I would like to have seen that London or, better yet, to see a modern London with “long groves of darkness” blooming with subtle “islands of light.” Some eighty-five years after the publication of Woolf’s essay, her equation has been reversed. Now, long groves of electric light give way only periodically to pockets of gaslit beauty or darkness. My visit here is the first time I experience a feeling that I’ll have in several other cities and towns, especially in Europe, so rich with centuries of built history: how much more beautiful the nights could be here if more attention were paid to light and darkness. It’s not that the London lighting doesn’t have its moments—Parliament from across the Thames, for example—but in general the lighting relies on floodlights plastered against building walls, with the result a somewhat patchy appearance, especially compared to the subtle and more uniform lighting I will see in Paris. The opportunities for creating and enhancing the beauty of London at night are enormous—its gaslights and human history give it such an advantage over most cities in world—but for now these opportunities remain, for the most part, unrealized.
From Pall Mall to Trafalgar Square by 3:55, the “look right, look left” painted at intersection crossings, the black cabs slowing by, a row of sleeping red double-decker buses, Admiral Nelson immortalized with spotlights. Then, once again, the Strand. And lastly, Covent Garden.
This was the old market of London for hundreds of years, first outside the city walls, then at the city’s edge. Dickens closes his essay by visiting “Covent-garden Market” which he finds on market morning “wonderful company. The great wagons of cabbages, with growers’ men and boys lying asleep under them, and with sharp dogs from market-garden neighbourhoods looking after the whole, were as good as a party.” The sense of a party in Covent Garden has a long history. An engraving from 1735 titled “Drunken Rakes and Watchmen in Covent Garden” features said rakes in tricorner hats, with swords drawn, their arms around ladies. A dog barks in the corner, lanterns lie smashed on cobblestones, the watchmen enter with their staffs a-swinging, giving one rake a serious kick in the behind, while a lady plugs her man’s nose, and two link boys—who before gaslight “linked” travelers in the street from one lighted location to the next—stand holding their flames in the corner, clearly amused by ridiculous adults. What’s interesting, aside from the crazy scene, is that in the background, modern-day Covent Garden is clear. Beyond the swooning face of a petticoated dame, you almost expect, if you look closely enough, to see the Apple Store logo in the shop window under the colonnade. The church with the clock, the clock tower, the passages, the cobblestones, they’re all here. The description states, “He and his drunken companions raise a riot in Covent Garden,” and funny enough, 275 years later, at just past 4:00 a.m., he and his drunken companions are still here, bellowing about Chelsea football as they lead each other, arms on shoulders, from the last pub to the next.
On the square itself, the gaslight still burns. But several shops are lit so brightly, either window displays or entire interiors, that electric light gushes into the square, flooding the night. To see how lovely Covent Garden used to be, stroll the side streets, Crown Court or Broad Court: gaslight and cobblestones, five-hundred-year-old buildings set close across from one another.
In Covent Garden Market now, night is still here, but morning is coming fast. It’s time to walk back to the Strand, to my bed and sleep, and I have a strong feeling that when I return in a few hours the scene here will be changed. Back will be the shopping throngs, cups from Caffè Nero in one hand and shopping bags in the other, gone the ghosts of farmers, their cabbages, their dogs.
A few nights later, I am standing on Île St.-Louis, in the center of old Paris, watching the pale peach glow from nineteenth-century lamps on a bridge over the Seine, the waxing crescent moon rising in a powder-blue lavender sky.
A gas lamplighter in the Parisian darkness of the 1930s as captured by the photographer Brassaï. (© The Brassaï Estate—RMN)
There are many bright cities, but only one City of Light, La Ville-Lumière. These days the city’s nickname is often translated as “the city of lights,” and with good reason, for the lighting of Paris is certainly part of its charm and identity. But if loads of electric light were all it took for a city to be called the City of Light, dozens of cities around the world would be well positioned to steal the title. We don’t know the exact origin of the phrase, but we do know it refers to Paris’s being the center of the eighteenth-century philosophical movement known as the Enlightenment. That is, the name City of Light has as much to do with new ways of thinking as it does with impressive artificial light.
It turns out that is still the case.
“Very little about this light is spontaneous,” says David Downie, an American expatriate and author of the wonderful Paris, Paris, who has joined me for a walk through the old city. “It’s all studied. Since 1900, they’ve consciously cultivated their image. Paris was really the first to pioneer this concept of a light identity. Of using light to create an atmosphere.” Downie points to the lamps glowing on the short bridge from Île St.-Louis to Île de la Cité. “See the light fixture? It’s a pre-1890s gas model with a little chimney, on a footbridge from the 1960s: That’s what it’s all about. They’re playing not just with light but with shadow. The darker it gets, the better this bridge looks.” While few would notice this bridge during the day, at night the lighting highlights the beautiful shadow-play on the bridge’s underside. “There are a lot of little details that come out at night,” Downie says. “They’re very careful to make the light just strong enough so that you’re not going to trip, but they’ve understood that they can’t blind you. Here, they’ve created a nostalgic, old-fashioned feel with a warm blanket of light.”
One feature of the lighting in old Paris is that there are few streetlights higher than fifteen meters, essentially no lights much above the first floor. The sidewalks and streets and balconies are lit, but above that the buildings fade toward darkness. “This was all studied; they want it to be this way,” Downie explains. “The goal here is to create atmosphere, and the darker it gets, the more atmospheric it becomes.”
As darkness collects between the buildings, along the Seine, on the rooftops, French doors, and balconies, rising around gold lamplight on the ancient narrow streets of these islands where the city was born, there is an intimacy, an openness—anyone can walk these islands, stand on these bridges, wander through this history, as though the city at night is a dinner party in a wonderful old house full of endlessly accessible rooms. The fromagerie, a little bell on the door and soft cheese white paper–wrapped, the boucherie windows full of twisted-neck fowl with feathered heads still attached, the Berthillon ice cream shop sending its small cones out into the night like messengers. Pipe organ notes sift through heavy, centuries-old wooden church doors, faux wicker-backed café chairs huddle around espresso-topped tables, a ribbon of moonlight ripples on the Seine’s silver skin as it flows under bridges lit yellow-gold marching west toward the sea.
“This is the beauty of the night, a beauty ‘rooted in atmosphere’ that is not easily explained,” explains Joachim Schlör in Nights in the Big City. “I start my nocturnal walk with pleasure, and my pulse beats slower in this pleasant darkness.”
Walking and old Paris go together hand in glove, one reason so many Americans—used to cities enslaved to the automobile—revel in visiting the French capital. Recently the notion of the flâneur has gained popularity, one who appreciates, Schlör says, “the fine art of walking through a city slowly and attentively, one’s appreciation bolstered by learning.” But in Paris this walking happens not only during the day. In the noctambule,