Whatever happened to the London night?
There was a time, well over a century ago now, when it was considered one of the finest Victorian inventions. Before then, the onset of darkness had spelled an end to the day. It represented its outer limits, its polar extremes. The night was seen as lawless, foreign territory teeming with rogues and banditos who took advantage of what Shakespeare called its 'vast, sin-concealing chaos' to revel in an orgy of depravity and pestilence. It snuffed out the civility and social etiquettes of daytime and brought back trace memories of an older London dense with eldritch forestry.
Gas lighting opened up the night. It made the dark city navigable. More than that, it made the darkness itself visible, inspiring etchers and penny-dreadful illustrators to set about delivering chiaroscuric variations on the theme of shadow, gloaming and umbrage to their patrons and editors. London, fat on imperial wealth, was booming and expanding as never before: shops stayed open later, a newly-established police force was able to patrol its streets, under- and overground trains connected the residents of its previously fragmented boroughs.
Brimming with confidence, full of self-love, the capital developed an appetite for stories, both triumphant and harrowing, about the picturesque characters who populated its nocturnal by-ways and crevices. The London night was a homegrown Africa that on-the-make writers scrambled to map and colonize.
Off they trooped: chin-whiskered moral reformers hoping to edify and save the wretched poor huddled in freezing coal sheds in Shadwell; antsy investigative journos-turned-urban mythopoets snouting for florid stories by moving between the masked ball-goers and theatrical aristocracy of the West End and, Hyde to its Jekyll, the East End of lantern-jawed street fighters, idiosyncratic music-hall performers and white lassies hunkered up in Limehouse opium dens run by their slant-eyed Celestial husbands.
And so it went on. As if to refute Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's later invocation of "Night, the beloved. Night, when words fade and things come alive", nocturnal London spawned a growing library of monographs ranging from the circumspect and sociological to the lubricious and hysterical. The city became part docudrama, part carnival of the grotesque. It was a hive of fascination and to it came a steady flow of gawkers, boulevardiers, solitaires, rubberneckers, slummers and sex tourists exercising their newly-found right to roam. Even crime did not stop them: the Ripper murders of the late 1880s led fresh hordes of tourists, many of them all the way from the United States, to hop aboard double-decker buses in order to see at first hand those that Jack London called "the people of the abyss".
The Blitz did for the London night. It produced life-threatening fear rather than flaneurial frissons. A select few foxtrotted in the face of the imminent apocalypse, and many more descended into the London Tube to sleep along station platforms, but the streets were blackened for the first time in over a century and the air thick with the acrid smoke of torched humans and devastated factories and buildings. Much of the East End, that hallowed no-go zone of otherness, was bombed to rubble. Hundreds of thousands of Londoners deserted the city in the following decades: they had had enough of darkness.
It's rare nowadays to hear anyone talk about 'night time in London'. That phrase, and its suggestion of a distinct, cordoned-off territory in which we may immerse ourselves in strange possibilities or make ourselves susceptible to off-kilter enchantments, seems rather old-fashioned. It has been emperilled by New Labour's vision of London - a blinging, pigeon-free, glass-fronted, private-finance-initiative-funded, cappuccino-sipping, Barcelona-mimicking, Euro-piazza festooned, Vanity Fair-endorsed, live-forever, things-can-only-get-better fantasia. The city in recent years has witnessed a bevy of real-estate moguls, foreign investors and film directors trading in a slicked-up form of commodity urbanism; equally, the 'London night' has morphed into, and been rebranded as, 'London nightlife'.
Now that most of its factories and workshops have shut down, to be revived occasionally as subjects of melancholy-suffused social history conferences or converted into niche museums for young schoolchildren who would prefer to be eyeballing David Beckham at Madame Tussauds, the capital has embraced its status as a post-industrial hub in which leisure and tourism are sovereign. Fun - its conception, manufacture and promotion - occupies hundreds of thousand of people; it is no longer primarily a much-anticipated evening reward for day-time graft and pen-pushing. Sex, which lewd and bawdy 17th century nocturnal travellers regarded as the capital's chief attraction, is remotely accessible to anyone with a laptop at all hours of the day.
Night London is endlessly studied and written about - not for any mysteries it may hold, but because it is now seen as an economic unit. It's a potential cash cow for struggling boroughs eager to hold on to some of the money that their residents travel to Camden and Hoxton and Leicester Square to spend. The language of their reports is a flat-footed anti-poetry studded with allusions to strategic guidance, mechanism development and positive visions. Acronyms clog the pages - TfL, EMZs, the latter standing for Entertainment Management Zones, a new term that describes an area in which large numbers of young people like to hang out in the evening.
Cost-benefit analyses are drawn up to wring maximum revenue streams from this new gold dream of a 24/7-capital. Geographic Information System technology is deployed with a view to stoking local regeneration. Street lights are installed and a lot more CCTV cameras. In the end, 'night life' turns out to means a clutch of surly-bouncer-fronted clubs pumping out monotonous bpm, and from which puke-breathed likely lads emerge at 2am to pick fights with girls who won't go home with them and Somali cabbies who, reluctant to have their back seats daubed in beer and kebabs, won't take them home.
The power of night has been waning for decades. Astronomers at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich stopped conducting research there as early as the 1950s because the light pollution was too great; few children growing up in the city today will ever have had the privilege of looking up and picking out a lucky star. The BBC, which used to stop broadcasting around midnight (its final chorus of God Save The Queen carrying the message that royalty was now instructing listeners to go to bed), is now a multi-channel cathode-ray companion throughout the night. The growing number of freelancers, part-timers and casualeers means that the witching hours are populated by more and more people ringing up call centres in Bangalore to check on their insurance premium payments, popping over to the local internet café to do a spot of photocopying, pounding the treadmill at the gym.
Even postmen, who used to go out on their first round in darkness, little torches appended to their heads so that they could read envelope addresses, have had their working hours restructured so that they only deliver mail during daylight hours. No longer will they tread the streets and climb the tower blocks in near-Stygian gloom to bring glad tidings and break-up letters to the breakfast tables of teary-eyed Londoners. No longer will they venture out under thundering skies so menacing that they feel sure they would never see in another morning. No longer do they have the option of nipping out of the sorting office to grab a fag and watch the dawn come up.
But how true are these laments?
It certainly feels to me as if the London night has been decommissioned and that its fissile, threatening energies are now spent. However, that's only an instinct: it really needs to be tested out. And that, over the course of the next year, is exactly what I'm going to be doing by reactivating the largely-dormant Victorian and early-twentieth-century genre of the midnight traipse across the metropolis. I will be journeying - from dusk until dawn; by road, air and water; from its concrete centre to its pastoral fringes; from its subterranean cellars to high up in the sky - with a view to exploring the extent to which nocturnal London can counterbalance an increasingly legible and emulsified diurnal London. I want to mainline its covert and shadowy energies, to locate the ghosts of old London that have been unmoored during the makeovers and transformations of recent history, to have adventures with some of the characters who patrol or run amok through its vast acreage.
My companion on these travels will be H.V.Morton. Or at least a slightly battered copy of his once-bestselling metrologue The Nights Of London (1926). He was a beat - not Beat - journo, a hack's hack from Moseley who had the outsider's enthusiasm for the capital and was capable of bashing out articles about it in next to no time - at his peak, he published five books on the topic in barely eighteen months. He saw London as a gloriously crowded theatre stage, a treasure trove of exotic material that he was ready to yomp for many miles to reach. In his later years, he would use the proceeds from his most famous book, a motoring pastoral called In Search Of England (1927) to retire to South Africa where he would while away the sweltering days playing with model soldiers and writing letters to friends about the awfulness of the blacks in his adopted country and those that had started arriving in Britain after 1948.
But The Nights of London, a collection of some of his reports for the Daily Express, shows Morton at his best, pounding the back alleys and wearing out shoe leather as he hoofs it across London to music halls, dodgy pubs, Chinese New Year celebrations; visits zoos and hospitals and the river police at 2am; catches the last omnibus. He marries journalistic precision to dreamy speculation. Not for him the self-obsessed maunderings of psychogeographic writing; he is happy and eager to talk to working Londoners who furnish him with grounded insights that it would be impossible for him to glean on his own. He is droll, occasionally patronizing, but always in thrall to his shifting streetscapes. His book, though by no means the last to be written on the topic of London at night, is the one to which I am most wedded.
Over the course of the next twelve months I will be revisiting some of the sites that Morton portrayed so vividly as well as moving across newer nocturnal topographies. I will be flying above the city with military helicopters equipped with night-vision cameras that can pick out shirt labels from a height of over 2000 feet; wading through vast rivers of congealed grease and effluence in the sewers underneath the city; spending time with the nuns of Tyburn who stay up throughout the night to pray for the souls of Londoners; accompanying marine patrol as they scan the Thames for midnight corpses; hanging out in east London towerblocks with grime pirate DJs as they play an elaborate game of cat and mouse with the police.
What will I find on these forays across London at night?
I've no idea: that's exactly why I'm going on them.