LONDON

Why compile an encyclopaedia of London? The man whose idea it was, Ben Weinreb, wrote in the introduction to the first edition of this work, in 1983, that he looked back to John Stow’s famous Survey of London, published in 1598 to show both “what London hath been of ancient time” and “what it is now”, to be both history and guidebook. In the nineteenth century, London not only grew physically into the world city we know today; it also saw itself chronicled as never before, with the introduction of population censuses, ordnance surveys, the social journalism of Henry Mayhew and the poverty maps of Charles Booth, not to mention the works of literary observers such as Carlyle and Dickens. Peter Cunningham, a civil servant in the Audit Office, wrote his celebrated Handbook of London in 1849, the first historical survey in alphabetical form. This became the model for Weinreb and his collaborator Christopher Hibbert. They agreed with Cunningham that London was a large enough and various enough subject to warrant the full encyclopedic treatment.

Weinreb, who died in 1999, was a bookseller with an interest in architecture; the editors of this beautifully produced third edition, Julia and John Keay, tell us that he began collecting information and enlisting contributors from his Bloomsbury basement in 1969. His desire was to give pleasure as well as instruction, to record facts but also to capture “the smell and gusto” of London life throughout its history. The new editors have aimed to retain this original flavour while updating the volume. As before, scholarly information, comprehensiveness and a generally high degree of accuracy are married to conciseness, lightness of touch, and an occasional turn of humour.

Long entries such as those on Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s Cathedral run to about 8,000 words, which would seem a lot if filled with a dry catalogue of the necessary facts, starkly deployed. In fact, the entry on Westminster Abbey enlivens the salient dates and details of the 950-year-old institution, its long procession of monarchs crowned there since William the Conqueror, and its roll call of statesmen, scientists and writers buried or commemorated, with local touches. Here, for example, is the boy from Westminster School removing Richard II’s jawbone through a hole in his tomb in 1776. Pepys – vying with Dickens for the status of most-quoted observer of London life in the volume – tells his story about kissing the lips of Henry V’s wife, Catherine de Valois, in the open tomb she had lain in for over 250 years, “reflecting”, he notes with glee, “that this was my birthday, 36 years old, that I did first kiss a queen” (which raises the question: did he follow this with further queen-kissing?).

The balance of information to anecdote is well judged; there is not too much spicing and it is never inappropriate. Entries under special subject headings are handled with greater or less humour as the topic allows. Planning and Building, Medicine, Transport, Maps of London, to give a few instances, are described with serious clarity. The entry on Medicine is exemplary, cutting a clear path through the intricacies of the early origins of hospitals in monasteries and charitable institutions and the rise of the royal societies of physicians, surgeons and apothecaries, with their rivalries and jealousies. By an Ecclesiastical Act of 1551, physicians were entitled, under the Bishop of London or the Dean of St Paul’s, to examine medical practitioners within seven miles of London, a privilege to which they clung long after medicine had become separated from its Church origins; by doing so, the royal societies held back reform in the profession until it forced its way through in the nineteenth century thanks to the efforts of Thomas Wakley, the reforming MP and founder of The Lancet in 1823, and other progressive politicians, sanitary reformers and journalists. Public Lavatories and Public Baths is a category which invites some humour and personal comment. The entry begins, as it did in 1983:

For such familiar institutions, the history of public baths and lavatories has been short. In the case of the former it seems destined to remain so, such is the current decline in their numbers. (The new editors might have added that the same is increasingly true of the latter, too.) The story is told of a court case in 1347 in which “two men were accused of piping ordure into their neighbour’s cellar”. Under Street Performers there is an amusing illustration of dancers on stilts performing to a barrel organ, taken from the 1861 edition of Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor. No picture, alas, accompanies the description of one Richardson, a seventeenth-century fire-eater, who apparently chewed and swallowed hot coals, then melted glass, and, as a finale, put a hot coal on his tongue, heated it with bellows until it flamed, then cooked an oyster placed on it, swallowing the lot. The entry on Street Signs and Pub Signs revives a sometimes forgotten past; Adam and Eve for fruiterers and Noah’s Ark for shipwrights must have been obvious choices in the days when the Old Testament was required reading.

Because the entries are of places rather than people, nice coincidences and serendipitous juxtapositions can give piquancy. Fifty years before Kelmscott House in Hammersmith became the London home of William Morris, the place where he established his progressive printing and design works, it was inhabited by Sir Francis Ronalds, inventor of the electric telegraph, who “planted eight miles of cable, insulated, in glass tubes, in the garden during his experiments” in the 1810s. Albemarle Street, Dover Street and Bond Street arose in all their elegance in the late seventeenth century on the site of the magnificent Clarendon House. Built on Piccadilly after the Restoration for the Earl of Clarendon, who had shared Charles II’s exile and was made Lord Chancellor on his return, it was not to be his home for long. In 1667, a gibbet was installed in front of the gates to signify Clarendon’s unpopularity; he fled to France, where he died. (His name lives on in architectural terms in Oxford University Press’s Clarendon Building in Oxford, which was built partly on the proceeds of the book he wrote during his last exile, History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England.) Charles II pops up again in the entry on Monument, Sir Christopher Wren’s memorial to the Great Fire. The King apparently declined the honour of having a statue of himself made to commemorate the disaster, on the reasonable grounds that he had not been responsible for starting the fire. Cheyne Walk by the Thames in Chelsea is similarly full of interest. Always fashionable, even in the nineteenth century when the rest of Chelsea was considered damp and dreary, this beautiful street was inhabited at different times by a heterogeneous set of celebrities, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who kept a famous menagerie in his house which he shared with his friend Algernon Swinburne; the great engineers Marc and Isambard Kingdom Brunel; the artists Turner and Whistler; and George Eliot in the last months of her life. The new editors add to this list a further set of celebrities, including two Rolling Stones, the actress Jane Asher, and George Best. At the other end of London – and a world away culturally and socially – Leytonstone boasts Alfred Hitchcock, Derek Jacobi and David Beckham among its famous sons. (In 1983 and 1993, the Encyclopaedia has John Drinkwater, poet and dramatist, born in 1882, as Leytonstone’s sole “famous son”.) Ho Chi Minh, we learn, once washed dishes at the Carlton Hotel.

The category Statues, arranged alphabetically from Achilles (in Park Lane, cast from French guns captured during the Napoleonic Wars) to Andrew Young (at Bush House, first valuer to the London County Council on its establishment in 1889, with the inscription “He laboured to beautify the London he loved”), takes note of two statues of George I, both destined to make a laughing stock of their original. The first, a cast of the king on horseback re-erected in Leicester Square in 1784, deteriorated along with the Square itself during the nineteenth century. The Encyclopaedia includes a sketch of the statue done after practical jokers had painted spots on the horse in 1866 (it had already lost a leg, as had its royal rider), put dunce’s hats on both horse and king, and pushed a broomstick through a hole in the king’s armour. The effect is of a crazy Don Quixote, and the sketch shows an appreciative crowd gawping at the spectacle behind the Square’s railings. This statue of George I has long since disappeared. The other still exists, but you have to look skywards to see it in its incongruous position on top of the unusual stepped steeple of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s church, St George’s, Bloomsbury. Both steeple and statue are outrageously pagan, the one modelled after Pliny’s description of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus and the other standing right on top in Roman dress. It is the only representation of a king on the outside of a British church, and is, as Horace Walpole said, “a masterpiece of absurdity”, but the church, recently restored after a period of neglect, is worth a visit for its neoclassical grandeur as well as its idiosyncratic adornment.

Inevitably, in a multi-authored work such as this, there are inaccuracies. These often occur when two separate entries touch on the same topic or person but do not agree on details. An example is Tavistock House, described under the heading British Medical Association and also under Tavistock Square. The first entry informs us that the Lutyens-designed building was put up in 1913, on the site of a previous house once occupied by Dickens, and that it was built for the Theosophical Society (of which Lutyens’s wife, Emily, was a member, though this is not mentioned here) and bought by the BMA in 1923, when Lutyens was commissioned to extend it. The Tavistock Square entry, poignantly updated to include the suicide bombing of a bus just outside the building on July 7, 2005, wrongly has Lutyens designing the BMA building in 1938.

The indexing, though generally clear and helpful, has some flaws. There is an Index of People and a longer General Index, under which streets, buildings and institutions are marshalled, along with “special subjects”. These last ought to have had an index of their own, as there is no simple way of knowing which subjects have been chosen. Only if you go through the whole volume or are sent from a particular place-name entry do you find that there is a (very informative) essay on Railways – which admittedly you might guess to be the case. But what about the previously mentioned Public Lavatories and Public Baths, and what about Football Clubs, Turnpikes, and especially Fogs, famous from Shakespeare through Bleak House to the last recorded serious fog in 1962? These are interesting entries which would have benefited from being listed in a separate index, rather than being left to chance. In the case of turnpikes, the volume correctly states under Dulwich Toll Gate that this is the sole survivor of London’s toll gates, but has not caught up with the (scandalous) rise in the fee from 50p to £1, while the entry under Turnpikes is seriously out of date, asserting that it “was still in operation after the Second World War”.

Sometimes the index suggests there are two people of the same name, when in fact there is only one. The nineteenth-century charismatic millenarian preacher Edward Irving appears twice in this way, once leading the reader to the Church of Christ the King, Gordon Square, built in 1853 as the Catholic Apostolic Church (said here to be a sect founded by Irving, though in fact it was established after his early death in 1834 by the rich banker Henry Drummond). This entry tells us that the church is “now used by London University”, which has not been the case since 1992. The other entry concerning Irving is that for Regent Square; it notes correctly that he preached at “a lofty Gothic church” built for him in 1824, but perpetuates a dating error from earlier editions, by stating that he was expelled for heresy in 1837, three years after his death. Conversely, two Louis Blancs share a single index entry; one was the French political exile of the 1848 Revolutions, living in Piccadilly, the other the designer of the D. H. Evans store in Oxford Street in 1937. In an error new to this edition, Dickens’s father is called Charles instead of John, and the liberal lawyer Thomas Denman is entered separately as “1st Baron Denham” by mistake. Mary Ward and Mrs Humphry Ward are, as in previous editions, separately indexed; neither the index nor the entries themselves show awareness of the fact that this is one person, the novelist and philanthropist, niece of Matthew Arnold and wife of Thomas Humphry Ward. Under Russell Square she appears somewhat enigmatically with her husband as residents of the Square, with no reason given for their inclusion. In truth, Mr Humphry Ward, art critic of The Times, was not celebrated at all except as the husband of his wife, who, under the name Mrs Humphry Ward, wrote the bestselling novel of its day, Robert Elsmere (1888), though that is not recorded here. Under the heading Mary Ward Centre she is given due prominence for her part in establishing, with the self-made newspaper magnate John Passmore Edwards, a settlement in the 1890s for the education, training and leisure of poor children and their parents in the Bloomsbury area. The building, a specially designed house on Tavistock Place distinctive for its arts and crafts detailing, was actually never called the Mary Ward Centre; its name has changed through the years and is now Mary Ward House. Confusingly, the Mary Ward Centre, where extramural education is continued in the spirit of Mary Ward and Passmore Edwards, is in Queen Square.

One wonders, on occasion, what sources were used in the search for information to include. Even the venerable diarist and breakfast-giver Henry Crabb Robinson, who knew and noted the table talk of writers from Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb and Hazlitt to the later generation of George Eliot, Herbert Spencer and R. W. Emerson, would not have claimed for himself the description he is given here of “witty journalist”. It is particularly painful for the present reviewer to note the hash made of an entry under the heading Strand. The mistakes were made in the 1983 edition and have not been corrected. 142 Strand was indeed the house where George Eliot lodged early in her career, though only till 1853, not 1855, as stated. The house belonged not to “Frederic Chapman of Chapman and Hall, Dickens’s publishers”, who were based at 186 Strand, but to the independent radical publisher John Chapman, who brought out George Eliot’s two translations of German biblical criticism and with whom she fell unrequitedly in love. Eliot owed Chapman both her introduction to G. H. Lewes, the man she went on to share her life with, and her start in literary London when, as Marian Evans, she moved to 142 Strand from her Coventry home to edit the radical Westminster Review, which Chapman had just purchased.

No reference book can claim complete accuracy, and some room for errors and misprints (of which I found hardly any) must be allowed; nevertheless, it is a pity to find even an occasional entry with multiple errors when reliable information is to be found in scholarly biographies and editions of letters. The updated Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has been available since 2004 to help with details about famous people, and the increase in reputable electronic resources since the first two editions of this work has surely made the task of finding and checking facts less onerous than it was twenty-odd years ago.

Among the completely new entries are those on London’s millennial buildings: the London Eye, the unfortunate Dome and the Millennium Bridge. The Dome’s travails are deftly and fairly told in an entry which eloquently combines factual detail with nuanced narrative:

A large white canopy with a short chequered history, the Millennium Dome covers 20 acres at the tip of the North Greenwich peninsula on the south side of the Thames. Suspended from twelve splayed masts of steelwork by some 45 miles of steel cable, it is the largest domed structure in the world, 365 metres in diameter, over half a mile in circumference, 50 metres high in the middle, and capable of accommodating just about anything. Indeed, such is its size that a satisfactory way of filling it, and so justifying the expense of construction and maintenance, has proved elusive.

The entry continues with a nod to the pop concerts which now take place in the Dome and the plans to use it during the Olympic Games in 2012. Perhaps when a fourth edition of the Encyclopaedia is called for, there will be cheerful news of the Dome (if it is still standing).

Complete up-to-dateness is impossible for such a big work, and the authors are to be congratulated on sensible and sensitive entries on such recent and still changing topics as the Channel Tunnel Rail Link and the opening of St Pancras International Station to take Eurostar trains to Paris and Brussels. They are also wisely cautious about politics and politicians, the topic most likely to become obsolete between editions, or even between completion and submission of the typescript and publication of the volume. Gordon Brown became Prime Minister too late for this edition; indeed, he gets only one mention: he appears in the entry for Upper Street, Islington, the venue of a now famous dinner with Tony Blair in 1994, after the death of the Labour leader John Smith, when the two men “supposedly” agreed that Blair should stand for leadership of the Party and remain leader “until such time as Blair would stand aside for Brown”. This dinner, says the entry, “became the subject of lively speculation, several dramatic reconstructions, and much later acrimony”. The restaurant where the two men ate, Granita, is indexed, too. It has changed its name and is now a historical detail, like the thousands of others in this fascinating guide to London and its delights.



Ben Weinreb, Christopher Hibbert, Julia Keay and John Keay, editors
THE LONDON ENCYCLOPAEDIA
Completely revised third edition
1,101pp. Pan Macmillan. £50 (US $99.50).
978 1 4050 4924 5