The London Mysteries

Temple Church, London. © Mandy Bristow 2009

I was just in the process of updating the info section of my Facebook pages when it struck me that, although London has many stories, there isn't a collective term for them.  I quietly put forward the title of this piece as a contender for such.

I am aware that other large cities have similar mythologies.  Personally speaking, however, London is the place that I am the most drawn to.  It is my home and the place of my birth.  It's not surprising, therefore, that the tales it generates are those I love best and are close to me.

London certainly has been around for over two thousand years.  When it started it was not as grand as Rome was at the time and, thanks to the depredations of war and developers, it has nowhere near the stock of ancient buildings as the Eternal City, but if one ever ventures into the alleys of the City or the cluttered markets of the East End, you start to see the belly of the beast.  Tales set in these dark and twisting backstreets can be far darker than the most disturbing fairy tales.

The primary and most obvious mystery is that of Jack the Ripper.  The murders attributed to an unknown person who became known as the world’s most notorious serial killer took place in Whitechapel in 1888.  The theories as to who he (or she) was, or even if there was an actual Ripper at all as opposed to a series of murders connected and conflated later by an infant tabloid press, still abound today.  To me, they were a result of a morbid fascination with a squalid ghetto of the forgotten right next to the monumental financial City of London, which at that time was growing more fabulously wealthy, fulfilling its rôle as the imperial capital it had become.

The next areas of unexplainable phenomena are the hauntings and strange materialisations on the London Underground or, as it colloquially known, the Tube.  The first line opened in January 1863 and was very popular indeed.  This led to expansion of what was the first rapid transit system in the world, and still the largest in terms of passengers.  The spectres seen include not only people but also entire trains.  The appearance of these shades seems to have started quite early on after the first lines were built, and persist strongly today.  There are reportedly even ghosts that can only be seen on CCTV.

Ghosts also abound in London’s famous theatres.  It would seem that the dead’s appetite for public appearances outlives their earthly bodies as many historic auditoria experience the icy presence of the departed.  It has been claimed that the ghosts of such board-treading luminaries as Joseph Grimaldi, the father of both modern clowns and the pantomime as we know it today, and the music hall stalwart Dan Leno, both still practice their brands of slapstick on the unwary players and stagehands to this very day.  Although, as the sceptics will say “Oh no they don’t”!

We return to the Tube for our next legend.  Mutants have been rumoured to live in the underground railway.  The creatures described are both animal and human.  Rats are said to retreat, quite understandably, into the large, dark spaces where food discarded by people and shelter may be found.  Whilst this is true, some folk also think that the rats have changed bodily in order to survive better in a world under the earth.  These tales also extend to supposing that groups of derelicts have, since the late nineteenth century, taken to living there.  As time has moved on, they have bred and changed in ways unknown to us surface-dwellers.  Whilst some say that there isn’t enough room down there, others tell of abandoned stations and stretches of tunnel still there but no longer used by either trains or passengers.  It might be worth thinking about how quickly mutations are supposed to appear in mammals in order to come up with a plausible answer to biological change, but it’s not hard to work out that those who can see and hear better in the dark, and those who are stealthy and nimble would have more success in adapting to the man-made caverns of the Underground.

What are we to make of the attempts, just after the Great Fire, to remodel London with the benign influence of the Cabalistic Tree of Life?  A certain John Evelyn who worked with Sir Christopher Wren in order to help rebuild the town is said to have submitted a new street plan that resembled the Sephiroth – the Tree of Life.  This was because many eminent Britons truly believed the British were one of the Lost Tribes of Israel.  If this were so then London was to be no other than a New Jerusalem.  It might be worth remembering that, the next time you tread the streets of our capital city, that not only was it the capital city of a world-spanning empire, but that much of it was deliberately reshaped to be a British Holy City on Earth.  Some of this crosses over into my other post Nicholas Hawksmoor - Dark Geomancer?

Naturally, as a seeker down those stranger pathways of existence on this Earth I would be very pleased to hear from anyone who wishes to add to this, admittedly all-too-brief list.