This church is St Mary-le-Bow, and the bells up in that steeple decide, by law of tradition, who counts as a real Londoner. Because to be a true Cockney — a genuine East End Londoner, the accent, the whole thing — you have to have been born within the sound of Bow Bells. These exact bells. If your first cries reached this steeple, you're the real article. If they didn't, you're just someone who lives here.
It's a lovely idea. It also creates one of my favourite quiet catastrophes in London. Because a few years ago, someone actually did the maths. They took modern traffic noise, and the fact that cities are just louder now, and they calculated how far the sound of Bow Bells actually travels today. In the seventeenth century it carried for miles, across open fields, over most of the city. Today? It reaches a small patch of the City and a sliver of Shoreditch. And that patch is all offices and banks and building sites. There are no houses in it. There are no maternity wards in it. Nobody
is being born inside the sound of Bow Bells anymore, because the only places you can still hear them are places where no one lives. The true Cockney is now, mathematically, a person who can no longer be born. An entire identity, quietly zoned out of existence by traffic.
These are also the bells that, in the old legend, called Dick Whittington back to London when he'd given up and was trudging o
