For the old Waterloo is a place of arrival and departure, is a place where you see people crying
goodbye and kissing welcome, and he hardly have time to sit down on a bench before this feeling of
nostalgia hit him ... It have some fellars who in Brit’n long, and yet they can’t get away from the
habits of going Waterloo whenever a boat-train coming in with passengers from the West Indies ...
Sometimes they might spot somebody they know: ‘Aye Watson! What the hell you doing in Brit’n
boy? Why you didn’t write me you was coming?’ And they would start big old talk with the
travellers, finding out what happening in Trinidad, in Grenada, in Barbados, in Jamaica and
Antigua, what is the latest calypso number, if anybody dead, and so on . . .
S. Selvon, The Lonely Londoners
One grim winter evening, when it had a kind of unrealness about London, with a fog sleeping
restlessly over the city and the lights showing in the blur as if it is not London at all but some
strange place on another planet, Moses Aloetta hop on a number 46 bus at the corner of Chepstow
Road and Westbourne Grove to go to Waterloo to meet a fellar who was coming from Trinidad on
the boat-train.
S. Selvon, The Lonely Londoners
London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall.
Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired
from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or
so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots,
making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into
mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses,
scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas in
a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands
of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke),
adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the
pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the
river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and
dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of
collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on
the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich
pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe
of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his
shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a
nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty
clouds.
Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey
fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before
their time—as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.
The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near
that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old
corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln's Inn Hall, at the very heart of the
fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.
C. Dickens, Bleak House
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
"It have people living in London who don’t know what happening in the room next to them, far
more the street, or how other people living. London is a place like that. It divide up in little worlds,
and you stay in the world you belong to and you don’t know anything except what you read in the
papers. Them rich people who does live in Belgravia and Knightsbridge and up in Hampstead and
them other plush places, they would never believe what it like in a grim place like Harrow Road or
Notting Hill. Them people who have car, who going to theatre and ballet in the West End, who
attending premiere with the royal family, they don’t know nothing about hustling two pound of
brussel sprout and half-pound potato, or queuing up for fish and chips in the smog. People don’t
talk about things like that again, they come to kind of accept that is so the world is, that it bound to
have rich and poor, it bound to have some who live by the Grace and others who have plenty. A
poor man, a rich man. To stop one of them rich tests when they are going to a show in Leicester
Square and ask them for a bob, they might give you, but if you want to talk about the conditions
under which you living, they haven’t time for that. They know all about that already. People get
tired after a time with who poor and who rich and who catching arse and who well off, they don’t
care anymore."
S. Selvon, The Lonely Londoners
There was a time when whatsoe'er is feigned
Of airy palaces, and gardens built
By Genii of romance; or hath in grave
Authentic history been set forth of Rome,
Alcairo, Babylon, or Persepolis;
Or given upon report by pilgrim friars,
Of golden cities ten months' journey deep
Among Tartarian wilds--fell short, far short,
Of what my fond simplicity believed
And thought of London--held me by a chain
Less strong of wonder and obscure delight.
Whether the bolt of childhood's Fancy shot
For me beyond its ordinary mark,
'Twere vain to ask; but in our flock of boys
Was One, a cripple from his birth, whom chance
Summoned from school to London; fortunate
And envied traveller! When the Boy returned,
After short absence, curiously I scanned
His mien and person, nor was free, in sooth,
80
90
From disappointment, not to find some change
In look and air, from that new region brought,
As if from Fairy-land. Much I questioned him;
And every word he uttered, on my ears
Fell flatter than a caged parrot's note,
That answers unexpectedly awry,
And mocks the prompter's listening. Marvellous things
Had vanity (quick Spirit that appears
Almost as deeply seated and as strong
In a Child's heart as fear itself) conceived
For my enjoyment. Would that I could now
Recall what then I pictured to myself,
Of mitred Prelates, Lords in ermine clad,
The King, and the King's Palace, and, not last,
Nor least, Heaven bless him! the renowned Lord Mayor.
Dreams not unlike to those which once begat
A change of purpose in young Whittington,
When he, a friendless and a drooping boy,
Sate on a stone, and heard the bells speak out
Articulate music. Above all, one thought
Baffled my understanding: how men lived
Even next-door neighbours, as we say, yet still
Strangers, not knowing each the other's name.
100
110
W. Wordsworth, The Prelude
The changing of the seasons, the cold slicing winds, the falling leaves, snow on the land, London
particular. Oh what it is and where it is and why it is, no one knows but to have said: ‘I walked on
Waterloo Bridge,’ ‘I rendezvoused at Charing Cross,’ ‘Picadilly Circus is my play-ground,’ to say
these things, to have lived these things, to have lived in the great city of London, centre of the
world.
Oh what a time it is when summer come to the city and all the girls throw away heavy winter coat
and wearing light summer frocks so you could see the legs and shapes that was hiding away from
the cold blasts and you could coast a lime in the park and negotiate ten shillings or a pound with
the sports as the case may be or else they have a particular bench near the Hyde Park Corner that
they call the Play Around Section where you could go and sit with one of them what a time summer
is because you bound to meet the boys coasting lime in the park […]isn’t it a lovely day as if the
sun burn away all the tightness and strain that was in their faces for the winter and on a nice day
every manjack and his brother going to the park with his girl and laying down on the green grass
and making love in the winter you would never think that the grass would ever come green again
but if you don’t keep your eyes open it look like one day the trees naked and the next day they have
clothes on […]when is winter a kind of grey nasty colour does come to the sky and it stay there and
you forget what it like to see blue skies like back home
S. Selvon, The Lonely Londoners
Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour,
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
G. Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
OH, to be in England
Now that April 's there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England—now!
R. Browning, Home Thoughts from Abroad (1845)
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one,
tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries
sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can’t be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts
of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge;
in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling
and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing
of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.
V. Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
This is London, this is life oh lord, to walk like a king with money in your pocket, not a worry in
the world. Is one of those summer evenings, when it look like night would never come, a
magnificent evening, a powerful evening, rent finish paying, rations in the cupboard, twenty pounds
in the bank, and a waiting under the big clock in Piccadilly Tube Station. The sky blue, sun
shining, the girls ain’t have on no coats to hide the legs.
In the big city the sex life gone wild you would meet women who beg you to go with
them one night a Jamaican with a woman in Chelsea in a smart flat with all sorts of
surrealistic painting on the walls and contemporary furniture in the G-plan the poor
fellar bewildered and asking questions to improve himself because the set up look like
the World of Art but the number not interested in passing on knowledge she only
interested in one thing and in the heat of emotion she call the Jamaican a black
bastard though she didn’t mean it as an insult but as a compliment under the
circumstances but the Jamaican fellar get vex and he stop and say why the hell you
call me a black bastard and he thump the woman and went away all these things happen in the
blazing summer under the trees in the park on the grass with the daffodils and tulips in full bloom
and a sky of blue oh it does really be beautiful then to hear the birds whistling and see the green
leaves come back on the trees
S. Selvon, The Lonely Londoners