CENTRE POINT
London has become, however briefly, a city of the open air
SIMON JENKINS
London this week has been like Ran- goon before the monsoon. The Great Wen has been suppurating for a month. Heat and humidity have driven its inhabitants into parks and to the banks of the neglect- ed Thames. As they crowd the ghats of Westminster and Southwark, the river gazes sluggishly back at them, turns yellow and slinks out to sea. London is as unused to heat as it is to snow. It is a city without climate control. The shock to its system has sweat oozing from every pore, while Con- rad taps his pipe on the stern rail and mur- murs, 'It reaches you finally, does the heat.'
Yet the change is extraordinary. I spent 24 hours last weekend showing American friends round the city. There was barely an inch of space to spare. We went from Chelsea up to Notting Hill, round to Regent's Park and Camden Town, down to Covent Garden and Soho, along the Strand and across to the South Bank and Bank- side. Everywhere was crowded. In despera- tion we cut up to St Katharine's Dock, to Whitechapel and on to Islington. Each neighbourhood was carpeted with humani- ty. The parks were like refugee settlements. On Saturday evening and Sunday lunchtime, there seemed not a restaurant table empty, nor in Soho or Camden even room to pass in the street. The metropolis was enveloped in a gigantic carnival.
Westminster Abbey, Trafalgar Square and the Tower of London were impenetra- ble with tourists. Some 20 million visitors are expected in central London this sum- mer, half of them from overseas and three times the population of the Greater Lon- don area. Driven from the usual sights, groups could be found beached like disori- entated whales in such unlikely spots as Paddington, Brick Lane and even the Clink. Improbable byways became bustling boulevards. The splendid new tree-lined river walk between the National Theatre and Blackfriars was more busy than the Quai d'Orsay, with the added attraction of no traffic.
The hidden caverns of Bankside and But- ler's Wharf were alive with people. Cars could not move down Commercial Street past Spitalfields flea market. Tourists with heat-exhaustion flopped against Huguenot walls alongside drunks and beggars. Twenty years ago, Covent Garden was a deserted no-man's-land at weekends. On Saturday night, a quarter of a million people must have been carousing through this now gild- ed quartier. From the Piazza across Long Acre to Chinatown and up to Old Compton Street, no wheeled vehicle could move through what is now a regular weekend fes- tival of street music, exhibitionism and foodism. The area has been pedestrianised by force of numbers. I have lived my life in central London and never seen it so alert to fashion, or so popular.
In his book on The City as a Work of Art, Donald Olsen delves into the difference between London and Paris as places of public enjoyment. It lies, he claims, in architecture rather than in climate or social habit. (Both have the same rainfall.) Nine- teenth-century Paris was built high and dense for security, its citizens living with their servants in apartments without kitchens. This forced them out on to the street for meals and entertainment and thus into de facto mixed communities. Lon- don did not worry about security and spread over the Thames basin with proper, self-contained houses for all but the poor- est residents. 'An evening at home' became the Londoner's most prized pleasure. Lon- don was a naturally private, introverted city. While Paris was gay, London was Pooterish. The charm of Paris was public, that of London secret.
The past week nudged London in the direction of Paris. To stay indoors was intolerable and the city turned itself inside out. This was not the usual London, its public spaces dominated by dreary thor- oughfares and ugly high-rises, its people scurrying between buildings and the Underground, dodging rain and enduring the cacophony of traffic. This was London through the looking-glass, London driven to divest itself of its privacy, to become the planner's dreamland of ubiquitous public congregation. It was a jubilee of the sun.
As so often in the life of cities, the best results were achieved not by design but by accident. On Saturday we found ourselves dining by the Thames directly opposite the Temple. The brasserie was in a temporary concourse on land blighted by some plan- ning fiasco ten years ago and untouched since. From the table we had a majestic panorama from Westminster to St Paul's, a delight offered the public by none of the architect-designed buildings on either side, the National Theatre, London Weekend or Sea Container House. London is never happier than when 'unintended'. Hence the crowds in Camden High Street and Porto- bello Road, in Soho and Petticoat Lane. The rare deserted neighbourhoods were those apogees of postwar planning, the Barbican, Broadgate, Paternoster Square and Lower Thames Street.
Some instinct draws the visitor to the fragments of London unmarked by all but the most deferential urban design. In the new leisure economy, conservation is no longer profit forgone. It is lucrative. The astonishing markets now sprawling round Camden Lock, I am told, have a higher retail turnover per square foot than Bond Street or Regent's Street. The same must be true of Portobello. Modern architecture still finds it hard to create the same sense of urban hospitality as a Georgian façade or a Victorian warehouse. The jewels of the South Bank on Saturday were not the National Theatre, King's Reach or London Bridge City. They were the river frontages at Coin Street, Tower Bridge and Shad Thames, where blight has stopped develop- ment in its tracks.
London has become, however briefly, a city of the open air. It has rediscovered its river and sent tens of thousands to prome- nade its shores. Bazelgette's noble Embankments have emerged to challenge the Ile St Louis, Trastevere and the Bom- bay Bund. Sitting there on Saturday night 1 could just imagine Handel's ladies fanning themselves on their barges, while the Water Music floated on the stream and gondoliers with flares danced attendance. (The trans- port minister would ban the lot of them today.) Of course, cities cannot deny their pre- vailing wind. My crowds in linens and pana- mas, in miniskirts and tank tops, will soon give way to Eliot's besuited zombies plod- ding over London Bridge to be 'undone' in King William Street. Cities cannot cheat the climate. But they can surprise us by suddenly slipping on the garments of a sun- nier clime. When this torrid interlude is over, I hope the place does not revert whol- ly to type.
Simon Jenkins writes for the Times.
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