History is a city

On a recent trip to England, while sitting on a train en route from London to the north where my mother, and hundreds of years of ancestry are, I lapsed into my usual reverie, staring out the window for the entire duration of the journey, books and laptops and other distractions soon forgotten watching the city rush by cinematically like a film on fast-forward past suburbs, crumbling grand facades, council estates, brand new apartment buildings and the towering office blocks of Canary Wharf. It struck me that wandering through a city is like exploring our collective consciousness and that these rapid, rushing snapshots are like the swift passing of centuries shaped by thought and creativity. Architecture, no matter the era, is never entirely divorced from the context in which it was originally conceived. Like all ideas it is not plucked cleanly from the void.

This is especially noticeable in the ancient cities of London or Kyoto or Rome or Athens where the old and the new exist side by side, atop and under one another. Cities are often the birthplace of ideas and innovation, every idea has its day and each building is a remnant of some idea or concept in its ascendancy. In London there is the obvious example of Buckingham Palace representative of monarchy, hierarchy, patronage, a time when bloodline mattered most and then not too far away the ubiquitous tower blocks, symbols of socialism, egalitarianism, the welfare state. Both palace and tower block are, conversely, perhaps also illustrative of dissolution and … decline. Dotting the countryside as the train speeds into the north once proud factories, emblems of the mighty industrial age strike a plangent chord; derelict, abandoned, obsolete. As these buildings fell into disrepair and disuse the made-over docklands, now Canary Wharf, began to teem with life and activity: the rise of the service economy. Perhaps one day those gleaming towers of wealth and high finance will also seem eerily anachronistic.

I was lucky enough to be in Kyoto for the annual Sakura festival where the beautiful blossoming of the cherry tree is celebrated. This event symbolises the transient nature of existence; it’s inherent temporality, the old adage that change is the only constant. Time, along with death, is the great leveller.

We too will be swept away by the tide of history and perhaps resurface in some other form altogether — like the kingfishers of Ovid’s Metamorphoses harking back to halcyon days.