The View from London During the Coronavirus Pandemic

The city looks not so much post-apocalyptic as post-capitalist, as if the fever of consumption that characterizes it had finally burned itself out.
Flowers on ground
Photograph by Peter Marlow / Magnum

Regent Street, in central London, is a sweeping boulevard laid out by the architect John Nash at the request of his close friend and client the Prince Regent, later King George IV. Nash, who had made his name building country houses for aristocrats, was a Georgian-era precursor of New York’s Robert Moses: a town planner who sought to separate the poorer, more squalid eastern side of London from its newer, grander, wealthier west. Nash’s instrument for dividing London was Regent Street, a wide concourse devoted to luxury shopping. The journalist George Augustus Sala described it in 1858 as “an avenue of superfluities—a great trunk road in Vanity Fair.” When the street celebrated its two-hundredth anniversary, last year, superfluities were still abundantly represented among the retailers that could afford its rents: Coach, Burberry, Lululemon, Apple.

Apple was the first to close voluntarily. It did so on March 14th, when the company announced that all its retail stores worldwide, outside of those in China, would temporarily cease operations—displays of devices designed to invite touching having been alarmingly rebranded as possible vectors of contagion. When I rode my bike down Regent Street’s dramatic curve on the afternoon of Sunday, March 22nd, all the stores were shuttered. Apart from a couple of guys in track pants eying the Rolex display at Mappin & Webb, the upscale jewelry store, the sidewalks were empty. We’re accustomed to reach for the phrase “post-apocalyptic” to describe an urban landscape devoid of life, and the Christian preacher with the microphone and the amp who was haranguing an almost deserted Piccadilly Circus added to the dystopian atmosphere. But what the streets really recalled were images of London during the economic crisis of the nineteen-seventies, when Prime Minister Edward Heath imposed a three-day week to conserve fuel, and power cuts regularly dimmed even the busiest thoroughfares. Now the city looks not so much post-apocalyptic as post-capitalist, as if the fever of consumption that has come to characterize the metropolis had finally burned itself out.

That Sunday ended a weekend that was a turning point for London. Schools closed on Friday afternoon, remaining open only for the children of “key workers”: nurses, police, supermarket staff. Students in the equivalent of the tenth and twelfth grades, who had been expecting in summer term to sit an intense sequence of exams, for which they have been preparing for two years, were informed that exams were cancelled, and they’d be assessed by their teachers and mock-exam results instead. “She feels like she’s been fired,” the father of a devastated sixteen-year-old girl told me. Public transport had already contracted. On Friday evening, the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, appeared at the government’s now daily press conference to announce that cafés, bars, restaurants, and night clubs should close that evening and not reopen the next day. Johnson longs to be liked; his default manner is a blithe fulsomeness, which even in the current crisis he has had trouble shedding. “We’re taking away the ancient, inalienable right of freeborn people of the United Kingdom to go to the pub,” he said, as if delivering the news with a jovial dig in the ribs. (A week later, Johnson released a self-recorded video in which he announced that he had tested positive for the coronavirus, and was in isolation at 10 Downing Street.) In contrast, Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, appeared statesmanlike when, in the same press conference, he announced that the government would pay eighty per cent of the salaries of workers put on furlough because of the virus, up to twenty-five hundred pounds a month. Within days, the Transport Secretary, Grant Shapps, effectively nationalized Britain’s railways, to prevent the private companies that run them from collapsing. Having celebrated a landslide victory in the elections last December, the Conservative Party may end up introducing the most socialist policies Britain has seen in decades.

Beyond Regent Street, London’s theatre district, around Leicester Square, was empty. Earlier in the week, Johnson had called on the public to avoid theatres and cinemas, but stopped short of ordering them shut, angering venue operators who would thereby be deprived of possible insurance payouts to cover their losses. By Friday, the order to close had come. Farther north, ambulances with wailing sirens headed to University College Hospital, on the Euston Road, while nearby Harley Street, famous for its private medical clinics, was deserted. On Saturday, the government announced that a deal had been struck with Britain’s private-hospital sector, making an extra twenty thousand staff, eight thousand hospital beds, and twelve hundred ventilators available.

I passed an ambulance parked on the street outside a block of housing for elderly people, its doors open and its stretcher readied for use. Across the street lay the green expanse of Primrose Hill, one of London’s loveliest parks. It was Mothering Sunday, and, while the Prime Minister had urged citizens to call their mothers and not to visit them, earlier in the week he had reassured Londoners that going outside for fresh air was still something they could do. As a result, the parks seemed hardly less crowded than they would have been on any other bright spring day; walkers and joggers on narrow paths observed social distancing only up to the point of mathematical possibility. On either side of Regent’s Park Road, a pretty street of upscale boutiques and restaurants, rival florists were open, their storefronts bursting with bouquets, as if for a wedding, or a funeral. ♦


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