The last of old London
A.N. Wilson
The Changing Metropolis: Earliest Photographs of London 1839-1879 Gavin Stamp (Viking £14.95)
Whitehall, 1839, in bright September weather. Rays of sunlight coming up from the direction of the river, and light breezes likewise, wafting as they have done for the last two happy years since Victoria was crowned. A smell of something in the air, not wholly agreeable, perhaps blown up river from the sea; change, perhaps, blowing clouds of dust against the higgledy-piggledy shopfronts of ofd Whitehall, or is it merely the odour of stale fish coming from the river, or the odour of horses in the streets?
No one about much to offer their opin- ions in the matter, this bright morning. Williams the hosier, and his next-door neighbour the cutler are keeping indoors, the odour of change or of eels and oysters being, for all we know, disagreeable to them. Two bonneted ladies, almost out of sight down Whitehall, scurry in the direc- tion of Scotland Yard, perhaps to report a change in the wind to the constabulary. A cabby waits at the cab-stand, beneath the little lamp-posts, giving no indication of what he thinks of the odours, nor even whether he notices them. And nearer at hand, beneath a statue of a man on a horse, two little urchins are snoozing on the pavement, and mustering up all the indifference of which they are capable to the glare of the morning sun, and the attentions of the foreign gentleman. And a token of their indifference is that they pull down their top hats full over their eyes.
Curious man, the foreign gentleman, of the name of Monsieur de St Croix. Peers at the urchins for a while and then removes his hat which would appear mighty civil in your Frenchman. Then covers his head with a black cloth. And click, click. Is it the noise of the cabby, jangling his bridle, or is it the Frenchman's false teeth grinding beneath the black cloth? And what is he doing beneath it? The two boys, with their hats over the eyes, affect as much aloof- ness to the foreigner's activities as the other gentleman, whose horse rests on a plinth above their heads. This gentleman on a horse stares away from M. de St Croix into the hazy sunlight, and into the smells and the changes blowing up from the river, easily able to bear them, it may be thought, since smells and changes are minor irrita- tions compared with having your head chopped off, which was what inconveni- enced this gentleman 200 years before.
Four years pass, and the advantages of decapitation recommend themselves yet more fully to the gentleman on a horse, since falling masonry never sounded very loud in decapitated ears, and rising dust never caused an itch or a tickle to a decapitated nose. Behind him, in the new- fangled Trafalgar Square, named after a sea-battle with which the gentleman on horseback had nothing to do, they are heaving stones and erecting scaffolding. (Does he flinch, just a little, at the sound of them erecting a scaffold? Sensitive fellow, very). Click, click. Another gentleman, as English as the last gentleman was French, is burying his head in a black cloth and grinding his teeth as on the previous occasion. No rabbits dance out of Mr William Henry Fox Talbot's top hat, any more than they had danced out of M. de St Croix's, but some sort of magic is being accomplished as he click-clicks and stares at the new-fangled buildings. A column is being erected, it would seem, and a statue a good deal larger and higher than that of the equestrian gentleman. 1843.
Click, click. More gentlemen, more black cloths, more false teeth, more wind, more smell, more change, and the gentleman on horseback still stares despondently down
Whitehall and wonders if London will ever he the same. In 1857, he gazes incredulous- ly at a tall Gothic clock-tower they seem to be erecting on the edge of the palace of Westminster, as mediaeval as anything they dreamed up in the merry old days of thumb-screws and star chambers and in- quisitions of the Spanish, or for that matter any other nationality you might select. Click, click. 1870, and an anonymous gent- leman has the courtesy to face the eques- trian gentleman with his camera and reveal that someone has removed the iron railings which used to surround that statue, and someone else has built an ugly hotel to the right of it. Someone called Stanford has set up in business here now, a stationer's shop also selling maps, which the equestrian gentle- man would have need of if he clattered of up the cobble-stones and tried to explore the London he had known before his misfortune in the matter of heads and scaffolds. For there is change everywhere. No sooner, it would seem, had certain gentlemen hidden their heads beneath a black cloth and clicked with their false teeth than some other gentlemen of a rowdier and more destructive disposition would come along and knock down what the clickers had clicked at. If he rode his horse eastward, the equestrian gentleman would see a lot of old inns had gone. The pinched, miserable little inns which over- looked Bell Yard off Fleet Street went in the 1860s or 1870s — Bell Yard, which was so dark that the shopkeepers hung out looking-glasses on chains to catch a little reflection of the sooty, foggy London sky- Stately old coaching inns like the Oxford Arms, which went in 1878, to make room for the Old Bailey (poor justice in that!) or the Angel Inn, Faringdon Street, which flapped its wings and took flight at the advent of the Holborn Viaduct in 1867.
No more swooping and skidding down the steeps of Holborn Hill for the cabs and coaches and omnibuses we saw there in 1864. No more slithering up its summer mud, nor heaving their way up its winter ice for the crowds who trudge the pave- ments each day from Holborn to the City. Highly agreeable to the modern mind to see the piles of rubble and the heaps of scaffolding, and to know that so much of the wicked old star-chambering, coaching- inn past has been obliterated, and that so many gabled houses, courts, and even the very graveyard of St Andrew's Holborn have been destroyed in the interests of speed and enlightenment.
Stare on, gentlemen beneath black cloths! Stare on, gentlemen in cabs, and gentlemen on old wharfs and river stairs as you watch them build the new bridges across the brown Thames water. Stare on, equestrian gentleman, at your old London, and how we showed our love for it in the days of Queen Victoria, who was altogether more fortunate in the matter of architects as in that of scaffolds and heads. You had Inigo Jones to build you Covent Garden, but her architects pulled down the last vestiges of old Jones's work in 1877. Pass a number of years, and nobody will know what old London was, nor how we changed it.
Or nobody would have known, had it not been for the click-click, and the black cloths, and the images they left behind them. Pass a number of years and a fierce 20th-century gentleman discovers them, a gentleman of such fiercely architectural opinions that you might have mistaken him for an 18th-century gentleman. Stamps his foot, does this gentleman, which is suffi- ciently fitting, for Stamp's his name. Looks up the Strand and asks us what we have done with Temple Bar. Observant gentle- man. Regrets the ruination of Chelsea. Thinks that the advent of the Chatham and Dover railway bridge across the bottom of Ludgate Hill in 1865 was `disastrous'; says it was 'lamentable' to destroy the elegant old Hungerford Market and build Charing Cross Hotel in its place. Nostalgic fellow, very, Stamp. Blusters. Weeps. Makes us weep, too. Says that daguerreotypes, and calotypes and a great many other disreput- able types here assembled make a case against us Victorian Londoners. 'They suggest, in meticulous detail and haunting clarity, that almost every change that has taken place in London since those pioneer- ing days of photography has been a change for the worse'. Case hard to answer. Make amends. Buy it for Christmas (Victorian invention). Cheap at the price and well researched. Very.
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