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April 25, 2008

A crowd flowed over London Bridge

I am back in London again to pick up a prize and continue my ongoing comparison of my native city with the one where I live - New York.

As always, when arriving at London Bridge station this morning, I was reminded of T. S. Eliot’s lines from The Wasteland:

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,

To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours

With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

Eliot once worked in Lloyds Bank as a clerk. I recall that Sir Jeremy Morse, the former chairman of the bank, had tears in his eyes when he recited those lines from memory in a valedictory speech.

Anyway, this morning they were as true as ever as I pushed through the crowds to board the Jubilee Line. A sign proclaimed that the line service was good but, as Bill Clinton might have said, that depends on the meaning of the word “good”.

In practice, it meant a Tokyo-like crush to get on the train. Having got used to the New York subway, which can be crowded but is generally not crushed, it was striking.

This is not actually a comment on the subject of London infrastructure since it is a lot better than it used to be and the US hardly has much to write home about as far as its transport infrastructure goes (as anyone who has driven the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway recently could tell you).

The point is that there are an awful lot of people from many nations in London. It continues to amaze with its transformation into a global city.

It made me wonder how London will be affected by the now conflicting trends of a secular rise in trade and a cyclical downturn in financial and housing markets. The London boom of the past few years owed a lot to cyclical and secular forces working together.

Maybe in a year or two it will be easier to buy a house and to get on the tube in London. I wonder.

April 25th, 2008 in Cities | Permalink

5 Responses to “A crowd flowed over London Bridge”

Comments

Congrats on your prize and tell us about what happens when you go to get it. London may amaze with its transformation into a global city, but are Londoners happy people these days?
Posted by: J.J. | April 25th, 2008 at 4:00 pm | Report this comment
Congratulations.

Recently the FT also won the “newspaper of the year award”. But who’ll win it next year? The FT? If the prize rotates like the EU presidency (and how many serious newspapers are there in the UK, the world centre of serious journalism?) then does it matter much? My point is: serious journalism is a dieing species; the FT is a bastion of what it used to be. There is no competition, and therefore I fail to understand the significance of the prize (if a different newspaper wins it next year, should I switch?).
Posted by: RCS | April 25th, 2008 at 5:09 pm | Report this comment
New York, like the US at large, is bland. A big city, with all the wealth of the world, but no spirit. No TS Eliot.
Posted by: RCS | April 25th, 2008 at 5:27 pm | Report this comment
RCS, we have our own Woddy Allen to immortalize NYC — watch “Manhattan”.
Posted by: RB | April 25th, 2008 at 7:49 pm | Report this comment
I recently picked up a DVD of The Lavender Hill Mob. Early in the film, there’s a very evocative shot of crowds and traffic streaming over a London bridge on their way to work. I don’t know London, but it may be the same scene you and Eliot evoke, but circa 1950.

I found the DVD at the flea markets at 25th Street and 6th Avenue in Manhattan. If you haven’t discovered them yet, they’re nice for weekend browsing, and the occasional bargain.
Posted by: GMN | April 28th, 2008 at 3:59 pm | Report this comment