The Road to Little Dribbling (8 page)

But then that’s the thing about London. It does a lot of things supremely well and gets hardly any credit for it. So let me say right here, I think London is the best city in the whole world. I know it doesn’t have New York’s electricity and edgy dynamism or Sydney’s harbor and sandy beaches or Paris’s boulevards, but it has more of almost everything else that makes a city great—greenery, for one thing. Nobody realizes it, but London is one of the least crowded cities on earth. New York has ninety-three people per hectare, Paris eighty-three, but London just forty-three. If London were as densely populated as Paris, it would have a population of 35 million. Instead what it has is parks—142 of them—and more than six hundred leafy squares. Almost 40 percent of London is green space. You can have all the overwhelming noise and bustle of a metropolis, then turn a corner and hear birdsong. Perfect.

London is arguably the biggest city in the world. Not in terms of sprawl—though goodness knows there is plenty enough of that—or number of inhabitants, but in terms of density and complexity and depth of history. London is not just vast horizontally but vast across time. History has left it sumptuously jumbled. It’s not even one city but two—Westminster and the City of London—plus a more or less infinite number of subsumed villages, boroughs, districts, wards, parishes, and geographical landmarks that cover the map with quaint and appealing names: Parsons Green, Seven Dials, Swiss Cottage, Barking, Tooting Bec, Chalk Farm, the mysteriously gallic Theydon Bois. Most of its best-known districts—the West End, Bloomsbury, Whitechapel, Mayfair—have no official existence or formal boundaries. They just are. Politically, London is a loose affiliation of 32 borough councils and the Corporation of the City of London, its responsibilities divided among a Greater London Authority, a London Assembly, 73 parliamentary constituencies, and 624 political wards. It is, in short, a great mess. At the head of it all is Mayor Boris Johnson, a man whose bumbling manner, whose very hair, is a monument to disorder. And yet somehow it works. It is a truly great city.

And it is just packed with stuff. London has 50,000 listed buildings, 150 scheduled ancient monuments, 900 conservation areas, 550 archaeological sites, and four World Heritage sites. It has forty-three universities, more than any other place else in the world. It has nearly three hundred museums. It has a garden museum, a cricket museum, a museum of typefaces and fonts. There are museums devoted to magic, canals, Freemasons, to Sigmund Freud. There is a museum in North Finchley devoted to the history of Belarus. (No idea.) Wimbledon has a terrific lawn tennis museum. The Royal London Hospital has a museum containing the magnificently deformed skeleton of Joseph Merrick, the celebrated Elephant Man, and an exhibition on Jack the Ripper (he committed his murders in the district), among much else. You can never run out of things to look at in London.

I had two weeks at my disposal, at least notionally. Both of my daughters had contrived to get pregnant simultaneously (though in separate buildings) and were scheduled to give birth at roughly the same time in different London hospitals, and I was under strict instructions to be nearby in order to—well, I don’t know what. Boil water perhaps. Stand around in a willing but useless manner. Who knows? But in the meantime I had two weeks that I could fill in any way I wished so long as I stayed sober enough to drive and didn’t stray too far.

I decided, impulsively, to start with a trip to Leighton House, home of the Victorian artist Frederic Leighton, on Holland Park Road in west Kensington, and now preserved as a museum. I didn’t know a thing about Leighton, and I wasn’t at all sure if that was my fault or his. It turns out he was the most famous artist of his age. Who’d have thought? I had walked past the house several times and always thought it looked intriguing—it’s big and has an air of solemn importance, as if this is a house and a person you really ought to know about—so I had put it on my Things to Get Around to Eventually (But Probably Won’t) list. It isn’t often I knock something off this list, so I was rather pleased with myself just for thinking to go there. Besides, it was a rainy day: a good day for a museum.

I liked Leighton House immediately, not least because my ticket price was reduced from £10 to £6 on account of my great age. The house is gloomy and grand, but interestingly eccentric; it has, for instance, just one bedroom. In terms of decor it feels a little like a cross between a pasha’s den and a New Orleans bordello. It is full of Arabic tiles, silk wallpapers, colorful ceramics, and lots of art, much of it involving bare-breasted young women, which I am always up for.

Leighton isn’t terribly well remembered now, in part because many of his pictures ended up in odd places like the Baroda Museum in Gujarat, India, and Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia, where not many of us go to look at pictures, and in part because his paintings are in any case a little overwrought for modern tastes. Most involve a lot of upstretched arms and pleading faces, and have titles like
And the Sea Gave Up the Dead Which Were in It
and
Perseus, on Pegasus, Hastening to the Rescue of Andromeda
.

But Leighton was hugely esteemed in his own lifetime. He was elected president of the Royal Academy in 1878, and in the New Year’s honors list of 1896 he became the first—and so far still only—artist to be ennobled. He didn’t get to enjoy the privilege long. He died less than a month later, and was interred in St. Paul’s Cathedral as a national treasure, with great pomp. The
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,
always eager to be at least fifty years out of touch, gives him eighty-two hundred words, a thousand more than it gives almost any of his better-remembered contemporaries.

Leighton lived alone in Leighton House for thirty years. His sexuality was always something of a mystery to those who were interested enough to think about it. After decades of apparent celibacy, he seems to have stirred to frisky life after he discovered a young beauty from the East End named Ada Pullen (who subsequently, for reasons unknown to me, changed her name to Dorothy Dene). Leighton scrubbed her up, bought her a fine wardrobe, schooled her in elocution and other cultural refinements, and introduced her into high society. If all that brings to mind Prof. Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle, it is no accident. George Bernard Shaw is said to have modeled
Pygmalion
on their relationship. Whether Leighton knew Ms. Dene in the full, biblical sense isn’t known, but he certainly enjoyed painting her without clothes on, as the Leighton House collection enthusiastically attests.

Leighton’s possessions were auctioned off straight after his death and the house itself was knocked about by subsequent owners and then wrecked by a German bomb during the war, so almost nothing worth seeing was left by the early postwar years, but little by little over a period of decades the house was restored to just as it was in Leighton’s day, and it is now quite splendid. I can’t say that a great deal of the artwork was entirely to my taste, but I did enjoy the experience very much and when I stepped outside the rain had stopped, the sun was shining, and London looked awfully fine, its streets glistening and cleansed (sort of).

—

And so passed a couple of happy weeks. Each day, without a great deal of thought beforehand, I did things that I had never done at all or hadn’t done in years. I strolled through Battersea Park and then along the river to the Tate Modern, one of London’s best new museums. I went to the top of Primrose Hill to take in the view across the city. I explored the quiet streets of Pimlico and the lost world of Westminster around Vincent Square. I went to the National Portrait Gallery and had tea in the crypt of St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church in Trafalgar Square. I walked through all the Inns of Court and visited the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons just because I happened to pass it. These are all wonderful things. You should do them, too.

I went to Southall one day to go to lunch with my friend Aosaf Afzal, who grew up near there and offered to show me around. Southall is the most overwhelmingly Asian place in Britain. For a long time, it even had a Punjabi pub, the Glass Junction, where you could pay for drinks in pounds or rupees, but that closed in 2012.

“A lot of Asians don’t have a great pub-going culture,” Aosaf explained.

It was certainly the liveliest and most colorful place I had ever seen in Britain, with shops stacked to the ceilings and spilling out onto the pavements with the most extraordinary range of wares—buckets, mops, saris, tiffin containers, brooms, sweets, you name it. Every shop seemed to sell exactly the same crazy range of items. Each appeared to be doing good business, but all that activity masks considerable deprivation. Hounslow, the borough in which Southall resides, is the second most rapidly degentrifying community in Britain, however exactly that is measured, Aosaf told me. “Hounslow has a population of two hundred fifty thousand but no bookshop and no cinema,” he added cheerfully.

“Then why do you live here?” I asked.

“Because it is my home,” he said simply. “It’s where I am from, where my family is. And I like it.”

It struck me that when I think of London and Aosaf thinks of London we think of two quite different cities, but this comes back to my earlier point. London isn’t a place at all. It’s a million little places.

—

Sometimes during this happy fortnight I just went about my business. I was walking down Kensington High Street one day when I remembered that my wife had instructed me to get some grocery items, so I popped into a Marks and Spencer store. It had evidently undergone a refurbishment since I was last there. In the middle of the main floor, where there used to be an escalator, there was now a staircase, which I thought slightly odd, but the really big surprise was when I went down to the basement and discovered that the food hall—the grocery department—was gone. Marks and Spencer stores always have a grocery section; I had been in this one a hundred times at least. I walked all over, but now there was nothing for sale in the basement but clothes.

I went up to a young sales assistant who was folding T-shirts and asked him where the food hall was, thinking they must have moved it to another floor.

“Don’t have a food hall,” he said without looking up.

“You got rid of the food hall?” I said in astonishment.

“Never had one.”

Now I have to say right here that I didn’t like this young man already because he had a vaguely insolent air. Also, he had a lot of gel in his hair. My family tell me that you can’t dislike people just because they have gel in their hair, but I think it is as good a reason as any.

“That’s nonsense,” I said. “There’s always been a food hall here.”

“Never been one here,” he responded blandly. “There’s no food halls in any of our stores.”

“Well, pardon me for saying so, but you’re an idiot,” I said matter-of-factly. “I have been coming here since the early 1970s, and there’s always been a food hall here. Every Marks and Spencer’s in the country has a food hall.”

He looked at me for the first time, with a kind of unfolding interest. “This isn’t a Marks and Spencer’s,” he said with something like real pleasure. “This is H&M.”

I stared at him for a long moment as I adjusted to this new intelligence.

“Marks and Spencer’s is next door,” he added.

I was quiet for about fifteen seconds. “Well, you’re still an idiot,” I said quietly and turned on my heel, but I don’t think it had the devastating effect I was hoping for.

—

After that, I resumed long days of walking, on account of it involves little contact with strangers. One afternoon, taking a shortcut between Euston Road and Tottenham Court Road, I chanced upon Fitzroy Square, a large open space enclosed by cream-colored houses, nearly every one of which had a blue plaque on it announcing the identity of someone famous who had once lived there. Some nine hundred of these plaques can be found on buildings all over London. Fitzroy Square is particularly well endowed. It has plaques to George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf, James McNeill Whistler, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, Ford Madox Brown, and August Wilhelm Von Hofmann, a German-born chemist who did novel and transformative things with isomeric orthotoluidines and triphenyl derivatives. That may not mean anything to you or me, but there are chemists reading this page right now who are having orgasms. In one corner of the square was an Indian YMCA—a YMCA just for people from India; how splendid!—and opposite it was a statue to Francisco de Miranda, liberator of Venezuela, who also lived here. A later resident, it appears, was L. Ron Hubbard, beloved father of Scientology. Goodness me, what a city.

Just beyond Fitzroy Square was a quiet, anonymous-looking road called Cleveland Street. I couldn’t think why the name was familiar until I looked it up afterward and then it all came back. Cleveland Street was the scene of one of the great scandals of the nineteenth century. In the summer of 1889, a policeman stopped a telegraph boy and found that he had a suspiciously large amount of money in his pocket. The boy confessed that he had earned it working in a homosexual brothel at 19 Cleveland Street. The police investigated and found it full of men of superior rank, including the sons of two dukes. But what made the story particularly juicy was the widespread belief, hinted at in all the papers, that one of the other Cleveland Street regulars was Prince Albert Victor, son of the Prince of Wales and second in line to the throne. Later, this same Albert would be proposed (on scanty evidence, it must be said) as a possible Jack the Ripper, which must set some kind of record for least salubrious royal personage. At all events, with telling swiftness the prince was dispatched on a lengthy tour of the empire, and on his return was summarily betrothed, whether he wished it or not, to Princess Victoria Mary of Teck. Just over a month after the engagement was announced, however, the hapless prince caught pneumonia and, to the relief of nearly everyone, died. Amazingly—well, amazingly to me—Princess Victoria Mary thereupon married his brother, who went on to become King George V, our old friend of “bugger Bognor” fame. And all that, I think, may go some way to explaining why the royal family is occasionally just a trifle strange and emotionally challenged.