Gross sights and smells of England, and London style

HUBBUB: FILTH, NOISE & STENCH IN ENGLAND

By Emily Cockayne

Yale University Press, $35, 336 pages

London — After a Fashion

By Alistair O’Neill

University of Chicago Press, $24.95, 240 pages

REVIEWED BY JAMES SRODES

A friend of mine recalls being on a drunken revel in Beirut with Kim Philby, on a

Christmas Eve shortly before the notorious British turncoat spy for the Russians escaped to Moscow. Philby masqueraded as a Times correspondent, and both men turned nostalgic for London’s Fleet Street newspaper district and the pubs thronged with drunken journalists like themselves.

“Ah, to be in Fleet Street on Christmas Eve,” Philby exclaimed. “And see the peas and carrots steaming on the sidewalk.” He never saw London again.

A coarse anecdote to be sure. But it is advance warning that at least one of the two books under review is not for the weak of stomach. For while Samuel Johnson is correct that “[w]hen a man is tired of London, he is tired of life,” the London of history and even of today is a rough place to live for those of delicate sensibilities.

“Hubbub,” by British scholar Emily Cockayne, is just the book for readers who have savored the rowdiness and earthy chaos of the London of Hogarth prints (especially “Gin Lane” and “A Rake’s Progress”) and the dining-seduction scene in the film “Tom Jones.”

The book is more broadly gauged in that she has also done exhaustive research on similar conditions and trends in the university town of Oxford, the manufacturing center of Manchester, and the stylish holiday-health spa for the rich at Bath. But the focus remains on London, from the medieval enclosed village of Elizabeth I and the 1600s through the 1770s when it rivaled Constantinople in size and sprawl and was unrivaled in wealth by any capital in the world.

The evolution of great cities is at root the story of how each city’s culture and attitudes about living together change over time to meet changing circumstances. So this is a story about people, and it is one that is thoroughly researched and written with a light but informative touch.

The London of Queen Elizabeth I was certainly big enough for its time, but most of its 200,000 inhabitants still lived and worked within the city walls, originally built as fortifications. If the citizenry were ugly, diseased and in an almost-permanent state of rebellion about something or other, it was because there were few certainties about healthful and congenial living, and much of what was certain was just plain wrong.

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