Rumour has it, the city is going to start reopening on the 15th of June. This means that non-essential retail shops (but not pubs, restaurants or hair salons) will start opening their doors once again. Whether the city and country are ready for this is a different matter entirely. My friends in China and across Asia are starting to resume business as somewhat usual--track and trace is in place as is compulsory mask wearing. The UK is nowhere near that. We're far too 'individual' for measures that would protect the common good. And so we will be here, in this no man's land of virus, for the foreseeable.
As sod's law dictates, I can't remember a sunnier several weeks in London. We've had maybe one day of rain and 50 days of blue, blue skies and warm weather. What better time to hoof it over to Covent Garden and back?
On our Saturday walk, we were greeted with quiet streets just about everywhere. There were some people out. But some was not many and with shops still very much closed, people didn't mill about.
Exmouth Market
Signs to remain two metres apart have become ubiquitous throughout the city. Tape lines spaced 2 metres apart scale the perimeter of grocery stores, corner shops and cafes that remain open.
At the weekend, Covent Garden is usually teeming with street performers and slow walking tourists. We normally avoid it, pardon the pun, like the plague. Yesterday, we were greeted with a much serener scene. Actually, post-apocalyptic comes to mind; the entire centre was bereft of people.
Leicester Square was even creepier. We actually didn't recognise it without the masses of people queueing to get tickets for the cinema, lounging in the square or um-ing and aw-ing about whether a third visit to M&M world was feasible.
Had we turned left to Trafalgar Square instead of right into Chinatown, we would have been greeted with a more normal London scene. Thousands of protestors took to the streets for the first in a series of Black Lives Matter protests, another event added to the history of 2020. I'd like to hope we'll look back on this year in the future and see it as a major turning point against institutional racism, both in the UK and USA. But the news out of the US continues to terrify me. How do you fight large-scale complicity?
A short shuffle away, Chinatown's lanterns stood out in stark contrast to the empty. Some restaurants recently started opening to takeaway and so it was one of the slightly busier parts of the city.
Soho
Chinatown's 'busy' only made Soho's empty all the more stark. It was a little heartbreaking to see the normally bustling streets completely empty, cafes and restaurants largely shut up. The men of G-A-Y stood out front, dressed in drag, peddling smoothies on their smoothie bike. But that was about it. Iconic Bar Italia shut. Delightful Balans Cafe shut.
And so we made our way back to North London via the backstreets of Holborn. The blue skies were backdrop to the widespread green. We had moved from early spring to summer in the blink of a lockdown.
