PD Smith

In the ear­ly 1850s, fol­low­ing the death of his father, Charles Dick­ens suf­fered from insom­nia. At night he wan­dered rest­less­ly through what had become the largest city on the plan­et. On one of these ‘homeless night walks’ through a Lon­don ceme­tery, he imag­ined the city pop­u­lat­ed by its past res­i­dents:

‘It was a solemn con­sid­er­a­tion what enor­mous hosts of dead belong to one old great city, and how, if they were raised while the liv­ing slept, there would not be the space of a pin’s point in all the streets and ways for the liv­ing to come out into. Not only that, but the vast armies of dead would over­flow the hills and val­leys beyond the city, and would stretch away all round it, God knows how far.’

Few cities can boast a rail­way line for the dead. The Lon­don Necrop­o­lis Rail­way sta­tion was con­struct­ed by the Lon­don Necrop­o­lis & Nation­al Mau­soleum Com­pa­ny, specif­i­cal­ly to serve their Brook­wood Ceme­tery, 25 miles away in Wok­ing, Sur­rey. The Company’s logo was, some­what ghoul­ish­ly, a skull and cross­bones.

The sta­tion opened on 13 Novem­ber 1854, just out­side Lon­don’s Water­loo sta­tion on the Lon­don and South West­ern Rail­way. Trains took coffins and mourn­ers from the ‘Necropolis sta­tion’ — locat­ed between York Street (now Leake Street) and West­min­ster Bridge Road — direct­ly to plat­forms with­in the ceme­tery. By 1874, 64,000 peo­ple had made the jour­ney from the Necrop­o­lis sta­tion and been buried at Brook­wood.

In class-con­scious Britain, even funer­al trains were divid­ed accord­ing to class, and this applied to both the liv­ing and the dead pas­sen­gers – although of course these only need­ed a one-way tick­et. Indeed, the trains had car­riages reserved for dif­fer­ent class­es (First, Sec­ond and Third) as well as for Angli­cans or Non­con­formists. At Brook­wood there were even two sta­tions, one for Angli­cans and the oth­er for Non­con­formists. Each sta­tion was also pro­vid­ed with its own licensed bar. The divi­sions in Vic­to­ri­an soci­ety last­ed up to the very edge of the grave.

When the free-thinker Charles Brad­laugh died in 1891, 5,000 mourn­ers took the train down to Brook­wood. No one was dressed in black. The 150 or so mourn­ers who attend­ed the cre­ma­tion of Friedrich Engels on 10 August 1895 at Wok­ing Cre­ma­to­ri­um also trav­elled from the Necrop­o­lis sta­tion. His ash­es were lat­er scat­tered from the cliffs at Beachy Head in Sus­sex.

Pri­or to 1900 there was a dai­ly funer­al express, down to Brook­wood and back. To make way for an expan­sion of the main­line sta­tion, a new Necrop­o­lis sta­tion, designed by Cyril Bazett Tubbs, was built at 121 West­min­ster Bridge Road from 1900 to 1902. By the mid-1930s, trains were only run­ning twice each week, much of their busi­ness hav­ing moved onto the roads.

On 16 April 1941 the sta­tion was hit by bombs dur­ing an air raid, dam­ag­ing the lines. It was nev­er rebuilt or re-opened. How­ev­er, the entrance to the sta­tion used by First Class tick­et hold­ers – both the quick and the dead – still stands in West­min­ster Bridge Road, a per­ma­nent reminder of a very dif­fer­ent Lon­don. I pho­tographed it last year. The sta­tion and ceme­tery is the sub­ject of Andrew Martin’s nov­el The Necrop­o­lis Rail­way (2003).

Sources:

Charles Dick­ens, ‘Night Walks’ (1860), cit­ed from Dick­ens, On Lon­don (Lon­don: Hes­pe­rus, 2010), 77;
Ben Wein­reb, The Lon­don Ency­clopae­dia (1983; repr. Lon­don: Macmil­lan, 2008), 992;
Ed Glin­ert, London’s Dead (2008), 215;
John M. Clarke, ‘The Lon­don Necrop­o­lis Rail­way’, Cab­i­net, 20 (Win­ter 2005/06);
Wikipedia

James Math­er has writ­ten a fas­ci­nat­ing and large­ly favourable review of City for this week’s Spec­ta­tor (7 July 2012). Here’s a taster:

“The book…is a rich kalei­do­scope cel­e­brat­ing urban life in all its aspects. It is nei­ther a sus­tained nar­ra­tive nor a polemic, but takes its cue from the episod­ic con­struc­tion of city guide­books. This con­ceit works well, helped along by copi­ous and colour­ful illus­tra­tions. No city, let alone the uni­ver­sal city, can be seen entire. Smith’s approach is to take the read­er on a series of tours, which are con­sis­tent­ly well-writ­ten and researched — and impres­sive­ly eclec­tic — that reveal his sub­ject mat­ter in myr­i­ad small glimpses. […] Smith’s book is at once a huge­ly enjoy­able read and an inspir­ing vision to aim for.”

You can view a PDF of the review here.

I began my book City with a sec­tion on the theme of Arrival. For me there is one place that sym­bol­is­es the hopes and fears of every­one who has ever arrived in a city, hop­ing to begin a new life: Ellis Island. Immi­grants were dealt with on Ellis Island from 1892. In the years to 1919, no less than twelve mil­lion peo­ple passed through this gate­way to Amer­i­ca. Near­ly half set­tled per­ma­nent­ly in New York City. It has been esti­mat­ed that almost 40% of Amer­i­cans have an ances­tor who passed through Ellis Island.

I vis­it­ed Ellis Island in 1998 as a tourist and found it a deeply evoca­tive space, with its unfor­get­table views of the soar­ing tow­ers of Man­hat­tan — the promised land, as one immi­grant, Jacob Riis, described it. For those who were turned away, this lit­tle island in the shad­ow of Lady Lib­er­ty became the ‘Island of Tears’, to quote a con­tem­po­rary jour­nal­ist.  But those who suc­cess­ful­ly passed the med­ical exam­i­na­tions and the ques­tion­ing (How much mon­ey do you have? Have you been in jail? Have you been an anar­chist?) were free to take the fif­teen-minute boat ride to the city of their dreams.

The mod­ernist writer Dju­na Barnes used a rather sin­is­ter image to describe the sight of New York from the water in her essay ‘The Hem of Man­hat­tan’ (1917):  ‘As we round­ed the Bat­tery, New York rose out of the water like a great wave that found it impos­si­ble to return again and so remained there in hor­ror, peer­ing out of the mil­lion win­dows men had caged it with’. As the new immi­grants, fresh from the trau­mat­ic expe­ri­ence of Ellis Island, approached the Barge Office at the south east cor­ner of Bat­tery Park, near Cas­tle Gar­den, they must have been awe-struck by the sky­line of Man­hat­tan, home to the world’s tallest build­ings. Their prayers had been answered and their dreams were about to come true. ‘I thought I was in heav­en,’ recalled one. ‘My God – was this a city on earth or a city in heav­en?’

In Hen­ry Roth’s nov­el Call It Sleep (1934), Genya Schearl watch­es New York from the fer­ry, after pass­ing through Ellis Island:

‘Before her the grimy cupo­las and tow­er­ing square walls of the city loomed up. Above the jagged roof tops, the white smoke, whitened and suf­fused by the slant­i­ng sun, fad­ed into the slots and wedges of the sky. She pressed her brow against her child’s, hushed him with whis­pers. This was that vast incred­i­ble land, the land of free­dom, of immense oppor­tu­ni­ty, that Gold­en Land.’

A bewil­der­ing array of emo­tions must have con­sumed those immi­grants as they pre­pared to step foot on Amer­i­can soil. Intense joy mixed with a grow­ing feel­ing of anx­i­ety. It was, after all, their first day in the New World.

You can view a full-colour sam­pler of the first sec­tion of City, includ­ing the essay on Ellis Island, here.

The author Mark Lam­ster has inter­viewed me about my book and about urban his­to­ry for Design Observ­er. He liked City, describ­ing it as “a mag­nif­i­cent achieve­ment”. One of his ques­tions was: Giv­en the oppor­tu­ni­ty to live in any of his­to­ry’s great cities in their respec­tive hey­days, where would you go? Here’s part of my answer:

Berlin in the so-called Gold­en Twen­ties. It was a deeply trou­bled city that had expe­ri­enced the hyper­in­fla­tion of 1922–23, when news­pa­per press­es were used to print ban­knotes. There were reg­u­lar street bat­tles between the Nazis and the Com­mu­nists. But para­dox­i­cal­ly it was also an incred­i­bly dynam­ic city, attract­ing some of the era’s great­est artists, writ­ers, sci­en­tists and film­mak­ers. It was a con­cen­tra­tion of tal­ent that has nev­er been equaled in Europe. Albert Ein­stein went there, as did Leo Szi­lard, the sci­en­tist who first real­ized how to unleash the pow­er of the atom. Bertolt Brecht was there and the open­ing of his and Kurt Weill’s The Three­pen­ny Opera in 1928 became a night peo­ple remem­bered all their lives. The Berlin artist George Grosz used to walk the streets with a sign read­ing “Dada über Alles”. It was the city of Alfred Döblin, whose mod­ernist nov­el Berlin Alexan­der­platz (1929) is one of my favorite depic­tions of big city life. His nov­el echoes with the lost sounds and sights of Berlin: faces glimpsed amongst the crowds, snatch­es of con­ver­sa­tion, phras­es from songs and adver­tis­ing hoard­ings, news­pa­per head­lines, the rat­tle of trams in Berlin’s streets, and the squeals of dying ani­mals in Berlin’s vast new slaugh­ter­house. Berlin’s heady mix of dan­ger and cre­ativ­i­ty encap­su­lates every­thing that makes urban life so end­less­ly fas­ci­nat­ing and allur­ing.

Read the whole inter­view here.

Since Jonathan Glancey’s and Jonathan Yard­ley’s reviews of City appeared at the begin­ning of June, there have been many more favourable pieces on my book. Here are a few quotes and links:

“It’s a won­der­ful book: BLDGBLOG meets Ita­lo Calvi­no. Gor­geous, smart, fun, and full of sur­pris­es, like wan­der­ing all the world’s great cities at once … Irre­sistible”
— David Dobbs, Wired.com

“From mega­lopo­lis to small urban spaces, we can­not deny that the pow­er and influ­ence of cities is tru­ly glob­al, as Smith argues. This book is a per­fect way to under­stand the glob­alised phe­nom­e­na hid­den behind the word ‘city’.”
— Ethel Baraona Pohl, Domus, 29 June 2012

“…hand­some and well-written…the great strength of City is that it gath­ers in one place myr­i­ad themes and angles, pro­vid­ing gen­er­al­ists with a high­ly read­able, pithy resumé of cen­turies of city-relat­ed hap­pen­ings and trends. Authors such as Alain de Bot­ton and Iain Sin­clair have cov­ered sim­i­lar ter­ri­to­ry else­where, but Smith is less pre­ten­tious and and less opaque than either…”
— Chris Moss, Times Lit­er­ary Sup­ple­ment, 15 June 2012

“The range of mate­r­i­al is breath­tak­ing, but Smith wears his eru­di­tion light­ly. The prose of City is smart and fast-paced, with a nice bal­ance between big pic­ture his­to­ry and close-up details. The book is full of “aha” moments and occa­sion­al humor. This one’s a must read for his­to­ry geeks.”
— Pamela Toler, Shelf Aware­ness, 29 June 2012. Starred review.

“Smith’s prose is clear-cut and con­fi­dent, and the book fea­tures stun­ning illus­tra­tions, most of them in colour…Smith is espe­cial­ly adept at cap­tur­ing the inces­sant human inter­ac­tion which char­ac­ter­izes city life, from car­ni­vals to street demon­stra­tions and graf­fi­ti. Read­ers can vir­tu­al­ly smell the pho sold by a street ven­dor in Hanoi, or mar­vel at acro­bat­ics of skate­board­ers along the Thames. An absorb­ing and time­ly book.”
— Marc Vincent, Cleve­land Plain Deal­er, 24 June 2012

More reviews and com­ments here. City is avail­able as a hard­back or as an e‑book on Kin­dle (UK & US) or iPad. Buy at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com | Barnes & Noble | Blooms­bury |Indiebound | Water­stones