London — human nature in city form

London is a city of restaurants, cafes and bars. From the greasy spoon to that darling little place in Brixton, everyone has their own favourite places to share the breaking of bread — from Injera to sourdough. London is the cooks and the waiters and the bar staff. London is couples lingering over linguine, a business meeting over a bhuna or a novel and a nosh for one. When the “Eat out to help out” scheme was on, London was outside on the pavements doing our bit to eat socially whenever and wherever we could.

London is a city of theatres large and small, of stages upstairs in a pub’s function room, where amateurs struggle through jokes for five minutes to an audience of three. It’s a place of concert halls packed to the rafters listening to musicians and music from around the corner and across the globe. London is its art galleries, craft projects, historical buildings and brand new landmarks.

London is an adventure and a haven, a place where communities come together. It’s a place where you can meet new people and people you have known all your life — or, if you prefer, a place where you can be left alone to mind your own business.

London has great depths of warmth and camaraderie, but it can also be a cold place. London is poverty and homelessness on our streets. London is the place where someone was stabbed a few streets from mine. London is foodbanks and impossible rents. It is air pollution and it is not infrequently smelly.

London is at once both stability and change. London doesn’t stay the same for all its familiarity. Its design and architecture are at once a testament to its longevity and its continual reinvention. Imagine trying to impose a grid system on zone one as they have in Manhattan? Some of the higgledy-piggledy streets were first walked over a thousand years ago and are still being dug up weekly by BT Openreach. London is a place where you can walk from a Roman wall to the neoclassical Bank of England and on to a building nicknamed the Walkie Talkie — a building made with so much glass it has been known to melt cars.

In the 1970s Derek Jarman shot swathes of his film “Jubilee” on the wasteland that was then the London Docklands and Stanley Kubrick used it as a substitute for war-torn Vietnam in “Full Metal Jacket”. In the 1990s I used to navigate my way home using Canary Wharf, as it then stood out like a beacon on the East London skyline. Now it is just one part of a much greater skyline in that ever growing construction and ongoing overcompensation for what capitalism feels it is lacking.

London has been changed by the pandemic. Some of the things we cherish most are now vulnerable. Restaurants, theatres and bars are all threatened by a lack of trade. But the spirit of London hasn’t changed. We remain a city of millions. Some were born here, some are from the other end of the country, others from the other end of the earth, but all belong equally. We remain the city that survived the Great Fire, the plague, the blitz and Boris Johnson’s two terms as mayor.

Change is as inevitable in London as it is anywhere else. London has always thrived on change. But I worry terribly about what will happen to the theatres and restaurants I love in the short term. I suspect that commuting to Central London from the Home Counties will drop off, probably forever and this will change the nature of some of the business zones and the services that feed them.

But London is human nature in city form. And the things my city is known for — for better or worse — are the most human elements of us all. Our joy in socialising, our misanthropy, our culture and our cruelty.

So even though it will be hard for many people now, on account of the cruelty of the pandemic and the chaotic response of the government towards certain sectors, culture will bloom again in London. Londoners will once again come together to eat, drink and be merry. We will gather to celebrate national and local moments.

London has been here in some form for thousands of years. It will be here in some form for as long as we have human civilisation. It will always adapt, it will always change — that’s part of its charm. But London will not be defeated.