London is over 2,000 years old. During that time it has grown from a Roman settlement into one of the world’s most important cities. It has also undergone numerous transformations and many of its old neighbourhoods have disappeared, to be replaced by new ones. One person who is fascinated by this is Tom Bolton, who has written a book on the subject: Vanished City: London’s Lost Neighbourhoods. We asked him how he first became interested in the subject:
Tom Bolton (standard British accent): Well, I started to think about the way that London had been something completely different to what it is now, but yet there are traces in London of what it used to be. So we think we’re living in a very modern city, but what we’re really doing is living in a Victorian city. The familiar structures of Central London were built in the Victorian era. And then, if you go further out, a lot of it is post-war and maybe 1920s, ‘30s expansion and development. But really it’s not as modern and current a place as we like to imagine, it’s full of history and complication, and if you look below the surface of what we see as we walk these streets every day, you get a sense that there’s something underneath. So I investigated that in more detail. And I started with Chinatown, in Limehouse, because in a way Chinatown is famous, everybody knows about the mysterious East End of the early 20th century with opium and dark streets and dark goings-on and criminal networks and Chinese sailors, Chinese people. But this was a real place, too, so you have somewhere that is culturally very, very familiar, but was also a specific location in London and has completely disappeared, so I wanted to find out how much of that was true, how much of the Chinatown that people know from the movies, basically, really existed and why it isn’t there anymore.
IMMIGRATION
Limehouse still exists but Chinatown has moved from the East End to the West End, specifically Soho. And, as Tom Bolton explains, the Chinese, who appeared in the Sherlock Holmes stories, aren’t London’s oldest immigrant community:
Tom Bolton: London sees itself as being an international city and we perhaps see this as a current set-up, something that’s only relatively recent, but it’s not the case. I mean, London has been international, in a way that port cities usually are, going back quite a long way, and in my book I look at the village of Ratcliff, which was the original London port, and if you look at the burial registers there, you’ll see that people are being buried who were from the West Indies, who were from India, who were from all parts of Europe, in the early 18th century. So, going back a long way, you already had a lot of trade via the ports with London and a variety of people coming and going and of course this goes back further, you can trace immigration back a long way, particularly in relation to the capital, which draws people.
THE BARBICAN
Another area that has changed beyond recognition is the Barbican. Today it is the symbol of modernity, but it has replaced one of London’s oldest areas:
Tom Bolton: I mean, the Barbican is a great example of how London reinvented itself and a complete district disappeared. So the war bombed London very badly, a lot of destruction in the City, but the most concentrated destruction was north of St. Paul’s in the area that’s now occupied by the Barbican. And this was a place known as Cripplegate and it was part of the medieval city, so within the walls you had an area that went back all the way to the start of London pretty much and it spread outside the walls and the gate – Cripplegate – was the gate in the City walls which linked these two areas. And when the bombs came, the whole area burned to the ground, so they had to start again. And when they started again, the Barbican didn’t repeat the street patterns that were there before, the medieval street patterns that had been there for several hundred years. The Barbican started again, it’s built on several levels, and it’s famously very difficult to navigate. People get lost in the Barbican all the time. So it doesn’t really represent what was there at all and immediately, I think, people started to forget that there’d been a historical district, a place that had its own identity. The Barbican kind of floats above street level in some ways, so you get the feeling it’s not really replacing Cripplegate, it’s sitting where Cripplegate still really is and, you know, under all this you’ve got the real city waiting to come back.
