Suspect that this sort of take could have been written in almost any generation
Review of a new book about London - admittedly a very personal take, but even so, with pretensions, it sounds, to having a wider perspective:
Robert... now looks on the London of yore - a time before property developers and retailers did their dastardly work - as superior in almost every way.
Or, tell me the old, old story. London has been doing that sort of thing for centuries and I am sure people have been bewailing the fact. (One day, my children, someone is going to mourn the days when it was all hipster caffs round here, instead of whatever Modern Abomination is there then, donchathink?)
London has been doing that sort of thing and Londoners have been adapting since it was a nameless settlement on the banks of the Thames, pretty much: I much prefer the take in Monica Dickens' The Heart of London (1961), set in a lightly fictionalised Notting Hill and adjacent in the turbulent bit of the 50s: 'Like all Londoners, they were desperately loyal about any threat to traditional features, but once they were gone, they accepted the new circumstance with surprising speed.'
E.g. How quickly the London Eye became iconic.
I do not doubt that some of the cultural phenomena that Elms mourns were in their day considered as pale and effete substitutes for whatever had gone before. This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2900402.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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