A Cocky Day in London Town

Architect David Marks dreamed he was flying over London and brought the idea to breakfast with him: “Let’s build a huge Ferris wheel for the millennium,” he proposed.

Julia Barton thought about it. “Why not put it on the Thames?” his wife and design partner suggested.

Three years later, their plan for a 500-foot-in-diameter Millennium Wheel diagonally across from the Houses of Parliament is a popular symbol of the new century for a metropolis of 7 million where--suddenly--the future is now.

What better civic signature than a wheel for a city on a roll? After long, hard years of economic recession, London is cocky again, enjoying a creative renaissance at once glitzy and well-coiffed.

Remember Mary Quant’s miniskirts and the Beatles? Well, once again London is a self-confident, frontiers-busting birthplace for ideas and innovation with strong international appeal.

“New York in the late ‘70s announced itself the center of the known world, and in the end everybody believed it. There’s that same feeling here now,” said Adam Edwards, a foreign correspondent in the Big Apple 20 years ago and now magazine editor at London’s Evening Standard newspaper.

The worlds of music, food and nightclubs, the movie and fashion industries and the arts all are flourishing. As the 21st century approaches, their denizens boast that London can lay claim to being the world’s most exciting city.

“There has been a culture change here in mind-set and environment. This is a new way to make a city,” said Camilla Cavendish, who heads a consortium of businesses and residents recasting a once-shabby neighborhood south of the Thames that now houses Europe’s largest cultural center. “This is a good time to be in London. It’s become a magnet for creative people. Other European cities don’t seem to have the critical mass or the flexible attitude.”

No Camelot, this. Poverty, crime, homelessness, overcrowding, traffic and pollution are all disturbing ingredients in London life. Grimy and “totally unacceptable,” says Graham Ashworth of the civic group Tidy Britain. “Stinking London,” says Trevor Nunn, incoming artistic director of the Royal National Theater.

Point taken. But, warts and all, London swings, regaining for many the preeminence it enjoyed three decades ago when Carnaby Street and Abbey Road lighted the world with the thrill of social revolution.

“John Lennon once said that what we had seen and learned in the ‘60s would come back. London is now seeing a revisitation of the ‘60s without the naivete,” disc jockey Johnnie Walker said. He started playing New Age music in the ‘60s on pirate Radio Caroline from a ship anchored outside territorial limits. Walker is now focused on music transmitted on the Internet.

What attracts outsiders to London are the same kinds of things that attract today’s new Londoners to change, says Robert Gordon-Clark, who works for an agency that sells the city to foreign businesses.

“We are cutting-edge, but we’re a bit old-fashioned. We have tradition but also high technology,” he said.

Confidence Returns

Recovery from recession, 18 months of cease-fire with Irish terrorists--now ended--and a returning national confidence have contributed to London’s new look. As has a world shrunk by television and computers. Surveys show what everybody knows: Londoners are leagues less insular than their parents were when the Beatles boarded a propeller-driven airliner to invade the United States.

End-of-century demands and tastes are international, and standards are high. Travel abroad is cheaper and easier than ever: Paris is closer by train than Glasgow. Been-there vacations have taught a whole generation of Londoners why the French, Italians and Spaniards take food seriously. And try to find a London cabby who hasn’t taken his family to Disney World in Florida.

“The ‘60s was only a microcosm of what we are seeing now,” said Terence Conran. Once a struggling iconoclast who brought good design to Main Street in the ‘60s, he now owns seven London restaurants, including a new one called Mezzo that is Europe’s largest.

In the Beatles’ era, one had to be audacious to consider entrepreneurship, Conran recalls. “If you asked for money at a bank, you were generally shown the door, especially if you were a penniless student with nothing but an idea. You had to mortgage the house to get money. Now there’s an economic and financial culture . . . a spirit of enterprise.”

Entrepreneur Mark Rodol, the son of a street vendor, brought back the dream of a warehouse-sized nightclub from a visit to New York. Now 29, Rodol says he’s older than any of his 48 full-time employees at the Ministry of Sound, a venerable (5-year-old) club in South London that has become a mecca for visiting American disc jockeys. Next month, a Los Angeles radio station, Groove FM, will begin music broadcasts live from the Ministry, opening with American DJ Frank Knuckles.

Pubs mainly close at 11 p.m., making “clubbing” the lifeblood of young London after hours. About-town magazines such as Time Out list more than 100 clubs offering a dazzling array of hip sounds that devotees know as house, garage, Brit-pop, techno and drum ‘n’ bass. The beat pounds from British bands like Oasis, Blur and Spice Girls at midnight-till-9 a.m. haunts like Hanover Grand, the Gardening Club and the Cross.

“There is great variety and diversity,” said Dave Swindells, clubs editor at Time Out. “In the last month or two, cutting-edge clubs have become more musically based, and some clubs are fusing music together. Drum ‘n’ bass is driving things forward just now.”

Minor themes also sound strongly across the city: a quiet revolution in poetry from a new generation of poets; five resident symphony orchestras; an annual summer series called the Proms that drew 34 orchestras and 59 conductors from around the world to 72 concerts this year, selling nearly 90% of tickets.

Filming Thrives

A metropolis sometimes ignored for months at a time by the sun and shunned for a decade by movie makers as an impossible place to work, London had been the location for 3,500 days of shooting on feature films by mid-autumn, a 50% increase over a year ago.

“This is our renaissance. I think we have about the same level of production now as New York, if not the same value,” said Christabel Albery at the London Film Commission. The new “Mission: Impossible” was a breakthrough for a city that is using relaxed bureaucracy and competitive prices to woo Hollywood and local movie makers back after inflexible, lackluster decades, she said.

“They did three major sequences in the center of London, including landing a chopper near Tower Bridge. None of that could have happened five years ago,” Albery said. Disney, Warner Bros., Columbia and Universal studios all have production crews in London working on new feature films.

Hot Cuisine

Perhaps the most astonishing change is in London’s palate. Only yesterday, the city’s food was justly famous for being bad. Today, there are a dozen Michelin-starred restaurants and about three times that many celebrity chefs. Sixteen weekly TV shows are devoted to food. Breakfast bagels and the lunchtime sandwich baguette abide peaceably in coffee shops with cappuccino and taramasalata.

That is the appetizer, but the menu is longer: $15 billion in annual British food exports include pizza, pasta, pita bread, tortillas, salsa, Sri Lankan spice cake, American cheesecake, Italian ice cream from Wales and gourmet soups sold in France as soupe du jardin.

Sure, old ways die hard. Some people still eat in pubs, although it is no longer safe to assume that all pubs serve bad food. Londoners buy their share of mushy peas, greasy French fries doused with vinegar and baked beans--900 million cans, 16 cans of beans per capita, were consumed in Britain last year.

But there are options. Across the capital, upgraded and dazzling supermarkets provide variety and freshness in the competition to accommodate new tastes. Restaurants sprung from more than 50 national cuisines are the spine of a $6-billion dining-out industry: Mongolian to Moroccan, Arabic to Argentine.

Prize-winning British artist Damien Hurst, he of the cows and sheep in formaldehyde, will choose the decor, furniture and color scheme of a new maxi-restaurant where celebrity chef Marco Pierre White, he of the renowned temper, will run the kitchen. A shark in a tank of formaldehyde will support the bar. All of this in the building in London’s Soho where Karl Marx lived from 1851 to 1856.

Cultural rebirth echoes across city icons: The Tate Gallery is expanding to the former Bankside power station south of the Thames not far from the newly opened replica of Shakespeare’s Globe Theater. There’s a plan to build a glass roof over the South Bank Center headquarters of the National Theater complex.

Upriver, the National Maritime Museum is being redone in Greenwich, designated site of principal millennium events. On the Westminster side of the Thames, a new state-of-the-art National Library is opening, the Natural History Museum has grown, and face lifts are underway or planned at the Royal Opera House, the Royal Court Theater, Albert Hall, the National Portrait Gallery and Sadler’s Wells Theater. The Victoria and Albert Museum will get an architecturally controversial new wing, and renewal is coming for part of the British Museum.

‘Like a Wild Garden’

In the fashion industry, London’s pool of innovative talent runs deep, and not all of it is formally trained.

“Our young talented people emerge out of a sort of benign neglect. England is rather like a wild garden in that sense, where wonderful untended flowers suddenly shoot up,” said Lisa Armstrong, fashion director of British Vogue.

In the flux, international designers are flooding in: This week, Gucci announced it will build its biggest European store on high-tone Sloane Street. And British fashion has soared spectacularly in recent months: This fall, the Paris houses Christian Dior and Givenchy named young Britons as their new top designers--John Galliano and Alexander McQueen, respectively.

Italian designer Giorgio Armani, who has a shop and a restaurant in London, applauds the city’s “slight trace of snobbism and its ironic extravagance. . . . A city that you think of as custodian of tradition is in fact graced with intellectual freedom that borders on anarchy.”

Free-flowing street fashion talent growls from the windows of shops like Red or Dead and Hype DF the way classic tweeds and raincoats discreetly beckon from sheltered harbors at Jaeger and Austin Reed.

Holly Devine, a fashion consultant from New York--one of the 2.3 million American visitors to London this year--says, “This city’s an unbelievable mix of super-traditional and super-chic.”

In the buoyant atmosphere, idea breeds idea. The government is weighing traffic reforms that would make London greener and more environmentally agreeable. In addition to banning cars or consigning them to tunnels in areas like Trafalgar Square, Parliament Square and Marble Arch--the heartland of tourist London--a new proposal would extend Hyde Park by tunneling under and turfing over Park Lane, a major thoroughfare through the city.

Building Abounds

As David Marks and Julia Barton recognize, fin de siecle London is a fine place for architects. Along both sides of the river, empty lots and warehouses are being systematically reclaimed as office buildings, new apartments and new neighborhoods. On the south side of the river, the new Oxo Tower skyscraper complex rises in Art Deco splendor.

It took a truck to lug 1,400 pounds of plans, including 8,000 drawings, to city planners reviewing a proposed 1,265-foot Millennium Tower, an office building that would dramatically alter the city’s skyline--twice as tall as anything there now. Planned by a Norwegian company, the tower in the heart of London’s square-mile financial center would be Europe’s tallest skyscraper.

The Marks-Barton white steel Ferris wheel would be the largest in the world. It too awaits final government approval. It would be powered mainly by tides sweeping up and down the Thames and would carry 2,200 passengers an hour on a sedate 20-minute “flight” above London beginning in 1998.

In 2003, with millennium festivities ended, the wheel would be dismantled and relocated. By then, its designers hope, it would have shown the sights and some of the spirit of the city to millions of residents and visitors.

“The best way to celebrate the new century is with something people can enjoy,” said Barton, architect, citizen and dreamer of the new London.