St. James's

I come in from the south, along St. James's Park, at about 1:30 on a Saturday. The path is busy. People walk it in twos and threes, and most keep going.

I climb the steps to Waterloo Place. From the first step the neighborhood feels like a way through. The people around me are headed up and away, toward Piccadilly.

Waterloo Place is a wide road that runs north, with statues down its center. It cuts the neighborhood unevenly: two-thirds to the west, one-third to the east. People cross in clusters.

I do not expect a theatre on Haymarket. His Majesty's Theatre is playing Phantom of the Opera. The show opened in 1986, and banners mark forty years. It is still made here.

From Piccadilly I turn south into St. James's Market, and the crowd falls away.

Jermyn Street. The shopfronts run on, one after another. Joseph Cheaney & Sons shows shoes in its window. I go in. The staff tell me the shoes are made in Northamptonshire. Not here.

Two shoppers pass the arched windows of Harvie & Hudson.

The security guard at Floris tells me, "I charge £29 per photograph, but my coworker charges £59." He says nothing to suggest he is joking.

At the John Lobb storefront a loafer sits on a lit shelf, orange light all around it. A man working there points me to the workshop. It is just around the corner, he says.

I swing back around the block, past T.S. Eliot House, near the London Library. A white shopfront with green window frames: Benjamin Spademan, Rare Books. Galleries stand close by. In one window the street lies reflected over a gilt-framed painting.

D.R. Harris is busy. People stand at the counter inside.

At 9 St. James's Street I speak with Christopher Gumbs, the general manager of John Lobb. He allows me to photograph the workshop. Under a sloped ceiling a man in a vest works at a bench shaping a wooden last. He is training on it this weekend. Monday to Friday, he applies soles to shoes. Lasts and boxes line the shelves above him.

On the same street, at Lock & Co., the shop manager, Maxwell Newman, has James Anderson walk me through the hat shop at the back. James wears a light grey hat. Wooden hat-making tools fill the shelves.

James tells me a fair number of the tools were used before the shop acquired them. When old hat makers close, they sell their equipment to the businesses still operating. One stainless steel hat stretcher was built by James's mentor in Luton. James works with a conformateur and a brass false thumb.

Everyone in the shop knows I am photographing.

I walk back through St. James's to Waterloo Place. At the top of the steps people cross the paving in every direction. I go down toward the park.