St. Martin-in-the-Fields, London

June 2004

Muted sunlight through two levels of windows in the church lit up the chamber ensemble, as they struck up. The music immediately soared and climbed to the high vaulted ceiling, reaching a crescendo and then doubling back again. As the 'cello anchored, the violins sang out a sweet melody. The audience sat rapt, as bows caressed strings into the sounds that filled the church, throbbing into every corner, under every pew, into the galleries on either side of the nave, and into every little crevice in the dark woodwork. The notes counterpointed briefly, changed key, with motifs repeating like the gilded plasterwork on the ceiling, varying, yet the same, coming from the instruments held at the centre of the church by students of the Royal College of Music.

Yet, despite the church's sober, almost drab, Georgian character, all cream and brown, the ardour, ecstacy, and youthful triumph in the music did not seem out of place. The Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields faded quietly into the background as the music took over. Only the music mattered; only the sound that reverberated subtly off the walls. We sat there, bound by the magical strings stretched on the polished violins, violas and 'cellos, their vibrations soaring and swooping down again in our ears until the performers had put down their instruments. I heard the piece, Mendelssohn's Octet for strings in E major, Op. 20, faintly and suddenly in my mind over the next few weeks -- and even now, its sounds linger.

That lunchtime concert appeared to be only one of the aspects of London that the city itself takes entirely for granted. We had entered the famous church with its soaring, elegant steeple, through its portico, after climbing the steps leading up from St. Martin's Lane, and had then promptly gone down to the crypt via a little wooden staircase. There, in the darkness and cold grey-black stones of the crypt, the church was running a flourishing restaurant. The steaming hot pasta and the vivid reds, greens and purples of the vegetables on the shiny white ceramic plate seemed to mock the rubbed and weathered memorial stone laid in the floor near our table, its lettering almost unreadable. Further down, in an incongruously bright area of the crypt, crowded with children and their parents, was a museum to one of those quintessentially British pursuits: brass rubbing. On the whole, the crypt of St. Martin-in-the-Fields seemed like no self-respecting resting place for the dead.

The reason, of course, is simply too much history. For those whose history goes back a mere three or four centuries, everything is to be preserved; for those who have so much history that they cannot keep track of it, it has to update itself or perhaps be destroyed. London takes its history for granted, or so it seemed. And perhaps that is necessary in order to remain a living city; perhaps it is not only necessary, but also fitting. The river flows on, as it has through the centuries, but its banks are not as they once were. Perhaps the city itself has to change continually, and some vestiges of the past have to either fade away, gathering grey dust and silver spiderwebs in the vaults of memory, or be reinvented to see a new day in a new avatar. Truth be told, it was not hard to digest that lunch, even if my thoughts wandered occasionally to the souls of those buried there.

Wandering out onto Trafalgar Square, consulting the ever-valuable A-Z guide, it was difficult to imagine that St. Martin's had once stood "in the fields" and that cows and sheep probably grazed placidly around the spot where Nelson's Column rises. Red double decker buses rounded the corners, tourists took pictures, workmen bustled around scaffolding at the National Gallery, pigeons fluttered around. The fields have long been paved. Only an evocative name lives on.

(Previously published elsewhere as part of a travelogue)