I managed the climb all in one go, which left me a wheezing wreck at the top. The spiral staircase gets narrower as you climb, so descenders huddle politely against the wall as the puffing climbers squeeze past. You find youurself on a square veranda with a 360 degree view of the city, albeit inside a mesh safety cage. This replaced a victorian arrray of iron bars erected in the mid 19th century to prevent the poor from putting an end to the misery of their existence. The bars would have been easier to take photographs through.
What you see from the top is - everything. The city sprawls to the horizon, below and sometimes above you. The monumental wall of 20 Fenchurch Street looms, leans towards you, as the Gherkin and Tower 42 peer over its shoulders. Meanwhile golden weathercocks atop the ancient Wren and Hawksmoor churches, for hundreds of years the tallest things around themselves, glint amidst the grey concrete and glass.
The bizarre jumble of old and new buildings sums up, for me, my fascination for London. Other big cities try for order, with straight roads and wide boulevards. Or they preserve the old, separate it from the new. Whereas London just shoves it all together in a mad tangle. And, somehow it works. There's history lurking in every corner. Pretty much every significant player in English history has walked down the very same streets you're walking down. Suck on that, New York.
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