Henry Van Dyke wrote, “London is a man’s town, there’s power in the air. . . .”

Maybe that’s why 177,000 people troop down to Buckingham Palace every morning to see the Changing of the Guard.

What happens, over a period of forty-five minutes: Some guys in red coats and tall black hats perform various ministry-approved silly walks while a couple of bands play brassy songs, some other guys troop through on horseback, and dark-suited policemen in lime yellow day-glow vests yell at the hoi polloi to get down off the fences. 

That’s power.

All these people would be doing other—more sensible—things, were it not for the heady aroma of power emanating from Buckingham Palace. That’s because the king lives there.

The main part of London is chockablock with gargantuan buildings in marble and other heavy stones. The Houses of Parliament stand for tradition and the vox populi. Westminster Abbey weds sanctimony with magisterial authority. The Tower of London has nine hundred years of experience as the enforcement branch. Endless corridors of bureaucratic power stack up along Whitehall.

And it’s all watched over by the unsleeping London Eye. 

Even a strong man might get vertigo.

A Chequered Past

Londinium was established about 47 A.D. by the Romans, who knew a thing or two about power. After a brief destruction by the Iceni under Queen Boudica, the city was rebuilt and grew rapidly in subsequent decades. 

Under the Romans, “Londinium was an ethnically diverse city with inhabitants from across the Roman Empire, including natives of Britannia, continental Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa,” according to Wikipedia. 

This cosmopolitan city was infiltrated and overrun by the Saxons over several centuries’ time, captured by Vikings for a few years, and eventually incorporated into Alfred the Great’s Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia in 886. 

The year 1066 saw the introduction of Norman law, customs, and language. The next nine hundred years or so crystallized the existence of a distinct Englishness that spawned a world-wide empire with leaders like Nelson, Wellington, and Churchill.

In the process, “being English”—or even “being British,” a broader label—was distilled into an essentially white and Anglo-Saxon identity.

Then, the World Changed

By the middle of the twentieth century, the British Empire (“Im-paahh,” in Etonian/Oxonian) was impoverished and exhausted. It was hard enough to hold the British Isles together, let alone India, Kenya, and the bloody Irish. The Empire was reduced to a “Commonwealth” of nations sharing a nostalgic attachment. 

Natives of Commonwealth and other nations increasingly migrated to London for economic opportunity, and the same thing that has happened to other major cities happened to London as well. It became jumbled up, ethnographically.

When Joelle and I visited in the early 1970s, the typical Londoner was pretty much the man or woman we had seen on our television tubes—a blend of Stanley Holloway, Robert Donat, and Mrs. Miniver. A few Indian restaurants were the only visible outposts of brownness. 

Today, fifty years later, London is alive with Britishers of all races, colors, and national origins. Stand on a street corner near Victoria Station, and in ten minutes you will see everybody in the world walk by. London has again become “an ethnically diverse city with inhabitants from” . . . just about everywhere.

Roger Miller would hardly recognize it.

The London Eye may never sleep, but the Big Wheel of History rolls on regardless.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer