Imagined London - Anna Quindlen [40]
But, of course, now we can buy Italian shoes and English woolens nearly anywhere in the world, just as nearly anyone in the world can buy those great American exports, the Quarter Pounder with Cheese and the Gap jean. New Bond Street in London is, as it has been in countless books and histories, a wonderful place to shop, but it is no more English than I am. Chanel, Tiffany, Donna Karan, Cartier: The English luxe purveyors are outnumbered by foreign competitors and, sadly, the same foreign competitors whose stores can be found in Paris and Toronto, Hong Kong and Las Vegas, surely in New York. Conversely, there is now a Burberry store in many American cities, and Harris tweeds can be found everywhere. Even William Evans offers a Web site for hunting gear and jackets, plus fours straight from the London store via FedEx.
There were those halcyon days during the 1960s and, later, in a smaller way, at the end of the century, when London had a hip cachet unheard of elsewhere in the world. The Beatles, Mary Quant, the Sex Pistols, the punk movement: The city had once again become the world capital, this time of cool. Cool Britannia: That was the catch phrase that all the magazines used as they turned London, a city for the ages, into flavor of the month.
But cool is a commodity that runs wild as soon as it is let loose and never, ever, acknowledges its roots, and before you could say Led Zeppelin or Haight-Ashbury, America had buried its former forefather. Not long ago I was cabbing it to Notting Hill, the new cool London neighborhood (even as I write this I know, in the nature of things, that some other place has likely supplanted it), when the cab driver slowed appreciably. “That is the home of Madonna,” he said solemnly. Who is, of course, the Quarter Pounder with Cheese of celebrities, American, middlebrow, famous worldwide.
Even the men who sell souvenirs along the iron gates of St. James’s Park are selling the same souvenirs, with slight adaptations, that their compatriots are selling opposite the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue thousands of miles away. Florid oil paintings of a barely recognizable generic city. Sweatshirts with the Union Jack instead of the American flag. Even the ubiquitous tee shirt, now gone worldwide: “My grandparents went to (fill in the blank) and all I got was this lousy tee shirt.”
Shouldn’t it at least read “bloody tee shirt?”
The net effect is to make everywhere feel somehow the same, and nowhere feel particularly particular. What a metaphor it seems to compare and contrast the most splendid and the most recent portraits of the monarch in the Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace. The glory of the place is a portrait by van Dyck of Charles I riding on a handsome, romantically rendered horse: enormous, overwhelming, larger than life-size in a baroque gilt frame. Its twin, I suppose, is the portrait of Elizabeth II presented by the artist Lucian Freud in 2001. It is about the size of a sheet of writing paper, and shows the Queen wearing the astonishing diamond diadem, on display elsewhere in the gallery, atop her familiar lacquered bouffant.
Yet, despite the crown, the Queen looks like a peevish aging housewife. There is nothing of splendor in the image: This is a quite ordinary woman incongruously bejeweled. One can only conclude that if Freud had painted such an image—realistic, no doubt—of Charles I, he would have been summarily executed. Ditto for the architects of the Millennium footbridge, opened to much fanfare—and months late—to celebrate twenty-first-century London. Reporters trooped across it en masse, and as they