It’s a hot September Saturday in the “capital of the world” and in just a few days, I’ll be bidding farewell and boarding a plane back stateside. Every time I leave London, a little piece of my heart breaks. I love and loathe this place like an ex-boyfriend that will forever haunt me in my sleep. Too many epic memories to cherish, one too many differences left unresolved. It’s the city of dreams and possibility, heartache and loneliness, the too-beautiful lover that captivates you the way delicate young women can drive old men mad. London is a city that cannot be tamed. It will never be mine.
Friends, relatives, writers and poets have attempted to capture the essence of this place and every time they do, I learn something new. A chance encounter with a new-found friend today had us talking about London’s amazing ability to give the gift of appreciation. In the absence of open spaces and quiet corners, you somehow find a gratitude for these exact things that you took for granted back home. Abundance from the void.
Barbara Chandler’s Love London is a visual account of the city captured through a series of film photographs and a collection of quotes. I’ve perused it now for over a week and each time I do, I am captivated not only by her ability to present this city in its rawest form (grimy, beautiful, crowded and grande), but also by the places she chose to feature in her collection. She’s presenting a London that is quintessentially hers but also a city that I feel can be mine, yours, theirs, everyones. I recognize the monuments, the bridges, the murals, the buildings in her book and instantly feel a kinship with her, the photographer behind the lens. It is not a tour guide, nor is it a travel book. Neither is it a collection of pretty postcard photographs that you find at the train station or the airport. Actually, at first glance, the images are not stunningly impressive nor conventionally beautiful. But look closer and you’ll find the book’s voice. Love London is a Londoner’s testimony. It’s an attempt to vindicate the roughness and softness of this city we’ve called home.
How delighted I was to see Barbara’s perspective of the SCARY mural that I stumbled upon in East London just a few weeks ago, her photograph somehow validating my need to take mine. Her London vindicating my London.
But perhaps what enamors me most of all is the collection of quotes included in the book: so eerily relatable, they give me pause.
“You may be alone and in Company at the same time.” – Henry Fielding (p. 164)
” [In London] love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea.” – Henry Fielding (p. 142)
“The parks are the lungs of London.” – William Pitt (p.120)
“London is far more difficult to see properly than any other place.” – G.K. Chesterton (p. 116)
“She [London] is just like a vast ocean where sardines as well as whales are living together.” – Yoshio Markino (p. 101)
“…it was a good place for getting lost in, a city no-one ever knew.” – V.S. Naipul (p. 92)
“This melancholy London – I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost … walk through its streets perpetually.” – W.B. Yeats (p. 71)
Page after page, a feeling of nostalgia hits me. The grain in her images, the out-of-focus portraits, the ugly beauty of the not-so-glamorous corners of this town. All of it presents a London that is real. Unpolished, grey, chaotic, hard. Just like mad blind love can be.
Suddenly, my London experience doesn’t feel so existential. Love London vindicates my complicated love for this city of dreams.
