|
Post by ilbonito on Apr 22, 2010 8:03:14 GMT
I thought I'd share this piece from last weekend's local paper, on London. I thought it was quite good:
Ah, dear old London, with your million deep-fried chicken shops, your "traffic calming", your excellent jackets and scarves, your bleak council blocks called Mandeville Close and your scowling, enduring populace. London, with your buildings black with grime and your unlovely rubbish strewn everywhere; your pockets of wild woodland in the suburbs and spires rising beyond grassy heaths. Your sad-faced men; your relentless architecture of cream-piping terraces or terse Georgian facades for thousands and thousands of kilometres of streets; your bricks in a dozen hues of baby-cack brown; and your discount shops jostling awkwardly in the ground floors of 200-year-old houses. Your august street names resonant of the Monopoly board and a hundred historical novels. Your riot of a peak hour in the Underground and your doughty buses. Your wonderful pubs and your awful Chinese takeaway. Your coltish maidens, your mulish old women, your cheery blokes, your oiks with slack mouths and one eye higher than the other. The way you make me inexplicably call older men "sir" here. The way people say, "Yer orright?" to each other in passing, more a statement than an inquiry. The pockets of cosiness and pointy bits of charm. The sheer crammed, uncomfortable, elbows-in fullness of it.
London, wedged between antiquity and the space age, heaving between exhaustion and mania. One of the greatest cities of the world but somehow daggy, too. The centre of town has a magnificence, a haughty heritage of insane privilege and dark deeds. The buildings might be caked with pigeon poo but they stand proud all the same, glaring with history. The dank Dickensian nests of Seven Dials, now gleaming with boutiques and loud with high heels. If you try very hard, behind the din of traffic and clang of building works you can hear the carriages trotting past. Damask curtains are drawn against the dusk, as plebs like me scurry past; passengers peer from the top deck of the bus into lamplit, warm living rooms.
But out in the suburbs things lose grandeur. There comes a point where it's hard to find beauty; or, numbed by the pitifulness, you exclaim over the banal. I'm disconcerted by the sameness: Deptford becomes New Cross becomes another street of bus stops full of listless, cold people, betting shops, chicken shops, hairdressers, the sense that history has run out here and people are patching it up, burrowing in, rubbish blowing past all the time. Possibly, a Londoner might say the same about Melbourne — that we are banal — but there is a tiredness here, for all the manic traffic and grocery shopping and sharp-eyed trading. There is a sense of managing despite.
Nevertheless, London, carapaced in its oldness, still flexes and shoots new life in the Olympics works, the urban renewals, the wetlands and the canny community art projects, all the ways Londoners find to brighten the place up. They are introducing Paris-style bike rentals in the streets and electric-car charging posts; they have a low-emission central zone and ambitious recycling. This in a town with 7.5 million people and a street layout from the Dark Ages. I wonder if Melbourne, much younger and more springy, has the same comprehension, the same under-standing of past and therefore future needs.
London never settles, never (you must say this in a croaky voice) gives up. It has been burnt, ransacked, flooded, emptied by plague and bombed. It has subsided and cracked, grown dim with dirt and been as poor and miserable as any place on Earth, or full of trumpets sounding glory. It has swapped population countless times, changed the language it speaks from Latin, through the invention and entire evolution of English, to Igbo and Hindi and Spanish. It has been the centre of an empire and a gutted, smoking smear. It is incredibly old and still generates so much of the newness the world craves.
Today, I discovered the enchanted dreamland of Little Venice and its canals, sweet willows and quiet paths; people strolled in Regents Park in T-shirts and ducks dithered. Miraculously, the sun came out. London changes, again.
|
|
|
Post by ilbonito on Apr 22, 2010 8:07:35 GMT
|
|
|
Post by spindrift on Apr 22, 2010 9:03:51 GMT
I like your relections, ilbonito..
|
|
|
Post by ilbonito on Apr 22, 2010 9:31:17 GMT
I didn't write that one! As I said, it came from a newspaper, "The Age". They are my pictures though
|
|
|
Post by spindrift on Apr 22, 2010 9:34:44 GMT
Oh yes, I didn't notice that. I read it in a hurry. Nice pics
|
|
|
Post by Deleted on Apr 22, 2010 9:56:58 GMT
You post the most interesting things, ilbonito. I don't have time right now, but will get back to this one.
|
|
|
Post by ilbonito on Apr 22, 2010 10:26:15 GMT
Thanks, Deyana. When I first arrived in London at the start of my trip last year, the skies were blue and clear. It was December but not too cold, I actually found the air clear and refreshing. I was staying in an old Georgian terrace house, on a street full of them, around the corner from Portobello Market. I would go down the street, stopping for a coffee or a chorizo roll a vendor was selling (delicious!). The market was buzzing with funky clothes stores and little cafes. Posters advertised Kurdish film festivals, and cool-sounding nightclub events, and new pop stars. A West Indian man dressed as Santa Claus was playing a steel drum. At night I would ride on the second floor of a double decker bus -a novel sensation -into Oxford Street, through phantom-like neon Christmas decorations and thronging crowds, or stop at the internet cafe along the buzzing, late night Arab strip on Edgeware Road. I visited museums and parks and art galleries, and flicked through my Timeout listings guide: the options were endless. London seemed so vibrant, and yet also so cute – with its double decker buses and its red phone booths and its leafy squares. And it was so “happening”, everyone was here – like the centre of the universe. There were crowds everywhere radiating energy. I was hooked; and spent the rest of my trip in Europe looking forward to my return. At the end of my European trip I tagged along with my husband (who had a conference there) for another weekend. Arriving at London City Airport, I had to take the train into Hyde Park, where we were staying. It was drizzling and grey and as the train glid over the Isle of Dogs and through the East End, my mood dropped. This was a whole different cityscape, one of carparks and warehouses and huge construction sites where the city was being ripped open and it seemed, clumsily stuck back together ; housing blocks alternated with grim streets of Victorian tenements; hard-looking and mean, with not a twig of greenery in sight. Above them towered new, and hardly-more-appealing, fortress-like condo developments. Everyone on the train was wearing tracksuits and grim expressions. It started to rain. We passed the Milennium Dome – gargantuan, alien looking and hideous, glimpsed from the train through a frame of passing junk yards. I got off, lugging my heavy bags and tried to exit – only to be told that the ticket I’d purchased from the machine was somehow invalid. I was fined 20 pounds by a gaunt, sallow man with appalling teeth. I went to drown my sorrows with a large Pepsi and big Mac, standing under the harsh fluoroescent lighting of a handy McDonalds, and I looked around at the similarly depressed faces all around me, a United Nations of bad skin, all wolfing down their greasy burgers. Wow, I thought. London sucks. I felt like the city had kicked me in the guts, or it was a huge soulless machine, utterly indifferent. One that would grind me down then spit me out. And yet, by the end of the day – after a successful sightseeing foray to Southall – I was in love with London again. At its worst, I have no doubt London can be soul-destroying. Living in a shabby (yet overpriced) studio in one of those windswept, uncared for estates, commuting daily through surging crowds and shitty weather; just the thought depresses me. But there is something about London that saves it – a wild card. Perhaps it is randomness, and unpredictablity, and its huge variety. Its a city that give you anything if you care to look, and can knock you senseless if you let it. I get the sense that you can never “know” London, never get it cornered. There is so much bubbling away in its different corners, sometimes blissfully unaware of each other and more often colliding, and melding in new and unexpected ways, like experiments in a chemistry lab. For no city in the world perhaps has given so much; its music, its “look”, its humour (sometimes harsh, often gentle), its language … and there is always something new around the corner. London has an electricity all its own.
|
|
|
Post by ilbonito on Apr 22, 2010 10:30:33 GMT
Southall is the hub of London’s huge Indian community. It draws immigrants from other places too, but it is dominated by the Punjabis, as you can tell the moment you arrive at the train station, about an hour West of the city’s centre. nterestingly, the UK’s subcontinental communities are quite disparate; the Bengalis hang out at Wehitechapel and Brick Lane, right on the other side of town. The social differences are stark too: one interesting figure I read was that while average incomes for ethnically “Indian” Brits now actually exceed that of white Britons, ethnic Bangladeshi/Pakistanis still lag substantially behind. Southall is an interesting place with its music shops blaring bhangra, (not to mention the cars cruising down the main street), two Sikh gurdwaras, and the offices of the world’s largest circulation overseas Punjabi newspaper. But it is dominated by one building, and an unexpected one at that: The Himalaya palace was built in the 1930s as a wildly exotic Chinese temple picture palace. Who would’ve excpected this in drab outer London? It is fabulous. Now (of course) it screeens Bollywood flicks. Sadly the one I wanted to see wasn’t screening yet.
|
|
|
Post by Deleted on Apr 22, 2010 14:37:50 GMT
At least it is still a cinema!
|
|
|
Post by fumobici on Apr 22, 2010 16:42:03 GMT
Well described, London defies description.
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Apr 23, 2010 16:34:28 GMT
Great reading here, Ilbonito, from the quoted article to your lively and honest commentary. I always appreciate the way that you include the negative elements in your reports about various places, but in a way that makes it clear the comments are subjective, plus, you're never peevish.
Several years ago my son spent a couple of weeks in London, without enough money to do all he wanted, but absolutely enthralled & continuously getting lost on purpose. He said that when he realized that his time there was almost up, he got depressed at the thought of having to leave.
Your pictures are wonderful. The hot pink one is fabulous, with that flat block of color and the naturally b&w elements. What is the tiled tunnel? Also, is that 4th picture taken from inside the airport, actually looking down on houses that close?!
Last question -- is "daggy" an Australian word?
|
|
|
Post by gertie on Apr 23, 2010 22:29:40 GMT
I found London to be everything you've said, and yet somehow other. There's just something about London and Londoners that is a thing unto itself and yet delightful to glimpse.
|
|
|
Post by ilbonito on Apr 24, 2010 8:55:49 GMT
Thanks bixaorellana. I guess "daggy"is an Australian word; it means dowdy or unfashionable. The word itself is quite oldfashioned and "daggy"now....
The tiled corridor is (from memory) Tottenham Court Rd tube station. A tube station anyway. And the "London City Airport"pic is from the platform of its attached train station, so yeah, those houses are right next to the airport!
|
|
|
Post by ilbonito on Apr 24, 2010 8:56:31 GMT
btw - does anyone know what "traffic calming"(quoted in the article in the original post) means?
|
|
|
Post by ilbonito on Apr 24, 2010 9:05:44 GMT
The one thing about London that struck me – whether in good neighborhoods or bad – was the babble of different languages, the swirl of people. Because EVERYONE is in London. As a Chinese-Australian friend and her Sri Lankan-Australian boyfriend had told me, its not a big deal where you come from in London, because everyone is from somewhere else. Literally, almost every person had a different accent; Italian, Pakistani, many I couldn’t trace. It has to be the most cosmopolitan city on Earth. All of Europe is here; they come from Gdansk and Kiev to work in shops, and fly in from Moscow and Dubai to buy up half of Kensington. They pour in on Easyjet, from Bergen or Madrid, to go shopping and see a show. Italians swarm over the Underground, and Scandinavians clog up Oxford Street, young children in tow. Twenty-somethings from Madrid/Lyon/Thessaloniki/Bucharest come to study English and work as waiters. Thrusting young professionals flock to Europe’s highest-paid jobs, in the City. The faces on the subway are black, brown, Mediterranean, veiled. I saw a platinum-blonde, punk Arab lesbian complaining loudly about her girl troubles, and stood behind a middle-aged woman in Boots in her fur-lined Winter hijab. Of course there are communities from Britain’s former colonies; Indians and Jamaicans and Nigerians and Bangladeshis; but also ones I hadn’t expected; Vietnamese in Hackney, Moroccans in Ladbroke Grove, Congolese and Somalis in Haringey, Brazilians, Colombians and thousands and thousands of Poles.
|
|
|
Post by ilbonito on Apr 24, 2010 9:11:32 GMT
Despite my recent infatuation with cemeteries ( I visited two in Paris…three if you count the one for cats and dogs), London’s Highgate is by far the best graveyard I have seen. And by best, I mean spookiest. This is the graveyard that is said to have inspired “Dracula”and I can believe it. Toppled gravestones and mossy angels peer out of the undergrowth while crows caw ominously from the treetops. It probably helps that I visited it on a damp and foggy day too. Highgate was built in the Victorian era as the jewel in the crown of a ring of nine “cities of the dead” circling London. They were designed to cope with the overflow of bodies from a population explosion and a cholera epidemic, and Highgate was the chic-est, most expensive address of the lot. But over time, the lavish crypts and lush gardens cemetery fell onto hard times – the cemetery was bombed in the war and never repaired, and the company managing it finally went bankrupt in the 1960s leaving the 17 hectare property to revert to nature – unmanaged, unsupervised, the trees overgrew the graves and it turned into a kind of green, jungly no-mans land, behind a high brick wall in the London suburbs. Vandals broke in, damaging the graves and climbing into the elaborate crypts. Pigeons, owls and bats took others. It sounds a wild, lawless place. It must have been amazing. But in the 1970s a local community group took over and they now run the cemetery with an iron fist; so much so that the only way to visit is on one of their (ambitiously priced) guided tours. But I took the bait …and I’m glad I did. This is the Egyptian Avenue, a creepy tunnel of carved, faux-pharaonic crypts. Below are more of the graves scattered around. But my main interest was in the intriguing myth of a “‘Highgate Vampire”. In the 1970s a number of foxes were found dead in the graveyard, from no known cause. Sightings of strange figures started to be seen by those visiting relatives' graves. A whisper started. Soon, two of the country’s top spiritualists had revealed the existence of a “Highgate Vampire”and were competing to find and kill it. When a vampire hunt was announced for Friday 13th hordes of vampire-hunters converged on the cemetery, climbing the locked gates with hammers and stakes in hand, and wreaking havoc. According to wikipedia’s article on “the Highgate Vampire’: Some months later, on 1 August 1970 (Lammas Day), the charred and headless remains of a woman’s body were found not far away. The police suspected that it had been used in black magic.
Farrant (one of the main vampire hunters) was found by police in the churchyard beside Highgate Cemetery one night in August, carrying a crucifix and a wooden stake. He was arrested, but when the case came to court it was dismissed. A few days later Manchester (the other wouldbe-undead-slayer) returned to Highgate Cemetery, but in the daytime, when visits are allowed.
Again, we must depend on his own published book for an account of his actions, since neither press nor police were present. He claims that this time he and his companions did succeed in forcing open, inch by inch, the heavy and rusty iron doors of a family vault (indicated by his female psychic helper). He lifted the massive lid off one coffin, believing it to have been mysteriously transferred there from the previous catacomb. He was about to drive a stake through the body it contained when a companion persuaded him to desist. Reluctantly, he shut the coffin, put garlic and incense in the vault, and came out from it .
A later chapter of Manchester’s book claims that three years afterwards he discovered a vampiric corpse (he implies that it was the same one) in the cellar of an empty house in the Highgate/Hornsey area, and staked and burned it .
All of this was reported widely (and gleefully) in the tabloid press of the day, but when I asked our otherwise knowledgeable Friends-of-Highgate appointed tour guide, she said she got the question all the time but knew nothing about it, and then clamped shut. A thought tickled me. If you were a professional tour guide and you got the same question all the time, wouldn’t you think to research it? Was this not a cover-up? When I asked her she admitted the Friends of Highgate wished to downplay the matter. The hysteria of the vampires had after all occurred just about the same time they took over the cemetery … Then another thought occurred – what if the Friends of Highgate were vampires themselves? What better ruse than to buy up a cemetery under the guise of being a benevolent conservation group, then to shut down the rumours. Is that why the guide got so agitated when anyone strayed from the group and urged us to “keep together”"… and what were all those “dangerous”signs on the tombs….. Too much “Most Haunted” and “True Blood”? You decide!
|
|
|
Post by Deleted on Apr 24, 2010 10:31:18 GMT
I think you've hit the nail on the head about who is running the cemetery now (great pictures!). All we have to do is write the scenario.
I was noticing that the London Wikipedia article only reports 38,000 French as living in London, where the figure given in France is generally along the lines of 150,000. In any case, it is getting harder and harder to track EU citizens in the EU because nobody needs to register anymore.
|
|
|
Post by ilbonito on Apr 24, 2010 11:28:02 GMT
I remember reading in an article somewhere (and no idea where they sourced this) that London is now the fifth-biggest "French"city, ie in French elections London has the greatest number of voters except for Paris, (and the rest I'm guessing) Lyon, Marseilles, Nice and ...Toulouse? I found that quite amazing.
Maybe I'm extremely naive or extremely Anglo-centric, but I was amazed how "European" London has become.
|
|
|
Post by bjd on Apr 24, 2010 12:15:49 GMT
I hadn't been in London for about 25 years when I returned a couple of years ago. What struck me was not the number of "Europeans", who blend in more, of course, but how many non-Europeans there were. I found it much more cosmopolitan than Paris, for example -- to compare cities that have similar populations and are not that far apart.
|
|
|
Post by spindrift on Apr 24, 2010 13:10:47 GMT
I love, absolutely love, central London....SW6, SW3, SW1, W2, NW6, NW11 and, of course, W1. I don't bother with other areas much.
|
|
|
Post by lola on Apr 24, 2010 15:09:08 GMT
Wonderful, ilbonito.
|
|
|
Post by Deleted on Apr 24, 2010 17:28:30 GMT
I love, absolutely love, central London....SW6, SW3, SW1, W2, NW6, NW11 and, of course, W1. I don't bother with other areas much. And you give those areas such lovely poetic names...
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Apr 24, 2010 18:50:08 GMT
Great thread & keeps getting better -- love that first photo of the cemetery, also "Scandinavians clog up Oxford Street" among your other wonderful pics, history, & commentary.
Thanks for your answers to my queries above ....... except that I'm not Gertie.
|
|
|
Post by ilbonito on Apr 25, 2010 2:16:11 GMT
Sorry, I always seem to get confused about who is who ... And you seem to bear the brunt! The comment about the Scandinavians came from bitter experience being stuck behind a large group of painfully slow walkers!
|
|
|
Post by ilbonito on Apr 25, 2010 2:30:38 GMT
|
|
|
Post by Deleted on Apr 25, 2010 2:51:53 GMT
So enjoy reading your views all the places you a have been to, ilbonito. I just love all the museums in London. And the fact that the real big ones are just walking distance from each other. The National History Museum is the best I've seen anywhere. I took my kids to see it when we were last visiting and they really liked it. Southall is the hub of London’s huge Indian community. It draws immigrants from other places too, but it is dominated by the Punjabis, as you can tell the moment you arrive at the train station, about an hour West of the city’s centre.
Yes, it is! I remember my family going there on occasions to visit friends, when I was a kid. You are so knowledgeable, ilbonito Are you a Geography teacher by any change? I worked in London for some years and like Spindrift, really like those areas, such a cosmopolitan feel about them.
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Apr 25, 2010 4:11:56 GMT
Scandinavians clog up Oxford Street The comment about the Scandinavians came from bitter experience being stuck behind a large group of painfully slow walkers! Ha! I thought it was a clever comment on the kind of footwear "they" favor. ;D I think I would trade a major organ for a chance to see that African collection for real, instead of in an art book. Re: the different nationalities making up London's population -- Edward Rutherford's novel London doesn't always work as entertaining fiction because of the sheer weight of facts presented. Still, the information and statistics about the various waves of immigration throughout the centuries are fascinating. www.sfsite.com/~silverag/rutherfurd.html
|
|
|
Post by ilbonito on Apr 25, 2010 10:54:36 GMT
Ha! I thought it was a clever comment on the kind of footwear "they" favor. Sadly, not that witty Just got stuck behind extended families of ambling Norwegians, padded with amazing numbers of shopping bags! I really like Zadie Smith's novels for that lit-bit-of-everything London feeling. "White Teeth" was great where she (a black British woman) wrote from the perspective of an older Pakistani man, or her second novel (the name escapes me now) where the protagonist is Chinese-Jewish. And Deyana - I am a teacher actually! Though English, not Geography. I've often thought I'd like to give geography a go, though.
|
|
|
Post by Deleted on Apr 25, 2010 12:58:28 GMT
Well, I'm sure you are an excellent teacher. Maybe I should hire you to teach me? ;D I need lessons in English and Geography!
|
|
|
Post by ilbonito on Apr 25, 2010 14:06:30 GMT
Thanks In addition to the cemetery at Highgate I also dropped by another lesser-known London attraction connected to death; the Monument to Animals in War, in Hyde Park. To be honest, I didn’t know whether to be touched by this expression of humanity’s nobler sentiments, or to find it ridiculous. I thought it interesting that the monument specified that it honoured the animals who "fought" for Britain and its allies; the dogs, horses and glow worms (apparently used for lighting in WW1 trenches) that served Germany get no mention.
|
|