Looking Up at the Buildings

Most of a city lives above eye level, where almost no one ever looks.

We walk through cities at eye level, and a little below it. We watch the pavement for obstacles, the shopfronts for what we came to buy, the faces of strangers for the brief negotiation of who steps aside. The world we actually navigate is a narrow horizontal band, roughly head height, perhaps a storey up at most.

And above that band, almost entirely unvisited, is the rest of the building. The ritual is simply this: now and then, on a street you know well, stop and look up.

The second city overhead

The first time you do it properly you may feel slightly foolish, head tipped back like a tourist. Then the upper storeys come into view and the foolishness gives way to a small, genuine surprise. There is so much up there. Carved dates and crests. Faces moulded into the stonework, grimacing or grinning at no one. Old painted signs for businesses that closed before you were born, ghosting through the brick.

The shopfront you have passed a thousand times turns out to have three handsome floors above it, complete with balconies and a flourish of decoration that nobody at street level was ever really meant to see.

Detail meant for no one

What moves me most is how much care was lavished on parts of buildings that almost no one looks at. A craftsman carved that cornice knowing full well it would sit forty feet up, out of easy sight, weathering quietly for a century. It was done well anyway, for its own sake, or for the sake of the building, or simply because that was how things were done.

There is something steadying in that. A small argument, made in stone, that not everything has to be noticed to be worth doing properly.

A free and portable pleasure

The great thing about looking up is that it costs nothing and is available everywhere. You do not need a special street or a famous skyline. Your own dull high street, the one you find faintly depressing at ground level, very likely has a much better-looking upper half that you have simply never seen.

Try it on a walk you make often. Pick a building and lift your eyes to the roofline. You will not do it constantly, you cannot walk around permanently gazing skyward, but a handful of times, on familiar streets, it quietly doubles the city you thought you knew. The other half was up there the whole time, waiting for you to remember that it existed.