The Doors of London

Every quarter hour, from our rented suite in Camden Town, we hear the bells striking at St. Pancras New Church. During our first few days here, I was ill-informed enough in both physics and geography to believe that I was hearing Big Ben. Not so. We are, however, hearing the same tune: Westminster Chimes – or, as it’s known locally, “the Bongs.” St. Pancras is a ghastly looking place, its Portland stone facings permanently stained by exhaust and its early Victorian imitation-classical architecture looking about as reverent as a piss in the font. Why is an edifice completed in 1822 called the “New Church,” you ask? Because St. Pancras Old Church, originally built in the Year of Our Lord 314, sits just down the way. By the Mary Wollstonecraft memorial in its churchyard, Percy Shelley and the author of Frankenstein once planned their scandalous elopement.

This is the kind of historical experience I’ve been having in London: so much past crammed into every corner, overlaid, overlapped, combined, confused, and/or integrated – the resemblance to a parish jumble sale militates against a sustained sense of wonder. One simply loses track. Stan, for example, had a bit of a moment at the British Museum this afternoon, beside the skull of an ichthyosaur. “Bought by the Trustees in 1821? My gosh, that’s an awfully long time ago. Oh – wait...”

It’s been fairly easy, though, to forgive myself this apparent inability to take London seriously. And having done so, I’m free to enjoy whatever bits of the city’s history take my fancy. I’m currently very interested in the doors of our building. No two are alike. Some open to the right, some to the left, and some have two narrow leaves and open in the middle. Some have doorknobs in the centre, some have no doorknobs at all. All have a variety of keyholes (placed anywhere from knee height to eye level), and at least one of these will require a skeleton key. The array of colours is kaleidoscopic, and the variety of doorknockers, hallucinatory. This is what happens when you have about a century and half to personalize things.

The British mania for gardening has also left its mark on the building. The garbage bins in the courtyard rest under a bower of ivy, roses, and climbing hydrangea. The roof is a paradise of container gardens, some of them so cleverly planted that the pots are invisible. Even in this wet climate, it must take an impressive amount of hand-watering to sustain all these flowers and shrubs.

For real horticultural loopy-loos, however, one must visit the Hampton Court Flower Show, which is currently underway about an hour and a half from here. As part of Stan’s London conference, we were offered a chance to visit the Show as an excursion. I kiboshed the idea, conjecturing that a couple of hours in the blazing sun among blue-haired old ladies and their prize rhododendrons would finish Stan off completely. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The BBC has running coverage of the Show, and he's fascinated by it. There are water gardens, spice gardens, historical gardens, and Girl Guide gardens, and the gardeners themselves are maestros of the horticultural world. One man has been cross-pollinating clematis plants – just clematis plants – since he was sixteen years old. This year, he's introducing a clematis that doesn’t climb. We might end up seeing the damn Show after all.

For the record, the suite we’re renting is in Sandwich House, on Sandwich Street. I assume the name commemorates the famed John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich (better known to his many lowlife London acquaintances as “Jemmy Twitcher”) who allegedly invented the eponymous food sometime in the eighteenth century, because he was too busy gambling to eat dinner. Like its namesake, Sandwich House is a bit off the square – long exposure to weather and a complete lack of heat expansion joints has cracked the cement of the stairs and walkways, and some of the embedded steel beams have rusted or declined. A chartered surveyor tucked a letter through our door a while ago, explaining the long and complicated set of procedures necessary for getting the structure's loads distributed properly again; it made me sympathize for the first time with people who want to tear down all the heritage buildings and start over with condos and box stores. At any rate, we opened our door yesterday to find a structural engineer with a piece of blue chalk and a radar gun inspecting beams in our wall. Here are the tell-tale signs that your building might have structural engineers: