The London Spy aka Ned Ward: pub landlord and chronicler of the chaos, smells and characters of early modern London life. Ned is something of a literary hero of mine. Well before the likes of Henry Mayhew, Ned was tirelessly meandering through the streets of his city, entering its establishments and publishing newspaper articles with observations of the characters and characteristics within. In his trawling, heady and often scathing descriptions he brings alive the colours, sounds, smells and atmosphere better than any painting or etching I have seen. Travelling with Ned you are given a time traveller’s license, he holds your hand and delves you in, in congruous disguise, into the depths of the bustling, stinking, sometimes sinister and sometimes joyful world of eighteenth century London.

I stumbled across Ned last year, when deep in the midst of my MA research. As I read the first few lines of his book I knew I was on to a winner and felt like a mudlark, having spent hours scouring the murky banks of the Thames and stumbling at last upon a glistening glinting nugget of history. His prose was rich with humorous metaphor and brimmed full of atmosphere – a stark contrast to many of the dry and moralising religious pamphlets I had become used to.

In one passage, he and a friend visit a coffee shop where:

‘a parcel of muddling muck-worms were as busy as so many rats in an old cheese-loft; some going, some coming, some scribbling, some talking, some drinking, others jangling, and the whole room stinking of tobacco like a boatswain’s cabin’.

His distaste for this place proliferates and he continues without abandon:

‘Being choked with the steam that arose from their soot coloured ninny-broth, their stinking breaths and the suffocating fumes of their nasty puffing-engines, my friend and I paid for our Mahometan gruel and away we came.[1]’ (Mahometan gruel being a contemporary slang term for coffee).

The series sees him and a friend sauntering through the streets of the city, past St Paul’s, Ludgate, Newgate and Smithfield, eventually through St James’ Park and then on into Westminster. Finally they travel back up through Charing Cross finishing at the Tower.  That many of these sites are still with us makes his prose come alive all the more, I can envisage walking those same pavements with Ned’s book in hand trying to recapture his observations in my mind and I intend to do just that.

[1] Ned Ward. The London Spy. Reprinted edited version of 1709 edition. (London: Folio Society, 1955) 13.