Look back to celebrate this city of firsts

The lives of Major General Sir Henry Havelock and Sir Charles Napier (perhaps even Admiral Nelson) were a mystery to the Mayor. But rather than learning about their lives, he wanted their place in London's past airbrushed out.

Livingstone's Philistinism is all too prevalent amongst our political elite.

On the very eve of the Iraq war, Tony Blair infamously remarked to the United States Congress that "a study of history provides so little instruction for our present day".

When just such a study would have offered a great deal of sage advice about the invasion of Middle East nations by British forces.

Refreshingly, the current Mayor has a passion for the past.

I didn't vote for Boris Johnson and disagree with most of his policies.

But in the Story of London festival currently taking place across the capital, Boris has taken a lead in championing the value of history in the lives of all Londoners.

So tomorrow sees the start of Film Weekend, with showings of wartime footage at the Imperial War Museum and a screening of the entrancing film Beautiful South: Lambeth and Southwark at the BFI.

Next weekend (20/21 June), I will be curating a series of public lectures by some of Britain's leading historians at King's Place, while Living History events promise to set the Thames alive with a magnificent Tudor pageant.

It's a particularly apposite time to be thinking about the story of London when all around us lurk ugly echoes of the past.

This was the city that led the anti-fascist struggle in the Thirties — and this week we have seen two newly elected BNP MEPs (from Lancashire and Yorkshire) driven from outside Parliament in a shower of eggs.

London, so dependent upon global commerce, has also borne the brunt of previous economic downturns.

Now, as in 1948, we find ourselves planning for another "Austerity Olympics" in the midst of a global financial crisis.

Then, as if to top it all, we have the Tube strike with its resurgence of Seventies-style union militancy under Bob Crow.

A look into London's past also allows us to take a slightly longer perspective on the capital's current challenges. For this city is undergoing seismic changes.

Of course, we have experienced extensive migration in the past with the black presence in London, for instance, stretching back to the Elizabethans.

But there is no doubt that the change we have witnessed over the past decade in terms of new communities, languages and cultures entering London is profound. And we need a strong sense of our complex history and collective identity as Londoners to deal with some of the ensuing tensions.

But in doing so, we can also celebrate this city of firsts — of extraordinary innovation in constructing the Underground and sewerage systems, confronting plagues and fires, pioneering street culture and building some of the world's greatest buildings before then knocking them down again.

That's why people keep coming here: because of London's history. Napier, Havelock, and Nelson included.

More information on Story of London lectures at www.kingsplace.co.uk/spoken-word/story-of-london

I'm not the only one to miss obvious talent

The welcome return of Mitchell and Webb to TV screens this week is a painful reminder of my haplessness as a talent scout.

I was directing a Cambridge Footlights show in the mid-Nineties, when a young David Mitchell turned up to audition.

Of course he was, as today, funny, self-deprecating and gifted.

And obviously I turned him down as too young and inexperienced.

Instead I cast a safe-pair-of-hands student — his name now escapes me — but he's certainly not a Bafta winner and panel-show superstar.

I recounted this indefensible decision to a publishing friend recently.

He listened sympathetically before revealing how, in his long and gilded career in the books industry, he had turned down Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy and Richard Adams's Watership Down.

It makes Mitchell's meteoric rise slightly easier to take.

Pond protesters' bare cheek

One topic and one topic only is dividing north London opinion at the moment — whether or not to extend the nude sunbathing plot at the men's swimming ponds on Hampstead Heath.

Entertainer Julian Clary and gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell have this week presented a 1,000-strong petition to the chairman of the Heath Management Committee demanding extra space for naturists.

Quite rightly, local conservationists and more traditionally minded swimmers are opposing this unwarranted exhibitionist expansion.

There is already far too much sunbathing at the ponds as it is.

The whole purpose of freshwater swimming is as a short, sharp, masochistic dip followed by a desperate attempt to revive circulation.

The ponds should not be for a louche afternoon of iPod shuffling, magazine-flicking self-display.

What's more, these proposals put at risk the pond's greatest asset — its rich social mix of orthodox Jews, Kentish Town old boys, Gospel Oak ruffians and Hampstead literati.

No to the sunbathers!

Science Museum unveils revamp

At last the Science Museum is undergoing a refit.

The £150 million modernisation scheme, unveiled this week by director Chris Ratley, sets out to transform this museological crustacean of Cromwell Road.

The last decade has seen it overtaken by its competitors.

The V&A is a global powerhouse combining scholarship and sell-out shows such as the Kylie Minogue dress fest.

The Natural History Museum has kept its dinosaur crowd and brought in new audiences with the Darwin Centre.

The Science Museum looked unloved but that is set to change, with plans for a bold rooftop ccosmology gallery and a new focus on the science of climate change.

The only problem is the price tag. Perhaps the solution is one more gallery dedicated to the oldest science of all — alchemy.