As I stood at the door of 221B Baker Street, I distinctly heard my heart crying out in my body: I really didn't expect to stand here in my lifetime.
In fact, in addition to the row house where the souvenir shop called "Sherlock Holmes Museum" is located, which still retains the Victorian style, surrounded by modern buildings, in the distance is the Prince Regent Park under the early spring sun, open and bright, and two large road construction vehicles are under construction...
As a detective fan, I'm obsessed with Jeremy Brett's version of Sherlock Holmes, not Benedict Cumberbatch's version of Detective Charlotte. High-top cylindrical hats, tuxedos, and the stigma-headed cane, for more than a hundred years, the sun of the Empire has fallen into the Western Mountains, but it is also at this time that the British style has gradually fascinated the world. Cultural soft power is not soft.
London is not an old city, and the wonderful thing is that the stone building and the steel and glass buildings blend very naturally. Big Ben echoes the "London Eye" across the River Thames, and the detectives have long admired New Scotland Yard, commonly known as the Metropolitan Police Service (Chinese officially known as the "London Metropolitan Police Department"), the world's first police agency, founded in 1829 – now just a short distance from the Palace of Westminster, but new to the marble walls. Even in Oxford and Cambridge, as long as you go out of the core area, modern buildings are everywhere. It's just that these buildings don't rely on their own modernity to brag and hustle and bustle, desperately expanding its spatial volume, so classical and modern are very harmonious.
From my temporary residence in Newcastle "or Generation Lane" (my parody of Hallane Terrace) – it's hard to say whether the style of the block is classical or modern, with rows of similar three-storey houses with an English look between the eyebrows, but, having cut out the accessories of the vestibule and backyard, the houses are basically the same – out there is the Jesmond subway station half below the road, but opposite the subway station is an old and quaint cathedral. Bypass an old railway bridge similar to the Truman Jungang Overpass and walk inside Newcastle University. Over there is the university's teaching building shaded by trees, and here is a row of reddish-brown student dormitories. There is a blue-and-white round porcelain plate hanging at the door of the student dormitory - this kind of blue-and-white round porcelain plate hanging at the door of the house is very common in the United Kingdom, it is a monument marker, similar to China's "cultural relics protection unit sign", but it is not as strict as China's authority, and even fictional characters in literature can hang one - the above text says that two hundred years ago, a celebrity in a certain industry once lived here. I remember standing in vain in front of this house for a while, trying to find traces of the unknown celebrity's past from the half-new and unladen wall tile door frames and window sills. I've seen a few times in the streets of England where residents painted facades and repainted houses that weren't old and decaying. This struck a Chinese: the house could indeed have been painted.
It wasn't until the contours of the renovation of Truman West Avenue appeared that I suddenly realized what I had seen in Britain. I think that those antique buildings may not really be the original works that have survived to this day, and the exquisite carvings and ancient and modern reflections of the later generations have been precipitated in time, which has made people more late obsessed with the style of legend.
I have seen an aerial photo taken from Truman West Street, between the black tiles, wooden eaves, and pink walls is a dim street light. It was the world on which my life depended. The smell of fireworks in the world, like the words and laughter of neighbors, is so familiar. As the renovation of West Avenue, which began last year, progressed, the houses in the photos were demolished. Every time it was demolished, I rushed back to see it. Watch your world gradually collapse and disappear into the depths of time. The grocery store in front of my house, in my childhood, was the largest cloth shop in Trumen, and the black wall facing the street could still recognize the two large characters of "(so-and-so) Sauce Garden". The blacksmith shop around the corner of the street has a peculiar two-story attic, not tall, not large, as if it were a cat crouching on a human shoulder—only an all-wood house can be so freely mixed and created. I still remember when I was a child, someone set up a big table in front of the store every afternoon to sell brine, the two old people who sold brine were brothers, the brother wrote a good hand, and the payment was "ground lung mountain tree"...
It wasn't until the elders of my own family moved back to their hometown and new homes that I found that although it was no longer what I remembered as a child, the new appearance of the old street was also a different kind of beauty. Still the pink wall, or the black tile, or the wooden eaves, but the glass and carving of the façade have replaced the previous door panels - like a girl in Hanfu, full of collagen, full of youthful energy. The most rare thing is that the road is much more spacious and neat, and there is even a small garden, but the house is still not high- this girl raises her hands and throws her hands and carries the book. So, if I had to choose, I might still prefer to choose the remodeled old street.
I asked myself why? I think that the art of space such as architecture is actually the art of freezing time. The rotation of time does not have to be resisted, and people are always willing to keep up with the pace of the times, as long as the shining points contained in tradition are inherited, as long as the later "new" remember to remain humble and low-key, as long as there are still people who can remember what happened here.
Du Weibin/Wen Yingjun/Photo
Source: Yuhuan Today
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