Boris Johnson - Johnsons life of London: the people who made the city that made the world

BORIS JOHNSON

JOHNSONS
LIFE OF
LONDON

THE PEOPLE WHO MADE THE
CITY THAT MADE THE WORLD

For Marina

Contents

Sundry interesting London inventions have been interspersed in the text

S till they come, surging towards me across the bridge.

On they march in sun, wind, rain, snow and sleet. Almost every morning I cycle past them in rank after heaving rank as they emerge from London Bridge station and tramp tramp tramp up and along the broad 239-metre pavement that leads over the river and towards their places of work.

It feels as if I am reviewing an honourable regiment of yomping commuters, and as I pass them down the bus-rutted tarmac there is the occasional eyes left moment and I will be greeted with a smile or perhaps a cheery four-letter cry.

Sometimes they are on the phone, or talking to their neighbours, or checking their texts. A few of them may glance at the scene, which is certainly worth a glance: on their left the glistening turrets of the City, on the right the white Norman keep, the guns of HMS Belfast and the mad castellations of Tower Bridge, and beneath them the powerful swirling eddies of the river that seems to be green or brown depending on the time of day. Mainly, however, they have their mouths set and eyes with that blank and inward look of people who have done the bus or the Tube or the overground train and are steeling themselves for the day ahead.

This was the sight, you remember, that filled TS Eliot with horror. A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, reported the sensitive banker-turned-poet. I had not thought death had undone so many, he moaned; and yet ninety years after Eliot freaked out the tide of humanity is fuller than ever. When I pass that pavement at off-peak times I can see that it is pale and worn from the pounding, and that not even the chewing gum can survive the wildebeest tread.

The crowd has changed since Eliot had his moment of apocalypse. There are thousands of women on the march today, wearing trainers and carrying their heels in bags. The men have rucksacks instead of briefcases; no one is wearing a bowler hat and hardly anyone seems to be smoking a cigarette, let alone a pipe. But Londons commuters are still the same in their trudging purpose, and they come in numbers not seen before.

Londons buses are carrying more people than at any time in history. The Tube is travelling more miles than ever, and more people are riding on the trains. It would be nice to reveal that people are ditching their cars in favour of public transport; and yet the paradox is that private motor vehicle transport is also increasing, and cycling has gone up 15 per cent in one year.

As we look back at the last twenty years of the information technology revolution, there is one confident prediction that has not come true.

They said we would all be sitting in our kitchens in Dorking or Dorset and telecottaging down the information superhighway. Video link-ups, we were told, would make meetings unnecessary. What tosh.

Whatever we may think they need to do, people want to see other people up close. I leave it to the anthropologists to come up with the detailed analysis, but you only have to try a week of working from home to know it is not all its cracked up to be.

You soon get gloomy from making cups of coffee and surfing the Internet and going to hack at that piece of cheese in the fridge. And then there are some profounder reasons for this obstinate human desire to be snuffling round each other at the water cooler. As the Harvard economist Edward Glaeser has demonstrated, the move to the city is as rational in the information revolution as it was in the Industrial Revolution.

By the time I get to cycle home, most of the morning crowds have tramped the other way. Like some gigantic undersea coelenterate, London has completed its spectacular daily act of respiration sucking in millions of commuters from 7 am to 9 am, and then efficiently expelling them back to the suburbs and the Home Counties from 5 pm to 7 pm. But the drift home is more staggered. There are pubs, clubs and bars to be visited and as I watch the crowds of drinkers on the pavements knots of people dissolving and reforming in a slow minuet I can see why the city beats the countryside hands down. Its the sheer range of opportunity.

You can exchange Dante/Beatrice glances on the Tube escalator; you can spill someone elses latte and offer to buy them another; you can apologise when they tread on your toe, or you can get your dog lead tangled in theirs, or you can just collide with them on the pavement. You can even use the personal dating services in the evening paper or (I imagine this still goes on) you can offer to buy them a drink. These are some of the mating strategies of our species; but they have statistically a far higher likelihood of success in a city, because it is in the city where there are the numbers and the choice of potential mates and the penalty for failure is much lower.

The metropolis is like a vast multinational reactor where Mr Quark and Miss Neutrino are moving the fastest and bumping into each other with the most exciting results. This is not just a question of romance or reproduction. It is about ideas. It is about the cross-pollination that is more likely to take place with a whole superswarm of bees rather than a few isolated hives.

You would expect me to say this, and I must of course acknowledge that many great cities can make all kinds of claims to primacy, but at a moment when it is perhaps excessively fashionable to be gloomy about Western civilisation I would tentatively suggest that London is just about the most culturally, technologically, politically and linguistically influential city of the last five hundred years. In fact, I dont think even the Mayors of Paris, New York, Moscow, Berlin, Madrid, Tokyo, Beijing or Amsterdam would quibble when I say that London is after Athens and Rome the third most programmatic city in history.

Around the world there are similar crowds of commuters, tramping similar pavements with the same grim-jawed mood of economic competitiveness. They are wearing a London invention the dark suit, with jacket, trousers and tie, that was pioneered by eighteenth-century dandies and refined by the Victorians. They travel on devices that were either invented or developed in London: underground trains (Paddington to Farringdon, 1855) or buses, or even bicycles, which were certainly popularised if not invented in London.

If they have just got off a plane, that machine will have been guided through the sky by air traffic controllers who are trained to speak a language that emerged in its modern form in the London of Geoffrey Chaucer.

They may make use of a cash machine (Enfield, 1967) before entering a department store (which appeared in its modern form in Oxford Street in 1909). When they get home the chances are they will slump in front of a television (the first example of which was turned on in a room above what is now Bar Italia in Frith Street, Soho, in 1925) and watch the football (whose rules were codified in a pub in Great Queen Street in 1863).

You know, I could keep it up for quite a while, this tub-thumping list of London innovations, from the machine gun to the Internet to the futures market for Chteau Haut-Brion. But the citys contribution has also been spiritual and ideological. When Anglican missionaries fanned out across Africa, they carried the King James Bible, a masterpiece translated in London. When the Americans founded their great republic they were partly inspired by the anti-monarchical slogans of London radicals; and across the world there are governments that at least pay lip service to concepts of parliamentary democracy and habeas corpus that London did more than any other city to promote.