When my wife and I first went for lunch at the Tate Modern's glass-enclosed café, the young hostess asked, "Which side of the room would you prefer?" Though her question sounded innocent, I kept thinking that the answer would become a kind of statement. Sit on the right atop this converted power station, and you'd join the City men, lunching ladies, and designer-clad bohemians looking north across the Thames to the heart of the new London, where squadrons of cranes were rebuilding the city before our very eyes. Choose the left, and you'd gaze south over sprawling old London—crane-free neighborhoods that were dingy 100 years ago and haven't grown any more fashionable since. There, you'd find yourself among students, pensioners, and scruffy loners aggressively scrawling marginalia in their paperbacks.
Which side did we belong to?
Paralyzed by choice, I stood there until my wife, Sandi, got impatient and said, "Let's just sit in the middle." So there we sat, surrounded by empty tables, and as she ordered celery soup with spiced pear compote and Stilton bread, I tried to justify my dithering. "London," I told her, "is not as simple as it used to be."
And, really, it isn't. The city is now being sold as the capital of hip Europe, a reborn boomtown where the mobile phones never stop chirping and taxis are full at midnight. The dirty buildings have been scrubbed white, coffeehouses and trendy bars keep springing up like toadstools, and the pleasure-seeking young pour in from all over the Continent to take part in ecstatic clubbing. The air is thick with noise and the intoxicating scent of money—money made, money spent, money flaunted. Why, things are so good, the city has even run out of office space. Londoners were delighted when Bertrand Delanoë, the new mayor of Paris, declared that he wanted the French city to be as thrillingly modern as the one his countrymen have always condescended to. While it's been years since Paris set any real trends, London has pop-culture self-confidence to burn. It boasts celebrity filmmakers like Guy Ritchie and Hollywood movies named for Notting Hill. It trumpets scandalous artists (Damien Hirst), jet-set couturiers (Stella McCartney), top architects (Norman Foster), not to mention archetypal heroines (Bridget Jones).
And then there's the food, which you never stop hearing about. Every week a new restaurant opens, and there's talk of a Madonna sighting; turn on the telly, and you can't escape Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson, cooking gurus whose recipes come with more than a pinch of sex appeal. The city even has its totemic novel, White Teeth, Zadie Smith's exuberant vision of a racially mixed London whose blend of bouncy storytelling and multi-culti utopianism seems at once very old and very new—as if Charles Dickens were angling for a place at Sundance. Although one sees signs that this sense of destiny is starting to fray (diseased meat, train derailments, the shadow of northern race riots), London is still suffused with a serious case of Hot City Hubris, the sense that here is where everything is happening.
You can't really blame Londoners for strutting. When I first lived there, as a student in the mid-1970s, I was shocked by how poor and downtrodden it was. Despite a brief, giddy boomlet in the Beatles era, when it swung like a pendulum do, the city had never recovered from World War II. The electronics were shoddy, the media retrograde (The Black and White Minstrel Show!), the modern architecture Khrushchev-worthy, the food almost proudly abysmal—I've never seen so many peas cooked to mush. Yet despite all this, I loved London for its parks, bookstores, theater, sophisticated talk, and taste for eccentricity.
Naturally, my starstruck enthusiasm had my British friends there scoffing. For them it was hopelessly dreary. I remember interviewing filmmaker Julien Temple, who couldn't stop slagging off his city. Finally, I brought up Dr. Johnson's famous line, the one about a man who's tired of London also being tired of life. "I'm not tired of life," Temple snorted. "I'm just tired of London."
This deep sense of the city's inferiority began to change during the 11-year rule of Margaret Thatcher, whose ruthless restructuring of the British economy made London richer than ever (while turning the north of England into something of a backwater). Indeed, if the Thatcher era was about turning London into a commercial beehive, Tony Blair has spent years inventing a fresh image for the stodgy old capital, making it young, chic, European—swinging. And his efforts have clearly paid off.
Nowhere is Re-Swinging London more visible than along the Thames, celebrated by Wordsworth, mocked by Verlaine ("a gigantic overflowing toilet"), and neglected for much of the past 50 years. When I first lived in London, I was aghast at the South Bank, a spooky moonscape of rotting wharves and dark streets filled with the loony and violent. Even the vaunted South Bank Centre was a gray bunker that seemed to be auditioning for a role in A Clockwork Orange.
All that has changed over the past dozen years, and the Thames has become the showpiece of Britain's millennial celebrations; in fact, if you want to mark the boundaries of the new London, the river offers two handy landmarks. To the west stands the River Café, famous as the flagship of the London food boom. To the east, in the area known as Docklands, you find Canary Wharf, a new business-shopping-dining complex whose 50-story tower dominates the horizon (it's the tallest building in Britain) and whose denatured mallishness embodies what many Londoners fear could happen to their city: It will be swallowed up by internationalized corporate blandness.
The good stuff lies in between. Thanks to redevelopment, you can now amble along the South Bank for miles, even at night, and it's astonishing how much there is to do along the way—go for a breathtaking Ferris wheel ride on the gargantuan London Eye, dip into the National Film Theatre for a Renoir classic, pop across Waterloo Bridge to explore the vast classical majesty of Somerset House, then nip back for a meal atop the Oxo Tower, whose acclaimed brasserie offers atonement for all those years the English were forced to eat Oxo's nasty meat extract.
Such a ramble revolutionizes your entire conception of London—giving you the city in 3-D, as it were—and each time I do it, I'm flabbergasted by how long the river was wasted. For the renovation doesn't merely bathe the South Bank in a newfangled sheen but alchemically transforms the whole city's iconography. You've never fully experienced the grandeur of St. Paul's until you've seen it from a high floor at the Tate Modern.
London today has an unrivaled genius for recycling the old into something new and trendy—be it Oasis stealing the Beatles' sound, Norman Foster covering the British Museum's Great Court with an exquisite glass web, or (to get back to the riverbank) Terence Conran converting old dockside warehouses into the fancy condos and restaurants at Butler's Wharf, next to Tower Bridge. Where Jack the Ripper once hunted ladies of the evening, foodies now stalk organic arugula, Oaxacan chiles, and lemon sago at Borough Market, which has been around for over 700 years but only recently became the new place to go.
Just east of Butler's Wharf you find the Design Museum, the first museum in the world devoted to the design of everyday objects, and though its exhibits are only middling, the very name evokes a powerful truth about the new London: It's done to the teeth. The city is crawling with what Philip Dodd, director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, calls graphic entrepreneurs. Their work is everywhere—the yin-yangy logo for British Telecom, the controversial art in the Sensation show that infuriated New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, the pointedly unpolished silver-gray metal of the Tube's new Jubilee Line stations, which have the cold beauty of the Death Star.
What you're seeing," Dodd told me over monkfish at the ICA canteen, "are people who are neither full-fledged artists nor full-fledged businessmen. And even if you don't like their work, you have to admit that it grabs you." Almost by the lapels. Where the city used to be famous for its lousy marketing (being good at business was somehow deemed vulgar), it has become a salesman's dream. Everything is about branding—even gridlock. Each weekend, motorists rant about a particular stoppage on the North Circular Road. It's known as the Ikea traffic jam.
London's pursuit of the hypercapitalist millennium might well be unbearable were the English not so bad at being modern. The "River of Fire" fizzled during the millennium celebration. The Millennium Dome proved to be a colossal bust—less a British Disney World than an Olympian Wal-Mart strangely denuded of all products. And Foster's elegant Millennium Bridge, a laserlike pedestrian walkway over the Thames, had only one small flaw—it shook so badly it couldn't be used.
Heads would roll over such things in Paris or Tokyo, but Londoners view such fiascoes with the ironic satisfaction of people not altogether convinced that they really wanted a brave new world in the first place. "Anybody else would turn that bridge into a ride," insists our friend Vikram, "but not the English."
One evening, another friend took us to dinner at Wapping Food, another Victorian power station, this one recently converted into a fashionable East End food-and-art space. Pipes and worn-out gauges adorn the walls; plastic chairs hang from the ceiling; the wine cellar is pointedly all-Australian. We were joined by one of London's most eloquent refuseniks, writer Iain Sinclair, whose brilliant, crabbed, wantonly eccentric Lights Out for the Territory is the great visionary book about the city in the last half century. Nobody knows London better than this tireless walker who can tell you a story about every nook and cranny—the building where a failed art movement got launched, the pub where a low-level gangster got murdered, the doss-house where writer Jack London once spent a few nights.
We passed the evening talking about what Sinclair calls heritage pirates. To him, these are the politicians and developers who are busy erasing the things that make London as unique as a fingerprint—the centuries-old whorl of streets, buildings, landmarks, neighborhoods—and coating it with the squeaky-clean Teflon of chain pubs, shopping malls, and office buildings. In the process, they are stealing the social and personal memories that make a city human. "You go to the South Bank now," he says, "and nobody knows what was there before."
After dinner we made our way across the street, past the old smugglers' pub, the Prospect of Whitby, and climbed down to the riverbank. The night was crisp and black, with a sliver of moon on the recurve and lights twinkling on the far shore. Sinclair looked up and down the dark river, taking in its timeless flow. "Now this," he said, reveling in the chill air, "is nice."
Although Sinclair's hostility to Re-Swinging London contains its own ironies—his books are selling better than ever—it does throw into high relief the great drama of this city's renaissance: How much can become modern and international without losing the distinctive tang that makes London London and not, say, Frankfurt? Only a puritan would disapprove of many of the city's new pleasures, from the excellent juice bars to my stylishly comfy hotel room at One Aldwych, with its heated bathroom floors. Yet what makes the place great is something deeper, something partly represented by Sinclair, who belongs to its great tradition of passionate, off-kilter individualism.
I fly to London for the enduring richness of its established culture, not for stylish museums whose cafés serve tea-smoked duck. Which is why, one Saturday morning, I took the pricey, erratic Northern Line way down south to Tooting, an unloved and unlovely neighborhood thoroughly ignored by tourist guidebooks. Stepping into the bustle of Tooting Broadway, I was ravished by a sense of déjà vu. Here was an older London of butcher shops and off-license takeouts, tiny newsstands selling Silk Cuts, and seedy little betting shops where you could play a long shot on the fifth at Epsom. There wasn't a yuppie pub in sight, just the shops along the high street and side streets filled with row houses that had been there for decades. Here was the city as I knew it a quarter century ago.
Except, of course, that it wasn't. For while the buildings looked the same, the people did not. The sidewalk swirled with different colors, different nationalities, different languages—like a cinema verité spot for Benetton. A West Indian mother scolded her kids in patois but was answered in South London English. A Pakistani businessman rolled up outside Patel Bros. Market in a turquoise Rolls-Royce. White old-age pensioners with faces like spuds walked slowly, bent double under the weight of their shopping. There were laughing Nigerian teens, sullen punks pincushioned with piercings, stately Indian matrons who stared from their shop windows as if they owned the universe.
What a mix. And looking closer, those shops were new, too—halal butchers, Indian spice shops, greengrocers selling Caribbean tubers and produce. Although Tooting is far poorer than central London, which sometimes resembles a Potemkin village of prosperity, it's far more vibrant than the all-white London communities ever were.
If anything has made London swing again, it's the way these immigrants have created a new cultural hybrid—they've changed the city, and the city's changed them. For years, the only safe way to get a good meal in England was to shun standard British places (and cornstarchy Chinese ones ) and head straight to an Indian restaurant. It's no coincidence that vindaloo is now acknowledged as the national dish—routinely served with chips—or that you can buy ready-made pakoras at Marks & Spencer.
Nor was it accidental that, in Tooting, I should stop for lunch at Kastoori, a vegetarian restaurant owned by the Thankis, an Indian family originally from Uganda. Their Gujarati-style cooking integrates African ingredients to produce dishes unlike any I've ever tasted—green banana curry, kontola (a mountain vegetable) in garlic sauce, and the stuffed bitter vegetable known as karela bharela. Kastoori provided the best meal I had in London, far better than the one at the Michelin-starred Zaika, in Kensington, which aspires to give Indian cooking the refinement of French yet also serves such mutant food as samosas with a chocolate brownie inside. Even as the chocomosa (as it's known) epitomizes the new London, Kastoori is a reminder that it's possible to be original without broadcasting the fact.
As is the Sir John Soane's Museum, a few miles north in Holborn, one of the purest and most brilliant expressions of the London mind. Born a bricklayer's son in the middle of the 18th century, Soane became one of the Georgian period's most prominent architects, designing the Bank of England in the late 1780s (only the exterior wall remains, alas). But public and private lives have always coexisted, often uneasily, in London (think of all those cross-dressing Tory MPs), and the respectable Soane also happened to be something of a mad collector. He bought a house at 12 Lincoln's Inn Fields as a family home, then added the two adjoining houses, turning the whole thing into a gigantic display case for his endless acquisitions. When he died in 1837, he left the property to the nation with the provision that it should be left as it was.
Walking through the green front door is a bit like stumbling through Lewis Carroll's looking glass. The house is crammed with stuff, much of it classical, as if Soane had gone to some odd Athenian warehouse sale and walked off with the lot. There are marbles and casts, crypts and sarcophagi, Laocoön statues and Apulian vases, Cantonese chairs and copies of old masterpieces like the Vatican's Apollo Belvedere, all the original paintings of Hogarth's series The Rake's Progress, not to mention Soane's own scale model of the Bank of England. Yet what's astonishing about this museum is not the startling floor-to-ceiling proliferation of objects, but Soane's own deliberately surreal manipulation of space. Even after walking through the museum several times, I couldn't figure out how the rooms actually come together. For this is a house of domes, archways, weird skylights, secret doorways, panels that pull back to reveal more panels, windows that gaze into other rooms, and cunningly placed mirrors that give the illusion that still other rooms await you. Lucidly conceived and boundlessly self-referential, the museum is the architectural counterpart of a Nabokov novel.
The place knocks me out. Stepping into the watery afternoon sunlight, I began raving about why the Soane's museum is so much better than the Tate Modern. It's modest, not self-congratulatory, personal, not institutional, and its display is genuinely original, not some theory-spouting curator's desperate attempt to make the same old Picassos seem somehow new. In a city dying to embrace the future, Soane's old house is actually the most modern place around.
"And that's why the old London was better than the new," I manfully concluded as we began to walk away.
"Don't be so smug," said Sandi, pulling out her guidebook. "They restored this museum in 1995."
She took my defeated hand and led me back toward spruced-up Covent Garden, where we had a perfect cappuccino.