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London is a small, grand city. Or rather, two small, grand cities: the old and older city in the east, settled by our Roman friends, presided over by the uncontestable beauty of St Paul's, and made ever more prosperous by the keen and avaricious mercantile men who think and labour there; and the city in the west, younger than its brother but venerable enough, rooted in the authority of the Westminster, and home to the long dead affluent. To the north it is bounded by such marginals as Paddington, Marylebone, St John's Wood (the only tube station to share no letter with the word 'mackerel'), and the now disreputable Kings Cross. The river Thames delineates the southern border and anything south of that may be safely ignored as far as our two small, grand cities are concerned.
Of course statisticians will cry foul at this geography, and point out that London occupies a vastly greater area (varying according to each report), is home to many millions of people (again varying and probably un-knowable), and whose boundaries stretch ever further and in all directions. I cannot argue with these knowledgeable men, except to say that when I have heard people speak of London, both visitors and locals alike, I have heard them speak of the monuments and palaces, the museums and theatres, the architectural wonders, the bridges, the squares, the towers, the churches, the cathedrals, the abbeys, and the parks. They speak of other things too, but almost all of these fine civic treasures, these beacons of delight, are to be found within the borders I have drawn above. There are exceptions: Windsor is life-stoppingly beautiful, but it is not in London, and neither is mazy Hampton Court.
And so our two cities can be considered small, almost as small in fact as when they were founded and started to grow all those many years ago. The industrial revolution brought several things to our two cities, but mostly it brought people. The vast migration of the land-dwellers filled the streets and lodging houses. The work houses and poor houses swelled with numbers untold and, in the end, could do no more than burst. The influx consumed all available resources and so, gradually, the map started to change. The spaces between villages first withered and then disappeared. The fields outside the borders were built upon and occupied. London began to spread and radiate, and, as it did so, what we now call suburbia was born.
Ever since has suburbia spread; consuming green fields and leafy woods; planting its iron stakes in the ground and connecting itself at every point. And as it made its slow but inevitable progress, so did it spew grey concrete structures before it, and so did it leave trails of beauty spoiled and ironmongery in its wake. It became the city's no man's land. Neither city nor country, neither rich in history nor set with the natural beauty of life; a cultural wasteland devoid of the nobility which age brings, boasting no architectural achievement, indeed, aspiring to none, and providing for the cultural oasis of the city, a desert in which to live. This is not London's fault of course. All cities are the same; they have to be, for Man has thought of no better way. Our two London cities are small, but suburbia is vast.
The place of Charring Cross originally derived its name from the hamlet of Charring, where King Edward I erected one of a series of crosses in memorial to his deceased and, it is believed, genuinely beloved wife, Eleanor of Castile. The original cross is lost to us, but the (much grander) Victorian replacement now resides in the forecourt of the pleasantly small railway terminal that bears the same name. It is this cross, someone has decided, that marks the centre of London.
Some twenty or thirty miles due east from Charring Cross, through the rude concrete jungle of suburbia, lies the equally rude concrete town of Rainsford. This town, as its name suggests, was once a fording place for the river Rain, a tributary of the Great Isis. The Rain was never a great river itself, but it is now condemned to a mean, sewer-like existence beneath ground; devoid of life, barren of hope and completely black. Rainsford is a town of perhaps fifty thousand souls, a new-town really, subject to the sterility of town planning, straight roads and flower bedecked roundabouts. It has grey, concrete car parks and grey, concrete stores. Its houses are grey too, as are its schools and public buildings, its government offices and leisure facilities, such as they are, and, of course, its roads and walkways are stone and concrete grey. If it wasn't for the dirt and grime, spread hither by the transport systems, or the litter, strewn thither by the citizens, everything would appear grey. Grey and bleak and without beauty of any kind.
The last time I went there, I was in a generous mood. I decided that I would take a good look round and if I could see or hear or feel, three beautiful things I would, perhaps, forgive it for existing. I was thorough in my search and took my time about it; but I found only one thing – the church, but that was broken and crumbling; old without being ancient, well meant but without support, loving without being loved. As i stood and looked upon my find, a mother threw two empty soda cans and some dirty tissues onto a grave, a grandmother, with true guttural menace, spat a gobbet at my feet, and a youngster, no more than twelve, encouraged me to 'f--- off aart the way mate'. It is that kind of place.
It is true that a forty minute drive from Rainsford will find you on the wildlife flats of Essex or in the ancient forest of Epping; true also that Rainsford was once prevailed upon to play host to poor king Harold; but, these things aside, there is little to recommend it.
Since Harold, there is no recorded visit of any personage from the higher classes in England to Rainsford; any member of the middle class portion finding itself stranded there would seem to have moved away; and the more noble members of the lower 'East End' variety returned to the eastern fringes of London and then, mysteriously,vanished without trace. There are no bourgeois or bohemian elements there, and such intelligentsia that exists is comprised of ethnic doctors, provincial lawyers, land agents and teachers, and the occasional aspiring local government official. The remainder, have taken occupancy in council dwellings or low price private housing, attained positions in factories, car plants, or on the lower scale in The City, and proceeded, nefariously, to create for themselves the new working, or more precisely, lower class. They had reaped the benefits of economic boom and rising property prices, they had found relative prosperity in the increasingly free market and small business monetary systems, and they enjoyed the rewards of cheap labour, goods and trade from overseas. They prospered financially and came to enjoy, for the first time, the unique social power that only affluence and property ownership brings. Power that previously only the historically rich had known. But, and herein lay the problem, they wielded this power in order to grow and promote themselves only, declining to consider, or perhaps not able to understand, that with such power must come social duty. Without service to the community around them, or a social conscience, without cultural growth or an artistic meritocracy, without the gentlemanly manners so emblematic of the Englishman abroad, or the modes of higher social behaviour to be seen in the grander houses of the land, then only a barren cultural and artistic wasteland can follow, an anarchy of behaviour, a moral vacuum, an arid well of intellectual and spiritual freedom, and an educational abyss. Thus did Rainsford 'grow', and thus is Rainsford 'growing' still.
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