| London for the literati |
|
|
|
Page 1 of 2 In his fascinating book A Reader's Guide to Writers' London, Ian Cunningham encourages visitors to the capital to explore with a different perspective.
"London is illimitable," wrote Ford Madox Ford in The Soul of London. He was speaking metaphorically, of course, but the sheer size and diversity of the city can be daunting for anyone who wants to write about it. For a start, how do you define London? Until the reign of Queen Victoria, the capital consisted of Westminster as the seat of government, the City as the centre of commerce and not much else; outlying districts such as Clapham and Putney and Bow were villages where you went to escape London. Today the term "London" is used to cover an amorphous mass of land never meant to be a coherent whole. Depending where you are, "London" can mean the riverside tranquillity of Richmond, the self-conscious solemnity of Belgravia and Westminster, or the windswept open spaces of Wanstead and Blackheath. It was all very different 200 years ago, when Thomas De Quincey could walk along Oxford Street and see open countryside less than a mile to the north. Dickens, who began his career in the 1830s, was perhaps the last writer truly to have the measure of London, before it grew too big and too complicated to take in. Yet even in his own lifetime, London was expanding at a prodigious rate, and it's worth remembering that many of his novels, such as The Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield and Little Dorrit are set in the London of Dickens's childhood - a largely pre-industrial London which had already ceased to exist. Since Dickens's death, writers have tended to cultivate their own patch of London, rather than grapple with the metropolis as a whole. The ghost of John Betjeman is still a benign presence in Highgate; Patrick Hamilton's characters can still be seen any weekday lunchtime in the pubs of Fitzrovia and Earls Court; and, at the time of writing, Iain Sinclair reigns supreme in the east, between Stoke Newington and the river. Like most large cities, London treats both newcomers and long-term residents with supreme indifference. Like an ageing, cynical courtesan, she is long past caring whether she makes a good impression. Instead she relies on her writers to do the job for her. No one who's read Trollope can enter Westminster Abbey without remembering Septimus Harding's lonely afternoon there in The Warden. If you're a fan of Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, you'll never walk across Clapham Common again without thinking of Maurice and Sarah, separated by "less than five hundred yards of flat grass". And if your childhood reading included Dodie Smith's The 101 Dalmations, I would challenge you to walk around the Outer Circle on a summer evening without thinking of Pongo and Missis on their way to the Twilight Barking on Primrose Hill. Selecting such scenes and matching them to the spot where they happened is only half of the remit of my book. The other is to match their creators with the places where they themselves went for entertainment and inspiration. Many of these writers would be roused to fury if they knew some of their most private moments would be posthumously exposed to public gaze, though diarists such as Samuel Pepys, James Boswell and Joe Orton ultimately have only themselves to blame. Their Bacchanalian exploits around the metropolis enliven the pages of their journals. MayfairOccupying a large portion of Albemarle Street is Brown's Hotel, which has accommodated numerous distinguished literary visitors since it opened in 1837. Rudyard Kipling had his wedding breakfast there in 1892, before setting off on a round-the-world honeymoon, and Agatha Christie used the hotel as her London base. Brown's appears, thinly disguised, in a late Miss Marple novel, At Bertram's Hotel (1965), whose elderly heroine finds the place an oasis of old-fashioned calm in the heart of 'swinging' London.WestminsterSince it was consecrated in 1065, Westminster Abbey has been the scene of the coronation and often the burial of kings and queens. In his "Ode on the Abbey Tombs", Francis Beaumont found this a source of irony:Mortality, behold and fear / What a change of flesh is here! / Think how many royal bones / Sleep within this heap of stones. Beaumont was himself buried in Poets' Corner, near the south transept, in 1616, joining Geoffrey Chaucer (died 1400) and Edmund Spenser (died 1599), who had both lived in cottages in the grounds. BloomsburyDickens liked Bloomsbury enough to live there twice, first at 48 Doughty Street and then at 1 Devonshire Terrace. He arrived at Doughty Street just as he was starting to become famous, but by the time he returned to Bloomsbury in 1851 he was in his late 30s and about to embark upon the dark London novels Bleak House and Little Dorrit. His view of the city became more jaundiced: "Whenever I come back from the country now, to see that great heavy canopy lowering over the housetops, I wonder what on earth I do here, except on obligation." The "great heavy canopy" was choking, sulphurous fog, a by-product of the Industrial Revolution.Camden TownThe playwright Alan Bennett has lived in Camden Town since the early 1960s. His play The Lady in the Van is about Miss Shepherd, an elderly eccentric woman who lived in a succession of vans near Bennett's house in Gloucester Crescent. To Bennett and his neighbours she became a familiar sight, "moving slowly around her immobile home, thoughtfully touching up the rust from a tiny tin of primrose paint, looking in her long dress and sunhat much as Vanessa Bell would have looked had she gone in for painting Bedford vans." Bennett eventually gave Miss Shepherd and her van sanctuary in his front garden where she stayed for 15 years, until her death.The BoroughThe George in George Inn Yard is London's only surviving galleried coaching inn. Before the Globe Theatre opened in 1599, plays were performed in the courtyard; as a young actor Shakespeare himself is said to have performed here, from the back of a cart in the courtyard.Fleet StreetFor nearly 500 years - from the arrival of Caxton's former assistant Wynkyn de Worde in 1500, until the introduction of desktop publishing in the last quarter of the 20th century - the name Fleet Street was synonymous with printing and journalism... the satirical magazine Punch was founded in the Punch Tavern at 99 Fleet Street in 1841; the bar is filled with original drawings from the magazine. |
