loveable city
At Heathrow I spent 5 pounds on a journal called Monocle (a new baby of design guru Tyler Brule, the founder of Wallpaper). It lists the 20 most liveable cities in the magazine's first ever survey of such things. I had to buy it (even though it costs more than The New Yorker) because Singapore comes in at number 17. WOW! Looks like all the money we've been throwing at making ourselves hip and happenin' is finally working the magic that Singaporeans are best able to understand: Place on Global Chart.
I am a sucker for rankings, so of course I had to buy the mag. And I love the bit where it says that there were 22 murder cases in Singapore in 2006 open bracket all solved close bracket. Not even World's Most Liveable City - Munich - can match that.
What got me most worked up though is that London is not in the list. Okay, maybe it's because the Monocle head office is based in London and they would rather choose cities where they've not had to deal with the hassles of commuting, supermarket shopping, and the unpredictable English weather. I just spent 10 days in London and 4 days in Zurich (3rd Most Liveable City) and I must say, that though it was nice to have swift trains, clean air, lake and mountain views, and pretty Swiss houses to look at, I would probably suffocate from, oh I don't know, the absence of spirit, the vacuum where there should be vibe.
Where are the ghosts in Zurich? A city without ghosts cannot be liveable, it's not even been properly initiated into the rites of inhabitation. I readily admit that my own ignorance about Swiss culture and history plays a part in my indifference. For a great part of London's charm for me comes from it's having been the address of George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Christina Rossetti (who loved the poetry of the street Seven Sisters), Karl Marx (buried in Highgate Cemetery - so is Rossetti), Sigmund Freud (London was his refuge from Nazi Vienna in the last year of his life), Ezra Pound (lived in Kensington from 1904-1914, I think), J.S. Mill, and many more writers and artists.
noisynotes and I did a walk around Kensington that began on the High Street, wound through the oldest square and the second oldest square in the area, meandered through mews (stables turned into small houses), and finally ended at Holland Park. Can I say this without sounding like a total Anglophile? No, not really. I was in love with it all. And mainly because it's a big, crammed city of people and ghosts and it's not perpetually caught up with being globally liked and ranked highly on some world-class chart.
Here are some new finds I shall be returning to the next time I go to London:
- Lambs Conduit Street (cafes, Persephone bookshop, the Good Foods shop, Folk clothes and shoes, sadly no size 35)
- Gordon Place (the prettiest cul-de-sac on earth, possibly)
- Holland Park (the roses and the path of baby maples)
- Camper shoes in Covent Garden (not at all new, but what's new is that they now have size 35!)
London is also loveable because two of my dearest friends ER and MT live there.
I am a sucker for rankings, so of course I had to buy the mag. And I love the bit where it says that there were 22 murder cases in Singapore in 2006 open bracket all solved close bracket. Not even World's Most Liveable City - Munich - can match that.
What got me most worked up though is that London is not in the list. Okay, maybe it's because the Monocle head office is based in London and they would rather choose cities where they've not had to deal with the hassles of commuting, supermarket shopping, and the unpredictable English weather. I just spent 10 days in London and 4 days in Zurich (3rd Most Liveable City) and I must say, that though it was nice to have swift trains, clean air, lake and mountain views, and pretty Swiss houses to look at, I would probably suffocate from, oh I don't know, the absence of spirit, the vacuum where there should be vibe.
Where are the ghosts in Zurich? A city without ghosts cannot be liveable, it's not even been properly initiated into the rites of inhabitation. I readily admit that my own ignorance about Swiss culture and history plays a part in my indifference. For a great part of London's charm for me comes from it's having been the address of George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Christina Rossetti (who loved the poetry of the street Seven Sisters), Karl Marx (buried in Highgate Cemetery - so is Rossetti), Sigmund Freud (London was his refuge from Nazi Vienna in the last year of his life), Ezra Pound (lived in Kensington from 1904-1914, I think), J.S. Mill, and many more writers and artists.
noisynotes and I did a walk around Kensington that began on the High Street, wound through the oldest square and the second oldest square in the area, meandered through mews (stables turned into small houses), and finally ended at Holland Park. Can I say this without sounding like a total Anglophile? No, not really. I was in love with it all. And mainly because it's a big, crammed city of people and ghosts and it's not perpetually caught up with being globally liked and ranked highly on some world-class chart.
Here are some new finds I shall be returning to the next time I go to London:
- Lambs Conduit Street (cafes, Persephone bookshop, the Good Foods shop, Folk clothes and shoes, sadly no size 35)
- Gordon Place (the prettiest cul-de-sac on earth, possibly)
- Holland Park (the roses and the path of baby maples)
- Camper shoes in Covent Garden (not at all new, but what's new is that they now have size 35!)
London is also loveable because two of my dearest friends ER and MT live there.
posted by wheyface at 10:46 PM
5 Comments:
Hey hey, talking about cities. Reading this book called City Life by Witold Rybczynski (how on earth does one pronounce his name??!!). A colleague lent it to me. It was written in 1995.
In it, he writes: "Most cities have places of which the visitor can say when he reaches them, "Now, I'm really here." These hallmark places can be famous monuments like Eiffel Tower and Berlin's Brandenburg Gate or even famous buildings like Buckingham Palace. More often than not, they are large public places: The Piazza San Marco in Venice, Red Square in Moscow, Tiananmen Square in Beijing and New York's Times Square."
At that part, I got to thinking about Singapore. I couldn't come up with anything. The closest I could come to was the Singapore Girl. :-P
This, to me, was the saddest thing. People might turn to that "durian" but it's a recent thing. I think we need something of historical significance but I can't think of any for Singapore. Sir Stamford Raffles statue and the Merlion?
Yeah, we've got efficient system, clean streets, safe governance, 22 murder cases in 2006 that were all solved but where are the ghosts in this town? Sigh...this thought depresses me.
10 years ago I would have said "Katong" or the east coast.
But now that you mention it, I can't think of any place either.
Yeah, that's what I term "tragic" for a country.
ER is dead, long live EW.
xxx
ER! Sorry, I meant EW! Missus!
Oh oh oh we have a barncake on the premises! :-)
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