Before London went metric

A tribute to the city's lost architectural dignity, and its unregarded lives

Lindsay Duguid

The story of Lost London is straightforward: a largely Georgian city with medieval survivals was swept away in successive clearances. Streets, squares, courts, tenements and alleys were demolished wholesale for roads and railways, disappeared in grand Imperial redesigns and were flattened by the Blitz. What Philip Davies’s book – a collection of photographs from the English Heritage archives, spanning seventy-five years from 1870 to 1945 – provides is a chance to see how it used to look. The solemn static images of the city and its inner suburbs, taken from an unshowy vantage point with the aim of recording streets and buildings on the point of demolition, evoke a solid sense of place; they also offer, in the groups of people standing in front of their familiar places, an unedited glimpse of the dispossessed.

“What sort of lives did they lead?”, the author asks about these men in bowlers and flat caps, women in aprons and children in pinafores who are gazing expressionlessly at the unfamiliar photographer. Davies’s curiosity runs through the book’s scholarly captions, as he reads the details for us, pointing out things we might pass over: a shop sign boasting “Progressive Tailors”, a newspaper placard proclaiming “Coal Crisis. A Fruitless Day. Bill Postponed. Gloomy Outlook”, the red globe lantern of a “SurgeonAccoucheur”; the menu of O’Connell’s Coffee and Dining Rooms in Little Prescott Street (cleared for the Tower Bridge approach) offering a rasher and two eggs for 4d. As well as architectural descriptions, dates and incidental details of weatherboarding, stonework and paving, Davies points out in the depth of the pictures' accidental elements, such as a curious woman looking out of a window, a policeman unobtrusively on guard, a horse and cart, a cat in the sunshine; and he notes the “absence of clutter” and the quiet emptiness of the streets. In his long introduction, he attributes the dignity of these streetscapes – the harmony between the buildings and their occupants – to the use of imperial measure: “Neighbourhoods were laid out by surveyors who used acres, furlongs, rods and chains – measurements which had been in common usage for marking out arable land since the 9th century”; the scale of the squares and streets was based on the human form: “The builders used rules divided into feet and inches, or fathoms (the length of outstretched arms)”. A human feel also came from the use of timber and brick and from a creative intermingling of “polite” urban architecture and long-established rural traditions.

The strange timescale whereby a building can stand four-square for hundreds of years only to be tossed away in a matter of weeks is illustrated by the Oxford Arms, an ancient coaching inn in Warwick Lane, a cosy muddle of pitched roofs with dormers and galleries with washing lines, huddled round a cobbled courtyard, which was demolished in 1878. Relics of another age pictured here include almshouses, such as the Esther Hawes Almshouses in Bow Lane Poplar of 1686, photographed in 1910, each brick and tiled dwelling containing a single room, each doorstep bright white. And throughout the book are London’s chapels and churches – St Augustine, St Alphage, St Peter-le-Poer, among twenty of the City’s forty-seven churches which were damaged or destroyed in the Blitz, the romantic gothic chapel of Christ’s Hospital sold to the Post Office and levelled. Fame and familiarity were no protection: Exeter Hall, the centre of the anti-slavery campaign, was pulled down in 1907 to make way for the Strand Palace Hotel; the eighteenth-century houses in Charing Cross were demolished for the new Mall Approach in 1913; the timber-framed shops in Holywell Street, notorious for the pornography trade, were sacrificed to a clean sweep of propriety in 1906. From just beyond living memory are the merchants’ houses: Sir Paul Pindar’s city mansion, dismantled in 1890, its sixteenth-century frontage preserved in the V&A; the fifteenth-century Crosby Hall, removed from Bishopsgate in 1909–10 and reconstructed behind high walls in Chelsea; 75 Dean Street Soho, a plain house of 1713 demolished after a planning muddle in 1919. A section is devoted to London’s great houses: Devonshire House, Piccadilly (demolished 1924), Dorchester House, Park Lane (demolished 1929), Norfolk House, St James’s Square (demolished 1939, its music room recreated in the V&A). These symbols of privilege, with their sumptuous chimneypieces, soaring staircases, plasterwork and mirrored ballrooms, seem slightly garish here, full of hubris. By contrast, Downing Street, photographed in 1925, looks as though it might be at home in Stepney with its plain frontage and sooty brick; the interior photographs reveal Number 10’s basement kitchen and the small fireplace in the prime minister’s bedroom.

The solemnity of these photographs with their deep chiaroscuro and pale skies are full of a melancholy pleasure, a conflicted nostalgia for something we never knew. Yet while praising the aesthetic harmony of Spitalfields and Clerkenwell on the City’s fringes, Davies’s text is careful to lay out the misery and degradation of most late nineteenth-century London lives: the 55 per cent of children who died before the age of five in the East End, where the average age of death was thirty; the miserable existence of ragpickers and scavengers, the eyesores of middens and dustheaps, the smells of breweries and tanning works. He quotes Dickens – “London is shabby by daylight, shabbier by gaslight”, and Jack London, who gives a reason for the striking tidiness of the streets; “From the slimy, spittle-drenched sidewalk, they were picking up bits of orange peel, apple skins and grape stems, and they were eating them”; and of course Charles Booth whose seventeen-volume The Life and Labour of the People in London (1902) had been originally intended to disprove socialist claims that a quarter of Londoners lived in poverty, but revealed instead the true dire state of living conditions in the capital. “With the people”, Booth’s note-taker recorded, “it is the children who mark the greatest contrast; and then the women; the appearance of the men is less affected by poverty. With the houses it is . . . the windows and doors that tell the tale.” Nostalgia would be an insult to Booth’s subjects, but Lost London, which is beautifully bound and printed and has an accurate and useful index, could perhaps be seen as a tribute to those unregarded lives.

Lost London was published in 2009 – and almost immediately reprinted – and its introduction pays what is now a hollow tribute to the city as “a world centre for the trading of financial services”, mentioning trenchantly but only in passing its “post-war architecture of staggering mediocrity”. It is the present-day fabric that makes these images so powerfully melancholy; the contrast between the unpretentious dignity of the houses, shops and pubs and the overweening office blocks and shopping centres of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the shards and blades and towers. The firms responsible for the current block developments in St Giles, Blackfriars, Brewer Street and Smithfield Market should be required to put up on their hoardings, next to the visionary architects’ impressions, a view of what they are replacing so that we can see what is still being lost.

Jerry White’s book for the Museum of London, London: The story of a great city, “told in words, pictures and facsimile documents”, is, by contrast, relentlessly cheerful. Its full-colour photographs show the London Eye lit up in mauve – captioned “twenty-first century London at night”, Canary Wharf – “Manhattan on Thames . . . an astonishing new financial service and residential area grew out of the ruins of London’s upper port”, and the devastated site of the London Olympics – “showing the completion of the main stadium’s shell in June 2009 . . . just one element in a project of almost fantastic complexity and enormous cost, intended to transform the face of East London”. The book’s historical survey of “one of the greatest cities on earth” is a sort of pageant, taking in familiar landmarks – the Execution of King Charles I, the Fire of London and the Festival of Britain – and brief sociological subsections on Politics and Riot, Carnival City, Public Pleasures, From Purcell to Punk, Growing Up in London, London’s Underworld, etc. The text is brisk, the design restless; unsurprising visual material is strewn across the pages on an apparently random scale, in boxes, cut-outs and double-page spreads to show us again, Doré’s opium den, Hogarth’s Bedlam, Victorian paintings, nineteenth-century popular prints, pages from the Illustrated London News, travel posters (Bedford Park: “The area is still popular – and expensive – today”) and photographs of a pearly king and queen, a hansom cab, the Kray brothers. The facsimiles in fold-out slip cases – of maps and curiosities, such as a ticket to the upper gallery for the coronation of George III on September 22, 1761, and a menu from Joe Lyons Corner House on the Strand dated August 1939 – are very finely reproduced. There is, however, no table of contents, no source notes and a dense block of picture credits instead of a list of illustrations.

Philip Davies
LOST LONDON, 1870–1945
368pp. Transatlantic Press. £29.95.
978 0 9557949 8 8

Jerry White
LONDON
The story of a great city
124pp. Deutsch. £30.
978 0 233 00285 9