St Pauls dome at night
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 - (C) freefoto.com Lloyds - (C) freefoto.com Gherkin - (C) freefoto.com
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.