40 years ago | London, UK | 13th February 1984

Forty years ago, I made my first ever visit to London. It’s fair to say I was amazed and disappointed in equal measure by the mid-1980s version of our nation’s capital. And many of its shortcomings then would seem unimaginable to anyone making their first visit there today….

We didn’t really do holidays and weekend breaks as a family for most of the Eighties. The business was growing and work seemed to be all-consuming. And so it was on this particular half-term weekend. We’d only gone to London so my Dad could visit Crufts and see if the dog market was a viable area for diversification. Having built so success in the equine sector from shows like the Horse of the Year Show, it was an obvious progression to find an equivalent in a similar market.

We took the train down, from Wigan North Western to Euston. Then as now (or at the very least, the last time I did this), we descended from the main hall to the dingy, filthy taxi rank below. Our taxi ride took in Trafalgar Square, The Mall and Buckingham Palace. At the time, it seemed like that was just the way were going. Looking back, my Dad had obviously decided to do a bit of quick sightseeing on the cheap, on the way to our hotel, wherever it was.

My over-riding impression was that the place was decidedly grimy and shabby around the edges. This was not the London of today, with its gleaming skyscrapers, sandblasted stonework and sanitised tourist photo spots. This was the grittier, patched-up, down-at-heel version, that you can only see in films of the time, like An American Werewolf in London or The Long Good Friday. A London with its famous, historic sights, still caked in the sooty residue of its infamous smog, visibly unloved and trading in faded grandeur, unapologetically displaying its urban decay and reminders of declining industries.

The clearest representation of this juxtaposition of iconic and eye-sore came when we walked over Tower Bridge. Stand on the South Bank side of the bridge, we looked west and could take in ‘Big Ben’*, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the NatWest Tower and, just across the river, the Tower of London. Looking upstream, you saw the real-life version of the stylised, familiar ‘Thames TV’ logo that used to appear at the end of so many television programmes on weekday evenings.

The view downstream, could not have been less evocative. Derelict warehouses, idle cranes, dark, foreboding facades, all reminders of London’s lost status as a world-leading port. Whether through arrogance, logistical weakness or simply a lack of investment, the inevitable march towards containerisation had seen its once-thriving docklands by-passed by far more efficient, far less romantic places like Tilbury and Felixstowe. It was the manifestation of a London stuck in its obsolete past, although the first signs of its confident future were emerging.

The building nearest the south end of Tower Bridge, on the estuary side had been converted from an old warehouse into what looked like luxury apartments. It stood out because there was no evidence of this imaginative repurposing anywhere else. Even then, it provided an oasis of possibility in a desert of disrepair. It was clear to me, even then, that if London was ever going to be as bold and important as it so often liked us to think it to be, this really needed to happen everywhere else you could see, as you looked eastwards from Tower Bridge.

Nearly five years later, when watching A Fish Called Wanda at the cinema, when Kevin Kline’s character ‘Otto’ dangles John Cleese’s character’Archie’ from the window of his friend’s apartment, with the Thames at low tide in the background, I felt, perhaps a little naively, that I knew exactly where that scene was filmed. I’m not sure if I was right about this one-time enclave of redevelopment by then but it’s still significant because it would have been amongst the first films to reflect the soon-to-be burgeoning trend of docklands ‘gentrification’.

Not long after, came the emergence of Canary Wharf, with its (then) ‘Tallest Building In Britain’ at 1 Canada Square. As the new millennium approached, the Dome at Greenwich signified a further march of time in the area’s fortunes. All the time, London’s burgeoning success was driving property prices and, in turn fuelling further redevelopment further and further down the river and inland.

In the late 1990s, I was fortunate to be invited to our industry’s annual consumer awards, which, for a time, were held on a Thames cruiser. Each year, we’d embark from the Royal Festival Pier, meander down the river, to around the Thames Barrier, turn around and amble back. Amongst the wining and dining, varied conversation and award-giving, it offered a perfect opportunity to see, each year, the extent of the eastward sprawl of the city, only a decade and a half after my first, dismal view of the area. I often thought back to that moment, to the fact that even to a ten year-old, it was glaringly obvious that this was all so inevitable.

I didn’t take the pictures below, but I’ve attempted to credit them both. They were taken 36 years apart from the top floor of Guy’s Hospital, south of the river, looking at Tower Bridge and beyond. The years are not a perfect match for this story; the first image was taken in 1980, four years before I first stood there. But they neatly convey the transformation I knew was necessary and that we eventually saw.

I’ve been back to London countless times in the last forty years, for sporting pilgrimages, for work, sightseeing, visiting Parliament, going to The Palace, and enjoying so many nights out around the town. While it’s now immeasurably better-presented, visibly more confident and far more tourist-driven, it still amazes and disappoints me in equal measure – for a variety of reasons. I’ve always found the place to be like a heady cocktail. Sometimes you’re in the mood for it and the buzz it offers is like nothing else. And then you realise that, however much you enjoyed that buzz, it’s not a reality you want to sustain for any more than a short time. And by knowing when you’ve had enough, you can better look forward to the next time.

And I do still look forward to the next time…

* I know, I know. “‘Big Ben’ is the bell, not the tower” – but we all know what we’re talking about though, don’t we?