Imagined London - Anna Quindlen [30]
All this, however, takes place against a backdrop the former occupants of the place, even the most gifted fantabulists, could scarcely have imagined. There is a swathe of grass full of picnickers and young families on blankets, and then a wall of large featureless buildings of no particular modern design around the kind of barren open urban plazas that have turned out to be a mecca for skateboarders. Although Prince Charles seems to have no eye for even distinguished modern architecture, perhaps the inevitable effect of living in a series of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century palaces, he wasn’t far off when he said the Royal National Theater building looked like “a disused power station.” What’s worse, the Tate Modern Museum is a disused power station, the Bankside Power Station, decommissioned in 1986, reborn with works by Picasso, Jackson Pollock, and Andy Warhol. Thank God for Southwark Cathedral, with its stained-glass windows showing scenes from Shakespeare, and the reproduction of the Globe Theatre, which was built in the old fashion, with pegs instead of nails. Wandering behind Waterloo Station with its new Janus face, half a staid turn-of-the-twentieth-century block, the other half all cables and glass, there is actual life: several blocks of identical houses, two up, two down, but betraying with their enameled doors, their window treatments, and their window boxes the unmistakable odor of recent gentrification.
It would be easy to be snide about this, particularly in light of the beautiful state of preservation of the north side of the Thames, except for the lessons of history. One is that the original Southwark neighborhoods were the kinds of places residents were tempted to bulldoze, not preserve. The area had been a place for the unwelcome and the unlawful, at one time home to seven prisons, among them the original Clink that gave the name to all the others. It was also one of those areas, common to all great cities, where the undesirable but essential were located, the noxious factories, the tanneries, the soapmakers. Prostitutes worked the streets, radicals hid in the cellars. It was as though the whole area was a place of incarceration where the rest of London sent its troubles to be contained, and when its buildings were torn or closed down, for many who had lived or worked there it was as Dickens had written of the Marshalsea, once part of the area: “The world is none the worse without it.”
But it’s a mistake for a visitor, particularly one from America, to be disdainful of any London neighborhood where the newly built has taken the place of what went before. We Americans have an inferiority complex about the British, if for no other reason than that the history they carry is so much longer and richer than our own; after all, what passes for a very old building in Boston or Baltimore is merely middle-aged in London. (And we are convinced that British actors are better than our own, simply because their accents are so mellifluous.) But even those who have the usual American inch-deep knowledge of history understand that the small island nation from which we sprang has seen hardship that we cannot compete with. Fires that destroyed entire neighborhoods. Epidemics that wiped out hundreds of thousands of people. The slate of London had already been wiped