

Épanche tout son cœur en glorieux projets.

London has not as yet inspired such realism, though there is no intrinsic reason why it has not done so. This is, however, by the way. The point I am coming to is that Meryon was recording Paris at the right time; whatever may have been the social or political need, the boulevards arbitrarily imposed by Haussmann changed the character of the city. For this reason, London, which owes an immeasurable debt to Wren, was better off without his street plan, drawn up immediately after the Fire; it was logical and arbitrary, like Haussmann’s avenues, but out of touch with the genius of the city. Even more out of sympathy are the newer developments in London – the road-widening schemes. Motor traffic is destroying London. Such considerations are not, however, the purpose of this book. I mention them here because these roads, lacking the architectural genius of Nash, are eroding the quality of London. Behind these soulless developments looms the city of the machine-made man.

‘Let’s all go down the Strand’ was a popular music-hall song. There was some point in doing so then, for it was replete with interest in the form of music-halls – the Gaiety and the Tivoli – shops, smoking saloons, the Lowther Arcade, and Romano’s. Earlier still, in the mid-nineteenth century, the Strand still contained much old property, and was considered raffish and rather doubtful. Today it is one of the dullest of the famous streets. Even so there are discoveries to be made. For example, there are a surprising number of ancient houses still left in the Strand. Many of them have been re-fronted, and it is necessary to see them from the alleyways at the back. Four houses in the Strand retain their ancient fronts and from them it is possible to reconstruct in the imagination a picture of how most of Fleet Street and the Strand looked, as far as domestic houses were concerned, about the time of the Great Fire. Westwards from Temple Bar, there are two forming the Wig and Pen Club, and farther along and opposite Australia House is a pair of charming old houses with overhanging windows surviving from the seventeenth century – Engerts, the photographic dealers, and the premises occupied by the Equity Permanent Building Society. It is not impossible that all these houses date from before the Fire. Near these is the entry that leads to the Roman Bath in Strand Lane, and if you look back in the direction of the Strand, you will see a delightful Regency balcony to a house of the early eighteenth century. This sort of thing goes on all along the Strand. There is the well-proportioned upper part of Thresher and Glenny’s, the outfitters, and lower down, on the opposite side above Boots, a bit of 1860-ish Gothic, somewhat in the style of the first Gaiety Theatre which was not far away.

Now I am about to introduce a favourite of mine – though I often tremble for its future – the gas lamp in Carting Lane, by the side of the Savoy. It is almost unique, as only two of these lamps survive in London. This one has been here for about eighty years, and, as can be seen from the illustration, is a superb specimen, richly topped with ornament. It is known as the Patent Sewer Ventilating Lamp; its iron column is hollow to allow, as the name implies, for the passage of sewer vapours. What is more, these gases can be seen in certain lights and smelt too, but not of anything more noxious than cabbage water and the odour of London dinners. It is one of the remaining iron lilies of the Strand. One of the more depressing aspects of old London photographs is to see the abundance of rich gas lamps on the pavements, the crossings, and by steps and pubs, for they are now disappearing. On occasions, a rescue operation, as in Trafalgar Square, has been carried out, but then the colour of the gaslight is missing, together with the cosiness of the flame:

Sewer gas ventilating lamp in the Savoy

Underneath the gaslight’s glitter

Stands a little fragile girl

Heedless of the night winds bitter

As they round about her whirl;

While the hundreds pass unheeding,

In the ev’ning’s waning hours,

Still she cries with tearful pleading,

‘Won’t you buy my pretty flow’rs?’