Great Cities Through Travelers' Eyes Read online

  Victorian London, a city of 5–6 million people and capital of the global British Empire, became notorious for its extremes of wealth and poverty and for its dank weather, both vividly described by many visitors. In the 20th century, London continued to expand, despite the bombing (Blitz) of 1940; a wave of immigration that began in 1948 with people from the West Indies on the HMT Empire Windrush has made London one of the most multicultural cities in the world.

  1599 THOMAS PLATTER

  Thomas Platter the Younger (1574–1628) was born in Berne, Switzerland, the son of a humanist scholar of the same name. His journals, which cover both his life at home and his travels in England, Spain and France, provide much vivid detail of everyday life. His descriptions of the entertainments of late Elizabethan London, including visits to the Globe Theatre where he saw a play (probably) by Shakespeare, offer important insights into the popular entertainment of the day.

  On 21st September after lunch, about two o’clock, I and my party crossed the water, and there in the house with the thatched roof witnessed an excellent performance of the tragedy of the first Emperor Julius Caesar with a cast of some fifteen people; when the play was over, they danced very marvellously and gracefully together as is their wont, two dressed as men and two as women.… Daily at two in the afternoon, London has two, sometimes three plays running in different places, competing with each other, and those which play best obtain most spectators.

  The playhouses are so constructed that they play on a raised platform, so that everyone has a good view. There are different galleries and places, however, where the seating is better and more comfortable and therefore more expensive. For whoever cares to stand below only pays one English penny, but if he wishes to sit he enters by another door, and pays another penny, while if he desires to sit in the most comfortable seats which are cushioned, where he not only sees everything well, but can also be seen, then he pays yet another English penny at another door. And during the performance food and drink are carried round the audience, so that for what one cares to pay one may also have refreshment.…

  There are a great many inns, taverns and beer-gardens scattered about the city, where much amusement may be had with eating, drinking, fiddling and the rest, as for instance in our hostelry, which was visited by players almost daily. And what is particularly curious is that the women as well as the men, in fact more often than they, will frequent the taverns or alehouses for enjoyment. They count it a great honour to be taken there and given wine with sugar to drink; and if one woman only is invited, then she will bring three or four other women along and they gaily toast each other; the husband afterwards thanks him who has given his wife such pleasure, for they deem it a real kindness.

  1725 CÉSAR DE SAUSSURE

  De Saussure (1703–1783) was from a noble Protestant family in Lausanne, Switzerland. From 1724 he travelled across Europe for fifteen years, including a four-year stay in London from 1725, and a second visit at the end of the 1730s. He published an account of his travels in 1742. An Anglophile, he saw St Paul’s Cathedral as, with Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, the most beautiful building in the world, and believed England was marred only by its religious divisions.

  A few days after my arrival in London I had an unpleasant experience. Wishing one evening to walk in the park, and having already visited it twice, I thought I could easily find my way there and back alone. The evening was very fine, and I stayed in the park till ten o’clock, enjoying my stroll and the amusing sights around me, the park being very crowded that evening. When I wished to go home again and cross the Mews, a large square occupied by the King’s stables, by which way I had come, I found the gates already closed. I immediately set about trying to find out my whereabouts and a new way home.

  Unfortunately I could not speak a word of English, and wandered aimlessly about, trying to find my way, unable to ask anyone’s help or to hire a hackney coach, as I could not make a driver understand me or give him my address. The only thing I could do was to walk from street to street, in the hopes of recognizing some landmark or other; but after hoping this for about an hour I found myself in an entirely unknown part. It was now past midnight; the streets were empty, and I did not know what to do. I sat down on a seat in front of a shop and longed for day.

  After I had been seated there for half an hour or so, to my intense relief two gentlemen happened to go by, and you can imagine my delight when I heard them conversing in French. I almost thought they were angels sent to my help! I hastened to stop them, to explain to them my unpleasant situation. They inquired where I lived, which I could not tell them, the name of the street having completely escaped my memory. After questioning me for some minutes as to what country I came from, how long I had been in London, whether I had any acquaintances, it turned out most fortunately for me that these gentlemen were acquainted with a friend of mine, and that they lived at no great distance from him. They were kind enough to show me the way themselves, and we walked two miles together before I got back to my rooms. Since then I have taken good care not to lose myself again. I am too much afraid of spending such another weary night.

  1790 XIA QINGGAO (HSIEH CH’ING KAO)

  Xia Qinggao (1765–1822) travelled through western Europe between 1783 and 1797. He worked as a seaman on a Chinese merchant ship. He was illiterate and went blind during the course of his travels; towards the end of his life, he dictated his memoirs.

  England is a sparsely settled island, separated from the mainland, with a large number of rich families. The dwelling houses have more than one storey. Maritime commerce is one of the chief occupations of the English, and wherever there is a region in which profits could be reaped by trading, these people strive for them, with the result that their commercial vessels are to be seen on the seven seas. Traders are to be found all over the country. Male inhabitants from 15 to 60 are conscripted into the service of the king as soldiers; a large foreign mercenary army is also maintained. Consequently, although the country is small, it has such a large military force that foreign nations are afraid of it.

  Near the sea is London which is one of the largest cities in the country. In this city is a fine system of waterworks. From the river, which flows through the city, water is raised by means of revolving wheels, installed at three different places, and poured into pipes which carry it to all parts of the city. Anyone desirous of securing water would just have to lay a pipe between his house and the water mains, and water would be available. The water tax for each family is calculated on the number of persons in that family.

  Men and women all wear white ordinarily; for mourning, however, black is used. The army wears a red uniform. Women wear long dresses that sweep the floor, with the upper part tight and the lower part loose. At the waist is a tight belt with a buckle. Whenever there is a celebration of a festive occasion, then some young and beautiful girls are asked to sing and dance to the accompaniment of music. Girls of rich and noble families learn these arts when they are very young.

  1811 LOUIS SIMOND

  The French-born writer Louis Simond (1767–1831) lived in America as a young man and, with his English wife, made a two-year journey across the British Isles while the Napoleonic Wars were still raging.

  11 January A sort of uniform dinginess seemed to pervade everything, that is, the exterior; for through every door and window the interior of the house, the shops at least, which are most seen, presented, as we drove along, appearances and colours most opposite to this dinginess; everything there was clean, fresh and brilliant. The elevated pavement on each side of the streets full of walkers, out of the reach of carriages, passing swiftly in two lines without awkward interference, each taking to the left. At last a very indifferent street brought us in front of a magnificent temple, which I knew immediately to be St Paul’s, and I left the vehicle to examine it. The effect was wonderfully beautiful; but it had less vastness than grace and magnificence. The colour struck me as strange – very black and very white, in patches which envelope somet
imes half a column; the base of one; the capital of another; here, a whole row quite black, there, as white as chalk. It seemed as if there had been a fall of snow, and it adhered unequally. The cause of this is evidently the smoke which covers London; but it is difficult to account for its unequal operation. This singularity has not the bad effect which might be expected from it.…

  My friend conducted me very obligingly back again through the whole town. In our walk we passed several large squares, planted in the middle with large trees and shrubs, over a smooth lawn, intersected with gravel walks; the whole enclosed by an iron railing, which protects these gardens against the populace, but does not intercept the view…. I have heard no cries in the streets, seen few beggars, no obstructions or stoppages of carriages, each taking to the left.…

  24 January The people of London, I find, are quite as disposed to answer obligingly to the questions of strangers as those of Paris. Whenever I have made inquiries, either in shops, or even from porters, carters and market-women in the streets, I have uniformly received a civil answer, and every information in their power. People do not pull off their hats when thus addressing anybody, as would be indispensable at Paris; a slight inclination of the head, or motion of the hand, is thought sufficient. Foot-passengers walk on with ease and security along the smooth flagstones of the side-pavement. Their eyes, mine at least, are irresistibly attracted by the allurements of the shops….

  17 February We have been a whole month in London, and for the last three weeks I have set down nothing in this journal. It is not, as might be supposed, from having been too much taken up, or too little. A French traveller once remarked sagaciously, that there is a malady peculiar to the climate of England, called the catch-cold; this malady, under the modern title of influenza, has recently afflicted all London, and we have been attacked by it. A friend of F. who had come to London on purpose to receive us, has been obliged to fly precipitately; others dare not come.

  1826 HERMANN VON PÜCKLER-MUSKAU

  On one of his visits to Britain in the 1820s, Hermann von Pückler-Muskau (see page 102) was much taken with the rebuilding of London recently done by the Prince Regent and John Nash.

  5–6 October The huge city is…full of fog and dirt, and the macadamized streets are like well-worn roads; the old pavement has been torn up and replaced by small pieces of granite, the interstices between which are filled with gravel; this renders the riding more easy and diminishes the noise, but on the other hand changes the town into a sort of quagmire. Were it not for the admirable ‘trottoirs’ people must go on stilts as they do in the Landes near Bordeaux. Englishwomen of the lower classes do indeed wear an iron machine of the kind on their large feet.

  London is, however, extremely improved in the direction of Regent Street, Portland Place and the Regent’s Park. Now for the first time it has the air of a seat of government and not of an immeasurable metropolis of ‘shopkeepers’, to use Napoleon’s expression. Although poor Mr Nash (an architect who has great influence over the King and is the chief originator of these improvements) has fared so ill at the hands of connoisseurs – and it cannot be denied that his buildings are a jumble of every sort of style, the result of which is rather ‘baroque’ than original – yet the country is, in my opinion, much indebted to him for conceiving and executing such gigantic designs for the improvement of the metropolis.… It’s true, one must not look too nicely into the details. The church, for instance, which serves as ‘point de vue’ to Regent Street ends in a ridiculous spire which every part seems at variance with every other. It is a strange architectural monster.…

  Faultless, on the other hand, is the landscape-gardening part of the park, which also originates with Mr Nash, especially in the disposition of the water. Art has here completely solved the difficult problem of concealing her operations under an appearance of unrestrained nature. You imagine you see a broad river flowing on through luxuriant banks and going off in the distance in several arms, while in fact you are looking upon a small piece of standing, though clear, water created by art and labour. So beautiful a landscape as this, with hills in the distance and surrounded by an enclosure of magnificent houses a league in circuit, is certainly a design worthy of one of the capitals of the world, and when the young trees are grown into majestic giants, will scarcely find a rival.

  1854 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

  The American author and social campaigner Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) is best known for her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) about the conditions of life for slaves in the United States; she also wrote on a wide range of social issues. In 1854 she visited England on a triumphant tour of lecturing and campaigning.

  At about seven o’clock we took our carriage to go to the Earl of Carlisle’s, the dinner hour being here somewhere between eight and nine. As we rode on through the usual steady drizzling rain, from street to street and square to square, crossing Waterloo Bridge, with its avenue of lamps faintly visible in the seethy mist, plunging through the heart of the city, we began to realize something of the immense extent of London.

  Altogether the most striking objects that you pass, as you ride in the evening thus, are the gin shops, flaming and flaring from the most conspicuous positions, with plate-glass windows and dazzling lights, thronged with men, and women, and children, drinking destruction. Mothers go there with babies in their arms and take what turns the mother’s milk to poison. Husbands go there and spend the money that their children want for bread, and multitudes of boys and girls of the age of my own. In Paris and other European cities, at least the great fisher of souls baits with something attractive, but in these gin shops men bite at the bare, barbed hook. There are no garlands, no dancing, no music, no theatricals, no pretence of social exhilaration, nothing but hogsheads of spirits, and people going in to drink. The number of them that I passed seemed to me absolutely appalling.

  After long driving we found ourselves coming into the precincts of the West End and began to feel an indefinite sense that we were approaching something very grand, though I cannot say that we saw much but heavy, smoky-walled buildings, washed by the rain. At length we stopped in Grosvenor Place and alighted. We were shown into an anteroom adjoining the entrance hall, and from that into an adjacent apartment, where we met Lord Carlisle. The room had a pleasant, social air, warmed and enlivened by the blaze of a coal fire and wax candles.

  1885 HIPPOLYTE TAINE

  The French literary and art critic Taine (1828–1893) was a champion of the naturalistic novelist Emile Zola. Following a visit to England, he published a series of essays on English life in a Paris newspaper.

  Sunday in London in the rain: the shops are shut, the streets almost deserted; the aspect is that of an immense and a well-ordered cemetery. The few passers-by under their umbrellas, in the desert of squares and streets, have the look of uneasy spirits who have risen from their graves; it is appalling.

  I had no conception of such a spectacle, which is said to be frequent in London. The rain is small, compact, pitiless; looking at it one can see no reason why it should not continue to the end of all things; one’s feet churn water, there is water everywhere, filthy water impregnated with an odour of soot. A yellow, dense fog fills the air, sweeps down to the ground; at thirty paces a house, a steamboat appear as spots upon blotting paper. After an hour’s walk in the Strand especially, and in the rest of the City, one has the spleen, one meditates suicide. The lofty lines of fronts are of sombre brick, the exudations being encrusted with fog and soot. Monotony and silence; yet the inscriptions on metal or marble speak and tell of the absent master, as in a large manufactory of bone-black closed on account of a death.

  A frightful thing is the huge palace in the Strand, which is called Somerset House. Massive and heavy piece of architecture, of which the hollows are inked, the porticoes blackened with soot, where, in the cavity of the empty court, is a sham fountain without water; pools of water on the pavement, long rows of closed windows – what can they possibly do in these catacombs?
It seems as if the livid and sooty fog had even befouled the verdure of the parks. But what most offends the eyes are the colonnades, peristyles, Grecian ornaments, mouldings and wreaths of the houses, all bathed in soot; poor antique architecture – what is it doing in such a climate? The flutings and columns in front of the British Museum are be-grimed as if liquid mud had been poured over them.

  St Paul’s, a kind of Pantheon, has two ranges of columns, the lower range is entirely black, the upper range, recently scraped, is still white, but the white is offensive, coal smoke has already plastered it with its leprosy.

  1956 SAM SELVON

  The Trinidad-born writer Sam Selvon (1923–1994) migrated to Britain in 1950, and his novel The Lonely Londoners (1956) described the lives of the West Indian immigrants of the so-called Windrush generation. Written mainly in Creole and patois, it includes experimental sections of stream-of-consciousness.

  Oh what a time it is when summer come to the city and all them girls throw away heavy winter coat and wearing light summer frocks you could see the legs and shapes that was hiding away from the cold blasts and you could coast a lime in the park and negotiate ten shillings or a pound with the sports as the case may be or else they have a particular bench near the Hyde Park Corner that they call the Play Around Section where would could go and sit with one of them what a time summer is because you bound to meet the boys coasting lime in the park and you could go walking through the gardens and see all them pretty pieces of skin taking suntan and how the old geezers like the sun they would sit on the benches and smile everywhere you turn the English people smiling isn’t it a lovely day as if the sun burn away all the tightness and strain that was in their faces for the winter and on a nice day every manjack and his brother going to the park with his girl and laying down on the grass and making love in the winter you would never think that the grass would ever come green again but if you don’t keep your eyes open it look like one day they have clothes on sometimes walking up to the Bayswater Road from Queensway you could look on a winter day and see how grim the trees looking and a sort of fog in the distance though right near to you you ain’t have no fog but that is only deceiving because if someone down the other side lookup by where you are it would look to them as if it have fog by where you are and this time so the sun in the sky like a force-ripe orange and it giving no heat at all and the atmosphere like a sullen twilight hanging over the big city but it is different too bad when is summer for then the sun shine for true and the sky blue and a warm wind blowing it look like when is winter a kind of grey nasty colour does come to the sky and it stay there and you forget what it was like to see blue skies like back home where blue sky so common people don’t even look up in the air and you feel miserable and cold but when summer come is fire in the big town big times fete like stupidness and you have to keep the blood cool for after all them cold and wet months you like you roaring to go though to tell truth winter don’t make much difference to some of the boys they blazing left and right as usual all the year round to talk of all the episodes that Moses had with woman in London that would take bags of ballad….