I started at the Bank of London in front of the Exchange, per Morton's In Search of London, and walked down toward the Tower and the Tower Bridge. He writes how hard it was to imagine London’s founding in the wilderness when he wrote just after the Blitz, and the landscape was quite urban. For the contemporary visitor awash in car traffic it is utterly impossible. I tried briefly, closing my eyes and thinking unsuccessfully of shepherds, then bought a cup of coffee at Starbucks and walked along the Thames, around the Tower, across the magnificent and fearsome Tower bridge and stood for a bit in its middle.
The Pool is gone; and so is Billingsgate, and the Southwark area near the river is thick with development of the generic Riverwalk kind. I was still getting my bearings, as I found out later, looking for an absent London in its modern successor. I walked to London Bridge and recrossed the river. Morton notes that Wren’s signature is visible from every bridge – not so now. At that moment, I haughtily agreed with Prince Charles that the city had lost its post-Blitz opportunity to have created a lovely city with vivid architecture. London fails to be either Rome or Chicago (which fail London, obviously, in their own ways). But more on this later.
The Tower does look bright and cheerful, as Morton wrote, not a bastion of cruelty, from the river on a bright sunny day. The lawn is what makes it so, I think, and its antiquely distressed walls. It looks very Rapunzely. And you can’t really see the water gate, which looks like nothing so much as a gaping ugly mouth with teeth. So it looks fine, history of spectacular brutality notwithstanding.
The photo I regret missing is of three young men walking down Queen Victoria Street in The City, wearing suits and bright ties, vivid in their youth and participation in the long tradition of Making Money. (When I snapped the picture, I got them perfectly focused, from the chest down.)
The photos that are strange, thanks to the lovely weather today, are of sun pouring over the Tower Bridge and the into the gullies of the City buildings.
Certainly, I feel sorry to have missed Morton’s London. I’d have loved to smell the fish in Billingsgate, seen the ships in The Pool (even if fewer and unmasted), seen Wren’s low skyline undulating along the real grade of the old city. Nor is this an idle unearned nostalgia. London really does feel less interesting, less visible, than it must have seemed then. But reflection changed how I felt about this, as I point out in a moment.
I walked up to St. Paul’s. I sat a bit in the pews, and watched a service almost begin; I looked at a few monuments along the sides where I recognized names. I saw bits of scenery from the running Royal miniseries. I walked down into the crypt, but I did not linger long, and came straight back up. I walked up to the Whispering Gallery, a rim inside the dome where whispers carry with great clarity, and from there I walked up to the next platform, and finally to the top, from which the view of London is absolute.
This is where having read Morton paid substantial dividends. When I saw London from above, and had a sense immediately of the newness of the city, the piecemeal concrete buildings build on minor variations of a few basic styles that might be classed as “Midwestern America Regional Post Office,” I understood what I was seeing. Morton talked about the vast swaths of damage he saw before him, the cellars exposed to sunlight for the first time in decades or centuries. Then he talked about the frustration (perhaps unique to the British, for whom gardening isn’t so much a hobby as a mandate) that householders must feel to see their riven walls and exposed living rooms under siege by the weeds that explode opportunistically where cultivation recedes. What I was seeing was the same thing – weedy buildings that had to be built swiftly and competently and opportunistically so that life could begin again.
No, many of them are not lovely. Certainly many of the fine smaller churches sit at elbows with vulgar utilitarian and almost Soviet buildings. But I realized the choice must have been to let London sit, elbows on knees, to wait for vision, for loose cash, for another Wren – or to go back to work and stay vital with the best one can do, which it surely is. From the top of St. Paul’s, I could see where I had started – the Tower bridge. And I could see where I was bound – the Houses of Parliament, with Big Ben and their own spun candy tower. I went down the steps, and walked through the Temple, where people really carry tall stacks of briefs just like on Rumpole.
I walked along the river, past the obelisk and past the sphinx benches, where workmen sat and talked and people smoked cigarettes and waited to decide what they would do next with what remained of their days. I made my way down through a pedestrian tunnel and came up to find Parliament along the river, in a building which is so large and ornate that it looks like a child’s day’s work on a dribble sand castle. I sat and looked at it for a while, walked up and down it, watched the tourists taking pictures of Big Ben (like me).
I walked around to the rear and looked at The Burghers of Calais, the Rodin collective bronze, which fulfilled what I expected of it. It’s easy, and the title might have been something like Fear, Resignation, and Bravery. But it’s certainly worthy of its scale and strength and spirit.
When I found my way around into the Abbey, it was very confusing. I had known it to be smallish, but the habit in some great churches of endlessly subdividing them with moveable walls and clusters of folding chairs is disconcerting. The variety of worship spaces seemed intended to chop up the flow of the interior. I could look up at the ceiling and get a sense of it, but then when I found myself routed in one direction and then another by velvet ropes it got harder still. So I had to go through it a few times to get a feeling for it.
But then, a gracious steward, an Irishman who had lived in America and then come home and then to England, was a great help. I showed him Morton and he greeted it like you do a memento you keep somewhere that’s not special but is safe so that you will see it now and again -- “Ah, ‘Morton!’” – as though he had suspected it might turn up, and couldn’t be more pleased now that it had.
With his help it began to come together – the tomb of Edward the Confessor, the coronation throne, the kings ringed around Edward and so also around the wellspring of pre-Norman English identity. Some of what I was seeing seemed hidden or even tucked away. The Confessor’s tomb is barely visible in the center of the other tombs, and when you make it out finally it’s a confusing ark that looks a little like it should be puffing around the Island of Sodor.
There’s a special other place built by Henry V – a chantry -- hidden above the visitor’s head. Memorials and graves are pushed to sides and tucked under ledges. It was as if the kings and successive architects were making the best of a natural cave. The stone selected for the flagstones, or for grave slabs, seemed to have no consistent pattern, and much of the ornament was determinedly drab. But while I walked around, I saw the sorts of people who were buried and entombed in the church, and my realization and awe grew.
I saw the rack of iron atop Elinor’s tomb, where candles were burned in annual vigils, and the kings laid out head to foot in sarcophagi like lengths of dike thrown up against the tide of time, and when I crossed a slab of marble that showed Charles Darwin had been buried beneath, I could not help but kneel and spread the tips of four fingers across it. Darwin, after all.
So I began to understand where I was, in a national hidey-hole. It was like the children's place under the stairs where everything is just so and where it should be, even if the treasures that need to go there multiply and multiply so that every floorboard is covered and the woodwork is covered and thumbtacks hold things against the ceiling. Mementos of the beginnings of a long life when it is still short, precisely arranged around the edges, in an order that makes perfect sense to the only person who matters -- the keeper of the shrine. I’m glad to have been allowed in.
Suddenly, then, though, I walked up the steps and found myself in the modernity of Henry VII, his bright chapel with the Order of of the Bath's knights’ identities arrayed around the sides and the tomb in the center, and I thought of the road thick with cars on the other side of the windows. The chapel really is as beautiful as the guidebooks say; it truly is a miracle in itself, stone spun like tatted strings around and over brilliant illumination. It was daylight after the hidey-hole, bright hope and order and righteousness on the way to Now.
And I was pretty much done for the day. There was nowhere to sit, really, and my feet hurt. So I just stood there for a while, looking up into the fairy cave at the end of the dim passage, and I waited to regain the energy to rejoin the unruly contemporary world.