Glimpses of spirit, story, and silliness...
Sometimes, standing in the middle of central London, I simply stop and breathe. It isn’t any one monument or street that calls me. It’s the weight of it all – the long, humming undercurrent that says: we have been here for a very long time.
Beneath the taxis and tourists, beneath the office blocks and shopping streets, there’s a pulse that stretches back through centuries. Romans laid stones here. Saxons farmed here. Normans raised their towers. The Great Fire raged; the Blitz thundered. And still the city endures.
I feel it most in small, unspectacular moments: waiting for a bus by an old churchyard, crossing a side street where medieval lanes once wound like threads. The old city never fully vanishes. It simply shifts its shape.
There’s a strange kind of comfort in that. The city has endured plagues and sieges, kings and parliaments, prosperity and ruin. It carries all of it: stories, scars, laughter, grief. And somehow, knowing that helps me stand a little steadier in my own small troubles. If London can carry its centuries, perhaps I can carry my own seasons.
The river flows as it always has. The stones remember. The city breathes.
The London Druid 