Walk in the Dark

London night has been lit four ways in its history. By moonlight. By oil light. By gas light. And by electricity. If you were born at the end of the 18th century, you could have lived in three of those great eras of illumination; treading as a child through the warm liquid quiver of oil light, then in youth excitedly seeing the first gas lamps lit on Beech Street and Whitecross Street in 1807, where the Barbican now hunkers down, before finally, old and uncertain, witnessing the harsh, overwhelming birth of the electric age, the most potent of them all, on the Embankment in 1878.

As humans, we war on darkness, frightened of its grim latency. And wary of the people who move comfortably in it. A person walking towards you on a pavement in broad daylight doesn’t even raise an eyebrow. A person walking towards you on the same pavement in the dead of night can raise the hairs on the back of your neck.

As much as anywhere has won the war on darkness, London has. It never gets much darker here than evening time, except in little elusive pockets, rural enclaves like the belly of Clapham Common, or certain neglected alcoves buried in backstreets where electricity hasn’t bothered to penetrate. And yet the city at night still attracts us. London is a beautiful place to walk at night. It always has been. And people have always been compelled to do it, pulled werewolf like out of their beds, out onto the moon bathed streets. 

Before Covid banished London nightlife, I used to walk home after nights out, happy and inebriated. I looked forward to that swaying walk almost as much as the chatter and drinking of the evening itself. The half lit, half silent 3am streets were the perfect counterpoint to the thumping, sweating noise of a bar or club.

I would often be out in central London, and walk back east, into Aldgate, the real, ancient heart of London, walled by the Romans to keep the indigenous people at a safe distance. A walk like that, executed in an unsteady, drunken gait, would take me about an hour, the perfect length for a walk, long enough to fall into a meditative, appreciative state, but not so long as to tire or bore you. Certainly nothing compared to the marathon treks of perhaps London’s greatest nightwalker, Charles Dickens, who would walk all night, visiting resonant places from his childhood, creeping up to the walls and touching the cold stones of Newgate Prison, listening for the night cries of its inmates, walking in the rain, revelling in the beauty of the shadows, the fog and the gaslight.

My walks were shorter than that. But they suited me. I was always shocked at how just a few steps could transport you from crowded, throbbing streets to eerie silence. The ying and yang of sound. If I was in Soho, I would step out under the Pillars of Hercules pub, and down the thin, urine soaked Manette Street (itself named after Doctor Manette from Dicken’s A Tale of Two Cities), past the guitar shops on Denmark Street, and emerge in Central Saint Giles.

Here there was no one. The sounds of Soho were thin, attenuated, all that human joy and fire glossed, softened, made beautiful and philosophical through the faded detachment of just a few streets. I would stand there, my head buzzed, my legs softened, let silence settle like a blanket, let my eardrums acclimatise after the brutalisation of the preceding hours.

But was I actually alone? You are never completely alone, not in London. Suddenly a bundle of clothing shifted. I jumped. I had thought it a bin bag, but a movement revealed humanity. And not just one. The night came alive around me, writhing, figures swaddled in doorways, under awnings, sharp eyes peeping out from blackened hoods, under the lips of a café, a noodle bar, people huddled near the glass of a Japanese restaurant, perhaps hoping for the fragrance of food, proximity to an edible dream.

I saw them in the churchyard of St Giles in Fields, littered like the dead. The homeless often bunch and sleep around churches, hoping for the drift of God, the legacy of alms and charity, the sudden whip of a miracle. The orbit of a church is a zone more dense with charity than other places. St Giles in the Fields was the site of a leper colony almost a thousand years ago. The most reviled people of the medieval world were cared for there, as their skin thickened and dried, their eyebrows fell off.

In the 1700s, St Giles was the last church on the way from Newgate Prison to the hanging tree at Tyburn, and churchwardens would bless the condemned and then pay for them to have a pint of ale at the pub next door, calming the soul, quenching the thirst. Thus fortified, prisoners would roll on, heading for their final journey, crowds lining the street, screaming and cheering, thrilled by the ultimate severity of the moment. St Giles has always been a refuge for the truly desperate, the sickest of the sick, the poorest of the poor, those condemned by society to hang by the neck until dead.

And in the 21st century, the destitute still seek it out. People from every nation, washed up on the shore of London. I have seen them queuing in the bitter cold for a cup of hot soup in the churchyard, their bibulous faces smudged and smeared in true Victorian fashion, and then seen them slumbering in the moonlight, their heads resting against the gravestones of victims of the Great Plague. This zone of London is dense with generations of suffering and mercy, and even the shiny new multi-coloured buildings of Central St. Giles, formerly home of Google and various slick PR agencies, cannot completely rinse the legacy of the years away.    

Twenty minutes later, now firmly in the dead of night, I would pass through Holborn Circus, which opens up like a river, wide and beautiful, flooding across the viaduct, the blood red dragons on Holborn Bridge, squat and belligerent, marking the boundary of the old city. The light would be soft, spell-like. My footsteps would sound strange, detached from my body, almost as if I was being followed. But turning around, there was no one, just the equestrian statue of Prince Albert, in the middle of the circus, tipping his hat mischievously to me, telling me to hurry out of Central, away to the east.

I would look left, up towards Smithfield’s, home of the martyrs, and the oldest continuously operated meat market in the world. This was the spot where Watt Tyler was cut down by the Mayor of London, in more violent times, in times when a London mayor thought little of killing someone with his own hands, in broad daylight. On a night like the one I was passing through - on the very same spot where the blood of Protestant and Catholic martyrs would mix with the blood of pigs, cows and lambs in little rivulets between the cobbles - ravers from all over the world would in a few hours be creeping out of Fabric, their pupils bulging, their hearts thumping and stammering, clutching bottles of water, winding their way home as the sun rose.

I would smoke cigarettes on nights like those. When I walked. I am not a smoker. But there is something addictive about keeping your hands moving, especially when you are on your own, as if activity will keep you safe, chase away the oddly human sadness of doing nothing. And there is a hierarchy of intoxications too, wherein the milder chemical appears to chase away the effects of those above it: the person barrel rolling through eternity under the influence of some drug may glug a beer to cement themselves two-footed on the earth again, and further down the ladder, when I had drunk too much, I would drag greedily on a cigarette to clear my head. Each vice, grim on its own, placates the one above it.

I would feel the palm of my thumb chaffing on the flint of the lighter as I walked past the Old Bailey, the flame shivering and dancing, conducted by the night breeze. There, Newgate Prison had once stood. It was demolished in 1904. But it had been attacked many times before that. On a warm summer night in 1780, a mob had burnt it to the ground, one of the most violent incidents in the last thousand years of London’s history. William Blake, another great nightwalker, had been picked up by the surging crowd and carried to the front of Newgate Prison, witnessing its immolation, the freeing of three hundred prisoners. These were the men and women destined to die at Tyburn, to anesthetise themselves with alcohol at Central St Giles, often for crimes that today would barely warrant a year of incarceration.

They were almost cooked alive in the belly of the prison. Blake could hear them shrieking as the night sky turned orange, but at the last minute the mob hacked into the jail, smashed the cells, broke the irons, and pulled the convicts out into the night.

Further on, I would pass St Paul’s, its dome blue and beautiful, its belly full of dead heroes, the immortals, artists and architects, their bones collected from across the world, brought here, entombed. Only the very greatest are now remembered, the extraordinary amnesia of a constantly changing society fading the rest of away. They lie there, commemorated with the most grandiose of sentiments etched into granite, the words ‘we shall never forget’ written ad nauseam, whilst swarms of people flow past just on the other side of the cathedral walls every afternoon of the year, indifferent, unaware. There is a lesson. Don’t sacrifice yourself for the memory of posterity. It scarcely has one.

But if there’s ever a time for remembering, it’s the night. London seems even more historic at night, because it’s divorced from the overwhelming ‘nowness’ of its living people. In the day, contemporaneous concerns swamp everything else, people zipping to and fro, making appointments, making money, dreaming of money, texting, laughing, gazing at tomorrow. But at night, with the people stripped away, the city reasserts its age, its historical weight, its remarkable depth. We are left with the actual city, the stones and the concrete, built and imprinted upon, the physical legacy our ancestors.

There is a wonderful comment from the writer V.S. Pritchett: “London has the effect of making one feel personally historic.” It is true. That is how I feel walking past St Paul’s at three in the morning. Living on ground that so many people have lived and died on, in a place where so much has been done and accomplished, the city of Dickens and Darwin, of Marx and Maxwell, so many ideas birthed, so many things invented and spat out in the world, where so much greatness and misery and critical change has occurred, is to feel both small and ennobled at the same time. It is an odd sensation. To walk through London is to feel nourished by it. And you feel it more in the night, when the dead are not so comprehensively drowned out by the living.

My night journey home would start to come to an end in the Altab Ali Park, on Adler Street. A patch of tiny, rough scrubland, one of London’s tougher little parks. From there, I could see my flat, could feel the allure of my bed.

I have done many laps of this park over the years. I remember one night, stricken with a bout of insomnia, I had gotten out of bed, unable to bear another hour or tossing and turning, of sweating with rage into my pillow. I had stepped out into a warm night, in just a t-shirt.

There was a wan, sick little street light blinking in the park. The odd car cruised mysteriously down Whitechapel Road, someone or something in transit through the belly of the night, music blaring and fading in a moment from its windows.  And then I saw a homeless man, ragged, stretched like a plank between two large park boulders. Face down, his cheek and shoulders on one rock, his legs from the knees down on the other, his stomach just suspended in the air. The position seemed comically uncomfortable, and yet he was sound asleep, breathing deeply, whistling gently in the dark. I stopped, stared. I just stood there in the semi-darkness, fat pouches puckered like oysters under my red eyes.

I could have cried. I couldn’t sleep even when armed with pillows, blankets and duvets, ear-plugs and meditative music, all the accoutrement of comfort and slumber. And yet here he was, one of the forsaken of the earth, without even a bed to his name, sleeping on the rocks as sweetly as a baby. Inner peace? The stupefaction of large quantities of cheap alcohol? I don’t know. But I would have traded places with him, just for one night. Then I moved on, wishing the path was longer, that there was more walking to do, more journey. But it was almost over.

And a final memory. Walking home at 2am from a friend’s 30th birthday. I lived in Borough at that time. Half way over London Bridge I stopped, went to the side of the bridge, the Thames twisting like black rope underneath me, frightening and alluring. I could hear it whispering. Although happy, I could almost imagine how people make that jump. There is an alluring eternity about the Thames, its strong, guttural sound, the constant, heedless motion, the conduit to another world, like time itself. Turner died looking at this river. After a lifetime painting it. Here, in London. And long vanished civilisations used to throw the bodies of their dead into this river, to be carried away.

Suddenly I realised that at last, I was completely alone. Not even a tramp on the bridge. It was bizarre. Post-apocalyptic. But gentle at the same time. I gripped the concrete softly with my hands. I felt like I had arrived from a different era, or a different planet, blundered into a great civilisation that had been snuffed out in an instant, removed from the scene by some catastrophe that had left the buildings and the infrastructure as beautiful as ever, but robbed all the people away. How can a human stand on a great bridge right in the middle of a great city in the 21st century, the century of noise and overcrowding and mania, of constant contact and observation, and not see another human being? It felt freakish. Like the city was just mine for a moment, no one else’s, and it was showing me a picture of itself that no one else would ever see. I breathed deeply. I might never again in my life be totally alone in London. A moment alone like this could be remembered forever. That is the magic of the night.