A picture is said to be worth a thousands words but as I don't have a snap to share then I'll let these words by Rahul Jacob paint a picture on my behalf.
The best of times in the world's best city
By Rahul Jacob
Published: June 11 2005 03:00 | Last updated: June 11 2005 03:00
Last month, an unusually moving remembrance service was held for the nearly 300,000 victims of December's tsunami. Twelve lit candles were carried to the altar, each bearing the name of one of the countries affected by the disaster. They were placed on the altar to the strains of a Thai lament played on a traditional Thai fiddle. Then, as if the heavens had opened, petals of a myriad flowers began to drift down on the congregation of 1,800: jasmine from Indonesia and Myanmar, water-lilies from Sri Lanka and Thailand, and lotus from India.
The service was held in London, of course. I say "of course" only because it is fitting that the world's most multicultural city hosted the most inclusive memorial to the tsunami's victims all over the world. Those petals raining to the floor of St Paul's Cathedral on May 11 amounted to more than a remembrance of the 148 Britons who died and indeed the estimated 273,800 who had died in the disaster. Petals of waterlily from Bangladesh, protea from Somalia, and pink rose from the Maldives - it is hard to think of a more evocative metaphor for a city's immigrants. Even more than New York or Toronto, London celebrates - not just tolerates - its diversity.
Growing up in Calcutta, I knew London only as a succession of addresses on a Monopoly board - Bond Street, Piccadilly Circus, Park Lane. Now that I live here, I often miss the street signs completely because I am mesmerised by the daily pageant on its streets - Russian men walk alongside English, Senegalese women in bright national dress alongside Saudi women in black robes. London often seems to me to be the best city in the world.
That is a skyscraper of a claim and I can already hear the mutterings making an alternative case for the entrepreurial energy and abundance of grey cells in New York, the beaches and restaurants in Sydney, the scenic beauty of Cape Town and San Francisco. Aside from possessing all the usual characteristics of a premier world city - culture, major business hub, easy access - London trumps them all handily on three counts; its robust multiculturalism, its extraordinary civility and its gorgeous parks and communal gardens. The only serious contender is New York and, as a former New York resident, I would subjectively argue that London is well ahead on all three criteria. (New York's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, owns a house in London. I rest my case.)
Yes, London has its problems and its rough neighbourhoods. Coping with high prices is a perennial hazard of living and travelling here, in part because London has been enveloped in a property bubble for some years now and the wealth effect has had a knock-on impact on prices. And, sadly, on a coarsening of casual conversation. It is almost obligatory at London social gatherings to endure two questions from perfect strangers: 1. Where do you live? and 2. Do you buy or rent? (you respond by inquiring about their kitchen renovation).
Yet, it is the civility of London in trying situations that most impresses me. I put it down to the British being genetically programmed to queue. Two years after moving to London from Hong Kong, for me queuing now symbolises one of the most important lessons in life: things eventually come to those who wait (but not always at a time of our choosing) and its corollary, that life is more marathon than sprint. As the sociologist Kate Fox, author of Watching the English observes, the invisible queue exists even in a crowded bar. People know who approached the bar milliseconds ahead of them and there is never a hint of jostling.
A world view influenced by the need for patience makes the occasional headaches of London life - the daily announcements, say, on the tube that the Circle Line is experiencing severe delays, the District Line has emergency engineering works and the Northern Line has staff shortages - seem minor. There is a much lower incidence of road and sidewalk rage than you would expect; Fox purposely bumped into people on the street - 80 per cent of the people she lurched into apologised. She quotes George Mikes: "A man in a queue is a fair man; he is minding his own business, he lives and lets live . . ."
This is London's most agreeable trick - civility and calm in the middle of the ceaseless commotion of the modern metropolis. Quiet side streets aside, this is also because so much of the city is parkland. Where else can you leave the tumult of Trafalgar Square, the National Gallery and the theatre district and within minutes be contemplating the puzzle of why swans swim so gracefully yet waddle so awkwardly?
London's most popular tourist attractions such as the Tate Modern (a cleverly remodelled power plant in search of an outstanding modern art collection), Portobello Road (a fruit and vegetable market), and Buckingham Palace ("A child with a box of bricks could have done better", is how it is characterised in Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway ) escape me, however. If you are unlucky, the bucolic scenes in St. James's Park will be disrupted by the Changing of the Guard. The first time I chanced on this spectacle, I was mystified by the campness of it all - grown men strutting about in tight red liveried coats and black bouffant wigs - and wondered if it was a corporal punishment devised by those exclusive British boarding schools one hears about.
What I love most about London is how easily native Londoners take to people - and culture - from elsewhere in the world. Something called the Bollywood Brass Band is on the bill at Somerset House for July alongside Keith Haring's sculptures and African DJs. Inter-racial marriages seem much higher in London. Even Britain's bureaucracy is instinctively inclusive as I discovered filling out a national insurance form recently. Page one of the sample form had as its first entry not a hypothetical John Smith but a Nadia Singh, who I took to be Hindu or Sikh. A Polish cycle courier was killed in a road accident near the Financial Times office in 2004. Bouquets of flowers commemorated his life on the first anniversary of his death; his funeral service a year earlier had been attended by people of every ethnicity imaginable. A test of the 21st century metropolis is how it embraces outsiders.
In Salaam Brick Lane, one of the best non-fiction works of 2005, Tarquin Hall describes the cultural changes undergone by that gritty part of east London, once popular with Jewish immigrants, now with Bangladeshis. Hall describes in hilarious detail how his landlord, a Mr Ali, who arrived in London as a malnourished teenager from Bangladesh, responds to the complaints of his Jewish pensioner tenant about noisy gay neighbours upstairs. Mr Ali calls the police and demands they do something about what he assumes to be buggery going on day and night. ("The Koran forbids it, yeah."). The police laughingly dismiss the complaint, and Ali ruefully recalls that they said Her Majesty's law allowed it.
In microcosm, you have an immigrant's absolute faith in the police in his adopted homeland and their good-humoured insistence on the primacy of tolerance and the rule of law. For all its differences, London's most winning characteristic is that it is at peace with itself.
London's open garden squares weekend, today and tomorrow,
www.opensquares.org
