The Big Read

London is proof that the more things change, the more they stay the same

A peek into his grandfather's past shows Paul Ash just how fine a thing the modern British capital is

02 December 2018 - 00:00 By paul ash

The telephone shrilled. "The superintendent at Croydon speaking. There's a ninety-mile gale blowing here. I'm afraid your departure must again be postponed."
"But when is it likely to be?"
"Tomorrow - perhaps."
And there followed the click that heralded a dead line.
Meet William James Makin, "WJ" to his friends and my world-trotting, revolution-reporting, adventure-seeking grandfather.
It is the early winter of 1932. WJ finds himself in London, between newspaper assignments, kicking his heels while he waits to board an Imperial Airways Atalanta-class aircraft for a route-proving flight from London to Cape Town.
With a sigh he lit another cigarette and stared out of the window. A grey day of winter in Covent Garden. Dirty, frayed cabbage leaves scuttered along the gutters, blown by that same gale whistling along the canyons of London streets.
A magazine artist in shabby clothes, clutching a huge portfolio of drawings beneath his arm, battled with the wind. A standing dray-horse flung his nosebag impatiently towards the sky, scattering the corn. A blue-faced man with a cartload of bananas waved his arms and struck his miserable body with an attempt to flagellate his blood into warmth.
Eighty-six years later, I find myself ambling through Covent Garden, thinking about my grandfather, wondering in which street he saw the scuttering cabbage leaves, the wind-battered artist and the dray horse flinging its nose bag.
I too am waiting to a board an inaugural flight on a new air route to South Africa. As it happens, it is with Imperial Airways' successor, British Airways, and there is a certain synchronicity in the event: the route will be the airline's first direct service to Durban in nearly 20 years, a city that Imperial served in the late 1930s with lumbering flying boats that took a week or more to growl their way down Africa from Europe.
The difference is that today the sun is shining and even if the wind was howling, it would have to be a hurricane before flights were cancelled. Also, Croydon Aerodrome has long ago made way for Heathrow and we lucky few who can afford it can traverse a continent in mere hours, watching films and barely noticing the thunderstorms and desert-warmed updrafts over Africa.
THE MORE THINGS CHANGE
WJ would probably gasp out loud to see Covent Garden today. I see neither a single dray horse, nor a scuttering cabbage leaf. There are still sketch artists though, scribbling tourists' portraits. And buskers and mimes and throngs of tourists pouring out of the Underground station in a river of puffer jackets and trainers and jeans, plugged into their phones and taking pictures of everything.
It's cold, sure, and the icy wind howls through London's canyons as it always has, but there is nothing grey about this city anymore. It is, in fact, the Centre of the Universe.
The trip is a London primer for me and my fellow reporters. I am the odd one out in the group - because I've lived here before - so I have promised to behave as if it is my first time. And so I do.
One of the first things we do as tourists is take an open-top bus tour. I am prepared to be underwhelmed. Instead, I am blown away as we rumble through London's deserted Sunday streets, listening to the tour guide's driest of dry humour, as only a Briton can serve it up.
As we trundle through Westminster, he points out one of the new and very popular free schools where the previous prime minister's daughter - clearly strapped for cash - had found a place.
Then he points to the clock tower that houses the famous Big Ben, currently shrouded in scaffolding, as it will be for the next few years for heavy engineering work to prevent the tower from toppling over - in an estimated 800 years time. "Very forward thinking," he notes acerbically, "for a government that can't decide what to do about Brexit."
THE SPIRIT OF BRITAIN
If there is one image that captures the spirit of London, it would be the sight of the lofty, gleaming flanks of The Shard towering over the old battle-cruiser HMS Belfast, moored on the gurgling River Thames a stone's throw from Tower Bridge.
In one sweep of a not-very-wide lens, you have it all, from London's complicated and bloody past that seeps from the walls of the Tower, where spooky blackfeather ravens stalk the ramparts, to the folly of Tower Bridge itself, a landmark that is as London as black taxi cabs, red double-decker buses and policemen in funny hats.
The cruiser is Old Britain, an echo of the centuries when its navy ruled the waves. The Shard is New Britain, the mark of a country which had forsaken the might of Empire for the might of finance - well, until Brexit anyway ...
(The fact that 50kg shells fired from the six guns in the cruiser's forward turrets would fall on the London Gateway service station at Scratchwood, 18.5km away in northwest London, is a small but enjoyable irony in a country where the old is venerated and the new - The Shard aside - merely brash and ugly.)
The best view of the old cruiser is from a cruise boat on the Thames or from the observation deck of The Shard.
We do both. Not because we're greedy, but because each offers a different perspective on London. To cruise from Tower Bridge to Westminster on the river is to get a glimpse of what made London - for centuries - the most powerful place on Earth. The city's mythology, history and prosperity are intertwined with this rolling brown river as it snakes its way from its source in the hills near Oxford to its wide, broad estuary east of London.
The view from the river is all very well, but one thing you will struggle to find in London - which is flat and therefore loved by hundreds of thousands of bicycle commuters - is a place to get up high and find your bearings.
Until The Shard came along, the best view of the city was a sliver of skyline from Hampstead Heath, from an office in one of the towers in Canary Wharf or from the window seat of your airliner as you flew in to Heathrow.
The observation deck of The Shard changes everything. Now the entire cityscape spreads out to all the points of the compass. So, that's where Canary Wharf is. And that's how the river bends - no wonder we got lost trying to walk from Hammersmith to The Tate.
And, oh, look how puny is the London Eye compared to, well, this spire of steel and glass, where we sip bubbly from (plastic) flutes and watch London turn gold in the setting sun.
ALL ROADS LEAD ... TO VICTORIA
It began that same evening in a sordid street at the back of Victoria Station. It was a street of cheap hotels and lurking feminine figures in the deep shadows ... Everywhere, that inevitable sign of city civilisation confronts the solitary wanderer. "Bed and breakfast". It seems to be the only thing that mankind demands in these streets. And no awkward questions asked.
Tired of waiting, WJ makes his way by bus from Victoria Coach Station to Croydon Aerodrome. The art-deco bus station is still there - and still is a bus station. But the "street of cheap hotels"? In Pimlico?
WJ would have been suitably impressed by the Eccleston Square Hotel - a stylish boutique hotel stuffed full of the best tech and owned and run by a whirling dervish of energy named Olivia Byrne (who, for the record, is 28 years old, but that's OK, because she spent holidays in her dad's hotels in Paris, starting when she was ... 12).
"I found out that I quite liked the business," she says. She and her brother and father found an old fixer-upper in one of London's most desirable districts, and fixed it up.
So while WJ dined alone in a gloomy dining room at the Croydon Aerodrome, gazing "through rain- and wind-smeared windows into the darkness", I sleep on a £15,000 electronically adjustable Hästens Swedish massage bed.
While he waits for updates on a "shrill black robot" (his Bakelite telephone), I can use the room's 4G smartphone to stream Netflix and check out the weather updates on the free and fast wifi. A bit of rain forecast, but no wind, and certainly nothing that will delay our departure.
And while the waiter at the Croydon Aerodrome hotel stifles yawns behind his napkin, we are feted and fed in 2018. There is dinner - preceded by a lethal but marvelous margarita - at The Jones Family Kitchen, whose fish arrives daily from Cornish fishing boats; and breakfast of cronuts and French pastries at Dominique Ansel Bakery.
Afterwards, we are welcomed into Smuk, a Danish beauty and lifestyle studio where I apparently put the "man" back into manicure (ah, flattery) in between sipping bubbly and drifting out to take pictures of the vast Frida Kahlo mural in the courtyard outside.
Then it's to The Tate Britain for an exhibition by Edward Burne-Jones, last of the pre-Raphaelites, to stare in wonder at some other ethereally beautiful women.
And, yes, it is raining outside, but this ain't Croydon. Tomorrow, we will fly by Dreamliner to Africa. But that's another story.
PLAN YOUR TRIP
GETTING THERE
British Airways flies three times a week between Durban and London. Return fares are R7,492.68 in World Traveller (economy class), R15,612.68 in World Traveller Plus (BA's premium economy class) and R31,178.68 in Club World. All fares include taxes and carrier surcharges. The aircraft on the route is a Boeing 787 Dreamliner. For more information, see britishairways.com.
BACK IN TIME
Flight time is 11 hours, roughly the same flight time from Joburg to London. Consider that in 1952 when British Airways began flying De Havilland Comet airliners from London to Johannesburg - the world's first long-haul commercial passenger jet service - the flight made at least four stops and took more than a full day.
In the 1930s, when BA's predecessor Imperial Airways used flying boats on the long trek between Durban and Southampton, the journey would take at least a week.
Much of the flying was done at low level as the aircraft were not pressurised, which meant passengers had to endure wicked turbulence and often marginal weather as the aircraft slogged up the spine of Africa.
• Ash was a guest of British Airways and the Eccleston Square Hotel...

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