The Old Town

I had reached the end of Oxford Street and decided to pull up some grass. People were lazing about in Hyde Park on a beautiful cloudless sunny Sunday afternoon. I was enjoying my first banana in months, tasty and only fifty pence...

It could have been a standard weekend outing except that I happened to be in LONDON.

This city is exciting in a way that a wannabe World City like Sydney can never be (at least not for at least a millennium). London positively reeks of cutting-edge contemporary and a sense of never-ending possibilities. It is so jam-packed with diversity as it haphazardly mixes oblique glass panels and towering shafts of steel with centuries-old buildings, languages from across the globe compete with the mother tongue. In a strange way it all starts to get a bit repetitive: there’s always going to be a beautiful historic building down that anonymous alley-way, or some memorial, or a tiny Square of grass where suits are jostling with the creatives and the stylish and the down-on-their-luck for sitting space. I’ve given up taking pictures because there is so much juxtaposition and contrasts in the one frame that capturing it all is becoming tedious. Its crazy, yes, but I’ve only got 512MB on my Memory Stick.

And with all this beauty and design, there is also the ugly and the dilapidated. Take the Kings Cross area, for instance; the quaint and stylish bars are no match for the cheap-and-nasty fast-food outlets and flat and faceless hotel chains (of which one of them we are staying!). Yesterday I headed down to the Barbican, which is a monstrous example of self-contained urban planning. A village of brutal and seemingly alienating concrete blocks and towers, it is tempered by hanging flower-gardens, water features and a dark-ages (?) church. Oh, and a renowned symphony orchestra and two galleries. It is one of these galleries that was the reason for this visit, it was exhibiting the changing vision of the Future City from the fifties to the present, showing various urban projects (completed or otherwise) that at times seemed to be as isolating as the building complex that houses it.

Last night was capped off accompanying a friend to a photo exhibition down Portobello Road in Notting Hill and a couple of glasses of wine at a pub.