I’ve never been prouder to be a ’minsterite
This week, someone asked me whether I was scared to live in Westminster – as I have for 20 years – given its status as London’s chief terror target. “No,” I replied, “it makes me even prouder to live here, as I’m sure it does every other ’minsterite.”
There’s official Westminster, of course: the mother of Parliaments, Big Ben, all those bright young things, with their shiny morning faces, striving to break into politics. I defy anyone not to feel their heart swell as they stride past Oliver Cromwell, up Whitehall, and on, on to the National Gallery. Even if Trafalgar Square is packed with feral buskers and floating Yodas.
All human life is here: rich and poor, lawmaker and rioter. Here sits the ritz that is the Ritz; here also the former slum of St Giles, near Oxford Street, immortalised in Hogarth’s Gin Lane, and now the haunt of crack dealers.
As with so much of London, it’s a case of psychogeography a go-go. Pimlico, where I have made my home, holds my most cherished memories. An odd and uncertain place, deemed “mournful” by the novelist Peter Ackroyd, it is a spot where every Londoner
once harboured an ex-lover. Formerly a slum – still not quite pucker – it is a site of intrigue, assignations and the sniff of sex.
I once sat on my step in the small hours gazing boozily at the stars. A woman with fairy-tale-long golden hair strolled by with a snowy pony, led on a gold rein.
“It looks like a unicorn,” I mused. “Oh, but it is,” she announced gravely. “He is looking for his horn.” As are we all. In the Ealing comedy Passport to Pimlico, its residents run short of food, while enjoying a surfeit of gin and crisps. And so it remains to this day.