Lon-done
Keeping calm and walking modern and mythological London.
I had never been on a long haul flight when I first flew to London. It was 1995, in the back row of the non-smoking section of Garuda ‘cheap as you can get’ airline. The row behind was the smoking section. The flight stopped at both Denpasar and Rome each way and the overhead lockers rattled and sprung open with alarming regularity.
Arriving days later into Heathrow to epic manual visa control queues wreaking of tobacco and bleary-eyed but, like so many young Australians before me, so excited to be ‘overseas.’
I was to visit my in-laws-to-be for a week either side of a spring English garden wedding. I was to learn this event required a hat. As the car pulled up to the family home in Barnes it felt like I had fallen through the Playschool windows. It was the picture book England of my childhood imagination.
The train dust, drizzle and last tube of the night panics were all ahead of me.
It’s been nearly thirty years now and I’ve lost count of the number of return trips from Australia to London. Making that longest of long haul flights every other year when possible - to visit my husband’s family and keep my children connected to their ‘de Souza-roots.’
So much has changed and also nothing at all.
In 2023 there are very few cars in London central - with a high tax on private vehicles, there are more pedestrians than taxis, buses and bicycles combined. At times, I imagine I can hear the clip-clop of horseshoes.
The fates aligned and I was able to join mystic-historian Caroline Wise on one of her monthly Treadwell’s ‘Mythological Walking Tours’ of London. A generous guide, she shared her knowledge of ancient, pagan Britain, Roman and early-Christian London over four hours. Her stories peppered with a passion for the reclamation of the ‘old ways’ amidst the modern city. I loved it all.
Highlights :
revealing what lay beneath The Strand, so-called as it was the original river front of The Thames, the sites of maypoles, holy wells and ceremonial places.
the legend of Brutus and Troy, invented in the Dark Ages to provide a meaningful link for London to the Ancient Greeks and Romans.
the founding of St Paul’s on the site of the Roman Temple of Diana - something rarely spoken of. Paul was a patriarchal saint who determinedly crushed all practices that honoured the feminine, fertility and nature worship.
St Bride’s Church in Fleet Street with its crypt and holy well - only (re)discovered after the blitz in World War Two when a bomb split the church in half. A powerful and peaceful underground place. It is now accepted this was a sacred place where the Celts worshipped the Irish goddess Brigid.
There were so many more stories woven in. I highly recommend the tour to anyone visiting London that wants to get under the bitumen and into history.
The British story will remain deeply conflicted for me. A brutal and harmful coloniser and a conversation not being owned in meaningful ways by its institutions. I shunned visiting the British Museum and it was interesting to read The Tate admitting to its slave origins.
The day George Michael died, I was in London. This time, Sinead O’Connor died. I woke up early, queued her albums chronologically and walked the Thames Path. A profound sadness, humming with anger, overcame me. The cruelty of the music and media industries to women and abuse survivors.
Thank you Sinead, for being our torch bearer. Rest in Power.
London-time provided for many family catch ups, tube journeys, visits to the Tate Britain’s Rossettis and Somerset House Black Venus exhibitions. I’ve voyaged with ABBA and danced like it’s 1995 again with my husband and daughter at PULP’s show at the Hammersmith Apollo. I’ve walked the Thames Path and the length of Hyde Park. The weather was a mixed bag. The drizzle and tube dust haven’t changed. I discovered eyebrow threading.
It’s time to say goodbye (again) for now.
Stage three of the year’s adventure starts at sunset tonight - New York here I come.
#walkon2023 Step Count - accumulative total steps 1,007,468 (as at 29 July 2023)
Love seeing you all in that sunset