What’s amazing about London, is that you can follow along the very same streets, by-ways and thoroughfares that the great and the good have hoofed before you. Ancient ways and places that although layered over by modernity, still leave their mark. (So many buildings lost to the Great Fire, the Blitz and ‘progress’- Alas) But if you look carefully, ample evidence remains, from Roman Britain, through medieval London, the Elizabethans, the Georgians, way up to the oh-so-industrial Victorians.
We forget in the everyday hurly-burly just how many generations have lived and died in London. Recently, I was at Smithfield Market; it was getting dark, shadows were falling with a kind of vaporous mist rising up after the day’s heat. A clammy chill descended, prickling the hairs on the back of my neck; I don’t know why but I didn’t like the ‘vibe’ and high-tailed it out of there. (Only discovering later that it had been a place of many public executions; traitors receiving the worst of punishments, being hung, drawn and quartered, or more accurately, drawn, hung, emasculated, disemboweled, decapitated and then quartered. Women were spared this punishment, in view of their modesty, and merely crisped at the stake.)
Speaking of vibrations, much more positive ones were had from a recent visit to Gad’s Hill – not in London ‘tis true, but it was the decade-long home of London-loving, Charles Dickens. As I lingered on his porch, looked out through to the sun-lit terrace, stood in his original study, touched the walls and bookshelves of his home, even the spot where he fell and died, I felt only lightness and merriment. Perhaps people and places do leave an energy?
Or was it just the weather?
London Sketches – It’s the VIBE
...Or was it just the weather?