The Spirit of London

The Spirit of London
Boris Johnson

First published as Johnson’s Life of London, now released with new material following Jubilee and Olympic celebrations in 2012. This updated history of London shows that the ingenuity, diversity, creativity and enterprise of the city are second to none.London’s buildings may be famous, London’s history may be lengthy and illustrious, but it is London’s people who have given, and continue to give, the city its exuberant and exhilarating profile.London of the Olympic and Jubilee summer displayed Londoners on a world stage, but this is a city which has always lived on the energy and skills of its people, drawn to the capital from all over the country and the world.Boris Johnson shares with us his pleasure at London’s vitality and unique character, and selects the people who in his view have contributed so much to the spirit of London – some very famous figures, some more obscure. He includes everyone from the Romans to one of the author’s predecessors as mayor, Dick Whittington; from John Wilkes (a strong upholder of the freedom of the press) to J.W. Turner; from Chaucer to Gandhi, and through to modern times.Due to the limitations of some ereaders, it is not possible to show some special characters.

Dedication (#ulink_ddbc1a75-9f48-593d-b2ae-b01c928568fd)

For Marina

Contents

Title Page (#u20eab617-26a9-5497-b44f-4e8654b0576e)

Dedication

Prologue: An Unexpected Triumph

London Bridge

Boudica

Hadrian

Mellitus

Alfred the Great

William the Conqueror

Geoffrey Chaucer

Richard Whittington

William Shakespeare

Robert Hooke

Samuel Johnson

John Wilkes

JMW Turner

Lionel Rothschild

Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole

WT Stead

Winston Churchill

Keith Richards

The Midland Grand Hotel

Epilogue: Mo Farah

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Boris Johnson

Copyright

About the Publisher

Sundry interesting London inventions have been interspersed in the text

PROLOGUE (#ulink_78bbb2c1-0f14-5ad1-beeb-0007116fe51a)

An Unexpected Triumph (#ulink_78bbb2c1-0f14-5ad1-beeb-0007116fe51a)

We all have moments when we think we have really blown it, when we realise we have committed – or are in the process of committing – a goof that is irretrievable and from which there can be no realistic hope of return.

Such were my feelings, round about 9.30 pm, on Friday 27 July 2012.

It was the night of the Olympic Opening Ceremony. I was sitting in the special politburo seats in the stadium at Stratford, with Marina on my left and the Duchess of Cornwall (aka Camilla) on my right. Not far down the line was Her Majesty the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Prince of Wales, the PM, Sam Cam, International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge and the Countess Rogge, Lord Coe, Lady Coe, Michelle Obama, Mr and Mrs Mitt Romney and about 134 heads of state and government from democracies and tyrannies around the world.

We were all acutely conscious that there were about a billion people watching London, and it was a matter of national honour that we should not be seen scratching or picking our noses or behaving in any other unseemly fashion.

I was so overwrought that I will not deny that I had refreshed myself freely at the excellent VIP bar. But I can assure you, gentle reader, that this was nothing to do with the problem that overwhelmed me.

I was engaged in animated conversation with Camilla, who is every bit as wonderful as her most passionate advocates will tell you. She works blindingly hard, and has helped us a great deal in London to publicise campaigns against rape and domestic violence. She was enjoying the spectacle, and I kept leaning forward, toady-like, to make some point or other – to identify the flag of some nation, or to explain why the proceedings seemed to be partly in French. As I shifted my weight (over 16 and a half stone) I felt a little give in the seat beneath. It had been hitherto a comfortable perch, made of padded white leatherette, as swish as the rest of the Olympic stadium. But as I leaned a bit further forward, the underpinnings seemed to wheeze and bend with strain and then …

CRACK

… something serious snapped beneath my right buttock and after seven years of preparation for the Games, after all the speeches I had given about how ready we were, after all the trouble we had taken, as a country, to look competent and efficient I discovered in a millisecond of horror that I had bust my chair and that I was being pitched forward like a sack of coal or a keg of beer or a greased piglet on a tin tray.

And my head was going straight for Camilla’s lap.

As I dived unstoppably for the concrete floor, I reflected on the disgrace. I would have to say that I was drunk. It was the only excuse.

I couldn’t possibly blame the workmanship of the Olympic Delivery Authority, not after we had spent the thick end of half a billion pounds on building this stadium. I thought about the headlines, the savagery of the Olympo-sceptic press. I thought of the TV footage, the absurd sight of the Mayor of the Host City suddenly slipping forward and out of view, like a soldier shot out of line in a Napoleonic battle.

With effort I avoided collision with the knees of the Duchess and grovelled on all fours in front of her like some wheezing retriever; and I thought, as I prepared to haul myself back up, before global derision, that it wasn’t the first disaster of the evening.

It can now be revealed that a large chunk of the VIP party almost missed the ceremony altogether. For some reason it was decided that we should all take a bus from St James’s Palace through the rush hour traffic to East London, and we set off in plenty of time. There was the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition and Mrs Miliband, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and various bemedalled heads of the Army, Navy and Air Force, as well as other important ministers and spokespersons. You could have founded a perfectly viable country with that cast list. We had the great Sir Keith Mills, the unsung hero of the Olympics and the man who had done so much to secure the Games for London, we had all sorts of Olympics honchos who had offered up the best part of a decade to preparing for this moment, and we had an excellent driver. But no one had explained to him, with sufficient clarity, about where to exit from the A12, and indeed it turned out, as the evening wore on, that no one was able to explain. We got lost.

We noticed that we were passing the same anti-capitalist protest for the second time. We could see the mystic meccano of the ArcelorMittal Orbit getting closer then edging tantalisingly away. We appeared to be going round and round East London in ever-widening circles and it became increasingly clear that neither Sir Keith nor the driver nor anyone on board had a detailed plan as to how we should penetrate the Olympic Park, and a sort of panicky hilarity took hold of me – an unreal sense that this was beyond anything dreamed up by Armando Iannucci or the satirical scriptwriters of the sitcom Twenty Twelve.