The second feature of London that extends from this home-based society is its privacy. London is a private city, intimate and reclusive. It works best for those who know its secrets, those who have learned the ropes. Even the pub — that one symbol of communal life on every street corner — represents a physical challenge to the stranger. You have to push through a heavy door to enter. You cannot see what is happening inside from the outside. It does not offer an implicit welcome to the casual passer-by, unlike the sidewalk cafe. It is a closed place, its windows are frosted, its gaze is inward-looking. Children are not admitted, its aura is masculine, gloomy, self-absorbed. Even more extraordinary, inside some pubs there are bars that operate on an overt class system: this bar, the decor says, is proletarian, for serious drinking; that bar is genteel, a place where you may bring your wife. The two rooms are often quite separate, entered by different doors.
There is no street life in London as might be recognized in Paris or Rome or Madrid, there is no community of souls in this city, there is no democratic sharing in what the city offers. To get the best out of it you have to be a member of a club. Clubs operate in many diverse ways, from the traditional gentlemen’s club in St James’s or Pall Mall to an avant garde theatre group, but they all point to the same conclusion. If you live in the city and if you wish to exploit it to the full you discover that again and again, to experience the best London has to offer, you have to become a member.
Fifty yards from my house there is a small London square, classic, pretty, with tall plane trees and rhododendrons, a lush lawn, some park benches. You come upon it, as is true of so many of London’s hidden squares, quite by accident. It looks enchanting, a small green island amongst the brick and the asphalt, sheltered and tranquil. Iron railings surround it. Tired, footsore, perhaps just seeking a moment’s repose, you try the gate. Locked. But people are in there, children are playing. A small sign says—“residents only”—you walk on by, excluded. You may look but you may not touch. This little garden in Tedworth Square is yet another of London’s exclusive clubs for members only. If you want to enjoy it you have to qualify for a key.
Such moments provoke attacks of spleen against London and its bourgeois smugness. You cannot live in a great city and not be alternately enraptured and repelled by it. I think of my own nine years in London, how privileged and protected they have been, and how any account of my point of view of the place does no justice at all to its dark side, London’s slums and sweat shops, its poverty and meanness, its vice and brutality. Look how the glossy limousines sweep out of the Savoy Hotel on to the Strand and how there, in every shop doorway in their cardboard boxes, huddle the homeless, the drunk and the deluded. But this juxtaposition is commonplace, this is not London’s problem any more than it is New York’s or Delhi’s or Nairobi’s or Manila’s. Other grudges against the city are, however, more precise and localized. Why has London neglected its river and built power stations and coal yards and warehouses along its banks? Why have so many disgusting buildings been erected everywhere else? London was never beautiful, it could never be described as stylish or splendid. Its centre — Piccadilly, Regent Street, Oxford Street, Trafalgar Square — has a solid, massy quality to it, a reflection of the prodigious success of its mercantile past and imperial dominance. But even in the 1950s London had a low, almost Venetian skyline, punctuated by its needly church spires, one that has now virtually disappeared, swallowed up by the unregulated explosion of office blocks and high-rise buildings. Why is there so much dog shit in the streets? Why are there so many cars? Why did we allow Mrs Thatcher to abolish the perfectly efficient, though inconveniently socialist, Greater London Council so that this enormous city no longer has an elected administration to run it? The litany of complaints can run and run.
But, as Dr Johnson said, “He who is tired of London is tired of life.” And it takes only a moment for the bile and resentment to alter into in-vigoration and enthusiasm. In 1928 Cyril Connolly returned to London after five weeks in Spain. In his journal he recorded: “Back in London … feel nothing but intense disgust. General dissatisfaction and distress.” But a few days later he writes, “I seem to be falling in love with London… To feel this jungle come to life all round one in the evening, the same October mists, fires, lights, wet streets, blown leaves, to plunge into its many zones not knowing what one will discover …” This seems to me the authentic London voice and the authentic London experience. There is a vibrancy about the city just as there is complacency and apathy. There are maddening irritations as well as astonishing diversity. And there is also this constant prospect of discovery before you, of new places, people, experiences, views and vistas that this huge, perplexing, secret city somehow manages to keep hidden until it chooses to reveal them. A big solid hard place, pragmatic and worldly, but it still retains its powerful, irresistible allure.
1993
A New York Walk
Since 1996 I’ve spent between forty and fifty days a year in New York and, if I can’t claim to be a local, I do feel I’ve come to know the place better than your average tourist: I have my habits, I have my little routines and short cuts, I am a regular in certain bars and restaurants. I may not be at home but I feel I occupy a kind of residential limbo — in prolonged and agreeable transit. I am, as they would say in France, un familier.
One measure of this familiarity is that there is a walk I do most Mondays to Fridays that has become as much a part of my life as similar walks are in London. It starts where I live when I’m in New York, a small hotel on 63rd Street between Park and Madison, and it forms a rough oblong shape that covers a fair bit of the Upper East Side. The Upper East Side suffers a little from its reputation — as a place where only the truly wealthy New Yorkers live, hidden away in immaculate, doorman-guarded apartment blocks. Like all clichés this one possesses a fair degree of truth. But the denizens of this bit of Manhattan do make for a fascinating passing parade, and the one place you’ll see them out of their apartments and town cars is on the streets around here. People-watching doesn’t come much better than on Madison Avenue.
Yet the Upper East Side is a far more heterogeneous place than its snootily upscale reputation might suggest and the first and most intriguing aspect of this walk is that, over its couple of miles or so, you will encounter as many facets of Manhattan life as you would almost anywhere else.
I leave the hotel and turn left towards Madison Avenue and, a few paces later, reaching Madison turn north, heading uptown. In the four years I’ve been coming regularly to New York, Madison has turned itself into one of the most remarkable shopping streets in the world, a mile-long hymn of praise to labels and logos, high prices and haute couture. This is fine if you’re interested in shopping but, even if you’re not, these immaculate temples of consumerism are still diverting to the eye. The Madison run actually starts a few blocks south of 63rd with Nicole Farhi, Donna Karan and Calvin Klein, but as I turn northward pretty soon I’m flanked by Armani and Valentino and up ahead loom Krizia, Ungaro and Bulgari and so on. Also in this stretch of the Avenue are found small see-and-be-seen restaurants, such as Nello, Cafe Nosidam and La Goulou, serving international food to an international clientele, but my first break usually occurs, mundanely, at an ATM machine in Citibank and then, on 67th, I am occasionally obliged to stop for breakfast at the Gardenia Cafe. There are two potential breakfast/coffee stops on this long first stretch of the walk up Madison, but the other — another timeless classic, a Viand — is many blocks northward. The Gardenia is also a classic diner, although, fittingly for the neighbourhood, it seems slightly more genteel. A long, thin, dark room, serving American reliables — eggs, bacon, potatoes — with astonishing speed and fussless taciturnity. I drink my coffee and, if it’s a Wednesday, read my New York Observer, a weekly, and, just possibly, the most interesting and best written newspaper in the world.