In Europe

by puffing steam trains on viaducts, one neighbourhood after another was destroyed for the construction of railway stations and Underground lines, the city's centre was encircled by endless slums.
    All this was largely due to the medieval manner in which the city was run. Strictly speaking, London itself consisted of only one little town, the City of London, with around it a series of ‘parishes’ responsible for running the metropolis at large. Government after government ran into a brick wall of fiercely defended parish rights. Central planning, indispensable for any metropolis for the construction of roads, water systems, sewage and rail connections, was almost impossible in London.
    For some, however, the chaos of London, this piling up of wayward building styles without much in the way of planning, constituted a political statement: an act of defiance against the absolute power of a ruler, against a bureaucracy, against a Haussmann. Many British subjects – then and now – attached great importance to their own domain. They were willing to conform to the rigours of a tightly run public life, but as compensation they demanded great freedom in their own, private realm. Within those private boundaries they could behave as eccentrically as they liked. ‘My home is my castle’: the government was expected to rein itself in, the planners could only go so far, chaos was simply the price one paid. According to the urban historian Michiel Wagenaar, it was in this way that there arose ‘the urban landscape of the free market’.
    And that was not all. Filthy nineteenth-century London virtually forced its own inhabitants to get out, and before long that exodus was actually made possible by the construction of a rail network. It was around London, therefore, before anywhere else in Europe, that there arose a new phenomenon: the rural estate, the anti-city of the stately suburb, home front for a new generation of comfortable merchants, a place in which they could foster their own norms and values, their own forms of leisure and, ultimately, their own ideas about nation, religion and politics.
    I have been invited to tea at the home of Nigel Nicolson, eighty-two years old, publisher, diarist and former Member of Parliament. He is the grandson of the third Lord Sackville, and the son of diplomat and MPHarold Nicolson and the writer Vita Sackville-West – also known as the protagonist of Virginia Woolf's
Orlando
. It is late afternoon, the sky is beginning to change colour, and among the rolling hills around Sissinghurst Castle one occasionally hears the report of the pheasant-shooters’ guns.
    We are sitting in the kitchen, where it is almost cold enough to see our own breath. Most of the castle has now been surrendered to the National Trust – money! – and the day trippers. Nicolson lives alone. He is wearing an unusual quilted robe.
    The afternoon is destined to be a memorable one. He tells me about the lives of his parents – one of the most oft-described of English marriages – but most of our time is spent trying out the brand new microwave oven he has recently received as a gift. ‘A miracle, a miracle,’ he keeps shouting. ‘But how on earth does one go about heating up a mince pie?’
    I teach him how to boil a cup of milk using the microwave, and he tells me about his years growing up at Knole – hundreds of rooms and chimneys – and at Sissinghurst. ‘We didn't have a normal mother-son relationship,’ he says matter-of-factly. ‘My mother spent all day working in her room in the tower here. In the space of thirty years, I may have gone in there three times. The one who always busied herself with my younger brother and I was Virginia Woolf. Some funny woman once said to me: “You do know, I suppose, that Virginia loves your mother?” To which I replied: “Of course she does! Don't we all?”’
    Virginia was the ideal ‘auntie’. ‘She taught us to look at things through the eyes of a true writer. She always wanted to know more. ‘What colour coat was that teacher wearing?’ she would ask. ‘How did his voice sound? How did he smell? Details, details!’ One time, when we were catching butterflies, she asked us: ‘Tell me, what is it like to be a child?’ I still remember my reply: ‘You know very well what it's like, Virginia, because you were a child once yourself. But I have no idea what it's like to be you, because I've never been big.’
    I asked him whether having such