I live in London
Jan. 20th, 2006 01:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kniteracyI live in London.
Can you believe that? I live in London. I got up this morning, looked out my window, across the park to the pub they’re still not finished turning into flats, and that was a London park, ringed by London trees spreading their branches against the London sky. When I leave my house in the morning, I wait for a bus that takes me to Canada Water tube station, near Surrey Quays, part of the old London Docklands. In fact, one of the streets we pass on our bus ride to Canada Water was once a canal. Canada Water is a modern-looking station. You’d almost think you were in a modern city. And you’d be right--and wrong. This morning, I descended to the train with Emmylou Harris’ beautiful rendition of Barbara Allen in my head, and I thought about the dichotomy of a modern station, a modern train, a Jubilee Line train, and fifteen minutes, three sock rounds, and just the end of The Bad Touch later, Baker Street. Baker Street with its illustrations from Sherlock Holmes stories and the little Sherlock Holmes silhouettes on the walls and the tourists snapping photographs of the silhouettes and the pictures, and the escalator ride up and up again to street level, and the Sherlock Holmes Museum across the street, and the Lost Property Office for London Transit, and bus after bus until the modern pedestrian signal says it’s OK to cross the street and pass the Turkish market with all the beautiful fresh vegetables and fruits (including, incidentally, lovely pineapples). Across the street, the tall block of flats and offices is being cleaned and is covered with scaffolding. It’s a relatively new building: the carving on the top proclaims that it was built in 1909. I think about the men who worked on that building, how just seven years later many of them would have been in Normandy, wishing more than anything to be back a stone’s throw from Baker Street, putting roof tiles on a block of flats. On the top of the building I’m walking past, a huge block of flats, the ground floor level all stores including the Turkish grocery, a little arcade of shops, a Tesco, newsagents, and the like, there is a garden with evergreen trees in it. I wonder who uses that garden. I wonder who keeps it. I wonder what it looks like. My route to the second bus takes me past the original Lord’s Cricket Grounds, which are small and lovely and look like a garden now, with benches. The bus ride takes me round Regents Park and skirts the London Zoo, and I get off the bus at Primrose Hill. And just as Nic Jones comes on the mp3 player and the bright sun is making shadows of the London Plane Tree branches against the brightly painted house fronts, just as I’m crossing the canal and imagining the people living on the little canal boats, a bell cuts through the headphones, because it’s about time for the onion man. The onion man has a cart with a dog (in a red sweater) on it, and he walks his cart up and down the street, selling onions. Today he has a box with STAR WARS insignia in addition to the onions. You never know what could be in that box. Just a few more steps and I’m at the House. The other House, the one I work at, a stark brick building, remarkable for a number of lovely spaces inside but most valuable for its library. People greet me and tell me what’s going on. I greet them back and tell them what a beautiful day it is.
The sun is streaming through the windows from another perfect London sky. London, and England in general, is all the colours of all the picture-books I ever read as a child. It’s all the streets and little old ladies and friendly dogs and onion men and great old trees and brick buildings that stay and are built to stay for hundreds of years. It’s the rosy remembered childhood of Western civilisation.
London is a city with its own personality. London is an entity. London knows where you are going and has a good idea where you’ve come from. You can be infatuated with London, but London waits until you commit before she kisses you. You can count the skyscrapers, the tower blocks rising over the uniform smokestacks of Primrose Hill bordering other people’s green-because-grass-is-native-to-this-country back gardens, but there is no way to know how many people have wondered at that skyline, how many people have admired the bare branches against a sky that really is sky blue and clouds that really are white above grass that really is green. Really is greener. Really doesn't go brown. Really doesn't need tanks full of water to keep it alive. Greener.
I live in a city that has a nearly-thousand-year-old fortress and the biggest ferris wheel in the world. And you can just about see one from the other. (Well, you can always see the Tower from the Eye, but you can only almost see the Eye from the Tower. Honest.)
I live in London. Can you believe that? I can hardly believe it. But it’s true. I live here.
Can you believe that? I live in London. I got up this morning, looked out my window, across the park to the pub they’re still not finished turning into flats, and that was a London park, ringed by London trees spreading their branches against the London sky. When I leave my house in the morning, I wait for a bus that takes me to Canada Water tube station, near Surrey Quays, part of the old London Docklands. In fact, one of the streets we pass on our bus ride to Canada Water was once a canal. Canada Water is a modern-looking station. You’d almost think you were in a modern city. And you’d be right--and wrong. This morning, I descended to the train with Emmylou Harris’ beautiful rendition of Barbara Allen in my head, and I thought about the dichotomy of a modern station, a modern train, a Jubilee Line train, and fifteen minutes, three sock rounds, and just the end of The Bad Touch later, Baker Street. Baker Street with its illustrations from Sherlock Holmes stories and the little Sherlock Holmes silhouettes on the walls and the tourists snapping photographs of the silhouettes and the pictures, and the escalator ride up and up again to street level, and the Sherlock Holmes Museum across the street, and the Lost Property Office for London Transit, and bus after bus until the modern pedestrian signal says it’s OK to cross the street and pass the Turkish market with all the beautiful fresh vegetables and fruits (including, incidentally, lovely pineapples). Across the street, the tall block of flats and offices is being cleaned and is covered with scaffolding. It’s a relatively new building: the carving on the top proclaims that it was built in 1909. I think about the men who worked on that building, how just seven years later many of them would have been in Normandy, wishing more than anything to be back a stone’s throw from Baker Street, putting roof tiles on a block of flats. On the top of the building I’m walking past, a huge block of flats, the ground floor level all stores including the Turkish grocery, a little arcade of shops, a Tesco, newsagents, and the like, there is a garden with evergreen trees in it. I wonder who uses that garden. I wonder who keeps it. I wonder what it looks like. My route to the second bus takes me past the original Lord’s Cricket Grounds, which are small and lovely and look like a garden now, with benches. The bus ride takes me round Regents Park and skirts the London Zoo, and I get off the bus at Primrose Hill. And just as Nic Jones comes on the mp3 player and the bright sun is making shadows of the London Plane Tree branches against the brightly painted house fronts, just as I’m crossing the canal and imagining the people living on the little canal boats, a bell cuts through the headphones, because it’s about time for the onion man. The onion man has a cart with a dog (in a red sweater) on it, and he walks his cart up and down the street, selling onions. Today he has a box with STAR WARS insignia in addition to the onions. You never know what could be in that box. Just a few more steps and I’m at the House. The other House, the one I work at, a stark brick building, remarkable for a number of lovely spaces inside but most valuable for its library. People greet me and tell me what’s going on. I greet them back and tell them what a beautiful day it is.
The sun is streaming through the windows from another perfect London sky. London, and England in general, is all the colours of all the picture-books I ever read as a child. It’s all the streets and little old ladies and friendly dogs and onion men and great old trees and brick buildings that stay and are built to stay for hundreds of years. It’s the rosy remembered childhood of Western civilisation.
London is a city with its own personality. London is an entity. London knows where you are going and has a good idea where you’ve come from. You can be infatuated with London, but London waits until you commit before she kisses you. You can count the skyscrapers, the tower blocks rising over the uniform smokestacks of Primrose Hill bordering other people’s green-because-grass-is-native-to-this-country back gardens, but there is no way to know how many people have wondered at that skyline, how many people have admired the bare branches against a sky that really is sky blue and clouds that really are white above grass that really is green. Really is greener. Really doesn't go brown. Really doesn't need tanks full of water to keep it alive. Greener.
I live in a city that has a nearly-thousand-year-old fortress and the biggest ferris wheel in the world. And you can just about see one from the other. (Well, you can always see the Tower from the Eye, but you can only almost see the Eye from the Tower. Honest.)
I live in London. Can you believe that? I can hardly believe it. But it’s true. I live here.
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no subject
Date: 2006-01-20 02:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-20 03:04 pm (UTC)And so do I. A gift of joy is always welcome.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-20 03:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-20 04:03 pm (UTC)CB
no subject
Date: 2006-01-20 04:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-20 05:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-20 05:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-20 05:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-20 05:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-20 05:33 pm (UTC)Thanks for the conpliments, but I think it was the music. (http://www.gwenknighton.com/lyrics.html) ;)
no subject
Date: 2006-01-20 05:27 pm (UTC)I gotta get there sometime.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-20 07:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-20 08:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-20 11:39 pm (UTC)Whereupon she threatened to cut me off if I ever moved out of the US. And I was too much of a coward to go away and be totally on my own.
I'm hoping that with more time free I'll get to go over more often. I'd love to be able to live half a year here, half a year there. Tom, otoh, doesn't even want to move out of Massachusetts! :-<
You got my dream. Couldn't have happened to a more deserving person. Unless it were me, of course. :-)
no subject
Date: 2006-01-21 03:01 pm (UTC)Ed says : "Can you say 'happily ever after?'"
Hee. What he said. ;-)
And another few things to look out for
Date: 2006-01-23 08:16 am (UTC)London didn't get designed. It grew. There were lots of little villages that gradually got swallowed up - and if you look, they're still there, complete with village greens in some cases, and still feeling that the next village down is different and foreign. And how did it grow? What was it that filled the gaps? Well, it was all the incomers, from all over the world, from every culture in existence. London is a melting pot. We've been absorbing newcomers for the last two or three thousand years, and that pot is still bubbling. And the evidence of the earlier additions is still there. I was walking through the City area once, from one concrete and glass monster to another, and passed a small open area with a sunken building in the middle. A temple to Mithras. Built by some Roman immigrants who were feeling homesick. It's still there, though I'm not sure to what extent it's still used. Go up to the Museum of London, they'll show you the old walls around the City - and the line of carbon in the soil where Boudicca burnt the place to the ground. All right, so some absorptions went a bit more smoothly than others... but she hit London because it was a major city, and that was about two thousand years ago. Take a look at the Chinatown area, it's got its own identity, but it's very much a part of the whole.
There are laws in London created because of things that happened a few centuries ago, and they're still there, and still important. Don't plan on having a thatched roof in central London, it's illegal. After that Great Fire in 1666, they were banned. When the reconstruction of the Globe Theatre was built, it had to have special dispensation, and some very elaborate fire precautions.
Try looking at who's allowed to drive their sheep across London Bridge, and when. (Hint - probably not you).
And the great thing is that this is all a continuing process of change and growth. It isn't "there's History, in a glass case". *We* burnt down those Romans, because we didn't like them. *We* used to live in tenements on the old London Bridge, and throw our broken pots into the river. Last week, last year, last millennium - it's all one story. And yes, so your ancestors wandered off to Foreign Parts for a bit, it's still your story too. What's a few centuries between friends? Now you're home, with new experiences to feed into the mix.
Re: And another few things to look out for
Date: 2006-01-23 10:16 am (UTC)Well, except for the bit which is technically still part of Cambridgeshire...
There's a pub near Hatton Garden which is on the site of the former palace of the Bishop of Ely and as such is technically to this day still not part of the City of London - the police actually aren't allowed to enter without asking permission (fleeing criminals are advised that this tends to be given!). Whilst also in that pub are the remains of IIRC a cherry tree which Elizabeth I is said to have danced around - and since she gave Ely Place to one of her favourite courtiers, Sir Christopher Hatton (hence Hatton Garden) the story could well be true.
And London has a myriad of little bits of history like this.