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So it goes, scene upon scene upon scene, one little square of activity abutting and reinforcing the next, like the parks of London themselves. Even the physical city seems to shift and change under the impetus of the new activity. Throughout London, wreckers and city planners are at work. Once a horizontal city with a skyline dominated by Mary Poppins' chimney pots, London is now shot through with skyscrapers, including the 30-story London Hilton and the 620-ft. London post office tower. Westminster Abbey's statues and memorial have been newly cleaned and painted, and the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral is undergoing a $420,000 polishing that will return it to the splendor envisioned by Sir Christopher Wren—and, hopefully, keep it that way, since electric-shock pigeon deterrents are being added. London Bridge is falling down, and plans have been drawn for a $6,700,000 replacement.
More important than all the other changes is the fact that the center, the heart of London, has gravitated slowly westward to the haunts of the city's new elite, just as it did in centuries gone by. The ancient Tower, built by the Norman Plantagenets, gave way to the thriving guildhalls of the medieval City of London just up the Thames. The city yielded to neighboring Westminster and ultimately to the symbol of Victoria's empire, Buckingham Palace. After its latest shift, London's heart has come to rest somewhere in Mayfair, between the green fields and orators of Hyde Park and the impish statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus.
A large slice of London's 2,400,000 young adults and working teen-agers live in Chelsea, Earl's Court and South Kensington, the residential districts roughly comparable to Manhattan's upper East Side. While the models and ad agency execs can afford quaint private houses, with black-painted doors and tidy flower boxes, the lesser lights pack themselves into shared flats (three or four to an apartment) that cost a minimum of $30 a month, or nest in "bedsitters" (furnished rooms, $10 a week). "Youth has become emancipated," says Mick Jagger, "and the girls have become as emancipated as the boys."
Dirty Dick's. No other city offers a wider variety of ways in which to pass the time, and Londoners pursue their pleasures as relentlessly as people anywhere in the world. London has hundreds of pleasant pubs with such charming names as the Bricklayers' Arms, Coal Hole, Crown and Two Chairmen, Dandy Roll and Dirty Dick's, but the two current favorites among the In set are the Cross-Keys and the King's Head and Eight Bells. Dozens of nightclubs offer totally uninhibited striptease, including Raymond's Revue Bar, sizzling in Soho, where the current attraction is an Australian blonde named Rita Elen, who does her exotic dancing with a full-grown live cheetah named Ginni.