Look Up

A story of the difference of looking above the current and into the past.

In her left hand, the grip of her carrier bag holding an hour's worth of shopping. In her right, a bus ticket for the trip she inevitably had to make after the rain had finally stopped. Stood under a shelter outside a famous department store, she looked at the world around her. Modern society had dictated that the high street become a haven of big signs, flashy forefronts and famous names; a line-up of retail heaven for any seasoned shopper. Left to right it allowed the same conclusion to hit her mind. 

And then she looked up.

Modern society had also dictated that we accept that a pair of headphones and a distant expression is the common way of walking from A to B. Shoulders slumped, music blocking the outside world, a crime almost all are guilty of. Yet the simple change of direction as she gazed at the buildings around her led the imagination that seemed so tucked away in her modern mind come to life in a flurry of thought.

Opposite her stood a grand Victorian building, a building that led her to decide that in her little bubble of happiness was an old house that housed the well-off factory owners that looked down on the rubble that roamed the coddled streets of their time. A family that floundered about in the riches everyone dreamed of and a mother who followed her husband around to improve his appearance at all times. She smiled in the satisfaction of how mother time had thankfully changed that perception.

A glance down the high street saw a tall building with a beautifully constructed steeple stood high above the dampened streets of this typical Winter day. Who knew what wonderful and majestic creatures had occupied this grand view over the years? Today it held a holding position for plenty of pigeons but the absurd lengths her mind took led her to think of the pigeons and their heritage. A brief chuckle rose out as she caught the sudden absurdity of such a thought.

Next door she noticed pillars leading from a wet, reflective floor up towards a monumental lion carved into the medieval styling of a building she'd never even thought twice of at eye level. It was almost a basilica in the grandeur of her mind, even Romanesque in the ability to pull some kind of connection to a Roman invasion that never existed outside the realm of her imagination. Fields surrounding with farms working their hard graft, a different world from the world she knew so well now. Whilst she knew that reality probably had a far less exciting story to her own she very much preferred the Roman influence she'd made up.

It hit her excited mind that so much history could exist within the walls she tread past every day without a second thought. To look up and see such a different world from the one that everyone had become so used to led her to ponder why it's something that no one else noticed. Could it be that we're all so sucked into the retail world we live in now that we simply choose to ignore the past as it watches over us day after day?

Before she could second think herself a brief respite in the rain allowed the girl to make a small bit of progress as she continued her ascent into the past by looking up at the buildings all around her. There was stories for every building with the decades and centuries that each one clearly existed within. Orphanages from the earlier years that allowed children to band together in their playful times, buildings clearly more recently with their Brutalist architecture pushing through the gothic stylings of its older neighbours, banks that didn't look a day older than their early 20th Century inception all hidden above a flat world of modern retail.

The bus stop soon appeared in front of her sodden feet, and she sat under the plastic shelter looking back at the street she had walked down. This sudden change of perspective made this dull street seem so much more epic. She could see the cobbled roads with horse drawn carriages tapping around to the sound of the hooves. She could see the kids running around with metal hoops under the protective watch of their parents as they exchange pleasantries in Victorian dress. There were lines of men marching through on the way to fight for their country, groups of people celebrating the success under the VE Day banners lining the streets, collections of cars beginning to fill the streets under a new age of peace and love and the slow inclusion of more shops. 

And it's always been there. For her parents, for their parents, for many decades going back. It never left any of them.

She looked back down and studied her left hand. The shopping bag, soggy and wet, reminded her of where she really was. On a high street, in the 21st Century, with shops looking at her from every direction. As she stepped on to the bus and took a seat, she made sure she gave the history that was so easily missed a final goodbye and looked back up at the past as modern life carried on directly underneath it without a second thought. Imagination was a wonderful thing, she just wished reality was anywhere near the same.