London Interlude

London River

I'm behindhand with posts. Three international trips in six weeks, lots to do, not always friendly circumstances. (Six inches of snow in Denver in mid-May, flooding that closed the highway I needed to use, etc. etc.--no walking by the water here, the river wanted to eat you alive.) But I am finally back in Berlin and should have a couple of quiet months here now.

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I had one short job to do in London in mid-April and another at the end of the month. So, over the Channel we go, in mid-month, and I seem to have fallen asleep somewhere over the Continent--but then I look down and we're headed straight up the Thames Estuary.

This is Heathrow, of course we're in a holding pattern, says the Lufthansa pilot, in a tone of resigned disapproval (the same tone in which the Lufthansa pilot says, This is Shanghai, of course we won't have an on-time departure). So we tilt and circle, and once or twice I can see a densely-bridged stretch of the river that must be in central London, though we're still fairly high up and the details are hazy.

Thames, Tower Bridge, London. Photo, Daniel J. Maxwell, Wiki Commons.

The underground train from the airport into central London is packed; I am squashed in beside a heavily perfumed pair of Royal Jordanian crew members. How beautiful they are, a man and a woman with faces like Achaemenid Persian sculptures in dark gold; they are reading the Daily Mirror in a desultory way, passing the paper back and forth. Aaagh, the British tabloid press. The headline on the page that laps over toward me is, "Perv Videos, Sex with Dog." (There'll always be an England, but is this a good thing?)

It's more than forty years now since the first time I was in London. Hitchhiked in from the West Country with a friend, then. Somewhere after the fruit-juice delivery man in Somerset, somewhere after the wait in a damp wind near Stonehenge, we picked up a long ride with a race-car driver. So we got across the south of England fast and bagged the last beds at the Bloomsbury YWCA, which no longer exists. And good riddance, in a sense: mein Gott, how that place smelled, you had to hold your breath in some parts of the building so as not to be overcome with nausea. I don't know where the smell came from; it wasn't the cooking, which took a strong stomach but had a different smell. Baked beans and chopped-up spaghetti for breakfast, horrible stuff. 

This was also the London where you could get wonderful theater seats for half a pound. I saw (twice) a young Ian McKellen as Hamlet (and how old McKellen is now, playing Gandalf in all those hobbit movies, how can so much time have passed?). The Hamlet was an almost uncut production that meant a mad run afterward to the Y, to make it in before the iron-hard curfew. I learned how to push in crowds, for the first time in my life (no real experience with such things in Colorado). This was probably as good for me as seeing a classy production of Hamlet.

The friend had to go back to the US before I did, and I stayed in the Y for another week (gasp, retch). I shared the room with Yorkshire shopgirls who might have been speaking Uzbek, for all I could understand of their talk. I sat in Russell Square on gray days, reading Henry James and eating ripe blackberries by the boxful, sharing space with the mad old women who fed the birds. 

I took the boats up and down the river. Down, somewhere east of Tower Bridge; up, all the way to Hampton Court and back on a perfect September day, through the boaty suburbs where people were getting home from work on a Friday evening and getting out on the river. Lawns that ran down to the water, with cream teas on the lawns. Little sailboats with red sails on the river. Messing about in boats. It seemed incredibly wonderful.

The Thames at Richmond, 1895. Wiki Commons.

Archangel and I were away from London for a long time after the 1970s. We finally came back in the early 90s and stayed with a friend in Richmond. The friend, who used to work on things like famine relief in Cambodia, was working for a big software firm by then. Everything had changed, the city had washed its face and had big money, and there were homeless young people sleeping on the sidewalks everywhere. 

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How deep the London underground is, how complicated the passages from platform to platform, down little winding corridors lined with what looks like cracked bathroom tile. (How unlike Berlin--our neighborhood underground line is really only just underground: if you're at the station entrance and hear the train coming into the station, you can take a flying leap down the stairs and catch it--at least, you can do this if you're still young enough to take flying leaps, which I am not.) Here in London, the escalators go on forever--oh, I know it's not as deep as the metro in Moscow or St. Petersburg, but I still feel a bit like a Jules Verne character in Journey to the Center of the Earth, as I head for the surface again. 

Up up up we go on the escalators into central London, past endless theater posters. (Germany does not have this brilliant proliferation of private-sector theater.)  Out of the underground, into the maze of little medieval streets. Gate Street, Remnant Street. Two derelicts are arguing drunkenly at the turn of Gate Street.  I'm jollier than you are. You are not. I'm jollier. No I am ... See, I made you laugh! I'm jollier than you are!

Noise, crowds, auto exhaust. The streets going down toward LSE, where I have a long day of meetings tomorrow, are being torn to pieces; the sidewalks are ripped up, the facades are covered with scaffolding. (Part of this, I discover later, is work following an underground electrical fire early in April that was fed by a gas leak and burned under the street for two days, sending flames shooting up from the manholes.)

It's a lovely piece of the city all the same, there are always sweet, still places. This is the north side of Lincoln's Inn Fields; I am being put up by my excellent hosts on the west side, somewhere among the deconstruction.

Lincoln's Inn Fields. My photo, April 2015.

There's nothing on my schedule this evening, and the spring evenings are long. Time to walk by the water. 

It isn't far to the river: I bumble through LSE, through the tiny lanes and steps, to the Strand. The street layout here comes from a world not only long before cars but even before horse-carriages, a world with no need for space in which to move large wheeled objects rapidly. The Strand is a fairly big street, but two of the great baroque churches that dot this part of the city, the so-called island churches of St.-Mary-le-Strand and St. Clement Danes, sit slap in the middle of the street, with the traffic dividing around them as best it can. 

The late afternoon has turned dark, with cloud off the sea. The street is shadowed and seems full of sound instead of light; they're change-ringing at St. Clement's, with a tremendous peal that multiplies itself in the tight-packed city, echoing from stone to stone.

     Oranges and lemons, 
     Say the bells of St. Clement's.

     You owe me five farthings,
     Say the bells of St. Martin's.

How wonderful they are, the Wren churches. I love the names: St. Mary-le-Bow, St. Lawrence Jewry, St. Peter Upon Cornhill, St. Martin Within Ludgate. I love the Portland stone: that white-gray limestone from which big things in London are built: the British Museum, Buckingham Palace, the Bank of England, the National Gallery, and this string of pale, chaste, Anglican-Baroque churches in the City and Westminster.  Wren built more than fifty churches here, in the desolation after the Great Fire. The exteriors must all have been black as sin in the days of coal fires, but they've been cleaned up since--and what a wonderful color the Portland stone is, what shall we call this color? Subtly different from my other favorite limestone city, Chicago, built of Blue Bedford stone from the Indiana quarries. This is cream-tea color, perhaps.

Looking down Fleet Street toward St. Clement Danes. Photo, Victor Grigas, Wiki Commons.

The dragon on the column in the picture above is one of about a dozen that guard the entrances to the City. The dragons aren't old, they're modern fantasy layered into the old city. The dragon in Fleet Street, in the picture above, is a late-Victorian creation (1880), and most of the boundary dragons date from the 1960s. The pair on Victoria Embankment, which I pass on my way downriver, are the oldest, from the mid-nineteenth century; they used to be decorations on the Coal Exchange building, over toward the Tower, where the massive coal shipments that kept the city heated and powered and lethally filthy were bought and sold and taxed. (The dragons were saved and moved over to the Embankment in the 1960s, when the Coal Exchange was torn down to widen the street. The London coal business was perhaps by then not what it used to be, after a murderous smog in the early fifties killed over four thousand people in a few days, and coal fires were subsequently restricted.) 

Boundary dragon, Victoria Embankment. My photo, April 2015.

The city tax on coal funded the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire in 1666, including the building of St. Paul's and the other Wren churches. The coal tax also funded the building of the Thames Embankment in the nineteenth century, which replaced marshy ground with the stone-foundation bank that I am strolling along at the moment.

Actually I am on the Thames Path, which opened in 1996: 184 miles of footpath from the river's source in the Cotswolds down to Greenwich. (Thank you, National Trails.) It's nice to see pedestrianism coming back; I don't know why our parents' generation was so fixated on cars, so determined to regard landscapes as drive-through experiences. 

The generation before them still walked. Often (and especially when I am back in England) I think of two old men I met at the beginning of the 1970s. One was a historian who had been a Rhodes scholar in the mid-1920s, a rural Kansas boy doing a year or two at Oxford that opened up the world for him. In the summer he and a couple of friends took a boat across the Channel and walked from the Low Countries to Italy. Along the roads that hardly had cars on them yet; just horses and wagons, summer dust, winding ways through the fields and towns. Roads still lined with trees to give shade to the travelers on foot or on horseback. 

Lost worlds. The trees are gone along the highways, cut down to widen the roads and reduce the number of objects against which out-of-control cars can crash. (There are still roads like this here and there, though, espeically in central Europe: if you're walking across the country, through the woods and fields in Brandenburg, or Meck-Pomm or any number of places, you can tell when you're coming to a road, because you can see a double line of trees on some relatively high stretch of ground, where the road would not be too muddy.) 

Sycamore allee near Kröpelin (Mecklenburg-Vorpommern). Photo by C. Pagenkopf, Wiki Commons.

The other old man I think of was someone I met in Scotland, when he was having a look over the territory where he used to go walking on holidays. One more look, he said, before he went into hospital for a risky operation. 

He was full of memories, of course--and what were the memories that stuck with people like this, the things they would want to tell to a young person, chance-met or slight acquaintance?

It was all about World War I. They had lived through World War II as well, but it mattered less, it left less trace. You get in a rush later, your life leaves less impression on you. I remember the historian, who was still a boy during the first war, talking about seeing military parades in his little town in Kansas (parades that said, look what we're sending to Europe!). One parade included a primitive tank that got stuck in the pertinacious Kansas mud and had to be pulled out by horses. 

The great memory for the hiker in Scotland was of being a very junior British diplomat at the Versailles peace conference. Eager, frustrated, lost, exhilarated---what is so enthralling as to have a hand in making bad history? 

What would we talk about in twenty years, if some passing young person was inclined to listen? I have no idea. I met an old Frenchwoman on a long flight in the 70s, who told me about walking with her mother in the streets of a Paris suburb during the First World War, hearing the guns when the Germans were close. Her mother had a long lilac-colored dress that brushed the gravel path; brush, brush went the dress on the gravel in the September afternoon, and crump went the artillery. Perhaps the Germans would be in the city soom, perhaps everything would change; perhaps not. Brush brush. Crump. 

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Well, things do change. The wars are past, for the time being. There's been a lot of building in London since the 70s, or even the 90s, and not everyone likes it. There was considerable opposition to the glassy tower here (by Renzo Piano), which was finished in 2012 and is popularly known as "the Shard." It's the tallest building in Europe, and it was being plunked down in what had stayed a pretty low-rise city for a long time. So I understand the hesitations about it, but what a lovely thing it is. Look how it shines in the clouded sea-light, how it changes, moment to moment, as the day dwindles into a gray April twilight.

Blackfriars Bridge and the Shard. My photo, April 2015.

I'm not sure it has turned out to be a very successful investment project; the office floors were slow to find occupants. But then, the state of Qatar owns a majority share of the building (it houses al-Jazeera's biggest operation outside Qatar), and presumably the state is in the investment for the long term.

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The path is on the other side of the river from the Shard, in the financial district proper. I have not seen so many men in dark suits and ties--or such overwhelmingly male gatherings--since I do not know when. It's about half past five, and the young bankers and lawyers are having their afternoon pints, oblivious to the beginnings of a fine rain. A few of them are startlingly, incapably drunk; most not. 

Pub along the Thames. My photo, April 2015.

Relative to Berlin, that swampy tabletop, London is a hilly place: you go up from the river, up little steep streets or stairs. I can see Tower Bridge up ahead, which was about as far as I meant to go, and this rather secretive-looking set of steps going off to the left is tempting as a turnaround place. Where will this go? To one of the sweet places in the city.

The street sign says I am going up St. Dunstan's Hill, presumably there is a St. Dunstan's church somewhere up here--and so there is.  

St. Dunstan-in-the-East. My photo, April 2015.

What a great builder Christopher Wren was. This tower and needle-spire are his, added to the medieval church when it was patched up in the 1690s, after the Great Fire. The tower and spire still stood when all the rest of the church had to be taken down and rebuilt from the ground up in the eighteen-teens, because the roof was too heavy for the supporting walls. The walls had stood for a long time, but the roof had pushed them so far out of true that it was only a matter of time until they collapsed. 

The tower and spire still stood when most of the church was destroyed by a bomb hit in the 1940s. The interior, open to the sky, has been turned into a garden: there is a flowering cherry, a few palm trees, a green lawn, a lot of quiet in the April twilight.

St. Dunstan-in-the-East. My photo, April 2015.

But it's time to go back to drunken-banker-world and grab an early supper, and get back to the hotel to check through the presentation for tomorrow morning. So, let's take a more inland route, along Eastcheap, and see what the City looks like these days.

Lots of newer buildings, I haven't been here for an age. The building popularly called the Gherkin (by Norman Foster) is a bit intrusive but lively. --A certain penny finally drops as I catch glimpses of this building down various streets. "Gherkin" (British for pickling cucumber) always seemed an odd word to me--somehow it doesn't look English. It finally dawns: the German word for cucumbers is Gurken. The word comes from German through Dutch to English. Duh.

The Gherkin (30 St Mary Axe) and St Andrew Undershaft Church.
Photo, Carlos Delgado, Wiki commons.

The church in front of the Gherkin has stood here looking like this, against various backgrounds, since the sixteenth century; it's one of the very few to have survived both the Great Fire and the Blitz. 

Other things have not survived. The reason that a new building like the Gherkin could be put here is that the building previously on the site, the Baltic Exchange, was badly damaged in a terrorist attack (Provisional IRA) in 1992, and after some consideration was deemed beyond rescue and torn down.

The Baltic Exchange as an institution (not building) still exists: it's an association of some six hundred companies that control a good deal of the shipping in the world. The job of the association itself is to provide freight market prices and shipping-cost indices that are used to set rates and settle freight derivative contracts around the world. All this information used to be exchanged on a trading floor, but these days it's on a screen on your desk, if you're in that business, so the Exchange doesn't need the building. 

London always had big business with the Baltic. In medieval and Renaissance London there was a substantial settlement of Hansa merchants--that is, merchants from the semi-independent cities along the North Sea and Baltic coasts and the rivers that emptied into those seas; merchants who handled the trade in grain and furs and timber and amber, all the stuff that came and went in North-world, so different from the Mediterranean trade in oil and wine and spices.  

The Baltic Exchange was founded in the mid-eighteenth century--but not, as it happens, by people from North-world.  By Greeks, rather--later added to by members of the so-called Chian diaspora, people who fled from the island of Chios after the 1822 massacre by the Turks. (Population of Chios before the event, 100,000-120,000; population after the event, maybe 20,000. Some were killed, some sold into slavery, some fled, never to return.)

The Chians (partly Greek, partly Genoese) were merchants from way back, and at the beginning of the nineteenth century the successful merchant families had been making out like bandits, moving Ukrainian grain to Western Europe, and western manufactured goods back the other way. Those who weren't at home during the massacre, or managed to get away, moved out to cities where they had long had business: Odessa, Alexandria, Trieste, Marseilles, London. 

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I wonder how often the big prestige projects, like the Gherkin and the Shard, actually make money--or rather, for whom they make money. Swiss Re used to own the Gherkin, and unloaded it early in 2007 for about twice what they paid for it. The buyers were a British investment firm and a German property company, IVG Immobilien. Eventually the new owners couldn't meet their mortgage payments, and the property went into receivership about a year ago. IVG is seeking compensation from some former managers who were responsible for the possibly excessive price of the deal; I don't know whether they've had any luck. [http://www.propertymall.com/property-news/article/34249-IVG-seeks-compensation-from-former-managers-over-Gherkin-deal] The building was sold about six months ago to the Safra Group. The Safras are billionaire Brazilian bankers with origins in Syria and Beirut; they got their start in banking under the Ottoman Empire, by financing trade between Aleppo, Alexandria, and Istanbul--picking up some of the business that used to belong the scattered Chians, perhaps? I don't know.) 

How many diasporas have scattered people into London over the years. The Chians in the early nineteenth century, Poles and Italians in political troubles in their home countries in the middle of the century, Central Europeans fleeing the Nazis in the 1930s and early 1940s, among many others. And what becomes of people, in these translations from one culture to another ...? What sort of Londoners do they all make?

On the way back to my hotel I pass another Wren church.

St. Bride's, 19th century engraving, Wiki Commons.

This is St. Bride's, the Fleet Street church, with many famous parishioners, ranging from John Milton to that offshoot of the Central European diaspora, Sir Clement Freud: British celebrity chef, member of Parliament, television personality, grandson of Sigmund Freud (who fled from Vienna to London in 1938).

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Long work day the next day, and then just time for a shorter stroll upriver early the following morning, before I head back to Berlin. (It would have been a somewhat longer stroll if I had not been stopped along the Embankment by the police, who claimed to believe I was engaging in some kind of illicit currency transaction with the young Asian visitor whom in fact I was helping to get a picture of himself in front of the London Eye. I don't even know what kind of illicit currency transactions you can have in London--there isn't a black market in pounds, is there?)  It's a beautiful, beautiful April morning, the Portland stone is white in the spring sun, and the river is full of traffic.

On the Thames, looking toward Whitehall and Charing Cross station. My photo, April 2015.

I go as far as Lambeth Palace (the Archbp of Canterbury's London residence), and cut back through the Archbishop's Park (how well the English do gardens):

Archbishop's Park, Lambeth. My photo, April 2015.

Then back over Westminster Bridge, which is starting to fill up with tour groups. What did Wordsworth, that poet of lakes and mountains, think was the most beautiful view in the world?  The one from Westminster Bridge.

    Earth has not anything to show more fair:
    Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
    A sight so touching in its majesty:
    This City now doth, like a garment, wear

    The beauty of the morning: silent, bare,
    Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
    Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
    All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

The bridge is packed with operators of shell games and their eager victims.

Then back to the hotel through Whitehall Gardens (ach, I do love English gardens, they're so lush with flowers):

Primroses in Whitehall Gardens. My photo, April 2015.

Whitehall Gardens. My photo, April 2015.

I pick up my bag and take the underground back from Holborn to Heathrow. In the Holborn station there is a digital screen on the wall facing the platform, which shows a weather forecast sponsored by the Tate. In Berlin, which is literal-minded, the weather forecasts provided on public transit show a sunshine/cloud icon and a predicted temperature. Here the screen says something like, A warm golden glow: the forecast today resembles Dante Gabriel Rosetti's "Woman in Yellow." And the screen shows the Rosetti watercolor from the Tate, which is indeed like a glow of sunshine in the underground. When I am back a few weeks later, on a day with heavy rain forecast, it says, "Pull out your waterproof jacket, you're going to need it! This afternoon's forecast resembles The Deluge, by J.M.W. Turner." And there is a reproduction of the Turner painting on the screen.