"I can walk about London and see a society that seems an absolutely revolutionary change from the 1950s, that seems completely and utterly different, and then I can pick up on something where you suddenly see that it's not"
About this Quote
Penelope Lively registers the double vision of a city layered by time. London, in her description, looks remade since the 1950s: a vast, diverse metropolis of global cuisines, shifting gender norms, queer visibility, smartphones on every corner, glass towers where factories once stood. The changes feel revolutionary, the texture of daily life radically altered from an age of ration books, deference, and rigid roles. Yet a gesture, a building, an accent at a doorway, a club that still guards its threshold, a property listing priced for dynastic wealth, a school crest on a blazer, and suddenly the past declares itself. Beneath the sheen of novelty, continuities endure.
That tension is central to Livelys work. She has long written about memory, time, and archaeology, treating places as palimpsests where earlier inscriptions bleed through the latest lines. London becomes an urban dig site: the new stratifies atop older layers that have not been erased. Progress and persistence sit side by side, each qualifying the other. The city teaches that history does not move in a clean forward sprint; it accretes, adapts, and disguises itself.
There is a quiet skepticism here toward triumphalist narratives of modernity. It is easy to be dazzled by rebranded districts and a multicultural street scene and assume that the old hierarchies have dissolved. Lively hears the subtler signals: class encoded in voice, the enduring authority of certain institutions, imperial ghosts in public monuments, economic structures that funnel advantage along familiar grooves. The shock she names comes from catching these continuities in a single revealing detail, like an archaeologist finding a shard that dates the stratum.
As someone who has watched Britain shift across seven decades, she is attuned to both rupture and recurrence. Her observation is a method as much as a remark: look closely, resist simple stories, hold change and endurance together. London asks for that double vision, and rewards it with a truer sense of how lives are lived in historys long present.
That tension is central to Livelys work. She has long written about memory, time, and archaeology, treating places as palimpsests where earlier inscriptions bleed through the latest lines. London becomes an urban dig site: the new stratifies atop older layers that have not been erased. Progress and persistence sit side by side, each qualifying the other. The city teaches that history does not move in a clean forward sprint; it accretes, adapts, and disguises itself.
There is a quiet skepticism here toward triumphalist narratives of modernity. It is easy to be dazzled by rebranded districts and a multicultural street scene and assume that the old hierarchies have dissolved. Lively hears the subtler signals: class encoded in voice, the enduring authority of certain institutions, imperial ghosts in public monuments, economic structures that funnel advantage along familiar grooves. The shock she names comes from catching these continuities in a single revealing detail, like an archaeologist finding a shard that dates the stratum.
As someone who has watched Britain shift across seven decades, she is attuned to both rupture and recurrence. Her observation is a method as much as a remark: look closely, resist simple stories, hold change and endurance together. London asks for that double vision, and rewards it with a truer sense of how lives are lived in historys long present.
Quote Details
| Topic | Change |
|---|
More Quotes by Penelope
Add to List
