Georgian London Q&A sessions almost always include a sight/sound/smell question, so when I was approached by the Dark Skies 2010 campaign to blog on Georgian London at night, it seemed the perfect opportunity for a post on images of the nocturnal city during the 18thC.

The London of three centuries ago was by no means pitched into blackness at night.  Street-lighting had been compulsory since 1417, when every householder had to hang a lantern above their door between dusk and midnight (there's a lot of the claptrap about everybody going to bed as soon as it got dark - if they did, who needed the light to see by and who was going to put it out at midnight?).  After the Great Fire there were comprehensive plans for improvements of London's streets and lighting became a serious business, with shilling fines if you didn't hang out your lantern.  Houses of 'quality' employed lantern-men or lamplighters to take care of it all for them.  Despite all this, there are enough complaints to decipher that only the bigger houses lit up on a regular basis.  It was considered just about enough if every tenth house had a decent lantern outside, to get you from one to the next without breaking your neck on a cracked paving stone.

Contrary to popular opinion, the streets of London weren't filled with ordure.  Any animal or human refuse that was tipped into the streets was collected by the scavengers who filled barrows and took it down to the dungboats moored at little jetties along the river.  They went daily down to the market-gardens to the West at Pimlico and Fulham, where it was used as fertilizer.  Dogs' mess, the curse of the unobservant modern Londoner, did not remain long on the streets: it was a precious commodity known ironically as 'pure'.  Pure was needed for tanning leather and the pure-collectors were paid handsomely by the bucketful as they delivered it to the workshops, mainly in Southwark.  I cannot imagine becoming a pure-collector was top of anyone's career choices, but a valuable contribution to daily life nonetheless.

A better job was that of 'linkboy'.  Freelancers, almost always young boys familiar with their territory, carried lanterns in front of sedan chairs to stop the lead carrier from stumbling, or escorted strangers and tourists to their destination for a small fee.  Link boys were usually dedicated urchins, and street fights regarding 'patches' were not uncommon.  Adolescent male sex-workers sometimes posed as link boys, loitering on the streets with a lantern, but their age (the age when linkboys tended to move onto other jobs) was the giveaway.  The linkboys tended to work the smaller streets where carriages and coaches did not run, but the general street-lighting must have helped the coaching services, which ran through the night all year round, heading off to distant parts of the country, or returning.

Another place where work often ran through the night was the construction site of St Paul's, behind the rough brick walls built for secrecy and patrolled by guard dogs after dark.  During the construction of the cathedral, the black night sky was as important to Christopher Wren as the daylight: the original windows were clear glass, 'for there is nothing to compare to natural light', and Wren originally planned to house a telepscope in the south-west tower, although he was later thwarted by bureaucracy.  Had he succeeded, that telescope would now sit amongst the sodium glare generated by the modern City.  (Incidentally the Blitz, such a desperate tragedy for London, was something of a boon to St Paul's Cathedral.  In December 1940 a massive bomb crashed through the roof just above the north porch.  It hit the black and white tiled floor, detonated and pushed out the east and west walls by almost eight inches, splintered the ugly Victorian porch and blew out every window of the cathedral, destroying the Victorian stained-glass.  The walls were shored up in a couple of days, and the decision was taken to replace all the windows with clear panes, as Wren had originally designed, returning the cathedral to its original calm beauty.)

In the London suburbs, such as Marylebone and Hackney, the main roads were lit by torches, kept burning by local volunteers.  The darkness that fell between each light was the danger area where footpads lurked, prompting for formation of vigilante groups to patrol the areas.  Night-time crime waves hit the city in 1728, in the late 1740s and again in the late 1760s, when it seems likely organised gangs were operating.  Otherwise, London was a relatively safe place even in the dark: girls and women with jobs involving selling milk, flowers, stalling out at markets or laundering/being a day-maid walked the streets before dawn, and there are remarkably few cases involving random attacks on females.  Still, most of those on the streets were men, either those with night-jobs, or rolling home after a session in one of London's many all-night beer-cellars located near the Strand and the theatres of Covent Garden.  One witness at a trial in the Old Bailey, when asked why he was on the street at three in the morning, responded that he had the following day off work and had gone out to fill his boots on account of his 'holiday'. 

On January 28th, 1807 gas-lighting was installed on Pall Mall, and quicky rolled out across the capital, marking the end of darkness for London.  The map above shows a city now perpetually light, shielding us from the night sky with a sodium glow.  It is perhaps, to us, the least obvious symbol of our progress towards an artificial existence.  No doubt Wren would have been disappointed not to see the stars from his beloved cathedral, but did ordinary Georgian Londoners look up at the night sky and marvel at what they saw there, or were they too busy trudging to and from work, hurrying to meet a lover, or to make the dawn coach?