There are probably other streets as ugly, as utterly bereft of the
romantic, as Lots-road, Chelsea, but certainly nothing more desolating
can exist in London. It was ten years since I had seen it, and now I
saw it at its worst moment of the week, about ten o’clock of a Sunday
morning. Some time before I reached it I heard a humming vibration
which grew louder and more impressive as I approached. I passed (really)
sixty-eight seagulls sitting in two straight rows on the railings of a
deserted County Council pier, and on a rusty lantern at the head of the
pier was a sixty-ninth seagull, no doubt the secretary of their trade
union.
A mist lay over the river and over a man reading the “Referee” on an
anchored barge, and nobody at all seemed to be taking any notice of
the growing menace of this humming vibration. Then I came to a gigantic
building, quite new to me--I had not suspected that such a thing was--a
building which must be among the largest in London, a red brick building
with a grandiose architectural effect, an overpowering affair, one of
those affairs that man creates in order to show how small and puny
he himself is. You could pile all the houses of a dozen neighbouring
streets under the colossal roof, of that erection and leave room for a
church or so. Extraordinary that a returned exile, interested in London,
could have walked about London for days without even getting a glimpse
of such hugeness.
It was shut up, closed in, mysterious, inviolable. The gates of its
yards were bolted. It bore no legend of its name and owner; there was no
sign of human life in it. And the humming vibration came out of it, and
was visibly cracking walls and windows in the doll’s-houses of Lots-road
that shook at its feet. Lots-road got up to that thunder, went to bed to
that thunder, ate bacon to it, and generally transacted its daily
life. I gazed baffled at the building. No clue anywhere to the
mystery! Nothing but a proof of the determined tendency on the part of
civilisation to imitate the romances of H. G. Wells!
A milkman in a striped apron was ringing and ringing angrily at the
grille of a locked public-house. I hate to question people in the
street, but curiosity concerning a marvel is like love, stronger than
hate.
“That?” said the milkman peevishly. “That’s the generating stytion for
the electric rilewys.”
“Which railways?” I asked.
“All of ‘em,” said he. “There’s bin above sixty men killed there
already.”
*****
Who would have supposed, a few years ago, that romance would visit
unromantic Lots-road in this strange and terrible manner, cracking it,
smashing it, deafening it, making the vases rattle on its mantelpieces,
and robbing it of sleep? Lots-road is now the true romantic centre of
London. (It would probably prefer to be something else, but it is.) It
holds the true symbol of the development of London’s corporate life.
You come to an unusual hole in the street, and enter it, and find
yourself on a large floor surrounded by advertisements of whisky and art
furniture. The whole floor suddenly sinks with you towards the centre of
the earth, far below sewers. You emerge into a system of tunnels, and,
guided by painted white hands, you traverse these tunnels till you
arrive at a precipice. Then a suite of drawing-rooms, four or six,
glides along the front of the precipice. Each saloon is lighted by
scores of electric lamps, and the steel doors of each are magically
thrown wide open. An attendant urges you to come in and sit down. You
do so, and instantly the suite of rooms glides glittering away with you,
curving through an endless subterranean passage, and stopping now and
then for two seconds at a precipice. At last you get out, and hurry
through more tunnels, and another flying floor wafts you up out of the
earth again, and you stagger into daylight and a strange street, and
when your eyes have recovered themselves you perceive that the strange
street is merely Holborn.. . . And all this because of the roaring
necromancers’ castle in Lots-road! All this impossible without the
roaring necromancers’ castle!
People ejaculate, “The new Tubes!” and think they have described these
astounding phenomena. But they have not.
*****
The fact that strikes the traveller beyond all other facts of the new
London is the immensity of the penalty which the Metropolis is now
paying for its size. Tubes, electrified “Districts,” petrol omnibuses,
electric cars and cabs, and automobiles; these are only the more
theatrical aspects of an activity which permeates and exhausts the life
of the community. Locomotion has become an obsession in London; it has
become a perfect nightmare. The city gets larger and larger, but the
centre remains the centre and everybody must get to it.
See the motor cars speeding over Barnes Common to plunge into
London. One after another, treading on each other’s heels, scurrying,
preoccupied, and malodorous, they fly past in an interminable procession
for hours, to give a melodramatic interest to the streets of London.
See the attack on the omnibuses by a coldly-determined mob of workers
outside Putney Station, and the stream that ceaselessly descends into
Putney Station. Follow the omnibuses as they rush across the bridge into
Fulham-road. See the girls on the top at 8 a. m. in the frosty fog. They
are glad to be anywhere, even on the top.
See the acrobatic young men who, all along the route, jump on to the
step and drop off disappointed because there are already sixteen inside
and eighteen out. Notice the fight at every stopping-place. Watch
the gradual growth of the traffic, until the driver, from being a
charioteer, is transformed into a solver of Chinese puzzles. And
remember that Fulham-road is one great highway out of fifty. Bend your
head, and gaze through London clay into the tunnels full of gliding
drawing-rooms and the drawing-rooms jammed with people. Think of the
five hundred railway stations of all sorts in London, all at the same
business of transporting people to the centre! Then put yourself in
front of one station, the type-terminus, Liver-pool-street, and see the
incredible thick, surging, bursting torrent that it vomits (there is no
other word) from long before dawn till ten o’clock. And, finally, see
the silent, sanguinary battles on bridges for common tram-cars and
’buses.
Not clubs, not hotels, not cathedrals, not halls of song, not emporia,
not mansions; but this is London, now; this necessary, passionate,
complex locomotion! All other phenomena are insignificant beside it.