London Calling. London Walks connecting.
This is London. This is London Walks. Streets ahead. Story time. History time.
For a year and a half, I lived in the middle of London history.
I just didn’t know it.
In 1973, during my first academic year in London, I lived at number 11 Albany Street.
Five pounds a week, something like that.
Regent’s Park was just around the corner. University College London, where I was doing my PhD, was an easy walk away.
It was a wonderful place to live.
I just hadn’t noticed.
Well, of course I’d noticed that I lived there. I knew where to put the key in the door. I knew the way to the Tube. I knew how long it took to walk to UCL.
But I hadn’t really noticed it.
There’s a difference.
Albany Street was talking.
I wasn’t listening.
That isn’t quite right, either. It wasn’t that I found London uninteresting. How could I? I’d come from a small town in Wisconsin and landed in this enormous, astonishing, complicated city.
Everything was different.
But I wasn’t asking questions.
That was the failure.
Why was it called Albany Street?
Why were those handsome houses covered in that smooth, pale material?
What was stucco?
What was a mews?
Why was there a pub called the Queen’s Head and Artichoke?
And why, farther up the road, did Albany Street suddenly become Coliseum Terrace?
I asked none of those questions.
And if you don’t ask the question, you don’t go looking for the answer.
I was full of myself, of course.
There I was, in what was said to be the finest English department in the world. Doing a PhD. Working with a very distinguished supervisor.
Very pleased with myself.
I was being trained to read literature.
Trained to notice things.
Images. Patterns. Allusions. Ironies. The significance of a name. The importance of setting. The meaning hidden inside apparently ordinary words.
I could do all that with a novel.
I couldn’t do it with the street outside my front door.
I was studying Dickens.
Henry Mayhew had lived farther up Albany Street.
There’s a blue plaque at number 55.
Mayhew, the great investigator of Victorian London. The man who went into the streets and asked questions. Who talked to costermongers, mudlarks, crossing-sweepers, sewer hunters, rat catchers and street sellers.
Mayhew wanted to know how London worked. How Londoners earned a living. What they ate. Where they slept. How they survived.
And there was I, studying Dickens, living almost within hailing distance of Henry Mayhew, taking no interest in him whatsoever.
That is quite an achievement.
Half a century later, it embarrasses me.
But let’s ask the questions now.
Albany Street was laid out in the 1820s. It was named after Prince Frederick, Duke of York and Albany, the younger brother of George IV.
Yes, that Duke of York.
The Grand Old Duke of York.
He had ten thousand men.
He marched them up to the top of the hill.
And he lent the second half of his title to the street where, a century and a half later, a young American was living for five pounds a week and failing to ask why.
And the stucco?
Stucco is plaster made to look like stone.
London’s great architectural confidence trick.
Build in brick. Coat it with stucco. Score lines into it. Paint it the colour of expensive stone.
There you are.
Instant grandeur.
London putting on its best clothes.
I saw the clothes. I never asked what they were made of.
Behind the house was a mews.
A wonderful mews.
I didn’t know what a mews was.
I didn’t ask.
Originally, a mews was where the horses and carriages were kept behind the grand houses. Stables below. Rooms for the coachman or groom above.
The machinery of elegant London tucked away at the back.
Even the word has a story. A mews was originally a place where royal hunting hawks were kept while they moulted, or mewed. The royal hawks eventually gave way to royal horses, but the old name stayed put.
A tiny fossil of falconry embedded in the London street map.
All of that was sitting behind my house.
I took no interest in it.
Then there was the pub.
I remembered it as the Crown and Artichoke.
Memory had moved the monarchy around a little. It was, and is, the Queen’s Head and Artichoke.
What a name.
The Queen’s Head, fair enough. London pubs are full of royal heads.
But the artichoke?
Surely that deserved a question.
The old tavern was there before Regent’s Park. It stood out in the fields when this was still the edge of London. When the park was created, the pub was displaced and rebuilt on Albany Street in 1811.
So the pub was older than the street.
The artichoke had got there first.
And then there was Coliseum Terrace.
During half of my second academic year, I lived farther up the same road, where the address became Coliseum Terrace.
Coliseum?
What coliseum?
I didn’t ask.
Had I asked, a vanished wonder of London would have risen out of the pavement.
An enormous domed building designed by Decimus Burton once stood there.
The London Colosseum.
It opened in 1827 to house a gigantic panorama of London, based on drawings made by Thomas Hornor from high above St Paul’s Cathedral.
Imagine that.
Before aeroplanes. Before drones. Before Google Earth.
You entered a great pleasure dome beside Regent’s Park and found the whole of London wrapped around you.
A city within the city.
The Colosseum came down in 1875. Houses went up in its place. And those houses preserved the ghost of the vanished building in their name.
Coliseum Terrace.
I lived in the afterlife of one of London’s great lost attractions.
Never asked.
Never knew.
And at the bottom of Albany Street was Marylebone Road.
Except Marylebone Road hadn’t always been Marylebone Road.
It had been the New Road.
Opened in 1756, it was London’s first northern bypass, carrying traffic around the built-up city rather than through it.
There was another question I never asked.
Why is this broad road here?
And then, underneath it, another layer of history.
On January 10th, 1863, the world’s first underground railway opened. Steam trains ran between Paddington and Farringdon, passing beneath the New Road corridor.
The first Underground railway in the world.
And I was living just above it.
History in front of me. History behind me. History beneath my feet.
Dukes and panoramas. Hawks and horses. Mayhew and Dickens. The New Road and the first Underground.
It was like standing in the middle of a battle with history raging in every direction and somehow failing to notice the battle.
The place was drenched in history.
Soaked in it.
And I was walking through it perfectly dry.
Perhaps that was youth.
Perhaps I was preoccupied with my PhD.
Perhaps I had other interests.
English girls, principally.
But today’s word is obtuse.
Obtuse.
It comes from the Latin obtusus, meaning blunted or dulled.
That feels exactly right.
I wasn’t stupid. I wasn’t incapable of seeing what was around me.
My curiosity was blunt.
It hadn’t yet been sharpened into the working tool of a London guide.
Because that is what guiding is.
It isn’t knowing everything.
Nobody knows everything.
It is noticing something and asking the next question.
Why Albany?
Why an artichoke?
Why Coliseum?
Why does the architecture suddenly change here?
What I was vaguely aware of in 1973 but hadn’t given a moment’s thought to was the neighbourhood was full of postwar – mostly 1950s buildings. Why were they there? When I went through there yesterday and saw them again – for the first time in half a century – I knew instanta. The area would have suffered a tremendous amount of bomb damage. A whole neighbourhood pretty much turned into rubble. And then rebuilt, when possible. Rebuilt quickly, on the cheap.
And back to some of the original buildings that survived, there were questions I should have asked but didn’t ask.
What was this building before it became that building?
Who lived behind that blue plaque?
What happened on this apparently ordinary patch of pavement?
And then, whenever possible, going off and finding the answer.
That is how a street opens.
One question produces an answer. The answer produces another question. And suddenly the ordinary street isn’t ordinary at all.
It is royal dukes and hunting hawks. Horses and coachmen. Stucco and social investigators. A vanished pleasure dome containing the whole of London. A road built to go around London. A railway built to go underneath it.
It was all there in 1973.
I wasn’t.
Not really.
I had crossed the Atlantic. I had arrived in London. I was studying great writing in a great university.
But I had not yet learned how to read a street.
Half a century later, I’m still learning.
And perhaps that is the real qualification for being a London guide.
Not having all the answers.
Knowing enough to ask the next question.
You’ve been listening to London Calling.
The title of this one was London Was Talking. I Wasn’t Listening.
This is London. This is London Walks.
And this time, I’m listening.
See you tomorrow.