Getting Pickled in London

You might infer from my essay about Tate Modern, where I dumped on a beloved contemporary art museum, art films, and giant spiders, that I am hard to impress. I see why you might think that.

Today I dispel that perception by writing positively. I write about a work of art that left me in awe. It is not a painting, or a sculpture, or a movie. It is not music, and neither poetry nor prose. It is not, as you might otherwise soon surmise, a building.

I will explain.

As we left Tate Modern, Denise and I talked about what to do next. Neither of us was interested in another museum. I looked at my phone and suggested that we walk 1.3 miles to the “Gherkin.” Denise looked skeptical. “The point isn’t the building,” I argued. “The point is the walk.” I meant it. Mostly.

“Gherkin” is the popular name for that shiny blue London office building, the cylindrical structure with a tapered top and a line spiraling around the core. If you have seen any post-2004 movie set in London, I guarantee that you have glimpsed the Gherkin and thought, maybe even said, “Holy crap, that is one weird building.”

We didn’t notice this right away, but we hadn’t walked far when Denise said, “Doesn’t it seem weird that there is so little traffic in this capital city, during tourist season, during business hours?” I looked around and thought about the previous ten or fifteen minutes. She was right. In this city of nearly nine million people, downtown traffic was sufficiently light that people could safely jaywalk across complicated multi-lane intersections. They were doing it all the time. We were doing it.

The next thing we noticed was the easy co-existence of old and new. Low-rise stone buildings frame the view of shimmering silver skyscrapers. And these were not only those boring monoliths we are used to seeing in New York or Denver or Los Angeles. No, the people who built these structures cared about more than merely maximizing rentable square footage. They wanted a statement.

A conventional city planner would be aghast at the contrast.

But the contrast gives London a uniquely energetic vibe.

As we mosey along, gawking at the tableau, I start to feel giddy. This odd mix of architecture is so bizarre I am a little befuddled, but in a pleasant way. It is like walking through a surrealistic painting, one simultaneously depicting the past, and the future. I am delightfully disoriented. I’m feeling a little high, almost like it is Super Bowl Sunday and I have just finished the first beer of the morning.

According to Google Maps, we still have another ten minutes or so before we reach the Gherkin. The app displays a route with lots of turns. Another quarter mile at least, I reckon. Denise points to her right. “There it is,” she says.

She is right, of course. Denise knows a lot about pickles and she wasn’t about to mistake another building for the Gherkin. I run ten or twenty yards for a view less obstructed by trees. It is awesome. And I mean that literally, as in, “I am awestruck.”

I could show you a picture focused on the Gherkin. Centered around the Gherkin. But you already have seen those images. More than that, as fantastic as the Gherkin is, it is the context that makes the scene awesome, as in, slack-jawed dumbstruck.

I stitched together two different photos to offer a wider angle without distortion.

As you can see, the Gherkin is not really blue. You think it is blue because movie directors and photographers favor capturing the image on a clear day, when the gray glass panels reflect a blue sky. I assure you, however that the more subdued Gherkin is no less striking. Suddenly finding it among these smaller and much older brick and stone buildings is like bending over and intently following an ant’s progress across a wide street, only to feel your head hit something, which makes you look up, and you realize that you have bumped into Optimus Prime, leader of the Autobots, which, up to now, you have seen only in the movies.

Yeah, I stand behind that analogy. Finding the Gherkin was exactly like stumbling upon an actual Transformer.

But the work of art that left me in awe, the one mentioned in my opening remarks, is not just the pickle. It is not even mostly the pickle. It’s the safe and relatively quiet streets, the majestic old buildings, the shiny new towers, and the youthful business-minded pedestrians. It is the way old and new are mashed together, each treated with equal reverence.

The greatest work of art in London, is London.

And it is one transcendently weird masterpiece.