Lurid, traumatic and intimate
“Darkhouse Lane, [an] alley at Queenhithe leading down to the river, marks the approach to ancient public stairs giving access to the water.”
This lane, described matter of factly by Charles Pendrill, no longer exists. Like so much of London, it is mutable; folded through fire, shrapnel and collapse. Its history — and it does appear, in countless little asides, echoes, and reverberations through the story of the city — dates back to the very earliest foundations of London; a fetid and lively passage between the stew-dark river and the city which fed from it - and feeds from it still. Today, in its place, stands Dark House Wharf and the blocky, rueful massif of the Northern & Shell Building; former home to the Bank of Hong Kong and, latterly, headquarters of a global media company which — across the long sump of the 1990s and 2000s — has seen a dizzying array of media properties fall into and out of its hands; chewed up and spat out by increasingly nebulous corporations and funds of ambiguous finance.
Hot sunlight turns into cooked apple. Cigarette stained, cold like the dead of a star. The Northern & Shell does what so many buildings, designed as financial institutions, do with their architecture, and their practices; they make themselves obscure, just as they rear up - incomprehensibly large - in our sight. It is gigantic - but impossible to see inside of. It says: I am important. More important than you. But you’ll never know quite what I’m up to. Finance — a dire ecosystem of assurances, gestures, hurried little whispers — has no body, no clothes. So it must shroud itself in dark and viscous armour; in a wry, anachronistic nod to digital pixelation, its envelope studded with outcrops of blue and black glass. So too, the media empire which followed on its heels, having dealt in titles that scratch our seemingly unending itch for the lurid, the traumatic and the intimate; celebrity gossip rags and shiny softcore, wrapped and bound in glossy, smiling print. The building is dark, trading in often secret desires. It clothes itself in blank and reflective cladding while laying bare our most private confidences, secrets and wants.
One recent historian of London remarks on the “strange continuity” between this dark, obscurant building and the name of the lane which preceded it. Dark giving unto darkness; “suggesting that on certain occasions the city may act almost as an echo chamber.” Its secret life persists. You can mute brick and stone, but histories - these are driven into the very soil. And they will make themselves known.
But perhaps the ties go deeper than the simple naming of darkness. What of the material continuity of a place across the span of centuries?
A kind of pandemonium
In Act III, Scene 2 of All’s Well That End’s Well, Shakespeare gives passing reference to the bleak thrall of a ‘darkhouse’ - a “seat of gloom and discontent.” A malodorous place, which, as one later chronicler suggested, might better describe “an old word for a madhouse”; a darkness both literal and speculative.
London’s early history thrills in the presence of darkness; fog-wrapped, mildewed and darkened - an architecture of shadow that might drown you. But this place of gloom also has very real and extant outposts, even if it whispers at the edges of the strictly material plane. After all, Ned Ward — in the 1709 edition of his London Spy — makes coarse reference to “a kind of pandemonium, called the Darkhouse at Billingsgate” - the eponymous ancestor of the stacked heap of the modern Northern & Shell. The Darkhouse - by an act of peculiar continuity - occupied the very site where this modern tower of dark glass stands today.
Ward would stay one night with his companion in this uncertain place. In the morning, he walked away with a pretty sour opinion:
“after satisfying our tun-bellied hosts, we left the infernal mansion to the sinful sons of darkness, there to practice their iniquities.”
Of course, Ward was not so revolted as to avoid spending the night there. Drink. Fucking. Gambling. Etc. A later historian refers to it as a “canyon of depravity,” adding yet more weight to the spatial metaphor of its physical inertia, its sunken mass. A canyon, a void, a deep place hidden from the waking eye. A place where you might go to deal in depravities - to satisfy the lurid lusts of the workers and customers of Old Billingsgate, the legendary fish market which once occupied this central London site.
Today, of course, the market has found a new and modern home amongst the skyscrapers, financial institutions and warehouses of Canary Wharf. Another instance of peculiar continuity between past and present; the link between fish flesh, darkness and finance seeming almost immutable in the history of our city.
The city’s hidden organ
In its heyday, Old Billingsgate was an organ of the city; a grinding mechanism designed to satisfy the physical fact of the ever-growing population and its straining appetite. It was a fish market; a place where, in Ward’s time, “huge quantities of perishable merchandise were sold and large fortunes realised.” It was part of the alter-economy of London; the pre-dawn mirror-world which still continues to exist in the fact of the pre-economy of night workers who service the body of the day-time city; cleaners, road sweepers, baristas and cooks. Fishmongers and florists and butchers who carve, slit and cut their wares hours before the city workers wake up.
It is a world unravelled by Francisco Garcia in a recent article for Prospect, who observes: “many Londoners will never see them. But the office cleaners and night wardens, healthcare workers, bus drivers and hotel receptionists that keep the city running in the dark make-up over a third of London’s total workforce.” It is a vast and amorphous workforce, a shadow population who remain in the darkness; left behind just as Ned Ward walks away, blinking and dumb, into the London sunlight. To operate in the world, London makes gestures behind its back.
Constance Reid returns us to this world, remarking on the eponymous street where the Dark House was found - “taking its name from a ‘dark house’ on the corner that was known as a notorious rendezvous of fishwomen and seamen.” This is Ward’s “infernal mansion”, a place of assignation, of secret transaction that had persisted across the centuries. The lane’s abundant darkness would have suited these clandestine intimacies, stolen quickly and without ceremony only yards from the sucking silt-bed of the ancient Thames. Walk to this site today and feel its cleanness, its confident assurance. A geometric building of impenetrable armour. Spotless paving slabs. Granite benches. An iron rail (round and as cold as stone) runs along the murky flank of the Thames. There’s not a fish in sight; and barely any people. The building might as well be empty; an infinite void.
And yet, the stench of rotted meat and the brine of the river can be taken away, but they can’t be obliterated. They remain in the stone; hardened and absolute. The city has an olfactory memory, libidinal and sly. Centuries ago, the sellers of fish would raise umbrellas and shrouds over their wares, to fend off the weak sun and the flies, while lighting smutty candles amongst the silver fins and scales, “at three in the morning and in winter at five.” The city’s appetite began to gnaw long before many were awake, still fidgeting in unlit rooms. It dug its heels in to the clayey, messy mud.
It is a place captured in a largely forgotten print by French engraver Gustave Doré (1832 - 83), who — in 1872 — captured the cloying closeness of Dark House Lane. As he observed:
“the air is filled with mingled odours of fruit and fish. The herring-merchant contends, in this Araby, with the wholesale vendor of oranges. Oyster-shops, with cavernous depths in which hasty men are eating, as my companion has it, "on their thumbs;" roomy, ancient fish warehouses and fruit stores on the north side—and only fish everywhere on the south—with here and there peeps of the Poolyard”
Rot, intimacy, fruit and fish. There are “roomy” spaces, “cavernous" depths”, warehouses and tight squeezes. The print — reproduced below — tells a story of mucky revolt; of fish bodies piled in thick, chunky rows while leering, peering shoppers squirm through the cloistered pack of merchants and buyers. It is a throng; dismal and euphoric.
Dore was accompanied in his expeditions across the capital by writer Blanchard Jerrold in addition to a team of plainclothes policemen. Life — amidst this “picturesque tumult” (as he called it) — was not always safe. A gentleman might get lost in these squirming little alleyways. In the published book of these engravings, penned by Jerrold, the lanes are described as “dark and greasy.” To come into contact with the Dark House is to assume something of the nature of the fish; wet and blinking amidst all this submerged gloom.
And yet, the perception of Dark House Lane — cloying, dangerous, decadent — might obscure the fact that it was also just an ‘ordinary’ London street. People lived here, worked here. They sought their fortunes and favours amongst its packed, reeking alleyways and secretive little rooms. A writer in the 1843 edition of New Sporting Magazine recounts a particularly appropriate anecdote, of a wife’s rage at finding a suspicious note in her husband’s pocket, reading: “Lucy. Darkhouse Lane.” The association of the place, and the other woman’s name, is clear. Ready to “rip his eyes out,” the husband explains that this letter is really just a business card for “Mr. Lucy’s well-known fish shop at the corner of [the lane].” Perhaps both truths are simultaneously real; the speculative and the lived. The real darkness might exist in the murky space between them.
The more things change
The peculiar continuity between Dark House Wharf — with its bullying mass of hard glass, blocky envelope and cloudy stone — and the Dark House that gave the building it name, is one founded on fish, finance and fucking. On the enticing story of speculation, finance and desire. There is a link; unbroken, albeit invisible, across the years. Even centuries ago, Londoners like Ward found themselves both repulsed and attracted to the squalid intimacies of this sly “pandemonium,” just as we find ourselves hooked on the lurid revelations of gossip rags and the smutty stories of tabloid journalism - on the wares that this place, however invisibly, plies today. The fish may have been evacuated, just as the splendour of all that rot and dead fruit have been vacuumed from this once thronging site. But still, a little rot remains - even behind darkened, occluded windows and hardened doors. Secrets are sold, photographs placed by sub-editors in layouts and pages. Suggestive, secretive and often questionable content is dreamed up, parcelled up and shipped out into the world. Stories that play on our fears and desires. The market has been surgically removed from the body of the city. But the sale still goes on.