Salamanca

There is a great deal of helpful information on Salamanca, in Euroresidentes ‘New Visitors Guide to Spain’. We visited the city, located in the region of Castile-Leon, in May 2001 and immediately surrendered to it. There are some places that you just feel at home in, and this was how it was for us. Sharing with Bologna in Italy and Oxford in England, Salamanca has the distinction of being the oldest of European universities, and everywhere we went there were flocks of earnest students carrying books and folders under their arms, always on the way to somewhere else. One night we had dinner in the student refectory of Fonesca College which was open to the public, and earlier visited the University’s old lecture theatre with its central lectern and wall seats, and the amazing old library packed with dusty row upon row of precious books.

We visited the two cathedrals – the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ entwined, where a Mass was being held. It has an amazing façade, benignly watched over by the statue of a previous Bishop. There is a very strong sense of monumental medievalism about the whole city, an exception being the remarkable Arte Nouveau/Deco House which is open to the public. It was extremely hot when we were there– 41 degrees one day, and we did our sight-seeing by hugging the shade as we went from place to place, fortified by various liquid refreshments and the occasional ice cream.

The Plaza Mayor has to be seen and experienced. Built in the golden stone from Villamayor typical of many of the city’s buildings, it is in the great tradition of European squares. Here is the place to see and to be seen and we sat amongst tourists, students and families in the great square, some of whom were perhaps relaxing after shopping in the attractive arcades that surround it. One evening we came across the beautiful Covento del Saint Esteban, just before it was due to close. A helpful man at the desk encouraged us in, and we were able to wander around the cloisters and up to the high choir above the nave, with room for 118 monks. We saw one of them! And later an elderly Franciscan in the street. The façade of the building is stunning – a tapestry in stone, showing the stoning of Stephen.

In our few days in Salamanca we felt that we had met the city and, sitting in the evening shade in the park amongst groups of resting people, the citizens themselves.

Bryan

London

Like any large capital city, London is a kaleidoscope of communities, many of them originally villages or suburbs gradually amalgamating into a unified but diverse whole. These days it is essentially an international city where more than a hundred different languages are spoken. Unlike more compact cities you can’t walk London, a visit has to be planned and transport organised if you are going to have a real sense of the place.

The River Thames defines London, as it flows through the city on its way to the estuary and the sea. The first of many bridges was built in 1197, uniting the two sides of the river. Originally a trading post and then a Roman settlement, London has prospered by encouraging trade rather than fortifying itself against attack. Today the South Bank of the river has many cultural attractions – Concert Halls, National Theatre and FilmTheatre, the London Eye, the replica of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre and the Tate Modern Gallery, whilst on the north bank there is St. Paul’sCathedral, the Bank of England, the financial centre of the City, and the Houses of Parliament, alleged to be the oldest democratic legislature in the world.

Another feature of London is its parks, open to the public for recreation, family picnics and providing the occasional forum for protest meetings. St JamesPark is notionally the possession of the monarch and near to the monstrous London home of the Queen. Hyde Park is huge and welcoming and Regent’s Park is bordered by the eighteenth century regency buildings of John Nash. London’s West End draws many visitors, with its numerous theatres and fashionable shops and Piccadilly and Leicester Squares are where it all begins. You can now walk freely in nearby Trafalgar Square and Nelson, high up on his monument, is being refurbished as he looks down on the National Art Gallery and St. Martin’s in the Fields Church, a centre for peace and justice and a sanctuary for homeless people.

The city is peppered by districts that echo the names of the various gateways into the old city – Cripplegate, Aldgate, Moorgate and so on. The excellent London Museum in the Barbican area is well worth a visit, with its summary of the city’s history supported by many artefacts and visuals.

I have looked towards London all my life. I had my first jobs there. As a family we lived in the poorer East End of the city for a decade, during much of the Thatcher years and were made painfully aware of the worst inequalities fostered by her government. But whenever we visit, it is like coming home again.

London in five paragraphs? Impossible!

Bryan

The origin of cities

The rise of the city is indistinguishable from the history of civilisation. Whereas families and then groups of families were primarily into survival, often with shared hunting grounds and religious cults, life in the great cities became more structured and controlled. There people began to develop language and writing, learned to draw, sing, learn, buy and sell, to call upon their gods and relate to each other commercially and within the rule of law.

Lewis Mumford in his magisterial if idiosyncratic book ‘The City in History’ (1961), sees the beginnings of urban life in the formation of the earliest villages as long as 15.000years ago. ‘The modern city itself, for all its steel and glass, is still essentially an earth-bound Stone Age structure’, he says, and points out that the granary, the bank, the arsenal, the library, the store, the canal, the drain, the sewer, citadels and sacred sites all pre-dated the city, and continued in numerous manifestations as the importance of the city grew.

The ancient folk ways were maintained and survived the development of the bigger, richer and more powerful urban life. However, the transition from a small open society to an amorphous walled community, says Mumford, meant that ‘new ways, rigorous, efficient, often harsh, even sadistic took the place of ancient customs and comfortable easy-paced routine’.

Monarchy was at the heart of the primitive city, says Mumford, supported by the priestly caste, the two sometimes invested in the same person and family. He argues that it was the hunter chieftain and his growing influence on the village which was the catalyst that turned small scattered communities into more complicated ones protected within the citywall. ‘Under pressure of one master institution, a multitude of diverse social particles, long separated, if not mutually antagonistic, were brought together in a concentrated urban area’.

The genesis of the city of course was in the east not the west. It is possible to date its formation as a social unit around 5,000 years ago. We know about the great urban landmarks of Ur, Nippur, Uruk,Thebes, Heliopolis, Assur, Nineveh, Babylon but their origins are shrouded in mystery. All of them however were in a restricted geographical area, dependent for irrigation and trade on the draining of the swamps and the control of great rivers.

We shall be thinking in this blog of some of the cities of Europe, but those early cities of Mesopotamia, Greece and Egypt, the customs of their societies, the store of knowledge in their libraries, the planning of their streets and open spaces, the pre-eminence of their religious sites were all prototypes of the cities we know today and which we will now begin to visit.

Bryan

Cities in Europe

This new series of blogs will be personal but not too autobiographical I hope. Ishall write about cities that I have either lived in or visited. There will be more than forty of them.

We shall not be trying to vie with the travel agencies or holiday brochures. There will be no advice on where to stay or how to travel. We shall leave that to the professionals. In keeping with the purpose and theme of Euroresidentes, I want to bring to life some of the diversity and fascination not only of Spain’s great cities but of other European ones as well.

I shall be writing as an enthusiast who loves the countryside as a diversion and refreshment, but who is happiest in the cut and thrust of city life, stimulated by all its advantages and mostly able to withstand its considerable deficiencies.

I have lived in cities for most of myworking life, and whereas some may find them intimidating, even hostile, they have been my home and I have found myself there. It is estimated that almost half the world’s population now live either in cities or within a city culture, and that the massive increase in urbanliving accomplished in the last century is likely to continue. Our dependence on the media – which is essentially metropolitan – increases that urban consciousness.

Next time, a bit about the origins of the City and then our first stop, which will be London.

Bryan