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London Calling

London Calling

Author: Jo Rushby
Date: 2022-09-26

Many of us cannot bear to watch. Many of us cannot look away. Queen Elizabeth is dead. The world eyes, or should I say the BBC, CNN and Sky's cameras are on London. Thousands line the streets, queuing to get a glimpse of the oak coffin. We get distracted. Charles is fuming that the royal pen leaks exactly at the time he is to sign the proclamation turning frog into King. 2016,

I wander the streets of London carrying thoughts of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway published the year before Queen Elizabeth was born. London is the epitome of ambiguity and incompatibilities, where 'the business part of the city people were not eternally occupied with trivial chatterings, but with thoughts of ships, business, law, administration, while the atmosphere was at the same time so stately, gay, and pious.' In this unknown part of London, Elizabeth [the heroine] feels 'the thrill of a pioneer, the excitement of someone on tiptoe exploring a strange house by night with a candle, on edge lest the owner should suddenly fling wide his bedroom door and ask her business, nor did she dare wander off into queer alleys, tempting by-streets, any more than in a strange house open doors which might be the bedroom doors, or sitting-room doors, or lead straight into the larder.'

The last great battle for London was the Docklands. It was a place you could smell and imagine faraway lands. Small pubs with rickety stairs that sunk you into another world. A fish market as raucous as a Punjabi wedding. Tumbledown flats that survived Hitler's blitz. Dens and liars. But the bulldozers came, pounded the docks and built exclusions of consumption. 'Going, going, gone ... the corporate monoliths of business architecture, ugly by day, deserted by night, will continue their relentless obliteration of the ancient street patterns of the East End ... ' (David Widgery) I lived in London for many years. Catching the last of the old. The Gothic architecture, pre-war tenements, the last of social housing. The bars before they became bistros and the East End restaurants that sold baltis to rattle the system and singe the tongue. But still there is history here. I wend my way to Charing Cross and catch a glimpse of a plinth - Charles 1.