All the Tiny Moments Blazing

A Literary Guide to Suburban London

Ged Pope

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781789143089
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

From Evelyn Waugh to P. G. Wodehouse and Lawrence Durrell, a sweeping celebration of literature set in and inspired by the suburbs of London. The London suburbs have, for more than two hundred and fifty years, fired the creative literary imagination: whether this is Samuel Johnson hiding away in bucolic preindustrial Streatham, Italo Svevo cheering on Charlton Athletic Football Club down at The Valley, or Angela Carter hymning the joyful "wrongness" of living south-of-the-river in Brixton. From Richmond to Rainham, Cockfosters to Croydon, this sweeping literary tour of the thirty-two London Boroughs describes how writers, from the seventeenth century on, have responded to and fictionally reimagined London's suburbs. It introduces us to the great suburban novels, such as Hanif Kureishi's Bromley-set The Buddha of Suburbia, Lawrence Durrell's The Black Book, and Zadie Smith's NW. It also reveals the lesser-known short stories, diaries, poems, local guides, travelogues, memoirs, and biographies, which together show how these communities have long been closely observed, keenly remembered, and brilliantly imagined.

1	‘THE BASTARD SIDE’
	Southeast London, I: From Deptford and New Cross to Greenwich, Woolwich, Blackheath, Charlton, Brockley and Lewisham

South London – and southeast London in particular – has a unique place in London suburban fiction and culture. ‘Why is London like Budapest?’ opens Angela Carter’s partly Brixton-set novel Wise Children (1991): ‘Because it is two cities divided by a river’, comes the answer. South London is frequently presented in much writing as being the ‘wrong side of the river’ or ‘the bastard side of Old Father Thames’.¹ Here, in Carter’s novel of doubles and duplications, twins and reflections, south London is the unwanted reflection, the despised and rejected other half, of the city proper.

For influential Victorian novelist and historian Walter Besant, the place is defined by lack. In his popular history and guide South London (1899), South London is a debased and empty wilderness, a fake. It looks like a city but is not really a city at all:

It is a city without a municipality, without a centre, without a civic history; it has no newspapers, magazines, or journals; it has no university; it has no colleges, apart from medicine; it has no intellectual, artistic, scientific, musical, literary centre – unless the Crystal Palace can be considered a centre; its residents have no local patriotism or enthusiasm – one cannot imagine a man proud of New Cross; it has no theatres, except of a very popular or humble kind; it has no clubs, it has no public buildings, it has no West End.²

This sense of the wrongness of south London is echoed in Harry Williams’s 1949 survey South London:

There is, in fact, something basically wrong about South London. Across ‘the water’ as the denizens of Bermondsey call the Thames, vigorous life is still to be found. Law, Government, Finance, Insurance, Shipping, Entertainment, Art Galleries, Museums, historical pageantry, these things are almost a monopoly of the northern bank . . . despite the fact that, as a town, it is barely one hundred and fifty years old, it is already moribund. It is a monument to mediocrity, bad taste, and lack of quality.³

South London is also, variously presented, as we shall see, as homogeneous, boring, flat, empty, insular, ugly, weird and – a common theme, this – highly destructive of what was once considered a beautiful and serene countryside. Besant catches this theme of suburban devastation well:

It is difficult, now that the whole country south of London has been covered with villas, roads, streets and shops, to understand how wonderful for loveliness it was until the builder seized upon it . . . All this beauty is gone and we have destroyed it; all this beauty has gone for ever and it cannot be replaced. And on the south there was so much more beauty than on the north. On the latter side of London there are the heights, with Hampstead, Highgate, and Hornsey and one row of villages; but there is little more. The country between Hatfield or St Albans and Hampstead is singularly dull and uninteresting; it is not until one reaches Hertford or Rickmansworth that we come once more into lovely country. But the loveliness of South London lay almost at the very doors of London; one could walk into it: the heaths were within an easy walk; and the loveliness of Surrey lay upon all.⁴

Jonathan Raban, in Soft City (1974), recalls how, in his younger years of exploring the capital, south London was a blank, off the map completely:

South of the river, I was lost, navigating by the London A–Z on cautious excursions to Clapham, Catford, Brixton and Battersea, each place intimately associated with a friend who, so far as I was concerned, might as well have chosen to live in Sevenoaks or Guildford. But all of London north of the Thames felt like home to me.⁵

Deptford and New Cross

Around 3.5 miles south of London Bridge, along the key A2 traffic route out to Kent, along the Thames opposite the Isle of Dogs, Deptford is adjacent to Greenwich but in a different world altogether. New Cross is just along to the south and west. This area has long been the grubby, muddy industrial and commercial counterpart to celebrated ‘Maritime’ Greenwich. In riverside Deptford, originally a fishing village, Henry VIII built a huge naval dockyard, the area becoming an important victualing and repair yard. It was also the last safe stop for London-bound coaches in from Canterbury, a raw mix of stevedores, sailors, migrants, travellers, foreigners, outcasts and criminals. In the nineteenth century Deptford was a base for coal-yards, gas and chemical works and numerous sprawling workshops. Charlie Higson in Happy Now (1993) describes the dramatic shift from Greenwich to grubby Deptford:

The drive from Blackheath to the printworks in New Cross usually took about ten minutes on a Saturday and as he drove westwards the surroundings grew more and more shabby and seedy. It was surprising how quickly elegant Greenwich and the Heath gave way to run-down Deptford and New Cross. The streets were dirtier, the buildings neglected, the people noticeably poorer-looking.⁶

Deptford is best known, in literary terms, as the place where Elizabethan playwright, poet and spy Christopher Marlowe was mysteriously murdered in a brawl in a tavern or rooming house over the settling of a bill (the famed ‘reckoning’). Marlowe’s remains lie unmarked somewhere in the churchyard of St Nicholas, Deptford (there is a memorial plaque). Marlowe’s noirish death – a stab wound entering over the left eye – and his involvement with the shadowy and extensive Elizabethan spy network and criminal underworlds is the subject of Anthony Burgess’s atmospheric reconstructive historical novel A Dead Man in Deptford (1993). Prominent here is the visceral filth and the murky double-dealing, violence and wordplay of Elizabethan London:

Cat or Kit, I said, and indeed about Kit there was something of the cat. He blinked his green eyes much, and evaded, as cats will, the straight gaze from fear of fearful aggression or of some shame of one order or another . . . He ate little but drank and vomited proportionally. He was given, when Sir Walter Stink, the Lord of Uppawaoc, brought the herb into fashion, to the rank tobacco of Barbados and filthy pipes that whistled and bubbled with brown juice . . . At first as at last he was a fair curser and ingenious in his blasphemies, as for example . . . by the stinking urine of John the Baptist, by the sour scant milk of God’s putative mother the Jewish whore, by St Joseph’s absent left ballock, by the sore buggered arses of the twelve apostles . . . and the like.⁷

In 1652 John Evelyn, diarist and gardener, and his wife, Mary Browne, moved back to Deptford from Paris, where, as Royalists, they had been nervously sitting out the Civil War. They returned to dilapidated Sayes Court, which had been in Browne’s aristocratic family for generations:

9th March 1652. I went to Deptford where I made preparation for my settlement, no more intending to go out of England, but endeavour a settled life, either in this or some other place, there now being so little appearance of change for the better, all being entirely in the rebel’s hands.⁸

Evelyn subsequently worked on improving the house and, especially, the gardens at Sayes Court:

this particular habitation and estate contiguous to it . . . very much suffering for want of some friend to rescue it out of the power of the usurpers, so as to preserve our interest, and take some care of my other concerns, by the advice and endeavour of my friends, I was advised to reside in it.⁹

Evelyn became an early horticulturalist (especially of trees, which he noted as crucial for building ships and hence national security) and Sayes Court eventually became celebrated for its garden, all 100 acres of it. Centuries later, in the 1880s, moves to preserve remnants of the garden led to the formation of a company with the aim of protecting ‘the public interests in the open spaces of the country’. This became the National Trust.

A visit to Deptford is recorded by the antiquarian and historian Ralph Thoresby (1658–1725):

We went by water to Deptford where another new church is built . . . and were very civilly treated at Mr Sherlock’s (the minister) . . . he showed me some Roman coins, of Antoninus Pius, &c. and urns, dug up in the gardens . . . Discourse upon the Royal escape, occasioned another, of King Charles the First, which I had a mind to hear from the daughter of the party concerned . . . who told the history, with many circumstances, the chief whereof are that her mother, Mary Baily of Deptford, after she had been twelve years blind by the King’s Evil, was miraculously cured by a handkerchief, dipped in the blood of King Charles the First.¹⁰

Deptford is the ideal setting for Paul Theroux’s 1976 atmospheric novel The Family Arsenal. Here, shabby Deptford stands for a sense of national decay and exhaustion, of moral drift and political strife, set in that year’s freakishly hot summer. We see how a disillusioned former American consul in Vietnam winds up living in a house in very down-at-heel Deptford at the centre of a pseudo-family of drifters, would-be terrorists and IRA activists, child criminals and slumming aristos. The novel is full of apocalyptic foreboding: ‘this summer something dreadful was happening: a slump, or worse – an eruption.’¹¹ Teenage semi-criminal Brodie, ‘envisioning bursting buildings’, wills ‘the wobbling pillars outward . . . with cart-wheeling men and spinning hats . . . dissolving to a sprinkle of dust’. Here the only way London can be made to mean something ‘is by reducing it to shattered pieces’.¹² Aristocratic Lady Arrow, on a rare visit across London, crossing the Thames from Belgravia, eager for picturesque working-class poverty, experiences profound disappointment at Deptford Station:

Lady Arrow got out of the taxi in Deptford High Street, looked around and felt cheated. Then she walked to assess it, to give it a name. No name occurred to her; she wondered if she had come to the right place. But she had: there were the signs. Deeply cheated, tricked by the map and her imagination. She had wanted to like it and had prepared herself for a complicated riverfront slum with the kind of massive mirrored pubs she’d passed on the Old Kent Road, damp side lanes and blackened churches and brick-peaked Victorian schools contained by iron fences and locked gates; with a quaint decrepitude . . . a place where you could believe a poet might have been stabbed.¹³

Deptford here will not conform to Lady Arrow’s expectation of picturesque dilapidation.

She had expected something different, not this. It was ugly, it was shabby – but not in any interesting sense. It was, sadly, indescribable. She had wanted to be startled by its grime, and the taxi ride across the vast grey sink of London had been long enough to suggest a real journey to a strange distant place. Deptford was only distant: characterless, without any colour, a dismal intermediate district, neither city nor suburb, boxed in by little shops and little brown terraces – many defaced with slanted obscure slogans – and very dusty . . . If anyone asked she would say Deptford was like the scar tissue of a badly healed wound. She was oppressed by the council estates, cheap towers of public housing draped in washing lines. All those people waiting; she could see many of them balancing on flimsy balconies, staring gravely down at her.¹⁴

Where Edwardian commentator Walter Besant argued that ‘one cannot imagine a man proud of New Cross’, Roy Porter, esteemed historian of Western medicine and theories of identity and selfhood, argues otherwise. At the start of London: A Social History (1994) Porter revisits and recalls his childhood in 1940s and ’50s New Cross, a ‘stable if shabby working-class community completely undiscovered by sociologists’. ‘Nobody liked living in New Cross Gate,’ Porter admits.¹⁵ This was a strangulated world of grim austerity; food rationing, overcrowding and dirt, against a background of fog, gas lighting and tin baths. But, as Porter admits, ‘there was much to be said for that kind of respectable working-class inner-city neighbourhood that is now pretty much a thing of the past’.¹⁶ This was also a world of full and secure employment, benefits when needed, a loving extended family, and a knowable and reassuring community. There was also lots to do:

Who needed to travel far? There were plenty of things to do around home. The Gaumont, ABC and Astoria all lay within easy walking distance. There were municipal parks and swimming-baths. Millwall Football Club was only five minutes away at the Den, Cold Blow Lane; there were also greyhounds on Thursdays and Saturdays, and speedway on Wednesdays. In the summer there was the Oval, and that magical Surrey cricket team.¹⁷

Deptford and New Cross were rough yet slightly bohemian in the 1970s and ’80s, the latte...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 ‘THE BASTARD SIDE’
• 2 ‘THE HOWLING DESERT’
• 3 ‘A STRANGE FEELING IN THE AIR’
• 4 ‘SO VERY GREY AND MEAN’
• 5 ‘UNCONGENIAL NEIGHBOURS’
• 6 ‘REAL STABILITY’
• 7 ‘FINE THINGS TO BE SEEN’
• 8 ‘ASPIRING IN THE AIR’
• 9 ‘SO NEAR HEAVEN’
• 10 ‘IN ALL PLACES HIGH AND LOW’
• 11 ‘THE ODOUR OF OLD STONE’
• 12 ‘THE OVERLOOKED CITY’
• REFERENCES
• A READER’S GUIDE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS