reading the city

After some years away, work brought me back to the city.

For all my mixed emotions on returning, my eyes gorged themselves on the cityscape.

I realised that I was like one re-reading a favourite novel, scanning familiar pages for landmarks recalled, and celebrating at once both my recall and the city's persistence. My eyes were frantic for detail. I couldn't open them wide enough.

Every street was a page indented by paragraphed turnings into side-streets. Parades of shops like stanzas in poetry.

The city was a vast Victorian novel with a cast of individually realised architectural characters all interconnected, the story arcs and plot twists mapped by these roads and junctions. Looking along just one street I could read the melodrama of the ten years I had been away: the relative fortunes of shops I remembered, the small grief where a business had disappeared, the fading of once upstart new architecture into a slightly shabby middle-age, the shock slide of some buildings into a neglected architectural dementia.

The city I loved had continued without me. It was naturally, and rightfully, oblivious to me. Others had far more claim to ownership. And yet... and yet I carried within me my personal version of this town, my own narrative of these streets.