The Spirit of London. Boris Johnson
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that bright people come to London to find, one currency more dear to the human heart than money itself – and that is fame.
It was the eternal contest for reputation and prestige that encouraged Londoners to endow new hospitals or write great plays or crack the problem of longitude for the navy. No matter how agreeable your surroundings, you couldn’t get famous by sitting around in some village, and that is still true today. You need people to acknowledge what you have done; you need a gallery for the applause; and above all you need to know what everyone else is up to.
It is the city that gives the ambitious person the scope to eavesdrop, borrow or just intuit the ideas of others, and then to meld them with his own and come up with something new. And for the less ambitious, it is a chance to look busy and ingratiate yourself with the boss in the hope of avoiding the boot – because if someone is ‘working from home’ then I am afraid they are a great deal easier to sack.
These are some of the reasons why people have chosen not to stay at home with the cat; that is why there is the drumming migration over London Bridge. For centuries people have been coming not in search of oil or gold or any other natural wealth – because London has nothing but Pleistocene clay and mud – they have been coming in search of each other, and each other’s approbation. It is that competition for prestige that has so often produced the flashes of genius that have taken the city forwards – and sometimes the entire human race.
If you had come to London 10,000 years ago, you would have found nothing to distinguish the place from any other estuarial swamp in Europe. You might have found the odd mammoth looking lost and on the verge of extinction, but no human settlements. And for the next 10,000 years it was pretty much the same.
The civilisations of Babylon and Mohenjo-daro rose and fell. The Pharaohs built the pyramids. Homer sang. The Mexican Zapotecs began to write. Pericles adorned the Acropolis. The Chinese emperor called his terracotta army into being, the Roman republic endured a bloody civil war and then became an empire and in London there was silence save the flitting of deer between the trees.
The river was about four times wider than it is today, and much slower – but there was scarcely a coracle to be seen on the Thames. When the time came for Christ to preach his ministry in Galilee there were certainly a few proto-Britons living in a state of undress and illiteracy. But there were no Londoners. There was no big or lasting habitation on the site of the modern city, because there was no possibility of a settlement – not without that vital piece of transport infrastructure I use every day.
By my calculations, today’s London Bridge must be the twelfth or thirteenth incarnation of a structure that has been repeatedly bashed, broken, burned or bombed. It has been used to hurl witches into the Thames; it has been destroyed by Vikings; it has been torched at least twice by mobs of angry peasants.
In its time the Bridge I use every day has sustained churches, houses, Elizabethan palaces, a mall of about two hundred shops and businesses as well as the spiked and blackened heads of enemies of the state.
The previous dilapidated version was sold in 1967 – in one of the most magnificent examples of London’s protean talent for export – to an American entrepreneur called Robert P McCulloch. He paid $2.46 million for the structure, and everyone laughed behind their hands because they assumed that poor Mr McCulloch had confused London Bridge with the more picturesque Tower Bridge; and yet the Missouri chainsaw tycoon was not as foolish as he seemed.
The bridge has been re-assembled stone by stone in Lake Havasu, Arizona, where it is the second most visited tourist attraction after the Grand Canyon; and the fascination is deserved, I would say, given the utter indispensability of London Bridge in the creation of London.
It was the bridge which created the port; it was the toll booth on the north side that necessitated the guards, and the guards that necessitated the first housing. It was the Romans, in about 43 AD or soon thereafter, who built the first pontoon bridge.
It was a bunch of pushy Italian immigrants who founded London, and seventeen years later the boneheaded ancient Britons responded to this gift of civilisation by burning London to the ground, destroying the bridge, and massacring everyone they could find.
Who goaded the Romans to invest
It must have happened about here, I reckon. It is a bright autumn day, and I have found what could well have been the heart of the earliest Roman settlement. It’s just up from London Bridge, at the junction between Gracechurch Street and Lombard Street, with Fenchurch Street running off to the right.
There’s a Marks & Spencer and an Itsu restaurant ahead, but according to all my books the space I am interested in is now occupied by a yellow box junction at the crossroads.
So I risk a few toots from the motorists by cycling on to the spot; and my mind empties as in a trance; and I no longer see the shiny new banks and accountancy firms, but half-built wooden homes, the smoke from a thousand new hearths shimmering over all and new unsurfaced roads and a forest in the distance; and just before I scoot away again I imagine what it must have been like to be in the hobnailed sandals of poor exhausted Suetonius Paulinus, the governor of the new province.
He had just marched as fast as his troops could go, down what is now the A5 from North Wales, down the Edgware Road, down Cheapside, and now he stood on the patch of gravel that served as the marketplace for the very first London. Before him there was a collection of London merchants, in a state of terror.
They knew what had happened to the people of Colchester in Essex – thousands of them sliced by sharp Celtic swords or skewered on pikes or burned alive in their wattle dwellings; the very temple of the deified Claudius sacked and burned to the ground, its occupants carbonised. They had heard all about the ferocity of the Iceni and their queen, Boudica. They had heard what a big and indignant woman she was, with her mane of red hair and her determination to avenge the rape of her daughters by Roman troops.
Help us, Suetonius, they begged the Roman general; and the miserable fellow shook his head. As he looked at early Londinium, he could see the ambition of the settlers everywhere. Colchester (Camulodunum) was officially the colonia or capital, but London was already the most populous centre, an entrepôt town, as Tacitus describes it, swarming with business folk and travellers of all kinds.
If Suetonius looked to his right, down to the bridge, he could see ships tied up at the dock: unloading marble from Turkey to beautify the sprouting new homes, or olive oil from Provence or fish sauce from Spain. He could see ships loading the very first exports of this country – hunting dogs or tin or gold or depressed-looking woad-stained slaves from the dank forests of Essex.
All around he could see the signs of the speculative money that had been poured into the town. Just in front of him, we now believe, was a new shopping mall with a portico 58 metres long, and he could see women with their heads covered, haggling by some scales, and pigs snuffling in rubbish. There were piles of fresh timbers being laid out, so that proper square Roman buildings could replace the primitive round huts of the earliest years. There were fresh hazel laths for the wattle, fresh clay for the daub. There were carpenters who had been hired for the work, not all of whom had been paid. The roads through London were already done to a professional Roman standard, nine metres wide and constructed of hard-rammed gravel, cambered at the side to allow rainwater to drain off into ditches.
There were about thirty thousand of these Londoners in an area roughly the size of Hyde Park, and when I say Londoners I don’t mean cockneys, obviously. They weren’t Brits: indeed, they would have been pretty contemptuous of the ‘Britunculi’ – the little Britons, as one Roman legionary was later to call them.
They were Romans, Latin-speaking traders in togas or tunics, from what is now France, Spain, Germany, Turkey, the Balkans – from all over the empire. They had expensive Roman tastes, for wine and red terra sigillata crockery, with its pretty moulded reliefs. Even in this misty outpost, they liked to lie back on their couches and toast each other