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.
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