Turning London into a Theme Park

Turning the Queen into her own Queen impersonator (as Commentary’s John Podhoretz put it) underlined that vague unsettling feeling you get walking around Central London that these days it’s the theme park of a great capital rather than an actual one. The iconic red telephone boxes, for example, are currently the home of eccentric “artwork” — in Covent Garden, a statue of a giraffe busts through the roof of one and nibbles the leaves overhead. Meanwhile, the red boxes without giraffes have non-working phones, stink of urine, and are plastered with prostitutes’ business cards — though even these have a quaintly dated, semi-parodic quality about them: In the one round the corner from the Houses of Parliament, a Russian lady promises clients “the ultimate Soviet Union.” Like the Queen’s, it’s a 007 gag, but from the Roger Moore era.