London's hidden enclaves

I am constantly surprised by how often I am constantly surprised.

This week, I attended the local  summer party on the square where I work.  I was surpised at how interesting, down to earth, friendly and warm the people I met there were.  I was surprised also, at how diverse they were and how, having worked in my building for so many years, I had never come across this other world.

Let me explain,  I work in a fairly grand but small georgian building, tall and thin and wholly unsuited to being an office, but designed by John Adams, one of Londons finest regency architects.  It is situated in a beautiful, rather secret regency square in London, with a small but perfectly formed garden in the middle where office workers spread out their jackets and sandwiches in summer sunshine, and foreign students chatter against the railings outside in faltering English.  Occasionally TV companies film period pieces there.  Indians from the Indian YMCA round the corner take photos of each other and once in a while anarchist squatters take over a building and create free schools (courtesy of Guy Ritchie.)

As well as varied little hotpotch of offices (engineers, magistrates, interior designers, two small embassies, an international school and a theological hospital) there are flats and houses.  A small but hidden community of (often) well to do small holders in the London's Fitzrovia prairies.   We also have a few glitterati: Ian Mckeowan, Griff Rhys Jones, Fay Maschler.

So that's it in a nutshell, and like most communities that live side by side each other in London, never the twain shall meet, until, sometimes, oddly, worlds collide in twilight crashes.

The party was catered by a lady from number 14, (and her mother who'd rushed here from france on a hastily booked easy jet flight), music delivered by a jazz trio related to someone in no 1, and dedicated to a man from who'd rented a peppercorn rent for 40 years and had just died.
I talked to his 'adopted' son and daughter in law (he was childless).  They described a man who, Betjamen like, had fought the authorities since the sixties turning a parking lot into a garden, by a restored piece of England's heritage.

I like communities.  I like London for the way it swirls up separate little groups who keep to themselves.  Where you are, as I'd recently read, defined by the title of your postcode.  It's not often you look under a stone and uncover a world.

Of course we all got very drunk and a few of tried to sing some karaoke.  But that's not for these pages...