Sargeant’s Mess (2018) is a tourist catcher’s net in restaurant form by the Tower of London (c. 1078). It has views of the wide, fat Thames — an old man now, like Falstaff — on its slow journey to Southend-on-Sea. The City of London grows like a glass parasite, but it can’t do anything about the Conqueror’s keep. It is partly made of Norman stone — a joke for historians only? — and it won’t be gentrified, amended, or moved.
The Tower squats inside those insanely over-repointed medieval walls like a dowager abutting a conservatory. It will never, and I say this happily, be a block of flats, or an Apple shop, or a Starbucks. Henry VIII added the cupolas, and they are very gay, but that was it.
I love this fortress, even if it has moved from decapitating pretenders to selling pencils.
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