The House by the Thames (14 page)

But Bankside, and Southwark generally, in the years when the second Edward Sells was doing his apprenticeship, was not quite the same place where his father had set up twenty-odd years before. At long last London Bridge was losing its supremacy as the only river crossing. With the building of two bridges up river between 1750 and 1770, one linking Westminster to Lambeth and the other going from Blackfriars to the old Paris Garden stretch, the whole geography of the Surrey shore was altered. A transformation that was before slow and piecemeal was now accelerated: it would culminate in Southwark at last becoming urbanised.

But did this change indicate greater ‘civilisation', as our ancestors would have put it, or a social decline? This question tends to lead to generalisations about the course of London life during the eighteenth century, and these are notoriously unreliable. Two conflicting views seem to have been handed down to us, depending on the viewpoints of different witnesses at the time but also on the perspectives of those looking back from the vantage point of later generations.

On the one hand, there is the substantial figure of Hogarth: his pictures, whether showing a dissolute moneyed class devoid of any social conscience, or a brutalised and poverty-stricken underclass perpetually drunk on gin at a ha'penny a glass, have tended to loom large in our mental picture. There is also the poignant image of the retired sea-captain Thomas Coram, establishing his foundling hospital in the 1740s because he was so shocked by discarded babies he saw lying on waste ground or even in the streets. There were complaints at the time that London was growing too fast, drawing in from all over England young men and girls, prey to all kinds of moral temptations: these uprooted people, it was said, crowded into unhealthy and inadequate lodgings ‘often separated from Vice only by a deal or lathe and plaster partition'.
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The working classes had become ‘insubordinate'; the town was dangerous, and the main routes leading to and from it, what with highwaymen and footpads, were even worse … Southwark Fair, on St George's Fields, was just the sort of rowdy gathering that should be suppressed …

But the reality was that Southwark Fair, like the Borough Market which was also thought objectionable, had been a feature of Southwark since the Middle Ages. It was also a fact that people had been seeking their fortunes in London for centuries, and that its inexorably growing population had always owed more to this immigration than to a high birth rate. Though London did double its population between 1710 and 1820, and remained the largest city in the world, its actual growth rate was far less than that of some northern cities, which developed over the same period from tiny market towns into industrial centres never before seen, and imposed an entirely new way of life on the masses who poured into them from country districts. There had been people in London living in squalid conditions, vulnerable to vice, since the days of the Flemish women on Bankside and doubtless long before: abandoned babies were nothing new, nor were drunkenness and violence, nor were the deaths from starvation in hard winters. The fact that these social ills now began to be commented on as something that might and should be remedied was in itself a sign of changing ideas, and of an increasing number of people with essentially altruistic views about the way society should be run. The Gin Acts of 1751 and '53, imposing taxes and limiting sales, were an early attempt by the governing classes to regulate public behaviour by means other than harsh punishment. They were the beginning of a whole raft of rules and provisions that the following century would bring. Successive generations brought new consciousness to bear on old problems, and formed the habit of congratulating themselves on society's progress compared with the situation in ‘the bad old days' – whenever these were currently deemed to have been. This tendency to patronise and pity our ancestors has continued to the present day.

There is, however, another possible view of eighteenth-century London. This is of a city in which wages were high in comparison with those in major foreign cities and life generally less primitive, with a great many things to buy. To many visiting foreigners London seemed an orderly, pleasant place, where, it was commented, people were mild-tempered, beggars did not cringe, and working men did not go in fear of their masters. After the mid-century, when gin-consumption had been successfully reduced, a number of home-grown complaints actually centred on the new working-class appetite for tea and sugar (‘luxurious tastes'), the amount of meat eaten by this supposedly ‘degraded' class, and the fact that fine wheaten bread had now, in London and its surrounding area, largely replaced the traditional rye. The new cheap calico, as an alternative to the traditional woollen and linen cloths, now made it possible for all but the poorest women to dress in a more ‘cleanly' way: this too came in for criticism on the grounds that ‘you can't tell the maid from the mistress'.

The birth rate picked up after the mid-century; more children survived their first few years, and among people of all ages death rates, which had always been high in London, began to go down. Plague, which had been a regular visitant on the Bankside of Henslowe and Taylor's day, was by the eighteenth century a thing of the past. Now other traditional diseases, such as scurvy, dysentery and malarial fevers, declined also. Free lying-in hospitals and dispensaries were founded. Doctors, including a prominent Southwark medical man named Lettsom, began to have some notion of hygiene and of the importance of Good Air – an English preoccupation which was to become something of an obsession as the air generally available in London became increasingly polluted. Strolls on the new river bridges were recommended as a preventative against typhus. As for crime and violence, the reforming magistrate Sir John Fielding felt that he and his new system had had some impact on this by the mid-1770s, when he wrote that ‘the rabble [were] … very much mended … within the last fifty years', while still considering them ‘very insolent and abusive'.

That was, however, before the Gordon Riots of 1780, which was the last major outbreak of apparently senseless violence in London. The crowd broke open the Southwark prisons, including the Clink, and set on fire the King's Bench prison. They came near to firing the Thrale brewery on Bankside too, under the impression that Henry Thrale was ‘a Papist' because he believed in religious tolerance; they were foiled only by the manager cleverly ‘buying them off with meat and porter' while he called in the troops. Elsewhere in town they marched on the house of the Lord Chief Justice and burnt his library. Then Fielding's concerned comment was that ‘the mob' had become a kind of fourth estate ‘threatening to shake the balance of our constitution'. Prophetic words, when we consider that the French Revolution was to overwhelm France a decade later. But what is significant is that revolution did
not
occur in England, and that in retrospect the Gordon Riots appear to have been a final spasm of ancient popular violence and paranoia which, by the end of the century, was becoming a thing of the past.

Collective street life, in the form of old fêtes and fairs, was diminishing, and London's social fabric was beginning to show many of the characteristics it would have in the century to come. The mix was complicated, because, at this time, and into the nineteenth century, well-to-do households such as the Thrales would still often live cheek by jowl with the poor ones who occupied the side alleys. Each class pursued its own preoccupations, sometimes with a robust disregard for others' problems, yet shared inevitably the same environment – the same floods on Bankside, the same smells of boiling hops and tan-yards and drains, the same cries of street sellers and tolling bells of churches.

The major change in the course of the later Georgian period that particularly affected Bankside, followed by Southwark in general and the neighbouring and newly accessible district of Lambeth, was the arrival of many more industrial premises. The importance of industry in London from roughly the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century has been understated by many commentators, who have written as if trade, in the form of shipping and wharves, were the whole of the story. Indeed, one writing in 1925, a time when the Surrey side of the river seems to have fallen so far socially that those on the north bank hardly recognised its existence, actually described the Industrial Revolution as ‘a storm that passed over London and broke elsewhere'.
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It is true that the capital was not physically transformed by large factories in the way that some other parts of Britain were: it did not ever harbour much heavy industry. But Clerkenwell and Shoreditch, like Bermondsey, Southwark and Lambeth, all districts which had been right on the edge of London in 1700, saw over the following hundred years a great growth and proliferation in their traditional industries. Many of these required workshops rather than ‘dark satanic mills'. Many were quite small firms that were containable in one-time residential buildings, old chapels, stables, ale-houses or granaries. But clustered together with others of the same kind they came to form a substantial industrial presence.

The traditional trade of Bermondsey had been leather tanning. Tanning smells awful, even without the vats of dog-excrement that were used to steep the skins, so this had for some time already made Bermondsey less than wholly desirable for living. Associated with tanning was wool-fing, for the production of felted material for heavy coats and hats – many of the drying grounds still shown on early eighteenth-century maps of Southwark were for this purpose. Now hat making, another related trade, began to be important on the west side of London Bridge also. The Rocque map of 1746 shows ‘the Skin Market' covering an area behind Cardinal Cap Alley that was originally one end of the Queen's Pike Garden. I think this was probably related to the hat business, as many of these were made out of rabbit skins, suitably plucked and brushed with mercury to keep the wet out.

Printing was another traditional trade in Southwark which now, with many more books and papers being produced, also expanded, adding its characteristic clack and thump to the background noises of the streets. Then of course there was the glass industry. Becoming more and more important at the western end of Bankside, the Falcon Glass Works co-existed for decades with the Tudor public house from which it had taken its name, but finally swallowed up the old house in the first decade of the nineteenth century. With the bridge at Blackfriars there was no call any more for the ferry and the chaises for hire. To the ironworks near the same place which had been there since Wren's day were added other firms, to make the new machines for yet more firms, mills and presses near by. The use of steam to power machines, even in small works, was coming in now. By the late eighteenth century the Rennie family, who were to be responsible for Southwark Bridge, Waterloo Bridge and eventually for the rebuilding of London Bridge, had set up their general engineering works in Holland Street, near where Holland's Leaguer had stood.

But the major time-honoured trade along this stretch of the river, which had settled there because it needed a plentiful supply of water on hand, was brewing. In earlier centuries each inn had done its own brewing – that was what the term ‘ale-house' implied – but by the late seventeenth century the activity tended to be concentrated into fewer and larger wholesale enterprises. As London had spread so little to the south, the Kentish hop fields remained readily accessible, and hop-dealing too became a major Southwark business. (An elegant Victorian Hop Exchange stands to this day in Southwark Street, put to other uses.) By the mid-eighteenth century, west of London Bridge, there was a brewery off Gravel Lane and another further west on the site of the one-time Royal Barge House, but much the largest was the Thrale brewery nearer to London Bridge, at Bankend.

Ralph Thrale, MP for Southwark, had clerked in the brewery for many years for his uncle; eventually he acquired the place himself as a flourishing concern and built it up much further. His son Henry inherited the business in 1758. He is a good example of a well-educated man of the period, undeniably a gentleman, who thought it quite in order to live within the precincts of the family manufactory. It was not till well into the nineteenth century that captains of industry habitually sought out countrified retreats, at a decent distance from the prosaic source of their wealth, where they assumed the lifestyle of landed gentry. Henry Thrale's wife, Hester, actually
was
from this class, her mother being the widow of a Scottish landowner. She did not particularly like living on Bankside, preferring the house and large garden that Henry owed in Streatham, an hour's drive away by coach over country roads. However, her contacts and her spirited intelligence led her into friendship in London with Dr Johnson and his circle, which included Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke and Fanny Burney.

She seems to have comforted herself with the idea that the stench of the tan-yards, not far from their house in Deadman's Place, protected against infection. (This was presumably an alternative theory to the Good Air one that would later be promulgated by Dr Lettsom.) As many of her children, including their only son who was to have inherited the business, disappeared at an early age into St Saviour's churchyard (their extinguished names are there to this day in the burial registers), this theory must have worn thin, but Hester Thrale was indomitable. She managed to steer her erratic husband through several near-disasters, including bursting casks, a failed experiment with brewing a liquor to protect ships' bottoms from worms, and the winter when ‘Mr Thrale over-brewed himself … and made an artificial scarcity of money in the family which has extremely lowered his spirits. Mr Johnson endeavoured last night, and so did I, to make him promise that he would nevermore brew a larger quantity of beer in one winter than 80,000 barrels, but my Master, mad with the noble ambition of emulating Whitbread and Calvert, two fellows he despises – could scarcely be prevailed upon to promise even
this
, that he will not brew more than four score thousand barrels a year for five years to come.'