Imagined London Read Online Free PDF Page A

what people own, what it says about them, and how their lives appear from the outside. In other words, real estate and facades.
    It is possible to organize a tour yourself, somewhat in the manner of the “Good Walk” section of a Fodor’s guidebook that loops around what were once called “the fashionable ways.” It’s also possible to be struck immediately by how little has changed, and how much, which, of course, is the keynote of London. Galsworthy draws a little map in words, early on in this doorstop of a book, confident, it’s clear, that his readers will understand the code contained in the addresses: “There wasold Jolyon in Stanhope Place; the James in Park Lane; Swithin in the lonely glory of orange and blue chambers in Hyde Park Mansions—he had never married, not he!—the Soamses in their nest in Knightsbridge, the Rogers in Princes Gardens.”
    They are all still there, 150 years after the action of the novel: the tall houses with the white fronts and the dignified columns, the street where Swithin lived, with its buffer of old-growth trees from the busy traffic of the Bayswater Road. But Park Lane was savaged in the early part of the last century, the bowfront houses with gardens running right down to the edge of the greensward largely demolished and the road along Hyde Park widened into a major autobahn. The broad avenue is a hodgepodge now: of lovely old houses taken hostage by corporations and equipped with security keypads to one side of the fanlit doors and sleek office furniture as out of place as a cow in the high-ceilinged parlors; of graceless apartment blocks with postage stamp balconies scarcely worthy of the name and certainly not capable of a chair and a table from which to sit and savor the view; of estate agents offering more of the same; of Jaguar and Rolls-Royce dealerships.
    In the park itself is a posted timeline, showing how it too has changed, the land acquired by Henry VIIIfor hunting in 1536, hangings at Tyburn discontinued in 1783. There is a notice on the board to leave the baby birds alone: “Parent birds rear their young better than you can.” Another asks for public help with information on a recent assault and carries the heading RAPE in red capital letters. A third suggests the number of dogs that can reasonably be handled by a single park-goer (four) but concludes that no hard-and-fast rule will be made “at this time.” Young Londoners seem a bit sick of the stereotypical view of the English: doggy bird-watchers mired in propriety and history. It is just that the stereotype seems to so often conform to observable reality.
    It is probably in the London parks that the descriptions contained within its best known novels come most alive; it is also in the parks that a reader realizes that the London frozen in the amber of great fiction is a London quite out-of-date and out of time. The soldiers on horseback in Rotten Row may seem more appropriate than the runners in shorts and singlets simply because, for a reader, the tableau of Hyde Park is indelibly one of a parade of conveyances, barouche and phaeton and curricle. (I have encountered them all dozens of times in period fiction. I still have no idea what they are, much as after all these years of reading the English magazine Tatler I have still not managed to puzzle out who gets tobe called an Honorable, and why. Frankly, I don’t much care.) The milky-skinned English roses are outnumbered by Indian families walking with their sloe-eyed children. This is part of the problem with developing an understanding of London simply from reading its great books; too much of it takes place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, too little in the present, on buses and the Underground and in the back of an Austin Mini and in neighborhoods rich with the sounds and smells of India or Jamaica.
    Surely there are still Becky Sharps, manipulating their way into an advantageous marriage