Celebrating a city that the planners couldn’t destroy

The streets of central London, which Simon Jenkins calls “the most exhilarating human construct in the world”, follow the same pattern as the streets destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, when 13,000 houses were burnt down. Not only that, the streets preserve the plan laid down by King Alfred when he took control of the city in the late 9th century. This is fortunate, as a new, geometric, less unevenly reticulated scheme, of the kind unsuccessfully put forward by Christopher Wren, “would have fallen easy prey to 20th-century redevelopments, the fate of Nash’s Regent Street”.

Jenkins’s first book, A City at Risk, in 1970 was subtitled A Close Look at London’s Streets. Five decades on, he brings much knowledge and experience to his defence of those streets, in this study of the battle for “London’s appearance – why it looks as it does today, more variegated and visually anarchic than any comparable city”.

Individual losses have been terrible. Of the 109 churches burnt in 1666, 51 were rebuilt, but only 24 survive today, the others often falling to Victorian traffic improvements, rather than to the Luftwaffe. Jenkins misses most bitterly “the least spoilt and most gorgeous interior in the City”, as John Betjeman put it. This is at Wren’s St Mary-at-Hill, where there was a fire in 1988. The pews, pulpit, reredos and other pieces of furniture were put into store with the promise of restoration. Thirty years on, the plasterwork is restored, but the interior remains a bleak shell. Gavin Stamp, the late architectural historian, suspected that “the parish now likes to have a wide open floor which can be let for moneymaking secular activities”.

“The greatest architectural crime, in the City of London, of the 20th century”, in the words of indefatigable recorder of English architecture Nikolaus Pevsner, was also the most pointless. This was the demolition of Sir John Soane’s Bank of England – pointless since the bank found room for extra workers on other sites in any case. Some idea of the Piranesian wonders of the three-acre bank that Soane spent 40 years building – in a classical style reworked in a strange modern idiom – can now be gained only from such drawings as the watercolour by Joseph Gandy from 1830, showing the behemoth from a bird’s-eye view with the roofs cut away, as though in ruins. Black and white photographs from 1925 during its demolition show similar views in reality.

On an even larger scale a century ago, 3,000 people were moved out of “the only surviving neighbourhood of pre-fire London” around the Aldwych (the heart of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Lundenwic) to make way for a “Parisian boulevard” in the shape of Kingsway. The redeveloped Aldwych became a white elephant that fell into the hands of an American speculator, Irving T Bush. His name bounced round the globe when the BBC used Bush House for its World Service.

A kind of hatred for beautiful old buildings is discernible on the face of Herbert Morrison, the Labour leader of London County Council, in one of the photographs in this book, attacking with a hammer and chisel John Rennie’s “sublime Waterloo Bridge” as Jenkins calls it, built in 1817. “In the heart of the capital, we needed a traffic artery not an ancient monument,” Morrison declared. But as Jenkins points out, efforts to get more traffic into the West End were later replaced by efforts to reduce it.

More cheeringly, attempts to turn much of central London into a traffic-dominated dystopia were defeated by luck, developers’ greed and public hostility. The two chief planning villains were Sir Colin Buchanan (1907-2001) and Sir Patrick Abercrombie (1879-1957). For them “it was as if the Blitz was a facilitator”. Abercrombie wanted to build five ring-roads round London, from which half a million people would be moved out, including 40 per cent of the East End. Buchanan’s idea was to have traffic at ground level and pedestrians upstairs on a citywide deck. No one asked pedestrians if they wanted to walk on decks above noisy, fume-filled roads. Relics of that vision include the vile subterranean stretches of Thames Street and a dual carriageway at London Wall with marooned upper-level walkways.

Jenkins enters enthusiastically into the struggles between planners and buccaneer developers who filled London with the office space which theoreticians had thought would be provided by new developments in the Home Counties. London’s population had reached 8.6 million in 1932, then fell – by 9 per cent between 1950 and 1970 – only exceeding its former peak this year. Its prosperity may rest mainly on financial services, but its success as a human city depends in Jenkins’s view chiefly on streets of terraced houses, established by the Georgians and expanded by the Victorians. People like to live in houses with front doors, and small businesses thrive in small premises. London has always developed through private enterprise; speculative building has left us the pleasures of Soho and Pimlico, Belgravia and Battersea.

This is billed as a short history. It would be better less short or more limited. The first 1,803 years canter though 159 pages; the remaining 171 years occupy 190 pages.

There are no footnotes. That doesn’t necessarily matter, since books that do have references all too often transmit errors from other books. But it sometimes left me wondering. In the matter of St Mary-at-Hill mentioned above, for example, Jenkins writes of “17th-century woodwork”, though I think it had been replaced in sympathetic style by W Gibbs Rogers after another fire in 1848.

Earlier Jenkins writes: “In 1554 apprentices hurled snowballs at the Catholic Philip II of Spain’s entourage when he came to marry Mary.” Since Philip, not yet king of Spain, arrived in London in August, this doesn’t sound very likely. The story originates in an anonymous diary of 1553-54, which says that on January 2, when ambassadors arrived from the Low Countries for the “knitting up” of the marriage of the Queen, “the boys pelted at them with snowballs”. Philip wasn’t there. But then (as Jenkins quotes from a 1592 letter from the Protestant Duke Frederick of Württemberg) Londoners “care little for foreigners, but scoff and laugh at them”.

In 1534, Thomas More, we are told, was “adamantly opposed” to the Act of Supremacy, so “was executed a year later – and canonised by Rome”. He wasn’t canonised till 1935, though. Similarly, the monks of the Charterhouse resisted the dissolution of the monasteries. Eighteen of them “were eventually executed”, Sir Simon says, and were “duly made saints by the Catholic Church”. They were in truth beatified in 1886 and three of them made saints in 1970.

This sort of minor drift might not seem to matter, but saints have their place. As Jenkins records, it was Geoffrey Rippon who in “a bizarre act of political sabotage” had his officials list 250 buildings across Covent Garden, preventing it from being redeveloped with decked walkways and surrounded by dual carriageways. We should light a candle for him.

A Short History of London by Simon Jenkins is published by Viking at ￡25. To order your copy, call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop