Cities: A Magisterial Exploration of the Nature and Impact of the City from it's beginnings to the mega-conurbations of today

Book by Reader John

1

First Impressions

Cities are the defining artifacts of civilisation. All the achievements and failings of humanity are here. Civic buildings, monuments, archives and institutions are the touchstones by which our cultural heritage is passed from one generation to the next. We shape the city, then it shapes us. Today, almost half the global population lives in cities. By 2030, the proportion is likely to be two-thirds.

I was born in London. My earliest urban memories are of cuddly barrage balloons anchored to a skyline of roofs and chimney-pots, and of airraids that sent us scuttling from the house in the middle of the night, down into the shelter at the bottom of the garden. Next morning, our street was littered with lumps of shrapnel which might still be hot if you went out to collect them early enough. I grew up in a city under reconstruction, much of it wrapped in a fascinating lattice of ladders and scaffolding and adorned with buckets dangling on pulley hoists. Buddleia flourished on the best bombsites – their flowers attracting lots of butterflies – red admirals, lesser and greater tortoiseshells, peacocks and, more rarely, painted ladies. We caught them in nets made from old muslin curtains, and a popular How To . . . book told us how to anaesthetise them in jam-jars half-filled with crushed laurel leaves, and how to prepare them for our collections with a pin through the thorax and the wings held outspread with thin strips of paper.

We took fruit from the trees of abandoned gardens (and some not so abandoned gardens – scrumping, we called it), built fires with matches illicitly obtained, experimented with Woodbines, baked potatoes we had pinched from the kitchen and ate them half-cooked. Sometimes, but rarely, we dared to venture at least a few stairs down into the frightening dark cellars of bombed-out houses. For an eight-year-old, post-war London was an adventure playground with minimal adult supervision.

Grown-ups used to joke that London would be a wonderful place when it was finished, but I could never understand what was so funny about that; it seemed perfectly possible that a time would come when all the building work would be over and done with and that would be that: London, finished. And though I don’t recall giving the matter any thought, I imagine now that my vision of the finished city would have been more or less the same as the London I knew, only just a bit tidier.

There were electric-powered trolley buses and trams as well as dieselengined buses and you could often sneak on and off them without paying, but bicycles offered an altogether free – and freer – means of getting around the city. We were adventurous, but quickly learned to avoid getting a wheel stuck in the tramlines at tricky junctions, and after just one fall you never forgot to ride cautiously along the woodblock surface of Borough High Street on rainy days, when it was as slippery as a sheet of glass.

London’s main rail terminals were the grand grimy cathedrals of the steam age in which we congregated to collect engine numbers. At Waterloo station, Victoria, Charing Cross, Paddington, Saint Pancras, Euston and Liverpool Street we scampered from platform to platform as the trains pulled up to the buffers – engines hissing steam and smoke. The locals and the expresses disgorged their passengers from third class and first class, while we peered into the Pullman carriages with their little table lamps alight at the windows.

We all either owned or yearned for a Hornby-oo electric train set, and given the opportunity would spend hours sprawled on the living room carpet, devising complex routes around the furniture. I cannot recall that any of us ever seriously wanted to be an engine-driver, but boys generally were supposed to cherish such ambitions and certainly our respect for the men who clambered up onto the footplates of the huge Golden Arrow and Castle class locomotives was unbounded. With fire and steam at their command, in grimy overalls and greasy caps they drove those magnificent creations of bright painted steel and shining brass across the length and breadth of Britain: the Flying Scotsman, the Atlantic Coast Express. The driving wheels – taller than a man – always juddered and skidded on the rails as the pistons began to push, and the locomotives really did seem to pant with the effort – just like Thomas the Tank Engine. Awesome is the word recollections of those engines bring to mind now, but at the time – well, they were impressive, yes, but no more than a part of everyday city life. For us, their main significance was as bearers of the numbers we ticked off in our books.

Smoke was another awesome fact of life that seemed commonplace then. My recollection is that everyone smoked – at home and at work, in trains, buses, cafés and cinemas. The entire country – not just the railways – ran on coal (though it was delivered to our houses by horse and cart). Smoke wafted from the chimneys of more than a million households. Every day, thousands of tons of coal were burned in London’s fireplaces, boilers, and furnaces. Clouds of steam, smoke and soot spewed continuously from locomotives, gas works, power stations and industrial smokestacks – with either Young’s brewery on Wandsworth High Street or the malodorous Battersea candle factory adding their own distinctive whiff to the air in our locality – depending on the direction of the wind.

Throughout the city, buildings were coated with a patina of soot which in some instances gave the impression that burnished black basalt, not white Portland stone, had been used in their construction. During most winters there would be occasions when a layer of cold air hung for days over London, trapping the smoke rising from the chimneys below. Soon a sulphurous mixture of smoke, soot and moisture would envelope the city – tinged green, and thick enough to become known as a peasouper. When you opened the front door, skeins of fog would drift into the hallway – and threaten to fill the house if you left the door open. On days when visibility was down to a yard or less, getting lost on the way home from school became almost a matter of pride: ‘couldn’t see my hand in front of my face,’ you’d say.

The pea-soupers killed hundreds of people every winter – anyone with asthma, or another respiratory problem, was at risk from inhaling the toxic mixture of fog, smoke and soot-laden air. The word smog entered the vocabulary as a definition of this very serious threat to public health in Britain’s cities (London was not the only city affected. The problem was as bad in all industrial cities). Widespread public demands for action over the number of deaths forced the government to act and a succession of Clean Air Acts were introduced during the 1950s and ’60s.

I left London before even the first Act of 1956 could begin to take effect, and went to live in Cape Town, on the southern tip of Africa, where a prevailing weather system of wet north-westerlies from the Atlantic and powerful dry south-easterlies from the Indian Ocean alternately washed and swept the city clean. Later I was based in Nairobi for a number of years. Meanwhile, the London I had known was being transformed.

Oil, gas and electricity steadily replaced coal as the city’s fuel for factories, power stations and domestic use. The widespread introduction of central heating rendered household fireplaces and chimneys obsolete. Slum clearance opened up the urban landscape, and by the time I moved back to London in 1978 the city had become a markedly cleaner place – even to the extent of inspiring property-owners to have the patina of black soot scrubbed from the facades of their buildings. Smog and peasoupers were bad memories that old people tut-tutted about over tea. And London seemed reborn – especially in the spring, when the plane trees had just come into leaf and the sun was shining.

Living and working in Africa for all those years, with only occasional visits to London, was absorbing and valuable in itself but also delivered an unanticipated bonus – in that it delayed the occasion of my first visits to some of Europe’s major cities until fairly late in life. And I believe that whatever I may have missed by not touring Europe at an earlier age has been made up for by the older eye through which I viewed Vienna on a first visit in 2001, for instance, or by an extended stay in Paris during 2000; and by going to Venice for the first time in 1997.

‘The thing about Venice, is that it never fails to exceed expectations,’ a friend remarked when I told him of plans for that first visit. ‘Whether you’re going for the first time or the tenth, however much you already know and have planned for in advance, you always come away feeling that Venice has given you something extra.’

In an age that regularly oversells its offerings, arousing the jaundiced expectation that the reality will be less than the hype, this seemed highly improbable. On the other hand, Francis did not have a reputation for needless exaggeration and, true to form, he was absolutely right. Venice did exceed my expectations. The city did give me something extra. But not just the mental image and recollection of novel experiences, nor even the roll of pleasing photographs. More than that, I came away from Venice with nagging questions about its status as a city, and about the phenomenon, function and ecology of cities in general. Why do they exist? How do they work? Why do some seem so much more alive than others?

Venice is crowded, smelly, decidedly dirty in places, and much of it appears to be in a state of imminent collapse: crumbling and sinking into the murky waters of the lagoon. It has magnificent churches and palaces, the four wonderful gilded bronze horses of San Marco, numerous splendid galleries and Harry’s Bar...