Bankside used to be, according to the playwright Thomas Dekker, “a continual row of alehouses”, but a few years later he changed “alehouses” to “stews” — brothels. Brothels had been legal in the neighbourhood since 1154, and a foreign visitor to Bankside remarked that “English women be as hot as goats”.
Bankside alone, at different times the home of bear gardens, several playhouses including Shakespeare’s Globe and now of Tate Modern, has offered myriad entertainments, and to particularise all the leisure activities the city has offered seems an impossible task but it did not daunt the journalist, critic and historian Felix Barker, or his collaborator, Peter Jackson.
Both authors would also say that it was a lot of fun, and in the autumn of 1992 the jolly odyssey appeared to be coming to satisfactory fruition as Pleasures of London. Their opulently illustrated account of the leisurely joys of London through history, with pictures dredged from both private and public collections, was about to be published by one of our leading publishers. Five years before they had received a £10,000 commission for the work from Macmillan. But it was a time of recession, and Macmillan had committed to a new 34-volume Dictionary of Art and to continuing with the 29-volume Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and the grim outcome was that Pleasures was axed. “It was an unexpected and devastating blow,” says Barker’s consultant on the book and collaborator on other publications, the journalist Denise Silvester-Carr.
Macmillan allowed them to keep their commission and freed them to take their project elsewhere. Another publisher agreed to proceed but suddenly went bankrupt, and the manuscript was lost. Not long afterwards, in 1997, Barker died, as did Jackson in 2003, and Pleasures of London appeared to have ended with them.
Thanks to Silvester-Carr’s determination, however, and the enthusiasm of the London Topographical Society, of which Jackson had been chairman and who supplied Ann Saunders to co-edit the 250-page coffee table book with her, their project has at last been published.
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It was known that after the Macmillan deal collapsed Peter Jackson, who had compiled one of the finest collections of prints, drawings and photographs of London in the world, had cautiously kept back a number of the photographs. Three years after his death, Jackson’s widow, Valerie Harris-Jackson, found among them an uncorrected copy of the lost manuscript.
“We were delighted and very keen to publish it if it could be put together again,” said Roger Cline, treasurer of the London Topographical Society. “The question was whether sense could be made of the manuscript — and fortunately, Denise, who had worked a lot with Felix, knew what his sometimes oblique cross-references meant, and where some of the missing photographs could be found.”
It was a two-year commitment for Silvester-Carr. “Even after we had the manuscript right, we had about 750 of the 800 photographs that were intended originally and we had to work out Peter’s system of filing through I don’t know how many boxes in his vast house in Northwood to find them all. Then we had to get copyright permission again for many of them,” she said.
The book is written in Barker’s inimitable style honed over more than four decades in Fleet Street, and as the author of a biography of the Oliviers, a history of the Coliseum theatre, the immense London: 2000 Years of a City and its People (1974) with Jackson, and with the Guildhall librarian Ralph Hyde of London As It Might Have Been (1982). His last book, with Silvester-Carr, was Crime and Scandal: Black Plaque Guide to London (1985).
Among many pastimes, Pleasures of London chronicles the fairs, such as at Southwark, dating from 1462 and suppressed in the 1760s for “riot and immorality”; gambling, which ran like a fever through 18th-century London, and the first lottery in 1568; theatre from medieval morality plays to Oh! Calcutta! in 1968; horse racing at Notting Hill; boxing in Leicester Square; music at Vauxhall; the Festival of Britain in 1951, and the Great Wheel, “London’s greatest and latest toy”, which rose 300ft above the roofs of Kensington more than a century before the London Eye.
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Pleasures of London by Felix Barker and Peter Jackson, edited by Ann Saunders and Denise Silvester-Carr, published by London Topographical Society, £30