St. Paul’s, Saturday evening |
Daytime, the City of London is ordinary. Ordinary streets, sober office buildings in pale grey stone or shiny glass. Add people in the streets, a few trees here and there, flowerbeds, and the brown waters of the Thames, and it’s a decent enough place to be – but it isn’t very exciting, really.
As it gets dark, the balance changes. Ordinariness is replaced by spots of stark beauty against a dim background, and the City becomes quiet and beautiful. The City is very calm in the evening. The noise and life that would fill a high street at night – bars, neon lights, KFC and McD – is conspicuously absent, and the little that’s there is concentrated to a few spots.
At night, all the flat grey buildings shift into the background, and others step forward. Church steeples are lit up by white lights. St. Paul’s, which is just a large grey cathedral during the day (as much as any cathedral can be “just a cathedral”), glows against the night sky, majestic and huge. Three of its sides have undergone a thorough cleaning over the past couple of years (the fourth side is still wrapped in scaffolding and white plastic) which has made it look even more beautiful.
Tower 42 | Lloyds | The Gherkin |
These 3 images (C) Freefoto.com |
The top of Tower 42 (NatWest Tower) is bright blue and green; Lloyd’s steely sides are electric blue; the Gherkin (or the Swiss RE building) is topped with red sparks.
A few years ago, when the Gherkin was finished but still unoccupied, all of it was lit at night: every other floor was electric blue, and every other one was bright green. Some nights it even had huge floodlights pointing at the sky. It was a marvellous sight.
Nights are soft in London. In the country, the night sky can be a wide expanse of stark black with sharp stars. But in London, there is always a slight fuzziness to the sky, even when it isn’t really cloudy, and stars are few and dim. So the shining lights of the City have no competition.
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