The Big Smoke

You’ll have to be quick, but it’s here – right now, in London. It’s a thing that I imagine you never thought you would see again. A thing that you had stopped looking for. A thing so rare, so wondrous and so unexpected that when you first encounter it, you feel a little faint and have to sit down. But it is, to repeat myself, here.

‘Where?’ you ask. ‘Next to the newly refurbished St Martin-in-the-Fields on Trafalgar Square,’ I reply. ‘Which side?’ you ask. That is a fair question, and I’m glad you asked it, as the church already has several sides at pavement level and, since the recent completion of its refurbishment, several more sides below the pavement. That’s a lot of sides.

So, and hopefully this will make things clearer, you’ll need to be on the northern side of the church – the same side as the Pret A Manger just up the road and the National Portrait Gallery opposite – and, an important bit this, above the ground. You know, where there used to be that slightly shambolic crafts market, just around the corner from the homeless hostel and the statue of Oscar Wilde having a fag. (Is that the worst piece of public statuary in this or any other city in the world or is it just me who doesn’t like it?)

You’ll need to be near that low wall where the builders who have been working on St Martin’s still gather. You’ve seen the men. Mainly bald and wearing yellow tabards. As they smoke and watch girls go by they have the air of an occupying army that is relatively content to take over the running of our streets for the present but may, at any moment, turn into a blood-crazed and lust-fuelled mob. Not unlike the Red Army when it entered Berlin in 1945. Which may be a little unfair on the builders.
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This is quite a public place, and just how long it can survive pristine as it is, at the exact heart of our great pulsating city, is doubtful. Which is why, if you remember my advice at the start of this piece, you should get down there as quickly as you can and see it. If, of course, it’s not too late.

It’s a depressing thought but it is almost certainly the case that London and Londoners’ propensity to spoil everything will have already done for my discovery. But let’s be optimistic and suggest that, just this once, it has survived. If I weren’t lashed to a chair writing a review of an Albanian ear-trumpet orchestra at a community theatre in Ruislip (I liked them actually and yet somehow I didn’t), I would go down there right now and see it again. Because, really, it isn’t that far from the office and it is something that needs to be seen more than once to be believed.

I have already seen it a second time. I took the editor of this magazine to see it, just to check it did exist – working on the theory that if the editor of Time Out London says something is on in London, well, something is on in London and there can no longer be any doubt about it.

On seeing my startling discovery, just as I had, he went a bit dizzy and had to sit down.

But there it was: an expanse of pavement – say, 30 yards long and six yards wide. Yes, it was punctuated by a glass-domed light well and the entrance to a lift, but it was still a pretty large expanse and nowhere, in not one place on its broad, pale stone features, could we see a single piece of chewing-gum. It exists, I tell you: a London pavement with no gum on it. But not for long, so go and see it. While you can.