The Passing of Baroness Thatcher - Celia Rees

I was going to blog about something entirely different but I've just been watching the funeral of Margaret Thatcher. I wasn't meaning to, you understand, but I was caught by the ceremony of it all, the black draped drums, the gun carriage drawn by six black horses, the half muffled bells, the measured tread of the coffin bearers, the soldiers lining the route with their heads bowed and arms reversed. It was a historic moment and they don't come all that often, these great state occasions which we 'do so well' as David Dimbleby likes to remind us. The last funeral for a British Prime Minister conducted on this scale was for Sir Winston Churchill, the honours then done by Dimbleby Senior. A dullish day, I seem to remember, all in black and white, of course, the soldiers in great coats, mourners in top hats and tail coats, with the coffin arriving by river, all the cranes dipping in recognition. No cranes now, only the soaring towers and winking lights of Canary Wharf. A different time, different age. That was definitely history. The world has changed since then.

The gun carriage made its slow way towards St Paul's accompanied by ragged applause and cheers from the crowd. I don't remember people clapping and cheering before. It was more bowed heads and respectful silence. But perhaps that kind of quiet, deferential behaviour has passed into history along with the cranes of the London Docks. The route took the procession down Fleet Street, past signs for Starbuck's, Macdonald's, Costa Coffee, Subway. Change again. If the cameras had panned up a bit, they might have caught the fading titles of the great newspapers whose offices used to line this street which is still our defacto name for the press. The newspapers are not there any more - gone to Wapping and the very term 'press' is obsolete, gone with the old printing presses and the ruthless destruction of the skilled print workers who worked them, swept into history by Mrs Thatcher, along with the mines and the miners' unions, the steel works and steel workers and most of British manufacturing industry. She was a tidy woman by all accounts. 

It is fitting, perhaps, that the route took her next into the City. Up Ludgate Hill past the towers of steel and glass, home to the 'new' industries, released by the Big Bang of 1986. The financiers and commercial lawyers, the banks and insurance brokers, all now spilling out of their offices in shirt sleeves, smart phones and cameras at the ready, to witness her passing and register their presence as part of it to message, tweet, post on Facebook. An unimaginable technology in the 1980s when cameras used film that had to be developed and mobile phones were the size of house bricks. 

On she went to St Paul's Cathedral, where the half muffled bells tolled loud and soft to mark her passing and the great and the good waited for her, her coffin carried up the steps by representatives of  the different branches of the armed forces who lost men in the Falklands War. So they took her into St Paul's, into the presence of the assembled congregation, her family, the Queen, the Archbishop of Canterbury, British politicians, assorted world figures, Henry Kissinger,F. W. de Klerk, and all sorts of others from Jeremy Clarkson to Terry Wogan. To Be A Pilgrim, Love Divine, All Loves Excelling, I Vow to Thee My Country, prayers and readings and the timeless simplicity of the Book of Common Prayer Funeral Service. 

Then she was borne out to those raggedly cheering crowds and put into the back of a waiting hearse,  her last public moments over. Whatever one thought about her, loved her or hated her, she made history and shaped it, now she was being taken off to become part of it herself. 

The Importance of Remembering by Lucy Inglis

Last week a friend flew in from Charleston. He wanted to spend a couple of days sightseeing in the City of London before he spent the weekend with friends, so we decided to take in St Paul’s Cathedral and the Tower of London. 

I started working in the City of London almost fifteen years ago and I’ve lived here for seven. It is, as people often observe, a very lovely but peculiar place to live. It doesn’t have the obvious appeal of somewhere like Paris, Rome or Venice. There are no green spaces, people hurry everywhere all the time. It’s either too crowded, or deserted. There are too many offices and Tesco Metros, but it does have a thick crust of time that clings to almost everything. Even the new buildings are tinged with it, like a creeping moss. In the fuss and inconvenience of the Olympics, the endless construction work, I had forgotten, but it only took a few hours to rediscover.

We went first to St Paul’s cathedral, where my guest was somewhat shocked to see a service starting as tourists walked around, chatted and took photographs, although, he reasoned, in a place the size of St Paul’s what else could you do? We looked at everything, and climbed to the Stone Gallery for the incredible view of the City below (not the Golden - vertigo beat us). In the crypt we visited the tombs of Nelson, Wellington, Turner, and of course, Wren as we discussed burial rituals in Georgian London and in the American South, as well as the most macabre tombs we’d seen. He won by some margin after regaling me with the image of the rotting corpse carved in stone he’d seen in New Orleans.

Then it was to the Museum of London, via the medieval and Roman London Wall. I had forgotten it was there. Seeing it on the street was almost a surprise. The grey squirrel sitting on the top of it seemed equally unimpressed, looking at us as if to say ‘What do you want?’ Around every corner we seemed to find something else. At the Museum we saw London from prehistory to the modern in what was literally a whizz around before we went over to the Guildhall to look at the Roman amphitheatre. I feared I had history’d out my companion, already weary from his flight. But no, back he came for more the following day.

At the Tower of London we sat by the river, had a cup of coffee looking at Tower Bridge, and marshalled our resources. There is, after all, far too much to see on one visit. We debated the Princes in the Tower, the recycling of crown jewellery, and how long it would take to carve a shield and motto into the stone wall of your cell. All the ravens were annoyingly camera shy. How and why did Walter Raleigh ultimately get it so wrong? For my friend, visiting the church where Thomas More is buried was an unexpectedly moving moment. 

At Tower Hill, we said goodbye. I had decided to walk back, past the end of the street where Samuel Pepys lived, past the Monument to the Great Fire of London, the Bank of England, the Mansion House and streets with names such as Huggin Lane and Old Fish Street Hill. All these things I had forgotten were there in my rush for a pint of milk and the often elusive dog food. 

The photos in this post are not of the big things but of all the little things we saw, neglected corners of the City. A memorial tablet bedded into a wall where a churchyard once stood, the chapel on Aldersgate, and the interior of St Stephen Walbrook. Rediscovering all the good things about where I live turned sightseeing with a friend into something really memorable. Now I have to be sure not to forget again!