On the particular quality of the city in its correct season
London is a city with a correct season, and that season is October. The particular combination of copper foliage, grey morning light, and the city's full cultural programme running simultaneously is unavailable at any other time of year.
London is a city with a correct season, and that season is October. The particular combination of copper foliage in the parks, grey morning light, and the city's full cultural programme running simultaneously is unavailable at any other time of year. July belongs to the tourist city; December to the consumer city; October belongs to the city that lives here year-round and knows when it is at its best.
The parks are the argument. Hyde Park, Regent's Park, and St James's — the three central royal parks that constitute the most generous green infrastructure of any European capital — are in the state of late-deciduous transition throughout October, and the particular light that filters through half-turned leaves at 8am on a grey morning has a warmth that the full canopy of summer does not produce. This is the light that has been painted from Turner to Constable — not the light of a special condition but the light of London performing its regular season.
The cultural infrastructure — the museums, the theatre, the gallery season that opens in September and runs through to the Christmas break — is at its most active and least crowded in the weeks between the last summer visitors and the first Christmas shoppers. The National Theatre and the Barbican have settled into their autumn programmes; the commercial galleries on Cork Street and in Mayfair have opened their October shows; the West End is running at pace without the school-holiday crush. This is the professional London cultural season, not the tourist London cultural season.
The pub, in October, is the correct form. Not the summer beer garden, which belongs to a different logic, but the interior pub: dark wood, the smell of the first fire of the season, the particular amber light of a room lit against the early dark. The Bloomsbury pubs that have not been updated since the 1970s — the Lamb on Lamb's Conduit Street, the Museum Tavern opposite the British Museum — are the October version of what a London pub should be. They are best between 5 and 7pm when the light outside has gone and the rooms become their own complete world.
What October London requires is the correct programme: a morning in a park, two or three hours in a museum or gallery in the middle of the day, an afternoon walk through a neighbourhood that rewards walking at a slow pace, and an evening in a pub or a wine bar that has the autumn quality. This is not a demanding itinerary. It is simply the correct use of a city that has been doing this for several hundred years.