Memories of Jubilee Gardens

Some cities have a place that keeps pulling me back. Not the famous landmark. Not the postcard view. Just a patch of ground that somehow connects.

More than a decade ago I wandered along the Thames alone, back when the London Eye was still just an idea. I found a bench in Jubilee Gardens on London’s South Bank. Sat down and watched the city drift by. No grand revelation. Just the comforting feeling that, in a city of millions, nobody expected anything from me.

Just me and the bench at sunset. Perfect.

A few years later I returned. Same bench. Same river. I spent the evening reading Bruce Chatwin while the sun disappeared behind the skyline. London did what London does best: it carried on with a stiff upper lip, completely indifferent to my little ritual.

The next visit was different. I wasn’t alone anymore. The beautiful girl was far better company than a paperback novel, so the bench had to fend for itself while we kept walking past it.

Reading Bruce Chatwin in Jubilee Gardens.

And then, recently, I came back once more. I walked past that familiar spot and was struck by the uncomfortable arithmetic of time. Friends had come and gone. Relationships had begun and ended. Addresses changed. Priorities shifted. A few more wrinkles had appeared in the mirror, accompanied by a few extra kilos that stubbornly refused to leave. Yet there I was again.

There’s something oddly reassuring about discovering that beneath all the accumulated baggage, you’re still recognizably yourself. It’s also slightly irritating. You spend years imagining you’ll evolve into some wiser, sleeker version of yourself, only to discover you’re mostly the same fool with better luggage.

Jubilee Gardens, however, had changed. The quiet refuge I remembered had become another stop on the South Bank conveyor belt of tourists, buskers, food carts and selfie sticks. The city had polished away a little of the silence that made the place special.

Jubilee Gardens, my bench guarded by the lizard king.

It reminded me of one of my favorite stories in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. An ordinary man is granted immortality and agrees to meet the dream lord Morpheus in the same place every hundred years. Around him, kingdoms rise and fall, fashions become absurd and then fashionable again, generations vanish. The man remains.

Sitting there, I understood the appeal of that story a little better. Places become anchors. We return to them hoping they’ll remind us who we were, only to discover they’re measuring how much we’ve changed instead. Perhaps it’s finally time to stop visiting that bench. Or perhaps some ghosts deserve a courtesy call every now and then.