Mr. Johnson's London

I suppose it’s in the spirit of the London Olympic Games that the Sunnyvale Public Library set out Johnson’s Life of London prominently on the new books shelf. Whatever—I’m glad I picked it up because it turns out that London mayor Boris Johnson is an entertaining writer and eloquent advocate for his hometown.

Johnson’s love for “the world’s greatest city” is palpable; he embraces it with all its flaws. He describes it as “like a vast multinational reactor where Mr. Quark and Miss Neutrino are moving the fastest and bumping into each other with the most exciting results. This is not just a question of romance or reproduction. It is about ideas. It is about the cross-pollination that is more likely to take place with a whole superswarm of bees rather than a few isolated ideas.”

And then he goes on to trace the civic supercollider, starting with “the pushy Italian immigrants who founded” it. He uses the construct of profiling famous Londoners to trace the city’s development. Boudicca’s rampage spurred the Roman occupiers to invest in infrastructure in their far-off colony. Shakespeare represents the flowering of English theatre, which filtered out through the empire to spark entertainment on a global scale.

J.M.W. Turner—well, he refracted light onto canvas as no one had done before. Lionel Rothschild basically wrote the £4M check that allowed Disraeli to buy the Suez Canal from the French-led consortium that dug it but couldn’t make it pay. W.T. Stead gave us tabloid journalism (becoming the spiritual ancestor of Matt Drudge and TMZ.com). Keith Richards—seriously? Do I have to explain him to you?

He doesn’t skirt the city’s problems; he just takes the bad with the good and decides that, on balance, the latter outweighs the former. But it’s not just the people, it’s their interaction in that serendipitous setting of London—and Johnson’s style in tying it all together—that makes this a wonderful read. Want examples?

Establishing the Norman court at Westminster:

“So it was that London acquired its bicephalous identity, with the centre of political power at one remove from the centre of wealth.

“Sometimes the moneymen have infuriated the politicians, and sometimes the politicians have egged on the mob against the moneymen. But for a thousand years London’s commercial district has had easy access to government—and yet been apart from it; and that semi-independence has surely contributed to the City’s commercial dynamism.”

19^th Century hygiene:

“By 1858 the smell from the river was so mind-bending that MPs could take it no more, and Joseph Bazalgette was commissioned to produce the immense system of sewers on which the city relies to this day.

“The penny had finally dropped with London’s rulers. If you let poor people live in conditions of squalor and penury, then their diseases could be transmitted to the rich.

The Blitz:

“Looking back at the Second World War, it is pretty clear that it was a disaster for Britain and for British Standing in the world. For my generation of postwar softies, brought up to fear nothing more than the sporadic campaigns of the IRA or al-Qaeda, the Blitz seems an unimaginable horror. It was more terrifying and vastly more lethal than the Great Fire of London (which killed how many? That’s right—eight people); and it went on so long—night after night, month after month, from the autumn of 1940 to the spring of 1941, and then with a resumption in 1944 and a series of deafening false climaxes like a hideous parody of a Beethoven symphony.”

Well, I’ve used up my “fair use” portion of quotes.

Johnson’s liberal arts education shines through every paragraph, as does his relish at being able to apply it to so rich a subject. You should pick it up and share in the love.