Thanks to a random mixture of A.A Gill's recent profile of London, continuing my perusal of Daniel Miller's The Comfort of Things, the announcement of the last of the Billingsgate Fish Market Porters and lots of recent city wandering and bus riding, I've been inspired to scribble down some words that have little to do with food...
I love how London never seems to forget. It's a city that acquires - architecture, history, people, industry, culture - taking it all in but never quite being able to relinquish its grasp of what it already has, no matter how much detritus piles up. It's a city of layers, applying coat after coat of new paint to an old shopfront, demolishing buildings but leaving façades, mixing people and shifting populations, increasing the melting pot of areas rather than replacing the old with the new. It's seen in the store whose shining new sign still reveals the worn hand painted typography of the butchers that once filled its space; its the strip club in an old pub, whose lattice work of dancer's poles mingle with weathered gilded crown moulding and a rich mahogany bar, juxtaposing worlds and history amidst gyrating hips and shady old men.
London hoards - it shoves new belongings on the nooks and crannies of things already in place, the ultimate urban Tetris game to make everything fit, never knowing when a past memory might be of use.
When something does disappear, it's not often by choice - The Great Fire, WWII bombings, even the rise of housing prices pressuring longtime locals from the neighbourhoods they helped form. When change is suggested, it comes with a level of melancholy and anger equivalent to the loss of a family member, only reluctantly accepting change when necessity dictates it as so. London tries its best to look forward, but it can't help but perpetually linger in the past, covered in a haze of nostalgia as thick as its infamous fog...
(This is as far as I got scribbling on the bus this afternoon... I'm not entirely sure where its going, but just a few words to end the weekend.)
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