PD Smith

In the early 1850s, following the death of his father, Charles Dickens suffered from insomnia. At night he wandered restlessly through what had become the largest city on the planet. On one of these ‘homeless night walks’ through a London cemetery, he imagined the city populated by its past residents:

‘It was a solemn consideration what enormous hosts of dead belong to one old great city, and how, if they were raised while the living slept, there would not be the space of a pin’s point in all the streets and ways for the living to come out into. Not only that, but the vast armies of dead would overflow the hills and valleys beyond the city, and would stretch away all round it, God knows how far.’

Few cities can boast a railway line for the dead. The London Necropolis Railway station was constructed by the London Necropolis & National Mausoleum Company, specifically to serve their Brookwood Cemetery, 25 miles away in Woking, Surrey. The Company’s logo was, somewhat ghoulishly, a skull and crossbones.

The station opened on 13 November 1854, just outside London's Waterloo station on the London and South Western Railway. Trains took coffins and mourners from the ‘Necropolis station’ — located between York Street (now Leake Street) and Westminster Bridge Road — directly to platforms within the cemetery. By 1874, 64,000 people had made the journey from the Necropolis station and been buried at Brookwood.

In class-conscious Britain, even funeral trains were divided according to class, and this applied to both the living and the dead passengers – although of course these only needed a one-way ticket. Indeed, the trains had carriages reserved for different classes (First, Second and Third) as well as for Anglicans or Nonconformists. At Brookwood there were even two stations, one for Anglicans and the other for Nonconformists. Each station was also provided with its own licensed bar. The divisions in Victorian society lasted up to the very edge of the grave.

When the free-thinker Charles Bradlaugh died in 1891, 5,000 mourners took the train down to Brookwood. No one was dressed in black. The 150 or so mourners who attended the cremation of Friedrich Engels on 10 August 1895 at Woking Crematorium also travelled from the Necropolis station. His ashes were later scattered from the cliffs at Beachy Head in Sussex.

Prior to 1900 there was a daily funeral express, down to Brookwood and back. To make way for an expansion of the mainline station, a new Necropolis station, designed by Cyril Bazett Tubbs, was built at 121 Westminster Bridge Road from 1900 to 1902. By the mid-1930s, trains were only running twice each week, much of their business having moved onto the roads.

On 16 April 1941 the station was hit by bombs during an air raid, damaging the lines. It was never rebuilt or re-opened. However, the entrance to the station used by First Class ticket holders – both the quick and the dead – still stands in Westminster Bridge Road, a permanent reminder of a very different London. I photographed it last year. The station and cemetery is the subject of Andrew Martin’s novel The Necropolis Railway (2003).

Sources:

Charles Dickens, ‘Night Walks’ (1860), cited from Dickens, On London (London: Hesperus, 2010), 77;
Ben Weinreb, The London Encyclopaedia (1983; repr. London: Macmillan, 2008), 992;
Ed Glinert, London’s Dead (2008), 215;
John M. Clarke, ‘The London Necropolis Railway’, Cabinet, 20 (Winter 2005/06);
Wikipedia

James Mather has written a fascinating and largely favourable review of City for this week's Spectator (7 July 2012). Here's a taster:

"The book...is a rich kaleidoscope celebrating urban life in all its aspects. It is neither a sustained narrative nor a polemic, but takes its cue from the episodic construction of city guidebooks. This conceit works well, helped along by copious and colourful illustrations. No city, let alone the universal city, can be seen entire. Smith's approach is to take the reader on a series of tours, which are consistently well-written and researched - and impressively eclectic - that reveal his subject matter in myriad small glimpses. [...] Smith's book is at once a hugely enjoyable read and an inspiring vision to aim for."

You can view a PDF of the review here.

I began my book City with a section on the theme of Arrival. For me there is one place that symbolises the hopes and fears of everyone who has ever arrived in a city, hoping to begin a new life: Ellis Island. Immigrants were dealt with on Ellis Island from 1892. In the years to 1919, no less than twelve million people passed through this gateway to America. Nearly half settled permanently in New York City. It has been estimated that almost 40% of Americans have an ancestor who passed through Ellis Island.

I visited Ellis Island in 1998 as a tourist and found it a deeply evocative space, with its unforgettable views of the soaring towers of Manhattan - the promised land, as one immigrant, Jacob Riis, described it. For those who were turned away, this little island in the shadow of Lady Liberty became the ‘Island of Tears’, to quote a contemporary journalist.  But those who successfully passed the medical examinations and the questioning (How much money do you have? Have you been in jail? Have you been an anarchist?) were free to take the fifteen-minute boat ride to the city of their dreams.

The modernist writer Djuna Barnes used a rather sinister image to describe the sight of New York from the water in her essay 'The Hem of Manhattan' (1917):  ‘As we rounded the Battery, New York rose out of the water like a great wave that found it impossible to return again and so remained there in horror, peering out of the million windows men had caged it with’. As the new immigrants, fresh from the traumatic experience of Ellis Island, approached the Barge Office at the south east corner of Battery Park, near Castle Garden, they must have been awe-struck by the skyline of Manhattan, home to the world’s tallest buildings. Their prayers had been answered and their dreams were about to come true. ‘I thought I was in heaven,’ recalled one. ‘My God – was this a city on earth or a city in heaven?’

In Henry Roth’s novel Call It Sleep (1934), Genya Schearl watches New York from the ferry, after passing through Ellis Island:

‘Before her the grimy cupolas and towering square walls of the city loomed up. Above the jagged roof tops, the white smoke, whitened and suffused by the slanting sun, faded into the slots and wedges of the sky. She pressed her brow against her child’s, hushed him with whispers. This was that vast incredible land, the land of freedom, of immense opportunity, that Golden Land.’

A bewildering array of emotions must have consumed those immigrants as they prepared to step foot on American soil. Intense joy mixed with a growing feeling of anxiety. It was, after all, their first day in the New World.

You can view a full-colour sampler of the first section of City, including the essay on Ellis Island, here.

The author Mark Lamster has interviewed me about my book and about urban history for Design Observer. He liked City, describing it as "a magnificent achievement". One of his questions was: Given the opportunity to live in any of history's great cities in their respective heydays, where would you go? Here's part of my answer:

Berlin in the so-called Golden Twenties. It was a deeply troubled city that had experienced the hyperinflation of 1922-23, when newspaper presses were used to print banknotes. There were regular street battles between the Nazis and the Communists. But paradoxically it was also an incredibly dynamic city, attracting some of the era’s greatest artists, writers, scientists and filmmakers. It was a concentration of talent that has never been equaled in Europe. Albert Einstein went there, as did Leo Szilard, the scientist who first realized how to unleash the power of the atom. Bertolt Brecht was there and the opening of his and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera in 1928 became a night people remembered all their lives. The Berlin artist George Grosz used to walk the streets with a sign reading “Dada über Alles”. It was the city of Alfred Döblin, whose modernist novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) is one of my favorite depictions of big city life. His novel echoes with the lost sounds and sights of Berlin: faces glimpsed amongst the crowds, snatches of conversation, phrases from songs and advertising hoardings, newspaper headlines, the rattle of trams in Berlin’s streets, and the squeals of dying animals in Berlin’s vast new slaughterhouse. Berlin’s heady mix of danger and creativity encapsulates everything that makes urban life so endlessly fascinating and alluring.

Read the whole interview here.

Since Jonathan Glancey's and Jonathan Yardley's reviews of City appeared at the beginning of June, there have been many more favourable pieces on my book. Here are a few quotes and links:

“It’s a wonderful book: BLDGBLOG meets Italo Calvino. Gorgeous, smart, fun, and full of surprises, like wandering all the world’s great cities at once … Irresistible”
— David Dobbs, Wired.com

"From megalopolis to small urban spaces, we cannot deny that the power and influence of cities is truly global, as Smith argues. This book is a perfect way to understand the globalised phenomena hidden behind the word 'city'."
— Ethel Baraona Pohl, Domus, 29 June 2012

"...handsome and well-written...the great strength of City is that it gathers in one place myriad themes and angles, providing generalists with a highly readable, pithy resumé of centuries of city-related happenings and trends. Authors such as Alain de Botton and Iain Sinclair have covered similar territory elsewhere, but Smith is less pretentious and and less opaque than either..."
— Chris Moss, Times Literary Supplement, 15 June 2012

"The range of material is breathtaking, but Smith wears his erudition lightly. The prose of City is smart and fast-paced, with a nice balance between big picture history and close-up details. The book is full of "aha" moments and occasional humor. This one's a must read for history geeks."
— Pamela Toler, Shelf Awareness, 29 June 2012. Starred review.

"Smith's prose is clear-cut and confident, and the book features stunning illustrations, most of them in colour...Smith is especially adept at capturing the incessant human interaction which characterizes city life, from carnivals to street demonstrations and graffiti. Readers can virtually smell the pho sold by a street vendor in Hanoi, or marvel at acrobatics of skateboarders along the Thames. An absorbing and timely book.”
— Marc Vincent, Cleveland Plain Dealer, 24 June 2012

More reviews and comments here. City is available as a hardback or as an e-book on Kindle (UK & US) or iPad. Buy at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com | Barnes & Noble | Bloomsbury |Indiebound | Waterstones