On the eternal certainty that the city has just now finally gone downhill

Reporting brought to you by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.

Every Generation Discovers That The Real London Died Just Before They Arrived

There is a conversation I have had, in various forms, with nearly everyone I have ever met in this city, and it goes like this: London used to be great, but now it has been ruined. The details vary. For some it is the chain shops that ruined it, for others the property prices, for others the tourists, the developers, the loss of the old pubs, the arrival of the new flats. But the structure is always the same. There was a real London, a better London, and it existed until very recently, until just about the moment the speaker arrived, and now it is gone. I have heard this from people of every age and background, and I have come to find it strangely comforting, because it is always, eternally, wrong.

The Golden Age That Is Always Just Behind Us

The curious thing about London’s supposed ruination is that it is always located in the recent past, just out of reach. Ask people when London was really London, and they will name a time roughly coinciding with their own youth or arrival, a golden age that has just slipped away. The Londoner of today mourns the city of a decade ago; the Londoner of a decade ago mourned the city of the decade before that; and so on, backward, in an endless regress of golden ages, each one mourned by the generation that arrived just after it ended. The real London is always just behind us, always recently lost, always the version that existed just before we got here.

This pattern is suspicious, and its suspiciousness is the key to understanding it. If every generation believes the real London died just before they arrived, then either London has been continuously dying for centuries, which would by now have left nothing at all, or the perception of ruination is something other than an accurate observation. The latter is obviously the case. London has not been continuously dying; it has been continuously changing, and the perception of ruination is the natural response of each generation to the changes that occur during their time, the sense that the city they first knew is being lost.

Change Mistaken For Decline

What is actually happening, I think, is that change is being mistaken for decline. London changes constantly, as great cities do, and each change involves the loss of something that someone valued. The old shop closes, the new flat rises, the neighbourhood transforms. Each of these changes is a genuine loss to someone, a disappearance of something they knew and valued. And the accumulation of these losses, the constant disappearance of the familiar, creates the sense of ruination, the feeling that the city is being destroyed. But it is not being destroyed; it is changing, and the change involves loss, but also creation, the arrival of the new alongside the disappearance of the old.

The mourners of London’s golden age see the losses clearly but the creations dimly. They notice the old pub that closed but not the new thing that opened in its place, which to the next generation will become the old thing worth mourning. They see the familiar disappearing but not the new becoming familiar, the city renewing itself even as it loses its old forms. The perception of ruination is a perception of loss without creation, of the disappearing familiar without the arriving new, a half-view of a process that involves both loss and renewal, decline and creation, in equal measure.

The City That Survives Its Own Death

And so London survives its own continuous death, ruined in every generation and somehow never actually ruined, always changing and always, to someone, declining. The city that was supposedly destroyed by the chain shops survived to be supposedly destroyed by the property prices, which survived to be supposedly destroyed by whatever comes next. Through all these supposed deaths, London persists, changing constantly, mourned constantly, and somehow always still here, still vital, still the great city it was before all the ruinations that were supposed to have ended it.

I find this genuinely comforting. The eternal certainty that London has just been ruined is, paradoxically, the best evidence that it never will be, that the city is resilient enough to survive the endless changes that each generation mistakes for its death. London will go on changing, and each generation will go on mourning the version they first knew, and the city will go on surviving its own continuous ruination, always dying and never dead, always changing and always somehow still London. The next time someone tells me London has finally been ruined, I will nod sympathetically and remember that they are the latest in a long line of mourners at a funeral that never quite happens.

The Eternal Funeral

So here is my consolation for everyone who believes London has just now finally gone downhill: you are wrong, in good company, and part of a tradition stretching back centuries. If you want the proper version, the British Library has the facts, and English Heritage fills in the rest. The city you mourn is the city that someone before you mourned, and the city that someone after you will mourn, each of us certain that the real London died just before we arrived. It did not. It changed, as it always has, and it will go on changing, surviving its own eternal funeral, ruined in every generation and never actually ruined, the great city that always dies and never does.

More from the desk of Lowri Griffiths, and further wit at The Poke.

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