Living History

He wasn’t supposed to feed the birds. The slick black plastic placard at the gate told him that, as did a smaller, brassy one that had a sooty blush on it from years of exposure to the London atmosphere. But he’d come to London from a small town in Canada, and they didn’t have pigeons there- at least not pigeons like these, in their millions. So he ripped off a morsel of his boxed sandwich and rolled it between his fingertips, then flicked the crumbled bits to the ground. A fat pigeon landed nearby, blinking stupidly up at him before pecking at the paving stones in the bench’s shadow and was soon joined by another and then another and then another… but the pigeons didn’t bother anybody, being little more than a part of the visual landscape. They didn’t bother the man with  the Rastafarian cap and Ray-Bans, who dozed on the grass nearby, his headphones leaving him oblivious. They didn’t bother the trio of women stretched, catlike, in yoga poses and talked about circular breathing and tea-tree oil. They didn’t bother the interns near the gateway, dressed in their three-piece suits and serious, professional Guildhall mannerisms. But they delighted the young man who, having come to London, the great city of the world, could find nothing more suitable and enjoyable than taking his lunch in the open air and sharing it with pigeons. But the others didn’t notice his smile, didn’t notice his momentary pride in flaunting the rules and feeding the birds. They hardly noticed him, and why would they? They, like all people, had all come to this park, this city for their own reasons, no two alike. They came to work, came to shop, came to protest, came to tour, came to live. They were aware that others in the past had come to London for all of these reasons and more, but they didn’t really think about them. London, to them, was a right here and a right now, and would continue to be such until they left it in one way or another. Nobody stopped to think about the people of the past or of the future… but that didn’t change the fact that they were still there and still important. There wasn’t a one of them there that knew that beneath the park’s grassy turf and flagstoned paths lay hundreds and hundreds of skeletons, for Postman’s Park, nearly a yard above the current street level, was built of the disused churchyards of Old London.

It is not alone in this; London has limited space, and for it to remain current, it must understand how to incorporate the old with the new. The city of London- the boroughs and the Square Mile- is far more interconnected than one would think. Unlike the planned cities and suburbs so prevalent in the United States, London is an organic city. It’s dynamic, alive even. Its human elements cannot be ignored; people don’t just come to this city to work, they come to live, just as we have. But you miss so much if you live in a place without making the effort to understand it. In our one required course, Global London, we are given the chance to have an amazing understanding of the way the city functions as a business and as a residence. Our talented and knowledgeable instructors work as a team to give us the tools we need to engage with the city, its economy, and its residences. But other things we must discover on our own. We must teach ourselves, however we can, what it truly means to be a citizen of a global city, and this is why the history that oozes down the Portland walls of grand houses, that rises like a pea-soup fog from the last mudflats along the Thames, that seeps out from the cracks in the remaining cobblestones is so very crucial to our understanding of the city. It was this quest for understanding that led me to Postman’s Park that afternoon.

I’d gone down to Guildhall for reasons unknown. It had just been a place that I hadn’t been yet, which made it important to me.

It was a lovely place, but as I wandered around and watched the people come and go, I began to wonder what it really was. It seemed to be one of those places where you were now, or you would be later, but it didn’t really mean much on an individual level. It was a place to exist, not a place to be. So as impressive as it was, I eventually wandered away to go find a park to relax in. London, I am convinced, has the best parks in the world, and Postman’s Park is no exception.

This little one with a fountain near its gates seemed delightful; populated but not crowded, with enough places to stop and sit and relax for a while. I found a bench, sat down, rummaged through my bag for some chewing gum… and then I saw them. Rows and rows of them.

I wasn’t surprised to see them. I’m an archaeologist, after all; I find nothing frightening or even out-of-place about grave markers. But seeing them made me think once again of the people who had come to this place before me. Guildhall might have been impressive, but it was a building, its spires reaching into the sky. It had little personal connection to anybody. But each of those simple markers represented a person- sometimes two. They embodied the people of London before and of London yet to come and the man with the pigeons and the women doing yoga. They are the everyday people, and for us to understand London, we must never forget that.

In America, our cemeteries are neat and tidy. In older places, like the costal towns, we might have a true churchyard or two, but often these are paved over and forgotten, until the ground is dug into again and the lives are rediscovered. We tend to think that steel and glass are what we need- that we must constantly push to be modern and to be on the cusp. But here in London, they understand that there’s no way to hide the people that made it a global city in the first place. Many monuments might have been repurposed or lost, but the memory is immortal. We can talk all we like about gentrification and urban development, but we can’t forget who came before us. London won’t let us.

(This is a quick little photoessay that I wrote for a contest. I like the way it reads, but I wish that I could have made it longer.)