Sadiq Khan is killing literary tradition. My great-aunt Virginia Woolf would be horrified

Telegraph

22-06-2025

Walking through Westminster I always think of my great-aunt Virginia Woolf's words: 'One feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night… a particular hush, or solemnity, an indescribable pause; a suspense before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed.'
While Big Ben is now booming out across the city, there isn't much else that my great-aunt would recognise. London has changed quite a bit over the past few years, especially under Sir Sadiq Khan. The first London Mayor to win a third term, Khan has repeatedly pledged to end rough sleeping in the capital, to tackle air pollution, to increase living standards for Londoners, and to end crime on the streets.
And yet in Westminster and across central London one is these days confronted by spreading tent encampments, roadworks and rubbish-strewn streets. One-way traffic systems are everywhere, pedestrianised zones, bike lanes weaving in and out of buses, and baffling roundabouts. Certainly devoted readers of Mrs Dalloway – the most popular and most 'London' of her books – many of whom are making the pilgrimage to Bloomsbury this Sunday to mark the novel's centenary, might not recognise the London of its pages.
Born in Kensington in 1882, Virginia Woolf was a Londoner to her core, from her earliest years in Hyde Park Gate, the childhood walks around Kensington Gardens and the Round Pond, and visits to the South Kensington museums. As a young woman, London was the epicentre of her social life and creative milieu, as part of the famous Bloomsbury Group. This included Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey, the adventurous and sometimes scandalous group of artists, writers and political thinkers who (according to Dorothy Parker) had 'lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles'.
London was also the inspiration for Virginia's writing and her solace in low moods, as she struggled throughout her adult life with the depression which would eventually overwhelm her. She found escape from her thoughts through walking, or as she called it 'street-haunting'. She walked alone through Westminster, Regent's Park, Bloomsbury, unseen, collecting and absorbing the sights around her, always trying to capture some essence of the city and its people: 'I stop in London sometimes and hear feet shuffling. That's the language, I think; that's the phrase I should like to catch.'
Clarissa Dalloway, just like her author, felt that walking in London was 'better than walking in the country', allowing her to escape and lose herself in 'that vast republican army of anonymous trampers'. The novel takes place on a single day, Wednesday 13 June 1923 (and this so-called 'DallowDay' is celebrated every year in the heart of Bloomsbury by wonderfully eccentric Virginia devotees from America and around the world). It follows the heroine from early morning through to the evening of the day on which she is giving a large formal party. Hence those evocative opening lines: 'Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.'
Virginia adored W1 and the surrounding area, sending Clarissa Dalloway off to buy gloves on Bond Street. In her diary from the early 1920s, Virginia recalls 'a fine spring day. I walked along Oxford St. The buses are strung on a chain. People fight and struggle. Knocking each other off the pavement. Old bareheaded men; a motor car accident etc. To walk alone in London is the greatest rest.'
So why isn't Sadiq Khan celebrating London's rich literary legacy? Our city streets are steeped in fictional characters, in the sights and sounds of our most famous literary scenes, the haunts and the houses of authors beloved the world over. It's not only Virginia's Bloomsbury and Clarissa Dalloway strolling through Westminster, it's Charles Dickens's Camden Town, Anthony Trollope's Mayfair, Wordsworth 's Westminster Bridge, Robert Louis Stevenson's Hampstead, Arnold Bennett 's Clerkenwell, Arthur Conan Doyle's Baker Street, to say nothing of George Orwell and Henry James – the list is endless.
We should be shouting from the rooftops about London: not in a contrived 'city of culture' way, but to preserve our unique literary heritage and capitalise on it. Instead of the relentless virtue-signalling, the rainbow-painted crossings and the Windrush line, what about an Orlando line, a Pickwick line or a Sherlock Holmes line? Instead of which, taxi drivers taking tourists into these parts of central London are increasingly trapped and gridlocked – as a Bloomsbury cabbie said to me yesterday: 'It's a bloody nightmare.' There are a few blue plaques, but every one of the famous squares could display public information, art and writings from that iconic bohemian set. Children at London schools should be reading and visiting our best London authors, their houses and local streets, getting excited about growing up here.
Instead of waging war on drivers with his low traffic neighbourhoods and Ulez schemes, the Mayor could focus on what's already here, he could welcome curious literary pilgrims from around the world and show off everything London has to offer. Instead of the rainbow flags, why not emblazon the images of our greatest London writers on the side of buses? Why not display their writings across the TfL network to inspire commuters and tourists as they travel across our capital city? At London airports too, we could welcome and inspire visitors with a reminder of our truly unique literary heritage.
The irony is that Virginia Woolf would be a fabulous woke icon for the Mayor if only he knew it, the most rainbow of all writers, with her rumoured lesbian leanings and her passionate love affair with Vita Sackville-West. Just look at Virginia's gender-bending Orlando (1928) in which the main character transitions sex from male to female, a ground-breaking novel which she admitted to Vita 'is all about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind.' Instead of slapping a trigger warning QR code on her statue in Tavistock Square, why not celebrate her as a feminist and gay icon, and an experimental literary genius?
One hundred years ago Virginia mused on London: 'For heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh… In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge, in the bellow and the uproar, the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men, in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment in June.'