Summer in the City

I always think of London as a summer city, or rather when I think of summers in the city it is London I remember.  Hot dusty streets and crowded trains contrast with cool grass and wide open spaces, cool dark pubs and afternoon pints.  The 'Abbey Road' album cover with its suggestion of heat and emptiness, a Maurice Utrillo mood of quiet corners and ordinary lives and all the bustle happening elsewhere.  I used to get up when everyone had gone, throw on a pair of shorts and sit in the garden in Sydenham, the grass cool and damp or already hot and dry and scratchy beneath my feet.  Swifts overhead, distant lawns being mowed, even a sheep from the small children's farm in the school.  Huge summer silences, clouds over a blue sky, emptiness.

And things happen in London in the summer time.  I saw Nelson Mandela in Trafalgar Square, a short speech on the balcony of South Africa House, Virginia Bottomley and Prince Andrew almost swept away by the crowd, who ignored them.  The tea pavilions at the Serpentine Gallery, the only one I have seen designed by Daniel Liebeskind, an annual temporary excursion into cutting edge architecture, absolutely free.  

Perhaps in summer cities we need an escape, a cool place to retreat to and take stock.  I wouldn't enjoy summer London as much from a hotel room.