This is a new book on the inexhaustible theme of London

In a small market in Portugal my eye was attracted to a dull-green-cloth-covered hardback that turned out to be E.V. Lucas' London Afresh (1936) -- in fact, this was the illustrated second edition published the following year. Accordingly, while we travelled in a vivid trance through unfamed rural bits of Europe my imagination was also slowly pursuing a quite different but somehow analogous journey, a walk from east to west in the London of 1936. 

Edward Verrall Lucas had published several books about London before; this was to be the last, already elegiac in tone and quietly reproachful of the capital's incessant redevelopment. It was aimed at visitors to London, from the colonies for instance; at any rate, visitors with interests like his own. His enthusiasm for painting -- he seems to know every picture in London, and his love for Constable and Turner is infinitely detailed -- makes me feel I've been wasting my life. 

Here's a flavour, which says more than any commentary. It is like the strangely gripping spectacle of a sand-castle being washed away. I can only grasp at a fraction of what this text evokes.  (It stirs very faint memories of a childhood visit with my grandmother to London; seeing beefeaters and ravens at the Tower, Piccadilly Circus, the Elfin Oak in Kensington Gardens ...)  How much more strange it must seem to readers who are half a century younger!

Any one may wander into the Port of London Authority building, and any one may try to read the names in the Naval Marine memorial, but leave has to be obtained to look at the maritime trophies at Trinity House in Trinity Square, close by. This is the headquarters of the 'Guild, Fraternity or Brotherhood of the Most Glorious and Undivided Trinity', a confederacy of Elder Brethren and Younger Brethren, bound together to supervise navigation, lighthouses, and so forth, and to relieve poor Jack when he falls on evil days -- as you will find them doing at their serene almshouses in the Mile End Road. 

Permission must also be obtained to see the Royal Mint, just north of the Tower, where our coinage is constructed. Here you will find not only precious metal in bulk, but machines of such sensitiveness that they reject instantly, for new minting, a half-crown or threepenny bit that is not perfect. To the happy rustle and crinkle of bank-notes, however, you will not listen here, for they are made in the valley of the Test in Hampshire. 

The oratory of the Tower Hill demagogues, socialists and theologians is free as air, and you may always study and rejoice in, freely, Sir Christopher Wren's tower of St. Dunstan's-in-the-East. Billingsgate Market is free, too, but it is at its liveliest only in almost impossibly early hours, and since the day when license invaded fiction and the stage, enfranchising speech generally, no longer has Billingsgate offered its old attractive monopoly of strong language. 

For interesting sauntering I recommend the streets east of the Tower -- Thames Street, Wapping and the Docks, and the wanderer will be lucky if he is provided with an order for the wine vaults, where, in caverns measureless to man, casks in bond are stored, and a kind word can be rewarded. 

To visit the Docks is swiftly to realize our dependent place in the Empire and in the world, for one sees in a flash what we should have to dispense with, were there no ships coming this way. And how fragrant much of it is!

One of the early excitements of my life, as I have written elsewhere, came from playing with the quicksilver which, on special occasions, the dame who kept my first school used to pour out of a bottle so that it might form into little gleaming balls and run about on a green baize cloth. First, there was the surprise caused by the heaviness of the bottle, and then by the curious consistency of this strange substance, liquid and yet dry, separating so easily into small drops and instantly reuniting into the mass. And the other day I found myself playing with quicksilver again, at the Docks, where one of the most popular exhibits is a great bowl of mercury, too weighty for an ordinary person to lift, into which you may plunge your hands, and on the surface of which lumps of iron swim like corks in the sea. A very mysterious fluid, this quicksilver, and but for at least two of its functions we should not (unless, like Narcissus, we bent our heads over pools), have any idea of what we look like or whether tomorrow will be fine or wet. 

A visit to the Port of London brings the world into very small compass. In the course of an hour one can be switched east and west, north and south; to Australia, by the myriad bales of wool; to Japan, by jars of peppermint; to the East Indies, by the cases of cinnamon; to Brazil, by the sacks of isinglass; and to Africa, by the tusks of elephants; and it is a sad thought that before these East End floors could be heaped up with ivory, its noble original possessors must have died; not necessarily by the bullet -- indeed the percentage of elephants killed by hunters is very small -- but in the course of nature. 

... A sale being imminent, I found one day experts examining the stock, whether in the rough, exactly as removed from the gigantic skulls, or in sections and fragments. There is not a piece, however small, that cannot be used for something, from the trophy on a rich man's wall to the tiny dot on a pipe-stem. Scoring-board pegs, drawer-knobs, knife-handles, paper-knives, cigarette-holders, hairbrush backs, shoehorns -- but for the deaths of elephants in Africa, what should we in Europe do for these? Yet the most interesting of the mammoths' reincarnations is as billiard balls, and I was shown piles of tusk ends from which two sets of three can be turned. A strange evolution; nor will anyone familiar with the caprices and intractabilities of the game be surprised to hear that it is from the female tusks that the best sets are turned. 

(from Chapter III, The Docks)

[Lucas must have been fed a line. Most ivory came not from elephants that were already dead but from elephants that were killed specifically for their tusks. In the era of London Afresh the ivory hunters were devastating the Kenyan elephant population.]

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For Lucas, Dickens was the greatest of Londoners, along with Pepys, Wren, Johnson, Turner, etc. Odd in a way: Dickens shared very few of Lucas' own interests: for instance he considered history largely an imposition and he cared not at all for the sort of art that Lucas adores. But then Dickens is apt to overwhelm such rational considerations. More characteristic of Lucas, perhaps, is his remark that our three most "human" essayists -- Goldsmith, Lamb and Thackeray (i.e. of the Roundabout Papers) -- all lived in the "lawyers' stronghold", the Temple. 

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"The four greatest British painters are, by general consent, Reynolds and Gainsborough, Turner and Constable, and all of them were Londoners -- all living and working much in London and all dying here." (p. 144). Painters I suppose means in oils, or he might have added Hogarth and Blake. 

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Lucas (1868-1938) didn't have much taste for modern painting: Van Gogh and Cézanne were too much for him. Nor modern literature, I think. He writes plenty about Bloomsbury, but he has never heard of the Bloomsbury Group. 

But he was not, which rather surprised me, a stickler for the authentic. In the museums he often seems most enthusiastic about the dioramas (model scenes) -- a form then in its heyday, before TV and animation and video came along to offer the same kind of virtual experience. He was delighted by the coloured postcards of artworks that were now becoming available in galleries and museums, and he strongly advised the visitor to start a collection. 

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One of the Constable watercolours admired by Lucas at the V&A:

View at Hampstead, looking towards London, watercolour by John Constable (7 December 1833)

[Image source: https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O126195/view-at-hampstead-looking-towards-watercolour-constable-john-ra/ .]

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Here are a few of the illustrations from the 1937 second edition of London Afresh. 

London Afresh takes a lively interest in the bomb damage caused during the "Great War". Four years after its publication would come the London Blitz; the author, who died in 1938, was spared that. 

The illustrator was H[orace] M[ann] Livens (1862 - 1936). Curiously, he is most remembered for having painted the first portrait of Vincent Van Gogh (his fellow student at the Academy in Antwerp in 1885-1886). Much of his work was unfortunately lost in the Blitz, and more in a fire at his widow's home in Harrow in 1957.