Sweet Thames run softly while I sing my song

What I shall miss about London

Everything I write is now free. The paid tier is for archive access only. I encourage you to cancel your subscription if you no longer want archive access. I ask for no payment. I ask for no subscriptions to support me or to be nice. More here. If you have questions, please email commonreader@substack.com.

---

London is a city of the imagination. It is full of apparitions: I cannot forget, on every street, that I am following Virginia Woolf around surprising corners, Thomas De Quincey in the vivid nights, Samuel Johnson talking loudly at dinner in the City, Helene Hanff on the Charing Cross Road, Christopher Wren on the Southbank, the players, the apprentices, the characters of Barnaby Rudge and Dombey and Sons making their confused way through higgledy-piggledy alleys. Far from being desperate to escape London as it declines into a place of lawlessness and decay (though those concerns are real), I shall miss so much of this wonderful city.

London is clustered with life. London has it all: crowded streets and open roads, galleried inns and glass towers, polished marble post-modern neo-Gothic and the Lady Chapel where Benjamin Franklin worked as a printer. Here history lives. We troop the colour and fly past the king. We fly a dozen flags from buildings where the great men have worked and died. Look out from the balcony of the National Gallery and you will see the place where Charles I was executed, where Churchill made war, and the great medieval hall where Lord Chancellors once strode, summoned to their king.

London is made of many villages, many moods, many times. It is said that after the Blitz you could walk a mile north from St. Paul’s and find almost nothing standing. The garment district had entirely burned. And yet, it is here that you can look down to the grassy remains of the Roman wall, touch the cold stones of the thirteenth century, and feel the cool air inside original churches by Wren, and a little further away by Jones, and Hawksmoor, whose mighty St. Mary Woolnoth (home of the abolitionist John Newton) is like a ship sailing out of the past into the heart of the City at Bank, the true heart of London if there is such a thing in this uncentered city,—and trailing in its wake, all those Dantean ghosts of T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land. “So many, / I had not know death had undone so many.”¹ In the waste land of the garment district, St. Bartholomew the Great survived, it is said, because of the priest who went onto the roof every night, to toss away the bombs that landed there.

There is history everywhere. Keats’ house. The chapel where Elizabeth Jenkins worshipped. The street where E. Nesbit lived. The White Tower of William I. The steps at Traitors Gate where Princess Elizabeth sat down and wept. Go to the Tate and see Turner’s tempests and Sargent’s vision of innocence. Walk the long streets of Georgian elegance, trace the decaying Regency, the peeling stucco villas, the little City roads where Betjeman regretted the loss of fish-shaped gas-lamps. See the manic Victorian dream fever of Tower Bridge (designed by Horace Jones who gave us Smithfield, Billingsgate, Leadenhall, and the Temple Bar.) Go and stand in the porch of St. Magnus the Martyr, where the old London Bridge arrived, and whose tower the morning commuters were once astonished to see spurting flame. Go stand at St. Mary le Bow, Bow Bells, where fires used to be set at the top of the tower, beacons to guide medieval travellers home. Across the street there is a tree said to be planted in Wordsworth’s time.

Oh this city of King Lud, of baffled barristers drinking wine at El Vinos, and the once mighty shops of the Strand: jewellers, booksellers, clockmakers, vintners. Oh this city of the river that passes King William IV’s Greenwich and Charles Barry’s Parliament, rising out of what was once a nasty marsh, dangerous to cross, so that in the old days the Commons clerk cried out in the early hours, to ensure MPs travelled in company—“Who goes home?” It is the main area of London where phones are stolen today. Behind Holborn there is a church built in the days of Edward I. Near Covent Garden is the house where Johnson met Boswell (a restaurant now).² In the London Library, I walk where J.S. Mill once walked and read the books published before he was born.³ These are the streets where Cowper dragged himself, half-suicidal, to the coffee house, and which he later recollected in rural tranquility.⁴

At the Prince Charles cinema you can see all manner of movies at all times of day. In the churchyard of St. James Piccadilly you can eat splendid Ethiopian food. On the Southbank are concerts by the world’s greatest musicians. There is world-class gelato in Covent Garden. A marvellous old bookshop in Blackheath. You can walk through Greenwich Park at seven in the morning and nine in the evening and catch the beginning and the end of the light; from the top you can see the river and Canary Wharf. You can go to Billingsgate at dawn. You can drink in the Carpenter’s Arms behind Hyde Park until midnight. You can stand in the attic of Johnson’s house where the Dictionary was written and the fire watchers once played a string quartet. You can ride the bus with an Earl or glimpse Princess Eugenie stepping, fleetingly, out of her taxi and into a member’s club. (Had I a cloak I would have thrown it down.) You can go to the Chelsea Physic Garden and see the herbs (so close to where Carlyle worked!) or visit the gardens where Shakespeare began the quarrel of the Wars of the Roses, surrounded by the chambers that were once occupied by Lord Denning and Lord Atkin, great heroes of English liberty. Here were decided the cases of Somerset v Stewart⁵, Entick v Carrington⁶, R v R⁷, and Liversidge v Anderson⁸. Here Wilberforce recited the entire Psalm 119 as he walked home from Parliament. Here Chaucer wrote his poetry, Milton his prose.

From St. James’s (where Addison and Swift supped at the coffee house) to Bloomsbury (where Dickens and Woolf lived) to Highgate where Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate Hill⁹, there are small thickets of trees where the questing Londoners can rest in the shade. In the V&A are mighty examples of the arts of all the world, ancient and modern. We have a long canal to walk beside, a river where you meet treasure seekers every day. Wellington’s house has a first-rate collection of Spanish art. The Chapter House of Westminster abbey is one of the nicest places in the country. In the bombed out ruins of St. Dunstan-in-the-East, where Wren’s needle tower is carried on four ogee-shaped flying-buttresses (an intoxicant for the imagination, especially when seen across the river), you can sit by the bubbling pool and watch the song birds fluttering between the ivy and the trees.

In London you can skip off to meet some writers for supper at a fine Vietnamese restaurant, hear from programme directors at ARIA about their work, go to a debate about the future of AI; it is here where I have walked in the Commons lobby when the voting bell was rung; here where I met John Carey after a talk about William Golding, heard George Selgin talk about monetary policy, went to an event hosted by actual Objectivists (an education in itself). When I worked in Westminster there was real discussion to be had about the gold standard, serious debate about tax reform; it was a place full of ideas and optimism; and when I walked in St. James park I was followed by the ghost of Alan Lascelles, who plunged in there in the darkness on the night the night of the abdication, walking round and round and thinking of James II.

I shall miss all this and so much more. The way the DLR, trundling under overhanging trees (along a track that feels as secluded from the city as the river than runs through Lewisham and Catford, where my children have paddled barefoot) scares up magpies ahead of it, as it trudges to Canary Wharf, past Billingsgate. At Greenwich you pass the mud, the old dock buildings, rusting river apparatus for unloading, and the tall Victorian warehouse with the words S.P. MUMFORD & Co. spelled out in proud white bricks, visible, then, from the water, no doubt. On the banks of the Thames I have gathered old pipes, snapped and discarded from long-gone pubs, two hundred years old or more. “On Thames’s Banks, in silent Thought we stood,/ Where Greenwich smiles upon the silver Flood.”

This is a splendid city for trees, bluebells, minor royal houses, curry houses, theatres that literally gleam with gold. O city of performers! where I have seen Mitsuko Uchida play Schubert, and when Paavo Järvi conducted the Firebird and I felt my body could no longer contain me; where we heard Vaughan Williams’ London symphony, the swish of the skirts; where I saw Penelope Keith in Noel Coward, Samantha Bond in Oscar Wilde, Maggie Smith in Eugene O’Neill.

The grassy path where my wife and I lay down to see the stars one night; laughing so hard at Alan Ayckbourn we might have fallen out of our seats; the park on a hill where I pushed my children’s buggy, where they stayed up late to see fireworks and the moon; the gardens where jazz bands play while we admired the roses, the brooms, the wisteria; riding the Clipper boat along the Thames while little working barges pull their load, seeing Greenwich come into view; the view from Hampstead Heath; Kew Gardens in the spring.

So many memories; so many ghosts.

A picture I took on the river this week.

1

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

2

“At last, on Monday the 16th of May, when I was sitting in Mr. Davies's back-parlour, after having drunk tea with him and Mrs. Davies, Johnson unexpectedly came into the shop; and Mr. Davies having perceived him through the glass-door in the room in which we were sitting, advancing towards us,—he announced his aweful approach to me, somewhat in the manner of an actor in the part of Horatio, when he addresses Hamlet on the appearance of his father's ghost, 'Look, my Lord, it comes.' I found that I had a very perfect idea of Johnson's figure, from the portrait of him painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds soon after he had published his Dictionary, in the attitude of sitting in his easy chair in deep meditation, which was the first picture his friend did for him, which Sir Joshua very kindly presented to me, and from which an engraving has been made for this work. Mr. Davies mentioned my name, and respectfully introduced me to him. I was much agitated; and recollecting his prejudice against the Scotch, of which I had heard much, I said to Davies, 'Don't tell where I come from.'—'From Scotland,' cried Davies roguishly. 'Mr. Johnson, (said I) I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it.' I am willing to flatter myself that I meant this as light pleasantry to sooth and conciliate him, and not as an humiliating abasement at the expence of my country. But however that might be, this speech was somewhat unlucky; for with that quickness of wit for which he was so remarkable, he seized the expression 'come from Scotland,' which I used in the sense of being of that country; and, as if I had said that I had come away from it, or left it, retorted, 'That, Sir, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help.' This stroke stunned me a good deal; and when we had sat down, I felt myself not a little embarrassed, and apprehensive of what might come next. He then addressed himself to Davies: 'What do you think of Garrick? He has refused me an order for the play for Miss Williams, because he knows the house will be full, and that an order would be worth three shillings.' Eager to take any opening to get into conversation with him, I ventured to say, 'O, Sir, I cannot think Mr. Garrick would grudge such a trifle to you.' 'Sir, (said he, with a stern look,) I have known David Garrick longer than you have done: and I know no right you have to talk to me on the subject.' Perhaps I deserved this check; for it was rather presumptuous in me, an entire stranger, to express any doubt of the justice of his animadversion upon his old acquaintance and pupil.* I now felt myself much mortified, and began to think that the hope which I had long indulged of obtaining his acquaintance was blasted. And, in truth, had not my ardour been uncommonly strong, and my resolution uncommonly persevering, so rough a reception might have deterred me for ever from making any further attempts. Fortunately, however, I remained upon the field not wholly discomfited.”

3

“That creature Dickens, whose last story, Bleak House, I found accidentally at the London Library the other day and took home and read—much the worst of his things, and the only one of them I altogether dislike—has the vulgar impudence in this thing to ridicule rights of women. It is done in the very vulgarest way—just the style in which vulgar men used to ridicule 'learned ladies' as neglecting their children and household etc.”

JSM to Harriet Taylor

4

“At seven o'clock this evening, being the seventh of December, I imagine I see you in your box at the coffee-house. No doubt the waiter, as ingenious and adroit as his predecessors were before him, raises the tea-pot to the ceiling with his right hand, while in his left the tea-cup descending almost to the floor, receives a limpid stream; limpid in its descent, but no sooner has it reached its destination, than frothing and foaming to the view, it becomes a roaring syllabub. This is the nineteenth winter since I saw you in this situation; and if nineteen more pass over me before I die, I shall still remember a circumstance we have often laughed at.”

5

“The state of slavery is of such a nature that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political, but only by positive law, which preserves its force long after the reasons, occasions, and time itself from whence it was created, is erased from memory. It is so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law. Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from the decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England; and therefore the black must be discharged.^”

6

“If it is law, it will be found in our books. If it is not to be found there, it is not law”.

7

"in modern times the supposed marital exemption in rape forms no part of the law of England."

8

“In England, amidst the clash of arms, the laws are not silent. They may be changed, but they speak the same language in war as in peace. It has always been one of the pillars of freedom, one of the principles of liberty for which on recent authority we are now fighting, that the judges are no respecters of persons, and stand between the subject and any attempted encroachments on his liberty by the executive, alert to see that any coercive action is justified in law.”

“Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate Hill, in those years, looking down on London and its smoke-tumult, like a sage escaped from the inanity of life's battle; attracting towards him the thoughts of innumerable brave souls still engaged there. His express contributions to poetry, philosophy, or any specific province of human literature or enlightenment, had been small and sadly intermittent; but he had, especially among young inquiring men, a higher than literary, a kind of prophetic or magician character. He was thought to hold, he alone in England, the key of German and other Transcendentalisms; knew the sublime secret of believing by "the reason" what "the understanding" had been obliged to fling out as incredible; and could still, after Hume and Voltaire had done their best and worst with him, profess himself an orthodox Christian, and say and print to the Church of England, with its singular old rubrics and surplices at Allhallowtide, Esto perpetua. A sublime man; who, alone in those dark days, had saved his crown of spiritual manhood; escaping from the black materialisms, and revolutionary deluges, with "God, Freedom, Immortality" still his: a king of men. The practical intellects of the world did not much heed him, or carelessly reckoned him a metaphysical dreamer: but to the rising spirits of the young generation he had this dusky sublime character; and sat there as a kind of Magus, girt in mystery and enigma; his Dodona oak-grove (Mr. Gilman's house at Highgate) whispering strange things, uncertain whether oracles or jargon.”

Carlyle, Life of Sterling

9.