On The Eve Of Coronavirus Lockdown, A Walk Through London’s Diseased History
ALL THAT WEEK I HAD LOOKED FORWARD to a football match. Yet as the virus spread I knew there would be no game to watch. Sure enough, all Premier League games were postponed the day before. I think we all knew it was coming, but hoped for one last day out.
The Premier League had acted in advance of the government in deciding to suspend the season. Liverpool’s Champions League game against Atletico Madrid had gone ahead days before, a decision that has since been questioned. There were 12 cases of coronavirus on Merseyside then. There have been more than 400 deaths since. I am glad now I did not go to a match three days later.
That Saturday, I went for a walk instead. A friend who lives in south London accepted an invitation to join me (we had been supposed to go to the match together). We met at Denmark Hill station, and spent the afternoon walking from there up to the Thames, across Tower Bridge, and through the City of London to return to the riverside at Temple.
Our route took in parts of the capital where thousands had died in previous epidemics. The plague pits lie beneath the streets of the modern city, but the scars they left on London’s history seemed to stand out that day on the body of the modern metropolis.
Lockdown was still a few days away, but already Londoners, sensing danger, were much scarcer than usual. A row of restaurants with a view towards Tower Bridge was unsettlingly quiet, especially as this was one of the first weekend afternoons of the year when it was warm enough to sit outside.
The restaurants and bars would not be open much longer. As my friend and I reached the other side of the bridge, and walked beneath the walls of the Tower itself, I was reminded of Pepys’ mournful diary entry in the plague year of 1665, when he wrote that he had found ‘the alehouse at the Tower stairs’ shut up, and learnt ‘that the person was then dying of the plague’ when he was last there.
On his way, he had met ‘dead corps’s of the plague, carried to be buried close to me at noonday’. His experiences put him ‘into great apprehensions of melancholy.’
City Hall and the Thames seen from Tower Bridge. Photo by the author.
We walked to St Paul’s cathedral, and from there to Smithfield. In 1381, the Peasants’ Revolt ended here, but its causes had arguably started much earlier in the century. After it arrived in 1348, the Black Death killed ‘between one third and one half’ of the population of London. Some of the victims were buried near Smithfield. Perhaps their remains lay beneath our feet as we walked that afternoon.
The Black Death also scythed through the countryside, to such an extent that it left a labour shortage on the land–and consequent disputes over wages. These grievances continued to grow until the uprising thirty years later.
We walked along the fringes of Clerkenwell, and up to the Church of St Sepulchre. In that other great work of pestilence literature, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, the narrator talks of how the plague ‘encreased prodigiously’ in these parishes in the summer of 1665.
St James’ Church in Clerkenwell lies on my morning walk to work–in normal times–from Farringdon station to City University. The last day I spent in my office at the University, the evening streets were already quiet: the rush hour crowds thinned beyond recognition on pavement, platform, and tube train.
When I return to work at the University, whenever that is, I am sure I will not pass St James’ without sometimes thinking of those who compiled the Weekly Bills–as the death tolls were then known–for the plague-ridden parish in those deadly days of the summer of 1665.
As the poisonous Brexit debate which divided the country for three years and more has lain dormant in the time of the virus, so differences were set aside then. It was religious strife which set Londoners against one another then–and the Civil Wars were well within living memory, too.
Defoe’s narrator writes of people divided by doctrine being ‘reconcil’d at this time’ but adds ‘as the Terror of the Infection abated, those Things all returned again to their less desirable Channel, and to the Course they had before.’
A week later, the lockdown had just been announced. I have not since strayed so far from my home in west London as I did that day when I walked through the history of the diseased city, or two days later when I caught the tube home for what turned out to be the last time for more than a month. The following Saturday, I took an early morning walk along the river between Chiswick and Hammersmith.
The pubs were all shut up: not just because it was early, but because the government had ordered it. The walk with my friend the week before had ended in one of his favourite pubs near Chancery Lane–now closed with all the others. At least–God preserve us, as Pepys might have said–the landladies and landlords have hopefully not died as he found with some of his favourite alehouses.
What changes will we see? I suspect that, as Defoe’s narrator found in his age, our old disputes will flare anew once we have the energy. We may also see social change–or at least demands for it–as the peasants sought after the Black Death. However the capital and the country emerge from this, we have learnt that our more comfortable and technologically advanced lives have not made us immune from epidemics. For that at least, this generation of Londoners will merit a chapter in the chronicle of the capital’s history of disease.
All text and photos © James Rodgers 2020
Twitter @jmacrodgers