In London, rain is never just weather. It is a background color.
When a red double-decker bus cuts through the layered clouds and moves slowly across Westminster Bridge, the chime of Big Ben sounds heavy and distant in the drizzle. For a moment, it feels as if you have fallen straight into the old time of Dickens.
A large part of London’s soul is open to the world for free.
Inside the British Museum or the National Gallery, you can pause before the Rosetta Stone or stand quietly in front of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. Outside, rain may be pouring down; inside, the wooden floors creak steadily under leather shoes. That is the weight of civilization, and one source of the city’s depth.
And when sunlight finally, stingily, reaches the ground, all of London seems to revive at once.
The lawns of Hyde Park instantly fill with people lying in the sun, while swans move through the Serpentine as if no one else exists. In London, the border between nature and city is blurred. One moment you can be dazzled by the shops of Regent Street; the next, you can slip into the shade of St James’s Park and hear the sound of a squirrel cracking open a nut.