Wych Street: what is lost
So, the BBC has received about 4,000+ complaints about its coverage of the Jubilee celebrations. And I’m willing to bet not one of them was about the egregious commentary going on by a couple of halfwits who know no local history, talking about local history as the Queen’s car passed down Kingsway and through the Aldwych, towards the Strand and then the Mall.
I’ve even searched and searched for this since, but it was an otherwise dull moment of the live coverage and no one has apparently wanted to save it.
Essentially, the commentary was about the building of ‘grand thoroughfares’ which, according to the commentators, make up ‘Imperial London’ (a phrase with no web presence, however, so that’s all I can tell you). (The fact that this ‘Imperial Thoroughfare’ begins at Holborn Station seems somehow gloriously typical.)
According to the commentator, London – unlike cities like Paris, Berlin, and so on – was ‘suspicious’ of these kinds of grand statement boulevards, because cities that had them had often been prey to dictators and despots. The idea – held by whom, they didn’t say – was that London’s shabby, undignified warrens of tumbling medieval streets befitted her democratic temperament. Or something. (And that this was considered an embarrassment.) So this is kind of interesting, because I’ve never heard it before. More, please!
‘But it really wasn’t very nice.’
‘No, it wasn’t!’
Oh.
They didn’t say why it wasn’t very nice – that along with other notorious rookeries it was just a pile of poor people struggling as best they could under the yoke of Victorian social policy.
So under King Edward all this old, undignified, stupid stuff, where you could never invite anyone back for tea, was demolished – and the people removed to go who-cares-where – to build Aldwych and Kingsway and bring London into the modern era, improving the whole thing etc. This much we knew, at any rate.
‘Much better!’
‘Yes! So, the creation of Imperial London…’
It does seem like locking the barn door after the horse has bolted, but never mind.
They didn’t happen to mention that these were Elizabethan streets that had survived the Great Fire. A commodity of which London has a conspicuous lack, through centuries of lack of care. Unlike so many of those other old cities which have preserved the oldest buildings – because, well, you can’t get them back again. No because it’s the Queen’s Jubilee, so therefore even in the face of common sense and the value of actual history, we have to admire and PREFER everything that was so much as touched by a feather of the wing of royalty! ‘Imperial London’ my baroque arse.
(When I was in Basel last year I was walking among buildings that were impeccably preserved, insanely beautiful, and in everyday use. The university has beams and ceiling paintings in departmental offices. Houses, you gradually note, have little discreet plaques over the door – put there when they were built – with years like 1283, or 1317.)
But no sooner has this little wave of bile gone down than I see, next morning good news! Elizabethan London is reasserting itself once more.
The Curtain rises.
Yes: only yards from the best-guess plaque that marks the old Curtain Theatre – and not far from ‘The Theatre’, excavated in Shoreditch in 2009 - the site of the old Curtain, itself demolished in the 17th century, built in 1577 and supposed site of the first performance of Romeo and Juliet, has been found. ‘An outer yard paved with sheep knuckle bones could date from the theatre or slightly later housing’…
This is where Shakespeare’s plays were performed while the Globe was being built – famously, out of the timber from the Theatre, which had been shipped by night across the river to flout the landlord.
So this is amazing news! Shoreditch somehow really is the place to be. The spirit stirs; the old lady moves in her sleep; and Dominic Drumgoole, artistic director of the new Globe, says it best:
“I love the fact that we are excavating London, and slowly clearing away the miserable piles of Victoriana and Empire, and revealing the wild, anarchic and joyous London which is lurking beneath. It reminds me of the Zocalo in Mexico City, where all the Spanish palaces are slowly sinking into the earth, and the old Mayan temples are being squeezed back up.”
Back to the BBC, and my boring old unfindable bit of guff. It would have been a fine ironic echo of the Aldwych itself: scrap your finest historic programmes, and save a dull ignorant slab of ignorant waffling.
Oh, wait.
And back to the Curtain, the Daily Mail wins my Headline of the Year prize. ‘Is this a digger I see before me?’
{ 10 comments }
Dear Katy
As I understand it, Christopher Wren wanted to completely rebuild London after the great fire of 1666. However, householders were reluctant to sell their slums so it never happened. In France they would simply have slapped a compulsory purchase order on the whole area and built something amazing. It was a tragically lost opportunity that will never be repeated.
Best wishes from Simon
Simon, you always make me laugh. Yes, this coin has two sides, and it is only one coin!
did you watch that bbc2 doc on deptford high street last night? exactly the same story – clear away the ‘slums’, build shonky high rises and wonder why all the tenants have nervous breakdowns.
but preferring ‘wild, anarchic and joyous London’ to ‘miserable piles of victoriana’ is the same judgement call wearing different trousers, isn’t it?
Julia, well spotted – it;s a huge and fascinating tapestry, this sort of ‘urban aplanning down the centuries’ thing. Think of it as a sort of MC Escher drawing. And no, I only heard about that programme after it was over – I’m planning to watch on iPlayer.
Christopher Wren wanted to tear down London – no it had already burned down – and rebuild it in his own image. I can sympathise/empathise with that. Nobody listens to me either.
If I understand correctly (which I doubt, but even so…), the problem with carrying out Wren’s ambitions was that of compensation for the owners of property affected and not least the delineation etc of those properties.
England being nothing if not a nation of shopkeepers, we kept it the way it was.
The Parisian boulevards were put there by Napoleon to enable military access to the centre in the event of peasants rising up, as it were.
There are two sides to the coin, as you say. Or maybe it’s a double edged sword. Or a tuppeny halfpenny excuse.
Christopher Wren was a VERY ambitious man. Thanks for that Peter. Napoleon was another one who locked the barn door after the horse had bolted. And yes, I think it was with the Victorians that it all started to get serious, they were a ridiculously industrious bunch. Even the history of the tube, which is in one sense about affordable travel for the masses, is all about demolition of the old places, and displacing the poorest.
I think there are two sides to this coin; there always are. There are genuine improvements, and some do indeed come at a high cost; and you can’t always see which will be which till long after.
It’s a long time now since I was in London but I remember the narrow old streets in the city and Drury Lane and Soho. Parts looked very like the photo of Wych Street.
Speaking as a citizen of the US, we suffer from the same thirst to replace the old (granted, not as old as in England) with the new and – allegedly – better. The entire interstate highway system involved tearing out huge swaths of old downtown areas, and destroying neighborhoods, all so people could drive faster to somewhere else. It’s a sad story.
Shaftesbury Avenue was built in the 19th century and included major slum clearances – is that the sort of thing they meant?
I’ve not heard of ‘Imperial London’ as an architectural style. When I think of ‘Imperial British’, I tend to imagine something along the lines of New Delhi.
I like ever-evolving London. Our mix of styles on the same street is different from other places. ?erhaps conservation has become too tight over the past few decades? Pre-King Charlie doesn’t help matters …
I had a (now dead) friend who was an architect after World War 11. I asked her about all the ugly modernist stuff. She told me that their ambition after the war was to destroy everything that reminded them of the old imperial orders, of hierarchy. So brutal modernistic buildings and high rises were born!! A coin with three sides!!