The City of London was founded by a Trojan prince and is guarded by Gog and Magog, and it now charges record rent, which I think the giants would understand
Saturday, Cannon Street, Looking at a Rock
On my Saturday off I went into the City, which is very strange at the weekend. All those glass towers and nobody in them. Just wind, and a man with a leaf blower.
I went to see a stone.
It is in a little glass case set into the front of an office building at 111 Cannon Street, at about knee height. A lump of pale limestone, the size of a suitcase. There is a plaque. People walk past it to the station without turning their heads.
It is called London Stone, and it may be the oldest thing in the city that is still more or less where it has always been.
What It Is
Nobody knows. That is the truth.
It has been in Cannon Street since at least the eleven hundreds. It is in the earliest lists of London properties. It was much bigger once. A great block, standing in the middle of the road, which carts used to run into. What is in the case is a fragment.
It might be Roman. A milestone, perhaps, the point from which all distances in Britain were measured. It might be part of a Roman governor’s palace, which stood nearby. It might be older.
What is certain is that Londoners have always treated it as important without being able to say why. When a rebel leader marched into the city in 1450, the first thing he did was strike the stone with his sword and declare himself lord of London. Shakespeare put that in a play.
The Founding
And then there is the legend, which is the bit I wrote my dissertation on.
In the twelfth century a churchman wrote a history of the kings of Britain. It is almost entirely made up and it is glorious. In it, Britain was founded by a man called Brutus, a prince of Troy, great-grandson of the hero from whom the Romans claimed descent. After the fall of Troy and many wanderings, a goddess told him in a dream to sail west to an island beyond the sunset, inhabited by giants.
He landed in Devon. He drove out the giants. He travelled up the Thames and built a city on its bank, and called it New Troy.
That is London. For five hundred years, that was the official history. Kings believed it. Poets wrote epics on it. It was in the school books.
And the stone, the story came to say, was the altar Brutus set up to the goddess. Somebody in the Victorian period added a “prophecy” that so long as the stone of Brutus is safe, London will flourish. It is the ravens again. Ancient, and about a hundred and sixty years old.
The Giants
Now the giants, because I walked on from the stone to Guildhall to visit them.
In the story, when Brutus arrived the island was held by a race of giants. Their chief was called Gogmagog. Twelve feet tall. One of Brutus’s captains wrestled him on a clifftop and threw him into the sea.
Over the centuries one giant became two. Gog and Magog. And by a turn I have never seen properly explained, the defeated enemies of the founder became the guardians of the city he founded.
There are statues of them in Guildhall. Carved wood, nine feet high, painted, in a sort of Roman armour, with enormous beards. The present pair date from the 1950s. The ones before were destroyed in the Blitz. The ones before that, in the Great Fire.
And every November, in the Lord Mayor’s Show, two huge wicker giants are carried through the streets at the head of the procession. They have been doing that, on and off, since the reign of Henry V.
So the oldest financial district in the world is watched over by two monsters it once threw off a cliff.
The Figure
I had a reason for thinking about the City this week beyond wicker.
A man from Luggage, who follows these things, showed me a report from one of the big property firms. It said that earlier this year the average prime office rent in the City rose to 130.80 pounds per square foot. A record. Up forty percent in twelve months. The very best space had fetched a hundred and sixty.
I did a sum on a till receipt. My box room at Great-Aunt Cordelia’s is about seventy square feet. At City rates it would be nine thousand pounds a year, as an office, with no window.
And the report said that nearly all the demand was for the very best buildings. The top towers are full. The rest go begging.
What the Giants Would Say
Here is my theory. I think Gog and Magog are the right guardians for that.
The whole legend of London is a story about property. Brutus arrives. The land is occupied. He removes the occupants and builds. The giants are the previous tenants. They lose. And then, and this is the City all over, they are kept on as mascots.
That is exactly what the Square Mile does. It knocks a thing down and names the new building after it. There are towers called after the churches they replaced. There is a covered market on the site of the Roman forum, with a piece of the old wall behind glass in the basement of a barber’s. I have been. You have to ask.
The past in the City is always conquered, and always put on display. A lump of limestone in a case at knee height, in the wall of an office that rents at a hundred and thirty pounds a foot.
Believing It
I should be fair to the old history. People laugh at it now. A Trojan prince, really.
But I understand why they wanted it. Every city wants to have been founded. To have come from somewhere grand. Rome had its twins and its wolf. London wanted Troy.
And the men who paid for the pageants and carved the giants were merchants. Practical people. They knew perfectly well, I think, that nobody had seen Brutus. They kept the story because a city that believes it is ancient behaves as if it will last. That is worth something when you are asking people to lend you money.
The towers are the same kind of story. Glass and steel, built to look as if they have always been there and always will be. Somebody is paying a hundred and sixty pounds a foot to stand inside that belief.
The Stone Again
I went back past it on my way to the Tube. A man in running clothes had stopped and was reading the plaque. He looked at the stone for quite a long time.
He said, to nobody, “Is that it?”
Yes. That is it. That is the altar of Brutus, the heart of New Troy, the stone on which the safety of London depends. It is in a box next to a branch of a sandwich chain.
He took a photograph anyway.
Sunday
Great-Aunt Cordelia wanted to know where I had been. I said I had gone to see a rock and two giants. She said, “On your day off,” in a tone of real sorrow.
I read the London Prat in bed. It knows the City better than I do. Its UK satirical news on giants suggests the present ones wear lanyards, and its British satirical news about the Lord Mayor explains, which I had never understood, that there are two mayors and this is the one with the coach. The American one my customer mentioned, Bohiney Magazine, is about a country founded in 1776, which by London standards is last Tuesday.
The Show is on the fourteenth of November. I am going to stand on Cheapside and wave at the giants. Somebody should say thank you for staying.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
