I remember one of my earliest visits to London, in the 1950s. I had a nice lunch in a restaurant on the second floor of a building with windows facing the Houses of Parliament. A lamb chop and canned peas cost me seven shillings sixpence, at the time about one dollar. When French, Italian, and Spanish chefs were later invited to work in England, canned peas gave way to more flavorful greens.
In Britain as elsewhere in Europe, the U.S. dollar went a long way back then, and therefore so did a visiting journalist's paycheck. An overcoat or a suit at Harrod's or Austin Reed cost half as much as it did in a U.S. clothing chain. The Horse Guards enroute to Buckingham Palace, the museums, Trafalgar Square and Whitehall, the rows of houses on one park-centered quadrangle after another, all memorable. This year, Austin Reed went bankrupt. And a suit of clothes in London is no bargain.
Then there was the theater. London is the center not only of the British theater, but also of the movie industry and television. So actors readily signed on for limited runs on the stage between more lucrative movie gigs. Theaters were government-subsidized, tickets were cheap, and there were dozens of plays to choose from; any turkey was assured of a great cast. More recently, the theater has been deprived of subsidy, an American was brought in to guide the Royal Opera and Ballet in the art of raising private donations (he then moved on to run the Kennedy Center in Washington), and you are hard-pressed to find a West End theater that is not presenting a show that is also being performed, or has been, or is headed to Broadway.
London is now in many ways like New York: the soaring cost of housing, boosted by flight capital from the world's kleptocracies; the central role of financial markets, in which the two cities compete to lead the world; the celebrity culture with glittery private clubs replacing the stodgy ones where the upper crust went to age; the construction boom of offices and condos; and the sound of every foreign accent echoing on the streets.
And if we've long heard that New York is not America, we just had proof that London is not England. I changed planes in London on the day of the referendum to quit the European Union. "Independence Day," the tabloid Sun screamed in its full-front-page headline, superimposed on a starburst, urging readers: "BeLEAVE in Britain--You Can Free UK from Clutches of the EU Today." And so they did, to the chagrin of the movers and shakers in London and the shock of Britain's friends and allies worldwide.
The value of the British Pound against the dollar plunged, saving me a chunk of money when the hotel and restaurant bills I ran up when I came back for a week to the U.K. appeared on my credit-card statement. But I can look forward to losing uncounted sums from my retirement accounts if world growth slows as forecast.
I've had only one experience working in London, a fortnight reporting for the CNN European business news program. Producing stories was easy and efficient. One that I remember was the earnings report of the company that makes Wedgwood porcelain dinnerware. The firm's chairman gave me an interview, and a camera crew and I went to the factory, which dates from 1759, in Stoke-on-Trent in the region called the Potteries. Our train was delayed by some kind of accident on the tracks, and we got there so late that we had precious little time for the camera crew to do a job and get us back the studio by deadline.
In 1999, Wedgwood moved most of its production to Indonesia. Seven years later, the Potteries were in the Brexit zone.
I enjoyed the London work experience. But my Washington job of interviewing members of Congress and heads of regulatory agencies was far more interesting and educational than the then-typical London (or for that matter New York) assignment of recording the views of a couple of securities analysts on how a company's decision to offshore production and lay off several hundred workers would impact its stock price.
My most recent week in the U.K. was mostly spent in Scotland, which was thrown into political turmoil by the Brexit referendum. Two years ago, the Scots had their own vote on whether to split from the United Kingdom. They opted to remain, on the understanding that the country would continue to be part of the European Union. A substantial majority of Scots voted in favor of the E.U. again this time. Their ruling Scottish National Party has its finger to the wind, to see if there's an appetite for another vote on secession down the road. Scotland's economy is not in great shape and it sells much more of its output to England than to the E.U.
Visiting the museums of Edinburgh, you are reminded that Scotland has a history of independence, and fought wars to preserve it, until the Union with England in 1707.
Northern Ireland also voted in favor of remaining in the E.U., in which the Irish Republic is firmly ensconced. The prospect that the border between the two might turn "hard," like the Mexico-U.S. border, is a talking point for those in the North who would like to unite with Ireland. The consequences of the Brexit referendum could eventually turn the United Kingdom into Little England again.
The bankers might decamp for Zurich or Frankfurt, the Eastern Europeans and other foreigners who staff hotels and restaurants and hospitals might look for more welcoming workplaces elsewhere. But Little England will still have its tourist trade.
There are the charming towns in the Cotswolds we drove through once with evocative names like Moreton-on-Marsh, Chipping Campden, and Stow-on-the Wold. There's York with its impressive Cathedral, the Minster, and narrow shopping street, the Shambles. There's historic Rye enroute to the English Channel coast, where we stayed in a centuries-old inn and slept in a fourposter bed.
Not far away, we stopped at Glyndebourne, a baronial estate whose owner and opera-singer wife created a summer opera theater, and lucked into a pair of tickets. Between acts of Mozart's "Abduction," there was a long intermission, during which the smart set in formal attire unpacked elaborate picnic hampers. For us, there was a cafeteria. The opera house has since been rebuilt and expanded, and we would love to go back. Meanwhile, Covent Garden is great.
And on all our trips to the British Isles, in lieu of lunch, we sought out a tea house serving scones with clotted cream and jam and tea or coffee. We did so again on our recent travels to York, Edinburgh, and Glasgow and, to our chagrin, it was hard to find a plain old scone. Mostly they were dotted with raisins, no choice offered. Finally, scone nirvana appeared in the cafe of the Scottish National Museum--the traditional unadorned version from a local bakery. Biting down on it brightened a week that was darkly clouded in the aftermath of the Brexit vote.