Walking Through History

Unexpectedly, I found myself walking through literary London, right past the blue plaque commemorating the Bloomsbury Group. On a foggy day, it’s like being back in the early 20th century; you can practically hear them scribbling away behind the white walls of the Edwardian homes on Gordon Square. Not far away on Woburn Walk is William Butler Yates’s old house, and just around the corner in Cartwright Gardens is where Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley made their home.

I like to think of them all, haunting the streets where they once worked, having endless literary dinner parties and comparing the way the neighbourhood has changed. Every time a blue plaque goes up, I imagine everyone who has been commemorated thus far gathering to gossip and hobnob about the newcomer.

But this place has significance in my own history, too: Cartwright Gardens is where I came on my first solo trip to the UK when I was deciding where I wanted to go for graduate school. I remember a little poky room in a fusty but comfortable BnB, reading a book of Douglas Adams’s collected essays and listening to a church nearby toll the famous quarter-chimes that sounded to me like the knell of Big Ben (though they were much more likely to be coming from nearby St Pancras Church.) I marveled then at every experience which seemed to me quintessentially London-like: Springwatch on TV, English breakfast with fried tomatoes and bacon which to me was like slices of ham, fish and chips. The thrum and bustle of London all around me seemed like a novelty that could never grow old.

Walking now down that same street, I marvel at how much has changed. Not in the street, there everything is exactly the same as it was when I first made my way to the sleepy crescent full of old-fashioned hotels converted from Edwardian houses. I imagine that so little has changed there since the 19th century that many of the figures inspiring blue plaques in the neighbourhood could feel at home in it even now.

The course of my life, however, has changed a great deal: studies which took me to three continents; trading my home in the southwest of England for a life in London; people eddying in and out of my life like clusters of leaves in a breeze. Since walking down that street I have published books, endured through illnesses, had my heart broken, broken other people’s. The hopes and fears which walked with me then are different than the ones that dog my steps today.

Yet for all the change since I first walked down that street, I rarely go to that neighbourhood now. Though it’s not far from where I work, my routine has become so set in its groove that it takes something unusual to pull my out of my course. The furniture of what is quintessentially London for me has changed a great deal. Instead of fried fish suppers and marveling at what a strange people would create and earnestly watch Springwatch, it’s normally a microwavable something from Waitrose and one of the Amazon original series. My new normal has settled into a comfortable, perhaps verging on dull, stasis.

But what I learned that day when I stumbled into the scene of memory is that it only takes the simplest change, the slightest alteration of direction, to remind me of the marvels on my doorstep. It wouldn’t take much to relive the marvels of the past. All of London is out there, waiting for me to step out and try a new road.