The rat-eating railway of Forest Hill

Pneumatic trains were to the Victorians something like maglev trains are to us: a transport technology of the future that seemed destined to remain there. They even merited some light sarcasm from George Eliot, in the introduction to Felix Holt: The Radical:

"Posterity may be shot, like a bullet through a tube, by atmospheric pressure from Winchester to Newcastle: that is a fine result to have among our hopes; but the slow old-fashioned way of getting from one end of our country to the other is the better thing to have in the memory."

What I hadn't realised until the other day was that there was an actual pneumatic railway in London in the 1840s - and that I used to live on the route of it. According to The Phoenix Suburb: A South London Social History, by Alan R. Warwick, the London and Croydon Railway ran air-powered trains between West Croydon and Forest Hill from October 1845.

The service was smooth, and silent, and apparently capable of exceeding 60mph. It had three ornate architect-designed pumping stations: "the most beautiful things of their kind that have ever been erected in this country". It was also ahead of its time in the literal sense that, when it was built, the materials did not exist to make it work properly.

The trains drew their air power from a pipe between the tracks, connecting to it through a "longitudinal valve", which a few decades later would have been made from toughened rubber. In 1845, it was a leather flap lubricated and sealed with a mixture of wax and tallow.

This was all right except in summer, when the tallow melted and the leather became too floppy; in winter, when the tallow froze and the leather became too stiff; and in spring and autumn, when rain washed the tallow off altogether. Oh, and the tallow mixture was also delicious to rats, which would "invade the track nightly":

"When the pumps started up in the morning, rats would be sucked through the pipe into the pumping station. To combat this, the engine room men placed open sacks over the inlet, to catch the rats as they poured in."

Less than a year after the experiment began, the London and Croydon merged into another railway, and the new company turned off the pumps for good.

Spoilsports.

[The Phoenix Suburb: A South London Social History, by Alan R. Warwick, Blue Boar Press, 1976. Haven't finished it yet, but so far it is proper old-school local history, full of street names and semi-disclaimed sensational anecdotes. It's also magnificently provincial. "Whether a suburb is S.E. or S.W., or N. or E., or whatever," says the preface, "it represents a way of life." In this sentence, as best I can tell, "whatever" covers the entire world beyond the inner London postcode system.]

Parting shot

Stephen Glover was one of three journalists who founded the Independent, in 1986. He went on, in early 1990, to become the founding editor of the Independent on Sunday, from which post he was rapidly ousted amid cost-cutting and acrimony. This is from his description of the board meeting at which he ceased to be an executive director:

I arrived back in the boardroom and sat down. Marcus [Sieff, venerable chairman of Newspaper Publishing plc, the parent company of the two papers] had the air of a man brought in to settle a dispute which he did not really want to understand. He said that there had been a consensus that I should be asked to stay as a [non-executive] director, but there were conditions. In the first place, the arrangement would last for a year, and would be renewed only if the board and I wished it to be. I would get no emoluments (the annual fee for a non-executive director was £12,000) since I had received a year's salary on termination of my contract. So long as I remained as a non-executive director I could not write for any other newspapers, but if I wrote for the Independent or the Independent on Sunday I would not be paid. Finally, I would not be released from my undertaking not to sell any shares before March 31st 1992. That was it.

I was getting the impression that some members of the board were not deperately keen that I should become a non-executive director. Andreas [Whittam Smith, editor of the Independent and chief executive of Newspaper Publishing] was sitting to Marcus's right looking red-faced and ruminative. I imagined him at the board meeting, allowing its sillier members to build up this list of conditions, saying nothing when a word from him would have brought an end to all this foolishness.

"Well, thank you Marcus," I said. "Can I think about it for a day or two? I hadn't expected any conditions and I will need to think about them. Some of them don't matter, but I might want to write for other newspapers, and if Christopher Barton was allowed to sell his shares when he ceased being an executive director I don't see why I shouldn't be. Andreas, you said that you would recommend that I should be able to sell my shares."

"Yes," said Andreas, "but the mood of the meeting was that in the circumstances it would be better not to alter that undertaking."

"I see. Well, I would like a few days, if I may."

"Of course, take as long as you want," said Marcus generously. "I hope it will all work out."

As I walked down the stairs it occured to me that there was one condition that they had not thought of. They had not said I could not write a book.

From Paper Dreams (1993), the memoir that Glover's former colleagues failed to stop him writing. By this point in the penultimate chaper they would probably have regretted the omission. Paper Dreams is an entertaining book, vivid and witty and languidly readable, but is also an act of vengeance, chiefly against Whittam Smith, and a little too openly vengeful to be effective. The era it describes - when a newspaper could be an exciting start-up business capable of attracting £200m in City capital, and when the Independent could feel disappointed at selling a mere 300,000 - seems almost more remote than that in older Fleet Street memoirs.

"Stuff endures"

One of the books that has most stuck in my head in the past year is Ruth Belville: the Greenwich Time Lady, by David Rooney. It's a biography, charming but stretched at less than 200 pages, of a woman famous for one thing. And it's a useful parable for anyone who finds themself in a rapidly, scarily changing industry (hi, fellow journalists!).

Ruth Belville inherited from her mother the business of going once a week to the observatory at Greenwich, having a fine 18th-century pocket watch set to the precise astronomically determined time, and touring the jewellers and watchmakers of London selling them time-checks. Her mother had taken on the task when she was widowed, in the 1850s; Ruth took her place from 1892.

By 1908, when she was the subject of a flurry of press interest, Ruth Belville already seemed an anachronistic curiosity. She should, everyone assumed, have been replaced by modern, telegraph-based electronic synchronisation. But that was expensive, and of variable reliability. Miss Belville, by contrast, charged very reasonably, and always turned up. Her market niche still existed.

The surprise is that Belville continued to make her rounds until 1940, well into the age of the radio and the speaking clock, supported by tradition-minded jewellers. David Rooney draws from this the moral I have taken as the title of my post. The past is still with us, just unevenly distributed, and for the best of reasons. "Stuff endures" - Rooney's nice phrase - because of the inertial power of human affection, and because arrangements can continue to yield rewards even if their original rationale has disappeared.

I have come to suspect that my own job, as a subeditor, is another example of the phenomenon. Subediting - the cutting, polishing and headlining of journalistic text as a separate job - was a natural corollary of hot-metal publishing, in which it was an essential gearing mechanism between reporters and the intricate, inflexible machinery their work drove. Ever since hot metal went, managers and consultants have sought to abolish subs; and yet subs have endured. They have been too useful and too well-established to be easily dispensed with. Those final corrections, that last touch of polish on the writing, all that minute coordination of detail and timing - it's hard to suddenly do without.

Which might give me new hope for my career, except for the fact that stuff doesn't endure for ever. We can't know whether it's 1908 or 1940. But it feels increasingly like 1940. That's what haunts me about Ruth Belville.

The second lump of sugar

In our view, the effect of every policy must first be regarded from the standpoint of the workers of the Nation, and of the poorest and most helpless among them. The charwoman who lives in St Giles', the seamstress who is sweated in Whitechapel, the labourer who stands begging for work outside the docckyard gates in St George's-in-the-East ... The policy which annexes even an Empire, wins an immortal battle, raises this man or that to the Premiership, or sweeps the board at a general election, shall appear to us infamous, not glorious - evil, not good - a thing to weep over, not to acclaim, if it does nothing towards making the lives of these people brighter and happier. On the other hand, the policy will appear to us worthy of everlasting thanks, and of ineffaceable glory, that does no more than enable the charwoman to put two pieces of sugar in her cup instead of one, and that adds one farthing a day to the wage of the seamstress or labourer.

That is TP O'Connor, writing in the leader column of the first number of The Star, his popular London evening paper, in 1888. You can find it quoted in Matthew Engel's Tickle the Public, or wherever learned British journalists grow teary about their trade. I came across it again in The Last Chronicle of Bouverie Street, a 1963 book about the death in 1960 of the News Chronicle newspaper, and incidentally of the Star. While I knew some of the details of the Chronicle's demise - others were shocking; I may blog about them later - the Star's story came as more of a surprise.

At the time of its death, when it was rolled into the London Evening News for no more than the cost of its pension obligations and week-a-year redundancy payments to its staff, the Star had a circulation - and remember this was a London-only title - of about 700,000. In other words, it was selling 200,000 more copies daily than The London Paper now manages to give away. But in 1960, that was only enough to make it the second-best-selling evening paper in Britain. And it had been losing money consistently since 1956. The poorest and most helpless, while numerous enough to make for a substantial readership, were not a demographic attractive to advertisers.

The city and the country's biggest evening paper, it should be noted, was not the London Evening Standard, eventual sole survivor of this three-way fight, but the title into which the Star was merged, the Evening News. The Standard won out not because of sales but because it attracted the most affluent, advertising-friendly readers. In the end, raw numbers are not enough. That might be considered a parable for the age of the unique-user count.

The other thought the story brings to mind is prompted by O'Connor's leader - as a good a manifesto for intelligent populist journalism as anyone could hope for. Here's the thing. If the conventional media were swept away tomorrow, expert coverage and scandalmongering-shading-into-muckracking would probably continue without much interruption. There are bloggers and others for all of that. What it might take a while to rebuild is any organisation with a wide enough reportorial reach, and a deep enough attachment to a wide enough public, to keep an eye on that second lump of sugar.

The Match King and the fading of fraud

Frank Partnoy's The Match King - a biography of Ivar Krueger, by some accounts the greatest financial swindler who ever lived - has the appearance of a book born under a lucky star. The author's previous works include Infectious Greed, a warning about the dangers of modern Wall Street complexities. So this feels like his moment. My friend Robert Colvile has said so in print. There was even time, before publication, to put a reference to Bernard Madoff into the introduction.

It isn't that simple, I'm afraid. Despite that mention of Madoff, The Match King is not prepared to give its subject the treatment that the times might now demand. In its conclusion, he is praised for his "financial innovation". He was, we are told, the first man to evade tax and scrutiny using Lichtenstein; the inventor of many brilliant schemes for handing investors apparent ownership stakes in a company without surrendering any control. Many of his ideas are still in corporate use today! I'm sure all this seemed less equivocally good a few months ago. Partnoy reserves judgment on just how much of Krueger's fall was panic and the effects of the depression - he was Time's cover boy for October 28, 1929, and seemed at first to be surviving, but ran out of credit-lines in a now rather familiar way - and how much was an unravelling swindle. Perhaps judgment has to be reserved, although it makes for an unsatisfying book. Let me summarise.

Ivar Krueger was "the Match King" because he built a match monopoly in Sweden, and came to America in the early 1920s asking for investment on the prospectus that he would use it to buy match monopolies in other countries. Tobacco was everywhere; the Bic lighter was 50 years away; matches were a big deal. Krueger paid dividends upwards of 20 per cent over a sustained period, and Partnoy is careful to establish that he didn't just do this out of subsequent investors' money - the match factories and their profits were real, and he did succeed in buying several monopolies.

On the other hand, Partnoy lays out several sets of alarming facts without quite drawing conclusions. Krueger apparently had a habit, whenever a deal was signed, of commissioning a rubber stamp of the other party's signature. We get nothing about any practical use he may have made of these souvenirs. He died - a suicide or a suspicious death - with his empire under great strain, and his reputation was destroyed when his associates tried to rescue the business using a document they found in his office safe. It was a monopoly agreement with Mussolini's Italy; and, as they subsequently discovered, it was a crude forgery. But Krueger doesn't appear to have told anyone about it - he merely hinted that something big was in the offing - or tried to use it himself. What gives? Then there is his preference for entrusting his most essential business to underqualified people he could control completely, rather than to anyone who might challenge him; and the way that the most important details of his empire remained inside his head.

It is the reason given for his vagueness that seems most suspicious to me. The case was that he couldn't give details on what he was doing with investors' money, because the details of his negotiations with foreign governments could bring those governments down. This is a confidence-trickster pitch: you elicit trust by admitting that you are trying to get one over on somebody - somebody else. It also plays to American assumptions about the venality of all other countries. "You sound like a conman" is far from a conclusive case, however, and if Partnoy is right we lack the detail to ever know exactly what Krueger was up to.

JK Galbraith thought Kreuger's story could function as an immunising memory - a reminder that this is a kind of person to be cautious of, fully crooked or otherwise, with sincerity possibly more dangerous than cynicism. That clearly isn't working. His top Google results, which are probably what passes these days for the verdict of history, include several defences and celebrations, and a get-rich-quick site with his name as the brand. Will today's fraudsters slip into a similar soft focus? They are probably better documented - but that may merely mean we have too much, rather than too little, information to be certain.

Epigraph for an essay on regret

And what could be greater fun,
Once one has chosen and paid,
Than the inexpensive delight
Of a choice one might have made?

-- W.H. Auden, from A Permanent Way

The essay is, of course, unwritten. But it may be too early to regret that.

In lieu of a postcard

"And the city is situated on hills; you are hurrying along somewhere and all at once beneath your feet you have a deep green chasm with a fine river below; you are taking a walk and all of a sudden there is another street located on a bridge above your head, as at Genoa; you are taking a walk, and you reach a perfectly circular open space, as at Paris. The whole time there is something for you to be surprised at." - Karel Capek on the wonders of wandering around Edinburgh, in Letters from England.

[Letters from England, by Karel Capek, translated by Paul Selver, London, 1925. The Czech satirist holidays, sending home faux-naive doodles and matching comic prose. The first few chapters, in which he is beaten about the head by London, are much the best; they show a near-Swiftian skill with lists.]

Additional note, in the event of this blog having a Scottish reader: Yes, he is aware that your country is not part of England; no, I don't know why he chooses not to reflect this in his overall title. The translator sounds potentially English; why don't you blame him?

The war on cliche-cliche

Here is the opening of Christopher Ricks's essay on "Cliche" in State of the Language (1980), a fat volume with many surprising authors (Enoch Powell! Angela Carter! Randolph Quirk! Something for everyone!) that I bought purely for the pleasure of this quote:

The only way to speak of a cliche is with a cliche. So even the best writers against cliches are awkwardly placed. When Eric Partridge amassed his Dictionary of Cliches in 1940 (1978 saw its fifth edition), his introduction had no choice but to use the usual cliches for cliches. Yet what, as a metaphor, could be more hackneyed than hackneyed, more outworn than outworn, more tattered than tattered? Is there any point left to - or in or on - saying of a cliche that its "original point has been blunted"? Hasn't this too become blunted? A cliche is "a phrase 'on tap' as it were" - but, as it is, is Partridge's "as it were" anything more than a cool pretence that when, for his purposes, he uses the cliche on tap it's oh so different from the usual bad habit of having those two words on tap? His indictment of "fly-blown phrases" has no buzz of insect wings, no weight of carrion.

Even George Orwell (whom William Empson, with an audacious compacting of cliches, called the eagle eye with the flat feet) - even Orwell had to use the cliche-cliches (hackneyed, outworn), and could say, "There is a long list of fly-blown metaphors which could be similarly got rid of if people would interest themselves in the job," without apparently being interested himself in whether fly-blown wasn't itself one of those metaphors which could be got rid of.

Ricks goes on to argue that writers can make intelligent, meaning-reviving use of cliche, quoting examples from Geoffrey Hill and, inevitably, Bob Dylan. "Cliches invite you not to think - but you may always decline the invitation, and what could better invite a thinking man to think?" I can't think of a better invitation, if you regularly wax sarcastic about writing, to think harder about the terms you use to do it.

[State of the Language, edited by Leonard Michaels and Christopher Ricks, California, 1980. You want this one, not the disappointing Faber-published sequel dated 1990. I bought my copy from the revived Skoob, now buried under the Brunswick Centre. Presumably a more prominent space would detract from the parade of expensive chain stores that make good, in a bad way, on the centre's claim to be "a high street for Bloomsbury". No matter: the basement shop has a decent amount of space, the lighting's good enough that you don't much miss the windows, the range of books is as wonderful as ever and there's now an official Skoob Glob. And they have a second copy of State of the Language (1980), if you're interested...]

Lanchester on copyright

John Lanchester's long article on copyright for this Saturday's Guardian Review was based on a commendably clear and simple principle: that the purpose of the copyright system is to ensure John Lanchester a living. To that end, besides a slinky version of the usual attack on Disney and some personal remarks about the difficulties created by the need for clearance on obscure works, he has two suggestions:

One is that the period of copyright control does not need to be the same as the period during which an artist can earn royalties. I worked for a short while at Penguin in the early 1990s, during which Joyce and Woolf both briefly came out of copyright (on January 1 1992) and sales in their work zoomed upwards, as publishers came out with competing editions - in the case of the one book for which Penguin already had a licence, Ulysses, sales went up (and there were five other editions on the market). As a result of having seen that at first hand, I think that, 50 years after an author's death, anyone should be able to publish a book or record a piece of music or put on a play, as long as they pay a royalty. This would increase general levels of cultural creativity and still allow revenue, but not control, to artists' descendants. We could even have some fun with Mickey Mouse...

The other suggestion is that artists should be guaranteed, by law, a percentage of the revenue from the sale of their work. At the moment, the big retailers squeeze the publishers, who in turn squeeze the talent, so that it is common for as little as 5% of the purchase price of a book, say - though it's not just books - to reach the writer. That's 95% of the money going to someone other than the creator: does that seem right? My experience of asking people about this suggests, very unscientifically, that most people aren't aware that three-for-twos and dramatically reduced prices mean that the writer is earning a smaller royalty per copy.

The suggestions cut against the prevailing legal tendency to make intellectual property behave more like other sorts of property - cutting against that is fine by me - but they also cut against each other. What percentage of the royalties from Family Romance would go, by law, to the author of the anonymous poem that can be quoted only in its English edition?

The risk of reproducing potentially copyright material, as I (poorly) understand it, isn't just that the author's grandchild can decide to have your book pulped; it's that they can present you with a bill of unpredictable and possibly profit-destroying size. To make the first suggestion work in a way that made use of orphan works easier, you'd have to set some kind of standard rate, and then set up an agency to distribute the cash, adjudicate on claims, and - if you believe that the owners of un-orphaned works should be able to demand more than agency rate - decide who's an orphan and who isn't.

Then once someone's successfully claimed the cash for an orphan work, it has presumably ceased to be an orphan. Can they negotiate a higher fee for the next edition? Or stop it coming out at all?

I'd like these kinds of tweaks to work - at the least the first one, if it worked, might have a relatively high chance of happening. But copyright is almost certainly more broken than that.

Skyline questions

Those who complain that the scale of the Westminster skyline has been outraged by the high-rise interlopers ignore the fact that cold measurements or even hotly angry ones are not everything - not necessarily anything much. What could dwarf that marvellous monster the Victoria tower, but something of its own kind?

When Barry reared his Neo-Gothic palace against the Abbey, the traditional ruler of the Westminster skies for so many centuries, that was true audacity. Both survive as mighty presences, the real abbey and that newer Nightmare Abbey of genius, ruling the scene unmoved by the lofty impotent giants surrounding it. Nothing much counts for much, or intrudes much. The Festival Hall complex, so alluring by night, fades by day into a range of concrete barns: almost a modern agricultural aspect, a Harvest Festival Hall. Next to it the vast inert face of the Shell building expresses total absence. But Wren's surviving churches, however small, refuse to be extinguished. They ignore monsters; they spike the scene like exlamation marks, commanding attention. And wherever you happen to be sailing or driving or walking, whether you are as near as Southwark or as far as Greenwich, St Paul's pops up all over the skyline like a floating bubble nobody can burst. If it had been anchored in a vista, as its creator intended, that dome would never have had the same capricious and buoyant appeal.

- Norman Shrapnel, A View of the Thames

This is 1977, and Norman Shrapnel assumes his readers will be "on the side of sensible planning", "the most careful and tenacious of co-ordinated schemes". The world that he is gently writing against was already disappearing, but he isn't to know that.

In 2007, those bubblings-up of St Paul's are "protected vistas" - we need planning to protect the appearance of serendipity. I'm not sure what the moral is, except that conventional wisdom is more fluid than it can sometimes seem. We go on making mistakes, but not always the same ones.

[A view of the Thames, by Norman Shrapnel, London, 1977. Late-career ruminations by a former parliamentary sketchwriter of the Guardian, in a lovely version of the paper's old C.E Montague-derived heightened colloquial style. Less deep-thinking than the creaminess of the prose would suggest, but it gives a nice picture of the docklands between death and redevelopment, and an engaging selection of the river's urban myths. The picture, incidentally, is the City seen from the ramp down to the debating chamber in City Hall; the pre-20th-century element seems pretty effectively expunged from that particular vista.]

Oxford links

I'm going to have to buy Isolarion, by the looks of it. I want to read more contemporary fiction, really I do, but I keep being tempted away. Incidentally, any Americans tempted up the Cowley Road by that Bookforum review should bear in mind that "From a penny to a thousand pounds" is a traditional slogan, not anything like an accurate description of the pricing at the Hi-Lo Jamaican Eating House: all the (very good) main dishes cost about the same (£8 or so, last time I was there, six years ago). Try to avoid being seated by the speakers and you'll be fine.

Also, while in town: this and this are cryingly envy-making.

London letters 1: Doorstep, Forest Hill

This is the first in what improvident ambition says will be a regular Friday photo series: the aim is to seek out interesting bits of lettering on London streets, with a particular relish for stuff that might otherwise be overlooked, and attempt to provide a little historical background.

Our first exhibit is the doorstep of what's now a Red Cross charity shop at 6 London Road in Forest Hill. I've chosen it because it's a splendid bit of Edwardian flim-flam, and because it has a lesson for the many people currently writing about the Death of the English High Street. The tendency when looking at an old photograph, or leafing through an old street directory, is to assume that businesses you haven't heard of are plucky little independents. Not much danger of that with Sainsbury's, which is still the third-largest supermarket group in Britain. According to the firm's fearsomely detailed if excessively twee virtual museum, this branch would have been part of a large-ish London "high-class provisions" chain when it opened; it's not on their list of branches open by 1900, and there were "more than 100" by 1903. Chains and supermarkets may indeed be throttling our high streets; it really would be nice to have a planning system that did more to encourage varied and independent shops; but multiples have existed for a long time, and writing as if they haven't will make you sound like Peter Ackroyd in London: The Biography surveying the modern Fetter Lane:

In the stretch of Fetter Lane which leads directly out of Fleet Street, with, on the respective corners, a bookshop and a computer supplier, is Clifford's Inn, the oldest Inn of Chancery and once the most important edifice in the street. Rebuilt now, and partitioned into offices and apartments, it is situated beside a modern restaurant, the Cafe Rouge, and opposite a new drinking establishment called the Hogshead.

It's a distinctive style, but unless you can match Ackroyd's torrential erudition - he goes on to link this stretch of road to John Wesley, Tom Paine, Keir Hardie, Dryden, Charles Lamb, Samuel Butler, Lemuel Gulliver, Virginia Woolf and "the only cross-eyed statue in London" - probably not one to copy.

(The statue is of John Wilkes, and went up in 1988: here's the PMSA record and photograph.)

The old rules

The following is from "Taboo: what newspapermen can never, never say", by Nicholas Tomalin, published in Punch in 1973 and republished in the posthumous Nicholas Tomalin Reporting two years later. It was probably ceasing to be true by the time it was written, but it may be suggestive about how hard it would be to restore a culture of "positive" commentary:

The final taboo that really irks me is the still lamentably general rule that all newspaper writers must be optimistic. 'Upbeat' is the word used. In a strict sense, an upbeat is of course the unimportant hiccup before the musical bar line; it is the down-beat that makes the important statemen. The word has become peculiarly corrupted to mean some tone of voice that makes readers cheerful, and more liable to buy advertisers' products. It means always looking on the bright side. I consider the effect of this taboo is quite disastrous on the national life. Because every second-rate hack knows he must be 'upbeat', and every advertising slogan is upbeating perpetually, anyone with a spark of intelligence comes to feel happiness is a totally unacceptable, vulgar, lying emotion (...) I am quite incapable of saying how utterly wonderful it is to be going onward and upward with ths great country of ours (even when I feel it), because so many idiots are saying so, so very often and so very insistently.

The thing about Penge

If you go around telling people you live in Sydenham, as I have had to do these past few weeks, you often enough end up talking about Penge, down the road. Sydenham isn't much of a topic, whereas Penge has a sort of inverse glamour. It may be something to do with Robert Rankin (I'm told) or Rumpole's "Penge bungalow murders", or the name being carried through town on the front of the 176 bus; more likely it's just the comedy of the sound, and the tinge of dull suburbia it now carries. Looking in Russ Willey's Chambers London Gazetteer (which also reminded me about Rumpole) it appears that Penge is "one of the few Celtic place names in London, and suggests the survival of a British contingent after Anglo-Saxon colonisation". The sense of grimly hanging on has hung on: it's now, going by its Chambers entry, the roughest end of a relatively posh borough (Bromley) having had the rough end of the Crystal Palace building boom. This is the magnificently sneery write-up it gets in James Thorne's Handbook to the Environs of London (1876):

Fifty years ago Penge was only spoken of as a common, and the maps show hardly a house upon it (...) Then "the plague of building lighted upon it;" spread more rapidly when Penge Place was taken for the Crystal Palace, Penge Woods was partly absorbed in the palace grounds, and the rest, doubly attractive from its proximity to that popular resort, given over to the builder; and culminated when a Freehold Building Society bought what had been spared of the Common for distribution among its members. Now, Penge is a town in size and population, in appearance a waste of modern tenements, mean, monotonous and wearisome. It has 3 churches, many chapels, schools, hotels, "offices" of all sorts, shops, 4 or 5 rly. stations, and whatever may be looked for in a new suburban rly. town.

I suspect that last sentence is less than half praise.

Revised and updated

"In all of the more than 700 places reviewed within this guide you should be able to get two courses (starter + main or main + dessert), plus half a bottle of house wine (or a couple of beers) plus service (we've assumed ten per cent when it is not automatically added) for no more than £20 per person." -- Time Out Cheap Eats In London, edition three.

"In all of the more than 500 places reviewed within this guide you should be able to get two courses (starter + main or main + dessert), plus half a bottle of house wine (or a couple of beers) plus service (we've assumed ten per cent when it is not automatically added) for no more than £20 per person." -- Time Out Cheap Eats In London, edition four.

Emphases, conveniently enough, in originals.

[Time Out Cheap Eats In London, edition four, 2007. This is the only guidebook I buy every time it comes out, but it has fallen upon evil days. Not only is the new one 50 pages and 200 entries shorter, it has developed a tendency to seek out posh sandwich shops. These will generally let you pick up a sandwich, a banana ("main + dessert") and a can of organic fake Coke ("a couple of soft drinks") for less than £20, but even in London they wouldn't fit most people's definition of "cheap". On the other hand, it's more sensibly organised -- it has all the maps gathered at the back, rather than sprinkled unpredictably through -- and it seems to have somewhat better coverage of outer London, even if it does file its one Forest Hill recommendation under Deptford.]

The years of cholera

Sometimes, a book can transform your view of some other book without so much as a direct reference. One of the first things this blog did, back when it still seemed possible that I might finish Macaulay's History of England, was to mock this statement of optimism:

The difference in salubrity between the London of the nineteenth century and the London of the seventeenth century is very far greater than the difference between London in an ordinary year and London in a year of cholera.

Thanks to Steven Johnson's The Ghost Map, I now know that I greatly underestimated the chutzpah involved. A "year of cholera" was not some immemorial curse. When Macaulay was born, in 1800, cholera was a disease that England heard of only when it devastated a British garrison in India. While he was studying at Trinity College, it was building a bridge of corpses across Europe. And while he was a new MP fighting for Reform...

In 1831, an outbreak tore through a handful of ships harboured in the river Medway, about thirty miles from London. Cases inland didn't appear until October of that year, in the northeast town of Sunderland, beginning with a William Sproat, the first Englishman to perish of cholera on his home soil. On February 8 of the following year, a Londoner named John James became the first to die in the city. By the outbreak's end, in 1833, the dead in England and Wales would number above 20,000. After that first explosion, the disease flared up every few years, dispathcing a few hundred souls to an early grave, and then go underground again. But the long-term trend was not an encouraging one. The epidemic of 1848-1849 would consume 50,000 lives in England and Wales.

As it happens, 1848-1849 is the period during which the first volumes of the History of England were published. That puts Macaulay's cheerfulness on a whole different level, no?

[The Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson, 2006. An old-fashioned story of scientific endeavour - empirical good sense and local knowledge, in the form of John Snow studying a Soho cholera outbreak, defeat fifth-hand argument from authority - made into something rather different by the author's determination to tell his tale at every scale from the microbial to the world-historical. His call for a "history of mistakes" (in this case, the mistake is the miasma theory of disease transmission that made cholera so difficult to understand) is somewhat undermined by his breezy and doubt-free way of throwing around currently fashionable ideas; this is not a book for anybody allergic to pat evolutionary psychology. But his confidence in digressing gives The Ghost Map most of its charm.]

Update: Tweaking the labels on this site I realise, somewhat embarrassedly, that I've come across part of this point before, barely a month after reading the Macaulay; I even gave it the same title. Oops. This latest version of the revelation is probably more startling, however; I don't think I previously realised that cholera was arriving for the first time, or how closely its rise could be seen to follow Macaulay's.

The road and the pavement

The first time I moved to London I read Jonathan Raban's Soft City, a brilliant hymn to urban disorientation and weirdness. It fitted. In fact it fitted so well that it was uncomfortable to read it on buses: I felt that I was looking into my fellow passengers' minds, which was creepy, and that I was offering them the means to look into mine, which was terrifying.

A month ago I moved to London for a third time - difficulties in getting a phone line sorted account for this blog's deadness since - and have ended up reading Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Among other virtues, it turns out to the Raban's anti-book: a hymn to the self-sustaining, self-ordering power of busy areas. He looks at the nearest main road and sees a malevolent river-god (see the link above for quote); she looks at the bustle on the pavement and sees a ballet. What makes it attractive, beyond the sunniness of her outlook, is the quality of her observation. Consider this, on how a good street can police itself:

The incident that attracted my attention was a suppressed struggle going on between a man and a little girl of eight or nine years old. The man seemed to be trying to get the girl to go with him. By turns he was directing a cajoling attention to her, and then assuming an air of nonchalance. The girl was making herself rigid, as children do when they resist, against the wall of one of the tenements across the street.

As I watched from our second-floor window, making up my mind how to intervene if it seemed advisable, I saw it was not going to be necessary. From the butcher shop beneath the tenement had emerged the woman who, with her husband, runs the shop; she was standing within earshot of the man, her arms folded and a look of determination on her face. Joe Cornacchia, who with his sons-in-law keeps the delicatessen, emerged about the same moment and stood solidly to the other side. Several heads poked out of the tenement windows above, one was withdrawn quickly and its owner reappeared a moment later in a doorway behind the man. Two men from the bar next to the butcher shop came to the doorway and waited. On my side of the street, I saw that the locksmith, the fruit man and the laundry proprietor had all come out of their shops and that the scene was also being surveyed from a number of windows besides ours. Nobody was going to allow a little girl to be dragged off, even if nobody knew who she was.

I am sorry - sorry purely for dramatic purposes - to have to report that the little girl turned out to be the man's daughter.

I'm sure other people could give you subtler or more rigorous versions, or refutations, of the "eyes on the street" theory that anecdote supports. Some of them would tell a similar story. But if there's any of them who would notice and describe the girl "making herself rigid", please tell me, because I want to read them.

Given the news around here at the moment, it feels good to be reading a case that cities are not necessarily places of terror; that they can be uniquely civilised, and civilising. My bit of south London (more or less as predicted) has managed occasionally to remind me of one of Jacobs's good scenes, rather than her bad ones. I just wish I could be more optimistic about conditions a borough boundary north.

Hats at war

George Orwell, as previously mentioned here, made the threat of the reappearance of the top hat -- portending the reappearance also of pre-war snobbery, Tory government and mass unemployment -- a running joke in his "As I Please" columns. Max Beerbohm, over in England from Rapello for the duration of the conflict, turns out to have had the equal and opposite thought. Here is Orwell, responding in October 1944 to a rote expression of conservatism in a writers' correspondence course:

I had the same feeling that the pre-war world is back upon us as I had a little while ago when, through the window of some chambers in the Temple, I watched somebody -- with great care and evident pleasure in the process -- polishing a top hat.

And here is Beerbohm, in 1940, mourning for an earlier lost world -- the London before 1910, when Piccadilly was crowded with fascinating horse-drawn carriages, rather than terrifying motor cars, and the artistic rebels in Chelsea had a proper respect for medieval precedent, and his crustiness was only a young man's act:

Perhaps after the present war the top hat will never reappear at any function whatsoever, even on the head of the oldest man. Perhaps it will be used as a flower-pot in the home, filled with earth and nourishing the bulb of a hyacinth or other domestic flower. I hope, in the goodness of my heart, the housemaid will not handle it untenderly, and will brush it the right way. For it is very sensitive. Its sensibility was one of its great charms. It alone among hats had a sort of soul. If one treated it well, one wasn't sure that it didn't love one. It wasn't as expressive as one's dog, yet it had an air of quiet devotion and humble comradeship. It had also, like one's cat, a great dignity of its own. And it was a creature of many moods. On dull cloudy days itself was dull, but when the sun was brightly shining, it became radiant. If it was out in a downpour of rain, without an umbrella, it suffered greatly: it was afflicted with a sort of black and blue rash, most distressing to behold, and had to be nursed back to health with tender and unremitting care. Nature herself was the best nurse, however, during the early stages of the malady. The patient was best left to grow quite dry by action of the air, before being ever so gently brushed with the softest of brushes. Gradually it became convalescent, and seemed to smile up at you while it was rubbed slowly with a piece of silk. And anon it was well enough to be ironed...

I don't say the man at the Temple had been out in the rain. But I'd like to think that's what he was thinking.

[Mainly on the Air, by Max Beerbohm, 1946. The once-famous war broadcasts, with a once-famous note apologising for the infelicities of his spoken style: "I would therefore take the liberty of advising you to read these broadcasts aloud to yourself -- or to ask some friend to read them aloud to you." Imagining his toying with the radio audience ("I am, in fact, a genuine Cockney (as you will already have guessed from my accent)") turns out to be one of the big pleasures of the book; by the later talks he is taking off announcers' quirks, and gesturing sarcastically towards the next programme as if he were John Peel on Home Truths. The ironic humour of his grumpy-old-man schtick is sometimes strained by the completeness of his grumpiness, but the context must have been transforming. John Updike, in Assorted Prose, talks of the broadcasts as a symbol of blitz stoicism. Max could moan about about "ferro-concrete" buildings without so much as acknowledging they were at that moment being bombed into ferro-concrete dust.]

Transition

I've bought a stack of old Pevsner guides in honour of the fact that I am likely to be moving in the next couple of months. It seems a considerable step from Notts -- opening sentence: "Neither the architectural nor the picturesque traveller would place Nottinghamshire in his first dozen or so of English counties" -- to London, which merits two fat volumes even on its 1950s boundaries and under 1950s Pevsnerian asperity.

The best way to narrow the tread may be to live in Lewisham -- opening sentence: "A large borough, but little to see, and nothing of first-class importance." That would make for better reading, too: Pevsner's sniffs of disapproval please me more than his catalogues of approbation.

Lewisham is honoured with two further section-opening insults. "The borough has been singularly unlucky in its architects", under "Public Buildings", is not at all singular -- in casual browsing, I am yet to come across a town hall Pevsner likes -- but the opening of the "Perambulation" is no-nonsense even for him: "There is so little of note that it is hardly worth working out an elaborate itinerary."

[The Buildings of England: Nottinghamshire, by Nikolaus Pevsner, 1951; London Except the Cities of London and Westminster, Pevsner, 1952; London: The Cities of London and Westminster, Pevsner revised by Bridget Cherry, 1973. Not to be assessed in one shot, at least by me; hated by most people with favourite buildings, particularly of a Victorian kind (he dismisses one of mine in Nottingham with two words: "fancifully ignorant"); full of dry amusement.]

Where was I?

London, and away from computers I felt safe blogging on. Sorry for the gap in transmission. In any case, it turns out that the Glorious Revolution doesn't have much to say about the arrival of a Democratic Congress, unless you count this:

The amity of the Whigs and Tories had not survived the peril which had produced it. On several occasions, during the Prince's march from the West, dissension had appeared among his followers. While the event of his enterprise was doubtful, that dissension had, by his skilful management, been easily quieted. But from the day on which he entered Saint James's palace in triumph, such management could no longer be practised. His victory, by relieving the nation from the strong dread of Popish tyranny, had deprived him of half his power.

Our text remains Chapter 10 of Macaulay's History of England; who gets to be William III -- and who you accuse of being James II -- are questions left to the reader.