Chronicles of London Bridge

A tender elegy for vanishing London, written as a conversation between two old Londoners who remember a city disappearing before their eyes. Geoffrey Barbican, wandering through the streets in 1827, mourns the ancient landmarks being demolished for modernity when he encounters Mr. Barnaby Postern, whose prodigious memory stretches back to the previous century. What follows is a wandering, discursive exchange that stitches together the bridge's Roman origins, its medieval rebuildings, the shops and houses that once clung to its arches, the suicides and spectacles, the stones that witnessed London's great fires and plagues. Postern speaks, and Barbican listens, and together they perform an act of preservation that is also an act of mourning. This is not a dry architectural history but a valediction, a way of holding onto a world that exists now only in the minds of the very old. For anyone who has ever grieved a changed city, or wondered what stories the stones could tell if only they had ears.