"If we don't end
war, war will end us." H G Wells
For over a quarter of a century I commuted into central
London, so you might be forgiven for thinking that I would not care that I no
longer have to, however in all of the time that I did that journey day in, day
out, I never became bored by or blasé about the sights. Crossing the Thames,
seeing Tower Bridge, the Tower of London, St Paul's Cathedral and the like on a
daily basis was not something that I tired of, so despite the fact that I no
longer have to, I still enjoy the occasional jaunt into the city. Add to that
my love of walking and going for walks in London is a thing that I indulge
myself with now and again.
There is something very calming about walking by water; even
walking by the sea on a stormy, winters day can be a restful experience in a
hypnotic way. Walking along the banks of the Thames is something that I find
both calming and stimulating, because there is always something to see, and
often something new and different. Over the last couple of years I have walked
from Canary Wharf on the north bank of the river into central London and along
the south bank from Greenwich on more than one occasion, however I have never,
before this week, strayed further west than Lambeth Bridge.
 |
| Ancient and modern. Southwark Cathedral and The Shard. |
With autumn now upon us and the weather less reliable, it
was a spur of the moment thing to go for a walk along the river on Tuesday as
the day dawned bright, mild and blessedly dry. It being Armistice Day, 11th
November, I contemplated visiting the poppies at the Tower of London, but
having seen them a couple of times during the summer and considering how
crowded it was likely to be, I decided not to. I set off from London Bridge on
Tuesday morning with the intention of seeing how far I could walk before either
my knee gave out or the river path did. Often on these walks I have Val for
company; being on my own I did wonder if I would have the discipline to walk as
far as we usually do together. As it turned out, I did a smidgeon under ten
miles before heading home, a couple of miles shy of normal.
London, indeed a lot of the UK, seems to have fallen in love
with sculpture in recent years, especially themed sculptures. There has been
Gromit, seen below at Paddington Station a couple of years ago, and now we have
a trail of London buses and Paddington Bears, a couple of which I passed on the
South Bank. [1] As
I mentioned earlier, we also have the poppies, all 888,246 of them at The Tower
of London and I will return to them later.
London's South Bank is a vibrant, lively place to walk even
if it can become very congested around the London Eye, especially in summer. On
Tuesday the crowds were thinner. By design rather than accident I reached
Westminster just before eleven o'clock, standing in silent contemplation as Big
Ben chimed the hour. At one time it was de
rigueur for London's traffic to come to a halt at this time and while it
might now be less practical than it was years ago, it was nonetheless
pleasantly surprising to see how much traffic halted on Westminster Bridge.
Past Lambeth Bridge it was new territory for me, but Battersea Power Station
and Albert Bridge apart, the river west of this point has less of interest, not
that the walk is any less pleasant, with Battersea Park and Wandsworth Park
oases of greenery. Eventually I crossed the Thames at Putney and headed home. The
alternative, to carry on walking, would have meant either turning back or
carrying on to Hammersmith Bridge, which I know now was just another two miles,
but on Tuesday I decided that enough was enough.
Having dipped out of visiting the Tower of London and the
poppies in the morning, I thought that having come to London on such an
historic day, it would be daft not to go, so I got off the tube at Monument and
walked along the river to the Tower. This proved a good decision as the crowds
were thinner; as I walked away from the Tower towards Liverpool Street, the
crowds were much denser.
Now much has been written about the poppies, most of it
positive, however there have been a few dissenting voices. Jonathon Jones,
writing for The Guardian, describes them as "fake, trite and inward
looking," which "lets Ukip thrive." He says that a memorial to
war ought to be "gory, vile and terrible to see," that the moat of
the Tower "should be filled with
barbed wire and bones." I do not find the poppies fake or trite and nor it
would seem do the estimated four million people who have visited them, but
there again I am not an art critic, so what do I know? Jones's point that a
better memorial would be barbed wire and bones has some merit and there's no
reason why some like minded person could not have done something of that
nature; the fact that no one has tends to place Jones in something of a
minority. Critics like Jones perpetuate the Emperor's new clothes syndrome
whereby anything popular is deemed to have no artistic merit but pretentious
nonsense that no sane person could find entertaining or attractive is lauded to
the heavens.
The actress and author Sheila Hancock has said that "a
tank should mow down the poppies and leave them shattered and broken like the
bodies of the guys that died." Symbolically this would be extremely
powerful, moving even, but not immensely practical given the fact that the
people who have paid for the poppies expect to receive one intact once they are
uninstalled.
Perhaps next year Mr Jones and Miss Hancock could
collaborate on a display of barbed wire and bones that are demolished by having
a tank driven over them, although I can't shake the image of the opening scene
in the Terminator film which that so strongly resembles and
which would forever trivialise the whole thing in my mind.
Why does The Great War, 'the war to end all wars,' still
resonate so much? Perhaps because of the numbers who died, or because so many
who survived have been with us in our lifetime; perhaps because of the horrors
of this war, which surpassed any that had preceded it. Perhaps it is because this war was the first
that saw extensive media coverage, the first that spawned any real dissent
(certainly the first that received any public acknowledgement) and the first on
mainland Europe that was so extensive, so all encompassing and which affected
so many non-combatants.
The war to end war sadly did no such thing; each year when
we remember the fallen in The Great War and in subsequent conflicts we might do
so in the hope that there will be no more in the future, but it is a vain hope.
It does not make our remembrance any less important, though.
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