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London: What London Is?
We all know that London stands on the Thames, that it is the capital of an empire on which the sun never sets, and that it has the right to call itself the largest and richest city in existence, perhaps the greatest congregation of human beings to which history ever had a chance of preaching on that old text, the rise and fall of so many a Babylon. We ought to know how it measures at least a dozen miles in length and breadth, and how it contains five millions or so of people, to which some half as many must be added if we take in its outer area. We can learn that it counts a million of houses; that its myriads of streets, if set on end, would reach across Europe; that it includes some sixteen thousand acres of open spaces; that yearly it lays twenty miles of fresh pavements, and adds new inhabitants enough to make a country town, while it is always swallowing some old village in its insatiable maw.
Those who have an appetite for such figures may further be instructed that every year its port harbours more than twenty thousand vessels of all flags, that every day nearly nine thousand trains run into its stations, and that every hour about ten million gallons of water are drawn for its various needs, flushing out in subterranean channels more than one cares to count or measure. The above are but samples from an imposing stack of statistics, that might be drawn upon by way of helping the imagination to realize what London is. Unimaginative and uninstructed eyes have long been content to leave the matter thus: "The cities of London and Westminster are spread out to an incredible extent. The streets, squares, rows, lanes, and alleys are innumerable. Palaces, public buildings, and churches rise in every quarter." I am using the pen of Miss Lydia Melford, whose first sensation in those thronged thoroughfares was like that of the fabulous Scot, at a later date found waiting shyly up an entry in Fleet Street, as he explained, till the people had come out of church.
But next arises the question, What is London?--one to be less readily answered. Not every Londoner could say off-hand whether Hampstead, for instance, belongs to his hive, nor in what sense it includes Norwood or Kew. London was once a walled city about the mouth of two small brooks flowing into the Thames; then, escaping from this confinement, like the genius released by a fisherman in the Arabian Nights it quickly spread itself over the surrounding heights and flats, till, from an area of some square mile or so, it had expanded more than a hundredfold. Sovereigns in vain bade its growth come to a stand, their proclamations as idle as Canute's commanding the waves. Not less vainly lords cried out against the citizens who presumed to neighbour their parks and gardens, sooner or later to be ploughed up by streets.
A century ago sociologists of Cobbett's stamp vituperated that "wen" whose bulk seemed a danger to national health; and by the end of the century the tumour was swollen five times as great. Not that it has grown so much out of proportion to the general body, if we may accept Mr. Matthew Bramble's indignant calculation, made several generations back, that "one-sixth part of this whole extensive kingdom is crowded within the bills of mortality." That is much the same ratio as London proper now bears to England, its own thicker outskirts and the rest of the United Kingdom being eliminated, which, if brought into the sum, would make it work out in favour of the capital's increase.
When we come to boundaries and definitions, we are met by the truly British want of system, symmetry, regularity, through which London was allowed to straggle and struggle up into a confused rough-cast conglomeration of materials stuck together by chance or by rule of thumb, cross-divided for different purposes, to be managed by divers and sometimes overlapping authorities. There are citizens who, till the consideration be brought home to them by rate-collectors or other call to civic duty, do not care to know in what parish, borough, Poor-Law union, Parliamentary division, or what, they have their home; and on the edge of London some may be hardly clear what right they have to call themselves Londoners. The City, as it is styled, honoris causâ, forms an independent core, round which strangers must be taught to distinguish between the County of London, by law established, and the wider circle that has come to be known as Greater London.
At the end of 19th century a new organization was brought about by the London Government Act, dividing the County of London into twenty-eight boroughs, exclusive of the City, which clings to its time-honoured jurisdiction and privileges, keeping good order within its bounds by a police of its own, and having its own learned judges to supplement the rough-and-ready justice administered by Lord Mayor and Aldermen. Each of the boroughs has now its corporation, wanting nothing of dignity but age; each of them is divided into wards, electing their quota of representatives on borough councils that replaced a huggermugger administration of vestries and local boards; and an these are knit together under the municipal parliament of the London County Council.
The new boroughs usually take their titles from some parish of note--Kensington, Paddington, St. Pancras, Shoreditch, and so on--while certain familiar quarters of London have had their fame slighted in this division, as Brixton swallowed up in Lambeth, Sydenham invisibly rent between Lewisham and Camberwell, and half a dozen smaller names lost in that of Wandsworth. Something was then done to round off the county area, as by dragging in South Hornsey, and turning out into Kent the "hamlet" of Penge, with its 23,000 people; but, after all such adjustments, the boundary seems a most zigzag one, which leaves Ealing and Edmonton outside of London, but takes in Woolwich and Hampstead. When one goes out the Edgware Road, beyond Maida Vale he has on his right hand the London borough of Hampstead, stretching on to the "Spaniards" at the farther end of its Heath; but the left side of the road is mere Middlesex, where Willesden would fain change its humble style of urban district for the title of borough, being, indeed, populous as half a dozen boroughs.
On the Finchley Road the frontier is at present marked by a loose end of tramway, which haughty London will not admit into her bosom. In less genteel quarters the limit may be betrayed at night by a rush across it of thirsty suburbans, whose public-houses shut earlier than those of the roistering County. On the east side, its manifest boundary is the Lea, beyond which some half-million of people live in Essex boroughs that belong to London as Salford does to Manchester. For certain purposes, indeed, these outskirts may dovetail into London, or be cleft within themselves; thus the south part of Willesden, above mentioned, holds fellowship with the London drainage system, while the north side of the parish has the more expensive lot of discharging its refuse from the Brent watershed.
Beyond the invisible border-line of the County come more or less thickly clustered the county boroughs, municipal boroughs, urban districts, and rural districts, that go to make up Greater London. The boundaries of this area, indeed, are well marked only to official spectacles. The London Postal District has a radius of several miles, stretching beyond the County limits, while excluding its south-eastern corner. A wider sweep is that of the Metropolitan Police District, taking in all parishes within fifteen miles of Charing Cross, among them independent towns like Bromley, Croydon, Epsom, Kingston, Barnet, and Barking, in a province not far short of 700 square miles.
A ring of old towns now etuds the girdle of the Metropolis, that makes up to them in prosperity what they lose in dignity by their dependence--Romford, Brentwood, Epping, Hertford, St. Albans, Watford, Uxbridge, Staines, Woking, Guildford, Dorking, Sevenoaks, Gravesend; and still further afield appear fringes and tassels of this still growing capital.
It will be seen, then, how various measurements might be taken of London's bulk, imposing by any definition. One visible boundary, that seems novel and practical, is suggested by Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer ( The Soul of London).
We may say that London begins where tree-trunks commence to be black, otherwise there is very little to distinguish Regent's Park from Penshurst, or Wimbledon from Norwich. This tree-trunk boundary is, however, defective enough; in many parts of Epping the wood is so dense that boughs and boulders are as green, as brown, as mossy, or as lichened as at Fontainebleau. The prevailing winds being from the south and from the westwards, again, the zone of blackened trunks extends farther than is fair towards the north and the east. But Judged by this standard, London, as far as I have been able to observe, is bounded by a line drawn from Leigh in Essex, half-way through the Epping Forest, to the north of Hendon, to the west of Brentford, the south-west of Barnes, well to the south of Sydenham, well to the east of Bromley, and so up to Leigh again.
Other observers will no doubt find this tree-trunk limitation a little faulty; but it takes in at least nearly all the looser elements of the sphere of London influence. And, as the invariable and bewildering exception to this, as to all rules, it may as well be set down that the most "Londony" of all London trees has a bark that is never uniformly black. The plane-tree grows best of all in London, because it sheds its bark continually; getting rid of its soot, it clears the pores of its skin and flourishes--if I may be allowed an image that appears frivolous but that is sober enough--a perpetual emblem to the city of the morning tub.
In the suburbs the plane yields first place to the flowering almond, in the parks to the thorn, but it is the tree of intimate London. Elms, however, are the trees most noticeable on the roads into London, and their trunks blacken perhaps soonest of all. Nine Elms, Barn Elms, and how many other "Elms"? greet us on the run into town; and the feathery outlines of how many of these trees close the vistas of those new suburban streets that are for ever drilling little pathways into the ancient "estates" of the home counties!
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