The Nights Of Old London
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The temperature is plunging and I can feel the velvet darkness falling upon London. As dusk gathers in the ancient churches and the dusty old museums in the late afternoon, the distinction between past and present becomes almost permeable at this time of year. Then, once the daylight fades and the streetlights flicker into life, I feel the desire to go walking out in search of the dark nights of old London.
Examining hundreds of glass plates – many more than a century old – once used by the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society for magic lantern shows at the Bishopsgate Institute, I am in thrall to these images of night long ago in London. They set my imagination racing with nocturnal visions of the gloom and the glamour of our city in darkness, where mist hangs in the air eternally, casting an aura round each lamp, where the full moon is always breaking through the clouds and where the recent downpour glistens upon every pavement – where old London has become an apparition that coalesced out of the fog.
Somewhere out there, they are loading the mail onto trains, and the presses are rolling in Fleet St, and the lorries are setting out with the early editions, and the barrows are rolling into Spitalfields and Covent Garden, and the Billingsgate porters are running helter-skelter down St Mary at Hill with crates of fish on their heads, and the horns are blaring along the river as Tower Bridge opens in the moonlight to admit another cargo vessel into the crowded pool of London. Meanwhile, across the empty city, Londoners slumber and dream while footsteps of lonely policemen on the beat echo in the dark deserted streets.
Glass slides courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
Read my other nocturnal stories
Lovely London before the blackout!
But I don’t think Billinsgate porters ran up the hill with crates on their head. In Down and Out in Paris and London George Orwell earned “tuppence an up” or pushing loaded fish barrows up the hill in Eastcheap. And in his lunch house bank clerk T. S. Eliot sees them lazing in the pub
O City city, I can sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,
The pleasant whining of a mandoline
And a clatter and a chatter from within
Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls
Of Magnus Martyr hold
Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.
Wonderfully evocative images
“Atmospheric” provides an apt description of these images. One of them, the third, is a bit of a puzzle, however, because it appears not to be depend on ambient light-sources, but to involve a projected beam, as if from a searchlight.
Beautiful post. Wonderful pics.
These photographs of Old London took my breath away –
“..And late at night, the fog that settles softly over London ..”
(lyrics from ‘Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner’)
Thank you G.A
& Bishopsgate Institute