citinotes
Babylon City
It’s 9 o’clock in the morning. You tear your eyes away from your phone as the sliding doors of the tube open. Covent Garden tube station surrounds you. A few steps later, you slow your pace. A queue of passengers awaits at the exit. Finally outside, swarms of people rush around, their faces changing in an instant. Crossing the Piazza, school groups and tourists jostle for a spot on the sidewalk, eager to witness a street performance. Deciding to do some shopping, you enter a store the size of a regional airport. Two hours later, you emerge, bewildered by how quickly darkness has fallen. Welcome to London, the modern Babylon of Europe.
When I think of this city, the first image that comes to mind is a long, narrow street filled with crowds in a hurry. I cannot fathom London without its volume, diversity, and energy. In an ironic, yet delightful tone, French diplomat Paul Morand once noted that London is beautiful “because of its people,” while Paris is so “in spite of them.”.
Who are all these people? Where are they rushing to, so task-focused and unfazed? One day, like a first-time swimmer in uncharted waters, I decided to blend in. I followed shoppers burdened with bags, anxious yuppies, and overexcited tourists, all galloping like a cavalry on attack. The most experienced ones held coffee cups in one hand, texting with the other, glancing up to avoid accidents—a perilous balance of speed, agility and reflex mastered only by Londoners -and New Yorkers.
It is the “Oxford Street tide” Virginia Woolf (1882 – 1941) depicts below in such vivid colors. A major modernist writer of the 20th century, Woolf’s upper-class, home-schooled education shielded her from the outside world. Picture the shock for young Virginia as she wandered the labyrinthine streets of London, observing dockworkers on the riverbank attempting to impose order on chaos. In her series of essays, “The London Scene,” she provides lively descriptions of Oxford Street in the early ’30s. She walks amidst a tide of buzzing vans, buses, music bands, and magicians. The endless avenue unfolds before her amazed eyes as “a perpetual ribbon of changing sights, sounds, and movement.”
The relationship between trade and architecture is discussed by British writer and literary critic, Victor Sawdon Pritchett (1900 – 1997) . A polyglot traveler, Sir Pritchett earned recognition as “the finest English short-story writer of the 20th century” by the Royal Society of Literature. In London Perceived, he delivers an insightful analysis of the economic, political and religious factors defining Londoner culture. The selected extract brilliantly delves into how the dominance of merchants in London played a defining role in shaping the city’s landscape.
London’s vibrant energy isn’t just about volume and pace; it’s also the city’s fascinating cultural variety. French diplomat Paul Morand (1888 – 1976), a man who spent a good part of his life in England, depicts London’s cosmopolitanism. An avid traveler and acute observer, he was able to fathom the psychology of the locals in any city he would visit. During the ’30s, in London, Morand had the chance to explore a wide spectrum of classes and cultures: from the noble Londoner of the garden-parties to the Indian chauffeur; and from the Italian journalist to the cockney of the pubs he frequented. In the following extract, this talented diplomat offers a discerning portrait of life in Europe’s largest melting pot.
Citinotes
chapter 1
Bigger, faster, stronger
Everything here exists on a grander scale; private clubs resemble palaces, hotels stand as true monuments, the river flows like an arm of the sea. Taxis navigate at twice the speed, and both sailors and bus drivers convey entire sentences in a single word. There’s a frugality in words and gestures, maximizing action and time. People here generate and expend resources at a rate double that of what’s seen in France.
Hippolyte Taine,
Notes sur l’Angleterre, Hachette, 1890.
I witnessed the most astounding spectacle that the world can offer: […] a forest of brick houses intersected by a bustling river of living human faces, each reflecting the myriad colors of their passions, the frenzied urgency of love, hunger, and hate… I am speaking of London.
Reisebilder – Tableaux de voyage, Renduel, 1834.
A city like London, where you can walk for hours without even reaching the beginning of the end […] is something truly extraordinary. […] – All of this is so grand, so immense, that one can become stunned and amazed of the greatness of England before even setting foot on its soil.
chapter 2
An extraordinary listening post
London serves as an exceptional listening post. It is the singular place on Earth where, in a single day, you can encounter a banker arriving from New York, a journalist fresh from the USSR, a wild animal hunter returning from the Congo, and a prospector descending from the Cap-au-Caire plane. Here, one has access to the swiftest cables, the most astute newspaper correspondents, the sharpest foreign diplomats, and, in general, the most reliable documentation. […]
The city sprawls endlessly, avoiding the abstraction found in Moscow or the deliberate attempts to amaze seen in Berlin. […] Its geography is purposeful and practical: we come to understand that Montreal is a mere ten seconds away from Piccadilly, and Singapore is within reach from the Strand; meanwhile, Toulouse is a six-month journey, and Warsaw requires a full year. The British universe is a self-contained world, self-sufficient in its own right […].
Constructed on the marsh, London […] does not rest upon civilizations piled up like layers of mattresses; here, everything is interwoven. Are we in the 13th, the 18th, or the 20th century? No one can discern that any better than they can determine whether it’s noon or eight in the morning, simply by glancing at the sky.
Paul Morand,
Londres, Plon, 1962
chapter 3
Those merchants who made London
From the 12th to the 19th century, […] the aristocracy emerged from the bourgeoisie […] and this bourgeoisie wielded significant power. The first priority for London merchants was to secure their independence from royal justice and the sheriffs; […]
However, these skilled and protective merchants lacked imagination; they possessed minimal understanding of the sea and trade, often having to rely on foreigners for foreign commerce. In times gone by, it was the Romans, and at other times, the Danes (who, seemingly, extended their naval voyages to the New World and the Far East), followed by the Normans, the Genoese; subsequently, Flanders and Guyenne became the focal points for London.
The city had evolved into a cosmopolitan hub reminiscent of the Plantagenets‘ legacy; the Hanseatic League monopolized Baltic trade, while banking was under the control of the Jews and the people of Lombardy. Flemish settlers established extensive corporate families known as guilds; these guilds, much like in Bruges, 12th-century Paris, and even today in the City or oriental souks, brought together trades and professions along specific streets. Harley Street, for example, continues to be known as the street of the doctors, and Victoria Street is synonymous with engineers..
These guilds, functioning as genuine mutual aid societies -each with its distinct life, monopoly, patron saint, and public holidays- have been collectively housed in the Town Hall’s common room, the Guildhall. It is these guilds that played a pivotal role in the creation of London.
From the 14th century onward, these guilds amassed substantial wealth. With each financial crisis faced by the royalty (as kings perpetually sought funds), they were summoned and, in return, granted new privileges, further enhancing their influence. […] The guilds played a pivotal role, and even today, they continue to shape the appearance of the city of London. […] These guilds gave rise to municipal assemblies of free citizens, from which the English Parliament emerged, establishing itself as the prototype for all parliamentary systems worldwide.
Paul Morand,
Londres, Plon, 1962
Badge of the London, Chatham and Dover Railway, –a railway company in south-eastern England created in 1859- from the first Blackfriars Railway Bridge.
A modern version of the old business banners hanging along the facades of the stores in Old Spitalfields market.
chapter 4
Swallowed by the city
This is simply to say that London is before anything else the world’s market, and that markets are as sensitive as opera singers. And this no doubt explains why London is the least splendid, the least ostentatious of the great capitals. Property is what it cares for. It has no definable style, though, as Henry James said, it has a succession of attempts at style. […]
The plain fact is the mercantile class that has owned London is now making gross fortunes by speculating in the rebuilding of it and is too greedy to be splendid. […] The merchants have always beaten down the planners; the mercantile mind cannot tolerate either vista or perspective.
It is indispensable for traders to dwell, as Walter Bagehot said, in a twilight where no shapes, sizes and distances are defined. We have no rhetorical architecture at all, and it is notorious that when Sir Christopher Wren planned a new London after the Great Fire of 1666, he was defeated. The Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace are among the few great edifices to stand in sufficient space, compose a view, and dominate a distance. St Paul’s, on its hill, is still shut in by the money-makers. Our only boulevards are the Mall and the Embankment of the river from Blackfriars to Chelsea; and though we have our monuments, palaces, mansions, formidable institutes, our rich art galleries and even a triumphal arch or two, these have been swallowed by the city. They are domesticated; they are never ornately imposed.
The Royal Observatory is one of the most important historical scientific sites in the world. It was designed by Sir Christopher Wren, a highly acclaimed English architect of the Baroque era, and designer of St. Paul’s cathedral, in the aftermath of London’s Great Fire.
Ibex House is an impressive Art Deco office building of 1937, set on the East side of the City of London. A Fuller, Hall and Foulsham’s design in the Streamline Moderne style, the edifice’s curved corners soften the geometry of the facade’s faience bands.
Post-modern skyscrapers with their edgy style are set to hug the soft curves of St Paul’s Baroque cathedral, along with countless brutalist, renaissance and gothic facades, in one of the most plethoric skylines of the western world.
chapter 5
Oxford street tide
In Oxford Street there are too many bargains, too many sales, too many goods marked down to one and eleven three that only last week cost two and six. The buying and selling is too blatant and raucous. […]
Everything glitters and twinkles. The first spring day brings out barrows frilled with tulips, violets, daffodils in brilliant layers. The frail vessels eddy vaguely across the stream of the traffic. At one corner seedy magicians are making slips of colored paper expand in magic tumblers into bristling forests of splendidly tinted flora – a subaqueous flower garden. At another, tortoises repose on litters of grass. […]
News changes quicker than in any other part of London. The press of people passing seems to lick the ink off the placards and to consume more of them and to demand fresh supplies of later editions faster than elsewhere. The mind becomes a glutinous slab that takes impressions and Oxford Street rolls off upon it a perpetual ribbon of changing sights, sounds and movement.
Parcels slap and hit; motor omnibuses the kerb; the blare of a whole brass band in full graze tongue dwindles to a thin reed of sound. Buses, vans, cars, barrows stream past like the fragments of a picture puzzle; a white arm rises; the puzzle runs thick, coagulates, stops; the white arm sinks, and away it streams again, streaked, twisted, higgledy-piggledy, in perpetual race and disorder. The puzzle never fits itself together, however long we look.
Virginia Woolf,
The London Scene, Hogarth Press, 1975
Vibrant London
Explore some of the most vibrant spots in the metropole.
