Inside track: Why London gets it right
In a few days from now I shall be in Dubai home to the world's tallest tower, sipping coffee with my Emirati friends, wondering why London gets it right? In the months of March and April, Easter and spring the weather changes from very cold at night to warm in the mornings with the possibility of rain, gusting winds and a hailstorm during the course of a day. You need to be prepared with an overcoat and or be ready to strip down to a T-shirt and cotton trousers at some point during the day. At this time of the year there is little chance of bumping into other Indians in the fashionable streets of Mayfair. Indians usually arrive in the months of May, June and July: businessmen at conferences, politicians at meetings and anyone else who can find an excuse to visit London.
The Easter break was therefore a good time to discover London a bit more without the distractions of meeting for the endless lunch or dinner invitations. At the start of the long weekend Easter holiday break every Londoner worth his or her salt was seen boarding a bus, train or plane or driving out to the "country" (The British expression for going away to the countryside during long weekend holidays). A friend invited me out to the Arts Club late Thursday evening at the start of the holiday. If you are wondering about my fascination with the arts at midnight, well, this place had nothing to do with arts. It was a social club housed in an old building, where artists used to hang out in years gone by, recently transformed into a upscale "members only" spot for the London cool set. The club was buzzing with people both inside and out on the streets. Unlike India where a developer can usually knock down an old building and build a new structure that can sometimes shock the senses, in London, planners are rarely allowed to get away so easily. So the old mingles effortlessly with the new and a developer can renovate but must ensure that the facade and character of buildings is maintained. Does this type of cautious redevelopment and mingling of history and architecture help in revitalising neighbourhoods in London? It certainly seemed to have had the desired effect.
On the Saturday I trooped off to an area known as the South Bank, on the other side of the river Thames, which houses the National Theatre, the Royal Festival Hall, Shakespeare's Globe, the Tate Modern Art Gallery and the London Eye (the wheel from which you can see miles around London) among its many cultural spots. Why had the planners create an area with this concentrated space of culture? Despite the holidays the area was packed with people. I had heard a play called Dara was being staged at the National Theatre and managed to get tickets, to a sold out house. The play is a story about the Mughal Empire in 1659 and the rivalry between two brothers Dara Shikoh and Aurangzeb. The sibling rivalry is stoked by a favouritist father (Emperor Shahjahan) into fratricide. It was the last night of the play and I discovered that an old friend, Zubin Varla (a British Parsi) was playing the part of Dara. The house was packed with Indians, Pakistanis and a fair share of the English. The play was topical as it focused on the differing views of Islam that the two brothers felt. It pitted the fundamentalism and brutality of Aurangzeb against the open-minded, loving mysticism of the Dara. Would the Indian subcontinent have shaped up differently had Dara come to reign and not Aurangzeb? I ended up in the "green room" after the performance with the actors and the debate on fundamentalism versus open-mindedness continued late into the night in the city of London. The city felt vibrant and alive.
The following morning despite the blustery winds and the cold I decided to head out towards my idea of the "country" and toured around Windsor Castle and its beautiful little villages that sit on the banks of the river Thames. This is the time when flowers are in full bloom and they were, the bluebells, snowdrops, cow parsley, common daisy, dandelion, thrift, cuckoo pint, common dog violet, buttercup were seen everywhere at the royal landscape gardens. The birds were also welcoming the spring in the scrub and the hedgerows nightingales, blackcaps, garden warblers, whitethroats, lapwings and redshanks, passage waders and the last of the wintering ducks, the woodpecker, cuckoo and peregrine falcon, the pheasants ,the squirrels, were all to be seen going about their business. The grass was lush green and the air was fresh. Lunch was a picnic on a bench in the Queen's private gardens which consisted of cheese pasty, with pickle and quails egg washed down with some Italian rosé wine. I was missing the aroma of spicy Indian food with which to fill the cold fresh air. Men, women children and dogs passed by as the only the English can do, chatting softly. No litter, no noise.
Back in London the next day foreigners were thronging the usual spots, the European tourists down Oxford Street and the wealthy Middle Eastern ones at Harrods. Why was London so busy, aside from the fact that by the end of the cold Easter weekend the sun was finally out? No doubt a mix of history, the empire and art was a factor to the draw. Why were people not frightened away by this expensive city? Why was the city not built with high-rise towers everywhere and all the gardens and the very valuable empty spaces not lined with housing or office towers? I tried to rationalise that people get attracted to London because there are plenty of gardens, open spaces and a village feel within and around the city. Houses are no more than two or three storeys high. High-rise towers are few and appear to be iconic and limited to certain parts of the city. As a result of a low lived-in feel of the city, there is plenty of interaction on the streets of London between those who live there and those who visit. With India on the move to smarten its cities will they be smartened I wonder with same interaction that London allows?