Long before I visited London, I knew about
Harrods. Harrods was where you could buy
anything under the sun. I knew about
double-decker buses and I understood how the mysterious Underground trains
worked.
I knew London before I ever saw it, and when I
actually did get to see it, as a 10-year-old ‘sophisticate’, it never for a
second let me down: the double-deckers were shiny and red as fire engines; the
steep white houses in Belgravia were trimmed with baskets of milk bottles and
boxes of flowers; at the Grosvenor House hotel, a sign in the dining room
announced that gentlemen were no longer required to dress for dinner. They
dressed anyway, young men in antique dinner jackets that would, years later,
appear to me to have been lifted from the BBC's wardrobe department.
London was alight with possibilities out of a favorite
picture book: Dr. Johnson's house tucked away in Gough Square; the views of
Parliament from Westminster Bridge; the Old Bailey where old judges wore silly
curly wigs and talked like judges in the movies. There was a pretty young queen
on the throne, and in front of her palace, row upon row of toy soldiers came to
life every morning at 11:30 for the Changing of the Guard.
That child's London, that city I loved so much, was
London as a theme park: tidy, glistening, held in an emulsion of sentiment and
memory, played by a perfect cast. The images of that city remain indelible, and
they show me, even as the snapshots fade to sepia, that at first glance, at
least, the cliches of travel ineluctably prove the truth. And oh, above all
else, its cobblestones smooth with age-London was old.
It was still old in the Swinging Sixties when I
returned. At Rye, a town exquisitely
dressed for the past, I dutifully called on Lamb House, where Henry James
lived, went to Chawton in Hampshire for Jane Austen, to Yorkshire for the
Brontes. Or was it Laurence Olivier in the movie version? But the music won. I
bought a miniskirt from Mary Quant; went to discos that, hewn from London's
bowels, were so dark at midday you were blinded when you emerged; and yearned
to visit the Cavern Club in Liverpool. The
music has been made part of history, co-opted by the theme park, and on the
Rock Tour of London the guide on the bus will show you where "the famous
ate and slept and lived and loved." If there's time, a visit to Beatle
City in Liverpool is the nonpareil nostalgia trip, Britain's answer to
Graceland. Ah, well, McCartney and Jagger and Bowie are pushing
“advanced middle-age”, or, as Yogi Berra once said, "It feels like deja vu
all over again."
For a decade (1989-99) Coronation Street was available for
inspection: it was a wonderful blurring of illusion and reality to walk the
street that served as the set for Britain's longest-running soap. Granada
Television opened its back lot to tours, thanks to its resident design genius, Roy
Stonehouse. There was Coronation Street, hard by 10 Downing Street, where a
jolly copper stood out front. But best of all was the exquisite copy of Natalie
Wood's dressing room-complete with fake Greek statuary and empty champagne
bottles-when she starred in Cat on a Hot
Tin Roof opposite Laurence Olivier as Big Daddy.
There are two kinds of theme
park, of course. One, like Granada's, was self-contained, where the price of
admission got you into a chaste environment, idealized, sanitized, with
thirty-one flavors, and, happily for Britain, the weather removed.
But for me, in Britain it's the
other sort of theme park that fascinates, where life imitates life and the past
pursues itself. It's everywhere: in Edinburgh, men wear kilts in bars; in
Glasgow, a city once reputed to be Europe's ugliest, public relations people
promote opera and croissants. The former proprietor, Mohamed Al-Fayed, of
Harrods made “Harrods more like Harrods, re-creating the elegance of the
twenties and thirties," or so they said, but no one said whether they could
re-create the salespeople as human beings. Omnia
Omnibus Ubique—All Things for All People, Everywhere.
Never mind, there is always
Covent Garden or tea at the Ritz, where I once met a man who could actually be
said to have been wielding an umbrella.
Consciously, unconsciously, the
natives play their parts: the cockney newsagent who sells you the headlines
calls you "ducks"; the antiques dealer in that Cotswolds village
worries about whether he can get his roof re-thatched; and locals in
Stratford-upon-Avon dress up as Stratford townsfolk. Tourists, when not
attending the plays of W. Shakespeare or consuming a Hamlet-burger, take snaps
of people who resemble inhabitants of Stratford. Window boxes are perfectly
kept.
''The Gentile’s Israel," a
friend of mine calls England. It's the British obsession with the past, with
class, both real and mercenary, that makes it a mecca for Americans yearning
for history. Brooke Astor, perhaps the
last grande dame of New York society, who's spent a good deal of her stylish
life in England, said, "Americans still do go to England to 'make it' in
society. After all, to go and dine at Blenheim would drive most Americans up
the wall with joy."
And there are peacocks cavorting
in Holland Park, and gee whiz, those window boxes! Ah, life in the theme park!
Better than Reality T.V., better than any soap. And the bride and the groom
from atop the wedding cake in the window where we press our noses have come to
life on the palace balcony, life magically puffed into them by some cosmic,
kingmaking Walt Disney. Like Mickey and Minnie, they cavort for our pleasure in
their very own nation-sized theme park, called the United Kingdom.
For decades, there's been a
version of Britain promoted that is all jolly nobles in stately homes, all teddy
bear rallies at Longleat, vintage cars at Beaulieu, weekends, for a price, at
Blenheim, complete with footmen. We love it, we want it, not, I suspect, because
we are naive suckers for the odd trenchcoat or title, but for the same reason
tourists from all over the world do - the French who call their kids Harry; the
Japanese who join Sherlock Holmes clubs; the Russians who built a Mary Poppins
Street at the Moscow Film Studios for the immensely popular Soviet version. It
works because the Brits themselves are crazy about their own past, the most
theatrical nation on earth, entranced with ritual and ceremony, tourists in
their own land.
In the 21st century, a
captain of industry longs to rent knee breeches and kneel down while the queen
taps him on the shoulder with a sword; pictures of royals sell millions of magazines;
people get dolled up like extras in My Fair Lady for Ascot; Prince Charles goes
to the mat to protect Georgian buildings.
As Britain plunges headlong into
the future, it becomes ever more concerned with preservation, renovation, the
rehabilitation and protection of its culture-much like the Victorians, who,
passionate for progress, were massively sentimental and put medieval ruins in
their gardens and crammed their parlors with memorabilia as an expression of
family values. Conservatism pays lip service to traditional values, but the
policies with which it is associated promise more change, more innovation, more
growth, more technology.
Go and see the Docklands and
London's East End renovation so huge it's called the biggest new city in
Europe. A ride on the elevated Docklands Light Railway is an experience for the
picture album, it's that good.
The few remains of the old docks
still give off a faint whiff of London as the great port city and the tiny
slices of the Dickensian city so authentic that the BBC could film
Bleak House without building any sets,
or changing anything at all.
But the warehouses at Butler's
Wharf and Cinnamon Wharf that once supplied an empire now supply the chic with
converted lofts and penthouse apartments, all glass, bricks, and views of Tower
Bridge and behind the riverfront apartments and high-rises are the rapidly
disappearing council flat neighborhoods.
The London Data Table
is a “table” in the shape of Greater London, which allows data to be visualised
and made tangible, bridging the digital and the physical. Data such as real-time aircraft positions,
bicycle hire usage, and live traffic updates can be projected onto the table,
creating an immersive overview of what’s going in the city.
Like all great cities, London
contains the quaint and transcends the picturesque; it is at the same time real
and a story out of that tattered book of my childhood. It's too rich, too wild,
too seditious, and too full of life to succumb. The music plays on.
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