Despite Omicron, a traveler in London finds reasons for hope

A few weeks later, I was on the plane. As I reached my seat, I heard my name. Just across that aisle seat were Susan and David Schwartz, a couple of New Yorkers I hadn’t seen since before Covid, and then we were hugging and saying, “Of all the gin joints…" Middle-aged travelers jumping up and down, quoting lines from “Casablanca," might piss off the starchy flight attendants, but who cares? We were going to London!

My first trip to the city was more than 50 years ago with my mother. She was a dyed-in-the wool Anglophile who, growing up in Winnipeg when Canada was still part of the empire (it didn’t officially split with the Brits until 1982), read all of “The Forsyte Saga" every winter. She cried when Edward VIII (later the Duke of Windsor) abdicated for the woman he loved.

I have British friends who laugh at my Anglophile obsessions. I know the hard facts: The pandemic hit the city particularly hard; long lines are everywhere; Brexit threatens to rob London of some of its thrilling diversity. Still, in no particular order I love: Shakespeare, Graham Greene, Daunt’s bookshop, the London Eye, the Beatles and the Stones, Ronnie Scott’s jazz club, Monty Python, “Love Actually" and “Brideshead Revisited," John le Carré, “The Great British Bake Off" and Cush Jumbo as Hamlet in last fall’s Young Vic production. And then there is the Thames.

Normally I would stay with friends in Notting Hill or Primrose Hill, some part of the residential city that’s built low, pretty and green. But for my three-week trip, some friends lent me a glamorous glass box of an apartment on the 22 floor of a building that overlooks the Thames near Waterloo Bridge. After all my years visiting the city, it was the first time I was really taken by the river.

There were no shades on the apartment’s glass walls, and the great sweep of the river, satiny silver at dawn, was silky black at night when it reflected the lit-up city, the new London skyline. Of all these buildings the Shard is the one I love, especially when it scrapes the gold and violet sky at dusk.

I looked down at Waterloo Bridge and saw toy-size square black taxis and little red double-decker buses, and I imagined Vivien Leigh and Robert Taylor as the star-crossed lovers in the 1940 film “Waterloo Bridge." So many movies and books seem to be intertwined with the Thames.

The river runs 215 miles, but it’s this tidal stretch through London that is thrilling, and terrible, that was a dump for Victorian industrial and human waste. This is the river Dickens describes in “Our Mutual Friend," in which Gaffer Hexam, with his daughter Lizzie rowing his boat, makes a living off the corpses he snatches from the river.

As late as the 1950s, the Thames remained a polluted graveyard—in 1957, much of it was declared “biologically dead." Its banks had long been plundered by impoverished young people known as mudlarks, scavenging for any scraps that could be sold. There was crime. As a gangster in “The Long Good Friday," Bob Hoskins struts and drinks Champagne on a yacht on the river. “Rivers can be very sinister places," Alfred Hitchcock’s voice pronounces in the opening of “Frenzy."

From my aerie over the Thames, I could almost touch the London Eye. Not a five-minute walk away was the National Theater, where I’ve seen life-changing theater: “Othello" with Adrian Lester, Sophie Okonedo as Cleopatra, and “Guys and Dolls."

I could see St Paul’s on the other side of the river and the Savoy hotel. If I leaned out far enough, I could see Tower Bridge. On and on to Docklands, to Gravesend where Pip met Magwich in “Great Expectations."

There were days when I walked along the water to Shakespeare’s Globe Theater, the Tate Modern, Borough Market. On the water, boats now include Ubers. Commuters can book one of these water taxis to and from a dozen points.

The Thames was once London’s main highway, as in Hilary Mantel’s book “Wolf Hall," which I read for the second time while tucked up in my flat. I came across the heartbreaking section where during a 1527 plague, Thomas Cromwell leaves his wife alive at home only to find her deceased a few hours later. Writes Ms. Mantel, “…it kills in a day. Merry at breakfast, they say; dead by noon."

I mention this to a friend who arrives at the glass apartment for a gin and tonic. But Cromwell prospered, he says. He got his own boat. The river survived, too. According to a recent zoological study, the River Thames, declared dead decades ago, is today alive with fish, sharks, eels and other marine life. A friend tells me of rumored dolphin sightings.

Now, just a month after I returned to New York, London is in the tight grip of the Omicron variant of Covid. Restaurants are closing again and tourists are staying away. In this horrible déjà vu, it’s worth recalling how the river came back. The Thames—and London—have withstood pollution, wars and plagues. They will again.