I start in Farringdon. It is not entirely unknown to me. I have visited a friend here many times in the past, learning the steps from the station to his house and back. I came here for a work dinner at Christmas at a restaurant that I can no longer identify in the daylight. Yet stepping out from a different station exit than usual, I am disorientated. It immediately becomes unknown territory in both street and people. I do not even know the real name of the area - so long have I labelled it based on the tube station, not realising that these few streets I have momentarily inhabited are in fact part of Clerkenwell. My London is of a tiny fraction of the City, the handful of streets where I concentrate my working days. Here people move at a different pace. Sat near the City but outside of it, it doesn’t have the same frenetic rush. Here there are people pausing, chatting, laughing. I find my bearings, walking up the slight hill of Cowcross Street. A reminder of a different time, when the feet of cows walked this route alongside humans towards the marketplace. The road marks one boundary of the priory of St John of Jerusalem1, a fact I am not aware of until later in the day when I am looking for more information.
Onwards to Smithfield’s market, crossing into the Square Mile. I am just early enough in the morning to see the last remnants of the market day. My world is one of the 9-5 (and beyond) where the days are all consuming and it is easy to fall into a trap of not seeing anything outside of it. Yet here is a different world entirely. No 9-5 here. It is 8.30am and the market has fallen quiet. The last deliveries are being slowly collected from the edge of the buildings; the rush and bustle of trading is over. I pass the odd collection of carcuses of what once lived, wrapped in plastic and stamped with barcode and price. Whilst I slept, here was full of activity. Now as I walk the road between the Victorian buildings, there is only the echo of what was. The occasional shout between a trader and a lorry driver is now easily heard. Detritus from the day’s business is being tidied up around me. All of this will end in the next few years, moving out of its city home and relocating to bring towns and the building will become part of a museum. It seems like a severing, a cutting of the city from the grubbiness of life, a replacement of pulse with concrete. I have an appointment to make and as my imagination cannot follow these people into the rest of their day, so outside of my own experience are their lives, I move on.
Onwards I walk, down Little Britain street to St Paul’s Cathedral, pausing to attend my appointment on the way. Once, upon this street resided the Dukes of Brittany, leaving their name behind. As with so many streets, there is history here and yet time presses and I make my way through it without noticing anything more than my destination. Appointment over, my heart has sought out the Cathedral. I have always loved this building. I can feel an energy around buildings, perhaps from the layers of human energy and emotions that engrain into them as they are designed, built and then used over time. Perhaps from my own imagination. For me there is a quietness that wraps around St Paul’s Cathedral and to step into its grounds is like walking through a barrier behind which all the noises of the busy City beyond is muffled. No matter how many glass superstructures are erected around it, this white stone building, greying from pollution yet somehow still white against the sky, anchors the City deep into its place next to the river. Its dome rises up into the sky, pulling you with it. You do not need to believe in its heavens in order to soar with it.
“Here it is again, looming over us, mountainous, immense, greyer, colder, quieter than before. And directly we enter we undergo that pause and expansion and release from hurry and effort which it is in the power of St Paul’s, more than any other building in the world, to bestow.”
Virginia Woolfe - Abbeys and Cathedrals
I continue further into the Square Mile. Some paths of the City are unknown and others I have walked over and over for nearly 20 years. My feet need no direction here, the concrete is known like a second skin and I criss-cross through roads and passages towards the train station. There is great comfort in this deep familiarity with place. Patterns of steel, concrete and glass are squeezed next to the white classical stone architecture of periods long since passed. The air is thick with the sound of building works as refurbishment is in progress everywhere. The City is a strange beast. Shiny and impressive on the outside, its buildings show off its power, status and money but none of the life that takes place behind its walls. Even those buildings that flip themselves inside out with their architecture reveal nothing to the uninitiated. So often their glass walls reveal only yourself staring back as you try to look in. People rush here, their eyes elsewhere as their thoughts remain at their computers, filled with the remainder of their to do list. Conversation here has purpose, time is measured and controlled, there is business to be done. The City fills in the morning with a rush, heaves, froths and fizzles with activity and then empties. Come the weekend only the remnants of that human energy is left to ripple around its windy spaces until finally dissipating in time for the whole process to begin again on a Monday morning.
I have reached Liverpool Street Station now, having moved from one marker of the Square Mile to another. I board a train homeward bound. The capital recedes quickly, the spaces open up to make way for rivers and trees. Grey turns to brown and muddy green. Houses are dotted between flooded fields where flocks of geese have taken up temporary residence. The cherry blossom is out in full bloom, weeks early, scattering itself snow-like across the ground. Concrete has given way to water and earth. The sky returns in a sweeping arc. The countryside beckons.
https://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vol46/pp182-202