CENTRE POINT
We expect London to deliver life's groceries to our back door. If it fails, we accuse it of terminal decline
Ionce heard Cyril Ray tell a group of friends that, after living and working in the country, he was 'retiring up to London'. He was greatly looking forward to life in the big city. The friends greeted the announce- ment with laughter. Nobody retired to Lon- don. You retired to the country. How eccentric old Ray had become.
I had just settled in the capital and was shocked. London seemed ideal for an elderly couple, a new adventure they could afford. A flat cost no more than a Home Counties cottage. They would be accessible to friends and family. But no, for Ray's contemporaries a distaste for London was de rigueur. It was a sign of middle-aged respectability, like deploring mini-skirts, despairing of television and switching to the Daily Telegraph. To like London was to be a roué, promiscuous, possibly unreliable. Decent people hated London and boasted of the fact.
This syndrome clouds Roy Porter's much-trumpeted new Social History of Lon- don. Most of the book I like. Porter's histo- ry is not that of any National Curriculum. It is a ceaseless argument between past and present. He is fascinated by wealth and poverty, by living and dying, by science and medicine. His London is a real place, not a congeries of kings and dates.
Yet like so many historians of the broad sweep Porter falls at the last fence. Faced with the London of his own lifetime, he declares, 'Axes Porter, le deluge'. London has finally 'had its hour upon the stage'. The period of its greatness, he alleges, was from 1570 to 1986. The start was the open- ing by Elizabeth I of Gresham's Royal Exchange. The end, believe it or not, was the signing by her namesake of the act winding up the Greater London Council. This was the moment 'when the doctor decided the case was incurable and aban- doned the patient'. The result was a 'pre- cipitate decline' of the ageing, ailing mega- lopolis into 'present disintegration'. The city of dreams had become the city of dreadful night. Thatcherism was to blame.
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