GHERKIN - a poem about London

I

Strange tower, half-way between
the dome of St Paul’s
and a right-angled skyscraper.

Take a computer programme
and extend a dome upwards until it achieves
the same ratio of height to width
as a standard city tower block:

Foster’s quiet masterpiece, like a mushroom
organically grown from London’s hidden psyche
calmly asserts itself —
City’s dome, icon of wit.

The master affects never to have considered
the shape from anything other
than a private aesthetic
and the classic necessities
of function. He was aware
of the strange effects of winds
hitting flat surfaces
deflecting upwards and downwards
gusts descending
like a williwaw
to the pavement below
knocking old ladies off their pegs
overturning dustbins
whipping paper and debris
through desolate spaces.

He wanted, he says
to avoid the strange urban blasts
that howl down from angular shapes.
And so he configured a building
rounded in cross-section
where the air flow was even and peaceful
pinching the base a little
so spaces would not concentrate
where pedestrians walked.

The building was environmental
in another sense too:
computer-controlled windows
opening and closing
gently rotating with the sun
like the leaves and petals of flowers
causing air to circulate naturally
through an interior
of green gardens

with only a faint whirring and clicking
like a thousand camera shutters.


II

In the great fire of London
a crouching, medieval city was destroyed
in a fireball of narrow wooden streets
the conflagration lasting three days and three nights.
And although Wren, that genius —
Royalist and Catholic —
attempted to impose an aristocratic order
a geometric grid of streets
and vast triumphal avenues
what rose instead
came from the heart of the usurping merchant class
a city in which form followed function.

London, she breeds
iridescent visions —
Chaucer and Donne and Milton.

Prophesying Jerusalem
William Blake in his revolutionary bonnet rouge
perceived light through branches
observed the systole and diastole of social order
celestial creatures in trees
sustaining his reverie.


III

Angel, unfold into the air;
take the form of summer light
over Ackroyd’s sickly, pullulating life
Sinclair’s detailed and subversive mythology
Eliot’s eructation of unhealthy souls
into the torpid air. Leave us behind
that London of the urban imagination —
Whistler’s Chelsea, dark rooms with prostitutes
and a painter’s leering interest
in Jack the Ripper —
pulling horrors from the river
under the searchlights of the police boats
the body flashing in black light:

London of Mosley’s Blackshirts
confronted by the anger of East End Jews and radicals
in the Battle of Cable Street.

Mosley himself, a former Labour Minister
handsome, articulate, plausible
advocated a government which would bypass
bureaucracy and Parliament
ally itself with youth
promising to strike a clean pose
facing only the future:

an early Cool Britannia.


IV

After the German bombers had gone
London was nothing more
than a smoking ruin
around St Paul’s
miraculously preserved dome.

Who could foresee, six decades later
after the IRA’s fertiliser bomb
destroyed the Baltic Exchange —
violence seeding new life —
those unlikely partners
commerce and urban ambition:

Swiss Reinsurance
and an eccentric London mayor
who worshipped foreign tyrants
and South American caudillos
from Cuba or Venezuela
with a fig leaf of Marxism
over their private parts.

Add into the mixture
the necessities of enclosing office space
and there arises over the city
in a position which can be seen from
Deptford and Southwark —
Shakespeare’s bailiwick
that place of rough watermen
lewd women, bear-baiting and brothels —
a sublime and graceful shape.

City of invisible earnings
paper fortunes, electronic transfers
commerce inextinguishable;
when consumed by flame
it rose again, twice —
not by royal edict or government fiat
but by Adam Smith’s invisible hand:
not as in Hausman’s Paris, with a rigorous grid
but street by street, through property developers
with names like Bond or Frith
whose greatest contribution
to visual and aesthetic order
was to prescribe a certain style of building
on the land they owned.

So from its beginnings the city created itself
sui generis, independent of the state —
layered life, refuge of unusual souls
city of immigrants, dissident intellectuals —
Chaucer the Controller of Customs
continental visitors, Voltaire, De Tocqueville
refugees and critics of Nazi rule —
Popper, Hayek, Gombrich, Pevsner, amongst others —

city of irrefragable freedoms
of innumerable races and cultures
standing silently teeming
above country or nationality
coolly tolerant, reflecting that movement
from Magna Carta onwards
that dispersion of power away from the state:

nobles above the king
merchants above nobles
universal suffrage for men
and women.


V

“‘Ere, get out of the way, you Berkshire Hunt.”

Richardson the gangster, put away in clink
was criticised in The Times for his habit
of extracting people’s teeth and nails
without their permission.
Studying for a sociology degree
while in prison he wrote
an angry response to the letters page
complaining that reports about him were inaccurate
not least since (he vociferously argued)
those whose teeth and nails
he had so casually removed
were not “members of the general public”
as had been so grievously alleged
but were instead — in his own words —
“bona fide criminals”.

City of anonymous adulterers
Mistresses, toyboys
Promiscuous interracialism

city of independent womanhood
minorities, eccentrics

& those most severely disciplined
by internal visions —
poets, writers, artists

creatures of night.

In Soho clubs and drinking holes
Francis Bacon liked to assert
“I am not one of those poufs who uses makeup”
though he liked being whipped by rent boys
between his forays
at the canvas. In other places

a quiet Mecca of pleasure-seekers
worships the little gods
in clubs where the heaving mass
of figures sways in concert
under strobe lights.


VI

If function leads form
here it sits
reflecting with perfect equanimity
the two predominant shapes of London’s skyline
equidistant between them, yet uniquely its own;
an ironic sculpture, elegantly achieved.

To those of us who are older
used to sixties concrete, urine-stained stairwells
the detritus of a modernist movement
united in patronising the common man
affecting to despise the market
(which is merely the common man writ large)
determined to inflict a brutalism
of bunker-like buildings
and soulless tower blocks
on the undifferentiated mass

here it stands — a stone’s throw
from the polished metal vertebrae
service systems and flying extrusions
of the Lloyds building —

shimmering under variable cloud.

We wonder at its purity
like a single thought:

its strange and subtle shadow
over London’s boroughs.


VII

Industrious bees swarm against the blue horizon
spiderworks and gantries
with the strange detachment
that accompanies wealth
an engine of the global economy

claiming to be an antidote at least
to Britain’s insular attitudes:

“fog in the channel; continent isolated”:
a counterweight to continental repressions
and bloody revolutions.

Roaring boys and girls on the stock market floors
on finding that union of heaven and earth
dark multitudes of angels and demons
cloud shadows over plains
travelling in curved glass
swaying

yielding youth to acquisition

delivered by bus
or underground
to who knows what terminus.


VIII

It requires, said Camus, a rare vocation
to be a sensualist
searching for just that solitude
that we seek in cities.

In a brief effulgence of sunlight
on a walkway by the Thames
warm bodies of women push infants in prams
observed by punks
in tattooed indifference

witnessed in turn by a London Eye —
that elegant, self-financing public project —
whose most salient feature
is that it was not created
by a politician or a bureaucrat.

On the steppes and red deserts, hooded figures
gather like locusts, ready to swarm.
Cities fall beneath their advance —
Constantinople, Rome, the gates of Vienna —
driven on by Mongol generals
or the written word
of flesh-hating prophets, yet

promises of death
and unlikely resurrection
appear no more substantial here
than images in an Imax cinema.

Instead, let us fight fire with fire;
if London’s heart
were eaten out again
by the hellfire of fundamentalists —
eyes, brains, sweetbreads, marrow bones —
they shall rest uneasy
in the certain knowledge
it shall become their own Golgotha

corrupting them with tolerance
as the City itself rises again.


IX

Here it stands
at 30 St Mary Axe
like the borough’s response
to the hierarchical
grandiloquent structure of St Paul’s —
that monument to classicism
religious conservatism, royal absolutism.

The Gherkin’s gentle reproof
is neither too high nor too low
not as tall as the National Westminster tower
(which shines appropriately gold at dusk)

standing slightly off centre
yet still dominant

cheerful, calm, ambivalent
above a silent ferment
of subversive energy
in our liberal
implacable
international city.