Peter Ackroyd - Colors of London: A History

Colorized photograph of the interior of the Crystal Palace during the Great Exhibition of 1851.

S ome people see it as a golden light glowing out of London. But the true color of the light of the city is elusive. It is tempered light; we can recognize its quality but not its hue. Yet, where there is light there must also be color, even if it is the color of gray stone or of shadow. In 1885 Henry James noted the way the light comes down leaking and filtering from its cloud-ceiling; there is a sensation of damp or misty brightness, as if everything were seen through tears. But James also noticed the softness and richness of tone, which objects put on in such an atmosphere as soon as they begin to recede. So the colors of London do not have the clarity or richness of those in Paris or New York. It has been said that nowhere is there such a play of light and shade, such a struggle of sun and smoke, such aerial gradations and confusions.

Claude Monets Charing-Cross Bridge in London was one of his thirty-seven paintings of the bridge and was completed in around 1902; the colors are pale and veiled, with orange, blue, yellow, and pearly white suffused in a mist that suggests early morning. All of these paintings of the bridge, like the other London vistas by Monet, represent the varied shades and transitions of the citys light. That was what entranced him, just as it captured the imagination of many other artists. Monet glides softly upon the dreams, for example, of Turner and Whistler.

The uniform uses of color in Monets painting suggest that bridge, river, and buildings are all one element rather than a collection of objects. The muted colors of blue and pink behave like gossamer, or a milky cataract of something half seen but felt. The more solid blue used to evoke the buildings has more solidity and weight than the pink of the air, but the difference is subtle. The color palette merges the object and the atmosphere that surrounds it so that, although they are distinct from each other, they create a single sensation; it is the painting of a moment rather than a scene. Faint or indistinct paint then conveys the London light that melts together in the background and foreground.

The natural gradations of light in the city, however, can in fact be recognized by the careful observer, from a yellow sunset to a soft violet in the south-west, from the bright light of summer to the redness of the winter sun. The parks on a fall evening were once suffused with a pale gray haze, soft and subdued. A faint, blue-green mist was described as the light that London takes the day to be, but the quality of daylight changes from area to area, from season to season, and from early morning to late afternoon. An observer in 1914 noted the veils of the London atmosphere whose greyness is built up of every color of the rainbow, whose murkiness gives quality to the silvery greys, and tinges the yellow fog with auburn gold. In such an atmosphere of mist and moisture, blue and yellow may seem brighter but red will be more subdued. Natural light changes the visual field. In the interiors of stores and houses, lights are cool and shadows warm; in the outdoors of daylight, the lights are warm and the shadows cool. On south fronts subdued colors will seem to be brighter, and on north fronts bright colors are dulled. Yet what is the natural light of London?

Bright sunshine on Carnaby Street in the 1960s.

In After London Richard Jefferies, in 1885, noticed the aerial gradation from a yellow sunset to an indefinite violet in the south-west; from the dazzling light of summer to the redness of the winter sun when the streets are suffused with a fiery glow. Yet there is also a coldness in the light of the streets, which may be glimpsed in the orange sunsets of fall, in the gray of winter, in the blue mists of spring, and in the haze of summer. Daily light is itself transient, a fugitive array of colors oscillating between what is faintly blue to what is faintly yellow. It has also been determined that healthy cells emit blue light, while diseased cells emanate yellow, which may help to elucidate its charm.

Much of that subdued and fugitive color has now been dispelled by neon, mercury, and general fluorescence so that the city lights up the sky for many miles around and reflects what Hippolyte Taine called the huge conglomeration of human creation. No darkness can obscure these swarms of light. They blaze perpetually. Seen from the air, the lights shine for miles like a boundless web of brightness. The city will never be able to cool down. It will remain incandescent.

The Victorians took full advantage of the London light, in what was considered to be the eighth wonder of the world and the crowning glory of the Empire. The Great Exhibition dominated Hyde Park like a vast cathedral of glass, to which people from all over England would come to worship the latest feats of technology as well as the wares of the globe. The nature of the modern world was indeed its theme and inspiration. As The Times put it, How much more may be done with steam? How much more with railways? How much better may we offer, and how widely may we diffuse, the intercourse of distant provinces and nations? Six million visitors came to find answers to these questions.

At the time of its construction over 1850 and 1851 the Crystal Palace, as it soon became known, was the marvel of London. From the planning to its opening was an enterprise of only nine months. Glass had never been employed on so large a scale, stretching over some 560 acres (226 hectares) on the south side of the park from the Serpentine to Knightsbridge. It was erected on sloping ground in order to accentuate its size

A poster from 1899 advertising travel by rail and sea from Paris to Brighton and London.

It encompassed two hundred cast-iron girders, three thousand columns and nine hundred thousand square feet of glass; its navvies, or construction workers, used four thousand tons of iron and four hundred tons of glass. The edifice was three times the size of St Pauls Cathedral. Glass is supposed to be a neutral or transparent medium, but the changing light of the morning and afternoon fundamentally changed the reflection on the glistening surfaces.