It was in a random neighborhood in Denver last October where the thought first occurred to me: brick is what I key on. There’s precious little brick left in the Bay Area, thanks to 1906 and 1989 and the unsuitability of unreinforced masonry as building material in earthquake country. But the neighborhood of early-20th century low brick buildings of two or three stories reminded me of Asheville, or of the bits of the Southside of Birmingham that first tipped my notice back in 1985. And then a walk through the France section of EPCOT in November confirmed it.
The neighborhood as urban village: that’s the thing I always seem to imagine. The confluence of old brick buildings, some centuries old, the presence of canals from an era before rail, the presence of streetcars or trams for anything that’s too far to do on foot.
The apotheosis of this, of course, is Shepherd Market. A tiny square with a couple of side streets in and out and a couple more pedestrian passageways. Inside: restaurants, barber shops, a couple of corner shops with soda and magazines and knockoff phone chargers, no fewer than four pubs, a tobacconist, a pharmacy, a hardware store. Apartments over almost all of them, many associated with centuries of practitioners of the oldest profession until only a couple of decades ago.
We’ve stayed at the Park Lane four times now – five if you count the one-night stopover at the end of the trip – but I only realized Shepherd Market was there at the end of a previous trip. These last two times, it has been where I get my haircut and straight razor shave, where I grab my first pint of the trip at Ye Grapes, where I can be assured of grabbing a couple bottles of Coke Zero to take back to a hotel that seems to have a deal with Pepsi in every country. It is a place of imagination: that perfect other realm where there is no job, no American politics, nothing to think about other than where shall we go today and what do we feel like doing.
In William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, Cayce Pollard thinks of London as “mirror world” – different plugs for different electricity, different light switches, different weight to the coins and different denominations. I feel that, big-time. A world where a pint of beer is a hefty and generous measure, but where as likely as not it’s barely 4% alcohol by volume. A place where fountain soda is basically unobtainable other than at American fast food chains, and God help you if you want a portion larger than a half liter even there. A place where coffee means espresso and is served in a thimble, a place where ice in a beverage is one piece at best the size of a Monopoly die. A place where I eat more vegetarian food in a week than I do the rest of the year in America, because it’s plentiful and better. A place where the wheat doesn’t put my wife’s immune system on monkey tilt. A place where instead of dealing with rideshare apps and their casual exploitation of distributed servantry, you put your hand up to hail the best cabs in the world – or climb to the top of a double-decker bus and enjoy the view from the front.
And yet, even as London is our own personal Disneyland, our friends there are contemplating getting out. Because just as Austin and Nashville and Birmingham can’t escape Texas or Tennessee or Alabama, London is trapped in England, in Brexitland, in a tabloid press culture and a non-urban population incapable of relinquishing imperial pretensions, A city that was the financial capital of the planet and the greatest cultural melting pot of our time until voters outside the M25 decided that they could vote themselves a British moon on a British stick. I know about all of this, thanks to BBC Sounds and Londonist and the sardonic remarks on BritBox panel shows, but when I’m in London it feels like something that never touches me, like what it must be like for people who don’t know or care or think about politics. I can just be. (Especially since for all its own bigotries, English conservatism doesn’t seem particularly hell-bent on ending abortion access or burning books. Their attitudes toward trans people are desperate, but that’s another post.)
London is what I think of when I think of getting away now. The Palm Court of the Park Lane, indie-chill music overhead and a glass of Auchentoshen on one big rock to hand, memories of our honeymoon or the time we just decided to live in London for three weeks and pretend we were wealthy and retired. Winding cobbled streets, a cheeky half of cask ale literally around almost every corner, the entire Mr Fogg’s chain of delightfully immersive cocktail parlors. A mirror world. Work doesn’t matter, politics doesn’t matter, we have no obligation but to enjoy ourselves and take lots of pictures. Sit in the club room with a fizzy clear lemonade (and maybe just the least splash of cognac on top) and use a big piece of hotel stationery and my favorite blue-black pen to write out what we want to see tomorrow.
But there was more to this trip than London. Of which.