Autumn thoughts from London

It’s been a longish time since I last posted, taken up with moving house and all the attendant challenges. After many years of voluntary exile (in France, China and the United States), I’ve now returned to my roots in North London – to write, to study, to think, to play and to work.

Like all great cities, London has its own texture – and most of it is pretty random, small-scale, even introverted. No one ever planned or designed or envisioned this city in the way that Pierre l’Enfant did for Washington, or Baron Haussmann for Paris. There’s no mathematical New York-style grid, and no freeways zoom all around it or up and down it, like Los Angeles or Shanghai. Even when much of the mediaeval city was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, the intellectual and collective effort of reconceptualising London for a changed world was beyond the grasp of the citizenry of the time – or perhaps just fundamentally out of kilter with the city’s spirit.

This is why still today the old centre of London (now of course the financial district) conserves the chaotic and jumbled street patterns of a city that disappeared over 300 years ago, together with wonderfully evocative street names like Crutched Friars and Seething Lane – even though nothing physically survives from those days except one or two churches.

All ancient cities are layered in this way, of course, some more obviously than others: Rome’s unique classical patrimony is visible everywhere, even as one drives in from the airport, while old Beijing clings on only in a few pockets among the skyscrapers and apartment blocks of a city which has totally remade itself over the past 20 years.

And yet all cities are also in some sense frozen in time – living snapshots of the days when they reached their greatest glory. For London that moment would be the mid to late 19th century: not only many of the city’s most famous monuments, like Tower Bridge and the Houses of Parliament but also much of its domestic architecture dates from that period.

To an extraordinary extent, London is a city of low-rise, often quite humble houses and offices built between about 1850 and 1920 – a city where people live if at all possible in their own single-family houses. Not even for affluent Londoners the magnificent apartment buildings lining the boulevards of Paris, or the palatial art deco 20-storey blocks of the Upper East Side – most of them want a house with a garden, or if that’s out of the question in a city where the starting price for the humblest such dwelling is half a million dollars, a flat carved out of one of those Victorian or Edwardian houses, preferably with its own balcony or roof terrace.

London’s “villages”, like the one where I’m living, are the unplanned and accidental result of the city’s massive growth during its glory years. Like a giant amoeba it spread over the surrounding countryside engulfing innumerable farms and hamlets, as speculative builders buried them beneath the streets and crescents where most Londoners still live today.

Fortunately for today’s inhabitants, the city fathers of this first modern megalopolis (London, now around no. 20 in total population, was the world’s largest city for about 100 years until overtaken by New York in the 1920s) saw the need to leaven its potentially toxic growth with plenty of parks and gardens. Thanks to their sparing of many fragments of countryside from development, 31% of the city’s surface area is green space, the highest proportion of any major world city, and few Londoners live more than 10 minutes’ walk away from a park large enough for a jog or a game of football. Moreover, the way that London grew, with relatively few high-rise buildings and apartment blocks, has left its population density among the lowest of all the world’s capitals.

But of course, the texture of a city reflects the predilections of its inhabitants, and Londoners, living in their little houses and flats in their “villages” and walking their dogs in parks which are like fragments of rural landscape magically translocated to the city, sometimes seem to be engaged in a massive collective denial of city life itself. It’s as if the city in some ways turns its back not only on the 21st century but on the 20th too – so unlike the unrestrained "Yes!" to urban life that one finds in New York (albeit frozen, perhaps, in its own glory days of the 1940s and 50s), or in the 21st-century megalopolises of Asia such as Shanghai, Seoul, Hong Kong and Tokyo.

Personally, I find all this quite to my taste – if, as it seems, the city which once was the first to embrace technology and industrial civilisation has concluded that it was all a terrible mistake, and hankers after the world that it destroyed in doing so, this nostalgia suits my temperament. We have indeed lost something irreplaceable in our scramble for physical comfort and possessions, and the pre-industrial countryside is a perfect representation and embodiment of that. Of course, the English countryside was never an untamed wilderness, rather a co-creation of man and nature, and no doubt Londoners’ nostalgia for it is also due to the remoteness in time of the period when most people lived there – unlike the inhabitants of most developing world cities, for whom the harsh and precarious life of the peasantry is no more than a generation away.

But that’s not the whole story, or even the main story: many, if not most Londoners, subject to the same stresses as any other city-dwellers of crowded subway trains, alienating office work, and unrelenting economic pressure, find some equilibrium and peace of soul in these green oases and in these quiet streets of red-brick houses, trees and neat little gardens. London by and large doesn’t attempt to batter you into submission with its hugeness and opulence, or to remind you of your insignificance with looming towers and pinnacles.

It spreads itself out in endless vistas of streets and crescents, of small and mostly unmemorable little shopping centres, dotted with parks and gardens. You can make of it what you will – all very understated, and democratic, in perhaps a quintessentially British way