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  The centre of London, the point from which all distances to the capital are measured, is actually Charing Cross, 100 yards west up the Strand, but walking up out of the Tube subway it’s impossible not to be struck with the impression that this is it, the city’s hub, with Nelson and his huge exclamation mark like a You Are Here arrow spearing down from on high. To your left, at the end of Whitehall’s stately procession, rises the famous clock tower of the mother of parliaments; turn 90 degrees to the right and through Admiralty Arch lies the distant regal mass of Buckingham Palace. In a city starved of grandly sweeping vistas, Trafalgar Square manages two. It is the only place in London where you can stand with your feet on the ground and survey the seats of both monarchy and government.

  I thought about this as I patiently circumnavigated the square’s outer perimeter under scurrying grey clouds, a circuit which required sixteen minutes and the road-safety input of no less than fourteen illuminated green men. Trafalgar Square’s history, I recognised, has largely been shaped by this symbolic centrality. Londoners have gathered here to protest their grievances against the state and to celebrate its triumphs and anniversaries; for decades they came here too to seek its mercy. By the 1880s more than 400 people were sleeping rough in the square every night, fed and clothed by charity volunteers; as late as Orwell’s time it was still the default option for London’s short-term homeless.

  In the street-party age Trafalgar Square’s bunting rarely gathered dust. A photograph I’d seen of the 1910 Coronation parade shows Nelson’s Column done up like a maypole, fulsomely bedecked with flags, flowers and ribbons. In 1918 the victory celebrations got rather out of hand: if you look harder than I clearly did you can still see scorch marks on the column’s base where ‘Dominion soldiers’ burned down a watchman’s hut.

  The authorities’ phobic response to any public gathering in the square can be traced to its sporadic 150-year history of attracting protestors. Even in the square’s planning stages they’d been worried. In 1848 thousands of Chartists assembled in Trafalgar Square, and in 1887 an estimated crowd of 20,000 unemployed men and youths were expelled from the area with such robustness by a force comprising half of London’s policemen that some 1,500 demonstrators were hospitalised. The capital’s unemployed were reluctantly allowed to gather at Trafalgar Square every Sunday in the early thirties, and it was regularly thronged with anti-appeasement demonstrators before the war and CND marchers after it. That 1990 poll tax riot might have been the first serious bother the square had seen for over a hundred years, but that didn’t stop the immediate imposition of yet more draconian public-order regulations.

  I know this because pegging it perilously through the rabid yells and parps of duelling white van men and into the eerily calm square beyond, I found myself presented by a precis of relevant bye-laws affixed to a lamppost. Last updated in 1999, in no fewer than fifty-six clauses these represent as fulsome a definition as you’ll find of the college principal’s wits-end diktat to his Animal House miscreants: No More Fun Of Any Kind. You cannot lie down in the square or even look as if you might be about to. You cannot land a helicopter, which I suppose is fair enough, or carry a kite, which isn’t. You cannot even, ‘unless acting in accordance with permission given in writing by the Mayor’, ‘use any apparatus for the transmission, reception, reproduction or amplification of sound, speech or images’. Go into Trafalgar Square with an Instamatic or a Walkman, in other words, and without Ken Livingstone’s signed permission you’re in contravention of the Greater London Authority Act.

  Looking around, it was clear how successful they’d been. Despite being backed on most sides by monolithically sober colonial headquarters largely put up, to his inevitable relish, in the immediate pre-Clunn era, Trafalgar Square in the mid-thirties was a far more diverting location for a promenade. The scarcity of traffic helped, of course, as did the continental border of trees. The main departure, though, looking at my 1935 photo of a square filled with sun and people engaged in many activities subsequently proscribed by the Greater London Authority Act, were the adverts. In 1842, the wooden screens around the half-finished stump of Nelson’s Column had been liberally flyposted with For The Benefit of Mr Kite-style circus shows, and the capital’s first electrically illuminated hoarding – advertising Vinolia soap – went up here in 1890, beating Piccadilly Circus by three years. As the capital’s bull’s-eye, it was only natural that Trafalgar Square should attract its bullshit.

  But what glorious bollocks the hoardings displayed in the thirties. Could anyone really have taken umbrage at a huge rooftop clock with ‘BILE BEANS’ writ large across its illuminated face? Or the neighbouring slogan for Zam-buk: ‘For all SKIN TROUBLE rub it in’? I for one would have had them listed and preserved.

  The adverts have all been banished, and now they’re trying to eliminate the last and most notorious of Trafalgar Square’s anarchic idiosyncrasies. Though here at least, as demonstrated by the youth on a mountain bike joyously pedalling at speed through a panicking flock of thousands, they’ve come up against resistance. Pigeons first gathered in Trafalgar Square before the column was finished – for such enthusiastic navigators it was an obvious geographic meeting point. By the late Victorian era sentimental Londoners were feeding them oats, and the entrepreneurs soon moved in: feed the birds, tuppence a bag, as the old seed-seller sang in Mary Poppins. My sunny thirties photo is generously punctuated with little shadows congregating around stooped silhouettes whose complicated hats mark them out as old ladies, and under the aegis of these dedicated avian custodians Trafalgar Square’s post-war pigeon population soared to 60,000.

  A reflex terror of the world beyond their beaks is one of the pigeon’s defining qualities, but at Trafalgar Square they learned to conquer many of their manifold fears. Coupled with mankind’s quest for photographic novelty, this docility assured that as London entered the tourist age the square was to witness some truly hideous tableaux: figures with outstretched arms, their entire upper bodies concealed behind a hundred flapping wings and beaks and deformed pink feet. It was like watching the grotesque public humiliation of failed scarecrows.

  In 2000, Mayor Livingstone decided enough was enough, and took away the last birdseed seller’s licence. Because this was Britain, the protests rang out shrilly: bill something as ‘the biggest and most barbaric pigeon cull the world has ever seen’ in any other country and you’d be inundated with ticket requests. Today, the thirty or so members of the Pigeon Alliance distribute up to 100 kilograms of birdseed a day in the square, keeping the population up in the low thousands. Notables rushed to support the cause: celebrity spoonbender Uri Geller, TV writer Carla Lane – the list has ended.

  I’d made tentative contact with the Alliance and been told they visited at midday, but the appointed hour came and went with no sign of human activity around the unwatered fountain that accommodated most of the cooing flutterers. An already leaden sky was now browning over with the promise of snow, and above their respective national headquarters the Canadian and South African flags whipped tautly in a stiff, chilled breeze; perhaps the weather had put the pigeon fanciers off.

  Two unhappy looking figures in fluorescent bibs were stamping about by the left-hand lions, and reading the legend ‘Heritage Warden’ emblazoned across their yellow backs I went across for a chat.

  ‘They haven’t been turning up that regularly for a while,’ said one, a Scotsman, asked to explain the Alliance’s absence.

  ‘Pain-in-the-arse nutters,’ offered his more forthright female colleague. ‘One woman always comes up to me and rants on about pigeons being better than people.’

  I expected to hear this hypothesis questioned and was not disappointed. ‘I get shat on about twice a week,’ she said, bitterly flicking a Doctor Marten at an encroaching bird. ‘People say they’re rats with wings, but they’re not. They’re worse.’

  The pigeon, it must be said, is not an easy creature to love. He eats fag ends and phlegm. He has fleas and craps in your crisps.
He out-rabbits rabbits in the shameless fecundity stakes, breeding six times a year to spawn young who are crapping in your crisps just two weeks after hatching. He is prone to blighting mutations of foot and face, mutations that would inspire pity for any other beast, but breed only further contempt for the mindless, soulless pigeon.

  The Scotsman wandered off and for a while my discourse with his colleague turned to the apparently more rewarding aspects of her professional life: directing foreign students to the nearest KFC, breaking up impromptu demonstrations, pulling prostrate pissheads up off the benches, photographing Japanese tourists. ‘I’ve taken more snaps of Trafalgar Square than anyone else alive,’ she confided touchingly, simultaneously gesturing half-hearted disapproval at three kids riding on a lion’s back. A Norwegian tourist came up to ask where in the square the thanks-for-the-war Christmas tree her countrymen donate to London every year is erected; the warden showed her, then murmured to me that the one Finland gives to Belgium is always bigger. She even let me in for a peek around Britain’s smallest police station, a one-man granite-walled cylinder hewn out of a squat, jumped-up bollard. On a shelf I noted a rusty set of meat scales and an enormous pair of cartographical dividers: ‘Lost property,’ she said, mysteriously.

  But spend any time in Trafalgar Square and you will find it impossible to keep pigeons off the verbal agenda for long. Wrinkling her nose in disgusted loathing at a hobbling, beakless freak, she returned to the theme with a gusto whose candour I feel it only proper to alert you to in advance.

  ‘We get dead ones every day, but I won’t touch ’em. Leave ’em for the cleaners. Saw one cop it under a taxi this morning,’ and here she failed to suppress a smirk, ‘head over here, body over there. And the other day . . . well, it shouldn’t make me laugh . . .’ – but my, how it did – ‘a couple of them got their heads tied together with some cassette tape or something and every time one tried to take off, the other sort of . . .’

  And because words could never hope to capture the slapstick hilarity of this scene she now began to re-enact it, hopping alarmingly about with one hand circling her own neck and the other round an invisible stooge’s. A Mediterranean couple with an open A–Z and furrowed brows approached, assessed her performance and backed quietly away. When she had finished the Heritage Warden dried her eyes and told me a story about what happens when a pigeon ingests baking powder. I think you can probably guess how it ends, but for those with inquiring minds and washable carpets I can reveal that crushed Alka-Seltzer apparently works just as well.

  She was preparing to distress some other tourists when the sun dropped dramatically below those ominous clouds, spilling a sea of gold in St James’s Park, a sea which flooded through Admiralty Arch and up to our lions. It was a staggeringly glorious prospect, and speaking for both of us she shielded her eyes and breathed, ‘Fantastic. Isn’t that fantastic?’ For quite a time we squinted wordlessly into the gilded vista. At length she sighed, ‘I know I’m in the wrong job, but . . . look at all that.’ And as she spoke she passed an outstretched hand from Buck House to Big Ben and all the burnished history between.

  It was a pity about the pigeons, the traffic, the Bile Beans clock and the fountains – drained, apparently, for regrouting, their guano-spattered blue tiles suggested a long-forsaken municipal lido – but however unpromising the scenario Trafalgar Square couldn’t keep its majesty to itself for long.

  Thanking the warden for our time together I walked back through the square’s movingly silent centre, the eye of London’s storm. Approaching the middle of the wall behind, the square’s northern periphery, I spotted a sort of oversized letterbox trying to glint in the sun. Inside it, as I noticed having walked across, were strips of dulled brass labelled ‘Imperial Standards of length at 62º Fahrenheit’; dated 1876, here were the Imperial inch, the Imperial foot and the Imperial yard. My heart swelled to see just how literally London had set the world’s standards, and sank only slightly when contemplating the looming obsolescence of every stated unit of measurement. We’d had it, baby, and whatever’s happened since you can’t take that away from us. Then I looked up at Nelson, and pondered with a slight wince that before the night that was just beginning had ended, I’d be back down the road.

  Following the unfocused sprawl of the orange set and the stations, Vic and Marge’s procession through the reds was refreshingly straightforward: walk up the Strand from Trafalgar Square and just after you pass the Law Courts you’ll notice the road has become Fleet Street. A whole set without one turning. During that journey, however, you’ll pass through more years of history than those spanning any other property group: begun in 1829 and now very nearly finished Trafalgar Square is one of the newest addresses on the board; named after an Anglo-Saxon word meaning ‘tidal inlet’, Fleet Street is very likely the oldest.

  Running from Hampstead to the Thames, the perennially disgusting River Fleet was channelled underground in 1766 and now serves only as a sewer. The river’s disappearance did for many of Fleet Street’s traditional industries – notably the grotesque and malodorous tanning of animal hides – but alongside the usual taverns, freakshows and brothels (right back in 1339 a resident was charged with ‘harbouring prostitutes and sodomites’) one survived. William Caxton’s protégé Wynkyn de Worde printed his first book in Fleet Street in 1500, by which time Richard Pynson – future Printer to the King – was already knocking out copies of The Canterbury Tales and text books for Eton. By the end of the seventeenth century dozens of printers and bookbinders were operating in the area, and in the early eighteenth Fleet Street’s first newspaper, the Daily Courant, opened its offices there. Two was company when the Morning Advertiser set up shop over the road, and a century on the crowd was almost out of control.

  Huddled blearily up to the steering wheel, so tired that parallel parking was out of the question, I bumped up on to a wet, black kerb at the top of Fleet Street and stared dully at the clock: 3.50 a.m., the time when all radio newsreaders sound like Lord Haw-Haw and all DJs like Noel Edmonds. Before me the street fell away down what had been the Fleet’s valley, then rose up to the softly illuminated St Paul’s, dome and shoulders above the offices. A police car screamed past in a blur of noise and light; a trio of binmen watched it without interest as they heaved cardboard computer boxes into their dustcart’s jaws.

  For some time, give or take the odd delivery driver or rattling, empty night bus, that was it. I’d almost drained my Thermos of caffeine syrup – it’s always hard to know how much sugar to put in these things – before the first pedestrians stumbled towards me: a groggy derelict loudly preoccupied with expectoration and two shivering office cleaners in blue nylon housecoats.

  I hadn’t expected much more. All I’d hoped was to imagine the pre-dawn bustle of newsboys and news vans that until twenty short years ago hummed and clattered and bellowed along both pavements and in between. Today the press is collectively referred to as ‘what was once called Fleet Street’, but in the thirties the street’s fame as the centre of newspaper publishing spread across the globe. To fill the time I opened up the 1933 directory at the appropriate pages and tried totting up Fleet Street’s resident titles, but somewhere in the mid-120s, between Gas World and the Sierra Leone Weekly News, I gave up. Number 67 Fleet Street alone, I noted, housed the offices of twenty-five madly diverse publications, from the Nottingham Guardian to the Malayan Medical Journal. And though many of these might have been one-man operations, there only for the kudos of a Fleet Street correspondence address, plenty of the national press not only answered their phones here, but compiled, composed and printed the entire paper in the same building. Inside its brooding granite fortress the Daily Telegraph housed everything from generators to an in-house foundry. The news came in through the front door in a journalist’s notebook, and after a few short but hectic hours in the hands of the men in green eyeshades it rumbled out the back in black and white. It was the same at the Express almost next door, and the Mail across the road in Tudor Street.<
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  In the days of hot-metal typesetting there was hardly an alternative to these Caxtonian guild-era set-ups, but as soon as digital technology provided one – inevitably both cheaper and boundlessly more flexible – Fleet Street fragmented and dispersed. The Cat’s Friend, the Dundee Advertiser and the Shoe and Leather Record might already have moved out, but when the last Fleet Street issue of the Sunday Express was loaded into vans outside the paper’s splendid Deco premises in 1989 an era officially came to an end.

  Perhaps because their city’s sprawling vastness made it difficult to satisfy the human instinct to pass stories about by word of mouth, Londoners have always liked their newspapers: they had a daily rag seventy-five years before Parisians got one. Approaching the Monopoly era, however, this affection bloomed into an unsightly national love-in.

  In an age when The Times still had classified ads on the front three pages and spelt ‘economy’ with a silent ‘o’ at the start, British newspapers had plenty to offer the man in the chauffeur-driven Silver Ghost but precious little for his more numerous counterparts outside in the street. The revolution was kick-started in the early twenties by Daily Mail proprietor Lord Northcliffe, who more than any other took to heart the wisecrack about how to headline that man versus dog biting competition. Indeed Northcliffe’s Mail, though then a broadsheet in layout, set the British tabloid agenda for the rest of the century: it was the first paper to run sensationalist ‘talking-point’ features headed ‘The Truth about the Night Clubs’ or ‘The Riddle of Spiritualism’, the first to examine new inventions such as aircraft and television, the first to target women readers. ‘Get more names in the paper – the more aristocratic the better,’ said Northcliffe with unfortunate prescience. ‘Everyone likes reading about people in better circumstances than their own.’