Primrose Hill, Cherry Blossom, the Correct Light, and the Annual Peace I Make With the Decision to Remain
Every year in the third or fourth week of April I do something that I have done so consistently over eleven years that it has become a private ritual rather than a deliberate act: I go to Primrose Hill early in the morning, before the park becomes the park that people come to, and I stand at the top and look at the city spread out below me and I understand, briefly and completely and without the need for any further argument, why I live here. The view from Primrose Hill in April is not a spectacular view in the way that views from tall buildings are spectacular: it does not give you the distance that makes a city look like a diagram of itself. It gives you London at the scale of London, low and wide and various, with the specific light of an April morning over a city that is beginning, tentatively, to warm up, and it gives you the feeling that this specific arrangement of human settlement, which is ancient and chaotic and expensive and frequently unreasonable in its demands on the people who live in it, is also, from this specific hill at this specific time of year, something close to perfect.
I am aware that this is an irrational response to a view and that the view does not actually offset the twelve percent rent increase or the Northern Line or the four pounds fifty for the coffee or any of the other specific costs that London extracts in exchange for the experience it offers. The view does not pay the rent. The view does not negotiate with managing agents or cancel on plans because the tube is suspended south of Camden or make the kitchen feel larger than it is. The view is simply a view from a hill in a park that is free, available, and reliably excellent in April, and it is enough, for the duration of the morning, to make all the calculations come out in London’s favour.
The Parks as Public Good
Hampstead Heath, which is a twenty-minute walk from my flat and therefore in the category of things I take for granted and should not, is among the more implausible facts of urban life: a rolling, partially wild landscape of several hundred acres sitting inside one of the world’s most expensive cities, free to access, available at all hours, and not significantly smaller than it was when it was preserved from development a century and a half ago. The Heath in April has the specific quality that things have when they have been through a winter and are recovering from it: the mud is still there but the growth is beginning, the ponds are cold and occupied by early-morning swimmers who have a relationship with cold water that I observe with respect from the path, the bluebells are starting on the wooded sections, and the city below the hill is visible through trees that are beginning to leaf and that will, in three weeks, close the view entirely until October. Visit London lists Hampstead Heath as a recommended destination. This is an understatement of institutional proportions.
What April Does to North London
The residential streets of Highgate and Muswell Hill in the third week of April are decorated by cherry trees that produce a quantity and quality of blossom that feels disproportionate to the tree’s size and annual commitment to doing this. The road under the trees at the height of the blossom looks as if someone has made a decision about the street’s aesthetics and then delivered on that decision comprehensively. The window boxes appear on all the houses at roughly the same time, as if coordinated, filled with things that people have been waiting since February to put outside. The allotments on the Holloway Road that I walk past most mornings are suddenly and comprehensively busy with people who have been waiting for exactly this permission from the weather. The market stalls change their produce. The parks fill with people who look slightly surprised and grateful to be warm, which is the North London spring expression: surprised gratitude, as if the winter were unexpected despite happening every year.
The Annual Peace
The peace I make with London in April is not the peace of someone who has resolved the question of whether the city is worth what it costs. It is the peace of someone who has decided, for another year, that the question is less urgent than the view from the hill and the restaurant on the corner and the park that is twenty minutes away and the cherry trees on the street that look like they have been arranged for my specific benefit and that I know are not but that feel that way at seven in the morning when nobody else is out yet and the city is mine briefly, as it occasionally is, before the day begins and everyone else arrives and it becomes everybody’s city again, which is also correct and also good, but which is a different thing from the early morning on the hill when it is very quiet and the light is the right light and I understand, without the need for further argument, why I stay.
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