It’s a London Thing is our Wednesday series in which we turn the spotlight on a unique aspect of London – perhaps a curious shop, sometimes an eccentric restaurant, a hidden place, book or oddity. The subject matter will be different every week. The running theme, however, will remain constant: you have to come to London to enjoy it. It’s A London Thing.
David's been away. It always gets him going…
It was like an egg yolk sliding down the tongs of a tuning fork.
It was a Manhattan sunset, perfectly framed by the canyon walls of 33rd Street.
Chanced onto. First sun setting I'd seen in the three or four weeks that I'd been there.
It was quite spectacular. But what really threw me was the realisation that I'd gone 20 some days in Manhattan without seeing a sunset.
"I gotta get out of here" was the thought that followed as a matter of course.
That was a long time ago. I've just come back from my most recent visit to the Big Apple. Glad, as always, that it was just a visit. Glad partly because of that sunset factor.
Come back to my town, London. Back to the neat propinquity of the latest issue of Time Out cover-proclaiming: "London - The World's Greatest City."
That T.O. cover crystallising my feeling swirl.
It's the trees. Well, it's a lot of things. But trees are one of them. And look, I'm not one of nature's tree huggers, but seeing lots of trees as soon as I got back here - well, it had the same sort of clarifying ampage the tuning fork sunset had back then.
And, yes, I know: Central Park. All 800 acres of it.
Now I'm also not one of nature's number crunchers, but since Central Park has been, inevitably, put into play on the chessboard of this discussion, let's pin that New York Queen by quietly mentioning that Hampstead Heath all by itself has ten percent more acreage than Central Park. And Hampstead Heath is just two percent of the total of London's public green.
Sunsets. Trees. Architecture that's human scale. Serious wealth that's, well, more tasteful (and therefore less oppressive)... It's the list that won't quit - right up to Paris being just a couple of hours away.
No question about it, they're both great cities.
But I'll take London.
Time out of memory.
To follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Bebo or MySpace, to watch London Walks Films on YouTube, to send us an email or simply to catch up on the latest news from www.walks.com, click on the appropriate icon below…
