PD Smith

The last few days have been pleas­ant­ly busy with inter­views and reviews of City. I was on Sean Mon­crieff’s show last Mon­day and talked to Robert Elms at BBC Lon­don on Wednes­day. Robert real­ly loves cities, espe­cial­ly Lon­don of course, so that was great fun. Yes­ter­day I talked to Rob Fer­rett at Wis­con­sin Pub­lic Radio. It was a wide-rang­ing dis­cus­sion about some of my favourite cities through­out his­to­ry. We talked for about an hour and took calls from lis­ten­ers, includ­ing one who had been to Tim­buk­tu. You can down­load the pro­gramme here.

A piece by me that appeared in last mon­th’s Archi­tec­ture Today on “My Kind of Town” is now online. I cheat­ed a bit and cre­at­ed a com­pos­ite of those aspects of cities that have most impressed me, from the gar­den squares of Blooms­bury, the evoca­tive his­to­ry of Rome, and the friend­li­ness and effi­cien­cy of Tokyo, to the dynam­ic diver­si­ty of New York City. Read it here.

This week­end there was a good review of City in The Econ­o­mist. Here’s an extract:

Mr Smith has writ­ten an unapolo­getic paean, not to any par­tic­u­lar city but to the urban idea in gen­er­al. Not for Mr Smith the lazy myths of a lost, rur­al gold­en age, to which many city-dwellers are prone to suc­cumb after a day spent nego­ti­at­ing the noise, traf­fic and smog of their man-made envi­ron­ments… The city is the build­ing block of civil­i­sa­tion and of almost every­thing peo­ple do; a guide­book to the city is real­ly, there­fore, a guide­book to how a large and ever-grow­ing chunk of human­i­ty choos­es to live. Mr Smith’s book serves as an excel­lent intro­duc­tion to a vast sub­ject, and will sug­gest plen­ty of fur­ther lines of inquiry.

The full review is online here. Yes­ter­day I found out that City had also been reviewed in the cur­rent issue of The New York­er. Being reviewed by The New York­er is a new expe­ri­ence for me, so that was real­ly excit­ing. It’s not online but I don’t sup­pose they will mind too much if I share it with you:

This “guide­book for the urban age” ranges from the Mesopotami­an cities of Eridu and Ur to the unbuilt cities of the future, which may or may not fea­ture smart elec­tric­i­ty grids, rent-by-the-hour “love hotels,” and “sky­scraper farms” hous­ing chick­en and fish that feed on the waste from hydro­pon­ic crops. Short chap­ters cov­er such sub­jects as parks, train sta­tions, depart­ment stores, hotels, graf­fi­ti, gen­tri­fi­ca­tion, park­ing meters, street food, ceme­ter­ies, and ruins. Smith’s enthu­si­asm for cities some­times laps­es in a gener­ic boos­t­er­ism that white­wash­es their more per­ni­cious aspects. But the book’s hodge­podge struc­ture excit­ing­ly mir­rors the impro­vised order of cities them­selves, and Smith encour­ages his read­ers to “wan­der and drift,” a strat­e­gy liable to gen­er­ate sur­pris­ing jux­ta­po­si­tions – as between urban birds, which sing at a high­er pitch than birds in the coun­try, and the police drones that fly above the streets of Liv­er­pool.

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.