The London ear

The opening bars of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s A London Symphony (1914) are scooped out from the gloopy bedrock of the city. Vaughan Williams was dredging through the same mud, silt, slime and ooze as those scene-setting paragraphs of Our Mutual Friend (1865), where Charles Dickens shows that the real glue binding his book together will be the River Thames.

Dickens’s famed ‘boat of dirty and disreputable appearance’ berths Our Mutual Friend in the earth and experience of London. Similarly, Vaughan Williams’s cellos and double basses, which launch his symphony, plod out from the sludge of the river. But, by the time his bucolic Scherzo waddles into view, you could be forgiven for assuming that RVW has taken a genteel amble around the countryside. Little about his sepia mood-music suggests a city on the cusp of the modern age.

Dickens becomes the seedbed of a whole tradition of London literature, from Arthur Conan Doyle to Will Self, Patrick Hamilton to Martin Amis. And what did Vaughan Williams’s symphony spawn? Precisely nothing. The project of making a classical music of, and about, London was unceremoniously dropped in a ditch.

Could tapping into an inherent sound of London even be possible? That question has wormed its way through my brain for years, and two newly published books have brought it back to the surface. Iain Sinclair’s London Overground: a Day’s Walk Around the Ginger Line takes an orbital journey around the city. The newly completed London Overground circuit allows the pyschogeographically minded author to take a fresh measure of the city. Sinclair tags the terrain by writer. Battersea was Angela Carter’s patch; Camden connects to one-time resident Arthur Rimbaud; Chelsea’s new-build Millennium Harbour feels like a J.G. Ballard dystopia waiting to happen.