Love & the City

“You are by yourself, against this huge crowd of people. You just need to be with someone to bare it.” Sometimes in casual conversations, the most intimate things come up. My colleague Anna was opening up about how she felt about the city: about love and the city. Her sentence, put there, just like an undeniable truth, made me think of when I broke up with my ex boyfriend and most of my foreign friends for some reason were expecting me to want to go back to Italy.

Indeed, in these three years in the city I have met many people, especially women, who are in the city to follow their love, rather than their individual dreams. Many actually have given up those dreams, in order to stay close to their men, and live in a chosen condition of depending from someone else’s decisions.

When I came to London, I was with someone. Although from the outside it might have looked like I came to the city to follow him, I had met him on the Isle of Wight and had already planned to study in London, so it just worked perfectly by chance that I started dating someone from there!

Being in a couple, my experience within the city was different than it would have been if I was single. Apart from the obvious personal life situations, such as having a family to refer to and a friendly house to go to when feeling home sick, I got to know two different parts of London very well at the same time. My halls of residence were in Trent Park, quite far from the city, but if I could see the word Oakwood on the tube map, it meant to me that we were still in it. There was not much to explore, I have to say, but me and my fellow students were quite happy having walks in Enfield town, Cockfosters and enjoying the night life that the campus offered us.

The other part of London I was discovering was Shad Thames. I used to spend all my weekends and many evenings there. After my first year of university, I even lived there for the whole summer. While halls were a place I never belonged to, this was a place I was starting to call home. I was in love with Shad Thames just as much as I was with my then boyfriend. For an islander, the view of the river was somehow a relief from the absence of the sea, and the possibility to see Tower Bridge from the window was such an uplifting view, especially at night, when the water is still and you can see the reflection of the bridge on it. There were a few peculiar factors that made it a very unique experience: television host Paul O’Grady was our next door neighbour, and it was not unusual to walk away from the building on a Sunday morning, finding oneself in the middle of a film set. I was living in a privileged area; I knew it and enjoyed every minute of it!

And then it came: the break up! My attachment to the pebbled street, and my exciting walk back and forth to love was a huge issue to overcome. I missed everything about it: the fish platter at Brown’s; the Circle with the horse’s statue in the middle of it; the Design Museum, where I saw Tim Walker’s exhibition; the best burgers at the May Flower, where I had my 25^th birthday party; the sun on the balcony before going to work; the wave of workers by the Hall of London; the big glass buildings around the Scoop.

I did not go to that area for a while, and when it happened that I had to –e.g. to be a tourist guide to friends and family- Tower Bridge was still the great set of a love story, as well as my favourite part of the city.

Perhaps one good thing about a village is that in fact, it’s not big enough for you to save certain “special places” forever. The main road is the one where you go through every day of your life, and that little romantic corner where you kissed your first love is also where your mum parks the car when in a hurry to get the bread.

I truly broke up with the whole part of the city that I almost named home, and as much it was heart breaking and incredibly hard, I had a whole new start for myself, many new places to explore, and a person to blame for never taking me to see them!