essay: London Sprawling [ Capital, Emptiness]

London Sprawling
by Jonathan Bell

The British capital is never empty, and only major television events can 
clear the streets. So why do movies and science fiction teem with vacant 
blocks? Does urbanism have room for emptiness anymore?

London is never empty. Even the annual May Bank Holiday, when people 
traditionally leave the city, shops shut, and the streets feel wide and 
airy, is a disappointment for the claustrophobe. I’m hoping for a city 
transformed from its usual schizophrenic self of snarling traffic, 
angsty crowds, and small moments of rapture into an urban idyll of 
broad, empty avenues and scattered lumps of lazy pedestrians. It doesn’t 
happen. The dip in traffic levels is perceptible, but hardly remarkable, 
and a few parking spaces have magically appeared where once there was 
barely space to squeeze between fenders. But the city is far from vacant.

Abandoned urbanism is part fantasy, part nightmare: an impossible dream 
that is now the preserve of advertising or cinema’s vision, dystopic or 
nostalgic. Modernity has made it near-impossible to experience the city 
as a truly empty space. Instead, we rely on false celluloid memories; 
the Swinging Sixties, when David Hemmings could swing his black Rolls 
Royce into any number of parking spots in the heart of fashionable 
Knightsbridge, or the Beatles could saunter across Abbey Road without 
having to keep a weather eye open for speeding cabs. Or the romantically 
scuffed early-morning streetscape, when only stragglers and milk floats 
are out and about, and our protagonist can saunter along litter-blown 
streets.

cont'd....
http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/letters_from_london/london_sprawling.php