Everything You Know About London is Wrong E-Book

Matt Brown

• Herausgeber: Batsford
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 213

Beschreibung

A highly entertaining read for anyone with even a passing interest in London's history. This myth-busting book takes you on a great ride through history and the city's character. Think that the tower that holds Big Ben is called St Stephen's Tower? Think again – it was called the Clock Tower until 2012 when it was renamed the Elizabeth Tower. Think that the Union Flag flying over Buckingham Palace means the Queen is home? Think again – it means that she's elsewhere, doing other Queenish things. Packed with details on real London history, it explodes a range of myths from the rumoured burial of Queen Boudica beneath platform 10 at King's Cross to the lamp on Carting (or 'Farting') Lane that runs on gas from the city's sewers. Myths regarding London's arts, entertainment, food, drink, kings and queens, traditions as well as politics are all covered, to give you a fascinating insight into the true capital.

Leseprobe

Everything You Know About London Is Wrong

Everything You Know About London Is Wrong

Matt Brown

Contents

Introduction

Myths for visitors

London is a city forever shrouded in fog

It’s always raining in London

The River Thames is filthy

The River Thames is the cleanest major river in Europe

London is a crime-ridden city where you’re likely to get mugged by an Artful Dodger type

All Londoners speak like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins, filling their phrases with cockney rhyming slang

The measure of the city

London is the greatest city on Earth

The M25 is an orbital motorway that encircles London

London is the capital of the United Kingdom

You have to have a London postcode to live in London

London ends, and the North begins, at the Watford Gap

The centre of London is at Charing Cross

A true cockney must be born within the sound of Bow bells

The City of London is a square mile

Historical bloopers

Boudicca is buried beneath Platform 10 at King’s Cross

The arms of the City of London contain the sword of William Walworth

The Great Fire of London was the greatest of all London’s fires

The Great Fire of London wiped out the Great Plague

When the ravens leave the Tower of London, the kingdom shall fall

In ancient times, the Tower of London was regularly used to execute traitors

It was impossible to break out of the Tower of London’s prison cells

Shakespeare’s Globe is an accurate recreation of the original Globe

Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe not to bomb Senate House, because he wanted to use it for a headquarters following an invasion of Britain

Before the 1950s, London was very white and very English

Landmark lies

The tower popularly called ‘Big Ben’ should actually be called ‘St Stephen’s Tower’ – Big Ben is the bell!

It is illegal to die in the Houses of Parliament

The statue on top of the Old Bailey is blindfolded to indicate that justice is blind

A model of Napoleon’s nose can be found under one of the portals of Admiralty Arch. Soldiers tweak it for luck every time they pass through

If the Union flag is flying on Buckingham Palace, it means that the monarch is at home

Old London Bridge was sold to a gullible American who thought he was buying Tower Bridge

The Shard is the tallest building in Europe

Counterfeit buildings

A statue of Eros stands in Piccadilly Circus

Green Park contains no flowers, on the order of Queen Catherine of Braganza

The prime meridian passes through the Royal Observatory, Greenwich

The BT Tower has no stairs, and is the only building in Britain that may evacuate using lifts in an emergency

Famous Londoners

Dick Whittington was a lowly farmer’s boy who became Lord Mayor of London three times, with help from his cat

Guy Fawkes was executed for masterminding the Gunpowder Plot

Dick Turpin was a dashing highwayman who rode from London to York in one day

Sweeney Todd was the demon barber of Fleet Street

Jack the Ripper stalked the fog-veiled streets of Whitechapel dressed in top hat and cloak

Boris Johnson is the Lord Mayor of London

Subterranean London

Buckingham Palace has its own private Tube station

The basement of the Viaduct Tavern on Newgate Street contains old cells from Newgate Prison

Scientific analysis of London Underground carriage seats found traces of vomit, semen and human faeces

Always remember to touch in and touch out

London language

Elephant and Castle is named after La Infanta de Castilla

We need to protect London’s traditional place names, like Fitzrovia

Are you pronouncing it wrongly?

Spelling and punctuation

That’s not my name

The phrase ‘on the wagon’ has its origins in London executions

The phrase ‘at sixes and sevens’ was invented by London livery companies in a dispute over precedence

Nylon was discovered by teams working in New York and London, hence it was called NYLon

A miscellany of misnomers and false etymologies

Popular culture

Sherlock Holmes was fond of saying ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’

The ‘swinging sixties’ were a time of free love, hedonism and high fashion for Londoners

Jimi Hendrix released a pair of parakeets from his Carnaby Street flat in the 1960s: now there are thousands of them

Aphex Twin lives in the strange glass and metal structure on the Elephant and Castle roundabout

Bob Holness played the saxophone solo on ‘Baker Street’

Mama Cass choked to death on a ham sandwich in London

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards founded the Rolling Stones after randomly meeting on Dartford station

Plaques that got it wrong

Wrong bomb

Other mistaken locations

Motor mayhem

Dickensian duncery

Official typos

Deliberate typos

Bankside oddness

The apologetic plaque

And now for something completely different ...

Tourist-trap trivia

You’re never more than six feet away from a rat

Savoy Court is the only place in London where you must drive on the right

A little-known Roman bathhouse can be found near the Strand

An old street lamp on Carting Lane is powered entirely by the fumes from sewers

Black cab drivers must carry a bale of hay everywhere they go

London’s equestrian statues conform to a hidden code

There are no roads in the City of London

Ely Place is technically in Cambridgeshire and you can’t be arrested there

The motif on Westminster’s lamp posts is a memorial to Coco Chanel

Trafalgar Square contains the world’s smallest police station

Marble Arch contains London’s smallest police station

Jeremy Bentham, the founder of University College London, still presides over council meetings, despite having died in 1832

London tour guides are full of rubbish

Let’s start a new wave of false facts

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

The streets of London are paved with gold. I learnt this as a child. It is a lie.

Later, I cowered from Sweeney Todd and cheered for Dick Whittington’s cat in pantomime. They never existed.

I was fed stories of far-off London. I lapped up tales of a fog-haunted city, where gents in bowler hats flowed over London Bridge. In the East End, chirpy cockneys rubbed shoulders with cheeky pickpockets, pearly kings and tap-dancing chimney sweeps. I was deceived.

I came to live in London. Further assumptions were proved wrong. You are nearly always more than six feet away from a rat. The M25 motorway does not mark the boundary of London. The river is not filthy (not usually). It does, sometimes, stop raining.

You live in London long enough and you’re sure to accumulate a head full of trivia about the city. Savoy Court, for example, which leads off the Strand to the Savoy Hotel, is the only place in the UK where you must drive on the right. Trafalgar Square contains the world’s smallest police station. Coco Chanel’s initials can be found on every Westminster lamp post. Guess what? Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. I began to suspect that, to a close approximation, everything I knew about London was wrong.

This book began life as a short article on the Londonist website in 2011. I briefly sketched out the truth behind a half-dozen city myths, including the one about the gullible American who thought he’d bought Tower Bridge, and the tenacious falsehood that the landmark we all know as ‘Big Ben’ was ever officially called St Stephen’s Tower. The piece hit a nerve. Over 70 people commented, adding extra detail or presenting their own myth-busting research. Londoners love to nitpick.

And so the idea has developed into a book. In these pages, you will find dozens of assertions about the capital – from the major misconceptions of first-time visitors, to the more quirky anecdotes that are the stock-in-trade of tour guides.

Each section starts with a commonly peddled ‘fact’, followed by a sound debunking. I’m very aware that the four most tiresome words in the English language are: ‘I think you’ll find …’. To that end, I’ve tried to avoid a supercilious tone in favour of something more light-hearted. My aim is to help readers think a little deeper about this great city, and to have a lot of fun in the process.

I have not covered the supernatural. London is one big rattling closet of ghost stories, from spectral hounds to phantom squirrels. To my mind, all are patently untrue, but there remains no way to prove a non-existence. Likewise, I’ve left well alone the folk tales and origin stories of London. The city was probably not founded by a King Lud, nor the Trojan hero Brutus. Nor was London ever guarded by the giants Gog and Magog. The Trafalgar Square lions will not spring to life when Big Ben strikes 13, nor has the eponymous statue of Queen Anne’s Gate ever been seen to roam that thoroughfare. London, however, must be left with some of its magic. For those stories, and other folkloric traditions, I would direct you to the wonderful London Lore (2010) by Steve Roud. The one exception I’ve made in this area is the dubious legend that the kingdom will fall when the ravens flee the Tower of London. You will see why.

This book seeks to point out common errors about London. That means I’m likely to acquire a certain amount of egg on my face if someone spots the inevitable mistakes in my own writing or research. I welcome any correction, qualification, addition, contradiction, refutation or other form of feedback. Just don’t use the words ‘I think you’ll find …’

Let the nitpicking begin!

Myths for visitors

We begin with the big stuff. London’s fame touches billions of people who have never visited, and never will. In forming a picture of the city, they must rely on cues from television, films, music, literature, magazines or simple hearsay. Inevitably, they get the wrong idea. To the Londoner, most of the myths in the section will be self-evidently wrong. The outsider, however, will find a few surprises.

London is a city forever shrouded in fog

London and fog go together like Rio and sun cream, or Tokyo and giant monsters. A thousand films and television programmes tell us that this is so – think Jack the Ripper, Jekyll and Hyde, Hitchcock’s The Lodger, or the adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

Twenty-first-century London gets surprisingly little fog. Yes, we still choke and splutter on unpleasant levels of air pollution, and the city is visited by occasional patches of photogenic mist; a full-on fog that brings traffic to a halt is, however, exceptionally rare.

This was not always the case. From the beginning of mass industrialization in the eighteenth century until the middle of the twentieth century, much of London was heated and powered by coal and its derivatives. Imagine a city with millions of people, where almost every building has at least one coal fire. A colossal amount of soot was kicked up into the air whenever people needed a bit of warmth. Usually, this sooty smoke would rise and blow away in the wind. The city skulked beneath a counterpane of grime, but this did not always intrude upon the streets. Every so often, though, atmospheric conditions would collude to make what’s known as a temperature inversion, where the air near the ground is cooler than that above. These inversions trapped the coal dust, leading to a thick fog at street level.

Such visitations became known as London particulars or, more evocatively, pea-soupers. This most British meteorological phenomenon was given its nickname by an American. The Oxford English Dictionary cites Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick, with the coinage: ‘Upon sallying out this morning encountered the old fashioned pea soup London fog – of a gamboge color’, he wrote in 1849. (Gamboge is a deep saffron colour, most familiar from the robes of Buddhist monks.) This peculiar hue was imparted to the fog thanks to the high sulphur content in the coal smoke.* In fact, allusions to pea soup go back a few decades before Melville, with regular comparisons in minor press reports suggesting that pea soup had long been a common simile.

These dense fogs were a London phenomenon for 150 years. Their banishment was held up by two main obstacles: half-baked technology and pig-headed people. The Victorians did invent several ingenious methods for capturing and controlling smoke release, but nothing that was economically scalable to the entire city. It was not until the mid-twentieth century, when coal power began to dwindle in favour of gas and other cleaner technologies, that this problem was adequately cracked. The second sticking point was obstinacy. Whenever the Government tried to legislate against factory smoke, the wealthy industrialists would argue that their contribution to choking the nation was minuscule compared with that from the millions of domestic fireplaces. By the same token, the politician who would ban coal burning at home faced a backlash from the public. In these days before television, a warming hearth was the centrepiece of the domestic scene. Few people wanted to give up the glow and the romance of an open fireplace. It was the stalest of stalemates. Add to this a perverse fondness for the fog. It was frequently romanticized in novels of the time, and many Londoners took pride in the gloom.

Nobody could argue with the fog’s detrimental effect on health, however. The final straw came in 1952, and in tragic circumstances that are often forgotten today. This was the year of the Great Smog, when a five-day blanket of pollution befouled the capital. By the standards of the time, it was a fairly ordinary fog: deep and dangerous, but not dissimilar to the visitations of previous years. Yet there was something more insidious this time. The casualties soon began to grow. The Government estimated that 4,000 people had lost their lives prematurely to respiratory illnesses in the days and weeks following the fog. That number has been revised since, and might be as high as 12,000, with many more suffering ill effects. Whatever the fatal tally, the Great Smog was almost certainly the most damaging air pollution event in the country’s history. Its effects finally prompted legislation with sufficient puff to clean up the skies. The Clean Air Act of 1956 brought in smoke-control zones in city centres, promoted the use of smokeless fuels, and encouraged industrial facilities to move out of towns. Steadily, the air above London got cleaner.

In the twenty-first century, we no longer experience pea-soupers, and any kind of fog is a rare event. However, emissions from road vehicles are still a significant problem. A recent study estimated that almost 9,500 Londoners per year suffer early deaths from prolonged exposure to nitrogen dioxide and particulates in traffic exhausts. The fogs of yore might have gone, but London’s air is still a killer.

*FOOTNOTE: If, by the way, you’re wondering why a yellow fog should be named after a green dish, the answer is refrigeration, or rather the lack of it. Today, we typically make pea soup from fresh peas or those that have been frozen immediately after harvest, giving pea soup a deep green colour. City-dwelling Victorians, particularly those with little money, could not readily acquire fresh peas, and so used a dried, yellow version.

It’s always raining in London

If the city is not spluttering under a heavy fog, you can bet that it’s drenched in drizzle. A popular impression of London is of grey skies, sudden downpours and that inevitable break in the play at Wimbledon or Lord’s.

It might be surprising to learn that London is among the driest capitals in Europe. Mean precipitation measurements vary, depending on how you take the average, but the trend is clear whichever set of data is used. In one survey, London measured 557 mm of annual rainfall, notably drier than Paris (631 mm), Dublin (758 mm), Rome (799 mm) and the sodden city of Amsterdam (838 mm). London does see more rainy days per year than some cities (109 versus Rome’s 78, for example), but the overall amount is often smaller. Certainly, our reputation as a miserable and damp city is not warranted, unless you’re going to compare London with somewhere on the edge of a desert, like Cairo. The capital is also the driest major city in the UK thanks to its position so far inland from the predominant south-westerly winds, which bring storms and weather fronts in from the Atlantic.

Indeed, London is in danger of becoming too dry. The South-East’s large and thirsty population places a growing burden on the capital’s reservoirs, to the point where the Environment Agency lists the area around the Thames as ‘seriously water stressed’. In 2012, utility company Thames Water opened a large desalination plant on the banks of the Thames at Beckton - the first of its kind in the UK. Should London suffer a drought, this facility would kick into action, filtering salt out of brackish river water to provide a drinkable supply for almost a million people. It is a measure of last resort and, at the time of writing, has yet to be called into action against drought. Nevertheless, its costly construction reflects a real concern that London might run out of water if annual rainfall drops further. ‘The trouble with London,’ we might all grumble in 50 years, ‘is that it just doesn’t rain enough.’

The River Thames is filthy

‘Dirty old river, must you keep rolling, flowing into the night’: so crooned the Kinks’ Ray Davies, in the song ‘Waterloo Sunset’. The river was indeed dirty in 1967, when Ray penned those lyrics. Industrial waste and the regular dumping of sewage, particularly following damage to infrastructure during the Second World War, gave the Thames a brown, noisome character. The river at this time contained very little oxygen, and hence few creatures. It was declared biologically dead by the Natural History Museum in 1957. You would not want to bathe in it.

Around the time of the Kinks’ masterpiece, a change was underway. Growing environmental awareness coupled with major investment in sewage treatment works significantly improved the quality of water. At the same time, the old, smelly industries that had characterized the Thames for centuries were in rapid decline. Fish were reported: perch, pike, roach, rudd, bream, dace and gudgeon. More exotic species arrived, such as angler fish, seahorses and even goldfish.

Then came the mammals. Seals are now relatively common in the Thames, and have been spotted as far upriver as Hampton Court Palace. Porpoises and dolphins are not unknown. Even whales are encountered in the river, with around five sightings per year. Fifty years ago, Old Father Thames rarely had a visitor. Since the river’s cleansing, he’s played host to 125 different species. This recuperation has not been fully appreciated by Londoners. Many do not realize that the Thames is brown from natural sediments rather than pollutants. A survey by the Zoological Society of London found that 83 per cent of Londoners, when asked to name something commonly found in the Thames, declared: ‘Shopping trolley’. The river is usually clean enough for swimming, and increasing numbers are donning wetsuits upstream of Putney, where fewer restrictions are in place. Even so, there’s still work to be done ...

The River Thames is the cleanest major river in Europe

Efforts to clean up the river have been so successful that we now have to be careful of rowing too far the other way when describing its cleanliness. Almost any article about the modern Thames will repeat the line that it is the cleanest metropolitan river – that is, one flowing through a major city – in Europe. But is it?

This claim seems to have arisen in the 1970s, when the Thames was well on the way to recovery from its polluted past. Yet I can find no evidence in scientific literature to back up the comparison. The Port of London Authority concurs, agreeing that the claim is probably unfounded. The Environment Agency and Thames Water were also unable to supply any evidence. Such a comparison would, in any case, be tricky. What constitutes ‘clean’? Which chemicals would you measure? Different rivers have different soils, climates, meanders, flow rates and native species. Any comparison would have to be hedged in caveats. All we can say is that the Thames is in much better shape than it once was, and is probably among the more healthy major rivers of Europe. It is not perfect, however.

Unlike some cities, London uses the same sewers for both wastewater and rainwater. Whenever the capital is treated to heavy rainfall, the sewers fill to capacity with a foetid soup that includes nourishing contributions from your bathroom. This feculent tide is disgorged untreated into the Thames. It has to be. The alternative would be to let our streets and homes take the surplus. This would never do, so around 40 million tonnes of tainted water finds its way into the river each year. (That figure, incidentally, is often used in a misleading way. The drains only flood during storm conditions, so that over 90% of the overflow comes from the rain. The foul matter is much diluted compared with the ‘raw sewage’ you’d find on a typical day’s outing to a sewer. Even so, it is enough to kill fish, inconvenience rowers and give celebrity swimmers* a turn for the worse.)

This problem should soon be alleviated by the Thames Tideway Tunnel. This huge interceptor sewer will follow the course of the Thames, deep beneath the riverbed. Sewage will be diverted down into this 16-mile-long pipe, which will carry the waste to Beckton for treatment. The project, due for completion around 2022, will largely eliminate the besmirching of the Thames. Perhaps then we really will have the cleanest metropolitan river in Europe.

*FOOTNOTE: Comedian David Walliams was feted in the press for swimming the length of the Thames in 2011. Though not unique, it was nevertheless a remarkable achievement. Alas, the swim is chiefly remembered for making Walliams ill. His well-chronicled battle against nausea and diarrhoea did little to dispel notions that the Thames is filthy.

London is a crime-ridden city where you’re likely to get mugged by an Artful Dodger type

The capital has something of a reputation for crime. Not surprising, given the long roll call of malefactors from the city’s past, both real and fictional. Noted crooks include highwayman Dick Turpin, Fagin’s gang from Oliver Twist and the Great Train Robbers. More recently, the popular imagination has been stirred by the attempted diamond heist at the Millennium Dome in 2000 and the Hatton Garden bank-vault raid of 2015. Couple this with a long history of terrorist attacks, and it’s not surprising when visitors to London worry about their safety.

I’ve lived in London for nearly 20 years. In all that time, I’ve never once been mugged and only witnessed the most minor acts of criminality. One datapoint does not a pattern make, however, and we need to look at official statistics to see if London really does live up to its reputation as a dangerous place.

Comparisons between cities are not easy. Different countries use different definitions for crime, making it almost impossible to compare like with like. Furthermore, not all crime is reported, and different cities will have different levels of unreported crime. That said, we can look at a few stats that should reassure you that London is no more dangerous than any other developed city.

Let’s tackle the Artful Dodger for starters. The Metropolitan Police Force* recorded around 20,000 personal robberies in 2014–2015, which sounds like a lot until you consider that there is a population of 8 million and an estimated 17 million tourists pass through each year.

In 2015, The Economist ranked the world’s big cities for personal safety, using a complex set of measurements. London came in as the twelfth most impressive out of 50 cities, way ahead of New York, Paris and San Francisco. (The top performers were Singapore, Osaka and Tokyo.) London was, however, trailing New York in terms of digital security, suggesting that you’re more likely to suffer identity theft in the Big Smoke than the Big Apple.

In terms of violent crime, London certainly has its share, but no more so than other major Western cities. The murder or homicide rate is one of the more readily compared crimes across territories; while its definition can vary, it is less ambiguous than, say, ‘personal assault’. Using 2012 figures, the murder rate in London stands at 1.6 per 100,000 inhabitants per year. This compared with 5.6 in New York City, 1.8 in Berlin and 4.4 in Amsterdam. More recent data shows that London has now dropped to just 1.1 murders per 100,000.

Even within the UK, London is not always the biggest magnet for criminals. Both Belfast and Glasgow recorded higher murder rates in 2012 (2.2 and 3.6, respectively). In 2015, the West Midlands overtook London as the centre of most gun crimes per capita. London suffered 19 incidents per 100,000 people, whereas Birmingham and its environs registered 19.4. Not the most significant difference, but illustrative that London is no worse than other big cities.

In short, a visitor to London is unlikely to become the victim of a crime, especially if he or she sticks to the central areas. Most violent crimes occur in residential areas away from the centre. This is not a city to fear.

*FOOTNOTE: The City of London Police is not included in these statistics. However, its territory (the Square Mile) is so small that the figures would not make much impression on the totals. It’s like not including the Vatican City’s crime rate in a survey of Rome.

All Londoners speak like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins, filling their phrases with cockney rhyming slang