The great railway stations of
London come grander, and more beautiful, but Paddington Station, where I’m
sitting waiting for a train to Oxford, has a lovely energy to it, especially
in the morning before 9. The high glassed curved roof, like impossible
vaulting, gives a beautiful indirect light.
People stride purposefully in
all directions. They’re in light jackets and coats, for it’s a chilly drizzly
early July day here in London. Most are commuters of some kind in tidy office
clothes, the men with briefcases and the women with good handbags; some are
like me, with luggage large and small, heading to somewhere out of town... A disembodied woman’s voice makes
announcements, and then occasionally a man’s voice comes on the loudspeaker
system , it’s the mayor of London on tape! - warning of the disruptions that
will come later this month because of the Olympics and telling us to pay
attention and “get ahead of the Games”, the slogan of the month here..
I got here by tube, two District
line trains, both of them packed with morning commuters. They were clean and
pressed, and also withdrwn into themselves, getting set for the day ahead, and
trying to tune out the crush of people around them. At least that’s how I read
their faces and body language. With my small pack and shoulder bag I was the
awkward anomaly in my train car, taking up extra room.
My train to Oxford isn’t for
another ninety minutes (I have a fixed-time advance purchase bargain ticket) ,
but I wanted to get here early to see this morning rush, to feel the
energy. There are people with
bicycles, commuters of a different kind, who pedal to work then change out of
their spandex and raingear and into office clothes. I saw small fleets of them
in the rain-wet streets this morning from the bus that carried me to the tube.
They look purposeful, like all dedicated urban cyclists. And there are people
sitting waiting, chatting to ech other in many languages, and keeping a keen
eye on the lit-up train schedule board, that shifts and changes all the time.
And there are pigeons calmly strolling around on the marble floor and looking
dazed.
What will the city look like in
three weeks, in the middle of the Olympics? It’s hard to visualise. The transit
authority has signs up everywhere exhorting people to plan ahead to try to
avoid congeston. For those who are free to change their hours of work, or who
can take weeks off, the Olympics is a hassle, but manageable. Many however are
trapped here with scheduled jobs, and for them it’s going to be a frustrating time.
That said, I have to talk a
little about the way that transit in London has transformed itself in the last
few years. There’s the new Jubilee line, with futuristic gigantic cement
tunnels and moving staircases, built to cross-connect Westminster, Waterloo,
and London Bridge for example, a diagonal access route across town from
northwest to southeast. It’s got the brute force and bravado of a big Chinese
or Thai megaproject.
So does the Shard, a tall
jagged-topped pillar of glass-clad steel that w as formally opened yesterday
near London Bridge, the tallest building in Europe..
I was in the area near London
Bridge to go to Borough Market. It’s one of the treasures of London, not just
the market but the whole area to the south of the river there, full of old
courtyards and generous factory spaces that date back centuries. It doesn’t
take much imagination to picture horse-drawn carts carrying huge beer barrels
through the narrow cobbled streets.
Many traditionalists hate the
Shard, an ultra-modern Renzo Piano-designed spike between the Borough Market
and the river. I think it works. It’s a confident punctuation point in the
traditional low-rise landscape, making us value it more.
Now the clock is almost at 9.15.
The commuting crowd has largely given way to travellers with luggage. There’s
less purposefulness and more questioning wandering.These are people who don’t
come here every day, for whom the station is unfamiliar new territory.
Recent trains announced include
trains to Cardiff, to Worcester, to Bristol, to Swansea, and several headed in
the Oxford direction, to Moreton in Marsh and farther.. The mind’s eye heads
west to rolling green country, softer accents, a slower pace. And this temple
of transport is the key to all that.
Long ago one of the first Agatha Christies I
read as a ten or eleven year old was the”The 4:50 from Paddington” in which a
woman sees a murder committed through a train window. It’s a good elaborate
story, as I remember it. But mostly what has stayed with me is the title. Paddington
as a place of departure, or story, or intersecting lives: that’s the large
mystery in the end.
Somehow, in train stations as in life, we usually manage to find our way in the
tangle of signs and blurry announcements and anxieties, and through the crowds
of people all striving to get where they want to go...
A few London notes:
I was staying with friends here,
the fabulous photographer Richard Jung, who shot the studio shots for the BURMA
book and all the four-colour books I worked on before that., including Hot Sour
Salty Sweet. He and his family live in London and it’s a treat to see them.
Last night we ate out at a casual thoughtful restaurant in Clapham called
Abbeville Kitchen. Highly recommended. There’s local meat and fish, slow-cooked
mains, and a great relaxed-but-attentive staff. (I had delicious lamb chops over simmered eggplant with a
dash of romesco on top; other plates included salt veal over lentils and more;
beef shin with huge butter beans; and simple mussels.)
And on my first day here I was
lucky to get to the Tate Modern, where there’s a Damien Hirst retrospective,
brilliant tour-de-force things, except (and you might disagree) that the room
of gold versions of earlier work, pieces that he sold at Sothebys, feels empty
and an undermining of what he’s done before. There’s a recreation of his life
and death piece: one room has butterflies pinned to large boards, and shtrays
full of butts; the other is humid and warm, with butterfly pupae on boards on
the wall, and lots of emerged butterfiesl fluttering around the many plants and
sugar water sources that are out for them. It’s a spectacle of irridecent blue and dots of red, and
leaf-camouflage, and dots of brown on huge quivering wings and... Mother nature
kind of trumps the artist, and we marvel at her work rather than contemplating
the construct within which the butterflies are presented.
And then I saw the Edvard Munch
show, also at the Tate Modern. It was astonishing. I was very ignorant, had no
idea of his work, had never understood what an exciting palette he had, or how
compelling his paintings are. If you can, to get to it; the other option is to
go to Oslo, for most of the work was from the museum there.
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