London’s Dead Thinkers Prevail
  
by Meghan Purvis

Okay, I confess: as a card-carrying Obie, I’ve spent my fair share of time in English seminars archly referring to the Dead White Guys of the British canon. Perhaps it’s just the universe’s payback, then, that I’ve spent so much of my first week in London hanging around them.
I mean that quite literally. This last week of orientation has involved many field trips spent tromping around London looking at history (one presumes the faculty wants us to get this out of the way so that, at some point, we’ll actually begin doing the coursework). History, as any fourth-grader can tell you, involves dead people. What the average American hasn’t quite processed is that in England, the dead people are front and center, like some gruesome wake that somewhere along the line turned into a frat party.
I got my first taste of this, literally, at the church of St. Martin-in-the-Field. The group of Obies I was with was ostensibly sent to the area to check out the gilt ceilings, the list of ministers dating back to the fourteenth century and the royal box behind the altar. What we spent most of our time doing was having tea in the surreal yet straightforward Café-in-the-Crypt. After taking a flight of stairs down from the church level, we found ourselves in an old-school vault — arched brick ceiling, grave markers in the floor — that also included a tasty and affordable snack bar. The table we ate at was directly on top of someone’s headstone.
Even my flat, plunked safely next to a street full of electronic retailers, isn’t out of the way of London’s morbid mayhem. There’s still plenty of Brit television to entertain me — soap operas, naughty comedies and “Top of the Pops” galore — but primetime is also full of crime investigation news shows. The difference between their version and, say, “20/20” is that over here the camera lingers lovingly over autopsy shots. I never thought waterlogged corpses were that photogenic, but maybe it’s just culture shock. I can’t stand Marmite either.
I’m from southern California, where something’s ancient if it survived the ’50s. Living in a city that is saturated with history is a little more than a shock — it requires a blasé attitude toward what anyone interested in the past (or, for that matter, anyone who follows a religious path) is tempted to revere. You can’t move around London without walking on dead people; the only difference is that, in the churches, the graves are actually marked. You walk on them anyway. 
Another church in central London, St. Bartholomew the Great, has a churchyard six feet higher that the rest of its surroundings; they actually moved the ground up as corpses were buried on top of each other. It’s a grim ambience to get used to, but it is one hell of an antidote to cabin fever. No matter how cramped my flat gets, there’s no chance of my killing my flatmates to get them out of the way — in a city that lives with its dead, above or below the ground doesn’t make all that much of a difference.

Meghan Purvis is studying abroad in London this semester and will be periodically contributing to the Review from internet cafes.