London Now – City of Heaven, City of Hell |
I received a communication the other day from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. The mission statement at the top read “Creating Sustainable Communities.”
This exhibition is a timely contribution towards the debate we must have on where we are now, what such sustainable communities might look like, what the challenges and ingredients are and how we can move forward. It is a debate which needs to be broadened beyond the professional and governmental circles in which it is sometimes confined because it is a debate of crucial significance for every citizen of London. So I salute the organisers and the artists represented here for making some shocking and suggestive visual statements to start us off.
In his book “The Etymologies”, St Isidore of Seville helpfully treats the subject of the city under two aspects – urbs and civitas. The word civitas stands for the emotions, convictions and rituals which cohere in creating the community of the city. Urbs stands for the built environment and it has been the weakness of much talk about cities since World War II that it has focussed on urbs to the exclusion of civitas.
I come from a highly argumentative tradition where cities are concerned. In the Bible the founder of the first city is Cain the murderer. Babel is a declaration of independence from God but the New Jerusalem in the Book of Revelation at the open ending to the New Testament is a place where God and humanity co-habit. The Bible may begin in a garden but it has its climax in a city.
In between there is realism about the way in which human cities are built and preserved by blood given and blood taken, by service and coercion. The figure of Nehemiah repairing the walls of Jerusalem with a trowel in one hand and a sword in the other stands for the creativity and the cost of the urban achievement.
This exhibition shows that the debate continues between those who like Shelley say that “Hell is a city much like London – a populous and smokey city” and his contemporary Blake who saw the city in a different light –And now the time returns again:
Our souls exult, and London’s towers
Receive the Lamb of God to dwell
In England’s green and pleasant bowers.
I have come to believe that pessimism is the luxury of rich and indolent people and that we have a chance of catching a tide as “the time returns again”.
I think that although urbs has been stressed at the expense of civitas, this is changing and we are at a hopeful point in the development of London. Public spectacle which has been always a tradition in the City of London is being more seriously incorporated in London life as a whole with the re-introduction of a pan London government. There is an imaginative programme of events in Trafalgar Sq in addition to the traditional demos. There is even a daring proposal that we make more of St George’s Day and Shakespeare’s birthday. At the same time urbs is not being neglected as I saw today with the greening of the area outside Bishop’s Court close to Holborn Viaduct. We are also living in a golden age of British architecture when public taste and architectural visions are vastly more in tune than they were even a decade ago.
Above all of course, London is a world-in-a-city where God has many names. When my Diocese was re-organised in the early 7th century the boundaries marched with those of the East Saxon tribe. The Bishop of London who had existed in Roman times became the Bishop of the East Saxons. Now there are as many tribes and tongues and peoples and nations here as there were in the visions of the Book of Revelation. We are in touch with this reality not least because the Diocese of London alone has the privilege of educating 46,500 London children every day in its schools where 200 languages are spoken. The challenge for us all in our generation is to build a united London where we can celebrate our diversity as an example of what our whole wired up world could be like. If we do not then we shall became a dreadful example of a failure to build a confident city, a city which has faith together in common values.
I believe that we are fortunate to be living in London at this point in history and in your name I want to express my gratitude to the artists represented in this provocative exhibition for depicting the traffic between Heaven and Hell, the relationship between them and for indicating so graphically the two ways we could go.
