The Spirit of London E-Book

Paul Cohen-Portheim

• Herausgeber: Batsford
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 234

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

A new edition of a classic Batsford title from the 1930s. London is brought to life through its people, buildings and history in this classic book, first published in 1935. The Spirit of London presents a wonderful snapshot of our capital before World War II and a charming insight into urban life in the 1930s. Paul Cohen-Portheim was an Austrian traveller and writer who was interned in the UK during World War I. His enforced stay made him fall in love with England and in particular, London. This is his take on the irrepressible city. Chapters include: Towns Within, Town Streets and their Life, Green London, London Amusements and Night Life, Traditional London, London and the British and London and the Foreigner. The book features Brian Cook's iconic illustration of Ludgate Circus and St Paul's on the cover. Add in the charm of the authentic voice of a 1930s Londoner, this book should be enjoyed by all Londoners and London enthusiasts.

Leseprobe

THE SPIRIT OFLONDON

By

PAUL COHEN-PORTHEIM

Author of “England, the Unknown Isle”

With a Foreword by

SIMON JENKINS

Illustrated from Photographs

FOREWORD

BY SIMON JENKINS

MY first London job required me to walk to work off the Strand through old Covent Garden market. It was a glorious initiation into the personality of the metropolis. I recall early winter mornings with freezing mist rising from hosed-down gutters, the smell of ancient cabbage, and the bizarre sight of nuns gleaning discarded vegetable scraps for their kitchens. I treasured those sensations in the sure knowledge that they would soon pass, and pass they did.

Far more has changed since Cohen-Portheim wrote his highly personal observation on London in the 1930s. He wrote of the horizon as of Wren’s “city of dreaming spires”, rising over a roofscape which the Victorians had not allowed to offend the majesty of St Paul’s. He could write of a Thames whose flanks were swathed in the masts and rigging of sailing barges. His Fleet Street was still “the acropolis of the printing press.” His London was still essentially English. It was not a city of tourists, indeed foreigners then found the place drab and “hopelessly boring”. Ethnic enclaves were confined to just a few streets north and east of the City.

Yet leafing through Cohen-Portheim’s pages, and especially his copious photographs, I find the continuity as startling as the change. Cities must live, eat and breathe, and they do so today much as they did between the wars. The fruit and vegetable market still opens and trades each morning, even if it is deep in the heart of Docklands, while its Smithfield sister battles on by Farringdon Road, stubbornly refusing to depart. As for old Covent Garden, it has acquired a new vitality and colour.

Most remarkable is how few of the views Cohen-Portheim depicts have been lost. The Museum of London once assembled footage of London streets as they appeared in the background of early movies filmed on location, fearing that a visual record might be lost for all time. Yet watching footage of cops and robbers in King William Street or a crooner on an open-topped bus, I was surprised at how recognisable most of the streets are to this day. The same applies to Cohen-Portheim’s townscape.

Despite the bombing of London, the landmarks which he picked out are still with us. We have the old Mansion House and Lombard Street, The Mall, Piccadilly and Regent’s Park. We have Shepherd’s Market and Berwick Street, St Lawrence Jewry and St Martin-in-the-fields, the Coliseum and the Old Vic. Of the bridges, London and Waterloo Bridges have gone, unnecessarily, but the rest have survived. Cohen-Portheim could today repeat his observation that the City’s medieval layout of lanes, alleys and courtyards has survived to an extent unimaginable in most comparable business districts. Hardly any are even called streets.

The greatest transformation lies elsewhere, deep behind the facades, in Cohen-Portheim’s fascination with London’s people. Most publishers avoid people in guidebooks – and certainly pictures of people – as it tends to date them. No such inhibition restrained Batsford in 1935. An extraordinary number of the pictures in this book are not of London but of Londoners. Some are of urban functionaries, opening parliament, assembling the Lord Mayor’s show or enforcing the law. But most are just anonymous crowds, on the loose in the city. They are engaged in watching a football match, strolling in the park, buying at a sale or waiting for a train. They are pictures of no one and everyone. They people the urban space with a personality rare in topographical literature.

We follow Londoners down streets wet with rain, enveloped in fog, noisy with horses and bereft of pavement cafes. We see them dive in and out of pubs, forced to retire home in the evenings when everything closes down. They gather easily in crowds, cloth capped or bowler hatted, grim or laughing. Cohen-Portheim lists the contemporary stars of theatre and music hall, Thorndike, Gielgud, Laughton, Laye, Cooper and Buchanan, and writers then in the ascendant, Shaw, Maugham and Coward. I note that the number of West End and suburban theatres (other than cinemas) he cites, approximately 100 in all, is almost the same number as would be listed today. We catch a glorious glimpse of Gracie Fields on stage from behind, singing out into the dark.

These Londoners had already come through what they regarded as the war to end all wars, and had experienced financial crash and depression. Their city had suffered much. But they were about to suffer far more, making this record peculiarly poignant. The war was to do more than blitz the East End. It broke up families and neighbourhoods and sent them scattering to the suburbs. The closure of the docks and much of London’s manufacturing industry transformed the workplace and sucked in hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the provinces and abroad. If the buildings of London were to suffer only surface wounds in the years to come, the city’s social geography was to be unrecognisable.

The more valuable is a work that does not pretend to be a guide but is rather one man’s observation of London at a single moment in time. I know of few books that leave a more vivid impression of the city I love.

Simon Jenkins 2011

PREFACE

BY RAYMOND MORTIMER

THIS book seems to me decidedly the best introduction to London that one could give to a friend from abroad. But he might reasonably complain that the warnings it contains are inadequate, that there is no other great city which so turns its back upon foreign visitors —food which is either expensive or tasteless, only one outdoor restaurant, two cafés (both remarkably ugly), and no night life except for the very rich. Before spending money on a Come to England campaign, it would be better to make England a pleasanter place to come to. Consider the London which the average Indian student sees, a London of bad-tempered landladies and cretinous tarts, with the Paris which welcomes the Cambodian and the Martiniquais, and you can hardly be surprised at what is so humourlessly called the disloyalty of the educated Indian.

Monsieur Paul Morand, whose wit, fancy and perceptiveness I very greatly admire, wrote a most flattering portrait of London, which was, however, disfigured by a number of surprising errors.There may be mistakes of fact in Paul Cohen-Portheim’s book, there are certainly judgments with which I strongly disagree— in my opinion, for instance, he grotesquely overestimates the work of both Raeburn and Epstein. But he certainly would not have made August Bank Holiday occur on a Saturday, as Monsieur Morand does. For he was not only a good Londoner, he was a good Cockney. And there would always be a fag hanging down from his lip as he sloped along with the crowd. There was often also a camera in his pocket, and among the photographs in this book taken by him there is one, of a guardsman flirting in the Park, which is typical of what caught his fancy. His understanding of England was extraordinary; and indeed he had leisure in which to develop it. For in 1914 he was caught here by the outbreak of war, and after some months of persecution was placed in an internmentcamp—an experience which he described in what is probably his best book, Time Stood Still.

This book on London was written in English: he intended writing it also, I believe, in French and German. For he was much more than a good Londoner, he was a good European. At present in every country, including England, there are powerful and malignant forces which deny the very concept of Europe. In Germany to be a good European is a crime punishable with imprisonment, exile, torture or death. The Roman Empire declined and fell largely because its citizens ceased to believe in it; and Europe seems destined for a similar fate. The arteries will again be cut as they were in 1914; the victim will bleed to death; and the surviving continents will cheerfully pass a verdict of felo de se. I am not suggesting that these other continents have nothing of value to contribute to civilization—Cohen-Portheim himself wrote of Asia with intense appreciation—and it is possible to hope that patriotism to Europe will in time be swallowed up in patriotism to the Earth. But if some intelligent Asiatic or African asks what grounds one has for one’s attachment to the idea of Europe, I would suggest that it is only European tradition which combines the belief in reason, the belief in humaneness, and the belief in quality. And any Weltanschauung which neglects any one of these beliefs must be inferior, because by starving the brain or the heart or the senses it is denying man his fullest development. (l am not suggesting that Europe has ever lived up to these beliefs.) The devastating results of neglecting either reason or humaneness are clear in history. The importance of the sense of quality is less recognized, for until recently Europe has not suffered seriously from neglecting it. But anyone who has visited the United States knows what a civilization with no sense of quality is like. Mr. Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World, depicted a society eminently reasonable and humane, a society by utilitarian standards immensely good, showing an illimitable balance of pleasure over pain. But, lacking all sense of quality, it was not a Utopia, but a nightmare.

The premature death of Paul Cohen-Portheim is tragic not only to his many and devoted personal friends, but to those who share his belief in the concept of Europe. In itself it is a small thing to be equally at home on the Zattere and the Kurfürstendamm, in the Rue de Lappe and in Islington. But it is upon the spread of an attitude to Europe like that expressed in different ways by Norman Angell, Julien Benda, and Paul Cohen-Portheim that the continuance of civilization depends.

Raymond Mortimer

AUTHOR’S NOTE

THE author does not feel that a new book about London needs an apology. However lengthy the list of books on that subject may be, it remains as inexhaustible as ever; London is so great and so comple a phenomenon, and it is moreover so constantly changing, that there is no reason why people should ever cease writing about it.

But if such a book does not need an apology it needs a preliminary indication of its character, for there are many imaginable categories of books on the subject. This book, then, does not profess to be a “complete guide-book,” yet it hopes to guide. A guidebook enumerates, this book appreciates. A guidebook is obliged to give pride of place to the most famous sights or curiosities; this book takes them for granted. Where it mentions them; it is not in order to describe them but to explain them; it is a critical not a descriptive guide. A guidebook must be complete, that is to say, include all sorts of dull matter; this book does not profess to be complete, but to offer a choice of what—according to the author—is most remarkable, curious, or unknown in London. As it wants to interpret London, it is at least as much concerned with the life of London as with its buildings and officially recognised sights. That is, incidentally, why the photographs illustrating it are considered a very important factor.

The book contains, I think, a good deal of information not to be found in a guidebook, while it omits most of what the guidebook offers. It wants to convey the atmosphere and spirit of London; it is a book about what London stands for and what it means. It hopes to appeal not only to those whot while already knowing London slightly, wish to know it a little more intimately, but also to those who, while knowing it, like to be reminded of it; and yet to others who may perhaps never see it and would still like to feel they know it a little. If it should, as I hope, appeal as well to the Londoners or English themselves, many of whom must know it far better than the author, that would be because they might like to hear a foreigner’s views on the sights and subjects so familiar to them, and thus possibly see them from a new angle.

As soon as a book of this sort ceases to be purely descriptive, and becomes explanatory or critical, it is bound to encounter opposition. Where the author states his opinion, the reader may think him wrong or ill-informed. But while prepared for this, I hope that there will be one thing no reader will deny, and that is that this book is written by one whose sympathy with London is very sincere, and who might, in fact, almost be said to be in love with it.

P. C.–P.

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

The contents of this book is a faithful facsimile of the original 1935 text. As such, it includes the phraseology of the time, including references to class and race, which may seem insensitive to today’s audience. The opinions are very much those of the author and reflect the period in which they were written. We hope, however, that this is of interest to today’s readers, but wish to remind readers that the writer’s opinions are not shared by the Publishers, and no offence is intended. The book obviously includes descriptions of places in London in the 1930s, some of which have disappeared and some of the information in the book is now out of date. References to the ‘last century’ is to the 19th century.

LIST OF PHOTOGRAPHS

NO.

TITLE

PHOTOGRAPHER

2

London Drizzle

Keystone

3

St. Martins-in-the-Fields from the National Gallery

Herbert Felton

4

Thames Shipping in the Upper Pool

Herbert Felton

5

The Dome of St. Paul’s and the City Spires

Sport and General

6

Sunday Morning in Lombard Street

Herbert Felton

7

Belgravia: Belgave Square

Herbert Felton

8

Bloomsbury: Bedford Square

Will F. Taylor

9

Lower Middle Class: Tooting

Aerofilms

10

Upper Middle Class: Wimbledon

Aerofilms

11

A Suburban Dormitory: Sanderstead

Aerofilms

12

Morning in the Mall

J. Dixon-Scott

13

Evening in Park Lane

Central Press

14

Georgian Houses in Queen Anne’s Gate

Herbert Felton

15

Regency Houses in Park Lane

Herbert Felton

16

May Morning in Piccadilly

J. Dixon-Scott

17

Shepherd Market

Central Press

18

Boodle’s Club, St. James’s Street

Will F. Taylor

19

Cumberland Terrace, Regent’s Park

Will F. Taylor

20

The Athenaeum Club, Pall Mall

Will F. Taylor

21

New Hall, Olympia

Fox

22

Store Lights in Brompton Road

Fox

23

Battersea Power Station from the River

Keystone

24

Thames-side Suburbia: Kew and Chiswick

Charles E. Brown

25

Academic Interlude at the British Museum

Fox

26

University College: The Luncheon Interval

Fox

27

Middle Temple Hall

Keystone

28

Fountain Court, Temple

Herbert Felton

29

Soho: Berwick Market

Wide World

30

Adelphi Terrace

Sport and General

31

Pall Mall Club

Will F. Taylor

32

Royal Society of Arts, Adelphi

J. Dixon-Scott

33

Dean’s Yard, Westminster

Wide World

34

Clifford’s Inn

Central Press

35

Winter in Westminster

Sport and General

36

Aldgate, by Petticoat Lane

Author

37

Ludgate Circus and St. Paul’s

Central Press

38

Aldgate Pump

Fox

39

Watercress Barrow

Herbert Felton

40

The City: Throgmorton Avenue

Sport and General

41

Kerbstone Activity in the City

Central Press

42

London Bridge: The Morning Influx

Tropical Press

43

Rush Hour: A Struggle for a Bus

Tropical Press

44

Interior, St. Lawrence Jewry

The late Charles Latham

45

Evening at Camberwell Green

Fox

46

A Road in West Kensington

J. Dixon-Scott

47

A Street in Whitechapel

Wide World

48

Bargains: King’s Cross

Fox

49

Bargains: Islington

Fox

50

Billingsgate Market

Keystone

51

The Lights of Piccadilly Circus

Fox

52

Bond Street

Herbert Felton

53

The Strand from Trafalgar Square

Herbert Felton

54

The New Regent Street from the Air

Charles E. Brown

55

Regent Street: The Quadrant

Herbert Felton

56

Piccadilly Circus Flowerseller

Wide World

57

The Time of Day in Belgravia

Wide World

58

January Sales: Contemplation

Central Press

59

January Sales: Realisation

Central Press

60

Secretary of State’s Room, Foreign Office

Sport and General

61

The Stone Cliffs of Whitehall

Sport and General

62

The Changing River Front, Victoria Embankment

The Times

63

Newspaper Factory in Fleet Street

Central Press

64

The Caledonian Market, Islington

Fox

65

Winter in Rotten Row

Sport and General

66

Winter by the Serpentine

Central Press

67

Summer by the Serpentine

Fox

68

Unemploment in Hyde Park

Central Press

69

Employment in Covent Garden

Wide World

70

Kensington Gardens: The Great Avenue

Will F. Taylor

71

Kensington Gardens: The Serpentine

Will F. Taylor

72

The Household Troops: On Duty

Herbert Felton

73

The Household Troops: Off Duty

Author

74

Winter on the Round Pond

Sport and General

75

St. James’s Park: View across the Lake

Central Press

76

Kensington Palace

Herbert Felton

77

Buckingham Palace

J. Dixon-Scott

78

The Crystal Palace from the Air

Fox

79

Hampton Court from the Air

Fox

80

Sunday Procession on the Embankment

Central Press

81

Royal Academy Private View

Keystone

82

Lunch-time Lecture at the National Gallery

Herbert Felton

83

Art Sales: Caledonian Market

Author

84

Art Sales: Christie’s

Central Press

85

Pavement Artist, Hyde Park Corner

Author

86

Christmas Toys in Holborn

Wide World

87

Music-Hall

Fox

88

Gallery Queue

Central Press

89

First Night Audience

Keystone

90

The Lights of Leicester Square

Fox

91

“Last House,” Leicester Square

Keystone

92

Football Audience at Highbury

Central Press

93

Cabaret Audience in the West End

Keystone

94

Boxing at the White City

Central Press

95

Paris in Regent Street

Keystone

96

Saloon Bar

Wide World

97

Euston Road Snack Counter

Author

98

Ye Olde Lunche in Fleet Street

Keystone

99

Mayfair Butcher’s Shop

Central Press

100

Workmen’s Dining-Rooms

Central Press

101

2 A. M. at Hyde Park Corner

Charles E. Brown

102

London’s Nightly Wash

Sport and General

103

Little Italy in Clerkenwell

Central Press

104

Early Hours at Covent Garden

Charles E. Brown

105

The Church and the Law

Keystone

106

Lord Mayor’s Day

Fox

107

Changing the Guard, St. James’s Palace

Keystone

108

Medieval Fronts in Holborn

Herbert Felton

109

A Georgian Front in the Haymarket

Will F. Taylor

110

The Opening of the Law Session

Keystone

111

Sunday in Oxford Street: Salvation Army

Author

112

Sunday in Hyde Park: Jewish Procession

Tropical Press

113

Peers and Peeresses leaving the House of Lords

Fox

114

After the Cup Final

Central Press

115

Royal Opening of Parliament

Wide World

116

Lord Mayor’s Banquet

Keystone

117

Tennis at Wimbledon

Sport and General

118

Cricket at Lord’s

Sport and General

119

Bank Holiday on Hampstead Heath

Keystone

120

Shelling Peas at Covent Garden

Sport and General

121

Football Crowd at Stamford Bridge

Central Press

122

Oratory Wedding

Sport and General

123

London Traffic

Fox

124

London Traffic

Fox

125

Croydon Airport

Fox

126

Holiday Crowds at Waterloo

Central Press

127

Thames Warehouses, with St. Paul’s beyond

Wide World

128

Millwall Docks and the Isle of Dogs

Aerofilms

129

The “Prospect of Whitby,” Shadwell

Central Press

130

Murky Weather on the Embankment

Fox

131

Evening at the Port of London

Sport and General

132

Demolition in Stepney

Fox

133

Reconstruction at the Marble Arch

Aerofilms

134

City Splendour: The Baltic Exchange

Central Press

135

A Wet Afternoon in Vauxhall

Fox

136

Greyhound Racing at Clapton

Central Press

137

Cumberland Hay Market

Will F. Taylor

138

A Court in Shoreditch

Keystone

139

A News-Stall off Leicester Square

Herbert Felton

140

Bargains in Millinery at a London Store

Tropical Press

141

Law and Order

Keystone

142

Law and Order

Central Press

143

The Time: Shell House

Fox

144

The Time: “Big Ben”

Central Press

Front End-paper

Sport and General

Back End-paper

Aerofilms

CONTENTS

FOREWORD By SIMON JENKINS

PREFACE By RAYMOND MORTIMER

AUTHOR’S NOTE

LIST OF PHOTOGRAPHS

I. LONDON THROUGH THE CENTURIES

II. TOWNS WITHIN TOWN

III. STREETS AND THEIR LIFE

IV. GREEN LONDON

V. LONDON AND THE ART

VI. LONDON AMUSEMENTS AND NIGHT LIFE

VII. LONDON HOTELS AND RESTAURANTS

VIII. TRADITIONAL LONDON

IX. LONDON AND THE BRITISH

X. LONDON AND THE FOREIGNER

INDEX

2 LONDON DRIZZLE

3 ST MARTIN’S-IN-THE-FIELDS, TRAFALGAR SQUARE, FROM THE NATIONAL GALLERY PORTICO

THE SPIRIT OF LONDON

CHAPTER I

LONDON THROUGH THE CENTURIES

No one knows exactly what London is, where it begins or ends, or how many people inhabit it. It is a city, a county, a postal district or a police district, and as it is ever spreading, growing, and changing its form, all these divisions do not embrace the whole. There is but one well-defined London: the City of London, and the City is both essential London and not London at all— essential because it is both its cradle and its centre, but not London at all because it is an administrative district independent of all the rest. The City stands, however, for historic London, and no capital gives one a more profound feeling of historic continuity—this in spite of the fact that it contains very few early historic remnants. In this it is very characteristically English, for the English are very practical business men, but at the same time devotees of tradition and of historic institution. As business men they are quite prepared to destroy a building or an institution if this stands in the way of progress, but as worshippers of the past they like to retain their name and semblance. Thus a street may be full of modern buildings, and have lost its old character, but it will retain its name, and therewith some of its memories. That is why few of the streets of the City are called “streets,” while it is full of Gates, Markets, Lanes, etc. There is hardly an historic street in Paris that has not changed its name and hardly one in London which has. England is the oldest constitutional and parliamentary monarchy, but it retains all the pomp of feudal royalty, and in exactly the same way the huge London metropolis retains its City, with its Lord Mayor and Aldermen, its mediaeval guilds, its rights and privileges; and the King of England may only enter the City with the solemn if symbolical permission of the Lord Mayor. The houses of the City stand on historic ground, the names of its streets are ancient, and—what is more remarkable—its ancient topography is almost unchanged. No Napoleon or Haussmann have here destroyed old quarters and drawn broad and straight avenues through tortuous mazes; the City is still a mediaeval rabbit-warren of courts, alleys, and passages, through which a few main thoroughfares stretch in winding curves and angles. In its lay-out the City of London resembles a Siena or a Lubeck, but its ancient houses have vanished, and in its buildings. it appears a modem business centre, full of offices, banks, and business premises. This is, however, a deceptive appearance, for hidden in odd nooks and corners are aImost innumerable vestiges of the past, if few of the early past. The City is truly a wood you cannot see for trees, and only, when you cross the Thames and gain a little of that distance the narrow streets deny you, will you discover its real character, that of a city of offices and warehouses surmounted by innumerable steeples and towers of churches, dominated by the huge dome of St. Paul’s; and thus unique in character.

It is difficult to imagine the Roman City of London, for Rome has not left its stamp here as it has done in most other parts of its dominions. There are no traces of the logical and geometrical planning of the Romans, there are no remnants of their temples or amphitheatres; there remain but a few unimportant vestiges of masonry, and a bath. And yet excavations made a few years ago on the site of the Bank of England have proved that the business centre of twentieth-century London is the same as that of Roman London, so great is the continuity of this city—and so great its change which abolishes the traces of the past. There, as now, London’s business centre was where Bank, Exchange, and Mansion House stand, and—if legend is to be believed—there as now the Deity was worshipped on the hill where St. Paul’s stands. The London Bridge of today is but a successor of the bridge the Romans crossed to enter the City, but if they entered it they would find no trace of their city left. The first period to leave visible signs on the face of the City was the Norman. William the Conqueror, who found the City already a self-governing body, which he confirmed in its rights and privileges, built his fortress, the Tower, just outside the gates, and there it still stands, still not included within the boundaries of the City, surrounded by a maze of later additions, and dwarfed by Tower Bridge. The Tower being London’s most famous historic monument is naturally overrun by sightseers, and thus it is difficult to recapture the spirit of the past there, while being conducted in a herd by a uniformed shepherd. Besides that, its surroundings are all against it; it lies too low nowadays, the surrounding greenery is too pretty for its grimness, the bridge-towers dwarf the White tower; it is, in short, a “museum-piece” like so many famous sights, but not a living part of London’s huge body. Its attractions are world-famous: armoury, regalia, beefeaters, and—last but not least—tragic memo- ries, but it is not a spot I have ever wanted to revisit (except the very perfect chapel of St. John’s), though I like to sit on the terrace, facing the river, where you may see people eating their sandwich-lunch, perched on absurd ancient pieces of artillery, and slum children playing about, while tugs and barges hoot and glide past, and there are no over life-size diamonds you are expected to admire, and no tiresome historical dates to remember. For some reason or other I can feel no interest in what remains of mediaeval London: it seems dead to me, and not connected with the living London of our day. St. Bartholomew’s the Great, though incomplete, is a very fine example of Norman architecture, as is the round church of the Temple, but to conjure up a vision of mediaeval England one must go to places like Shrewsbury or Wells or York, where the past has remained part of the fabric of the present. And the same applies to Gothic London (Westminster is a thing apart), and even to the London of the Renascence; these periods have left vestiges, of course, but their spirit has departed, that spirit so very much alive still in cathedral cities and university towns, and in so many villages of