Two Londons
There are cities we visit, and then there are cities we have already visited long before we ever arrive. I had known London through books, films, music and stories long before I stood on its streets. Jeffrey Archer had taken me through one London, James Bond had shown me another. Cinema and books had populated the city with characters, conspiracies, adventures and possibilities. So when I finally began walking through the city, places that had existed in my imagination for years acquired coordinates. Mile End and Bow Road were not just street names, King’s Cross was not simply a railway station. The real city kept unexpectedly colliding with the city I had carried around in my head! As days passed, another London began revealing itself; not the one of fiction, but that of history. The city that once stood at the centre of an empire upon which the sun famously never set. Now that is a difficult history to look at through the romantic lens of grandeur alone. The British Empire was built ...