BUILDING ON ENGLISH HISTORY

There are a million reasons to love England but the weather is not usually one of them, unless you are into mildew, chilblains and the aroma of wet wool.

But these last several days London has been as warm as Los Angeles, and what was evidently the wettest and most miserable June and July of recent memory, has left the city as green in August as it usually is in April.

The parks are blooming marvels, the various shades of emerald interrupted only by acres of pale flesh quickly tanning under the unaccustomed sun.

The climate of the moment appears to concur with an air of almost feverish prosperity. Those tall, thin, fragile-looking cranes that have been part of the Los Angeles skyline for years are now more numerous than steeples here.

You’d have thought that there was more history than all the property developers on Earth could bulldoze away or obscure with their new works. And yet in London, as in Paris, the returning visitor receives a far stronger impression of modernity than of antiquity.

Thankfully, London’s soupy soil won’t accommodate the really towering temples of Manhattan or latter-day Los Angeles. But London’s new office buildings seem to an amateur’s eye to lean, all too often, toward a blocky, vacant-eyed impersonality, with little of the style, classical or quirky, that has given this city’s streets their charm and interest. International anonymity looks like the prevailing mode.

Yet the new work, which is by no means invariably uninteresting, all suggests a returning vitality that I had missed in the ‘70s, when London had ceased to be swinging London and the natives were bitterly regarding their city as little more than a kind of summer camp for the Middle East and the United States.

The doubters argue that it is a bubble that will burst when the North Sea oil runs out, that it is based on speculation rather than real productivity and that the country, like the United States, is running up a mammoth bill that will one day have to be faced. What is also true is that London, and the south of England more generally, is an oasis of prosperity as opposed to the high unemployment and the pains of readjustment to a service economy in the north and elsewhere.

Yet London is a town of scaffoldings, cranes, excavations and temporary detours--maddening in an ancient city whose narrow streets often seem like detours to begin with.

Nowhere is the boom more dramatic than in the docklands area of London’s East End, where the place names include the Limehouse of “Limehouse Blues” and the East India Docks. In this place of abandoned warehouses and rotting and unused wharves, hundreds of acres have been cleared and high-tech office buildings and high-priced condos are going up.

The condos, seen as profitable speculations, are selling for upwards from $175,000, on the presumption that the supportive amenities, the chic boutiques and restaurants that are presently in short supply, are sure to follow. It is boom-town time.

Stanley Kubrick created parts of Vietnam in the vicinity, but very shortly Docklands will be a city within the city, with its own elevated railway. (The Queen came down not long ago to set the first cars in motion. To everyone’s embarrassment, they didn’t move and the bugs are still being ironed out.)

Philosophically, as everyone has noted, Margaret Thatcher’s England and Ronald Reagan’s United States are closely attuned. One common chord is that the arts have had hard going.

Support for the subsidized theaters which are the artistic glory of Britain--the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National and the provincial repertory companies--has been sharply cut. The RSC has just had a temporary reprieve from bankruptcy. Its ability to function as adventurously as it should is, like the National’s, at heavy risk.

The independence of the BBC, one of the glories of Britain and the world, has been under sharp attack from the government, and although it appears to have won its battles, it is not easy to say what subtle and long-range inhibiting effects the pressures could have. The attempts by the Nixon Administration to hobble PBS come to mind.

Yet BBC television carries on and so does BBC radio. Fred Allen’s famous line always comes to mind--he said BBC radio starts at 7 in the morning with a lecture on how to stuff a field mouse and just builds from there. In fact, its four channels cover a range of tastes from pop music to the most rarefied corners of music and spoken drama, all leavened on all the channels with expert news and commentaries.

And, if you can’t stand to stare at nothing, there is always cricket on BBC television. They are still talking in the sports columns about ways of speeding up the game. They were a quarter century ago to my certain knowledge.

I looked in on the first day’s play of England vs. The Rest of the World at Lords, and the players in white on the sparkling green beneath a cloudless blue sky were a sight for Constable’s eye. But I was reminded once again of the late Lord Boothby’s famous remark that the British had never been a very religious people and so invented cricket to give themselves some notion of eternity.

But the English batsmen appeared to be off to a rousing start. It must have been the weather.