What we can do

One in four young Londoners is now unemployed. The Evening Standard is running a campaign to encourage more apprenticeships in business. They are right. 

I am going to do everything I can to persuade my employer to take on apprentices in London for the first time. Is there anything you can do to encourage your employer to do the same? You may have more influence than you think.

Pride

My father was an author. My mother was a publisher. My brother is a bookseller. Perhaps it was inevitable I would hanker after the world of words; it's in my blood. On Saturday, my wife received an offer from a publisher (and a seriously good one!) to publish her first novel.

I cannot tell you how proud I am of her.

We celebrated with what was only our second ever visit to Tower 42. If you've not been, then do - but only when you've got something very special to celebrate, and are feeling seriously flush. You may still think of Tower 42 as the NatWest tower - it was built by that bank in its pre-Fred Goodwin days, and the footprint of the tower will forever be the current NatWest logo.

From the champagne bar on its roof, London by night is spread before you as a work of unplanned art. St Paul's dominates as it surely must, but endless lights flicker in a twinkling blanket to the horizon. It is magical.

Past and present

London has no shortage of historical set-pieces (the Tower of London, Parliament Square, Greenwich), but nowhere does the past feel closer than Smithfield. Sit in the tranquility of West Smithfield (as we did for brunch on Saturday) and you are surrounded by buildings whose purpose would be familiar to our medieval ancestors.

To your north is Smithfield Market. In 1174 the area that became Smithfield was described by William Fitzstephen, clerk to Thomas à Becket, as 'a smooth field where every Friday there is a celebrated rendezvous of fine horses to be sold, and in another quarter are placed vendibles of the peasant, swine with their deep flanks, and cows and oxen of immense bulk.' Ideally suited to the grazing of livestock (then an open space outside the city walls adjacent to the River Fleet), the market evolved organically over the next 150 years, culminating in the City of London gaining market rights under a charter granted by Edward III in 1327. As with the other great wholesale markets (Billingsgate for fish, Spitalfields for vegetables), Smithfield is still managed by the City of London to this day. Unlike the other two, it is still on its original site - albeit in magnificent new buildings designed by Sir Horace Jones in 1866.

Growing up, my best friend's dad was a butcher, working at Smithfield. I rarely saw him. Smithfield is a nocturnal animal, and his working day began at three in the morning, and ended at eleven. While Ian and I played at his house after school, he was generally asleep. I had no idea that he spent his days in one of the only workplaces whose purpose is unchanged in 800 years.

There are, of course, others. Many churches for example; though few have changed as little as St Bartholomew the Great. Look up from your West Smithfield brunch and turn to the East. The half-timbered gatehouse in front of you is tudor (dating from 1595), but its origins are much older. You are looking at the only remaining part of the west wall of St Batholomew's Priory. Like so many of England's priory churches, the building that survives today is a fraction of what was built. The present church of St Bartholomew the Great is simply the choir and crossing of the original church, but it is miraculously unchanged from its foundation in 1123. You may recognise it from Four Weddings and a Funeral or, more recently, T-mobile's wonderful royal wedding spoof.

Next to St Bartholomew the Great is the hospital that shares its name. Like the priory, St Bart's (as it is universally known) was founded by a former courtier of Henry I, a Canon of St Paul's Cathedral called Rahere. Recovering from a fever, he endowed a hospital in gratitude. It is still there, and is the oldest hospital in Britain to still occupy its original site. It grew apart from the priory, and by 1420 the two institutions were entirely separate. None of the original hospital building survives today (perhaps thankfully - an old church may suit modern liturgy, but I'm not sure a twelfth century hospital would suit modern medicine), but the hospital's church, St Bartholomew the Less, retains both 15th century tower and 15th century bells.

Have you finished your brunch yet? Well, order a coffee and, as you sit under the trees, think about what you've seen. The open space you are sitting next to is, in origins, what gave the area its name: "Smooth field", corrupted to Smithfield. Imagine it is 1305. It is a different world. The crowds are gathering for a great public spectacle. The Scottish nationalist William Wallace, against whom the English army has been engaged in battle for nearly ten years, has finally been captured. They did things differently then: the naked Wallace was dragged to Smithfield at the heels of a horse. He was released just opposite where you're sitting, and hanged, drawn and quartered (strangled by hanging but released while he was still alive, castrated, eviscerated and his bowels burnt before him, then beheaded and cut into four parts). His preserved head was placed on London Bridge along with the heads of the brothers, John and Simon Fraser. Truly, London was a very different city.

But, as the crowds disperse, you are left standing in an open space between a priory church, a hospital and a meat market.

Middle class

To the Geffrye Museum on Sunday. Have you been there? It's rather wonderful. Improbably set in beautiful 18th century almshouses in Hoxton, it records changes in interior design over the last half millennium; tracking the growth of London's middle class. Visitors start in the 17th century at one end of the building, and walk through a series of rooms representing a typical domestic scene of that period. In each case, we witness a moment in time for a typical Londoner. Two doors down from a Victorian lady reading a fashion magazine are a couple of Georgians interrupted playing cards. It is a magical insight into the forgotten lives of our recent ancestors: these are the people that did not make the history books, but whose lives seemed as important to them as yours does to you.

The Geffrye visit was impromptu - the plan on Sunday had been to go out for a Turkish lunch in Dalston and we jumped on the Overground for a couple of stops on a whim. The meal was splendid, in an area of London experiencing rapid change. One of many East End neighbourhoods to have been shaped by successive waves of immigration, the recent Polish arrivals share shopfronts with the Vietnamese, Turkish and Caribbean settlers that came before them. Today, however, the terraces of Dalston are returning to their roots, as middle-class graduates move in, raising house prices (and the standard of cupcake in the newly-opened fashionable cafes) and changing the purpose of an area that has assimilated migrants since days of the Empress of India.

After Geffrye, we returned to the Overground for the one stop jump to Shoreditch and coffee in the Boxpark. The Boxpark is one of those things that could only work in Shoreditch. A "pop-up mall" formed of disused shipping containers, it is populated by beautiful hipsters in their obsessively individual uniformity. I am so glad there are people willing to spend so much time and effort on how they look, despite so much of the aim being to look like they didn't really try at all. Silk screened coats, canvas shoes, vintage hats and metrosexual macs jostle in the sunshine by a railway bridge in an area once deprived, but now as affluent as it when it was first developed three hundred years ago.

In a few decades, the curators of the Geffrye will have to decide who to make their typical Londoner of the 2010s. They will have to settle on a single moment in time to represent you, me, the Turkish waitress who served our lunch, the chirpy oh-so-cool guys who gave us coffee and the people of (probably) a hundred nations that we unknowingly overlapped with in a single afternoon. How wonderful to live in a city that sets such challenges.

 

Hello

It is perfectly possible that no-one will ever read these words. That is certainly my expectation, and it is rather liberating.
 

Ten years ago, I entered the working world. I had, for many years, flirted with the idea of journalism, but - in the end - settled for corporate life and the predictability of a payslip.

Since then I have frequently wondered whether I got that decision right.

This blog is a test. I want to see if I can write clearly, cope with deadlines and think of interesting things to say. If it is wildly successful, then it will suggest I got one of the most fundamental decisions of my life completely wrong. It will also be wonderful! If, however, these words are read solely by me (plus my immediate family and, obviously, you), then it will be evidence of my excellent judgement. Either way, I'm guaranteed a good result.

 

While I want to test myself, I am also going to ease in gently. I am setting a target of one post per week, on Wednesdays, starting tomorrow. I do not expect a large readership, but - should I become the next Andrew Marr - then my future biographers can enjoy the sensation of seeing where it all began...