Esoteric London

Liverpool Road, London, N1. Photo © Roger Dean 2011

The English Way – Pierre Maillaud, 1945:

Among those who have witnessed a few of the ceremonies, melancholy or joyous, which illustrate the continuity of the monarchy, its power to communicate a sense of national permanence cannot be disputed. The Royal Jubilee in 1935, the days of mourning which followed so closely upon it, the Coronation of King George VI, the contrasts of pageantry and of the attendant popular demonstrations, all have left on my mind a single impression: a feeling of ‘out-of-timeness’, by which I mean something very different from archaism. The sensation was not that the clock had been put back some hundreds of years because the rites performed, the scenes enacted and garments worn had not changed for centuries; it was that what I saw and heard did exist irrespective of time and present circumstances, and that both were transcended. Here was a national symbol of permanence beyond the reach of contingency.