Open Ground
ByJAMES POPE-HENNESSY ISPENT some time the other evening in Paternoster Row in a search for the past; but the past for which I was seeking was an immediate one, for I was only trying to recall what daily life had been like there in 1937 and 1938. The recollection was not in itself difficult, and I could, visualise it all—the narrow, gorge-like street with tall buildings on either hand, and all the busy noise and movement associated with places which serve as office and as warehouse at once. There used to be lorries unloading great neat .square parcels of new books from the binders, hand-trollies laden with more book- packages clattering to and fro beneath the covered passage into Paternoster Square, printers arriving in trench-coats and trilbies, bicycles propped against the pavement outside the Chapter Coffee House, office-boys whistling as they carried pots of tea across the roadway, pigeons waddling in the sunshine, window-cleaners on precarious ladders jerkily leathering high panes of glass. At the western end of the Row, just beyond Ave Maria Lane, a gateway led into Amen Court, where canons and minor canons of the Cathedral resided in houses designed by Sir Christopher Wren. This end of Paternoster Row was, by comparison, a haven of peace and quiet. I found it quite easy to remember all these details of the scene I used to watch from my office window on long somnolent summer afternoons, when one's desk was piled with uncorrected galley-proofs and the only interruption to be expected was the telephone or office tea at three-thirty. glut I could equally well have reconstructed the scene from my arm-chair at home, for to connect so much lively commotion and activity with the site of Paternoster Row today needs almost as much imagination as to picture the court life of Imperial Rome while visiting the mildewed ruins of the Golden House of Nero. Today Paternoster Row is the polite name for a broken track running through a jungle of waist-high thistles and pink willow-herb, which bob and tremble in the evening l?reeze. Elephant hawk moths frequent the willow-herb in their season and at this moment of August, on the precise location of the publishing house in which I worked, there is a remarkably fine clump of deep purple buddleia in full bloom. Mr. Berenson tells us that only a good building can be relied upon to make a good ruin. The remnants of twenty bombed Wren churches prove how right this is. Yet by the same yardstick should we not revise our Views on some of the architects of Victorian offices and warehouses, whose achieve- ments, stripped of their excessive detail, make well- proportioned, rather romantic ruins ? And that very detail at which as a generation we were taught to scoff, how monumental it looks lying in its great cumbersome broken fragments just where the blast happened to hurl it twelve years ago. The intricacies of the ornamentation have been simplified and softened by the rain of London winters and of London summers, and much that was ugly is mercifully obscured by trailing grasses and garlands of grasses and bindweed. In all this wide waste land north of Saint Paul's—as one authority has pointed out, " there is more open ground today within a mile of Saint Paul's Cathedral than there has been since, the early Middle Ages "—nature has rectified what man has spoiled. Christ-Church-with-Saint-Leonard-Foster-Lane, created by Wren on the site of the Greyfriars, and notable for being one of the few London churches to have columns but no arches, was gutted in 1940; but it is now inhabited by a miniature forest of bright elder-trees, some of them twenty feet high. All along the paths between the ruins and above the cellars of destroyed buildings bracken is growing in ,tough, tousled profusion; while thistle, willow-herb, flea-bane and barley abound. In • the exposed basement of a building in Aldermanbury Postern the evening primrose and the foxglove flourish as contentedly, as in a Sussex wood. The effect of all this devastated region is neither eerie nor uncanny; it is simply bizarre, tranquil and picturesque. Once amongst the busiest of London's commercial areas, Cripplegate and Aldersgate are \ now virtually silent, and little boys play cricket on an improvised pitch beside the vegetable allotments near St. Giles's Church. The innate, irresistible romantic appeal of these flowery ruins has, so far as I am aware, only been appreciated by one writer, Miss Rose Macaulay, who used them as a setting for her last novel. But there is another book which might be regarded as intlispensable to anyone investigating the effects of the war on the City—Mr. R. S. Fitter's Natural History of London, published eight years ago, and providing not only an exhaustive survey of the flora and fauna of the metropolis, but a most absorbing section on the plant life, of the bombed sites. Mr. Fitter lists in an appendix one hundred and twenty-six plants new to the City of London which have now taken root there, and he also explains what a godsend to London birds (particularly the black redstart) the bombed areas have been. It seems from what he tells us that, with few exceptions, London birds proved immune to bombs : a wheatear was seen feeding in Cripplegate in 1942, starlings continued to breed happily in the worst of the blitzes and it was only exceptionally sensitive individuals like the Kensington sparrow which fainted during an air-raid, or the heron which flew screaming across St. John's Wood after the fall of a flying-bomb, which minded at all. Today the whole area round Saint Paul's is at avine disposition, although a somewhat unchristian spirit would seem to prevail within the precincts of Saint Botolph, Aldersgate, where a large notice is hung up: " Please do not feed the birds." Perhaps the church authorities feel that the City's birds have come off quite well enough as it is ?
During the 1940 bombings I used to come down each morn- ing to take notes of the damage done to City churches on the previous niglit. Inside the churches there was always the same sad scene—fallen roofing, stones steaming with water from the firemen's hoses, panelling, doors and hassocks charred to cinders, pillars that had been burned a kind of orange-red. Periwigged busts on wall-brackets stared 'down with +sightless eyes at the sodden smoking mass beneath them. Added to despair at the destruction of so much that was fine and inter- esting there was also the irritation of feeling that much more could have been done—as it was done, by voluntary effort, -at Saint Paul's—to organise a proper fire-watching system for these poor churches, or at best to protect their monuments. Rahere's splendid tomb in Saint Bartholomew's was without sandbags for a year until a letter to The Times drew attention to the fact, while it was mere luck that the bust of Mrs. Pepys was moved to safety a few days before Saint Olave Hart Street disappeared in a holocaust. Today, while some ruined churches like Saint Giles, Cripplegate, are well protected against the weather, others are still open to the elements : the agreeable, distinguished eighteenth-century wall-monuments of Saint- Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe have now been rained upon for more than a decade, until they closely resemble melting snow- men. A few scraps of corrugated iron and a moment's care could have saved them.
From the' standpoint of the purely picturesque each year that passes before the city is rebuilt improves its visual aspect. As a venue for a summer's evening's walk London can offer nothing better, for these ruins are more peaceful than any public park, and far more evocative and more interesting. This summer of 1953 the vegetation is especially green and lush, and the Coronation flood-lighting of Wren's steeples is a further addition. As the blue dusk gathers across the open ground at Cripplegate, where one of the bastions of Edward IV's wall stands staunchly upright, the tower of Saint- Mary-le-Bow is illuminated and suddenly shines out like an elegant pale lantern in the twilight. There seems to be no one about : and then you become aware of a group of people trudging resolutely and slowly towards you across the wastes of willow-herb and rubble. They loom up from the direction of Moorfields, looking much as one might fancy a group of medimval. London citizens to have looked going homeward many centuries ago at the evening closing, of the ancient Crepel-gate.
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