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

To the children who never lived

Wandering around the green hills and valleys of the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont in Paris’s busy and crowded 19th district (which I wrote about in an earlier post), one comes across this neat, slightly anonymous-looking green stele, with its troubling image of two hands reaching in vain for one another.
It’s a monument to the several hundred Jewish children of the district who were sent to their deaths in the concentration camps during the WW2 German occupation of France, and in particular to the 33 little ones who were too young even to have started school.

In fact, there are plaques and steles to these vanished children all around this area of Paris: they’re outside most of the schools and in many public squares. While the Nazi death machine – which became more frenetic as the war went on and as Germany’s eventual defeat became more certain – claimed French Jews from all walks of life, the inhabitants of North-East Paris were among the most vulnerable and defenceless. Recent immigrants or refugees, poor and already dispossessed, barely speaking French in many cases, what chance did they stand when even the wealthy and well-integrated Jews of the affluent western districts, French citizens for many generations, were stripped of their property and possessions and forced to wear the despised yellow star?

And what fragment of a chance did their children stand – the most vulnerable of the vulnerable, therefore the ones whom it’s our implicit duty as human beings to protect and defend – when this incomprehensible madness was raging all around them?

I don’t think we can enter into the mental world of people who are prepared to send not-yet-weaned children to be exterminated because of their racial origin, and I doubt that we should even try; it’s something which only a few writers have attempted, and with very patchy success. Perhaps the novelist E.M. Forster’s injunction to “only connect” doesn’t apply in this uniquely appalling case; perhaps the duty to oppose it in all its manifestations overrides any need to comprehend it, let alone to empathise.

Because this kind of mindset does continue to manifest itself, albeit usually in less extreme forms. I’m not referring merely to outbreaks of genocidal hatred such as those in Rwanda or former Yugoslavia, but to any and every time that an idea or ideology takes such possession of people’s minds as to override compassion, humility and even common sense. I’m talking, for instance, about the so-called “birthers” in the United States who are convinced despite all the evidence that President Obama was born in Kenya, and that he’s an alien interloper bent on imposing totalitarian socialism. Or the Chinese ideologues who claim that the Dalai Lama is an evil and power-mad plotter seeking to undermine the unity of the Chinese nation, or the followers of a religion whose very name means “peace” but who claim that it sanctifies random mass murder – and so many, many others.

Most of the misery that people have inflicted one each other stems from this unfortunate deformity of the human mind, whereby we can elevate an idea, a mere construct, above all the other impulses, emotions, experiences and impressions which go to shape our actions. It’s something which we all need to guard against.

Let’s pause a while to reflect and to shudder, and, in the moving words of the stele in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont: “Passer-by, read their names. Your memory is their only burial.”

Love is a waterfall

The 19^th district of Paris, where I’m currently living, is a bustling, chaotic, low-rent part of the city. Once a proletarian neighbourhood where newly-arrived country folk rented rooms while trying to find work as porters, dressmakers, or maids, it’s now a magnet for immigrants from Africa, the Middle East and as far away as China. The streets are grubby, the accommodation cramped and basic, there’s graffiti on the walls and garbage blowing in the wind; it’s a world away from the ultra-affluent quartiers around the Eiffel Tower and the Champs-Elysées which most tourists associate with “the city of light”.

Even so, it’s difficult for us today to imagine the squalor and misery of Eastern Paris 150 years ago: the barefoot children running and sleeping in the streets, whole families sharing one dingy room, lives framed and enclosed by a few dark, dirty and dangerous streets – unable to imagine or afford any form of recreation much beyond stupefying themselves with rotgut booze.

Much of Paris, even right in the centre, was similar when Georges-Eugène Haussmann was commissioned by Napoleon III to reconceive and reconstruct Paris as a modern city worthy of its glorious name. An important part of Haussmann’s plan was to provide the working classes with access to fresh air and the beauty of nature – hence the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont.

Built on the site of an abandoned quarry, the Parc is an extraordinary achievement of artificial landscaping, full of steep hills, mountain-like trails, hills and promontories, the highest of which is surmounted by a pagoda. There’s a large lake, where carp and tench swim and where herons and cormorants come to fish – and, most exotic of all, a 100-foot-high artificial waterfall, where clean, clear water flows over black rocks and into the lake. It’s as popular today as it must have been in the days of Baron Haussmann; small children chase each other up and down the hills, lovers embrace each other on shady benches, purposeful joggers plod around the tracks, and groups of friends spread picnic cloths on the grass and pass Sunday afternoons laughing and chatting over wine, cheese and pâté.

The Parc des Buttes-Chaumont is immaculately maintained by the city council, the flower-beds regularly weeded, the collections of exotic trees and shrubs carefully labelled and nurtured, and the tracks and paths swept twice a day – and, a nice 21st-century touch, free wi-fi is available throughout the park for people who want to bring their novels in progress or their Facebook accounts into its green shade.

What stupendous acts of love such places are, and the glories of the world’s great cities. Not built as the private property of a king, an emperor or a nobleman, nor to enrich some greedy great corporation, but simply to enable the people, starved of green and of contact with the countryside to breathe clean air and to rise their eyes to the beauty and simplicity of nature – and their maintenance today is an ongoing act of love which we all too easily take for granted. It often seems today that whatever’s free is somehow diminished in value thereby; shopping malls mean a lot more to a lot of people than municipal parks, while the natural world is fragmented and atomized into suburban gardens and country clubs.

Yet in parks we city-dwellers not only touch the eternal splendour of the natural world without effort or travel, but we also do so at no cost, and together. They remind us of what we share, as citizens, as people, and as living creatures upon the Earth – living lessons in history, civics, and ecology.