On My Climbing the Monument to the Great Fire of London
Today, I climbed the Monument to the Great Fire of London.
A column of stone, it stands off Fish Street Hill like a scroll stood up on one end. At the top, a copper vase of flames and 160 feet below, a history of the Great Fire etched into a flat white stone.
A renaissance man dressed in stockings, hat and powdered wig greets me at the door. He tells me the stair count and about the three pound charge but assures me the view is well worth it. Cutting through character, someone asks how often he climbs it.
“Everyday,” he says. “It’s the best job in the world.”
I walk away and make it a block, before turning around and paying my three pounds. Anyone that says he has the best job in the world is worth a few quid and moments of my time.
The trip up involves climbing 311 shallow steps, the stairwell twirling upward into a sky of cloudy Earl Grey. Along the corridor, slit windows provide sprouts of natural light accompanied by the occasional draft of benzene swept in by the wind below. Tourists shrink in order to pass, and apologize in Spanish, German, French, Japanese and Italian accents, pushing to continue their adventure in the opposite direction. By the time I reach the 300th step, light has began to build and I hear muffled voices unaccompanied by the echo of repeating footsteps.
As I step out, the view from the terrace hits me like a splash of cold water — London sprawled out in a stretch of black rooftops, intermittent with construction cranes and peekaboo alleyways. On my left is the “Walkie Talkie” building on 20 Fenchurch Street, beside it, the iconic 30 St. Mary Axe, also known as “the Gherkin”, once the Baltic Exchange but so damaged during an Provisional IRA bombing it had to rebuilt into a Faberge egg.
Continuing counterclockwise my eyes arrive at the northwest where a rising hill of concrete walls follow the straight of King William Street, one of the first sites to receive Hitler’s 57-day bombing.
It immediately seems the Monument isn’t so much a tribute to the Great Fire as much as it is a tribute to the resiliency of London — a city’s legacy built on fire, not only accidental but by bombings from the Nazis, Provisional IRA and Muslim extremists. Through all, the Monument has survived with her city’s walls — the details refurbished,the destruction replaced, the scars covered up like a poorly powdered bruise.
I look further left and am drawn to the approaching River Thames as it slips through the London Bridge beside the pyramid of The Shard. On the bridge, tourists snap photographs of the river as it passes underneath them and continues on, only to be swallowed under the peaks of Tower Bridge.
From the spindle of the Monument, the cityscape of London barely hides a storyline of people who have, and are still, paying a heavy price for once ruling 1/5 of the world’s entire population. The United Kingdom is now an overpopulated series of islands; a population underserved by civil services burdened by unemployed civilians and illegal immigrants, many of which from countries once ruled.
Legacy
And while the British will not let on to what bruises lie beneath or what regret lies upon their shoulders, the Monument speaks for them — that these are the people of the stiff upper lip, the originators of “Keep Calm and Carry On,” the tea-drinkers and shortbread eaters, the colonialists, the royalists; and this is their empire of smoke and flame.
