Living and Dying in London

Ever since Babylon, the great city has been damned as a great evil. Preachers and prophets, statesmen and statisticians, poets and public health experts-to say nothing of town-dwellers themselves-have accused the metropolis of being the fons et origo, the source and site of all manner of turpitude and corruption, of morbidity and mortality; and megalopolis has been judged merely the multiplier of the atrocities of metropolis. If Death could claim "et in Arcadia ego", the true force of such an observation derived from the fact that nobody needed to be reminded that the Grim Reaper's bumper harvest was being garnered every year from the labyrinths of hovels and tenements, with their attics, cellars, and subdivided rooms, that constituted the conurbation from ancient Ur to modern Mexico City. Indeed, through a rhetorical trope whose appeal has never been eclipsed, the city-whether the Biblical Sodom, Juvenal's Rome, Samuel Johnson's Juvenalian London, the "shock towns" of the industrial revolution, or the shanty towns of today's Third World-has been depicted not merely as a sink of slums and squalor, the breeding ground of disease, decadence and death, but as sickness itself incarnate, a wen, a cancer, a plague on everyone's houses. Inner-city blight and the dream of escape to rustic wholesomeness are not unique to the urban wastelands of modern times.1 Yet the great nostrum for the pestilence of the old city is, of course, the "new town".2 The story of the city in history has not been one of high-density settlements abandoned in mass about-turns, the return to Nature, to eremitical desert caves, Forests of Arden, or other Edenic wombs. It has, rather, been one of hopes of reformation, rebuilding, renewal; in practice, less an attempt to retrace one's steps to the paradise garden, but rather faith in the possibility that a garden city, an ordered city, a clean city, could be made a reality. London rebuilt after the Fire,3 or brand-new neo-classical Edinburgh,4 Salt Lake City, Brasilia or Stevenage, would be safer, more salubrious, more civilized, than the settlements they were designed to supersede. Ours is thus a phoenix vision of the city. New Orleans will be better than Orleans; Syracuse and Utica can be replanted in upstate New York in a prelapsarian New World. Cities will rise again from the ashes of hopes soured by mass crime, destitution, demoralization and pestilence. Doubtless this undying faith in the city as solution-surely the …