"Second city" syndrome.

As every visitor to London knows, Time Out is a weekly publication featuring a comprehensive listing of goings-on about town. Its orientation is very youth-trendy, but the listings are extensive enough that all kinds of people purchase it--it's as good for finding out about what's on at Wigmore Hall as it is for news on the latest fifteen-minute pop sensation. Every year Time Out supplements its weekly publication with a "London Visitor's Guide?" Now, for many people, the editorial content of Time Out is negligible stuff. Nonetheless, from a sociological perspective, this editorial content, with its invocations of what's hot and what's not, has, I think, a real value. The principal editorial feature in the 2000-2001 "Vistor's Guide" is a piece by Rhonda Carrier entitled "All Change?" One inevitably is first drawn to the call-out quotes in the loudly designed piece. "Londoners have had to wait for the dawn of a new millennium to kickstart a programme of projects both large and small that will change the face of the city forever?" The tone of "All Change?" is all excitement, telling of how London is new again, the capital of cool. The stodgy old architecture is finally being supplemented by ravishing new buildings, as the physical environment finally responds to the cutting-edge work of the 1990s Young British Artists. Tony Blair's "Cool Britannia" is not the marketers' cliche that "Swinging London" was back in the sixties; it is, increasingly, a brick-and-mortar, steel-and-glass reality. London, in other words, is, or soon will be, no longer London. Hooray!

Many Londoners seem to have grown tired of London, and wish to replace it with some other city. I turn again to that superb barometer of the new direction, Rhonda Carrier: There is, she says of the fogeys' love of heritage,

 
   a touch of snobbery about the unquestioning equation of age and 
   desirability, and more than a smidgeon of plain British guilt and 
   lily-liveredness at letting go of the past, as if our whole national 
   identity was encapsulated therein. This attitude has been exacerbated by 
   the fact that London emerged relatively unscathed from the horrors of World 
   War II and has impunity from natural disasters--just compare it to Tokyo, 
   say, where continual reconstruction due to incessant ravaging by fire, 
   earthquakes and bombs means that scarcely any building dates back more than 
   two decades. London's face has--until now, that is--remained remarkably 
   little changed over the course of the last couple of centuries. 

A reader of magazines reads all kinds of goofy stuff, but this is prime. It will of course come as a bit of a surprise to any Londoner over the age of sixty to learn that his city emerged unscathed from World War II. It is particularly ironic that Ms. Carrier should say such a thing in an article that is largely about Tate Modern, which is housed in a retrofitted building designed by Giles Gilbert Scott (1880-1960), one of whose major accomplishments was the rebuilding of the House of Commons chamber that German incendiary bombs destroyed in 1941. This rebuilding was a major statement of British pride and pluck in the aftermath of war. At that time, with but minor exceptions, British tradition was not something to be shouted off the stage, but something fought over. Even Nikolaus Pevsner in promoting modernism claimed for it the imprimatur of British tradition.

It is not my purpose here to analyze the reasons for the youthful disdain for Britain's past, or what we may call traditional values. All I can say is if there have been hints of this disdain in the past, today the disdain, in Blair's Britain, has become institutionalized. Peter Hitchens wrote a book called The Abolition of Britain.(1) The title is not hyperbole.

Part of what has institutionalized the abolition of London is the national lottery. The billions of pounds it has generated have been largely earmarked for building projects. The young Londoners who looked to Mitterrand's Paris with its grands projets now feel, courtesy of the lottery, that London leads the world in grands projets. There's the Dome, of course, an enormous boondoggle, but ultimately rather an insignificant part of the capital's transformation. Much more significant has been the "London Eye" which is technically not a Ferris wheel but which is, for want of another term, a Ferris wheel. Its iconic presence in the heart of the city has been likened to that of the Eiffel Tower. Many other projects are not such visible elements of the cityscape, but have garnered enormous attention--and crowds, which is what Cool Britannia seems in the end to be mostly about.

The principal symbol of young London is Tate Modern, at Bankside, the "Cathedral of Cool" as the press has dubbed it. It is unsurprising that museums are leading the way in the remaking of London. As has often been pointed out, museums, beginning, perhaps, with the Centre Pompidou, are the architectural emblems of our postmodern age. While museums have long been among cities' most important buildings, there is a difference today. Where once museums were conceived as storehouses of the nation's treasures, as pedagogical institutions, and as instruments of mass acculturation, today's new breed of museums is mostly about providing entertainment. Rhonda Carrier in Time Out celebrates the fact that the Olde London "theme park" seems to be a dying thing, replaced by the vitality of the YBAs and the new architecture. Yet, to use the much overused term of opprobrium "theme park," it's very hard to think of anything other than a true theme park that is more theme-park-like than some of these new museums. Tare Modern is surely among those in the forefront of this trend.