Theatrical Reflections in London – A City on Stage

One day the sun was up. Warm and sunny, Chorused all Londoners. Another day it was raining again in London. The kind of rain that doesn’t pour but lingers – soft, stubborn, and gray like an old coat that doesn’t fit but keeps you warm. The streets were slick with it. The pavements mirrored the sky, and the sky had no face, only mood. You walked because you had to walk. The city didn’t ask you to understand it. It never did. But in the puddles and the windows and the river that moved without sound, there were pieces of things – faces, buildings, bits of sky, memory. You saw yourself sometimes. Or thought you did. The kind of self you only see when the world is upside-down or quiet. And in that way, London taught you how to look again. Not just at the city, but into it. And into yourself. No wonder then that Sylvia Plath has called London “a city of mirrors – glass storefronts, train windows, puddles in cobbled alleyways – all reflecting a girl trying to find herself”.

“There is something in the London mist that makes one introspective,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “That shows not just the face in the mirror, but the thoughts behind the eyes.” We agreed with him. Every time. Whatever the weather, every reflection in London sets one off on a reflective trip. A journey that soothes the body and soul by its sheer visual display. London then is indeed a place for reflection – “in every window, in every shadow, in the ever-mirrored River Thames, thought returns to itself” … wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson.

I was browsing through my collection of photographs clicked of reflections in the canal near Camden, windows in central London, and a few near the river Thames… and all of them were ready to inspire me to write or paint or draw. Reflections are just as wonderful even when the wind is blowing and ripples appear on the surface of a canal or the river. It is poetic even then. When the wind stirs ever so slightly, the reflections begin to tremble—not enough to disappear, but just enough to remind you they were never real to begin with. A face in a puddle ripples like a forgotten memory, a lamplight stretches and dances on the surface of the Thames, uncertain and alive. There’s something tender in the way the world shivers under that touch of wind, as if it’s breathing, as if it’s dreaming. In that moment, nothing holds still – yet everything feels true. Fleeting, fragile, beautiful.

The River Thames, long the mirror of London, was once so reflective and still in the early dawn that Claude Monet, during his visits between 1899 and 1901, painted over ninety-five canvases capturing its ever-shifting moods – many at the exact same spot, simply observing how fog, light, and wind changed the water’s face. He called the Thames “a river of reflections.” In his letters, he wrote of how it “danced with the soul of London.”

Even the mist, that famous London veil, has inspired poets and painters alike—not just for what it hides, but for what it allows us to imagine. Virginia Woolf believed that “London’s fog was not a curtain but a canvas.”

There are some interesting snippets about reflections in London as writers and poets have always been observant and reflections have evoked all kinds of feelings. One of them from Victorian times saw something spooky in them. This was in the 1800s when gas lamps first lit the streets of London. Their golden glow shimmered in rain-slicked cobblestones and puddles like fallen stars. This Victorian wrote that “a man might glimpse his truest thoughts in the flicker of his reflection under gaslight,” because the light blurred the line between what was seen and what was felt. There is a line by T.S. Eliot that goes: “I had not thought death had undone so many” and it is believed that it was inspired not only by the commuters he saw but by the ghost-like flow of their mirrored silhouettes over the Thames at dawn. The reflection of the bridge, seen in early morning fog, was known by locals as “the second crossing.”

I read somewhere that even Charles Dickens loved walking the city restlessly at night and often journaled how the fog transformed familiar streets into “dreamscapes of memory.” He once wrote: “A puddle becomes a portal. A window a stage. London reflects not what is, but what might have been.” His reflections weren’t just in water or glass, but in the city’s mood, like soft echoes between the cobbles.

There is a strange fact mentioned in some pamphlet that talked about the London Underground. It spoke of mirrors installed at angles inside Tube stations that reflected light into the dark corners of platforms. I’m not surprised that these spots became accidental canvases where commuters could see themselves as well as others in surreal layers and this does appear like a hymn of overlapping lives. One wartime letter described them as “brief windows into other souls, framed in tile and shadow.”

So yes, reflections can be anything. Romantics. Surreal. Spooky. Adventurous. Melancholic. Quiet. Mysterious. Elegant. Playful. Gritty. Dreamlike. In London, reflections don’t just show the world – they translate it. They make the ordinary, poetic. The fleeting, unforgettable.
.
.
.
Arvind Passey
Uploaded on 23 April 2025
.
I’m participating in BlogchatterA2Z
.
.
.