A Riddle of Contradictions: In which I attempt to describe London’s spirit through architecture, local habits, and vegetables.

London is busy but relaxed.  Like any city, London is a hub of activity.  There are more things to do and see than one can possibly fit into a single vacation, maybe even a single lifetime – but goodness knows that this fact doesn’t stop Londoners and tourists alike from trying to do it all.  Yet despite this constant hustle and bustle, London is also the most leisurely city I’ve ever come upon, and I don’t just say that because the tube closes at midnight (which, by the way, is really annoying).  No, I say that because, although Londoners know how to keep busy, they also know how to purposefully relax.  To put down everything and take a break from the continual motion.  As a New Yorker, I find such intentional and extended rests strange, but a pleasant change, too.
 
London is crowded but spread out.  Geographically, London is huge, but the city’s giant scope is often not felt in one’s immediate area.  The buildings are relatively short for an urban environment, and it’s not peculiar at all to wander down empty streets in the middle of the day.
 
London is friendly but reserved.  I’ve lost track of the number of times that a Brit has approached me while I stand on a street corner glaring at my map.  Locals are not only generous with helping lost tourists, but will go out of their way to do so rather than waiting for the tourist to ask them and then grudgingly give directions (as more frequently occurs in NYC).  But this London friendliness is not exuberant; tones and faces remain calm, and to offer more help than needed pushes into the territory of rude.
 
London is the familiar made strange.  Sometimes, for brief moments, I will forget that I am not in America: everyone speaks English; the buildings, although generally squatter and older, resembles NYC’s gorgeous mish-mash of architectural styles; and the weather is more-or-less like the temperamental Seattle weather I grew up with.  But then I remember my location again with a jolt: I have to press floor ‘0’ in an elevator, rather than floor 1, to get to the ground floor; the speaker inside the tube announces in a distinctly British posh accent to ‘mind the gap’ as we step inside instead of to just watch your step; and the plethora of British coins is not only confusing, but very heavy inside my wallet.
 
Does this riddle of contradictions help at all in describing the spirit of place within London?  Hopefully a simile will help.  For me, London’s genius loci, its characteristic atmosphere, is much like mushy peas.  Mushy peas, for those unexposed to this gem from English culture, are essentially mashed potatoes, but with peas instead of potatoes (and no, that’s not the technical definition or recipe, but that’s how I think of them).  It’s an English comfort food, served frequently with pies or fish and chips.  Peas are not a difficult vegetable to acquire in the western world nowadays, but the specific peas required for mushy peas (marrowfat ones) are harder to locate if you’re not in the U.K.  The sight is bright green, not a sickly green, but rather a healthy shade of growth and harvest; the taste is soft, a substance flavored rather than dominated by its vegetables; the smell, too, is soft, a delicate scent of mingled gardens and salts.  Mushy peas do not overwhelm the palate with distinction, but rather comfort with a familiarity that, although strange, is welcome.
 
If you can’t tell, although there are some days when I miss my good ol’ American garden peas, I really do like mushy peas, too.

[image via http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00118/82547106_chips_118500c.jpg]

Woolfian London: In which I attempt to reconcile Virginia Woolf’s London with my London.

Although Virginia Woolf’s London is not even 100 years old, it is still a very different London than the one I’m currently living in.  In The London Scene, Woolf chronicles different aspects of her hometown in six essays that were originally written for Good Housekeeping, taking us everywhere from the cozy home of the London dweller to the hustle of cargo around the Thames. 

It’s hard for me to picture some of the images that Woolf paints so well as being more than images, as being the landscape of a place she lived and of a place I currently live: sail ships dotting the Thames, stray cats wandering the busiest warehouses, or tortoises being sold alongside flowers and shoes at an outdoor market (6, 13, 20).  Am I really wandering the same streets that Woolf wandered?  She only wrote these essays in ’31 – how can so much change in such a relatively short period of time?

Woolf herself, however, provides me with the answer.  In her words, “The charm of modern London is that it is not built to last; it is built to pass” (23).  I struggled over this idea for a little while.  Of course I know that people, and thus cities, change over time, but I am used to thinking of London itself as a historical museum: even though the particular artifacts on display may alter through the years, the structure of the building itself will remain.  

But Woolf, a direct inheritor of the modern world from the old – someone who had seen firsthand the collapse of what were once believed to be permanent structures in the wake of WWI – knows better.  As she witnesses the constant cycle of demolition and creation upon Oxford Street, a garish yet attractive shopping district and neighborhood, she understands that this need to “prov[e]” that “stone and brick” can be made “as transitory as [Londoners’] own desires” is a constant source of not only delight, but of innovation (24).  To constantly demolish and rebuild entirely is a creative act, and a purposeful one, too; London’s contents can be rearranged, but London the city will and does remain.

Not everything that Woolf describes feels as though it arrives from another era.  St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey still stand proud, along with the preserved houses of writers such as Dickens and Keats; Oxford Street is still a great shopping hub; and the Port of London remains a bustle of activity. 

I was particularly struck by how contemporary Woolf’s musings upon government felt.  Woolf expresses concern over the fact that government used to call for great individuals, yet now government merely produces “instruments” to function well within “committees” (61).  The danger, Woolf suggests, is that government has become too much like a machine in which people operate and choose not as they believe, but as the political faction they have been pressed into would like them to believe.  Woolf praises the House of Commons for ushering in a new era of democracy that takes into account commoner voices, democracy that does more than listen to individual aristocrats (62).  Her praise, however, is measured by the worry that the political machine will grow beyond man’s control.  Given the ongoing debates in the western world on the individual versus the society, on the prevalence of divisive political parties, etc, her words could not feel more timely.

[image from Virginia Woolf Society]