For Stephen Inwood, author of City of Cities: The Birth of Modern London, the answer to the question “when did London become modern?” is clearcut. He dates the change to about three decades, from the 1880s to the start of World War One. The men who marched off to France in 1914 were not, he says “leaving behind them a gas-lit, horse-drawn city.

It is true that London was still, in its worst parts, an impoverished world of slums, workhouses, sweatshops, prostitutes, dying infants, and men and women coughing with tuberculosis or bronchitis. But … Mortality, including infant mortality, had fallen by over a third, and the deadly power of infectious diseases over the population was being broken at last. Almost the whole population had been through elementary education, and many had gone further. Basic food was much cheaper, and the level and variety had been much improved. Families were smaller, and women of all classes were starting to escape from the servitude of repeated and unlimited childbirth.”

That passage illustrates roughly half of the concerns of City of Cities, which has an unusually strong focus on social issues. The other half of its detailed exploration of the city is of its physical and administrative infrastructure. Inwood gets down and dirty to the details of London life, from the swarm of rats which pour out of the demolished Gaiety Theatre into its restaurant before finding their way into the sewers, to the (possibly not entirely unrelated) rising rates of diarrhoea, dysentry and gastro-enteritis that the warmer weather of the 1880s brought, with consequent leaps in infant mortality.

Then he swoops to its social heights, to the hostess Lady Dorothy Nevill who in 1910 mused that: “Society, in the old sense of the term … [came] to an end in the ‘eighties of the last century. Birth today is of small account, whilst wealth wields unquestioned sway … The conquest of the West End by the City has brought a complete change of tone.” Virginia Woolf was equally unimpressed by her, a woman who “lived for 87 years and did nothing but put food in her mouth and slip gold through her fingers”. Continue reading

London has always been a city of incomers. In medieval and early modern times, “foreigners” were people who came from a different county, and Londoners mainly were foreigners. With its birth rate less than its death rate, the city needed, and still needs, new blood coming in all of the time to keep it going, let alone growing.

I’m one such incomer, but count my blessings in that I came into the city with professional skills, a bit of capital, and a few friends to start a support network. Many others start with far less.

This week’s Time Out continues the story of a 23-year-old Pole who arrived in London from a small, poor village, not speaking English. Wiola Andrzejewska started working in a factory without proper employment conditions, was sacked without notice, but gradually developed a network of cleaning and babysitting jobs. Going back to her home town – flying for the first time (having arrived by bus!), wearing London fashions and comparing her achievements to those of her peers who stayed at home, she realises that she has come a long way.

For others, however, London is not a place of upward mobility. That’s the case with Najwa, the central character in Leila Aboulela’s novel Minaret. She arrives as an asylum-seeker, but one who, at first glance, has all of the resources necessary to make a success of her life in the city. Her family has money – rather a lot of money – which is what got them into trouble in their native Sudan in the first place, with her father held and then executed for corruption after a coup. She has at least part of a university education, excellent English from a private school education in Khartoum, and a network of helpful relatives – everything, it seems to succeed.
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Somehow it seems, wherever and whenever you visit a place, you’ve just missed a golden age. You always should have found this Thai island 10 years ago, “when it was paradise”. And when you read 84, Charing Cross Road, it seems as though just after the Second World War was a paradisiacal age of bookselling, when dedicated experts spent their days sifting through classy hardback editions of obscure classics, just waiting to fill the orders of a New York woman – Helene Hanff, who describes herself as “a poor writer with an antiquarian taste in books”.

She complained, in a letter of October 5, 1949, to Marks & Co Booksellers at 84, Charing Cross Road, that decent editions were impossible to obtain in America. That was the start of a beautiful, long-distance friendship between herself and the staff of the shop, and, finally, their relatives, that continued into 1969. Together the collection of the correspondence forms one of the finest epistolary books I’ve ever read.

In such few words, a lasting bond was form, cemented with American food parcels that Hanff sent to obviously hungry post-war Britain. She’s certainly the strongest personality in the book. You can only imagine the reaction in “proper” London of 1949 to the epistle that started: “Kindly inform the Church of England they have loused up the most beautiful prose ever written, whoever told them to tinker with the Vulgate Latin? They’ll burn for it, you mark my words.”

Frank Doel is the chief correspondent from the bookshop side. He starts out all proper, professional English gentleman, but gradually unwinds, while Cecily Farr steps into an immediately friendly relationship and is soon sending detailed instructions for the proper preparation of Yorkshire pudding, to someone who has never seen and tasted it.
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