ABSTRACT
In her first published novel, Under the Net (1954), Iris Murdoch wrote that ‘some parts of London were necessary and some were contingent’ (1982 [1954]: 24). This was a philosophical in-joke of the period, but when I first read it, it seemed to me to represent a profound truth not only about London but about all great cities. At the time – I first came across the novel when I was an undergraduate – I believed that the ‘necessary’ parts of London – the old, central districts of Soho and the Law Courts, the sophisticated shopping streets in Knightsbridge, and the gracious parks and romantic residential districts such as Hampstead and Maida Vale – represented its essence. The contingent parts – suburbs, industrial estates, rubbish tips, railway sidings, dead ends, unused bits of land – were not the ‘real’ London. When travelling abroad, the parts of cities a tourist had to traverse before reaching the centre were even more contingent and one must mentally bracket them off in order to enjoy to the full the impact of the ‘essential’ city. The planless mess around Paris, the industrial wasteland of Mestre before crossing the lagoon to Venice, the suburbs of Amsterdam, were unfortunate accidents on the way to the transcendental experience that was the truth of these cities.
