fast
The noble workers, decayed, departed
in earth’s hard-grip, while a hundred times
the generations pass.9
The Ruin, the Old English poem from which the lines above are translated, describes the remains of a Roman city. The poet here has turned the experience of living amongst ruins into an elegiac romanticism weighed down with fate – what the English knew as wyrd (‘weird’) and the Norse as urðr; it was a sense, shared amongst the peoples of northern Europe, that all roads led inevitably into darkness – ‘that all glory’, as Tolkien put it, ‘ends in night’.10
The environments that played host to these great turnings of the cosmic wheel were therefore not happy places, not conducive to the building of bright futures. The ruin and decay was a reminder of failure and hubris, of the striking hand of fate and the erasures of history, haunted by the workings of time and by the memories of giants. It is for these reasons, as much as for any practical purpose, that the former Roman cities of Britain were shunned. In Londinium, only the small area around St Paul’s seems to have remained in use at all, the rest of the city crumbling, filth-strewn and insect-infested. Some of the clearest evidence for a human presence has been found in the shape of two strange corpses, two women of the eighth century whose bodies were disposed of in bizarre circumstances near Bull Wharf, between the river and the walls. The first had died a violent death – her head smashed in with a weapon or a tool, laid on a bed of reeds, covered with moss, enclosed in tree bark, surrounded by wooden stakes. This was not normal. Fifteen feet away another woman lay buried in a narrow grave; a more conventional burial, but still – in its location, its isolation, its association with the weird – a deviation from Anglo-Saxon normality. These corpses speak to us of the ways in which the old city was regarded: as a fitting place for aberration, as a harbour for the dangerous, uncanny dead.
The place that the Vikings had come to pillage in 842 was not the walled Roman city but a new town that had sprung up to the west. Known to the locals as ‘Lundenwic’, it was an Anglo-Saxon market place of timber homes, workshops and jetties, sprawling along the shoreline of the Thames from what is now the eastern edge of Trafalgar Square to somewhere in the region of St Clement Danes (near Aldwych). It was one of a number of contemporary settlements – including Hamwic (Southampton), Gipeswic (Ipswich) and Eoforwic (York) – that were focused on servicing trade and manufactured goods (the word wic is derived from the Latin vicus, a settlement that lacked some of the essentials for a true town in the Roman sense). Lundenwic had grown up in the late seventh century to exploit the opportunities afforded by the river and its easy access to the broader waterways of the Channel and beyond, as well as the overland routes and access to the British interior that the Romans had recognized long ago in situating their own city. Lundenwic – to borrow once more from Tolkien – was Lake Town to Londinium’s Dale: a wooden market town erected in the long shadow of its shattered stone forebear, awed by the splendour of its predecessor’s memory but haunted by its doom.
There are no maps of Lundenwic. There are, in fact, no maps of London at all before the sixteenth century. What we understand of the Anglo-Saxon street plan can only be pieced together from fragmentary mentions of roads and boundaries, from the road-names and the street plan of later periods, and from archaeology. The settlement occupied an area between two Roman roads that ran from east to west – one at the southern edge of the settlement and the other a few hundred yards north of it. They were already centuries old by the time of King Offa (r.757–96). The northern route is still followed by the line of what is now Oxford Street and High Holborn. Originally the Roman road to Silchester, this was a major highway connecting London to the wider countryside and onwards to the kingdom of Wessex. At what is now Marble Arch, this road crossed the Tyburn Brook and met the junction with Watling Street. From Essex in the east all the way to the west Midlands, Watling Street took travellers from Lundenwic to the heart of Offa’s Mercia. In the tenth century it was still recognized as a national artery of major military significance – a charter of King Edgar (r.959–75), dated to the beginning of his reign, described it as the wide here stræt (‘wide army street’).11
For at least a thousand years, the place we now call Marble Arch – the crossing of Watling Street, the Silchester Road and the Tyburn Brook – has been a potent landmark, a place of communal memory that thrums with ghosts, rough justice and legal assembly. The name of the stream has become synonymous with public hangings: the last execution to take place there (of the highwayman John Austin) was carried out on 3 November 1783. From the Tudor period onward, the gallows was a triple-beamed structure, like a massive wooden version of those odd plastic bits of miniaturized garden furniture one finds in takeaway pizza boxes. Now a strange memorial to the ‘Tyburn Tree’ stands on a traffic island at the junction of Edgware Road and Bayswater Road: three young oak trees, one for each leg of that morbid timber tripod. As these trees grow, their branches will intertwine, tangling with each other into a weird simulacrum of the awful structure that once loomed in their place; roots feeding on tarmac-sealed death, limbs creaking with swinging ghosts.
For the Anglo-Saxons, the crossroads was the location of the Ossulstone (Oswulf’s Stone). This was a mysterious monolith that served as the meeting place of Ossulstone hundred, a regional division of the county of Middlesex that – though it excluded Southwark and the city within the Roman walls – included much of modern London and all of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Lundenwic. It marked a place under the open sky for the freemen of the hundred to hear the king’s laws and pronouncements, to discuss and dispute with their peers, to settle grievances and see justice done. In cases of serious wrongdoing, guilt was often determined by the number (and the status) of the ‘oath-helpers’ who would swear to the innocence of the accused. Whilst penalties were not always extreme (most cases were settled by the payment of fines that related to the status of the injured party), the most serious and recalcitrant offenders could pay a high price. Hanging and beheading were the most common means of capital punishment, but burning, drowning and stoning – as well as a range of unpleasant mutilations – were also handed down to the unfortunate.
Today the area is dominated by a different monument, the funereal arch of white marble that was moved to the entrance of Hyde Park in 1851. This great rude hunk of architectural salvage from aborted plans for Buckingham Palace stands self-consciously adrift on its traffic island – unsure of its purpose, unmoored from its surroundings, a baroque obsolescence washed up on the flagstone beaches of the mystifying archipelago that (after the arcane traffic schemes of the 1960s) now lies along the chaotic littoral of London’s West End. Of the original stone monument – Oswulf’s Stone – there is no longer any trace.fn4
For the people of Lundenwic, however, it was the southern road that held the greater everyday importance during the eighth and early ninth centuries. Connecting the Roman walled city (and the church of St Paul’s) with an area of timber-built settlement encompassing what is now Covent Garden and the surrounding environs, the road ran just to the north of the sloping Thames foreshore, overlooking and providing access to the water. Before the twelfth century it was known formally as Akeman Street (Akemannestraet), from the Old English name for Bath (Acemannesceastre), the Roman city where the road terminated its straight-line drive through the western shires of England.13 But to the people of Lundenwic, just as to modern Londoners, their local stretch of this great road was almost certainly known by association with the shoreline that it shadowed: the Strand, a word unchanged in sound, form or meaning from the Old English (strand: ‘shoreline’, ‘beach’, ‘bank’).14
Craven Passage is one of the many crannies that riddle the city behind the grand façades, the modern steel and concrete. These are the mouseholes of history, the places where forgotten vistas and lost walks cling on in the shadows, pattering footsteps and muttered voices caught when the traffic dies away, when the light dims – a stone tape-recording. The Passage, the dingy underbelly of Charing Cross station, is a brick and flagstone vault that bores beneath the platforms of the Victorian
