London is suffused with centuries of suffered experience. It is an echo chamber of memories, dreams and desires. They do not necessarily take a material form. London is not a city with many physical vestiges of its past. It has few ancient houses and even fewer ruins. It seems to prefer to build over its history and thus to renounce it. Nevertheless the past is embodied in patterns of human behaviour, in habits of speech and of thought, in continuities of life and activity. If you want to understand the city, look around at its people rather than its monuments.
There is also another force in London that might be called the territorial imperative. It seems possible that one place — one street or one neighbourhood — can harbour the same activity or the same set of activities over many hundreds of years. It is almost as if the territory itself encouraged it, and drew into itself the people who might perform it. Let me present to you one neighbourhood, St Giles-in-the-Fields, that perfectly displays this phenomenon.
St Giles-in-the-Fields is the area around Shaftesbury Avenue, New Oxford Street and the northern end of Drury Lane. It began its city life in the 12th century when a chapel and a leper hospital of St Giles were built. St Giles was the patron saint of lepers, and the present church of St Giles-in-the-Fields is built upon the site of the leper hospital. St Giles is also the patron saint of beggars and vagrants, and for those afflicted with misery or loneliness.
This is highly significant, for St Giles itself has been throughout the centuries an area of sorrow and misery. In the 17th century, it became a harbour of poor people who relied upon parish charity. Charity was well known to be more plentiful in this area, partly because of the tradition of the leper hospital. The churchwardens of the 17th century write of 'the great influx of poor people into this parish'. Christopher Wren complained of the 'noisomeness' of the spot. In fact, the Great Plague of London began in some houses north of Drury Lane.
In the 18th century, the area became the site of Hogarth's engraving, Gin Lane, and its reputation for being dark and dangerous was materially increased by the squalid conditions induced by gin drinking. In the 19th century, it was notorious for its rookeries or slum tenements, until in the 1840s a great new thoroughfare known as New Oxford Street was built through the worst of the slums. But it did not remove the poverty. It simply displaced it to the margins. And the spirit of St Giles the leper saint prevailed.
In the 1970s Centrepoint, the tall building in the neighbourhood, hosted a charity for the homeless that became an inspiration for other such charities. There are still vagrants in the vicinity of Gin Lane and the narrow streets around the church of St Giles-in-the-Fields. For almost a thousand years, therefore, this small area has been a refuge and a meeting place for the despairing or the destitute. By the strange patterns of continuity that define the city, this has always been a haven and a refuge.
There are many other examples of this territorial magnetism, emphasising the point that in London you must always look back over your shoulder to glimpse the shadows of the past. There are parts of the city where the present reality is swept up by images and feelings that are associated with the history of one place. It is as if the past engulfs the present — or rather they are locked in a mutual embrace like lovers. Of all the cities in the world London is the one most invaded by the echoic principle. It displays its mysteries to those who wander and wonder.
I have visited many other European capitals and I must admit that none of them have for me that same echoic potential. The glory that was Athens and the grandeur that was Rome seem in some sense to have departed, despite the manifest presence of the past. But the brooding immensity of London remains. It does not have the elegance of Paris or the splendour of Vienna or the prettiness of Prague, but it has something far more important — it has energy, it has tenacity, it has darkness and power at its heart. The passing generations can no more change that nature than they can hold back the wind or the tide. London has become part of the natural world.
Foundation: The History of England by Peter Ackroyd is out this month (£25, Macmillan).
