London, I love you.

Two people, one river, and the city that makes them.

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London, I love you

Chapter One

Seven Dials

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North lives where seven streets meet, and in all his years there he has only ever taken one of them. The pillar in the middle carries six sundials. The seventh is the pillar itself, and its shadow keeps the hours whether anyone looks or not.

North has never looked. A man can mistake being careful for being alive for a very long time, and London lets him, because London is patient. But it has been watching. This morning he steps out in pinstripes, and cannot remember choosing them.

Seven Dials

There is a watch on his wrist that was not there yesterday. You go out in the morning as one person and come home as another, and nobody can ever tell you where it happened. He has never once been late for anything. It is a strange thing, all the same, to be handed the time. It means somebody believes you have somewhere to be.

London, I love you

Chapter Two

The South Bank

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Across the water lives South. People say nobody crosses the river if they can help it, and they say it as a joke, which is how people say the truest things they know. She never has. She decided long ago that she would not go looking, and that whatever was meant for her could find its own way over.

The Eye turns above her, thirty-two capsules, one for every borough, numbered to thirty-three so that nobody has to ride in thirteen. It is a city that takes care with its luck. She has lived beside it for years and never once gone up.

The South Bank

Under Waterloo Bridge, which the river pilots still call the Ladies’ Bridge because so many women built it in the war, the booksellers set out their tables in all weathers. She has read half of them standing up, a few pages at a time, and never taken one home.

On the far bank, the sphinxes beside Cleopatra’s Needle have sat by the water since 1881, facing the wrong way. North passes them in shoes he does not remember buying, and for once in his life he is not looking at the ground.

London, I love you

Chapter Three

St Paul’s and Bankside

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So they walk east, a river apart, keeping the same pace the way strangers do in a city, as if something has been decided and nobody has thought to tell them.

In the Whispering Gallery at St Paul’s, a word said softly against the wall carries all the way round the dome, and is heard by whoever is standing on the other side. North passes under the dome in a grey hat, and touches the brim, as if to someone.

St Paul’s and Bankside

On her side the old power station, full of paintings now, spent its first life keeping the lights on, and nobody called it beautiful until it stopped.

When the Millennium Bridge opened, the people crossing it fell into step without meaning to, and the more they kept in step, the more it swayed. They closed it after two days. South walks out to the middle for the first time. Someone has knelt there and painted little pictures on the gum everyone else walks over, and the dome is straight ahead of her. She goes back to her own side with a small bright pin over her heart.

London, I love you

Chapter Four

The Shard and St Dunstan’s

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By afternoon the sky has come down to meet the Shard, and the tallest building in the country has gone into an ordinary cloud.

South feels the old doubt then, the voice that says it is late, that it is going to rain, that she should go home. She does not go home. She has an umbrella now, folded small enough for one hand, and she keeps walking.

The Shard and St Dunstan’s

Across the water the City gets on with its business, and somewhere among its towers North finds he is wearing something green and close and warm, the kind of thing someone makes for you once they have noticed you are cold.

Then he turns into St Dunstan-in-the-East. The church lost its roof in the Blitz and has been a garden since 1971, and things grow in the ruins there. He picks a flower without knowing who it is for. A careful man does not do that.

London, I love you

Chapter Five

Tower Bridge

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Tower Bridge has lifted for ships since 1894. When a tall mast comes up the river the road itself stands aside, and the city waits on both banks, and nobody thinks it strange to wait.

A black cab comes up behind North and stops beside him. London’s cabbies learn every street by heart before they are allowed to drive one, and this one seems to know exactly where he is going. He does not get in. When it pulls away he is wearing a dark coat against the evening, and it goes on over the water without him.

Tower Bridge

Then the road begins to rise with a number 78 still on it, as it did on 30 December 1952, when the driver, Albert Gunter, put his foot down and jumped the gap. ‘I had to keep going,’ he said. ‘Otherwise we would have gone into the water.’

The bus comes down on the far side and goes past South, and she is wearing red.

In front of North the road stands straight up, and he waits for it to come down, the way he has waited for everything.

And then he crosses the river. It is not far. It was never far, and that is the thing he will find hardest to forgive.

London, I love you

Chapter Six

The Watch House

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She is at the end of the bridge when he comes down off it. Neither of them says anything. They walk the last of the way together, as if they have done it many times, up Bermondsey Street to the little house in the churchyard.

The watch house was built in 1829, so that somebody could sit up all night and keep the body snatchers out. Within three years the law had ended that trade, and it went on keeping watch anyway. Two coffees are waiting on its sills. ‘Is one of these yours?’ he says. Neither of them ordered either. ‘Yes,’ she says.

The Watch House

Then, because this is London, it rains. Neither of them moves. He does not look at his watch.

She opens the umbrella over both of them, and it is not quite big enough for two. He has been careful all his life and she has waited all of hers, and neither of them knows how to begin, and they begin.

The flower was for her. He knew it on the bridge. The coffee goes cold. And the city, which has watched them all day, does the kindest thing it knows. It looks away.

London, I love you.

North wears Seven Dials, Cleopatra’s Needle, St Paul’s, the Gherkin, St Dunstan’s and a black cab.

South wears the Eye, the booksellers under Waterloo Bridge, Tate Modern, the Millennium Bridge, the Shard and the number 78.

Made by Harrison Baker

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