A Picture of London

Imagine London in ruins.

Destruction and terror have haunted this city,

providing perpetual ruin and rebirth.

Writers, artists and architects have been inspired to create

great works of beauty that document a city beset by tragedy.

# In the city, there's a thousand things I want to say to you

# But whenever I approach you You make me look a fool

# I wanna say

# I wanna tell you

# About the young ideas

# But you turn them into fears

# In the city

# In the city

# In the city there's a thousand things I wanna say to you. #

Artistic interpretations of London across the centuries

record hundreds of different cities...

..pictures of London as a city of pageantry and celebration...

..pictures of London as a city of unruliness and anarchy.

Here, glory and beauty have always vied

with stink and suffering for the attention of artists.

I first drove a crane in '82.

I climbed up and I sat in the cab and I was very nervous, to put it mildly,

cos I wasn't particularly fond of heights.

I'd say the first time I was really quite taken with it,

looking around thinking, "I'm right in the centre of this.

"This is a world city. Everybody in the world knows about London."

And I'm sitting over the top of it, looking around,

and it is a... Yeah, it's a privilege.

The city has been there since forever.

You know, if you look at the old street system in almost any area,

certainly of central London,

you still see the little alleyways and little twisty little pieces.

Just a hotchpotch of planning over the years.

It gives me a feeling of change because the skeleton was laid down

years and years and years ago.

You can still see the shape there

and the shape, presumably, will stay there forever.

Each generation has tried to put a stamp on it.

Throughout history, many have tried to impose beauty and order

on London's streets,

but this city has discovered time after time

its true character lies in its unplanned, chaotic nature.

London has burned many times across the centuries,

its day of judgement revisited again and again.

'All over the Thames with one's face in the wind,

'you were almost burned with a shower of fire drops.'

'Above 10,000 houses all in one flame,

'the noise and crackling and thunder of the impetuous flames,

'the shrieking of women and children, the hurry of people,

'the fall of towers, houses and churches was like a hideous storm.'

The Great Fire Of London burned for seven days.

'The ruins resembling the picture of Troy.

'London was but is no more.'

Over 13,000 buildings were destroyed.

It was the calamity of the age,

but the smouldering hole at the heart of the city

would prove to be a huge inspiration.

Plans were drawn up to bring a new order of beauty to London.

Architect Christopher Wren proposed a London to rival

the glories of ancient Rome -

triumphal avenues and great piazzas.

At its heart - the new Cathedral of St Paul's.

Wren would create the first dome to be seen in London.

It would be a new age of classicism, of harmony and proportion,

banishing forever the chaos of the old Gothic city.

St Paul's would be the symbol of a London reborn,

a great phoenix risen from the flames.

Had Wren's plans for the whole city been realised,

the look of London would be very different.

'Wren's London would have been a noble city.

But it was not to be.

The forces of conservatism were too strong.

And so the streets of the city remain narrow and winding.

And this is the result.

The imprint of ancient London defines the map of the modern city.

The city sheds its skin while the bones stay the same.

Bank junction is like...

It's the pulse of London. It's the heartbeat of London.

You've got the Royal Exchange right in front of you,

you've got the Bank of England itself on the left,

and there's so much going on there.

There's a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes.

You just don't actually see it,

but you can virtually feel it going on there.

You can envisage the old Roman legions, I suppose,

crossing the junction there because initially

it was the old Roman part of London.

Time just sort of stands still while you're there.

If you could sort of half shut your eyes, you can see the old traders.

You know, they're going to Lloyd's of London

or little coffee houses in the back streets that are still there.

And you can see behind the windows of all the buildings there

the clerks with quill pens buzzing away, making lists and charts,

just generally getting on with the business of London.

It's the pulse. It's the heartbeat of London,

virtually in that little area there.

During the 17th and 18th centuries, new streets and houses spread west.

Beyond the old city, a very different London was emerging.

The Georgian London of Bloomsbury and Soho

would be the definition of urban elegance for the age.

It drew admirers from around the world.

'London has many fine open spaces called squares.

'The centres of these squares are shut in by railings.

'Those of Soho, of Leicester Fields of the Red Lion

'and the Golden Square are in this style.'

Even the image of the Thames would be civilised

in the eyes of Venice's greatest painter.

Canaletto's picture of London is one

of a beautiful city on the water,

refined and aesthetically perfect.

But Canaletto's London is pure artifice.

He moved elements of the city around to suit his compositions.

These are pictures of an idealised London.

They are the dream pictures of their age, commissioned by Londoners

who yearned for their city to be the new Venice.

Although Canaletto spent almost a decade in this city,

he rarely strayed from its grand thoroughfares and facades.

Coming!

How are you?

Other artists were drawn instead to the toil and sweat of London.

Covent Garden was home to a raucous meat, vegetable and flower market

that survived into the 1970s.

This is the New Covent Garden, which is in Vauxhall.

This moved here in 1974 from the Old Covent Garden,

which is in Covent Garden, not to get mixed up

between the New Covent Garden and the Old Covent Garden.

The spirit, I think, still remains here because of the people.

Morning. How are you?

Got Tommy Coopers in your team got beat every week just like that!

LAURA LAUGHS

The banter that goes on and the sexist remarks, which I love,

I know I shouldn't say that but I love it,

it's part of Covent Garden. It's Old London.

My great-great-grandmother,

she used to sell violets on the streets of London,

like the old-fashioned ones you see in Mary Poppins,

the old lady that's selling violets on the streets.

She would have gone early in the morning to the Old Covent Garden

and I dare say she had a bit of a whale of a time there.

Covent Garden is in my blood and I just feel like it's my home.

It's like being home.

I can feel the atmosphere of how it must have been in the old days.

It must have been dirty, smelly, busy

but absolutely full of people that were just alive.

Really, really alive in the mornings, and shouting and selling

and, you know, trying to barter

and just the whole thing must have been absolutely magical, really.

Around Covent Garden Market grew up a world of theatres,

brothels and coffee houses that attracted writers and artists.

Urban life in the raw was to become the subject matter of art.

Painter William Hogarth rejected artifice

to create a new picture of London.

In a series of paintings from 1736 entitled Four Times Of The Day,

Hogarth paints London as a divided city,

where high society rubbed shoulders with London's chaotic grimy truths.

It begins on a freezing morning in Covent Garden.

An affluent lady makes her way to church past drunken revellers

staggering home from the night before.

She is oblivious to the huddle of beggars

and whores warming themselves by the fire.

At noon, the notorious slum district

of St Giles is a divided world.

On the left, a group of fashionable Huguenot immigrants

pour out of the French church.

On the other side of the street are a group of well fed

but slovenly English peasants.

The only thing that connects these two worlds is a dead cat

that lies across the kerb.

Evening takes place at Sadler's Wells Theatre on the edge of town.

A young family's attempts to escape the crush and heat of the city

have ended, ironically, in exhaustion and frustration.

Finally, Hogarth takes us at night to Charing Cross.

A chamber pot is emptied out of a high window.

Its contents fall towards a drunk Freemason as he staggers home.

His light illuminates a group of homeless children

who huddle against a wall trying to sleep.

Balanced precariously above their heads -

bowls of fresh blood on the barber surgeon's windowsill.

Hogarth renamed the very streets of the city after

the alcoholic drinks that were fuelling such debauchery and cheer.

A warning of the evils of gin

and a celebration of the healthy properties of beer.

Well, there's one particular smell I don't like.

It's this dampness that comes

at the end of the weekend,

at the back of these restaurants

where everything's been removed.

It's a sort of... I don't know how to describe it,

like a stale grease, food.

It's a very depressing smell, you know what I mean?

Rotten meat, rotten meat, yeah.

I don't like dead rats. I don't mind live ones.

Something about dead rats, I don't know why.

I hope he's not doing what I think he is,

otherwise I'll have to go and to arrest him.

Well, there's a good chance that is probably urine, yeah.

You can always tell if it's in a corner, you know what I mean.

If it's hidden away in a corner, that urine, you know what I mean?

That, I would imagine...

HE SNIFFS

..I should say it's Coca Cola.

I remember once a girl was so sick walking through,

she was so bad, she kept getting sick.

I said, "Hang on a minute, darling," and I gave her a bag.

I said, "You do the rest."

Yeah, blood was actually found somewhere around here.

He's having an argument with his girlfriend,

he broke a bottle and stabbed himself and got up and walked off.

It's mayhem, you know,

some really good punch-ups, you know what I mean,

and then they just go home.

They let off steam and I come here the next morning

and try to work out what it was, who won.

Hogarth was the first artist to see the streets of London as theatre.

Their grime and detritus,

grotesque characters and events telling a very particular story.

The seamier climate of the city streets has inspired ever since.

And it's fun because you're watching other people's behaviour.

Cos it's such a job, it gets into your blood.

People will tell you that, you know.

This and the refuge, it gets inside you.

It's inside you. You find it hard to do anything else.

At the end of the 18th century, poet and visionary William Blake

prophesied a city where awfulness and wonder becomes the same thing.

Industrialisation, the machine age and the railways

would transform the look and the experience of the city.

No more the beautiful neo-classical Georgian city,

London was to become a huge sprawling metropolis.

One million inhabitants in 1800

would become 6.5 million a century later.

Now the truest pictures of London would find beauty

and inspiration in the most horrific qualities of the city.

This immense view of the sprawling metropolis was billed as

an illusionistic scene designed to thrill and excite.

Once thought lost forever, it was discovered in America in 1940,

being used to line a crate of firearms.

Above the city, all seems wondrous,

but at street level it was out of control again.

'The different departments of life are jumbled together.

'The hod carrier, the low mechanic, the tapster, the publican,

'the shopkeeper, the petty fogger, the citizen and courtier

'all tread upon the kibes of one another.

'They are seen everywhere rambling, riding, rolling, rushing,

'jostling, mixing, bouncing, cracking

'and crashing in one vile ferment of stupidity and corruption.'

For the last 200 years, many artists have tried

to contain London in one vast image or sprawling work.

I wanted to express my fascination with the city...

..its contradictions,

its intricacy...

..its mass of people,

all living their separate and sometimes communal lives.

The Isles of Slough, trading estate.

I made London into an island for a number of reasons.

Britain is an island.

It's a collection of islands.

It informs our national psyche.

It's a wry joke on London's self-importance.

The Isle of Woking, dormitory island town.

It's an image of both order and chaos,

and, at times,

an image of where the order descends into chaos.

Making it, I was trying to say how bewildering it can be,

sometimes, to live in the place.

The infinite amounts of stories and lives and histories that,

you know, ten million people in a city experience.

'The early clerk population are fast pouring into the city,

'middle-aged men whose salaries have by no means

'increased in the same proportion as their families, plod steadily along,

'apparently with no object in view but the counting house,

'knowing by sight almost everybody they meet or overtake.

'For they have seen them every morning, Sunday excepted,

'during the last 20 years but speaking to no-one.'

On the 16th October 1834, the Houses of Parliament burned to the ground.

Once again, it was as though the day of judgement

for the city was at hand.

Among the astonished crowd was a Cockney artist named

Joseph Mallord William Turner.

Sketchbook in hand, he feverishly captured the scene as it happened.

Turner became obsessed with the event,

and the sketches resulted in an epic oil painting.

And, as before, out of destruction would arise

a symbol of London's state of mind.

William Kent imagined the Houses of Parliament looking like this.

A classical building, symbolic of order and harmony

might have radically changed how the look of the city developed.

But it's no surprise that, once more, dreams of order were thwarted.

Sir Charles Barrie's intricate Gothic revival design

was far more suited

to a metropolis that was becoming ever more chaotic and dark...

..a city of the night.

'The streets of London, to be beheld in the very height of their glory,

'should be seen on a dark, dull murky winter's night'

'when the heavy, lazy mist which hangs over every object

'makes the gas lamps look brighter

'and the brilliantly lighted shops more splendid

'from the contrast they present to the darkness around.'

'London's a very quiet place at night, very ethereal -

is that the right word?

We all have our own favourite spots and they're usually

sort of dotted around London at different, different positions.

You can't obviously drive a cab for eight or nine hours

continuously and you have to find a little quiet spot.

There's a small church called St Mary's Church,

in Battersea Church Road, and it lies just on the bend of a river.

You can see cormorants, seagulls, terns,

feeding and just sitting there themselves as well.

You can see the large planes going over on their way to

London Airport but there's no noise at all,

and it's just like a little part of the countryside.

I love the tranquillity of it.

You can watch the river slowly go past like it must have done for millions of years.

'When the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry...

'..tall chimneys become campanili

'and the warehouses are palaces in the night.

'And the whole city hangs in the heavens and fairyland is before us.'

American painter James McNeill Whistler faced tough criticism

for these near abstract night-time images but, like so many artists,

his picture of 19th-century London

was of a city cloaked and impenetrable.

# A foggy day in London town

# Had me low and it had me down

# I view the morning with much alarm

# The British Museum

# It lost its charm... #

These smoggy pea-soupers were a combination of fog and smoke

from the increasingly large industry that lined the river.

Pea-soupers were commonplace until the 1950s.

In these fogs, all the grime and glory

of Victorian London was contained.

They have become the defining image of the city.

In the late 19th century,

two celebrated men trod the fogbound streets of London.

One was Claude Monet, the painter who sought beauty in the world,

the other a philosopher, Karl Marx,

who had a mission to expose poverty, suffering and injustice.

Two very different pictures of London.

'Without the fog, London would not be a beautiful city.

'It is the fog that gives it its marvellous breadth.

'Its regular massive blocks become grandiose in this mysterious cloak.'

For Monet, the smoggy conditions made London beautiful.

For Marx, they made it hellish.

The source of the acrid smog was the factories

of Whitechapel, Stepney and Bethnal Green in the East End.

The living conditions in this notorious district

represented all that Marx and his followers railed against.

Such contrasting views defined the picture of London

in the late 19th century.

'The Thames is so wonderful

'because the mist is always changing its shapes and colours,

'always making its light mysterious and building palaces of cloud

'out of mere Parliament Houses with their jags and turrets.'

'When the mist collaborates with night and rain,

'the masterpiece is created.'

'When I see these dirty tattered children with their bright eyes

'and angel faces, I am filled with apprehension,

'as if I were seeing drowning people.

'How to save them?

'Which to save first?'

And the squalor of the East End collided with the beauty

of the fogbound Thames at London's docks -

around the turn of the 20th century,

the busiest, most important port on the planet.

It's a world now almost entirely lost.

You see the river at night or early in the morning

and with no other traffic about,

and you squint and close your eyes to all the tower blocks and the modern buildings.

Some of the river frontage hasn't changed at all

in many hundreds of years.

'This stretch of the Thames from London Bridge to the Albert Docks

'recalls a jungle by the confused,

'varied and impenetrable aspect of the buildings that line the shore.

'They hide the depths of London's

'infinitely varied, vigorous, seething life.'

Joseph Conrad was a seafaring man and knew the grim life

concealed behind the docks too well to glorify it.

But he could not deny the romance of the place.

'When one talks of the Thames Docks, beauty is a vain word,

'but romance has lived too long upon this river not to have thrown

'a mantle of glamour upon its banks.'

The river is a special place at any time of the day

but the middle of the winter when it's pitch black, when there's a fog

and a mist hanging over the river, it can be a really eerie place.

The sublime feeling of wonder mixed with fear drew artists to London.

It was a city both aesthetically pleasing and horrific.

This is the city that would launch the career of Alfred Hitchcock.

Everything that would become known as Hitchcockian,

dread, apprehension, excitement and thrill,

was contained in the world of the London fog.

This great vision of the Thames Embankment is of a London

engulfed by the fires of hell.

To imagine London as a blasted, ruined, biblical city

became fashionable in the 19th century...

..as if London had at last taken its place amongst

the great cities of antiquity.

'We had one or two nights in Whitechapel,

'duly attended by police in plain clothes.

'We explored the docks, we visited the night refuges,

'we journeyed up and down the river.'

Something to read on the train apart from the Evening Standard.

Free Evening Standard.

I did sell one once. I remember it well.

'Dore's constant remark was that London is not ugly.'

When you've got nowhere to go like for me for instance,

I'd walk the streets.

I wouldn't settle anywhere. I'd sleep in the day.

But during the night I'd walk. If I'd nowhere to go, I'd walk.

And the night isn't that long and actually it's quite beautiful.

And you'd see the sun come up,

you'd see the birds, you hear them.

It is a beauty.

You're seeing things that people who are shutting their doors at night,

and have to go to work in the morning, don't see.

With these images, artist Gustave Dore created a defining picture

of 19th-century London and its East End.

Gothic, tightly packed, smoky, a place of poverty,

where the dispossessed, the newly arrived, scraped a living

on the dark dangerous streets.

But a recent discovery in the cellar of an old school in Hackney

several years ago reveals a very different

and proud picture of London's East End -

a collection of 2,000 glass plate negatives

dating from the 1860s, from a portrait studio in Hackney.

In contrast to Gustave Dore's East End, these are images of hope,

of dreams, playful and frivolous.

They are the work of photographer Arthur Eason.

Just brush the hair down a bit there. You've been a bit windswept.

-And you're going to keep the hat on? You always keep it on?

-All the time.

-Even at bedtime, Mum.

-Even in bed.

Even in bed, really?

My family first came to London in the 1950s from Barbados.

And we're getting the smiles happening, too. This is good.

We were born in Hackney, brought up in Hackney,

we were used to this big community, this like big family of people.

Pretend you're enjoying yourself. That's good. OK.

Let's have you relax a little bit, shall we?

I don't think I could really pigeonhole Hackney people as such.

They're far too varied, far too many ethnic groups,

different types of people here for all sorts of different reasons.

You're very serious over there! WOMEN LAUGH

That's better. OK.

I guess if there's one consistency at all,

it would be the fact that they're not from here originally.

There are far more people passing through the area, on their way

to other places, or settling here, but in general haven't started here.

And as the 20th century dawned, the earliest images of London captured

on moving film reveal a fast-paced city, chaotic and dramatic.

# Have you heard the latest thing in rhythm?

# It's a dream and it's got all London in a daze

# Got the population swinging rhythm

# And you're gonna crave this dancing craze

# Let's swing London rhythm

# Let's bring London rhythm back into town

# Come on, babe, let's trot 'em

# Ain't that music got 'em

# Dancing is delight

# While you're holding me so tight

# Stomp that London rhythm

# Romp that London rhythm, wait!

# Mooch around

# We'll begin at seven

# Gladding straight for heaven

# London rhythm is in town tonight. #

The rhythm and speed of this increasingly mechanised city

was to inspire the painter Christopher Nevinson.

He sees London as a crowded interconnected structure,

the brain of the planet.

Throughout the 20th century, London was a city caught between

the past and the future.

Many artists found inspiration

in the buildings and traditions that survived around them.

Others were inspired by the emerging modern city

and imagined what it might be like in the future.

Film director Gaston Quiribet created special effects to

transport the viewer through time in this incredible 1924 film.

It is the story of a machine that could see into the future.

Its inventor turns its gaze on London to reveal a hi-tech,

but troubled city.

High water levels flood Trafalgar Square...

..monorails across Tower Bridge...

..and, hauntingly, the Houses of Parliament

adorned with a German eagle,

presumably following an invasion of Britain.

In 1940, London burned once more.

'You can have little understanding of the life in London these days.

'There are no words to describe the thing that is happening.

'The courage of the people,

'the flash and roar of the guns rolling down the streets,

'the stench of the air raid shelters.

'In three or four hours, people must get up and go to work,

'just as though they had a full night's rest,

'free from the rumble of guns, and the wonder that comes

'when they wake and listen in the dead hours of the night.'

Artist Henry Moore descended below the inferno

into a new level of hell...

..a subterranean world of Londoners more fearful than ever before.

Moore captured the raw human emotion of the Blitz.

'The only thing at all like those shelters that

'I could think of was the hold of the slave ship,

'on its way from Africa to America,

'full of hundreds and hundreds of people who were

'having things done to them that they were quite powerless to resist.

'They were a bit like the chorus in a Greek drama

'telling us about the violence we don't actually witness.'

'At dawn, Londoners come oozing out of the ground,

'tired and red-eyed and sleepy.

'The fires are dying down.

'I saw them turn into their own street to see

'if their house was still standing.'

'I wandered in the desolate ruins of my old squares, gashed, dismantled.

'The old red bricks, all white powder,

'something like a builders' yard.

'Grey dirt and broken windows, sightseers,

'all that completeness ravished and demolished.'

As before, this was an opportunity to sweep away

the old and build London anew.

Throughout the history of London,

the building of tall towers had been proposed.

As early as 1852,

a plan to reconstruct the Crystal Palace as a 1,000-foot tower

might have given us the world's first skyscraper.

These are 1866 designs for towers on the Embankment...

..this, the design for a monumental tower in Westminster in 1904.

In 1918, a new tower was proposed

for Selfridges department store in Oxford Street.

And in 1951...

..this Orwellian plan proposed to transform London's Southbank.

But in 1956,

St Paul's Cathedral was still the tallest building in London.

That year, the government suspended

the 1888 London Building Act

restricting the height of buildings to 100 feet,

the height of a fireman's ladder.

The decision would transform the city's skyline.

But the new order of modernism was not to every taste.

For the poet John Betjeman,

it wasn't the future of London that inspired.

It was the past.

'Snow falls in the buffet of Aldersgate Station,

'soot hangs in the tunnel in clouds of steam.

'City of London, before the next desecration,

'let your steepled forest of churches be my theme.

'Sunday silence with every street a dead street,

'alley and courtyard empty and cobbled mews.

'Till tingle tang the bell of Mildred's Bread Street

'summoned the sermon taster to high box views

'and neighbouring towers and spirelets joined the ringing

'with answering echoes from heavy commercial walls

'till all were drowned as the sailing clouds

'went singing on the roaring flood of a 12-voiced peel from Paul's.

'Snow falls in the buffet of Aldersgate Station,

'toiling and dimmed from Moorgate Street past the train.

'For us of the steam and the gas light, the lost generation,

'the new white cliffs of the city are built in vain.'

Over the next few decades,

much of 18th and 19th-century London came under attack.

Tower blocks, housing estates, ring roads

and highways transformed London into a sometimes brutal modern city.

But it was no less inspirational to artists.

Writer J G Ballard was in thrall to a concrete world of the future.

In it were stories, possibilities, new ways of looking at the world.

'I was moving through the terrain of inner urban sprawl,

'a geography of sensory deprivation.

'A zone of dual carriageways

'and petrol stations,

'business parks and signposts to Heathrow.

'CCTV cameras crouched over warehouse gates.

'The traffic signals presided like small-minded deities

'over their deserted crossroads,

'the entire defensive landscape

'was waiting for a crime to be committed.'

# If I had my life to live over

# I would still do the same things again

# I would still like to roam

# To the place I call home

# Where memories will ever remain

# I'll meet you when school days are over

# And we'll stroll down the lane we once knew

# If I had my life to live over again

# I would still fall in love with you. #

I'm a Londoner and I was born in Blackfriars in 1928.

My husband helped to build Thamesmead. He was an erector.

I used to come down here and see him, like, on a Friday,

and then my daughter moved down here

and then I used to come down every weekend to see her

and it was lovely, really lovely.

I didn't think it was ugly.

The kids were in the paddling pool, playing.

I still like it.

I still like it,

but it's just deteriorating.

I'd love to live at the top of one of those.

That's where I'd like to live.

Over the last half-century, London has become a city of towers,

towers to live in and towers to work in.

And, once more, a new symbol of London would rise out of

a moment of destruction in the heart of the old city.

'A 15-year-old girl was one of two people killed last night

'by a terrorist car bomb in central London. 91 were injured.'

'A car bomb went off in a vehicle parked outside

'a row of banks in the St Mary Axe area of the city.

'Three people are reported to have been killed.'

'..the biggest bombs ever planted on the British mainland caused

'millions of pounds worth of damage. Buildings may have to be demolished.

'Windows were shattered hundreds of yards away.'

The old Baltic Exchange was beyond repair

and something would have to built in its place.

Architect Norman Foster's building at 30 St Mary Axe,

now affectionately known as The Gherkin, was completed in 2003.

It has become a beacon for the age,

the latest image of a city ever changing.

I lived at 21 Petticoat Tower, Petticoat Square Estate.

I've lived in the area of Petticoat Lane all my life

and have loved living in the area,

seen so many things coming and going,

and have grown up alongside of what's going on.

I've seen many changes from living up so high.

The city has to live and breathe.

And, by that, I mean the city is the lifeblood

and what goes on here in the city, in these office blocks...

..some people might refer to then as monstrosities but they're not.

Someone like myself, that takes every opportunity of looking out,

I can only see beauty there.

That, to me, is what being a Londoner's all about.

Knowing that you're coming into work

and be confronted with this view is always a pleasure.

I lost my wife two years ago.

I used to love taking my wife

to the places that I'd been to that she'd heard me talk about,

to the Gherkin, to the wibbly-wobbly bridge,

cos that was her nature. She wanted to see what was going on.

Every street, virtually every square of pavement has got

an imprint of my wife on it and so it makes driving in London

virtually a spiritual experience, every day I go out.

How I find London, it is a beautiful mess.

You've got these really modern buildings

next to very, very old ones

that survived the Second World War and that is London, you know,

all those bits and pieces thrown all over the shop.

I think it says about who we are as people.

You can turn a corner and you feel lost.

But it doesn't mean you can't find your way out of it.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd