Peter Ackroyd's London - 3/3 Water and Darkness

[Music] on the 14th of September 1880 to a young man threw himself from a bridge into the River Thames nobody knows why he wanted to die second man who happened to be passing by at the time jumped in to try to save him [Music] but the fierce tidal waters of the Thames had taken hold of him and refused to let him go london's dark river had claimed another life like thousands of suicides before and since the body was never identified this is the story of the mysterious world beneath the surface of the greatest city on earth the story of the dark depths of London [Music] [Music] by the middle of the 19th century London had become the center of world empire with the Thames and the thriving docks of the East End at its heart this was the greatest city the world had ever seen the model for the modern metropolis of the 20th century but beneath the surface the city was spiraling out of control it was a wilderness of disease and inner ality a place of terror destitution and death London was being transformed by the Victorian demands for power and progress at any price it was growing relentlessly a population of 1 million at the beginning of the 19th century had risen to five million by its close it was more than just a city it was an awe-inspiring spectacle of Imperial grandeur and unending poverty when the co-founder of world communism friedrich engels arrived in london in 1842 he found it a source both of wonder and of horror I know of nothing more imposing than the view which the Thames offers joined the ascent from the sea to London Bridge the masses of buildings all this is so vast so impressive that a man cannot collect himself but let all men remember this that within the richest city of God's earth there may be found night after night winter after winter men and women young in years old in sin and suffering rotting from famine filth and disease London had always aspired to be the greatest city on earth it had succeeded but only at the expense of the people it devoured in its drive for expansion and power the city was founded by the Romans and all the spectacle cruelty and violence of old Roman London was rising again the new architects of the city openly acknowledged and celebrated his Roman roots Nelson's column in Trafalgar Square was modeled upon a column from the temple of Mars in Imperial Rome and the architect Sir John Soane based his designs for the Bank of England on Roman originals this corner of the bank was inspired by a ruined Roman temple and the entrance to the bullion yard is a Roman triumphal arch mosaics in the entrance hall represent the Roman symbols for trade and commerce [Music] and King William the third becomes a Roman Emperor ironically when it was later rebuilt in the 1930s a real Roman mosaic was discovered beneath the banks foundations in Victorian London money was God and this was its highest temple the British Empire was established upon Commerce and upon trade and this building came to symbolize the spirit of the age London was the new Rome but Rome had suffered terrible violence and destruction it had ended in ruin there was a growing feeling that London might share the same fate beneath the surface of this imperial city an underclass was emerging - most educated Victorians these people were a dangerous mystery best avoided and ignored in the 1840s one man became obsessed with the condition of London and its people and had the courage to seek out the truth I ascended in a balloon to gain a strange perspective on this city it was a wonderful sight to behold a vast mass of churches and hospitals palaces and work houses docks and refuges for the destitute which make up London all blended into one immense black spot there is more virtue and more iniquity more wealth and more want brought together into one dense focus and in any other part of the earth Henry Mayhew was a Victorian Londoner who wanted to give the city's labouring for a voice in the autumn of 18-49 he began to document London's teeming life in an exhaustive survey entitled London labour and the London poor shall go to heaven if we didn't change we couldn't live mine's a wretched life and so his most and sangwich men I hardly remember my father Sir I don't dread the winter so the aged the orphan the halt the blind of London would film an ordinary City it may be a strange conception the city composed of the injured and maimed but it is the truth and then there are the poor who would film listen how heavily are modern Rome bears down upon the backs of the neighboring boy Mayhew's project dictated to his patient wife was as elaborate as the Victorian metropolis itself it was dark shocking dense and obsessively meticulous dozens admitted in the asylums for the house list poor bakers 167 basket makers 62 bedstead makers 235 bomb makers 178 book binders 255 brass founders 177 brick makers 39 brush makers 145 butchers 248 poor to feed the great reading commercial metropolis it has become it was hungry for human lives Londoners have been forced to sacrifice all the best qualities of human nature to bring to pass all the marvels of civilization which crowd their city dens of extreme poverty are to be found close to the splendid mansions of the wealthy even in respectable streets like Long Acre there are many cellar dwellings from which emerge into the light of day sickly children and half starved ragged women London has always drawn its inhabitants underground in the 19th century one-third of the poor lived in basements which were like filthy urban caves many also worked in its subterranean caverns those under the ground instilled an element of fear in those who remained above it was the fear of the depth that is why the figure of the underground man is so polluted the sewer hunters of the 19th century were known as Tosh's after the Tosh or popper they retrieved from the sewers to sell the sewer artists passed their time and little noise and papers that are generated by the sewers whose odour is dreaded and shunned by all as being something pista menschell get a debate did you find this godforsaken place I found silvery was time and again I once found a silver jug as big as a hot pot pretty of us cleared a couple of pair of pace in the day at the sewer trouble is no sooner we had the man who is all down the pub Victorian London was burying everything that got in the way of its ceaseless expansion including nature itself even the tributaries of the River Thames were paved over and incarcerated beneath the streets the waters from ancient streams and wells still cost beneath our feet they may be unseen but their spirits continue to haunt the city the fleet River still runs into the Thames to this tunnel beneath legate circus it has been reduced to little more than a sewer these are the lost rivers of London all of them flowing into the Thames among their mother Tyburn the Westbourne the walbrook and the fleet the valleys of these rivers have now been converted into roads train lines and sewers but their traces can still be seen all over London the world rock flows directly under the Bank of England beneath the vaults that hold the wealth of the city the course of the Tyburn can be witnessed in the basement of an antique shop of Oxford Street and the Westbourne River still flows unstoppably through a pipe above Sloane Square station it was enclosed in 1856 the last tributary of the Thames to be lost another victim to the ceaseless growth of London from Roman times the river fleet marked the western boundary of the city it quickly became associated with poverty and squalor from its source in the ponds on Hampstead Heath in the north it flows under some pancreas a gathering place for vagrants and the destitute to this day [Music] it flows on under what is now a Farrington Road and the adjacent railway line past turn Mill Street and Clark and well for many centuries this was a place of waffles and Load taverns the fleet was a center of immorality and disease [Music] after the Great Fire of London it was resolved to convert this squalid expanse of mud and grime into a new Venice the lower section was deepened widened and redesigned by Sir Christopher Wren but this 18th century painting is a romantic evocation of what it could have been in 1733 only ten years after wrens death it was bricked over and forgotten the fleet was as unimprovable as London itself every attempt to render it clean or Noble failed and at the dawn of the Victorian era this once-great River became a dark sewer while the underground rivers work their magic unseen beneath the ground the Imperial Thames remained the visible force it had always been visible but no less dark for the novelist a master mariner Joseph Conrad the Thames was the source from which the British Empire flowed in all its misery and glory the Thames has known the ships and the men they sailed from Deptford from Greenwich adventurers and the settlers messengers of the mic'd within the land what greatness had not floated on the air but that River into the mystery of an unknown earth dreams of men germs of empires [Music] and this also has been one of the dark places of the earth [Music] [Applause] darkness fired the Victorian imagination for Charles Dickens it was London's defining characteristic calm and unmoved amidst the scenes the darkness favors the great heart of London thrombus in its giant breasts wealth and beggary vice and virtue guilt and innocence repletion and the diarist hunger all treading on each other and crowding together for Dickens walking through the London night was a way of a laying his own private miseries as a child he had walked through the city and its nocturnal aspect reflected his sombre moods no person could share the misery inside him only London could mirror his melancholy the Thames had an awfully lock the buildings on its banks were muffled in black shrouds the reflected lights seemed to originate deep in the water as if the spectres of suicides were holding them to show where they went down [Music] the river has always been London's dark heart these are the River occurrence books kept by the whopping police they are a journal of suicides in the Thames containing the tales of all the people consumed by the river since 1839 they are some of the saddest books in the world among many anonymous bodies in the river we come across at a 4:20 p.m. on the 26th of May 1948 a 58 year old man who jumped from the woola's ferry he was heard to shout goodbye [Music] the spirit of the dead pervades the night images of the Thames there were few ruins in London the presence of earlier generations is felt rather than seen it is a city of shadows and of echoes darkness is part of London's legacy from its ancient past [Music] this place was once known as dark lane a tavern was erected here known as the dark house that narrow thoroughfare was renamed dark house lane the name has evolved over hundreds of years but the mood has remained the same today dark house walk is home to an international bank a huge steel structure clad in tinted glass the darkness of medieval London echoes through the centuries to the present day now the city's thoroughfares are monitored by surveillance cameras so it is impossible ever to feel completely alone modern London has become self-conscious forever watchful of its own citizens almost daring them to manifest the energy and violence of their predecessors [Music] one of the most terrifying of these predecessors was a strange demon that appeared for the first time in 1838 it embodied all the terror savage violence and darkness of the Victorian era as the story goes on a cold February night a girl called Jane Alsop sat alone in her room [Music] [Music] [Applause] awoken by the screaming James sister came to her aid [Applause] the demon went on knocking as if to say let me in I have not finished with you yet J and Allsop had been attacked by spring-heeled Jack a devil like figure with horns who could jump up to the rooftops he was seen in Limehouse and Berman's flames issuing from his mouth panic spread all over the city he was never called and mystery surrounds the future to this very day whether fire-eating Joker or mythical demon spring-heeled jack is a familiar London devil he is the savagery of 19th century London made flesh Spring Heeled Jack powerfully represented all the dark elements that lurked beneath the surface of the grand Imperial City but as London expanded this darkness was to find its way to the surface in an area that became known as the East End the East End grew out of the 19th century expansion of London's docks trade with the British Empire fuel of the growth of West India dock then London gone East India dock and Surrey to sum the East End immediately became a savage place Atem stocks recalls a jungle by the confused aspect of the buildings that line ashore as if sprung up by accident from scattered seed like the matted growth of bushes and creepers veiling an unexplored wilderness they hide the depths of London's infinitely varied vigorous seething life the East End earned its living from the river it was here that Henry Mayhew found many of the subjects for his survey of London labor and the London poor this city of Empire is also a city of savages a native of Africa or of Polynesia is not half so savage so unclean so eerie claimable as the tenant of a London slum [Music] here there were slums as far as the eye could see a road was built to connect the City of London with the docks it made its way eastward through Whitechapel Shadwell and Limehouse it was called Commercial Road and as it grew so did the East End the modern dockland of today bears little resemblance to its 19th century ancestor business has replaced the dirty industries luxury flats with Grand River Views have replaced the slums the gleaming architecture of a new century stands upon what were once forlorn and squalid landscapes of labour [Music] yet the ghosts of the East End's past still cast a shadow over the area The Commercial Road can still feel dank and depressing some places in London can retain their old power [Music] the area east of the old Roman City has always been the less fortunate when the Saxons of the 5th and 6th centuries invaded London they forced the Britons onto the east side of the river war Brook it was one of the earliest of London's boundaries [Music] even now the area east of the wall book has an atmosphere very different from that of the West the West End has the money the East End has the dirt the East has always been the dark side associated with poverty and squalor [Music] the East End was a place few Outsiders would dare to visit it was London at its worst I'm Henry Mayhew [Music] during the day there were three families crowded into one room the excrement came up through the floorboards there was an achiever like a cow house where 17 human beings ate drank and slept stricken left to die alone and the smell but it was indescribable [Music] good God what do you eat well I've scraped together and full of bugs and a bedclothes and crushed him under a candlestick [Music] excuse me dissing missing me it now feels as if it didn't belong to me you don't have to stay here I can't bear the thought going into the workhouse I would never leave this neighborhood when all is said and done it's raised me Mayhew was troubled by this territorial pride yet whatever their circumstances the people of the East End have always been fiercely attached to their own part of the city reporting these encounters was his way of challenging the complacent views of his contemporaries he was caught between two worlds the rich and the poor London and its underbelly seething in the eastern areas of our great city concealed by the thinnest crust of civilization and decency is a vast mass of moral corruption no form of Vice or sexuality attracts attention or causes surprise incest the East End became the abyss the nether world in the journalism and literature of the period it became the home of evil and immorality of savagery and unnamed Vice [Music] by the time of Jack the Ripper London itself seemed to have become a monster Friedrich Engels believed the city was changing human behavior itself the very turmoil of the streets has something repulsive something against which human nature rebels the hundreds of thousands of all classes and ranks crowding past each other are they not all human beings with the same qualities and powers with the same interest in being happy it occurs to no man to honor another with so much as a glance London has created a new face in human existence itself Victorian London was the first urban society of the modern era all the brutal impersonal and lonely cities of today began with 19th century London the city was overflowing not only with the living but also with the dead the buried depths of Victorian London were rising to the surface its graveyards faced a crisis of overcrowding coffins were placed tier above tier in the graves until they were within a few inches of the surface and became a source of stench and disease it is a solemn consideration what enormous hosts of dead belong to this old great city if they were raised while the living slept there would not be the space of a pins point in all the streets for the living to come out into but a vast armies of the day would overflow the hills and valleys beyond London would stretch God knows have fun London's answer for the need for more space for these vast armies of the Dead was the construction of seven joint stock cemeteries that encircle the city great necropolis is at Highgate Avenue Park Tower Hamlets Norwood none head Plumpton and Kensal green [Music] on the 30th of July 1887 there was a poorly attended funeral at Kensal green it was the funeral of a man who had once published a great masterpiece but had now been all but forgotten like the London poor he too had been ground down by the city he loved so much his name was Henry Mayhew his body now lies in catacomb a vault 52 [Music] soon after he died London would finally react to the inhumanity of the 19th century metropolis that had so disgusted and Mouton the living were to follow the dead out of the city Mayhew's London was about to be changed forever by the emergence of mass transport it created the greatest exodus in the city's history Londoners were finally to escape but they had to tunnel out the creation of the underground railway helped to give birth to the suburbs the Metropolitan Railway was opened in 1863 when steam trains went through enormous tunnels from Paddington to Farrington Road it was celebrated as the greatest engineering triumph of modern times [Music] slowly the tubes spread with the central line the Bakerloo the Piccadilly and the northern lines in the process London devoured the countryside in 1921 Dagenham was a small village with cottages and fields of corn within ten years 20,000 houses had been built there the old high streets became the London Road the names of the villagers outside the city became the names of underground stations London had in its old fashion simply changed its form the gin palaces gave way to local mock tudor pubs the hospital was were replaced by roadside Inns and the street markets by department stores and shopping parades London in its new form appealed to the width of the American poet TS Eliot I made a pilgrimage to Cricklewood where is Cricklewood said an austere Englishman at the hotel I produced a map and pointed to the silent evidence that Cricklewood exists he pondered but why go to Cricklewood he flashed out at length here I was triumphant there is no reason I said he had no more to say but he was relieved I'm sure when he found that I was American he felt no longer responsible but Cricklewood is mine I discovered it no one will go there again it's like the sunken town in the fairy story that rose just every May Day Eve and lived for an hour and only one man saw it [Music] these detached or semi-detached villas were engaged in a game of make-believe that they were not part of London at all but try as they might to look different from the city they were still inescapably part of its monstrous expansion [Music] this is Wolfson Street in another suburb East Acton which was built in the 1920s here in the 1950s a young boy grew up his name was peter ackroyd [Music] but I grew up a Londoner my home was very much part of London in reality the suburbs were as much a part of the city as whopping or Tottenham Court Road the tube and metropolitan transportation systems had redefined this city both above and below the ground this vast underground metropolis covers an area of 620 square miles with 254 miles of railway and 275 stations [Music] this London Underground poster of 1933 represented London as a body its veins and arteries are the underground network in many respects the underground is the lifeblood of modern London it is like the city above an arena for chance meetings and coincidences it is utterly impersonal and exhausting it can be alarming - and even violent it is a true mirror of London life for as long as they have been able to Londoners have tunneled beneath their city underground are to be found storage depots ventilation shafts telecommunications tunnels secret chambers and bomb shelters there are more tunnels under the Thames than under the river of any other capital city tunnels for trains for cars for public services and utilities and for pedestrians the Greenwich foot tunnel was opened in 1902 [Music] here in this tunnel under the river it can seem more lonely and more desolate than any other part of London it has the silence of past time of forgotten things [Music] underground London is part of the city's texture it imitates the patterns of the city above the ground with its alleys and it's fair Affairs its shortcuts and its shadowy corners the caverns of underground London resonate with echoes of the past [Music] with the outbreak of war in 1939 London once again became the city of the dreadful night with nightly blackouts it became crime even off unreal yet even in these most extreme circumstances Londoners did not want to leave many of them preferred to go underground it was almost instinctive to take refuge in the city beneath the streets these scenes were witnessed by the artist Henry Moore Londoners had decided for themselves that the underground was the safest place to be and nothing was organized there were no sanitary arrangements and no bunks some people brought their own mattresses others simply lay on the concrete platform the only thing at all like those shelters that I could think of it's the hold of a slave ship on its way from Africa to America the London Blitz began on the 7th of September 1940 the primary target was the East End and the dogs [Music] hundreds of planes followed the river in formation and dropped their bombs upon East Ham and Bethnal Green Limehouse and canning town in one attack upon a school four hundred children and teachers died London's docks were all but destroyed deeply moved by scenes of Londoners sheltering underground Henry Moore began to draw what he observed in the tube shelters the queues before 4 o'clock outside some of the tube stations of poor looking women and children waiting to be let in to take shelter for the night and the dirty old bits of blanket and clothes and pillows stretched out on the tube platforms it's about the most pathetic sordid and disheartening sight I hoped to see at the beginning of the fighting it was estimated that 177 thousand Londoners sheltered in the tube by night so many that the then Deputy Prime Minister feared that a permanent underground population would develop a population of troglodytes as he put it fear of the deep once more by the end of the war the death toll was 30,000 100,000 houses were destroyed and a third of the city of London was razed to the ground yet the sanctuary of the city underground had saved many of its people although a Briton was victorious it could be said that London had lost the war in the decades that followed the dereliction remains and the decline of the British Empire left the East End docks desolate memorials to their thriving Victorian past London has always been haunted by its association with Imperial Rome to the Victorians the city was forever in peril of falling into decline like its illustrious predecessor among the ruins of the Second World War this catastrophe now seemed to be London's true destiny what is the city over the mountains cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air falling towers Jerusalem Athens Alexandria Vienna London [Music] london's visionaries have often imagined the city in ruins for the river to dry the buildings to crumble would neatly end the story of this dark imperial city like ancient Rome London would be both dead and eternal preserved in the monumental ruins and returned to the elemental forces from which it was forged [Music] but I don't think this will ever happen the Thames will always flow the city will go on growing underground and out into the suburbs it is in its nature to encompass everything London is filled with many broken images laughter which should have been heard before a street which is unknown yet familiar a face that has been seen before it goes beyond any boundary or convention it contains every wish or word ever spoken every action or gesture ever made every harsh or noble statement ever expressed it is illimitable it is infinite London next

Channel: snadhghus

Views: 17,746

Keywords: BBC, Documentary, Peter Ackroyd, London, Whitechapel, Blitz, Spring Heeled Jack, History, East End, Cockney, Cockneys, London underground, Charles Dickens, Henry Mayhew

Id: 5PKhPshxw2g

Length: 45min 19sec (2719 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 03 2020