Dream about the cultural wonders of London
The sky may be grey but the English capital shines with art and culture.
I fell in love with London because of the sun. Not the one in the sky, which likes to hide behind a wall of heavy grey clouds, but the sun inside the former power station. It was 2003. Danish artist Olafur Eliasson had taken over Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall and filled the cavernous space with a giant yellow light and haze machines, creating an artificial sun in permanent sunset. People were lying on the ground beneath the shimmering disc, as though this spectacle was so overwhelming that their legs had simply given way. They looked like worshippers prostrate before a man-made glimpse of the sublime.
In the nearly two decades since, I have visited London numerous times and almost every one of those visits has delivered a sight that left me unexpectedly moved. One trip, I watched the lamps blink on in Victoria Park as a damp fog rolled in, straight out of a novel by Wilkie Collins. Another time, Savile Row tailors assembled a waistcoat before me that was so perfect it seemed almost impossible. And then there was the time I attended a late-night show at the Prince Charles Cinema with 100 fans doing the Time Warp in an ecstatic display of communal camp.
Over the past 18 months of quarantine and travel restrictions, I have imagined myself away to many different places around the world. But my fantasies of London have perhaps been the most vivid and precious, because nowhere else does the everyday brush up against the extraordinary so often.
In one recurrent daydream, I come out of the Tube station at Pimlico, walk past a newsagency and enter a familiar building that’s still pocked by shrapnel wounds from the Blitz. Like its more modern counterpart, Tate Britain is another repository of wonders. Few places have touched me as deeply as the room dedicated to J. M. W. Turner, where each canvas is like a vision of some half-remembered paradise.