The Language of the Walls
Abstract
H. J. DYOS ITIES are by nature bewildering places. They do not constitute a kind of macadamised meadowland to be understood, or supposedly so, at a glance. Their uncompromising surfaces and structures, their intersecting angles and perspectives, their contradictory demands and invitations, comprise on the contrary, or seem to do, a kind of chaos. The signs in the streets, the verbal and pictorial language of the walls, the whole rackety rhetoric of the most intensively-used spots, seem to the stranger the visible equivalent of half-a-dozen conversations overheard on the tele- phone at the same time. In time he learns the new tongues, construes the signs, makes the parts of the city that he uses coherent; but the sense he has of the urban environment, perhaps even of the urban community itself, as composed by accident lingers. This sense which city-dwellers sometimes have of living in alien surroundings, almost as if they were indeed living perpetually abroad, tends, as sociologists keep telling us, to be reinforced in many other ways. But the sense of estrangement that can be felt on the streets and in the other public places of London is not a necessary condition of living here. Nor are