Something of Myself

The history that is London

No street in London changes its name as often in as short a space as the one which starts at the BBC's overseas broadasting centre Bush House, just around the corner from the Strand. The street begins, below a bad piece of sculpture by the American artist Malvina Hoffman depicting Anglo-American friendship, as the characterless, traffic-despoiled Kingsway. A couple of hundred metres later, at the perma-jammed crossroads with Holborn, it is reborn as Southampton Row. About two hundred metres ahead it becomes the pretty but horribly polluted Russell Square, then turns briefly into Woburn Place, then leafy Tavistock Square, then Upper Woburn Place, shortest-lived of its many names, for a scant hundred metres, before becoming grim Eversholt Street, then manic Camden High Street, then grimy Chalk Farm Road, before growing slowly posher as it climbs Haverstock Hill and becomes Rosslyn Hill and then Hamptstead High Street. Once you've noticed this, its hard not to be amused by it, and to take it as an example of the crowded specificity of London - a tribute to the city's sheer amount of history, of lives, of human density.

Iris Murdoch's great line, in her novel Under the Net, was that "some parts of London are necessary, others are contingent".

And anyway, some of us prefer the contingent parts of London. The long street is one of them, full of history but at the same time scrappy-feeling and unplanned and random, and all the better, all the more characteristic of London, for that.

Another of my favourite places is a passageway just off Woburn Place called Woburn Walk, where there was a sandwich bar run by gloomy Italians with a plaque saying that WB Yeats had lived there. What the plaque didn't tell you was that that was also where Yeats lost his virginity, at the decidedly late-starterish age of 31. He and Olivia Shakespear had to go to Heal's specially to order a bed before finally consummating the relationship, and he found the experience - that of ordering the bed - deeply traumatic, since "every inch added to the expense".

All this is what this street used to mean to me. Everybody has their own version of their own bits of their own towns; history and memory overlap, and they are what make cities liveable; they are the human stuff with which we fight the city's potentially overwhelming feelings of anonymity, depersonality, and anxiety. They are how we make it human.