News
An American travel website is warning travellers off our fair city on the grounds that it's "dirty" and the cuisine isn't all it might be. While it isn't usually my style to enter this sort of fray - I am, after all, a dual citizen - I feel I must speak out.
I know I'm not alone in thinking that the boom years led London to have a somewhat bloated self-image: we began to think in terms of the City traders' bunce; if we were property-owners, we fell prey to the delusion that money in bricks and mortar was also cash in the bank; we ignored the widening gulf between rich and poor.
But while all of this may be true, we never lost our sense of integrity or civic pride. London was the first of the world cities - and it remains one of the greatest.
I've travelled extensively in the States and while there are some cities which indisputably have a character of their own, for every San Francisco or New York there is a Dallas: a plantation of homogenous skyscrapers and shopping malls which, for sheer blandness, makes Basingstoke look like Baghdad.
As for the food, don't get me started. And while our streets may be dirty, give me London's time-scumbled surfaces any time over the featureless expanses of plate glass and the antiseptic precincts of North America.
The same website suggested US travellers might be better off heading for Paris if they want to experience picturesque Europe but for all its obvious virtues, our neighbour has nothing of London's sheer grandeur.
You can't imagine having the experience I did the other evening, cycling from my home in Stockwell to the Whitechapel Gallery, in any other city in the world.
First the Victorian terraces of Kennington, then the resurgent Brutalism of the Elephant, next the Chaucerian confines of the Borough. At Tower Bridge, the traffic was held up as the bridge was raised to allow Silver Cloud of Nassau to dock in the Pool of London.
I've no idea what the passengers were thinking as the tug pulled them past Traitors Gate and they anchored in the evening sunshine by HMS Belfast but I can't imagine they were suffering from ennui.
As for me, I pedalled on to Whitechapel, where I stopped at Tubby Isaacs's stall (established 1919) for three fresh oysters on the half shell (cost £2.70), before entering the beautifully refurbished gallery, which has been vital - and free - East End aesthetic resource for over a century; later that evening I repaired to a balti house in Brick Lane for kebabs, and some of the creamiest dhal it has ever been my pleasure to sup.
Exercise, history, drama, excellent victuals - and all for a tenner.
Every so often even I succumb to a perverse urge to move to the sticks - but then I have a quintessential London experience like that, and realise that while tired I may be, I'm not tired of life.
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