Hug the walls of your cities

I wrote the post below ten days before the vile attack on Westminster. With hindsight I could/should have included the scars left by terrorism on London, pointed out the brickwork pock-marked by bomb blasts. Or the impact on its citizens (I was within earshot of the Hilton bombing in 1975, worked at Harrods when it was the most bombed building in Europe, and have been involved in endless rounds of precautions to keep our theatres safe). The reason I didn't include the scars of terrorism in the post below was because I had actually forgotten the fear, the anger and the outrage. But the response from my fellow Londoners this week, in our boulevards, buses and bars, has made me want to hug the walls of London closer than ever. ___________________________________________________________

I love Berlin. But I also love the fact that on a foggy day the years can recede into the mist and you can find yourself transported back to the emblematic heart of the Nazi terror (in reality I believe more Jews were sheltered in Berlin than anywhere in the ‘Reich’ during WWII).

I love London. But here it is harder to see the wounds left on the city by the nightly air raids and rocket attacks on civilian targets that characterized that conflict.

I love New York. But here you have to look back to an earlier conflict, the Civil War, and a later one, 9/11, to see the city’s scar tissue.

But we should never stop looking. Because the memory of conflict is built into the very foundations and fabric of our cities, in their walls and their watch-towers. It is the life-breath of the liberties that allow people to come together, make business together, make lives together.

As a Londoner, I grew up among bomb-sites. But in those days they were shrinking to ever- decreasing puddles as new buildings rose up from them.  I also grew up among the Post-War Liberalism that struggled to make sense of the horror that had convulsed the world, and to make that world a “better place” for the survivors. 

There were two words that summed up the spirit of that age: “Never Again!”

And they should still be the watchword, the glue, the cement, which holds together the building blocks of our free lives in our free cities. Because they remind us of what life can and will be like without those freedoms. However much this latest fog of opportunist-led ‘populism’ tries to obscure them from plain sight.