The London Loaf: Walking/Writing
Pen & notebook © Ayumi
The writer Charles Dickens used to walk for hours every day, and if you read his stories you can see how much inspiration he is taking from the people he encounters and the atmosphere of the city itself.
London is a good place to get creative because you can be both in your head and out of it at the same time. There is enough constantly changing stimulation to feed your imagination, whilst the sheer volume of people and activity allows you an anonymity within the crowd, so you can swan around musing poetically like a 19th century flâneur.
Some of my favourite moments of London in literature that you can find online:
Harold Biffen’s farewell walk across London in George Gissing’s “New Grub Street”:
“…The sun was just setting; he paused a few moments on the bridge, watching the river with a quiet smile, and enjoying the splendour of the sky…”
T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”:
“Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.”
Wordsworth’s “Upon Westminster Bridge”:
“The beauty of the morning: silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky,
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.”
Dickens’ description of the dreary November weather in the opening of “Bleak House”:
“…As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun…”
The song of the vagrant woman in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway:
“…the voice of an ancient spring spouting from the earth; which issued, just opposite Regent’s Park Tube station from a tall quivering shape, like a funnel, like a rusty pump, like a wind-beaten tree for ever barren of leaves…”
June 20th, 2010 at 11:11 am
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