In Our Time - London

Episode Date: September 28, 2000

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of London. To T.S.Eliot it was the “Unreal City”, to Wordsworth “Earth has not anything to show more fair” but to Shelley, “Hell is a city much like London”. At the start of this twenty-first century the capital city covers an area of 625 square miles, is home to 7 million souls, and has an economy which at more than £115 billion is larger than that of Saudi Arabia, Ireland or Singapore. Is this modern metropolis still the place that the poets described? Can there be such a thing as a history of a city, which in each generation sucks in its communities from around the country and around the globe? In a city whose buildings have been razed, whose people have been decimated and whose borders have been dramatically redrawn, what is there that connects it to its own past?With Peter Ackroyd, author of London: The Biography; Claire Tomalin, author and biographer of Samuel Pepys; Iain Sinclair, poet, novelist and author of Liquid City and Lights Out for the Territory.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, to T.S. Elliot, it was the unreal city. To Wordsworth, Earth has not anything to show more fair, but to Shelley, hell is a city, much like London.

At the start of this 21st century, the capital city covers an area of 625 square, miles, it's home to 7 million bodies and even souls, and has an economy which at more than 115 billion pounds is larger than that of Saudi Arabia, Ireland or Singapore. Is this modern metropolis still the place the poets described? Can there be such a thing as a history of a city, which in each generation sucks in its communities from around the country and around the globe? In a city whose buildings have been raised, whose people have been decimated and worse, and whose borders have dramatically been redrawn, what is there that connects it to

its own past. With me to discuss the character and history of London is Peter Ackroyd, author of London The Biography, which comes out on October 5th, the product and culmination of many years of research on the city, also with Miss Clare Tomlin, who's writing a biography of the Great London Chronica Samuel Pepys and with a Stuizier and Sinclair, poet, and novelist who's made London the theme of such books as Liquid City and lights out for the territory. Peter Ackroyd, you write what you call a biography of London. It's long, it's rich, it's hugely enjoyable. In the sense that it's biography, where does it start? When was London born? Well, if you think of London as a living organism with its own laws of growth and

change and development, then we'd have to say that it began at the very beginning. There are historians who believe that London was invented by the Romans, my own belief that it was invented by the British and Celtic tribes who emerged before the Romans on the banks of the Thames. But its life has always been one of trade. It's built upon trade and commerce, upon power, upon mercantile aggression, and it's retained that identity for more than 2,000 years. What evidence is therefore there being a Celtic settlement of note here? The evidence is now to be found in the storerooms of the Museum of London.

In the past, what happened with those old artefacts is they're sort of bunged into corners and not properly examined. But now the museum, experts are looking very carefully at the provenance of the ancient objects and finding significant patterns of occupation and activity, particularly in Southwark. It may well be that Southwark turns out to be the first London, we don't know. But what I am convinced of is that there's the way the city operates and the atmosphere, the existence, the spirit of the city, seems almost to demand a continuing occupation, a continuing life.

Just looking at it as a place, it would seem to be rather strange, were it not occupied when the Romans came, given its magnificent position with the hills to the north and the plain to the south and the river coming in and so on and so forth. But how did the name London appear? We believe this to be a Celtic name, which is, of course, of great distress to those who believe London was founded by the Romans. We believe it comes from Londonos, meaning cruel or fierce.

and of course throughout its history, London has been known for its cruelty and fierceness. So this nomenclature, primeval though it is, is of some appropriateness. I'm going to concentrate on much later on in London's history, but Clare Tomlin, just to get a feeling of its deeper past, say pre-Roman, Roman and then Norman. Do you feel that behind the work you're doing when you're writing about Peeps in London? Well, absolutely, because where Peeps was born, which is just off Fleet Street, underneath there there are the remains of a Roman villa.

And one of the things I have felt walking along the north bank of the river from Peep's birthplace to where he lived later, which was by Tower Hill, I have gradually got a stronger and stronger sense of the beauty of this site. London is not a beautiful city, but that site that you mentioned

where there's a south-facing hill protected from the winds of the north with the church now at the top. The church has been at the top of the hill for one time looking out over the green south. You can see how attractive it was to the Romans. You can see how they could plant vineyards there, how it was that they could fish in the river,

a river full of fish, even lobsters, peeps mentions lobsters in the river. You can see that for many, many generations, it was a delightfully attractive place. Yes, In Clare, just to get back to this, how far can you go back? You do, all four of us actually do a lot of walking around London, but your books come out of these walks.

Do you feel, without being a new sense, can you tell us more specifically about London's past as you drift past it in the streets and so on? Yes, I think it begins when you arrive in a new city. The only way to navigate it is to set off on these sort of journeys in which all you have to go on originally is a kind of mood or emotion. It's as Peter Ackroyd has said,

there are these echoes that come into you. So you find, you map out particular routes, from where I live in Hackney, which once have been a suburb outside what we really think of as London, is the city, the old wall city, the Roman wall city. If you live outside that, then you have to be drawn into this central energy, this kind of gravity that pulls you. And all the time, accidentally, there will be echoes of the past as you stand outside this building,

broadcasting houses, which looked this morning, in the London sunlight, a shimmering white cliff of Portland stone, you can see the fossils in the stone, and you can't not go back into the past. London's history is, if you collapse it, just like if you collapse Hamlet's the play,

it's very vivid and melodramatic and so on, is burned by Baudicero, Boe de Sears, we used to more melodiously call it at school, invaded by the Saxons and the Fiking, and beset by disease. But let's concentrate for the moment on the great plague of 1665, which at its height was killing,

was it 20,000 people a week? Can you give us some idea of London's response to that plague? London's response was like the response of London to all of its calamities, is to go into a state of hysteria and feverish rage. The plague was supposed to have begun

in the top course, of Drury Lane in unlucky district of St Giles, which has been known throughout his history until recently as one of the unluckiest or most unfortunate areas of London, because all areas have their own temperament, their own character. And it's spread throughout the rest of the city. I don't think there's much throughout the historical record. Would there be a sense that the plague was looked for

by religious groups or visioners? would they actually, although this is one of London's response to disaster is to rub its hands, warm its hands on the fire. There's Isaac's praise God barebones who went around with a basket of embers on his head, proclaiming the imminent destruction of the plague. But of course what actually happened out of this was not sort of bewailing God's providence or the workings of fate, but the royal society. So this sort of pragmatic empirical aspect of London's life came into play

after that particular tragedy. Let's concentrate on the plague for a moment because there are two or three views on this. You base your vivid accounts of the plague on Defoe, who wrote about it, a considerably led to date. He was only six or seven when the plague came out. And there are different versions of the plague. Claire Tomlin.

Yes, you're right, that clergymen got up and did suggest that the plague was a punishment from God, both before and afterwards. But I think there is another way of looking at it. Yes, it killed about the six of the population, but it was a poor plague. It was the poor who died.

And if you actually look at Peep's account of the plague and the time around it, you get an extraordinary shock. He knew the plague was coming, but there had been plagues regularly. So everyone was used to plagues. If you look through the parish registers of the 17th century, you find that there are plague deaths every year. Plague was endemic, and then there are great surges of plague, 1625, 1636, I think in 25, one diarist of that time

wrote that three score children died in one alley, 60 children in one alley. They were very used to the plague in London. The year arrived, 1665, Peep's is very busy, there's a war with the Dutch. His old mother has been sent to live in the country. Like all Londoners who were sent to the country, she wanted to come back.

And so Peeps and his wife invite her to come and stay. She arrives in London, just as the plague is really getting going, and she has a terrifically good time with her daughter-in-law. They go out on the river, they go to the theatre. They do all sorts of things. And Peeps cannot persuade her to leave. He finally persuades her on June the 22nd,

the day after he sees everybody leaving the city. Mrs. Peeps, grumbling away, being sent back to the country, leaves. Then Peeps himself, in fact, proceeds to have the best year of his life. And he actually says so. In September, the end of September 1665, when the plague is its very worst, he says, I do end this month with the greatest content

and may say that these last three months for joy, health and profit have been much the greatest that ever I received in all my life. He says this over and over again. During the plague, he's on a high, as people are often during the blitz, during war. He gives himself a very long leash sexually.

He makes a lot of money. He quadruples his fortune. Peter Ickwright, how do you respond to that? Because we get tremendous gloom, the city's silent, into a, in your book, you'd walk into a silent city, no noise, carter's taking away, people scudding up the middle of the street, not touching each other, and so on and so forth. That's the vision I have of the plague.

Well, apart from Defoe, I also use the materials of a clergyman who was in, who wrote during the plague, and there's no doubt that calamities of every kind bring out London in its almost primeval state, its theatricality, its fearfulness, and also its superstition, it's paganism. One of, as Claire was suggesting, one of the great features of London during the Great Plague and the Great Fire was this sort of pagan, uh, reversion to paganism and, uh, sort of disbelief in any firm deity. We know all the stories about the bodies being chucked, being said one a penny for a body of a child and so forth. But London has always been pagan, drunken, fury, fearful and violent. That's, that's at least how foreigners saw them. And the

Plague seems only to have brought out the most permanent and enduring of their characteristics. But it's interesting that these two versions can coexist to me because it seems to which the coexistence of undoubted extraordinary sickness, illness, poverty, and the violence done to poor people, and the prosperity going alongside, I mean, the traditional, the great house with the muse at the back and so on. That is one of the things that. But Ian Ciclau, can I bring you in on this? You and Peter, I would like to kind of begin to know,

a very fond of being metaphorical about that. Peter already says St. Giles is an unlucky place. Now, how far do you take this? With this very subject of the plague, it struck me that if you're doing what Peter has done and writing a biography of a city, you actually need this in terms of the drama of a narrative. And I think what works wonderfully well

about doing a biography of the city is that the city obeys the same rules as good fiction. Well, it does if you make it do. You can't not make it do. You can't you? We've just proved about the... He says brilliantly that the greatness of London is it's a muddle. And I think that's right. The history of London is a muddle.

London is like a great pudding. We can each pull out the plum we want. We have to all this metaphorical thing, Ian. When you speak to that? Do you really believe that certain areas of London are unlucky and certain areas that London has temperaments, that London has moods, that London has a growth and organic growth,

rather than somebody like Peter Aykroyd, who's a fiction writer as well as a biographer, shaping a growth out of a massive events which could be shaped into several different sort of growth. and therefore the organicism is in him and not in the city. What do you say about that? It's in both. I think when he comes to write about the city, what he is in fact doing is writing his own biography,

and his own biography is a form of fiction. It's wonderful how these elements go backwards and forwards in and out of each other. I'm not too convinced by that, actually. Well, let me just put this one. The first paragraph of Peter's biography of London mentions the metaphor of a great heart beating. He sets it up as a heart. Well, where's the heart of London, then?

Well, for him, the writer, it's in his own chest. And at the end of the book, when he completes this massive enterprise, he actually suffered a heart attack. Now, that is the kind of thing which you might well dismiss, but which I'm looking at it as with the eye of a poet or novelist or whatever. I'm a novelist too, but I think that's a coincidence. I don't think that is to do with any, any profound connection between him, writing about the heart of him, from which he is fully recovered

and looks on radio as well as his ever look. Well, the last chapter of the book has when finding the stone saying was Zurgam on it. So the metaphors maintained throughout... No, if London teaches us one lesson, is there no such thing as coincidence in Melbourne. But Ian, I'm very interesting what Ian says about certain areas having certain temperaments. Now, how would you... But Ian believes it too. We both believe it very firm. How would you explain that or describe that?

Well, I'd experience it first rather than describe it or explain it. I mean, it hit me most forcibly when I was doing it. the humblest of jobs as a gardener for the Parks Department in East London. I had to cut the grass around these monumental edifices of the Hawksmore churches without knowing anything about it. And being there on the spot, I began to inquire of anybody around church caretakers or even drunk sitting on benches. What were the stories of these places? And in each case, it seemed to uncover a pattern of kind of malignancy. extemporising from that

I began to kind of think of the whole map of London as a series of places that were fortunate or unfortunate or invoked certain moods. Again, certain oases like Fountain Court in the temple with the sound of the fountain has always been to writers

from generation to generation an image of calm and peace. Other places, as around Newgate prison, bring on a sense of foreboding even if you don't know that that building was one. the great prison of London, where people were executed on the streets. Well, do you think that people at Tyburn living in London now,

still go around and thinking, gosh, I feel as if I'm going to be hanged any minute, because this is the hanging place. I think if they don't have a sense of what has been there before, they won't be able to live in the present. So you're talking about knowledge rather than feeling in that sense? No, I'm initially feeling, but if you want to work on that feeling, the knowledge is there to be discovered. It's not a small point.

It's an interesting point, because both of you, Peter, Akroyd and Ian Sinclair, passionately believe in this living organic, and Peter's prepared to say there's no such thing as coincidence the heart, the heart and so on and so forth. And you think that the plagues continue, Ian Sinclair. You think that we've got a plague now, which is... It's called AIDS or whatever. I mean, I think...

Well, age is not a London plague. I mean, we're talking about London. So what specifically... I was thinking you were saying... Neither was the previous plague specific to London. It came from Europe. That's true. London is not an island.

London depends upon... London comes to life to the Thames. And from the Thames, the world... The world enters and the world leaves. London... Not much anymore. Well, it used to. And that was what gave it its spirit and its blood.

I mean, we could talk about in terms of, again, back to the heart as a series of veins and arteries. There is a great tradition of writing about London gloomily. London is not a superficially attractive city like Paris or Rome. And probably the greatest writer ever about London is Dickens, who presents it as gloom, bulging graveyards, mud, fog, all that. And I think it's very interesting that William Morris, whom I'm not sure that you mention this in your book, Peter, that William Morris could only redeem London in his imagination

in news from nowhere by seeing it as virtually destroyed and returned to green landscape. And I think that is a very important vision, that he couldn't face the darkness and the horror of London. Well, I think this is absolutely right, that Dickens's gloom is utterly dependent on a system of contraries, as always opposites. Along with that satinine gloom is a phenomenal sense of energy and the liveliness of the mob and all the theatre, the masks, the dynamism. And in any of these great London writers, beneath that chaos, there will be these instance when Paradise reveals itself as a series of buried rivers or as parks or as forests that people glimpse. were Dickens to come back now in a way.

I disagree with you about London not being an attractive city. Now we're in the world got the parks of London and so on. But that's a different... As to walk around, I think London's perhaps the most interesting. But it's not formally beautiful. If were Dickens to come back, or Morris to come back now, they would see their vision on the way there. There is no smog and fog anymore.

That's gone. The Thames is clean now. The green spaces are extended. A lot of the buildings have been cleaned. A lot of the buildings that were oppressive have been pulled out. So can we come back to this underlying thing again, Peter? You say that London has always had a sort of paganism about it, and this came out in the plague, the superstitions, they abandoned to despair.

You talk about people wearing charms, filters, exorcisms, amulets and so on and so. Do you think paganism has been running underneath this city for the last 2,000 years? Oh, absolutely so. There's no doubt about that, from the Temple of Mithras to the amulets sold in East End markets until recent years. There's always been a credulity and superstitious amongst the citizens of London, which is, I think, unparalleled than the rest of the world. But to go back to this thing about...

the organic nature of London, the nature of the territories which we were discussing. There's another element to this, which is of some significance or some consequence. In the course of writing this book, I discovered certain areas didn't only acquire moods, but they also acquired a very firm identity. It's quite obvious, for example, that the area of Clark and well has been the home of radical activity for almost 1,200 years from the time of the what Tyler, riots to the moment when Lenin edited an underground newspaper from the same vicinity. Bloomsbury for at least 600 years has been the home of occult activities,

from the quack astrologers who assembled around seven dials, to the Swedenborgians, to theosophists, to the Golden Dawn, all in the same tiny area. And there are all sorts of areas of London in which this truth seems to be applicable. certain areas seem to dominate or at least modify the lives and characters of the people who live in them. Now, I don't think there's any

scientific theory to explain this. Can we just switch to the fire, the great fire, because as plagues go through London and actually one of the things I wanted to tease out of you with plagues, which you didn't respond to, but maybe his little footnote to the plagues, is you talk about the current sickness of London as being

people fighting just to get to the place, to get to their work. I felt filled with the city of London now, And I'm sure everybody feels this every generation, that the transport system becomes clogged. It's actually physically difficult to move around the city. The buildings have their own diseases. They have fevers and sweats.

They're clad in these kind of overcoats that can be peeled and changed to give you whatever style you want. And my feeling is strongly that the city itself was sick. Now this may be projected by me upon it because I'm out of key with what's happening in the city. But looking always the poetic metaphors, the moment that the crash comes in the financial markets, then you have a great cleansing wind, and we can all respond in a primitive way towards these things, and that is very much sort of my reading of the city, knowing it's only not an absolute or overall picture.

What's your reading of the city after the Great Fire? Well, this was obviously a sort of monumental moment, because for once the planners could come in with their schemes and say, This can be the new, the radiant city. We can have a city that is rationally planned. And, of course, it doesn't work out, because London doesn't work that way. It always has to be chaotic and a bodged and a bit of this and a bit of that.

Well, it didn't work out because everybody owned... We're talking about 1666. We're talking about 1667, and that 1667 of the fire. Everybody owned a little bit of land where their house had been burnt, and they still owned it. So the great plans, you're right. The beautiful plans were made for enlarging the streets and changing the pattern.

But it didn't happen because of a quite simple practical fact, the ownership of the land by individual people. Still, these plans are beautiful in themselves. They are beautiful in themselves. In your search for poetic metaphors, Ian Zinclair, what do you bring to the Great Fire? Oh, well, obviously, Earth, Air, Fire, Water.

I mean, you know, London always is dependent on fire as a system of writing. I think fire comes and cleanses the frame from time to time. any of the great buildings that I've been interested in in East London I mean for example at the Church of Mary Matfellon in Whitechapel which was a pilgrims chapel on the Great Road out of London was destroyed five or six times by fire as soon as it was rebuilt for some reason to be struck by lightning it'd be damaged in a blitz that building could never stand and in the end they gave up on it and all that there is

is this wonderful ghostly outline of bricks in the grass and people still there are a drinking school sit in this park but they don't step within that building we're back to the notion of places that are unlucky London has always been a city visited by fire it's been uniquely blessed by divine or human intervention in that sense there've been so many fires

that it was amazing it rises again but it was done but then the other thing if you are looking for metaphors is that the colour of London has always been red Borges remarked upon this although he was blind when he came to London he saw red and all of the institutions and the civic, administrative and social affairs of London are conducted in red or scarlet.

So the fire is in one way as a sort of beatific confirmation of London's colour. If I could go back to Peeps, I said that Peep's was very jolly during the plague. The fire terrified him. The fire gave him nightmares. The fire really affected him because it was. It wasn't the, hardly anybody died in the fire. It wasn't the disappearance of human life. It was the disappearance of the whole world he knew, the buildings.

And it simply terrified him. Was it the disappearance of wealth that bothered him? Well, yes, it was wealth. But I think it was the actual buildings. And then he gives these extraordinary descriptions of the, for over a year after the fire. Nobody wanted to go in there because it was very dangerous, because there were great holes in the ground where there were sellers, and there were robbers.

so he would very, very carefully go around it. But there's something else which takes up the mythological points we've been talking about, Peeps, and many other Londoners thought that the fire had been started deliberately. And they thought it had probably been started by the Roman Catholics. And in fact, you find that within 12 years after the fire, you get the popish plot, which is when England became like America under McCarthy. Everybody was hysterical.

Peeps himself was put in prison. People were executed. The whole country went mad. Hysteria took over London. And one of the things they revived then was that the fire had been started by the Roman Catholics. So it did have an extraordinary resonance that fire in the whole community.

Do you think it has anything to do with sound? Because the plague comes like a silent sort of killer in the night. You can't hear it, you can ignore it. The fire erupts with this incredible, orgasmic sound. Terrifying noise, yes. And sound in London is the thing I think we haven't talked about. Well, no, but I've got a history of sound in the book,

the history of noise, and it's the most important feature of London life. It's a much more quiet city now than it ever was before. Yeah, I mean, I think believe people were actually deaf and within this period by church bells. Well, the tolling bells were a very important thing, not just in the plague, but through everyone.

Peeps over and over again talks about hearing the bell tolling for somebody dead, I mean, before the plague, just people he used. knew. It was very, very powerful thing, yes. And the maps of that period would depict, looking across the river, it would just be a forest of church towers, like

a kind of ships parked there. And gradually, as time goes on, and you have these now computer-generated visions of London, the churches totally disappear. But does it, the feeling, this idea of London as a being, as a place whose biography

can be written, as you've written biographies of persons, Peter Aykroyd, There's a sentence here which is, as you mind to what we're talking about from your book, you said, quote, London seems to invite fire and destruction from the attacks of Boidesia to those of the IRA. Now, that's suggesting that London is a person who's also a victim. A victim or a victor who deserves punishment. I mean, the old metaphors for London were Babylon, Nineveh, Tyre, Rome,

all great imperial empires, all the centres of great. imperial empires. And there's no doubt that the power of London is based upon authority, violence, oppression, commerce, as I said before, and trade. And a city which is based upon what one might call non-spiritual values is one which would seem uniquely inviting to invasive or punitive forces.

I think its status as the New Babylon, as it was known, invites images of ruin. And those, of course, were the common places of 19th century social descriptions. Claire Tomlin, you're going on with that? Well, you're missing out a bit that London is also founded on pleasure and purveying pleasure to people. And for instance, you talk about street theatre. I'd entirely agree with you. The street theatre of London has always been extraordinary.

But the theatre itself is... has been a huge part of the life of London. And the theatre has been, for a long time, it was a uniting factor in London life that into the theatre came. The royal family, the politicians, the merchants, the apprentices, the prostitutes, the students. It did something which doesn't happen now.

Yes, but it goes hand in glove with bear baiting, tormenting of beasts of every kind, these absolutely parallel activities. Well, that wasn't happening in Goralian and Covent Garden. And I think this goes through to, kind of current culture of their underground boxing and the more extreme elements of football

all this, the public spectacle is quite violent and dark as well as being pleasurable and like. I've got a trouble, they shot all the bears to save them from being baited, which always makes me love. But there's no necessary disparity between power and wealth and theatricality. In fact, they also go hand in hand.

The theatricality of London is an intrinsic aspect of its material power. No, with the point I was making, there is pleasure, too. The London does, is a city of pleasure as well as a city of fear and terror and all these grim things you keep talking about. But it is, we have grim tales from the two gentlemen

between us and we do. We do, we do, please. So let's pursue the grimness for a little more. One of the uniting things about the theatre the last two, three hundred years, is it wasn't just London theatre, they toured. And so you had seen a play in London, but you'd also seen it north, west, east and south,

which was one of the more uniting things about the country in those years. Coming back to you, Ian Sinclair, you say, as Peter talks about inviting fire and destruction, and then made a very neat sidestep to justify that, I thought. You say Londoners are attracted to disaster in some way. Now, again, these are strong words, really. They're quite interesting. I mean, were they attracted to the Blitz? Yes, yes, very definitely.

I mean, I think all the time, what we're looking for in London is energy, sources of energy. So we need a bit more energy, let's get Hitler to drop 30,000 bombs on us, is that the idea? We've lived on it ever since. It's not so much the people who suffered it at the time. My own house has got a split down the middle where... Is that invigorating? Yes, it is. It is like...

So you're very glad that the house was bombed because it invigorated by me. I wasn't there at the time, so... This is, this is... Am I the only person listening but thinks this is rather sinice? I don't go along with this. I mean, the... Well, you know, the fireman's report say it took us more time. to get rid of the gaping crowds

and to put out the fires. People go and look at fires. That's because people like to look at fires. They don't like to look at them. They don't like to be inside them. They don't like to be inside them. They're the pleasure of seeing destruction. After the event and safe from the event.

That's not the event which is being blitz. Would you develop what you said, Ian, because it's intriguing? What I'm always thought is that the essential nature of London is a tendency towards inertia. and melancholy and absolute stasis. And so to oppose this, we look for sources of energy, flashes of light, bursts of electricity. It's like Dr. Frankenstein clamping the dead body

and waiting for a bolt of lightning to bring this creature to life. Look at the art that's come out of the blitz. Now let's stick to the blitz, yeah. To the blitz, yeah. Well, the great sort of, if we think of the great art produced by London, you think of the films of Humphrey Jennings, you think of...

You think they're worth the blitz? No, of course they're not worth the Blitz. They don't cause the Blitz, but in response to the Blitz brings out the best spirit of London, it brings the city to life. Obviously, these things are not to be looked for or solicited. Go back your phrase, you said,

Londoners are a track of a disaster, and I said, do you think they're attracted to the Blitz, and both you and Peter, on cue, said yes together. Claude Tomlin, you didn't. I didn't. I'm very struck with a marvelous response to the Blitz, James Pope Hennessy's book about it,

with Cecil Beaton's pictures, was actually published in May 1941, this response to the literature, which was a very careful examination of what buildings have been destroyed and the value of them, including the Victorian buildings. It was an extraordinarily positive and brave response. It wasn't enjoying the British. It wasn't celebrating the Brits. It was saying, let us rise up out of this. John, this is recurrent. I think one of the great images in contemporary fiction for me is in Michael Morcox's book, Mother London. He has a blitzed city and he has this sort of heroic figure of a woman, I think, carrying a child, stepping out through the fire as if it was in the Old Testament.

That's the constant image, by the way, of London in flames with a child being carried out by its parent. And in fact, some of the most haunting images of London are as a ruined city, you know, from future fiction, or from McCallers, New Zealander looking out over the ruined dome St. Paul's. And also, of course, William Morris' news from nowhere. And Richard Jeffreys after London, which is the drown, the drought, water and fire, the drowned the drown city. What we're saying, Melvin, is not necessarily we applaud the blitz or its consequences, but the very nature of London elicits images of ruin and destruction. I agree with all that, but you're actually changing your ground. Let's turn to Dickens in the time

we have left, because it's been very difficult to keep him out of the conversation when we talk about London. And so many people around this table know so much about Dickens. It's the river life, it's the dust heap and the fogs and the misfits and the extraordinary poverty and the quirkiness. His image of London, first of all, let's start with Peter. Do you think he was true to his day in many senses, or was it a, to go back to the St. Clair was a poetic, metaphorical truth? There was real truth, sir, as well. Well, like most London writers, he created the city of his imagination, in part the city of his childhood, but also the city

of his aspirations. We can dwell upon the gloomier and more melodious aspects of his vision in terms of the dust-heaps and so forth, but we can also emphasize the sheer vivacity, theatricality, and energy of his vision. He was the first person, in a sense, who turned London

into a stage set, although we might say Fielding, did likewise. But Dickens for Dickens, London was a carnival, a theatre or a prison and a madhouse. All of the great theatrical experiences of London came into focus in his writing. He was probably the first London writer to tap into the extraordinary vivacity of Imperial London, early 19th century London. And he gave a stage to fringe people, to little people. I think it's one of the great things about Dickens that he moved anonymously.

around London watching, observing, looking at everything. And what he particularly liked were these people who lived at the edge. I mean, Joe, the Crossing Sweeper, the Dolls, Dressmaker, Nancy, Fagin's Boys, the Micawba family, people who clung on to society by their fingernails and could hardly make it. They were all there in London trying to make it.

And I think Dickens is brilliant at portraying that whole edge of society. Ian, do you think that Dickens, London, is with us still? obviously in our imagination as we read Dickens and so on. But when you go around London, you say, yes, Dickens is still vivid present. No. It's present to me as a kind of dream. I don't actually see signs on the streets. I don't think it's there on the streets. I think it's a very different kind of fiction on the streets now.

I think it's a city of extraordinary fragmentation now. That, for example, yesterday I went through Ridley Road Market in Dalston, which is completely otherworldly. It's just a babble of voices from everywhere, strange food and animals and energy, which you can see in terms of a Dickens paragraph. And then moving along later in the day to the riverside, down in Limehouse by Canary Wharf,

and you've moved into the fiction of J.G. Ballard. There is these incredible shining buildings. There are very few people there. And the river, as ever, is beautiful and wonderful and shining. You know, it's not just gloomy. It's not just the river from which Dickens is. characters fish out the corpses. It is also a sort of river of gold and it's like El Dorado on a good day. And I think behind all that we understand it took someone as grand as Dickens to achieve these

hierarchies of high and low, the stars, the mud, the earth, the whole thing, the mounds, the dust heaps. Dickens in himself, in his own personality, both as a writer and as a man, seemed to bring the whole of society together. For instance, socially, he was what we'd call behearted philanthropic. He tried to help people who are in difficulties, prostitutes, or people are very poor, and so on and so forth. He brought it together so we could think of London as one place. Do you think it ever really was one place or existed on these parallel lines in different sections? It's no place. I think it was always fragmented.

Dick said I'm here everywhere and nowhere. I'm as a marvellous account of what it's like to be in London, isn't it? I think London really was, once it had got beyond the walls of the city, original little lump. It ceased to be London. I mean, it's something else. It's interesting, but we're talking about a vast... I like contradicts old organic man on my right here, Peter Akros.

No, there is... My organic city is small. Another thing about Dickens is that he was always trying to get out, rather like peeps. They both had houses in the country. They both suddenly thought of themselves as going Dickens Gads Hill, peeps to Brampton, Huntingdonshire. And they never could.

And they were always... drawn back, always over and over again drawn back. They could not escape from London, but they had a sort of tension with it. They knew that there was this other life who could live outside London, and they couldn't do it. Going back to you, Peter,

and this book of yours, which I, as you know, I think is quite wonderful. Do you think, I'm serious question here, I mean, you can bring it into your mind. You've spent your life wandering around London, you've written about London again and again, as Ian hasn't wandered around it and so and so forth. But do you think it has that,

homeless, that single character, or it is, it always has been the fragmented society that Ian Sinclair found wandering around London last weekend. It's always been a city based upon heterogeneity, upon contrast. That's why Dickens was so great of bringing together the poor and the rich, living and the dead in one volume. It's always been a heterogeneous city. It's always been a city in a state of becoming. It's always been a city which is endlessly renewed out of its own ashes. In this that sense it cannot be defined. It has no meaning. Its only meaning is the process, the process of becoming. Finally, the centre of London, which you have not talked about, has been the centre until

now, it isn't the centre now, but it has been for hundreds and hundred of years, is there a river Thames. In your research is about Peeps and you're looking at the Temps, which was of TEMS is massively important at that time, of course, in the second of the seven years. It was the life of the city. And it's been much written about by poets and so on. What function do you see it as? playing in the life and history of London at that particular time? Well, it brought trade and it also sent out a war fleet, so it had a huge importance in the national life. I mean, the Navy, which was not properly organised yet,

was actually the biggest employer in the whole country and the biggest user of materials. So the river was absolutely crucial. And you get this curious thing. I mean, Peeps spends a great deal of his life, walking out along the banks of the Thames, to the shipyards where the ships are being built, where he's trying to bring order into the organisation

to root out corruption. You get this sort of double vision of Peeps enjoying walking along the banks of the river, often reading a book as he walks, climbing over styles, walking through the fields, and then arriving at these shipyards where this huge industrial process is taking place, budgets of hundreds of thousands of pounds. It's a very sort of curious juxtaposition.

The peaceful riverbanks are then this enormous activity. Do you see this ribbon of river binding London together, Peter? Oh yes, it always has, and I believe it's about to do so again. I doubt that very much. I mean, it was the M25, really. That's what it was. Yes. It was full of tramp steamers.

It was a working river. You look at it, and there's only one bridge. And to get across that river is actually a major hazard. you've got to put your life in your hands to get into one of these wharys. Now that isn't there, the Thames is now up for heritage grabs. It is the landscape to be fought over, and something as simple as a river bus service that is efficient, just cannot seem to be operated.

I wish it was. I think it should be brought back, but it's never going to be a great working river again. So you think the M25 is the Thames of today? M25 is the place to be now. You look at it from a distance, you hear this wonderful sound, a kind of whispering noise of heavy hauliers creeping round

and it is the place we should all be that's why I've been walking around it for the last year. You think the poets are going to play it as much heed as they did that... I do, I do. But everybody would have enjoyed the London eye from the 17th century. They would have seen this was terrific. A pleasure

wheel would have appealed to them very strongly, I think. But there were London pleasure wheels in the 7th century. There were, yes. He went over to the South Bank, in fact, to have a good time. I know. And that's the other thing about the South Bank. We emerged as the centre of refreshments in recreation. And so Zittlington.

I think I'm going to stop there. Thank you both. Thank you all. Thank you, Claire Tomlin. Thank you, Ian Sinclair. Thank you, Peter Ackroyd. Next week we'll be discussing the personality of Hitler with his biographer Ian Kershaw, Neil Ferguson and Joanna Burke. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast.

You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.uk forward slash radio 4.