The Changing Face of London

written in April 1999 for a Sunday Telegraph short story competition. It didn't win but I quite like it...

Between the hours of one and seven P.M. every working day, Micky Williams stands like a rock on his newspaper pitch as the waves of commuters and tourists break around him. He has worked outside the luxurious marbled walls of a commercial bank for twenty years. It is a good spot, right in the heart of the City of London.   Rain or shine, commuters coming down the uneven slope of Cornhill on their way to the tube station stop for their evening paper. 

Sometimes it’s like a bloody production line. He doesn’t have time to think as he hands out newspapers and change in perpetual motion. He tries to keep the queues to a minimum, all the poor bleeders want to do is get home after a hard day driving a desk. There is always some twit with a twenty-pound note and the smooth operation grinds to a halt while he sorts out the expensive spanner in the works. 

 “Haven’t you got any change?” He asks accusingly, as if the offender is drawing hostile attention to himself from the waiting queue on purpose. 

The offender invariably looks sheepishly away and shrugs.   Micky can remember the time when twenty-pound notes were rarer than pink socks. Times had changed. 

Talk about money, it was limitless here in the financial capital of the World. He can see it in bulging wallets and chic fashionable clothing that passes his pitch every second. It oozes out of the expensive steel and glass facades of buildings that seem to rise and fall every-time Micky bothers to look up.   

His clientele are mostly office workers, but he also speaks to tourists who think he is an unofficial guide. Some of them can’t ‘speaka-da-lingo’ so he has to shout to make himself understood. Usually he has to explain that the beautiful, but dirty, colonnades of the Royal Exchange are not in fact the entrance to the Bank of England. That is the big stone warehouse across the way. Invariably they are disappointed that such a bland, obvious structure is so unphotogenic and don’t offer a tip. 

But that is London; nothing is what it appears at first glance. The city can surprise even indigent people.   

A few years ago Micky had discovered a beautiful ornate courtyard behind a row of unappealing buildings. He had wandered through an alleyway that looked promising as a shortcut to his pitch and stumbled into a beautiful cobbled square with an unused fountain at it’s centre, neatly bordered with roses of a dozen different hues. The traffic hummed along in the background, oblivious to this haven only a dozen yards away. It is his secret garden. Few people ever go there and on bright sunny days he leaves home early, sits on the solitary stone bench in the middle of his splendid isolation and enjoys being alone in a city of ten million people. 

He has remained loyal to London all his life and this, he feels, is his reward.   He hopes his garden will stay this way forever, but he knows that very few things are sacred to a skyline that needs to adapt every time history takes a breath. Although the structures change, the people stay the same. He wishes it were the other way around. Micky hates the thin affected veneer that he catches in fragments of conversation every day. The clothes they wear - the job they do - the people they are seen with. They live in a small World. 

Micky loves this town because it makes him a part of something bigger than he can be on his own. Too many people believe the city is just a small part of their lives. They have no soul. Hopes and dreams and countless stories are crystallized into the structures surrounding them and when one is demolished it is like losing a monument to all the nameless people touched by it. Not just the people who lived and worked inside, but also the ones who passed by on their travels. Not forgetting those who stood outside and sold newspapers everyday as the World around them turned.   

Mickey has his own stories. The one he likes best – but never tells unless asked – is the day he met Royalty. Like everything else in a city where thousands of things great and small happen every second, it all went by in a flash, so that everyone never really experiences anything in London they only remember it.   

The building across the road had been pulled inside out to accommodate foreign moneymakers. Micky had watched the scaffolding go up and come down over the months with idle fascination and now the transformation was complete. The covers had been taken off and, as if by magic, a startlingly different, modern structure blinked back at him whenever he glanced that way.   

This particular day there had been a lot of activity outside the building. Sweepers swept, fussers fussed and a red carpet had been laid out incongruously across the flagstones. 

As Mickey unbundled the afternoon’s news, a motorcade suddenly appeared and drew up beside the carpet. The rear door opened and Prince Charles got out to greet a host of people that suddenly appeared. He stared uncertainly about, a stranger in his own realm, until his eyes fell on Micky across the street. The Prince whispered to the man next to him. Instead of entering the building, he crossed over the road towards the newspaperman as the police stopped the traffic. Micky held his breath as the heir to the throne approached. His Royal Highness stopped less than a foot away and held out a twenty-pound note. 

“Good afternoon, may I have a newspaper?” Asked the Prince. Micky’s World began to spin around him. It was a surreal moment in a surreal city. Micky looked at the Prince, at the people with him and then down at the proffered money. 

“Haven’t you got any change?” Micky asked instinctively.

The Prince shrugged and looked sheepishly away.