what we need is a great big melting pot…

London, UK: Here is one from the summertime, when the weather was hot. It really was, too; I actually got sunburnt in London. This may seem like a surprise to grown-up California me, but if I recall I used to get sunburnt all the time in London as a freckly kid, while my freckly grown-up self hides from the constant sun in Davis. Summer 2013 was a scorcher in London though. This is All-Hallows-By-The-Tower, an old church on the edge of the City right next to (you guessed it) the Tower of London. All-Hallows is old, really old. I walked around the crypts, passing original Saxon arches and Roman paving. It was founded in 675, yes 675 AD. England was a very different place then. It wasn’t even really called England. The church was built up and rebuilt over the centuries, and while it avoided the Great Fire of London in 1666, it got a fair old whacking in the Blitz, so had to be rebuilt again. My American friends may like to know that William Penn was baptized here, and John Quincy Adams got married here. Ok, hardly the stuff of Hollywood but still, historical.

But what is that tower growing menacingly behind it? This is part of the new London, the London that keeps adding big shiny funny-shaped skyscrapers every time I return. Your Shards, your Gherkins, your Cheesegraters, they all have silly nicknames that people in centuries to come will struggle to decipher as much as we giggle at the local streetnames today (“Piccadilly?” “Cheapside?” “Crutched Friars?”). This one, officially known as 20  Fenchurch Street, is commonly known as the “Walkie-Talkie”, which will confuse 26th century school history field trippers enormously as it neither walks nor talks. Some even call it the “Pint” which again is more of a laugh at our future metric descendants. What it really is known for now though is its incredible ability to, um, melt cars. In a strange story that sounds like a supervillain’s evil plan to rid the world of illegal parking, a couple of months ago, the London sunlight reflected downwards from the curving glass in such a way that it created a super-hot spot that actually melted a car – a Jaguar no less. They apparently didn’t foresee this particular design flaw; the “it doesn’t usually get sunny in London” defense probably got bandied about a few times. A big reflective surface facing the sun and curving to point downwards seems like a massive ant-burning practical joke, but hindsight is a hollow thing. I’m reminded of London’s “wobbly” bridge, when the greatest architectural minds in the world came together to build a state-of-the-art bridge for the new millennium, only for a it to sway unexpectedly from side to side. It’s fixed now, but the old wobble will always make Londoners smile.

So, that is All-Hallow’s-By-The-Tower. See it before it melts!

by Pete Scully