London has a genius for self-renewal — but what do we miss as a result?

In the autumn of 1987, after London had been hit by a fierce storm, Simon Jenkins wandered through Bloomsbury and noticed that workers clearing away the fallen plane trees were finding it hard to cut through the branches. When he looked closely, he saw this was because their chainsaws kept snapping against embedded fragments of wartime shrapnel. It’s a nice detail, and there are many in Jenkins’s new book, though he spoils this one by adding that ‘London never lets us forget its history’.

On any other day, surely, this legacy of conflict would have eluded his attention rather than imposing itself upon it. One of London’s features is its genius for self-renewal — after the Great Fire, for instance, as well as after the Blitz. In the process, a huge amount is swept into the dustbin of oblivion. Isn’t the real point of a book of this kind that it is all too easy to be ignorant of the city’s past? That, for example, London wants us to forget it was once not a beacon of sophistication, turning its back on the Thames, but the world’s largest port and a grimy centre of manufacturing?