A London Mosaic

by Walter Lionel George

In London, few streets and not many squares are alike. The detestable institution of the leasehold has had this good result, that few ground landlords in central London have built the houses they own. They have merely imposed upon the leaseholder the obligation to build a good house worth so much. As a result, the leaseholder has built what he fancied, and, therefore, London is not the result of the schemes of some horrid central office, but of the oddities and taste of thousands of men. That is why our sky-line is so broken, why, in Berkeley Square, we find two charming little, narrow houses close to a tall block of flats; that is why, in Oxford Street, tottering little shops, built under William IV., hug the Tube Station and its monster hotel. Variety is the salt of London life.

THE TUBE, 9.30 A.M.

Where London has, to a certain extent, abandoned variety, and that to good purpose, is in the squares. London, more than any in the world, is a city of squares; a feudal remnant has there set most of the important houses, while those of the vassals were placed in the side streets, and those of the churls in the mews. The squares imply social classifications, and though many of them, such as Golden Square, Soho Square, Regent Square, have fallen into the hands of the poor or of commerce, they all began by being centres of polite society. To this day there is something in a square that no other thoroughfare has; a sort of measured enclosedness, a finished privacy. The garden in the middle that none enter save lovers and cats, a garden sometimes sooty, sometimes kept trim by a gardener born old, is cut off from the rough movement of the city. Those who have been interested enough to penetrate into the green part of Cavendish Square or Craven Hill Gardens, will know that there one is as truly lost as in any lane of West Anglia. Those green spots are almost untrodden, and, to all visitors, are virginal. The impression of privacy extends also to the houses; though these may differ they do not vastly do so. The contrasts between them are those which appear among the members of a family. All are, to a certain extent, traditional, and it is mainly in the squares that you find remnants of Georgian London.

Most of Georgian London has fallen into the hands of the tenement maker, because the people of the Georgian period built in districts now populous, such as Clapham, Highbury, Soho, Chalk Farm, because the leases were long and the houses good enough to make it unbusinesslike to pull them down. Still, some Georgian London, and especially some London of William IV., has preserved its old, flat face, sober and dignified, yet has been modernised, internally, by anachronistic organs such as the bathroom, the telephone, electric light. Those houses are delightful, for the adventure of the present has purged them of the sins of the past. Such houses as the one now tenanted by Messrs Thornton Smith, in Soho Square, the small houses with the Adams doorways that make up the Adelphi, the slim exquisiteness of Westminster in Barton Street or North Street, all these, by their very form, suggest that inside all is order and courtesy. Those houses were built when land was cheap, when we did not need to pile Smith upon Jones and call the result Cornucopia Court, or what not; in those days they did not need to store coal in the pantry, and, for historic reasons, they did not combine the bathroom with the kitchens. Still, these are only survivals, and though the late William Willett did what he could near Avenue Road to restore the Georges under an Edward, the Georgian house is dead. It is too large; it leaves aside the servant problem; its rooms are too square, difficult to light, difficult to furnish in a period when furniture is small and tortured in design. It is almost as dead as the Elizabethan house, which is only a curiosity.

People still talk of Cloth Fair, but if you go to Smithfield you will find no Cloth Fair now, only a dirty little back street, not at all the scenery which Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree would have thought suitable for the entry of Bolingbroke into London. If you are wise, you will at once step back farther into the past and enter St Bartholomew’s, where arches and pillars, broad and solid as those of hell, will make you understand the Mosaic quality of the Christian faith. In St Bartholomew’s, that is black and dispassionate, dwells no gentle Redeemer, but the spirit of the Lord of Hosts.

True, there is Crosby Hall, though it is hard to shake off the connection between Crosby Hall and chops, for I knew it best in the days when, there, one ate chops (and sirloin, yes, sirloin). In those days, in the City, Crosby Hall was really an Elizabethan place, a mullioned old house, with sunken beams. For most of the day it held people who ate a great deal, drank a great deal, and bellowed, and played billiards, and flirted with the waitresses, and made bets, and told undesirable stories. Yes, it was real Shakespeare, all the time. But one day they pulled down Crosby Hall and re-erected it in Chelsea, near the end of Oakley Street; the last time I went in they were holding an exhibition of arts and crafts, which proved that leather might be compelled to assume many forms it didn’t like. I never saw it again. Then there is St Ethelburga, the little wooden church in Bishopsgate, which takes, I believe, a special interest in seamen. A pleasant little church, for there is something very human and pre-Fire in its having let off its frontage to an optician. (I wonder whether the optician and the incumbent both labour under the motto of Usebius.)

But if Georgian London has left so little, and Elizabethan London hardly anything, it is not so of the Victorian period, which still hangs over most of the city like the shadow of a great tree which will not let the flowers grow. Nearly all the houses in central London are Victorian; most are early Victorian, because the building rush in the ’eighties and ’nineties affected mainly the suburbs, where a ribald æstheticism combined with the discovery of the quaint by Charles Dickens. Now the Victorian period was neither picturesque nor quaint; it looked upon that sort of thing as indecent. It liked a plain house for a plain man, and the Victorian man got his house. In another fifty years or so, when time has done with the houses of the ’sixties, on their tombstone shall be inscribed: ‘Eight steps and a brass knocker, such are the wages of virtue.’ Some think that too much evil is spoken of the Victorian period, and that much that was solid, sound, truly English came to fruition in those days. For my part, I think that the Victorian period was nothing but a bad dream, that the English are essentially the people who drank sack, and danced round the maypole, just as now they drink beer and go to the cinema. The English are a pleasure-loving people, an emotional, perhaps a hysterical people; they are gay, improvident, thriftless, adventurous, reckless people; there is little to pick between them and the Neapolitans. Yes, there has been a lot of respectability and talk of carriage folk, and heavy sideboards, and being shocked, and all that sort of thing; but I submit that English history extends farther back than 1830, that there were happy days before the English grew oppressed with their new respectability, which arose slowly out of the sudden growth of wealth among numbers of ill-educated people. Before the ’thirties there were only two kinds of people: those who did what they were told, and those who did what they liked. The factory had begun to take shape in 1770; towards 1830 occurred the rise, all over the Midlands and North, of small workshops that became mills. This turned some members of the working class into capitalists. As the workshops grew, the working class population grew round them and formed towns. To serve the needs of these towns shops arose; these became prosperous, and produced another fairly rich class, the shopkeeping class. From the ’sixties onwards, the workshops, warehouses, and shops grew so much that those who, once upon a time, were scriveners, became managers and agents. This produced a third class of ill-educated people endowed with some money.

The result was soon felt: we had created the middle class, and as, in those days, the middle class was still conscious of the upper class, realised itself as lowly bred, it concluded that the only way of living up to its new money was to be more moral and especially more refined than either the upper class or the lower class. That is the origin of the red damask curtains, of the English Sunday (which once upon a time was debauched and delicious), of wax fruit, tall hats, black silk, jet, and such like horrors.

But is that the end? No. Round about 1890, the middle class having made still more money, having split itself up into upper middle class and lower middle class, having sent its sons to the public schools and universities, its daughters to Brussels or Dresden, began swiftly to slough off the old virtues which it no longer needed. The daughters went to dances under slender chaperonage; some of them became Fabians; red paper was scraped off and replaced by brown; Jacobean furniture came in; respectable people began to dine at hotels and, what was much more fatal, to lunch at restaurants. Bridge came in ... cigarettes crept in. I do not say the middle class is dead, but when you are tempted to think that the Victorian period represented, in English history, anything but an accident, anything but the formulation of a class, then consider most of your young acquaintances, and ask yourself, honestly, whether those very people, fifty years ago, would not have gone to funerals with weepers tied round their hats. To-day, there is a continuous impulse in the middle class to grow smart, fast, intellectual, all that. Call this progress or call it decay, never mind; I submit that it exhibits Victorian respectability as merely a stage in the development of English people, and that we are tending towards a time when the jolly 1780’s will live again with something hectic and abandoned thrown in. The English people are a light people, a gay people, and the famous period 1830–1880 was, after all, a short period in the eight hundred years odd which separate us from the Conqueror. It was a period of reconstruction, and the English emerged from it as new English, not very different from the old English. We have digested our money; of course, England was sleepy while she did that; those who believe that that sleep was natural to her suffer from illusion. Now she has begun to spend the resultant energy. Bustles, daguerreotypes, Sunday rest, and whiskers, Pecksniff will find all that in another region.