Imagined London Read Free Page A

conclude anything else. It is not only that the monarchy itself has become such a vestigial organ of the body politic in what is now a constitutional monarchy, but that this particular manifestation of its history and power is a kind of Potemkin village, neither illuminating nor majestic. (“A child with a box of bricks could have done better,” one of the characters concludes of the palace architecture in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. )
    The Foot Guards of the Household Regiment go through their famous change of personnel, in red coats and bearskin busbies, but the ordinary black-and-white coppers and the high security barriers around the old gilded palace gates tell the real story of the modern era. Down Birdcage Walk on a Saturday morning, in front of Wellington Barracks, two groups of guards, one with guns, one with drums, execute a complex pavane that is clearly as old as the Empire. But little is left of the Empire except a few stray Caribbean islands, the good-natured fealty of the Canadians, and the fact that, according to one cab driver, the second most commondinner dish in the U.K. (after roast beef and Yorkshire pudding) is chicken tikka masala.
    It is difficult to watch all this without A. A. Milne’s Christopher Robin rhyme going round and round in your head:
    They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace—
Christopher Robin went down with Alice.
They’ve great big parties inside the grounds.
“I wouldn’t be King for a hundred pounds,”
Says Alice.
    The guards with the musical instruments play the theme from Austin Powers. But is it really the theme from the silly cinematic satire of swinging England, or is it an ancient march tune co-opted by Hollywood producers? These are the sorts of questions that being an Anglophile tend to produce under the weight of long history and literary familiarity. Surely an American doesn’t want to get it wrong; if there is anything that England stands for, with its quiet central squares, its tweeds and twin sets and teas, the tight-lipped precision of its speech, it is that there is a right way to do things. This is where the right way has its ancestral home.
    â€œThis is the past,” said a British book editor, indicating the street scene outside a posh Knightsbridgerestaurant with a languid hand, not long before he decamped for great success in New York. “America is the future.”
    An easy glib explanation for a shift in geopolitics that has taken place slowly, over centuries. But it is not entirely true. London has the trick of making its past, its long indelible incredible past, always a part of its present. And for that reason it will always have meaning for the future, because of all it can teach about disaster, survival, and redemption. It is all there in the streets. It is all there in the books.

CHAPTER THREE
    L ondon opens to you like a novel itself. Those who prefer Paris or Rome complain that the English capital has no precise center, that there is no spot in the city that could be considered the hub around which the wheel revolves. There is some truth to that. St. Paul’s is an enormous visual marker from above, like a stern presence looking down and around on all. The string of parks—Hyde, Green, St. James’s—make a sort of central hub that enables newcomers to find their way around some of the most important landmarks and some of the prettiest neighborhoods. Piccadilly Circus seems more important than it ismainly because of the street bustle its tortured topographical layout foments.
    But the truth is that that is not really how London is apprehended. It is divided into chapters, the chapters into scenes, the scenes into sentences; it opens to you like a series of rooms, door, passage, door. Mayfair to Piccadilly to Soho to the Strand. Or, on a more intimate scale, the narrow little maze of Shepherd Market, with its ethnic restaurants and small spare trendy shops, to the wider but