London's way more intimate and smaller scale than I remember it from the last time I was here. Of course, the last time I was here I was walking around in a fog of extreme sleep deprivation/post partum depression with a three month old Isabel strapped to my front in a baby bjorn. Then, the city seemed massive, dirty, overwhelming. Now it seems so calm and clean and nonthreatening. This is not entirely to do with my state of mind, though that's part of it. It's also because we live in tony and bohemian and near everything Notting Hill as opposed to Stoke Newington, home to poor Orthodox Jews and Turkish immigrants, and three buses from the center of London, as I remember it.
I love our neighborhood. It's less glamorous and sophisticated than Chelsea and Knightsbridge, more Upper West Side or West Village than Upper East Side or Park Avenue. But, really, these comparisons are off the mark since London is so very different from New York City. Notting Hill is the most felicitous combination of white painted row houses, bending into Terraces and Crescents enfolding quiet and green private parks with benches and fences (over which Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts climbed in that forgettable movie hit of the mid-1990s); stone churches, shops ranging from news agents to plumbing supply stores to organic food emporia and impossibly hip boutiques; cobblestone mews(es)? and housing estates; and all on a scale that is smaller, less frenetic than New York, or for that matter Chicago or Boston. Is it that the streets are more narrow and the buildings less looming? I think it could be as simple as this. In NYC you get so little sky. Here, I walked to pick up Isabel at school today and passed by St. Lukes's Mews framed by a charming arch. I thought "what's the big pink and white building in the distance? It wasn't a building, it was pure, uninterrupted sky.
