London, Farringdon

I got off the train at Farringdon and went up the stairs and through
the turnstiles. I haven't normally done that; whenever I've been here
in the past it has usually been up the stairs as quickly as possible
and down the other side to try and catch the underground train sitting
on the tracks. It always, almost without fail, departs before I can
reach it. Today I was more leisurely, and looked around for the friend
I was meeting as I reorganised my belongings and fumbled with my
jacket. After establishing that she wasn't on the platform I came up
the stairs and glanced over the railings to see if I could see
her.

I reflected, in a moment of stillness among the bustle as I leant on
the wall, on what it is that makes a London station so distinctive.
They have this somewhat bizarre Victorian influence, lurking often in
tiles of lurid colours, like the bright moss green ones that adorn
parts of this one. The faded remnants of the bygone era mix oddly with
the modern grey barriers and London transport workers in their
blue-and-fluorescent-orange overalls. Despite the lack of cohesion,
however, I wouldn't change them for the world. This mix of old and new,
this impact of the past on the present is something I treasure. It
seems to set us in context; one can almost see steam trains on the
tracks that run under this vantage point, replacing the grubby blue
oblongs that sit there today, and its not hard to imagine a myriad of
possibilities for the future - monorails, hover trains, even a weird
kind of suction tube; they line themselves up and glide across my inner
vision as if on smoother rails than the trains that have passed beneath
my feet to date. I have sometimes tried to imagine what the future will
make of our era when it's not 'modern' any more. Will people make
collections of mobile phones the way that we have made collections of
stamps or old cameras? It seems somewhat odd that even in my short
eighteen years I should have seen such a mammoth change in the life of
civilisation. Maybe that's what shows I'm growing up - the fact that I
remember things when they were different to now; they say it's a
child's wish that everything remains constant, perhaps because they
have not yet become used to change. Maybe I'm still a child because I
imagine the advent of mobile phones to be a 'mammoth change'.

I went to lean in the doorway of the station, and looked out on a muggy
wet May afternoon with one shoulder against the tiled wall and my feet
hooked around each other, trying to avoid the eye of the beggar sitting
on the pavement opposite the entrance. I don't know that part of London
well - I'd been there once before this, with my Dad to go to a meeting
with some lawyers. About a tunnel, I think it was. The shops were all
shut, today, with wire cages over the windows and metal blinds across
the doorways. It seemed a little odd for a Saturday afternoon I felt,
but then there's nobody in town on a Saturday, because the people who
can afford it, like most of them, live out and work in. It's a place
meant to have people in, London; it doesn't quite seem right without
them.

I jumped as, finally, Gerry put her hands on my shoulders and asked
where I'd been - apparently I'd missed her on the platform. We gave
each other a hug by way of greeting and moved off companionably up the
road, Gerry talking her normal nineteen-to-the-dozen about the events
of the morning - her RADA audition. There was a group of people we were
following on the pavement, having what Gerry described as an 'argy'.
They weren't beating each other up - just shouting, which was something
I suppose. All the same, we crossed the road so as to avoid them. For
once our loud friends were speaking our language. At least, they were
using English words; the language they were talking is a dialect all
its own I suspect. You can't really be sure of hearing a word of
English spoken from one end of the street to the other in London, which
somehow seems a little strange in England, but is after all only a
measure of the kind of society we inhabit. 'Homogenised' is the word
they use I think. We live in a bigger world, these days, than people in
ages past generally had access to. It's a society where ancient
regional dialects are gradually getting lost or amalgamated into one
big everyday speech. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, it's
somehow reassuring that every group of people in every area retains and
creates its own slang, and thereby it's own language. We cannot say we
are losing our rich heritage; just allowing the steady march of time to
continue, bulldozering all before it and creating the melange of the
past that goes to make up the future.

Continuing our journey up the street, I noted another hang over from
former times. Every shop we passed was a jewellers, its windows filled
with wedding rings and necklaces behind those wire cages. Wasn't it
right back in the middle ages that shops that sold the same things
clustered together around the source of supply, or was it that
journeymen moved in next to masters? Little pieces of bygone history
lessons floated, a little muddied, to the surface of my mind and sank
once more. The atmosphere here seemed a little seedy, almost as though
it had gone past its best. The shop fronts were tatty and the pavements
narrow and littered with bits of rubbish and loose paving slabs. The
whole effect was to make the expensive objects in the windows seem
tawdry, even at the price of several thousand pounds.

After a bit, we stopped outside one of the shops and Gerry pointed
through the window to her Dad at the back, with one of those jeweller's
eyepieces over his glasses. He was intent upon his work and didn't see
us. Gerry didn't fancy fighting her way through what she described as a
'crowded shop', with one or two people in it, and so rang him, from a
distance of about 5 metres. An example, perhaps, of the laziness
brought about by modern convenience technology. I'm not sure it can
really be said that it has allowed us to be lazy, when one looks around
at the number of people who suffer from 'clinical stress' or whatever
it is. Andy came out after a minute or two and we all three drifted off
up the road and around the corner. We entered a region of back streets,
with which London abounds. It's most definitely a city of public areas
and hidden areas - there's the big roads that everyone knows; Oxford
Street, Tottenham Court Road, Trafalgar Square; and behind these there
are little pockets of forgotten lanes, like the one on which I stood.
Well, they're forgotten by the businessmen and the tourists, but not I
imagine by those who live and work on them. It is here, I think, that
London manages to hide its vast population. The road we walked along
contained the remnants of a market. It did last time I was here too, on
the day it snowed; I wonder if it ever has an actual market, instead of
a wreckage of empty carts, some of whom look as if they were even
designed to be pulled by horses.

We turned a corner and were in an arcade of shops. These weren't the
big public designer ones; these were the private little shops designed
for the daily living of a community. There was even a laundrette, a
feature I thought was going far out of date these days. There were the
usual fast food places, though these were the individual things; no big
MacDonald's or Burger King round here, just their shabbier, poorer
wannabes. We went into a dowdy newsagents, with out of date magazines
on the shelves and dusty chocolate on the racks, for Andy to fill out a
lottery coupon.

We continued on, Gerry trying to explain to her Dad the ins and outs of
the confusing (to him) drama school audition system; I was off in the
usual reverie that London brings upon me. This road was a tunnel
between a tall building on one side and an amalgamation of tall brick
walls from different eras on the other. There was a pavement, tarmaced,
but the road itself was cobbled, with garish double yellow lines
painted beneath the dog mess smeared there like dropped ice-cream. My
attention was drawn once more to the incongruity of the old and the
new, side by side like twins, that I'm sure one can find in no city but
London in quite the same way. As we threaded our way through bollards
and barriers designed to keep the cars at bay, there was an opening in
the wall to my left. I glanced up to see battered green doors with iron
railings and, further up behind a reinforced glass window, a group of
kids dressed obscurely in fluorescent yellow workmen's jackets playing
some sort of vicious game on the stairs. I turned my head away again,
to reflect on the fact that the community that lived in this block was
so hidden away, and perhaps so I wouldn't see what those boys were
really doing to one another. Someone once said that the sound of
children playing is indeed soothing as long one is far enough away so
as not to hear what they are actually saying. Terry Pratchett I think
it was.

The next time I glanced up from my contemplation of the pavement, it
was to find that the wall behind which several hundred people were
living their lives had given way to a stone slabbed alleyway leading to
a magnificent church building, with concrete walls built right up
against it. It must have been Victorian, I think, built of once-red
bricks, polluted black now by the passing of ages. It was Gothic in
style, with long flowing diagonal lines, and stood in sharp contrast to
the squat square stuccoed concrete of the modern buildings. This image
of an age gone past had superimposed itself on my idle glance at the
present, and shown me once more that we exist at the knotted 'now' in a
thread of history stretching back millennia, and perhaps which
stretches forward as long.

We came out into the shabby light of the dreary day onto Holborn. Here,
it was wide, about five times the width of the street that fed onto it,
lined with huge office buildings and busy with cars and buses. I knew
it better than the area we had left, having done a few months work
further up the hill for a friend of my dad's a few years ago. Here all
was shiny and new, with nothing tatty about any of it. The buildings we
passed had smart glass revolving doors, and desks for security men in
smart lobbies behind them. They probably back onto the estate we walked
past. I wonder if they know? If they looked out of their windows would
they see the church? Or the estate with the children? It's the idea
that two worlds can exist completely concurrently yet in complete
isolation that seems so strange to me, I think.

Andy left us at that point to return to work or find some lunch, and
Gerry and I crossed over the vast expanse of road, neatly avoiding
being run down. We caught a bus to Covent Garden, the Theatreland, to
spend the rest of our afternoon among the fashionable shops that are
what every teenage girl must think of upon imagining a day in the
City.