Johnson's Life of London Read online

  ALSO BY BORIS JOHNSON

  The Dream of Rome

  Lend Me Your Ears

  Have I Got Views for You

  Life in the Fast Lane

  Friends, Voters, Countrymen

  Seventy-two Virgins (Fiction)

  The Perils of the Pushy Parents (Poetry)

  Johnson’s

  Life of London

  The People Who Made the City That Made the World

  Boris Johnson

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  New York

  2012

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2012 by Boris Johnson

  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins 2011

  First published in the United States by Riverhead Books 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Johnson, Boris.

  Johnson’s life of London : the people who made the city that made the world / by Boris Johnson.

  p. cm.

  Originally published: London : HarperCollins, 2011.

  ISBN 978-1-101-58568-9

  1. London (England)—Biography. 2. London (England)—History. I. Title.

  DA676.8.A1J64 2012 2012001665

  920.0421—dc23

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  For Marina

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Boris Johnson

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  INTRODUCTION: LONDON BRIDGE

  BOUDICA

  HADRIAN

  MELLITUS

  ALFRED THE GREAT

  WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR

  GEOFFREY CHAUCER

  The Flush Toilet

  RICHARD WHITTINGTON

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  The King James Bible

  ROBERT HOOKE

  The Bow Street Runners

  SAMUEL JOHNSON

  The Suit

  JOHN WILKES

  The Bicycle

  J. M. W. TURNER

  Ping-Pong

  LIONEL ROTHSCHILD

  Joseph Bazalgette and the Sewers

  FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE AND MARY SEACOLE

  The Tube

  W. T. STEAD

  The Routemaster Bus

  WINSTON CHURCHILL

  KEITH RICHARDS

  THE MIDLAND GRAND HOTEL

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction: London Bridge

  Still they come, surging towards me across the bridge.

  On they march in sun, wind, rain, snow and sleet. Almost every morning I cycle past them in rank after heaving rank as they emerge from London Bridge station and tramp tramp tramp up and along the broad 239-metre pavement that leads over the river and towards their places of work.

  It feels as if I am reviewing an honourable regiment of yomping commuters, and as I pass them down the bus-rutted tarmac there is the occasional eyes-left moment and I will be greeted with a smile or perhaps a cheery four-letter cry.

  Sometimes they are on the phone, or talking to their neighbours, or checking their texts. A few of them may glance at the scene, which is certainly worth a glance: on their left the glistening turrets of the City; on the right the white keep of the Tower of London, the guns of HMS Belfast and the mad castellations of Tower Bridge; and beneath them the powerful swirling eddies of the river that seems to be green or brown depending on the time of day. Mainly, however, they have their mouths set and their eyes are blank with that inward look of people who have done the bus or the Tube or the aboveground train and are steeling themselves for the day ahead.

  This was the sight, you remember, that filled T. S. Eliot with horror. “A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,” reported the sensitive banker-turned-poet. “I had not thought death had undone so many,” he moaned. And yet, ninety years after Eliot freaked out, the tide of humanity is fuller than ever. When I pass that pavement at off-peak times, I can see that it is pale and worn from the pounding, and that not even the chewing gum can survive the wildebeest tread.

  The crowd has changed since Eliot had his moment of apocalypse. There are thousands of women on the march today, wearing sneakers and carrying their heels in bags. The men have rucksacks instead of briefcases; no one is wearing a bowler hat and hardly anyone seems to be smoking a cigarette, let alone a pipe. But London’s commuters are still the same in their trudging purpose, and they come in numbers not seen before.

  London’s buses are carrying more people than at any time in history. The Tube is travelling more miles than ever, and more people are riding on the trains. It would be nice to reveal that people are ditching their cars in favour of public transport; yet the paradox is that private motor vehicle transport is also increasing, and cycling has gone up 15 percent in one year.

  As we look back at the last twenty years of the information technology revolution, there is one confident prediction that has not come true.

  They said we would all be sitting in our kitchens in Dorking or Dorset and “telecommuting” down the “information superhighway.” Video linkups, we were told, would make meetings unnecessary. What tosh.

  Whatever we may think they “need” to do, people want to see other people up close. I leave it to the anthropologists to come up with the detailed analysis, but you only have to try a week of “working from home” to know it is not all it’s cracked up to be.

  You soon get gloomy from making cups of coffee and surfing the Internet and going to hack at that piece of cheese in the fridge. And then there are other profound reasons for this obstinate human desire to be snuffling round each other at the watercooler. As the Harvard economist Edward Glaeser has demonstrated, the move to the city is as rational in the information revolution as it was in the Industrial Revolution.

  And these people are coming here not just from Dorking, or even from darkest Dorset. They come from the ends of the
Earth. Dotted in that crowd of commuting faces will be people from every European country, from Russia, from Asia, from Africa and from both the Americas. They will probably have come to Heathrow, the busiest airport in the world, with 68 million passengers a year, and then cabbed or Tubed or trained it into a world city, a cosmopolis of three hundred languages, a city of constant immigration where East End churches have turned into synagogues and then into mosques. National football teams from fifty countries can turn up in London and expect to find a home crowd of more than ten thousand supporters each. No other city matches London for its pull and diversity—with the possible exception of New York, the shining transatlantic mirror that is, it so happens, the city of my birth.

  By the time I get to cycle home, most of the morning crowds have tramped the other way. Like some gigantic undersea coelenterate, London has completed its spectacular daily act of respiration—sucking in millions of commuters from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m., and then efficiently expelling them back to the suburbs and the Home Counties from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. But the drift home is more staggered. There are pubs, clubs and bars to be visited, and as I watch the crowds of drinkers on the pavements—knots of people dissolving and reforming in a slow minuet—I can see why the city beats the countryside hands down. It’s the sheer range of opportunity.

  You can exchange Dante–Beatrice glances on the Tube escalator; you can spill someone else’s latte and offer to buy them another; you can apologise when they tread on your toe, or you can get your dog lead tangled in theirs, or you can just collide with them on the pavement. You can even use the personal dating services in the evening paper, or (I imagine this still goes on) you can offer to buy them a drink. These are some of the mating strategies of our species; but they have statistically a far higher likelihood of success in a city, because it is in the city where there are the numbers and the choice of potential mates—and the penalty for failure is much lower.

  The metropolis is like a vast multinational reactor where Mr. Quark and Miss Neutrino are moving the fastest and bumping into each other with the most exciting results. This is not just a question of romance or reproduction. It is about ideas. It is about the cross-pollination that is more likely to take place with a whole superswarm of bees rather than a few isolated hives.

  You would expect me to say this, and I must of course acknowledge that many great cities can make all kinds of claims to primacy, but at a moment when it is perhaps excessively fashionable to be gloomy about Western civilisation I would tentatively suggest that London is just about the most culturally, technologically, politically and linguistically significant city of the last five hundred years. In fact, I don’t think even the mayors of Paris, New York, Moscow, Berlin, Madrid, Tokyo, Beijing or Amsterdam would quibble when I say that London is—after Athens and Rome—the third most influential city in history.

  Around the world there are similar crowds of commuters, tramping similar pavements with the same grim-jawed mood of economic competitiveness. They are wearing a London invention—the dark suit, with jacket, trousers and tie, that was pioneered by eighteenth-century dandies and refined by the Victorians. They travel on devices that were either invented or developed in London: underground trains (Paddington to Farringdon, 1855) or buses, or even bicycles, which were certainly popularised if not invented in London.

  If they have just got off a plane, that machine will have been guided through the sky by air traffic controllers who are trained to speak a language that emerged in its modern form in the London of Geoffrey Chaucer.

  They may make use of a cash machine (Enfield, 1967) before entering a department store (which appeared in its modern form on Oxford Street in 1909). When they get home the chances are they will slump in front of a television (the first example of which was turned on in a room above what is now Bar Italia on Frith Street, Soho, in 1925) and watch the football (whose rules were codified in a pub in Great Queen Street in 1863).

  You know, I could keep it up for quite a while, this tub-thumping list of London innovations, from the machine gun to the Internet to the futures market for Château Haut-Brion. But the city’s contribution has also been spiritual and ideological. When Anglican missionaries fanned out across Africa, they carried the King James Bible, a masterpiece translated in London. When the Americans founded their great republic, they were partly inspired by the anti-monarchical slogans of London radicals; and across the world there are governments that at least pay lip service to concepts of parliamentary democracy and habeas corpus that London did more than any other city to promote.

  Darwinism originated in the English capital. So did Marxism. So did Thatcherism, come to that, and the anarcho-communism of Bromley resident Peter Kropotkin.

  It was the vast tracts of empire that did the most to allow Londoners to project themselves abroad, the Cambrian explosion of Victorian technology and energy. But the empire was no accident, and it was no sudden fluke that made London in 1800 the biggest and most powerful city on Earth. That imperial epoch was itself the product of centuries of evolution, and the Victorians inherited a conglomerate of advantages—a wonderfully flexible language, skill in banking, naval expertise, a stable political system—that previous Londoners had laid down.

  A big city gives people the chance to find mates, money and food; and then there is one further thing that bright people come to London to find, one currency more dear to the human heart than money itself—and that is fame.

  It was the eternal contest for reputation and prestige that encouraged Londoners to endow new hospitals or write great plays or crack the problem of longitude for the navy. No matter how agreeable your surroundings, you couldn’t get famous by sitting around in some village, and that is still true today. You need people to acknowledge what you have done; you need a gallery for the applause; and above all you need to know what everyone else is up to.

  It is the city that gives the ambitious person the scope to eavesdrop, borrow or just intuit the ideas of others, and then to meld them with his own and come up with something new. And for the less ambitious, it is a chance to look busy and ingratiate yourself with the boss in the hope of avoiding the boot—because if someone is “working from home,” then I am afraid they are a great deal easier to sack.

  These are some of the reasons why people have chosen not to stay at home with the cat; that is why there is the drumming migration over London Bridge. For centuries people have been coming not in search of oil or gold or any other natural wealth—because London has nothing but Pleistocene clay and mud—they have been coming in search of each other, and each other’s approbation. It is that competition for prestige that has so often produced the flashes of genius that have taken the city forwards—and sometimes the entire human race.

  If you had come to London ten thousand years ago, you would have found nothing to distinguish the place from any other estuarial swamp in Europe. You might have found the odd mammoth looking lost and on the verge of extinction but no human settlements. And for the next ten thousand years it was pretty much the same.

  The civilisations of Babylon and Mohenjo-daro rose and fell. The Pharaohs built the pyramids. Homer sang. The Mexican Zapotecs began to write. Pericles adorned the Acropolis. The Chinese emperor called his terra-cotta army into being. The Roman republic endured a bloody civil war and then became an empire. In London there was silence, save the flitting of deer between the trees.

  The river was about four times wider than it is today, and much slower—but there was scarcely a coracle to be seen on the Thames. When the time came for Christ to preach his ministry in Galilee, there were certainly a few proto-Britons living in a state of undress and illiteracy. But there were no Londoners. There was no big or lasting habitation on the site of the modern city, because there was no possibility of a settlement—not without that vital piece of transport infrastructure I use every day.

  By my calculations, today’s London Bridge must be the twelfth or
thirteenth incarnation of a structure that has been repeatedly bashed, broken, burned or bombed. It has been used to hurl witches into the Thames; it has been destroyed by Vikings; it has been torched at least twice by mobs of angry peasants.

  In its time the bridge I use every day has sustained churches, houses, Elizabethan palaces, a mall of about two hundred shops and businesses, as well as the spiked and blackened heads of enemies of the state.

  The previous, dilapidated version was sold in 1967—in one of the most magnificent examples of London’s protean talent for export—to an American entrepreneur named Robert P. McCulloch. He paid $2.46 million for the structure, and everyone laughed behind their hands because they assumed that poor Mr. McCulloch had confused London Bridge with the more picturesque Tower Bridge; and yet the Missouri chainsaw tycoon was not as foolish as he seemed.

  The bridge has been reassembled stone by stone in Lake Havasu, Arizona, where I am told it is the state’s second most visited tourist attraction after the Grand Canyon; and the fascination is deserved, I would say, given the utter indispensability of London Bridge in the creation of London.

  It was the bridge that created the port; it was the tollbooth on the north side that necessitated the guards, and the guards that necessitated the first housing. It was the Romans, in about AD 43 or soon thereafter, who built the first pontoon bridge.

  It was a bunch of pushy Italian immigrants who founded London, and seventeen years later the boneheaded ancient Britons responded to this gift of civilisation by burning London to the ground, destroying the bridge, and massacring everyone they could find.

  Boudica

  She goaded the Romans to invest

  It must have happened about here, I reckon. It is a bright autumn day, and I have found what could well have been the heart of the earliest Roman settlement. It’s just up from London Bridge, at the junction between Gracechurch Street and Lombard Street, with Fenchurch Street running off to the right. There’s a Marks & Spencer and an Itsu restaurant ahead, but according to all my books the space I am interested in is in the middle of this intersection.