Lunch at the Tate

I recently was invited for lunch at a restaurant located in London’s Tate Britain Museum. Being on a short term visit to this marvelous city the experience of going to that restaurant and subsequently to another meeting at University City College (UCL) made me think about how we experience cities – there is a kind of paradox between visualising a place and actually experiencing it. A disconnect between an online and a real world.

Let me explain.

While on a short visit to London, a couple whom I had known for a long time invited me to an upscale restaurant in the Millbank district. The location was in Tate Britain a well-known museum specialising in British art. Even though I had been to the city many times before, the Tate was a new locale for me so I decided to go online to establish how to get there. The address had been sent to me on an e-mail so I clicked on it, which immediately led to Google Maps, were the locale was indicated via a pin. Searching for a nearby Metro (or Tube) station I then looked for the best route to take from were I was staying. A suggestion involving a change of two lines was made. And to make sure that I will not get lost I took an image with my camera phone of the map (I could have used my online phone capabilities but that would have involved an expensive amount of data transfer).

To further enhance my familiarity with the destination, I used Google Street View, a marvelous tool whereby one can experience walking through a city street, and see various signs and landmarks, all made available via Google’s meticulous visual recording.

Armed with all this information I proceeded to the nearest tube station, used the Oyster Card to access the first line I will use, and boarded the first train. London’s metro is over a hundred years old and after various, stops, creaks and delays I finally reached my destination. As I embarked from the underground station into the sunlight, and even though I had experienced this on my computer screen beforehand, the place seemed strange. For one thing should I turn left or right? Forgot to check that. I consulted my map photo, which was too small to see and the bright sun made this even more difficult. So nothing left to do but walk – and while doing that, certain scenes began to look familiar. I found the street I was looking for, and the Tate soon after that.

I entered the museum and proceeded to the restaurant were my companions were waiting. Following a delicious lunch I then left for a meeting at London’s well-known University College, Faculty of the Built Environment. Located in the city centre it should be easy to find, but nevertheless I had to rely on the help of a waiter in a restaurant who, using the address I gave him, typed it in his phone and immediately conjured a map that showed the directions I should take. Further delay thus averted I was able to make it to the meeting on time.

Throughout these travails and moves through the city, one encounters numerous people, on sidewalks, crowded in subway cars and sitting alongside street cafes. Vendors selling foods and drinks are spread throughout. Every person has a precise destination in mind, moving quickly. The sheer physicality and raw energy of the city becomes apparent, intensified further by the multitude of nationalities making up the city ‘s population.

In spite of various technological tools enabling us to become familiar with places we visit, the actual experience always differs. The sights, smells and sounds have a disorientating ability, placing us off centre, as it were, from the online world we inhabited.

But this experience also made me think about cities such as Abu Dhabi and Dubai. In their strive to become ‘world-class’ they have built gleaming towers, famous museums, invited top universities to set up branches and in one case actually built a mass transit system. Yet could one envision in the future a scenario like the one I just outlined? A future were the city is not conceived as individual nodes but as a system of settings interconnected with each other. As it stands now many of these projects are placed in isolation without a connecting tissue tying them together.

Cities such as London have of course evolved over hundreds of years, so they are composed of numerous layers and a large multi-cultural population who call their city home. Cities in the Gulf are still a long way from this, but they should look at these everyday encounters as inspiration for setting guidelines leading to this sort of vibrancy. It is one thing to articulate catchy slogans, and to print glossy brochures – but quite another to design a real city.

Lunch at the Louvre-Abu Dhabi, in the sense that it becomes part of a life-style, rather than a one-off exclusive affair, is a real possibility – enabling us to describe encounters, meetings and places in the same way that we use to evoke European cities.

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