St Paul's Wilton Place, Knightsbridge

My favourite toy on our shelves is a perspex children's tool box with red, slightly wobbly clasps, that we call 'The City Box'. In it are: shiny, shaped bricks, in 80s colours - old, wooden, coloured tiles, bought from a car boot sale in a 50s tin with a picture of a red-haired girl holding two puppies on the front - a string bag with German ( I think ), wooden houses, horses, hedges, a school house, a church - a tiny, slightly torn box with thin bits of wood painted as sky scrapers that funnily enough U,OL brought back from Russia as a present years ago, before he went to live there, when we were still together - a metal souvenir of the eiffel tower, another of grand central station in New York and a model of a bullet train and two bags of Muiji city blocks -those pale wood blank shapes of city monuments, one marked London and another New York. And the children always moan that I make them put everything back in the right bags and boxes. Though eventually, with encouragement they do.

Cycling alongside Buckingham Palace back from my trip to St Paul's, I am unsure how to write this. I don't feel attached to what I have to write about. The Tractarian movement initially championed by St Paul's church is difficult to fathom as a non believer in the twenty first century, though at it's core is the division between the Church of England and the Catholic church and the overlaps between the two. But, the beautiful view of Big Ben through a gap in the expanse of trees and then the hoop of the wheel above Horse Guards Parade remind me of the blank wood of the Muiji models and of the cities we have made laid out on the carpet. Invented metropolis that have included a school with horses in a hedged playground, the gherkin building alongside the statue of liberty and a high-speed, japanese-style train link made in bright orange and blue bricks alongside tiny skyscrapers of all colours. A city made from scratch.

To visit the church I park the bike in Hyde Park, jostling with the Winter Wonderland and Knightsbridge shopping crowds. Like time has tipped into Christmas. Everyone busy. A family walk past, wrapped up against the cold, talking about somewhere I know really well from my childhood in Hertfordshire - they must have come up on the train for the day. Though there are many different nationalities in the throng. Somehow I am against the tide, I am not going to Harrods or Harvey Nichols, I am not going ice skating or on a helter skelter. I am trying to cross the road into the quiet, grand, residential street, with a few Embassy flags visible, past a stately hotel with doormen outside.
St Paul's is set back from the road with a tall, dark tower, made from dirty stone, but I can see there are lights on, and the door is open. A man with a knapsack squeezes in before me as I stand in the porch fiddling my phone to silence. There is singing inside the church and for a minute I think maybe there is a service, though it is Saturday afternoon (the boys are at swimming lessons). When I step inside I realise it is a rehearsal. Gathered on the steps infront of an ornate rood screen, are singers and musicians, the music grand and beautiful. I stand, slightly self concious watching them, I am not sure where the man in the knapsack has gone. The church has a beautiful, high roof with wooden, carved trusses, a wooden gallery with carved angels looking down and tiled panels, like murals along the walls, almost pre-raphaelite drawn, showing scenes of Christ's life, and slightly awkward paintings of the stations of the cross sandwiched between each panel. The church is really clean, the carpets just vacuumed, everything polished. I am slightly embarrassed to interrupt the rehearsal as I look quickly round, worrying about mud from my boots on the carpet. When I leave I pick up a leaflet for the concert that evening, Handel's Coronation Anthems.

I know, I think, cycling home, I will let myself finally buy the book of London maps, that I have eyed covetously in the nearby amazing map shop 'The National Map Centre' on Caxton St. The shop is where I have found many of the old maps for this project. But this book 'Mapping London' which charts in maps, the growth and expansion of London from the initial clusters of population on the banks of the Thames costs £39.95 and I have looked and looked at it but not let myself buy it. I thought I would ask for it for christmas, but my mum and dad have already bought me an expensive cup and saucer to match the set I am collecting. ( I know, I know, I don't think my priorities are always right, but lovely things do make me happy.) And there isn't really anyone else I can ask for such an expensive book. But the building of this city, has become, suddenly the key - the population and expansion of London and for a moment with excitement, I think oh go on, just buy it. But the shop is not open. Perhaps a good thing, with christmas, my son's birthday and swimming lessons to pay for.

Instead I buy 'London. A Social History' by Roy Porter from the Westminster Bookshop on Artillery Row. Which is like a bookshop in a film, or a portal to another, slightly older, well-read world. I also buy a copy of 'On Churches' John Betjeman for my dad's christmas present and the nice, northern, gently spoken, man who is passionate about the books he sells gives me a pound off and we talk about the snow.

This is what I garner.

Around 1700 Celia Fiennes was impressed to find 'London joyned with Westminster...'

By 1760 When Lord Chesterfield built his mansion facing Hyde Park, the site was so rural he quipped he would need a dog for company.

It is just numbers really:

'London grew astonishingly in the nineteenth century, with its hordes of labourers and landlords, it pen-pushers and porters. Between 1841 and 1851 alone, some 330,000 migrants flooded into the capital, representing a staggering 17 per cent of London's total population. Of these 46,000 came from Ireland, fleeing famine and swelling the London Irish community to around 130,000. In the 1850s a further 286,000 migrants arrived; in the 1860s 331,000 Before 1840 the majority came from the south-east but by the 1860s, with agriculture in crisis, the net widened; all were drawn by the hope of work.'

Tobias Smollett's country character Matt Bramble says, 'What I left open fields, producing hay and corn, I now find covered with streets and squares and palaces and churches....Pimlico and Knightsbridge are now almost joined to Chelsea and Kensington and if this infatuation continues for half a century, I suppose the whole country of Middlesex will be covered with brick'

And a beautiful description by H. Llewellyn Smith,
'The contagion of numbers, the sense of something going on, the theatres, and the music halls, the brightly lighted streets and busy crowds - all, in short, that makes the difference between the Mile End fair on a Saturday night and a dark muddy land, with no glimmer of gas and with nothing to do. Who could wonder that men are drawn into such a vortex?'

Knightsbridge was, until 1824, a boggy and dangerous route threatened by highwaymen and thought too marshy for development. From 1825 Thomas Cubitt, the master builder developer who worked for the Marquess of Westminster, and on many projects ( including the nearby east front of Buckingham Palace, parts of Stoke Newington, Clapham, Camden and Pimlico) brought gravel up on barges from St Katherine's Dock ( which he was also developing ) and laid out his most prestigious development including Belgrave Square. He was the first builder to employ his own craftsmen and labourers. Also cannily he established brick fields in Barnsbury and built Cubitt Town on the Isle of Dogs, as a complex of sawmills, timber wharves, and cement and iron works which serviced his many projects. Thomas Cundy Junior ( there were three - senior, junior and the third) who all worked for the Grosvenor Estates alongside Cubitt designed St Paul's at Wilton Place. Initially ( and with great controversy ) the church was the first in London to champion the victorian Tractarian movement, ideas coming from Oxford emphasising a return to the ritual and traditions of the Catholic church and condemning the state as weakening the church.


I worry that I am an old fashioned mum, an old fashioned person, caught up in all these thoughts about old theological beliefs and educational toys. City boxes are not,after all, X boxes. Though my youngest son recently made a Wii out of a cardboard box, drew switches and cut handsets from card, biro-ing controls. The three of us played imaginary Wii for an hour. Tennis, running races, skateboarding, and ski ing. It was really good fun, though I wondered what the neighbours across the way would have thought at our strange antics. Though they probably just thought we were playing Wii. I don't think imaginary Wii and real Wii look much different from a distance.
Infact I have already bought the boys one for christmas ( though they haven't even asked for one - I think they just don't believe I will go for it) - so the neighbours will have to get used to us waving our arms around in our small living room. Though on Sunday, glancing across, Great Peter Street while we were having breakfast we saw framed in the window of one of the flats opposite a big, naked lady, like a Rembrandt painting. Which has made us laugh for days.

Finally, I read in the Guardian magazine this weekend in an interview with Gordon Brown and it says in a sneery kind of way,

'Brown would probably have been more at home a century or more ago when politics was about morality, principles and ideas.' Not bad things to aspire to I think, just not what we have at the moment.

This morning on Radio 4 it said Nick Clegg had been advised not to ride his bike in case someone pushes him off.


Amen

Westminster Methodist Great Hall

I can see one of the towers of the Houses of Parliament from our street and the helicopters overhead have been constant for days. It is still always a thrill however, the short walk, to Victoria Street and the sight of the London Eye squeezed between office blocks. Then the squash of the blank, concrete blocks giving way to Parliament Square. Big Ben's face familiar like a Dad's watch. The Houses of Parliament. Westminster Abbey. The peace camp tents. I live here. I always think. I live right here. With pride. Laughing at home on the night before the election that it would be possible to run out of the flat, round the block and wave to the tv cameras behind the political pundits and be back in time to watch it.

A week later, Nick Clegg twirling between the parties with the glee of Grayson Perry winning the Turner prize in a dress. Then the pair of them, school boys with men's pink, soap scrubbed faces. Our headboys. Gordon Brown a kind of left wing Coriolanus, his absolute honour and wilting strengths making tragedy inherent. I cried when he made his last speeches. He always seemed such a fundamentally good man. His son goes to my son's poor but beautifully behaved, high attaining, amazing school. Though presumably not for much longer.

Today I have been told I am no longer entitled to free dental care and glasses because I have taken on more work. I have been told that some of my childcare will not be paid because of an error. Most of my childcare isn't paid, it is just the little bit that might have been paid but won't be now. It has come as a bit of a blow. I don't think I have quite enough money to pay the rent this weekend. I don't know. I seem to fall a little bit between everything. I live in the heart of politics and just as we all are, I am it.

I had thought the Westminster Methodist Great Hall marginally nearer than Westminster Abbey, but as I get near I am not sure, they are so close to each other. Not much in it though and I decide to stick with my plan. It is a huge, white, wedding cake but though it is massive, it is somehow invisible, more like another government building than a church. But a sign says 'Whoever you are, wherever you are on life's journey. Welcome.' I walk in.

Inside I ask a man if I can just look at the church, and in the same moment see a poster for tours, 'do I have to take a tour?' I say. 'No.' he says 'you can just look'. He waves his arm around. The building is huge. 'Where do I go for the main bit?' I say. 'Upstairs.' He says.

Up the disney princess staircase, up and up, the curling, curving, ornate and marble stairs, to a sort of huge conference hotel corridor and then the doors into the ...........I don't know what the proper word is.......but I think assembly must be near. Like a parliament, I think. A god parliament. I didn't expect this, though I realise it is handy to be able to use parliament as a theme. There are chairs fanning out in neat rows, then a balcony with more chairs, all in the round. Except the focus at the middle is a low wooden stage and behind a wizard of oz organ. Absolutely massive. There are three cleaners staring at me as I enter, an industrial vacuum cleaner balanced on chairs. I bob and nod and smile at them. But they are busy. Cleaning and staring. The room has that funny brushed hush of corporate carpet. Above an enormous shallow dome, that should be beautiful and sort of is, but not quite enough. I don't stay.

Downstairs there is a table laid out with goody bags for some conference within the building. For a minute I think they say Prada. But they don't. A smaller more intimate chapel, at one side with book shelves just of the bible in the entrance. A statue of John Wesley, a short, energetic man, captured in wood. In a corner of the hallway, as if only stored, is a very plain cross. Again wood, but rough, visible brackets holding it together. I think I like this best.

I had read recently ' We secularists should forget the tedious fixation on belief, forget about being 'atheist' and concentrate on a conversation about the spiritual strategies for overcoming the common human resistance to living well.' Michael McGhee. Whatever parliament, I imagine this is the question. Perhaps my own question.

Later I read that the church was opened in 1912, built on the site of a music hall with £250,000 of the 'Million Guinea Fund' a fund where over a million Methodists gave a guinea. That the church was designed so that it did not look like a church, so that people from all walks of life would enter. That the suffragettes came here, and Ghandi.

Writing this at night. The helicopters still overhead. I hear Big Ben chime. I imagine David and Samantha Cameron listening too.


Amen.