Imagined London - Anna Quindlen [15]
What a relief to discover, on that first visit, that on close acquaintance I loved London rather more than less, as much for what she had become as what she had been, although the two seemed to me to be inseparable. Although I had work to do—interviews in the back of the Groucho’s slightly lugubrious dining room, afternoons at Broadcasting House, from which the BBC seems to have what any American journalist would consider a stranglehold on the media—my free time was spent wandering aimlessly through the streets of London, from Covent Garden through the West End, along the Strand and down to the Thames. Listening to the half-slurry, half-sharp intonations of the average English accent, passing a group of suited city types ranged outside the crammed entryway of a pub, taking the vertiginous escalators down into the Underground and then up again, all while moving from monument to monument—it was just as I’d imagined, and then some.
All around was the city I had learned to know, in all its incarnations. There were the street beggars with their dogs tucked into doorways. There were the lawyers—solicitors and barristers, I hadn’t learned to tell the difference, and QCs, I suppose, whatever that may be—moving like guided missiles in pinstripes to and from the Inns of Court. There were the giddy rich girls looking through the racks on Beauchamp Place in South Kensington, a clutch of nannies with their charges in strollers in Hyde Park, a young man in paint-streaked overalls selling river scenes next to the boats that take tourists up and down the Thames. There was a new London, a real London, a London apart from anything I had read that told its own stories through overheard conversations, glimpses into shop windows, bored faces on the train, waitresses in Soho coffeehouses.
The guard had changed.
I love big cities, find New York warm and companionable, think a little of the country goes a long way. So I loved this London from the very first precisely because past and present coexisted so completely. I would not say happily, always, since as a closet antiquarian I often find offensive the way in which the modern too often seems intent on shoving aside, with a big boxy hip, the slender graceful remnants of its own history. Perhaps nowhere was I as struck by this as I was in the City, for quickly I learned that that locution in literature referred not, as I had supposed, to the city of London, but to the part of London that is the oldest and today most dedicated to finance and commerce. It happened as I came upon the monument to the Great Fire of London. The denizens of the area had been wiped out by the Great Plague in 1665, and their chockablock little houses, shanties really, by a ravenous fire in 1666, and to commemorate the devastation Christopher Wren—whose contributions to the architecture of London in sheer number suggest that he never slept nor ate sitting down—conceived of a great stone column, erected not far from the baking house in Pudding Lane from which the flames were said to have first erupted and spread. Atop the pillar is a crown of flames, and at its base the explanation that the fire “consumed more than 13,000 houses and devastated 436 acres.”
What’s devastated, however, is the majesty of the monument, which was designed to be seen by anyone crossing London Bridge from the south bank of the Thames. Now it is a little like finding a needle, not in a haystack, but in a box of blocks, the large ungainly office towers around it, including that monument to the spread of American capitalism, the London headquarters of Merrill Lynch. And at the Tower of London, where I squatted in awe on the green at a sign explaining that Anne Boleyn’s bones were beneath the ground nearby, I was amazed to see that the ravens that once picked at the heads on pikes at Tower Bridge were still in residence, then a bit dispirited to discover that their wings were clipped so that they could stay within the Tower close in their now purely ornamental capacity. St. Paul’s Cathedral has