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Published: January 12th 2013
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Living in Kenton didn’t, and still doesn't, really count as living or being in “London”. For us insiders, Kenton is in Harrow and Harrow is in Middlesex aka Middx (one of the "Home Counties").
Kenton has an HA postal code rather than a NW, N, SW, E and so on. Our super precise English postal code was HA3 9PS. Because of this, one went “up to London” from Harrow. Just as the English “go to Europe this year” for their holidays.
For a few post grad summer months I commuted into and out of London on The Tube to work in County Hall. I was at the Greater London Council when it was holding onto its existence by its fingernails against a vicious Conservative Government.
My communal office was perched above the South Bank and it splendidly overlooked Westminster. Room 603, first row of dormer windows, third from the Westminster Bridge corner. I ate my packed lunches where the entry queues to the London Eye now trail.
I’ve since become a tourist in London. My lived on the edge and worked in the centre years have passed. I now see and feel London differently, with a middle
aged visitor’s and nostalgic youth’s eyes. When staying there, the last time was close to the Vietnamese Embassy, I tend to wake up excited at the coming day's events and the potential sightseeing, before the room service breakfast trolley rattles up the corridor. Often I listen to the radio when waiting for my holiday egg, sausage, toast and marmalade.
The BBC’s radio newscast are still announced by the Ding dong ding dong… Ding ding ding ding ding… of the bell family surrounding Big Ben. Ooooh that pregnant pause, that wonderful silence as the deep baritone bell slumbers in to be whacked hard - to sound out across the world... Dong... ...Dong... ...Dong... Big Ben. The sound of London. It brings to life the sketch of the Houses of Parliament on the label of the brown sauce bottle.
Even if I hear a carriage clock tinkling the hours in some back track East African village my mind drifts to the dobbing bells suspended over the home of my British Democracy. In the 1850s the Member’s of Parliament remixed their bells from William Crotch’s tune of 1793. William was an organ student at Cambridge. (An unfortunate degree to
read for a lad with a name as his.) Ever since the donging has been known as the “Westminster Quarters.” The Westminster Quarters, chimed with just four bells - an E, a D, a C and a G.
The Clash's “London Calling'” could be a smashing modern day alternative to Big Ben's clanging opener for yesterday’s news; suitable for when they refurbish the Palace. It’s got a rich, heavy bass rift and angry young lads chanting, "London calling to the faraway towns... The ice age is coming, the sun's zooming in, engines stop running, the wheat is growing thin. A nuclear error, but I have no fear, 'cause London is drowning and I, I live by the riveeeerrrrrrrr."
We now know The Clash got the ice age part wrong, but yes, London is indeed by the riveeeeeerrrr, and aye it was drowning – though the team in the GLC and the Population Studies Group thought we were the ones who would chuck it the lifeline.
I believe that it’s smells that evoke the strongest memories, but I've yet to meet anyone who can do odours on the internet. As a second best we can all learn to
do internet visuals. Above is one of my favourite scenes, Christopher Wren's seventeenth century dome and spires. Saint Paul’s Cathedral.
Our Chris, wearing his curly white wig, was commissioned by London's forefathers, wearing their expensive, yet slightly impractical, silk white stockings, to "do something with that space there, and make it look good pal," a few years after the peasants had died from a dodgy dose of Black Death, and the survivors had then been roasted by the Great Fire. Christopher Wren, the Norman Foster of his day, was finally commissioned to build his Cathedral. v2.3. Of course, in perfect twenty twenty Marxist materialist hindsight we know a big hospital or a couple of fire stations may have been more appropriate considering the circumstances, and public money better spent. There's little point in praying over spilt milk no matter how large your place of worship is.
Bill Brandt took a black and white photo of St Paul’s rising over the Henkel blitzed ruins and smoke of London. It's classic. It's copyrighted. So you can't see it here. What you can look at is my favourite view of London painted on a London guide book of 1942, published when
London was still up to her eyes in it and the middle classes needed a reminder of what “England” meant. Brian Cook’s the illustrator.
Brian took book cover art three steps further than those that book covered before him. Brian pushed wrappers to their limits.
First, he drew pictures that began on the front cover, to then drift over the spine, and end complete and resplendent on the back cover. It was revolutionary in his day. (The picture really starts on the back and ends up on the front if you open the book and lay it flat on your table and scan your eyes left to right. Back-spine-front. However, if you’re from Arabia, then front-spine-back could match your right to left reading convention.) Anyhow, Cook’s topographical covers were meant to be a single picture to cuddle and hold the words within.
Second step, Brian Cook bled his pictures off the book’s ends and sides. He drew no restricting frames or margins. Not a border in sight and that was a good decade or two before Jackson Pollack was reported to have said "There are no borders in my art, there are only edges" on the opening night of his retrospective at the Guggenheim.
The third dust covering ground breaker was that I reckon Brian Cook must have been on something when he had his crayons out. He captured St Paul’s with yellows, pinks and oranges. Pinks! Oranges! What a trip! When Brian did the cover for 'The Chilterns', he coloured in the high street church… purple. No one muttered an “it’s been PhotoShopped, I do all my art on the easel” complaint. If Cook had used purple in Wren's day there would have been an artistic outcry, accusations of witchery, hangings at Tyburn. (Maybe Brian's contemporaries were more worried about how blitz dust was getting everywhere than they were with having with a bright yellow St Paul’s on the front of their book.)
I wonder if Brian Cook and Jackson Pollack would have hit it off if ever they had met. I can see them nattering away over a pint, drunk in the inn featured on the Spirit of London cover above, across the road from St Paul’s, behind the policemen and the folk wearing hats.
Inside Cohen Porter's don’t 'judge a London guidebook by its Brian Cook dustcover' the chapter on St Paul’s and St Aldgate’s and St Everyother Person reads;
"St Paul's, with its soaring dome – a striking and widely recognised feature of the London skyline - has arrived in our current troubled times as a symbol of hope and inspiration, of enduring architectural prowess." What a pretentious git. Us down to earth 'sixites kids recognise St Paul’s as the one you could climb up and into, the one with the gallery running around the inside false skin under the famous dome. The Whispering Gallery. We would lean over the handrail and look down onto the altar. While Mrs. Russell next door suffered the onset of vertigo, and told us to “be careful” we'd mutter rude phrases onto the wall, while sisters on the other side, with their ears slammed against the cold Portland Stone, could listen in to what was said. Whisper, whisper, we're going to a dance. And then we’d scarper down the spiral staircase and leave her without any Mojos and Fruit Salads to chew. And St. Paul’s had a crypt. A church you could “do” things in. Brilliant.
London. Bells and classic sounds. Domes and classic views. Should you stay or should you go? Do both. Stay in London and listen to The Clash on your iPod. Go to St Paul’s and whisper onto the walls. That's my advice.
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