William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

So we cling to our familiar territories and venture forth with a bizarre reluctance. Everyone judges the other districts of London in unconscious comparison with their own. I have no desire to live anywhere else in the city so for me “London” is to a significant degree Chelsea and its immediate environs. I don’t drive either so my local streets possess a familiarity denied the motorist. I walk for miles through south-west London, in ever widening loops that take me to regular points of reference — bookshops, cafes, restaurants, cinemas, auction houses, newsagents. Here they make the best cappuccinos in town; here I can buy a complete copy of the Sunday edition of The New York Times on a Monday; here I can sit and read in a garden by a fountain. My portion of the city is exhaustively mapped, it is known intimately, but its grid references remain private and subjective.

Chelsea, of course, is a famous place and has been a haunt of artists and writers for two hundred years: Carlyle, Oscar Wilde, George Eliot, Whistler, Rossetti, Henry James, Swinburne, Henry Moore, Francis Bacon… From my bedroom window I can see the spire of the church Dickens was married in. In a house in the little square around the corner Mark Twain stayed, and so on. It is a district of narrow streets and stuccoed houses, of secret tree-filled squares and back-street pubs, of Georgian terraces and Victorian public buildings, all loosely held together by the winding ribbon that is the King’s Road. Cyril Connolly (1903-74), writer, critic and bon viveur, in many ways the quintessential Chelsea dweller, developed a potent nostalgia for the place. He called it “that leafy tranquil cultivated spielraum where I worked and wandered.” It is an enchanted place and there is a quality about the light too that appears different: perhaps it is the gleaming stucco that reflects back with extra force what little sun we receive in London, or perhaps it is the river — so close, but always out of sight — the air above and around it washed twice a day by its tidal ebb and flow, a conduit of freshness running through the grime of the city.

So much else of London suffers by comparison with Chelsea (or so Chelsea dwellers would have you believe): elsewhere seems less fun, less heterodox, less green, less refulgent, but Chelsea shares one quality with the other districts that makes London different from almost any other city one can imagine. Chelsea’s winding, narrow streets are lined with houses, small cottages and mews, Georgian crescents, Victorian terraces, and when one reflects further one realizes that London is in essence a city of houses, of single homes with small gardens with a single front door. There are a few areas of flats and apartments, but the overriding impression is of one family unit, one house. This seems to me to explain much about London, and not just the city’s sprawling, generous, unstructured size but also its particular atmosphere and ambience. The house becomes the centre of the city dweller’s universe, social life takes place behind the curtained windows of the dining room and sitting room, not in the streets, or squares or great public meeting places. In fact there are no real public areas in London, no great squares, no spacious boulevards. At night the vast majority of the population are back in their homes, enclosed and self-sufficient and indifferent to the life beyond their front door.

This has, it seems to me, two obvious effects that make London unusual, given its size and renown and that it is one of the great capitals of the world. First, the pace and energy of the city seem to quieten spontaneously at around eleven o’clock at night. It is as if there is a kind of tacit curfew, a feeling that to be out in the city after midnight is — if not illicit — not exactly normal. Leave a cinema or a show at the end of the evening and try to find somewhere congenial for a drink or a coffee or a meal and you are severely tested. The pubs are closed or closing, only a handful of restaurants serve meals after 11 p.m., public transport winds down, taxis disappear. The city is going to bed and those who want to stay up a little later are going to have their ingenuity and their wallets stretched to the full.

The second feature of London that extends from this home-based society is its privacy. London is a private city, intimate and reclusive. It works best for those who know its secrets, those who have learned the ropes. Even the pub — that one symbol of communal life on every street corner — represents a physical challenge to the stranger. You have to push through a heavy door to enter. You cannot see what is happening inside from the outside. It does not offer an implicit welcome to the casual passer-by, unlike the sidewalk cafe. It is a closed place, its windows are frosted, its gaze is inward-looking. Children are not admitted, its aura is masculine, gloomy, self-absorbed. Even more extraordinary, inside some pubs there are bars that operate on an overt class system: this bar, the decor says, is proletarian, for serious drinking; that bar is genteel, a place where you may bring your wife. The two rooms are often quite separate, entered by different doors.

There is no street life in London as might be recognized in Paris or Rome or Madrid, there is no community of souls in this city, there is no democratic sharing in what the city offers. To get the best out of it you have to be a member of a club. Clubs operate in many diverse ways, from the traditional gentlemen’s club in St James’s or Pall Mall to an avant garde theatre group, but they all point to the same conclusion. If you live in the city and if you wish to exploit it to the full you discover that again and again, to experience the best London has to offer, you have to become a member.

Fifty yards from my house there is a small London square, classic, pretty, with tall plane trees and rhododendrons, a lush lawn, some park benches. You come upon it, as is true of so many of London’s hidden squares, quite by accident. It looks enchanting, a small green island amongst the brick and the asphalt, sheltered and tranquil. Iron railings surround it. Tired, footsore, perhaps just seeking a moment’s repose, you try the gate. Locked. But people are in there, children are playing. A small sign says—“residents only”—you walk on by, excluded. You may look but you may not touch. This little garden in Tedworth Square is yet another of London’s exclusive clubs for members only. If you want to enjoy it you have to qualify for a key.

Such moments provoke attacks of spleen against London and its bourgeois smugness. You cannot live in a great city and not be alternately enraptured and repelled by it. I think of my own nine years in London, how privileged and protected they have been, and how any account of my point of view of the place does no justice at all to its dark side, London’s slums and sweat shops, its poverty and meanness, its vice and brutality. Look how the glossy limousines sweep out of the Savoy Hotel on to the Strand and how there, in every shop doorway in their cardboard boxes, huddle the homeless, the drunk and the deluded. But this juxtaposition is commonplace, this is not London’s problem any more than it is New York’s or Delhi’s or Nairobi’s or Manila’s. Other grudges against the city are, however, more precise and localized. Why has London neglected its river and built power stations and coal yards and warehouses along its banks? Why have so many disgusting buildings been erected everywhere else? London was never beautiful, it could never be described as stylish or splendid. Its centre — Piccadilly, Regent Street, Oxford Street, Trafalgar Square — has a solid, massy quality to it, a reflection of the prodigious success of its mercantile past and imperial dominance. But even in the 1950s London had a low, almost Venetian skyline, punctuated by its needly church spires, one that has now virtually disappeared, swallowed up by the unregulated explosion of office blocks and high-rise buildings. Why is there so much dog shit in the streets? Why are there so many cars? Why did we allow Mrs Thatcher to abolish the perfectly efficient, though inconveniently socialist, Greater London Council so that this enormous city no longer has an elected administration to run it? The litany of complaints can run and run.