What to do on my day off when I wasn't playing shopkeep? I took the tube into the City, travelling through wonderfully atmospheric and grimy cuttings, evocative of the Industrial Revolution, to Barbican and an empty City basking in late summer sunshine. From the station I walked west to Smithfield, through a dense network of streets and alleys to St Bartholomew the Great; church and urban fabric a great meshing of palimpsests. The scale human. The density high. Higher still until 1913 when there was a slum 'clearance' scheme in Cloth Fair to the north of the church, that saw the demolition of Medieval and post-medieval houses.
From Smithfield I wove my way south - a little directionless, but what did that matter? - finding myself in another city - of monstrous bland and blank office buildings. I shave to admit an ambiguity in my response to these buildings, symbols of the pre-eminence of the City in the world banking, I acknowledge. However they just don't make a city. A place of anomie and dislocation, of bland corporatism. Credit though to the City authorities for the wonderful garden created in the ruins of a bombed out Christchurch Greyfriars. Then unexpectedly the high dome of St Paul's and the peeling of bells. My new destination. Close to, the noise of bells was overwhelming and deeply emotional.
I stopped for refreshment, and then headed back towards Barbican tube station, stopping-off at a couple of very interesting examples of post War classicism: St Vedast Foster Lane, rebuilt after the War by Stephen Dykes Bower perhaps one of the best post-war restorations, and the Wood St Police Station by McMorran and Whitby. Not a particularly good photo of either building, I'm afraid. They both deserve a post to themselves. I arrived, eventually, at the labyrinthine Barbican Centre, where I had a mediocre lunch. It's been a while since I tasted the delights of British institutional cooking.
The jaunt ended in the delightful Charterhouse Square. A place like Cloth Fair that is much to my taste - humane in scale, complex in the interplays of history, style, materials and space.
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