About Time: We Celebrated London’s DiversityBy Angelica Malin
For over five hundred years London has been central to the unfolding story of what we now call globalization. From the potato-trading, tobacco-smoking pioneers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the exotic eastern spice traders who flourished under the British empire – and even now in a world where time and distance count for nothing – London has stood, and continues to stand, pre-eminent amongst the world’s great global cities.
If you wanted a location that brings all the tastes, textures, colours and flavours of our wonderful world together, you would be hard pressed to leave London off the menu. London is still very much a key point on any global map.
The familiar cliché is of the city as an international melting pot: a blending of the sum of its parts into a collective cultural stew. But such a glib description fails to do justice to the creative and enervating possibilities that London’s eclectic coming together allows. Rather than boiling all the world’s local flavours into a single amorphous broth, what London continues to deliver is a smorgasbord of endless possibilities, full of striking, piquant notes as well as more subtle shades of emphasis. Not for nothing is London famous as a crucible of creativity.
The advent of digital technologies has only added to the sense of London being at the hub of the international network. The vast sums of money flowing through the City is an obvious example of that trade, but the way Londoners can now communicate with anyone anywhere as a matter of course is itself every bit as remarkable. Cultural and culinary riches are trafficked as well as all that gold.
Londoners now have their fingers on a vast array of International pulses and wether it be music from Morocco or cinema from Sri Lanka, it merely serves to compound London’s identity as a conduit for the wealth of nations. Moreover, the London-based company Lottoland offers international lotteries from all around the globe and in this way it represents the perfect metaphor for London’s historical identity as a conduit for the wealth of nations, giving further scope to suggest that the city is interconnected as ever, on both a local and global perspective. What were once bordered, local activities are now interconnected as never before. Every network needs its nodes.
Every time we sit down to eat, turn on our iPods, our phones or our TVs the evidence of our globalized world is reflected back at us us. And without a doubt, London’s energizing appetite for exotic, exciting and undiscovered possibilities has enriched that process every step of the way. It is that energy and its exotic and rewarding history that makes London the world’s undisputed capital of globalization.