If there’s one word that embodies the spirit of London it’s this:
RESURGAM: “I will rise again”. Carved into a lunette on the south front of St Paul’s cathedral. There is a clear Christian connotation there – Christ rising again, and all that – but its placement here on the wall of the rebuilt cathedral is especially poignant.
The carving above the word is of a phoenix, reborn from the ashes, just as London was reborn from its ashes of the Great Fire in 1666. The phoenix evokes a primal spirit of defiance, of indomitable, dogged, resourceful, adaptable, pragmatic resilience. This is the city that is loyal to itself, that will always carry on and will always regenerate. It will thrive. It will survive.
Gloria Gaynor has nothing on Christopher Wren.
“Early each day to the steps of Saint Paul’s
The little old bird woman comes.”
EarthmanSam 