The posh mess of eighteenth-century London

I took the day off today and spent much of it engrossed in Jerry White's giant London in the Eighteenth Century: A Great and Monstrous Thing (2012). If his London in the Twentieth Century and London in the Nineteenth Century are as good--as full of detail, anecdote, and apposite quotation--then I'll gladly follow him all the way back to the (necessarily slimmer) Londinium in the First Century, should he decide the journey's worth it.

The opening section traces London's physical growth, and the buildings thereof, through the careers of two Scottish architects, James Gibbs and Robert Adam. As the eighteenth century opened, the London we know was still nearly all open land and fields, but by the time Gibbs died at midcentury, the open spaces around Hyde Park were starting to fill in with handsome terraced houses, and the city's inexorable march was truly underway.

White's description of the creation of Grosvener Square--now one of the poshest (and stateliest) locales in London--highlights the differences between building schemes then and now. This "grandest planned development of London's eighteenth century," which would convert the Grosvenor estate, was planned not as a set of buildings, or even a neighborhood, but as a whole town.

It is worth stressing just how socially mixed this most aristocratic of London estates was at its beginning. It was built not as a suburb but as a self-contained new town, complete with markets, churches or chapels, and even quartering and stabling for the 2nd Troop of the Life Guards, helpful in keeping the peace. Grosvenor Square, built from 1728, would immediately become home to the richest men and women in England, with a distinctively aristocratic tone, and so would Upper Grosvenor Street, Upper Brook Street, and, for a time, North and South Audley Streets. The first tenants of Grosvenor Square included the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of Coventry, the Bishop of Durham, Viscount Weymouth, the Earl of Albermarle and numerous titled widows. Other smart developments in Mount Street became the homes of fashionable tradesmen, "upholders" or interior designers and the like, all living and working conveniently close to their clients. But behind these frontages, Palladian and palatial, let mews and blind-end courts for ostlers and coachmen and laundresses. Dung heaps peppered the stable yards in sniffing distance of drawing-room windows. And to the north of Grosvenor Square was a much more plebeian district, at George Street, Hart Street, Chandlers Street and so on, built at the same time as the square but home to building tradesmen, blacksmiths, butchers, greengrocers and fishmongers with businesses in St George's and Grosvenor Markets in the north-east corner of the estate.

Today's wealthy are much, much better at separating themselves from the other classes whose labor they require.

Even the squares themselves, intended as beautiful open spaces, could be quite noisome. White uses St James Square, "still easily London's smartest in 1726," as an example:

The Square's great open space was like "a common Dunghill." It contained many "loads of Soil and Rubbish" on which "the Inhabitants have, for many Years past, thrown their Dirt and Ashes, and . . . Cats and Dogs have likewise been cast, on the same." There were also encroachments, "particularly by a Coachmaker, who has erected a Shed, about Thirty Feet in the Square, in which he puts Heaps of Wood, and other Things."

That description calls to mind two great books by Emily Cockayne: Hubbub, about filth and mess in early modern England, and Cheek by Jowl, which traces the history of neighbors--the people who are most often responsible for dumping the horrible rubbish in the first place. Here she is, from Cheek by Jowl, on dunghills:

Dunghills were heaped up wherever they could be contained, sometimes against the neighbour's house. Rain saturated these stinking piles, encouraging damp to penetrate indoors and creating the potential for flooding. A London inkeeper heaped dung against his neighbour's wall in 1677 and the moisture from it soaked through the wall "to the great damage and the Annoyance of her house."

But those were times when both the law and moral suasion had less force, where the boundaries between public and private, both in terms of behavior and space, were less clear and less rigorously enforced. It was, quite simply, less clear what one could and couldn't do in a public square, or who had the authority to check your behavior if it crossed that ill-defined line.

Which is just one of many reasons why I'm glad to be able to enjoy this summer night reading in my library with the windows open, while suffering neither noxious odors nor any more street noise than that provided by the cicadas and the occasional hum of a passing bicycle. Some days, in some it's easier to spot--and remember to be thankful for--progress.

"One can claim protection from the street-grinder, but who's going to interfere with the man next door suffering from jim-jams?", or, More on neighbors

Emily Cockayne's first task in Cheek by Jowl: A History of Neighbours is to decide just what a neighbor is: "Medieval villagers farmed strips of common land," she writes, "and the word 'nigh-bour' originally meant "the man who tills the next piece of ground to mine." That's not a particularly helpful definition for today, where, in urban spaces at least, the person who tills the next piece of ground to you is likely a friendly hippie from 'round the hill rather someone you would think of as a neighbor. But even recent usage can be frustratingly vague:

Early-modern neighbours could be anybody in the parish, albeit they might live a mile from each other. The looseness and geographical vagueness in the terminology makes it difficult to uncover much about what it meant to live very near to somebody. . . . Even in more recent times some biographers have been cavalier with the term "neighbour." Some have used it to mean "from the same town," or even "the neighbouring shire." These writers sent me on wild goose chases, tracking down "neighbours" who actually lived miles apart.

Then there's the problem of who counts as neighbor, exemplified by this passage from Elizabeth Taylor's biting, strangely affecting novel Angel (1955):

Lady Baines was Angel's nearest neighbour, she had declared on her first visit, ignoring the dozens of cottages, the doctor's house, the Vicarage, which lay between Paradise House and her own home. "No one between us and Lady Baines at Bottrell Saunter," Angel told people, doing the same.

Cockayne settles on a definition that seems utterly reasonable for both past and present:

One of my own neighbours told me that "a real neighbour is someone you can visit in your slippers" (he was wearing his at the time).

From there, Cockayne is off to the races, telling story after story of neighborly disagreement and disaster (and, occasionally, camaraderie or even romance). She acknowledges that the balance between bad and good neighbor stories may be skewed to the bad by the available sources, as no one goes to court to sing his neighbor's praises, but that's almost beside the point. Certainly Cockayne is mounting an argument--more deliberately than in her previous book, Hubbub--this time about how changes in living conditions have always been intertwined in complicated ways with changing notions of privacy, personal space, wealth, and social duty. But the nasty stories are what give the book life, and while perhaps the occasional account of neighbors helping with childbirth or sharing food may be necessary to the survival of our faith in human nature, what we really want is to read more disputes over dunghills and such.

And, oh, do we get those!

Dunghills were heaped up wherever they could be contained, sometimes against the neighbour's house. Rain saturated these stinking piles, encouraging damp to penetrate indoors and creating the potential for flooding. A London inkeeper heaped dung against his neighbour's wall in 1677 and the moisture from it soaked through the wall "to the great damage and the Annoyance of her house."

In this case, I might have listed "annoyance" first. Then there's the general nuisance of shared toilets--especially when combined with bored children:

Walter Greenwood and his chums interrupted their neighbours' motions by waiting until the shared toilet was occupied and then, "armed with a slat from an orange box at whose end stood a candle stump fixed in its own grease," they would slide it through the emptying flap and toast the occupant's bottom. Becoming a victim of "arseon" was only one of the many risks faced by neighbours sharing a toilet.

Then there's the more general nuisance of the loony neighbor:

In May 1883 [Henry] Kirkham "made divers loud offensive and alarming noises . . . beating and hammering with pokers hammers and other Instruments . . . and screaming, groaning and making other noises and also heating melting and dissolving divers large quantities of brass." His neighbours also complained of the smells and effluvia from his house.

It gets worse:

Ten neighbours were listed, who were also disturbed by his habit of "deliberately exposing himself naked in a most indecent posture situation and practice to divers liege subjects both male and female."

And that's well before the invention of the trench coat, the flasher's friend!

Familiar names turn up as well. George Gissing's diary provides some wonderfully grumpy, even catty moments, enough to make me wonder whether I should read the whole thing. "Fine days," he writes in August 1891,

but rendered utterly miserable by vile squabbles here in the house. The Rockett people behaving with every kind of vulgar malice. It makes me ill; I pass the time in sick, trembling rage unable either to read or think -- Yet i do think in a way; there has come across me, out of these miseries an idea for a volume of short stories, to illustrate the wretchedness of life in lodgings, to be called "At a Week's Notice."

Samuel Johnson, on the other hand, is positively charming in his neighbor-baiting:

In Oxford, Samuel Johnson was reported to have reprimanded Sir Robert Chambers for gathering snails and throwing them over onto his neighbour's garden, rebuking his "unmannerly and unneighborly" behaviour. Chambers argued that his neighbour was a dissenter, so Johnson changed his tune--"if so, Chambers, toss away, toss away, as hard as you can."

Cockayne's book loses a bit of steam as it approaches the present. That's less a fault of her writing or her material--a brief discussion of Silver Jubilee parties amusingly calls to mind the block party for Charles and Diana that Adrian Mole relates in his first diary--than a result of the fact that our own era's stories are always going to be less interesting, and more inflected by the familiarity of the actual frustrations they relate, than the past. A tale of an armorer who "built a forge made of earth and timber next to a neighbour's house" and "sledghammered armour plating and shook the neighbour's walls, ruined beer and wine in their cellar and filled their home with smoke" is, at four centuries' remove, as amusing as it is shocking; a £5,000 fine for noise pollution issued in 1993 over a crying baby simply elicits wincing sympathy for everyone involved.

But then, even though--or perhaps because?--I grew up in a small town, I've never really been the neighborly sort myself. I like having a neighborhoodl=. I like going into shops and knowing the people there and being known in return, and I like recognizing the dogs and stray cats of our streets. But I'm not one to look for communion or friendship from my neighbors. I understand the utopian impulse that would have us all sharing lawnmowers and trading services, but I want to choose the people in that circle myself, not have geography and real estate patterns do it for me. I think of a man quoted in David Kynaston's marvelous Family Britain: 1951–1957 after a tour and a sales pitch for the just-being-built New Towns:

The sort of thing the planning boys dream up, but which doesn't work out. . . . Then, there's no privacy--think of it, front gardens in common. And the back gardens divided only by wire, so your neighbour knows all about you. And to think of it on washing-day. And there's going to be a community centre. Yes, it's not a joke, there really is. A community centre! Planners are nuts on palliness.

I've turned to Kynaston before when I've been on the theme of neighbors, and I'll close with a line I quoted then, from a set of sociological interviews conducted in 1950s Britain. An interview subject says of a neighbor:

I never thought I'd come to hate anybody like I do her.

To avoid that risk, I'm inclined to stay at the level described by a 47-year-old housewife from Sunbury-on-Thames when asked if she knew her neighbors:

Lots I suppose but only to say "Good morning etc" or to have "the daily grumble" with either on the road or perhaps on the bus, wherever we happen to meet.

We may be dung-heap free, the smithys and slaughterhouses are far away, and my neighbors, I'm confident, are perfectly nice and good people . . .but I hope you'll forgive me if, Cheek by Jowl in hand, I continue to be a tad circumspect despite.

Nuisances, neighborly

A couple of months ago the publishers of Emily Cockayne's new book, Cheek by Jowl: A History of Neighbours, sent me a galley. Having greatly enjoyed her first book, Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England 1600–1770, I was excited about this one, and I've been pleased with what I've found as I've dipped into the galleys here and there over the past couple of months while the publication date neared. Cockayne in both books reveals herself to be a delightful archive mouse with a taste for anecdote, joyfully mining memoirs and histories and court records for minor moments that are usually passed over but which, carefully selected and assembled, can reveal wonderful new facets of life in the past.

And that all got so much better today with the arrival of the finished book--for, unlike the advance galley, it includes an index! My current obsession with the piano and my fears that my only barely competent playing might be annoying the neighbors more than they let on, I turned first to that entry. It could be worse, it turns out: while pianos are healthily represented in the annals of neighborly complaint, with nine entries (five of them under the subcategory of "noisy pianos"), that's not nearly so bad as some other sources of irritation. Children, for example, merit thirty-one entries--and that's before taking into account the separate entry for "Noises, children," with its seven. Or take the entry for pets:

Pets, 132, 149; see also birds; cats; dogs; monkey in the garden next door

No normally curious human could fail to follow up on "Monkey in the garden next door":

One couple were forced to endure a rather peculiar nuisance. The person who lived in the adjoining house owned "a large-sized, old and artful monkey," which had been won as a prize. Although kept on a chain, the monkey could escape and on occasiona had pursued the man's wife, who had to jump over a fence to avoid it." The couple requested that the Greenwich Police Court ensure that the monkey be secured. They were informed that they would need to make a civil case because the law covered dogs, not monkeys.

It's not a fair cop.

From there, the index led me, understandably, to "Murder," which is subdivided neatly:

Murder 7, 186; committed by a neighour, 83–84, 110, 195; overheard by neighbours, 17, 34–36, 102–3

Elegant as that is, it can't compare to the perfection of the entry for Sex, in which the order of the alphabet happens to set up the punchline:

Sex: hearing a neighbour having, 3, 197–8, 223; seeing a neighbour having, 14–16, 197; with a neighbour, 48, 72, 210–2

Sadly, it doesn't look like Cheek by Jowl has a Stateside publication date lined up yet, but it will be available any day now from the UK. I'll definitely have more to share from it in the coming weeks, but for the moment you'll have to excuse me: I haven't annoyed my neighbors with a runthrough of "Lush Life" for more than a day!