The House by the Thames (2 page)

Then, in the last quarter of the twelfth century, another stone one was constructed, a triumph of engineering with nineteen arches. This bridge, with intermittent accidents and modifications, carried Londoners back and forth for the next six hundred and fifty years; till the time came when accumulating complaints about its antique inconvenience, followed by decades of discussion, finally decided the Corporation of London to replace it.

Shortly before Victoria became Queen, when the new London Bridge was at last opened with flags, fire-works, balloon ascents, royalty and massed bands, the house across the water from St Paul's was one hundred and twenty years old already.

You could also take a route a little further west, over Southwark, Blackfriars or Waterloo Bridges. The house saw all these built too. From any of these bridges you can walk to the house along the river, where today a continuous, broad pedestrian path has superceded the old quays. What you cannot readily do, however, since the quays were swept away along with their many mooring points and water stairs, is what people did for hundreds of years: reach Bankside by crossing from the north shore in a boat.

Bankside, where the house stands, derives its name from being one of the earliest pieces of embanking done on the edge of the sprawling Thames, providing a solid shore for men and goods to land in a low-lying, marshy area. But today Bankside's long and intimate working relationship with the river seems to be over. The Thames, which throughout history has bound London and Southwark informally together, linking the north and south banks in waterborne commerce, is now little more than a great, airy space which separates them, a ribbon of changing light, a view.

To counteract this separation one more very recent bridge has been built, with the declared intention of linking Bankside to the heart of London. The Millennium Bridge, the footway on the axis of St Paul's cathedral, now crosses the water to meet the almost equally large bulk of the Power Station-turned Tate Modern on the other side. But a bridge at this point, usually a full-scale traffic one, has been hanging ghostly in the air for more than three hundred years. First suggested soon after the Restoration, the idea was revived at intervals through the eighteenth century but never quite got carried out. In the year of the Great Exhibition, in the mid-nineteenth century, it was proposed again with much fervour, and continued to be intermittently during the decades that followed. It nearly got itself built in the years just before 1914, but the Great War supervened and by the 1920s the sheer cost of the enterprise, including the amount of compensation that by then would have had to be paid to City property owners, meant that the plan lapsed again. This was fortunate, for the St Paul's Bridge as dreamed by its most enthusiastic promoters was a massive affair, complete with a winged goddess driving a two-horse chariot, and double pedestrian staircases surmounted by turrets at either end. Whatever social cachet its construction might have imparted to the warehouses and wharves which by then crowded on Bankside, one thing is sure: built where the present airy, slim pedestrian bridge now spans the river, St Paul's Bridge would have caused the destruction of a broad swathe of riverside buildings including the house which we are now approaching. As things are, by one of those chances which obliterate so much and yet sometimes idiosyncratically preserve, the newest bridge across the river misses the house but leads to within fifty yards of its door.

Viewed from the footbridge today the house, and the two smaller rebuilt ones adjoining it, look like miniatures that have strayed into the wrong construction-model. The house is three storeys high, plus an attic, but the modest scale of this quintessential English domestic architecture is dwarfed by two giants. On one side of it stands the industrial pile of the ex-Power Station, and on the other the reconstructed Globe Theatre with its combination of Disneyland fantasy and genuine sixteenth-century building methods. These two exceptional buildings are strange company for the house to keep. Long ago, it was one of a whole line of houses, many of them rather like itself or at any rate built to the same dimensions. Then, people would have passed it by without a second glance.

Now, as it stands almost alone in its white-stuccoed traditionalism, the guides on the passing tourist boats single it out:

‘– And on your left,' the loud-speakers proclaim, ‘we are just passing the house that was lived in by Sir Christopher Wren while he was building St Paul's, directly opposite.' Heads swivel, cameras snap, starting images of the house on journeys to the ends of the earth, promulgating the myth. It is not actually true. Wren can never have watched the dome of his cathedral take shape from those twelve-paned windows, since the house was not built till about 1710 when only the final touches remained to be put to St Paul's and Wren himself was nearing eighty. It is true that the present house stands in the footprint of a much older one; but where Wren may actually have lodged for a while in the 1670s was a house further west, whose dust now lies, along with so much else, under the block of flats on the far side of the Power Station.

But today, we want the surviving house to be Wren's. Today, the decent one-time ordinariness of 49 Bankside, rendered unique in that place by time and chance, has become emblematic of an entire world we have lost. Perhaps the fantasist who, shortly after the Second World War, noticed a Wren commemorative plaque on a wrecked wall further along Bankside and appropriated the idea to his own house, was achieving something more important than a bogus claim. On the new plaque he placed by the front door of number 49, he also made the far more implausible claim that Catherine of Aragon stopped for the night in 1502. Even if we assume that this refers to a night spent in an inn that is known to have stood on that site before the present house was built, it remains a fantasy. Catherine of Aragon was Henry VIII's first and longest serving-wife, till she was eventually rejected in favour of Anne Boleyn. She had been married previously to his elder brother, Arthur, who died after a year. Her original landfall was in Plymouth, and from there she made the slow overland journey eastwards, finally to spend a night in Lambeth Palace before processing along the south bank and making her entry to London proper over the Bridge. Spanish princesses, let alone future queens, do not stay in waterfront inns.

In any case, the probability is that in 1502 even the Cardinal's Cap (or Hat) Inn lay in the future and the site where it would be built later in the century was vacant ground. No matter. We clearly need number 49 today to represent for us not only the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire and the coming Enlightenment associated with Wren and his contemporaries. We also need it to symbolise a much older world, in which a gabled Tudor inn might be supposed to cater for queens and bishops and prostitutes on the same night, Shakespeare dropped in for a drink, bears were baited near by and boiled heads leered from poles on top of London Bridge, all conflated in some dateless Olden Time.

People passing the house on foot, treading the brief stretch of cobbles, now hemmed in by the walkway, that is the remaining vestige of the Bankside quays, stop to look at the plaques. If you sit in the house's first-floor front room, the room where Wren is said to have gazed out on his works, the sound of the words being read aloud and commented on in a variety of tongues reaches you from below. After several hundred years of resounding to the noise of laden wheels on cobbles, this river bank has been returned to the era of the footstep and the human voice.

Occasionally strangers will be brave enough to tug the ancient bell-pull, which jangles a bell within on the end of a wire, and enquire if the house is a museum that can be visited. They are politely turned away.

Before the door is shut again they will get a glimpse of a panelled room and an arched doorway, rugs and a longcase clock, perhaps a whiff of logs smouldering on a pile of soft ash in an open fireplace. Here, surely, is the past, on which the door has fleetingly opened? But there is no automatic admittance to the past. A way has to be found.

You may try to reach London's past through Wren, or the Adam brothers, or the builders Cubitt, significant creators of the idea of townscape within which we still live today. Or you may reach further back, through kings and queens and bishops, whose palaces and orchards are ground to powder beneath wharves, offices and by-passes, but whose much-encumbered lives have at least left tough parchment evidence behind them. You may reach it through the letters preserved in a few great families, or through the personal accounts of Pepys and John Aubrey, John Evelyn and Boswell; or through a procession of nineteenth-century commentators from Charles Dickens to Charles Booth, who felt a moral mission to record what they saw around them.

But the vast mass of men and women in every time do not leave behind them either renown or testimony. These people walked our streets, prayed in our churches, drank in our inns or in those that bear the same names, built and lived in the houses where we have our being today, opened our front doors, looked out of our windows, called to each other down our staircases. They were moved by essentially the same passions and griefs that we are, the same bedrock hopes and fears: they saw the sun set over Westminster as we do. Yet almost all of them have passed away from human memory and are still passing away, generation after generation –

‘
Rich men furnished with ability, living peacefully in their habitations
.

‘…
And some there be, which have no memorial; who are perished, as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born; and their children after them
.

‘But these were merciful men, whose righteousness hath not been forgotten …'

Witness to the living, busy, complex beings that many of these vanished ones were tends to be limited to fleeting references on pages of reference books that are seldom opened. At the most, there may be a handwritten note or a bill, perhaps a Will, a decorative trade-card, a few lines in a local newspaper or in a report from a long-obsolete committee, possibly an inscription on a tomb. There may perhaps be a relevant page or two in an account of something quite other, or a general social description which seems to fit the specific case.

Scant evidence, you may say, of lives as vivid and as important to the bearers as our own are today to us. But by putting these scraps together, sometimes, with luck, something more coherent is achieved. Pieces of lost lives are genuinely recovered. Extinct causes clamour for attention. Forgotten social groups coalesce again. Here and there a few individual figures detach themselves from the dark and silence to which time has consigned them. They walk slowly towards us. Eventually, we may even see their faces.

LONDON IS AN
odd capital city by European standards and therefore by those of other cities round the world that have inherited the European urban tradition. In Paris, as in Rome, Washington or St Petersburg, a prime site on a river bank opposite the centre of the town and its celebrated cathedral would not be occupied by a small piece of three-hundred-year-old private property. It would long since have been selected as a suitable location for a large governmental building, institute, university or opera house. Such plans have indeed been mooted for sections of London's south bank at various times, and one or two of them have actually been built a little further up river, but Bankside itself has remained untouched by grandiose urbanism.

One reason for this is that, till the 1960s, the Pool of London below London Bridge was a working port and the entire stretch of the south bank up as far as Westminster Bridge and Lambeth acted as a necessary back-up area of wharves, docks and warehouses. But to state this is already to beg a question: how was it that, in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when London was consolidating the shape it still has today, the south bank had such ample space available for lowly commercial uses? The north bank, too, was fringed with wharves, but these had to compete with the demands of City institutions, livery halls, the Inns of Court, the aristocratic houses in the Strand, the Palace of Westminster, and later with government offices and with the new embankment laid out with prestigious public gardens. Yet the first and almost the only grand administrative building to be located on the south side of the river, and that in a deliberate attempt to colonise suitably the site opposite the Houses of Parliament, was the 1922 County Hall (now turned to other, piecemeal uses). Even when London was in the throes of visionary planning after the blitz damage of 1940–44, and the Festival of Britain was celebrated in the ruined spaces by Waterloo Bridge, what got rebuilt immediately across the river from St Paul's? A smoking industrial plant whose chimney stack rose as high as Wren's dome. It was as if the south bank, though physically only a couple of hundred yards from the nexus of the City's power and prestige, was perceived as somewhere far more remote, indeed hardly visible.

Cities are formed not only by what happens but also by what fails to happen, by the force or inertia of tradition, and by the almost random decisions of individuals which sometimes have unthinkably long consequences. Historically, the south bank has always avoided becoming part of London. As late as the 1830s the parishes on the south of the river were fighting a rearguard action to be allowed to form a township separate from the capital (a true ‘Borough') with its own corporation, magistrates and judges. They were hauled protesting into the London system only by the establishment of the Metropolitan Board of Works in 1855, and finally by the creation of a new County of London in 1888. Till well into the twentieth century, long after the London County Council had carved Southwark and its eastern district into two London boroughs of Southwark and Bermondsey – casually splitting the ancient and cohesive area of greater Southwark down its central spine of London Bridge and Borough High Street – the whole area south of the Thames was still known as ‘the Surrey side'.