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When I Visited Saint Petersburg and it Snowed
Beneath the layers of a Russian city
I find it hard to walk through any city and not wonder “What was here before?”
It’s one thing I like about cities, the sense of things having been built on top of other things. Cities claim space not only by spreading over an area of land but also by superimposing themselves upon it over and over again.
The persistence of city life has always left an impression on me. The way the traffic pushes on indefinitely, the stop-start of lights, trains shunting and shuffling day and night, millions of people sharing the same confined space. That’s not to mention the layers that lie beneath, the buildings that were once here and the lives that inhabited them. Here in the UK, many buildings display commemorative plaques that hint at the past life inside — “Vincent van Gogh, painter, lived here,” as one old facade in London declares.
Then, every so often, turning a corner, you find yourself in a street that’s as empty as a school on a summer break. Here, a moment of calm before your footsteps return you to the thick mad haze of the populace.
Later still, as the daytime gives way to evening, you can lose yourself in the night time avenues, enchanted by lamp-lit doorways and the electric sheen of restaurant menus…
