Putting London in its Place

Understanding the swamp city

London is, as a matter of linguistic fact:

The low place; the place that floods. Put that in your big smoke and smoke it. London was a swamp, indeed, in the early medieval period when it was too dangerous and dank to bother founding a cathedral, which is why it was put in Canterbury instead. No emperors were crowned in London; Constantine the Great was crowned in York. London wasn’t even a true city in Roman terms, it was a minor provincial town as far as the Latinate colonisers were concerned. Colchester, Camulodunum, though, was a proper town.

Understanding London’s deep history requires acknowledging its rather fourth-rate origins. This isn’t just a matter of historical accident. There are a few fundamental problems with London from the point of view of ancient places for cities. The main issue was its swampiness.

Swamps are a bit of a problem form the point of view of building stone, which doesn’t really matter for small timber houses but it is a major problem when you want to make defensible fortifications, high-status palaces and cathedrals. London doesn’t sit on building stone, it sits on soupy muck, with some chalk deposits thrown in.

A typical piece of London’s functional architecture (railway arches) with clay-rich pale bricks.

London is a city of bricks. The advent of bricks is a rather late thing, being an ancient Roman technology that was forgotten for many centuries after the fall of the Empire in the west. They turn up again in about the 13th century, though there are no examples of this in the capital. You have to look at east Anglian towns to find really early brick buildings, but in my view these towns have a lot in common with London at least in the deeper past.

The east Anglian towns like Norwich, Ipswich, Great Yarmouth, King’s Lynn, and so on, are all swampy like London. Because they never became as economically strong as the capital, they preserved their medieval character. They are impoverished, though often beautiful, time machines of what the medieval capital might have been like (albeit at a much bigger scale).

The east Anglian towns sit in low ground criss-crossed by tiny waterways that were home to peat cuttings, sheep farming, eel-trapping, and of course shipping out to Europe. The reason our capital sits in the south east is very simple: it’s all about water and proximity. A concomitant of these places’ watery swampiness, was the abundance of clay and the lack of good building stone. This creates a very specific urban type, a truly synthetic urban type—the building materials have to be made, cooked—one which is exactly matched to the more famous streets of Amsterdam and Bruges.

The London Docks! You can see the Tower of London on the left. These are gone without a trace, but note how much more Dutch the city would feel.

The dessication of London, its loss of a connection to the sea and the wealth that is implicit in the sea is recent. One example of this is the London Docks, Wapping, which were once enormous warehouses but were infilled in 1969 with barely a trace left. Like London, the importance of waterways has been lost in East Anglia too.

Where east Anglia differs a great deal is the preservation of its medieval material, and narrow streets. London has none of this, because of the Great Fire which devastated it in 1666 of course, but also because of generations of renewal and remodelling before and after that date. Any medieval building that still stood by the mid 19th century was generally restored beyond recognition.

One strange event that has dragged London away from its swampy heritage is the influence of a small-town boy called Sir Christopher Wren. Wren famously got the gig to rebuild London’s largest church, St Paul’s, after the Great Fire. He did not do it in brick. He did it with Portland stone, an oolitic white limestone from an island several hundred miles away by water. In truth this stone had been used in the low place that floods for centuries, but it took a star project to really get it going.

After the many rebuilding projects by Wren and others, this pale, rather characterless stone reclad most of the city’s important buildings. This is distinctive when compared to the other high-status buildings of the North Sea, which typically stick to brick. The Oude Kerk of Amsterdam and Stralsund Cathedral (northern Germany) are good examples of North Sea brickaganzas. Although many of the high status cathedrals in the swampy regions have cores of imported stone, their later additions tend to give way to brick.

Yet London’s white, durable stone could only get there thanks to its waterway of the Thames. London will always dominate, but its dominance will be dependent upon others—those to the east across the water—as it always has been. I began by sticking it to London by pointing out its swampiness. In reality, London’s swampiness is the source of its success and what makes it interesting. Never forget how east Anglian London is, how Dutch it is, how maritime it is, and how synthetic it is.

The only ‘natural’ material in sight here is the roofing slates, probably imported from Brazil in this instance. Otherwise, it’s all synthetic, and there isn’t a lick of natural topography either. That, at least in part, makes London London.