Absence makes the art critic grow fonder

Alan Wall

LONDON by John Russell

Harry N. Abrams Inc, £35, pp. 256

Iplace all books on London on the rungs of a ladder that has Pevsner at one end and H. V. Morton at the other. Pevsner is the relentless historical and stylistic gazetteer: no building can escape his gaze. One or two may well have fallen down with shame by the time he finished with them. He is famously unsmiling, though one can detect the chill of a certain arctic humour in phrases like 'The style of the façade is free, i.e. bad.'

But Morton is a true companion, not a wall-eyed sphinx — he eyed takes you inside pubs and buys a round. In the grimmest situations he saves up at least one redemptive anecdote for the finale. After pages on the epic misery that was the life of Thomas Carlyle, and on what dark company he must have been towards the end, he finishes with the delightful remem- brance that the old tyrant left outside his door each morning a churchwarden filled with tobacco. This was for any passing poor fellow who found himself desperate for a smoke. A man capable of keeping that up, remarks Morton, 'must have had loopholes of likeability in him'.

John Russell's book on London lands exactly on the middle rung of my ladder. It is half anecdote and half artistic and archi- tectural appraisal. It is also very much the work of a Londoner who, on his own admission, doesn't live here any more and hasn't for a very long time. So there are some striking oddities. Try this, for example:

Thank goodness, I was beginning to think we were the only one's seeking solitude.' For close on 40 years now, the London taxi has been one of the rare ingredients in every- day life that is immune to fashion. The basic model and its derivatives have been around since 1958 and nobody — but nobody — has ever said, 'It's time for a change.'

Well, those pesky Metrocabs have been with us for the better part of a decade now and, try as one might, it is hard to ignore them, assuming one's here, that is. They are a curious hybrid admittedly, some- where between a low-grade limo and a minibus, but they do form a substantial part of the London fleet. We seem to be getting some duff gen here.

Russell's long-term memory is some- times a little wonky too. 'In boyhood I lived in Strawberry Hill', he tells us, and on the next page he says, 'Strawberry Hill was a backwater, somewhere between Twicken- ham and Richmond.' I can't believe the ter- rain about the Thames has changed that much in the last 50 years. There is also something a bit disturbing about the past tense of that 'Strawberry Hill was . . . . We know that Russell's no longer there, and doubtless his boyhood is as the snows of yesteryear, but Strawberry Hill seemed present enough to me the last time I checked on it, even if it wasn't quite where Russell last left it.

The proof-readers and copy editors at Harry N. Abrams, Inc. have something to answer for here. Accepting that they're probably more au fait with maps of Man- hattan than those of Teddington and envi- rons, they still should not have allowed the misquotation from T. S. Eliot who, after all, started off on their side not ours; nor the appearance in the text on two separate occasions (plus one more in the index) of a strange creature called Walter Jackson Bait. Odder by far than all of this is Rus- sell's notion of a 'Londoner', from which category some of my best friends would have to be excluded. If you don't get too cross, quite a lot of this is good fun. I par- ticularly enjoyed the description of Francis Bacon moving into 'the dockland area to the east of Tower Bridge'. There's a faint whiff of the Royal Geographical Society in Russell's remark that Bacon was 'one of the first people to see the point of those houses'. Except, one presumes, for the peo- ple who already lived there, on whom, in my experience, there settle very few flies. Bacon didn't go to Narrow Street to paint, for, as he confided to Daniel Farson, the light there somehow prevented it. There were, all the same, a number of local hostelries well-known for their provision of rough trade, to which he was famously par- tial. Money changed hands. Fellows traded. The neighbours I don't doubt took note. That's Londoners for you. But not for Rus- sell.

In his attempt to describe rigorously the habitat of what he means by 'the Londoner' Russell comes perilously close to the estate agent's window: Since World War II it has got through to the

Londoner that you can live perfectly well without leasing your house from the Grosvenor Estate in Mayfair, the Cadogan Estate in Chelsea, the Eyre Estate in St John's Wood, or the Bedford Estate in Bloomsbury. You can go where 'nobody' went before. Fulham, Pimlico, Kentish Town, Islington, the huge and till lately dilapidated crescents north of the Bayswater Road . . .

Well that really is a relief, I can tell you. For a while I thought I might have to be re- classified.

Russell gets better the further back he goes and he does, as one would expect, know his pictures. We are treated to a fair number of them in this lavish and hand- some book. He's extremely good on the Royal Society, which fires his imagination to a greater heat than contemporary Lon- don ever could. He's both well-informed and funny on the House of Commons, and he's positively Johnsonian when it comes to Johnson, presenting a small portrait worthy of Boswell himself. He's both informative and sympathetic on the subject of the river, on all that it has brought and then taken away again . I found the accounts of individual archi- tects the most compelling parts of this book. For Inigo Jones and Wren the author displays a veneration that might have become solemn were it not leavened by an irreverent curiosity for every single thing that glitters about them. He also gives the fairest short account of John Nash's career I've ever read. It's in his homage to the strange and passionate John Soane, however, that his pages start to burn. The remarkable and incomparable Soane has etched himself into Russell's mind and prompted him to write some of the best prose ever penned on that deliri- ously exotic building in the heart of Ealing, Pitzhanger Manor.

Soane also prompted some of the best writing in two other books about London which deserve always to be in print: Ian Nairn's Nairn's London and John Summer- son's Georgian London. Nairn writes of the Breakfast Room in the Soane Museum with a lyrical intensity which wouldn't be out of place in the Song of Songs; and Summerson produced one of the most cadenced essays ever attempted in architec- tural criticism on the Dulwich Art Gallery. Russell has, I believe, added something worthy of joining these in his Soane medi- tations.

He won't leave us, though, without a final off-the-wall stab at the contemporary metropolis. The book ends with a little paean to, of all things . . . motorways. 'The open road is truly open', Russell tells us. You can go anywhere.' The estate agent's window filled with strange reflections as I read this: ... those motorways now make it possible to drive to South Wales, to Shropshire, to Nor- folk, or to Somerset in time for a late lunch.

He obviously has little idea quite how late that lunch is likely to be.