Tourism of remembrace - The plaques of London
di // pubblicato il 28 Settembre, 2011
Is it possible that the mutability of our everyday sights might influence our disposition to change? For instance, could the resilience with which Italy changes also depend on the slow pace at which our cities do? Particularly because of our vast architectural heritage, many of us – among which is the writer – grow up with the feeling, rather than a real belief, that buildings, squares and parks should be handled with extreme caution; and, if it's not for restoration, they could be left untouched altogether. But it would perhaps be naive to consider the shape of the cities as the sole reason for their inhabitants' features.
London's very own appearance stands almost antithetic to that of any Italian city. Not simply for the modernity of its architecture, but rather for the ease with which ever-new buildings are constructed and torn down. Juxtaposed to our cities' “static landscape”, this could be considered a “prismatic landscape”: the architectural interventions of the last two centuries have been countless and bold. Above all (literally) stands the last addition to the Thames' skyline, Renzo Piano's The Shard, which, when completed in 2012 will become Europe's tallest building. In fact, in anticipation of the Olympics, the city is undergoing complete renewal, and is about to change once more both its face and profile.
London, it must be said, is well accustomed to the practice of total restyling: the first great/significant trauma came with the Great Fire in 1666, which razed almost the whole/entire? city to the ground, including St. Paul's cathedral. At that time the English capital was a stifling and poorly planned cluster of wooden houses, which allowed the flames to spread in every direction for four days. London had to be rebuilt from the ground up, this time with a far-sighted switch to stone. But it maintained its labyrinthine layout: having witnessed a rapid economical growth, the streets weren't functionally planned, so much as representing the boundaries between various traders' properties. In the intentions of Christopher Wren, the appointed surveyor for the reconstruction, the fire could have been the chance to give the city a more “classical” plan; but the urge not to lose the position as Europe's trading capital made it so that it was rebuilt around the pre-existing streets. Almost three centuries later, London was once again shaken by the heavy Nazi bombings, that also targeted it with V2 supersonic missiles, destroying over a million houses and claiming more than 40.000 lives.
These tragic experiences though, instilled a certain sensibility for the irregularity, and often the clash between the diverse architectures that today populate the town, apparently chasing each other as if they knew they wouldn't survive themselves, at the furious speed (just slightly hampered by the last economic crisis) with which London grows; and, in a similar way, its citizens seem positively resigned to transience, to the extemporary, to anomaly. Therefore, even the town's financial and geographical core – the City of London – that more than any other area was hit by the fires and bombs, does not show a scar. What could be considered the historical centre looks rather like a place where history has converged: gothic bell towers sprout much like lone shrubs, unstable toothpicks, threatened by (or in good company of?) modernist buildings and glass structures looming over them.
The problem that arises, then, is finding a way to create and preserve memory in a place that – aesthetically and demographically – doesn't have much of it. Even at a glance, more than many other cities and capitals laden with past, London appears to be peppered with plaques. They relate the story of a park, commemorate an event that happened nearby, or simply mark the house where important people were born and have lived. But in the inner boroughs these plaques multiply and record, aside from writers and politicians, conductors, doctors, suffragettes; and so they build a parallel population that manages to pass on the cohesive sense of a history, made of women and men who were born, grew up and worked in that place and, owing to their lives' consequences, are still a part of it. As for what concerns the “common folk”, they can adorn parks, thanks to the custom of dedicating benches to the deceased with a little eulogy that, even if for a fleeting instant, draws the attention of who sits there towards the spent existence of another. (And this is why I ache a little each time, in newsreels of demonstrations or in recent riots, I see park benches going up in flames).
Further into the City, the district where buildings are thicker and the combinations most outlandish, the plaques begin to commemorate the constructions. Some have been bombed, some burned down, the tracks of others have been lost for centuries; many were simply demolished without qualms (which, after all, do not belong to the country of industrial revolutions). The chromatic choices are here revealing: whereas in many Italian cities their colours are either unobtrusive or harmonize with the plasters, the City's plaques feature an eye-catching blue that sets them apart from the shades of grey sported by most buildings. But these signs are terse, and they don't provide much information. Rather than teaching us things, they tickle our curiosity: they're little more than tombstones for buildings that, like people, have come and gone. And then, just beside the real city, from the plaques among the skyscrapers and the few ruins that are left, one can perceive the many layers of an imaginary city, absent witness to centuries of history.
