The fun won’t last, of course. London swings violently between booms and busts. It was stuffy in the 1950s, when you couldn’t find a decent meal in the place; it was “swinging” in the 1960s, when pop music and Carnaby Street injected a dose of classless style. It was almost destroyed by grandiose redevelopment schemes in the early 1970s, then rescued again by the entrepreneurial energy of punk. In the early 1990s the city was mired in a deep recession. Now it’s back. Nobody planned this; nobody ever has. For 400 years, London’s fabric has been built, knocked down, rebuilt and knocked down again not according to any official blueprint (London doesn’t even have a citywide government) but by the invisible hand of the market. London has been made by thousands, millions, of individuals anxious to make a quick pound or two. In the apt phrase of the historian Boy Porter, London is “a muddle that worked.”
Crucially, it isn’t just a British muddle-that would be deadly. London dominates the economic and cultural life of the country, and yet it is the least British place of all. Of the 7 million Londoners, one fifth belong to an ethnic minority, a proportion that will rise to a third over the next 15 years. American designers Tommy Hilfiger and Donna Karan use London as their international launch pad, while European fashion biggies like Christian Lacroix take their cues from the place: “London,” Lacroix told the fashion magazine W, “projects the rhythm of today.” Eurostar, the high-speed rail link between London and Paris, has brought the Continent right into the heart of the city, enabling young Europeans to visit the clubs and bars more easily than ever. Of all French tourists to London, 45 percent are under 25. English is rapidly becoming the lingua franca of Europe; so while German politicians may like to visit Paris, German kids find it a lot easier to navigate the West End than the Left Bank. (Astonishingly, they might eat better in London, too.)
An international muddle, on its own, wouldn’t have produced this year’s buzz. London is happening because London is rich. The British economy has seen three years of sustained growth. And since the Thatcher revolution, the City has consolidated its position as a center of international finance. The stockbrokers of the 1950s would have bought a house in Wiltshire and a decent pair of shotguns. But Thatcherism was about not just making it, not just spending it, but flaunting it, so today’s millionaires buy a painting or bankroll a club.
There’s plenty wrong with London. A crescent of deprivation cuds round the east and south of the City and West End. The gap between rich and poor is widening; house and car break-ins are unpleasantly common; the incidence of violent crime rose 8 percent in London last year. The average speed of rush-hour traffic in central London is no faster than it was a century ago; rising pollution levels are blamed for a spiraling incidence of asthma among children. But to dwell on the downers misses the point. Henry James put it best, after he lived there in the 1870s. London, wrote James, “is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent.” For those wanting a quick dose of magnificence, 1990s fashion, here’s a tour.
The clubs: First, there’s the beat–a vibrating, gazillion kilowatts of it. Then a long metal corridor spray-painted with slogans: CELEBRATE THE LOVE and DO YOU REMEMBER YOUR FIRST TIME? The arena inside is two seething tiers ringed by neon-lit bars and 20-foot-tall, white statues-all of it surrounded by a warren of more rooms: videogame rooms, chill-down rooms, a dark cavernous disco swirling with piped-in fog. This is the Ministry of Sound, once just a dull warehouse venue, now a massively popular global-entertainment complex with its own record label, clothing line, cinema and store. How global? More than 11 languages can be detected, barely, above the music. If a slick superclub like the Ministry doesn’t appeal, something in London will–Goa trance nights, acid-jazz evenings, Caribbean funk. And then there are the tantalizingly obscure microscenes bearing names like Torrid Voodoo Exotica and Elevator Noir Crime Jazz.
Fashion: Phil Treacy is sitting in a golden-walled studio with his polka-dot dog, Mr. Pig. He’s just won London’s Accessory Designer of the Year award for the fourth time. Treacy, 29, has risen to prominence on a wave of feathery millinery that takes its inspiration from double-decker buses, Viking ships and patriotic flags. “It’s a [fir of an accident that I’ve got a world-wide market at my fingertips,” he says. “All I’ve done is what comes naturally.” It’s catching. The dread-locked John Galliano, 35, now at Dior, and the outrageous Alexander McQueen, 27, at Givenchy, are the only two Britons ever to head French haute couture houses. Both were educated at St. Martin’s College of Art, epicenter of London-as-Style. Meanwhile, Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Donna Karan and Tommy Hilfiger are all putt;nag stores on Bond Street.
The art scene: Striding through Soho with her cell phone and orange mohair coat, Sam Taylor-Wood, 29, looks more like a pop star than an artist. Her video installations use celebrities like Kylie Minogne and draw inspiration from the films of Harvey Keitel. Her themes are isolation and loneliness, but British avant-garde art, Taylor-Wood’s ineluded, is terribly glamorous. The season’s hottest play, “Art,” stars Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay as friends who fall out after one purchases a trendy but inscrutable painting. Some London dealers are more famous than their artists. Some London artists are more famous than their art. British artists don’t haunt garrets or starve. They go to parties. Date the good times from 1988, when the then unknown Damien Hirst (he of the cut-in-half cows) put on a show with his art-school classmates, opening the era of do-it-yourself curating. In the early ’90s, young artists began installing art in abandoned town halls and office buildings. “The art is provocative because they wanted it to be seen,” says dealer Jay Jopling.
Architecture: Sipping espresso on the patio at The River Cafe, his wife’s hot restaurant, Richard Rogers is asked how much work he had in London back in the 1970s, when he designed Paris’s Pompidou Center. Zero. And now? Temporarily setting aside a raft of other business (like an airport: Heathrow’s planned Terminal 5), he rattles the charts in front of him and points to a pronounced bend in the Thames. “It could be the greatest arts complex in the world,” he says. He means the South Bank across the river from Westminster–an area with the biggest cluster of galleries, theaters and concert halls in Europe. “The Thames,” he says, “is a great unused silver pathway through the city. London has always turned its hack on the river. But all that could change.” Already, gourmets cross the river to eat at Terence Conran’s Gastrodrome at Butler’s Wharf. The Tate Gallery hopes to transform the disused Bankside power station into a showcase for its modern-art collection. Planners last week approved a 500-foot Ferris wheel-the world’s largest. A modest version of the Thames boom is happening across London. More spending money, a housing shortage and rising real- estate values are transforming London neighbor hoods almost overnight. Notting Hill now mixes million- pound homes, Yuppie flats and low-income housing. If you can’t get a place there, try Clerkenwell, saved from the wrecking ball in the 1970s, just west of the City. Or search the raggedy East End–but hurry.
Her Majesty: Not everything cool about London is new. Nineteen-year-old Stephanie Leyten of the Netherlands stood in front of Buckingham Palace with her boyfriend one sunny day last week as the Queen’s Guard clattered past on horn-back. Her weeklong itinerary took in all of the traditional stops: the Houses of Parliament, the Tower of London, St. Paul’s. “We are too tired in the evening for clubs,” Stephanie says with a laugh. Picture-post-card London pours billions of dollars into the city’s economy. One of the things that makes London so entertaining is its mix of old and new. Those clever young things at the Ministry of Sound decided to celebrate the club’s staying power (five years!) this summer. Under cover of darkness, the Ministry projected its logo onto Buckingham Palace, complete with a declaration of durability: LASTS LONGER THAN A ROYAL MARRIAGE. Fair enough. But all that proves is that London’s boom may last, oh, another few months. Better get there soon.
