The Old Lady

The building in which I now live used to be office space, and before that a shoe factory. It was built at the beginning of what I am still not used to thinking of as the last century. The small street on which it is situated is negligible, but much older than the major thoroughfares surrounding it: Farringdon Road, Clerkenwell Road and Rosebery Avenue were all late Victorian inventions, imposed on top of the unruly streetscape that existed at the time by force of imperial will, brave new boulevards to carry traffic between the power centres of Westminster and the City and the outlying suburbs of Islington. Clerkenwell hasn't been countryside for centuries, but its inner city status is surprisingly new.

A block away from here is the Mount Pleasant Post Office, one of the major communication hubs of London. In these days of wired and wireless information exchange the humble postal service can seem increasingly outdated and sidelined, but millions of pieces of mail still pass through that place every day. Hundreds of trucks and vans roar into and out of Mount Pleasant at all hours of the day and night, many routinely using Warner Street to do so. From here they fan out across the country, laden with letters and packages, little scented love notes, tax demands, Readers Digest Prize Draw notices, death threats. Behind the main office building is a vast staging area in which the vehicles park, and are serviced, and filled. Beneath is the hub of the Post Office's own underground railway, running unseen and unmanned to points across the city. During the First World War, those tunnels were used to store the Elgin Marbles. There is an entire city there now, but little more than a century ago it was the Middlesex House of Correction, and before that the Cold Bath Fields Prison, notorious for its severe punishments. Prisoners were kept under the Silent System -- forbidden to communicate with one another -- and put to Hard Labour, strenuous work specifically designed to be unproductive.

You wouldn't notice if you weren't looking for it, but Warner Street is in the valley of the Fleet River, which now runs underground from its source in the Hampstead Ponds to an outlet into the Thames beneath Blackfriars Bridge. Although the Fleet is long buried -- its last open stretches were covered over in the 19th century, and those around here were suppressed long before that -- it defines, from its watery grave, much of north London's physical and mythopœic geography. Fleet Street, traditional home of British journalism (pigs in pork-pie hats) as well as Demon Barbers, takes its name from the river, as (less obviously) does Holborn (the Old Bourne). Construction of the new British Library was hampered by the waters of the Fleet flowing through its foundations, a fitting tribute to the river's malevolent spirit over the centuries. From the middle ages on, the slaughterhouses and tanneries of Smithfield dyed the lower reaches of the Fleet red; this stretch was briefly revitalized by Christopher Wren after the Great Fire, but just ten years after his death the drive to bury it became irresistible. Not that the Fleet cares. It gurgles away in a culvert outside our door, and in the depths of the basement, in a room below the gas and electricity and information feeds, it laps up to floor level, a cheery hello from the ancient water table.

A couple of blocks further away, Sadler's Wells theatre is another namesake reminder of our aqueous heritage. Back when this was all empty fields, the upper echelons of London society would make the long journey all the way out here to take the waters at the Wells, renowned for their restorative properties. It's bewildering now to think of Islington as a spa town. It was a different world, but the power of water remains. Right next to the Wells is New River Head, spiritual home of Thames Water, the (now multinational) corporation that hydrates our city. The New River Head offices have been turned into luxury apartments and sold off, but Thames Water still has interests here, including one of the main access points to the London Ring Main. Nearly anything you drink in this city has passed through that point.

Further afield still, down the hill and off to the left, St Paul's Cathedral squats, a fat, smug cleric in the heart of the city (and on the banks of the Fleet). In its shadow flourish Starbucks and Gap; the financial torrents of the Square Mile ebb and flow around it and tourists surge through and through. Wren's plans for the New Canal may have foundered, but his cathedral stands fast. When the Luftwaffe rained fiery death on London in 1940-41, St Paul's was untouched. Divine intervention? In the Whispering Gallery, above a terrifying, yawning chasm to the marble slabs below, you can talk to the wall and hear it speak your own words back, the sound having circumnavigated the dome to reach you.

A hop, skip and jump further still we find the Old Lady. The Bank of England is no longer the matriarch she once was, but even in her dotage she primps and preens on Threadneedle Street like the highest of high class courtesans. The street takes its name from the seamstresses who used to ply their trade there, but they weren't the only ones. Not so long ago the street was a notorious venue for prostitution, and accordingly titled Gropecunt Lane. The Old Lady knows this. Oh yes, she remembers.

This is not a pristine city, it is a city of perverts and monsters and criminals. It is elemental, a story of fire and water, air and earth. We live here, and take it for granted, and hate it, and love it. Thousands of years of bad blood flow through its veins. It is wicked beyond words, terrible and beautiful and here.

How could it not be magic?
Posted by matt at April 17, 2004 04:16 AM