Heaven at the Gates of Saint Peter

There’s a café with carnations on the tables and floral designs on tablecloths pressed under glass table tops.

In Sant Pere there’s a square where tables seat chattering groups who drink slowly and talk quickly. They hang about till the time has passed for them to leave. They laugh and joke, they talk solemnly then smile again. Normal human beings whiling away an afternoon in the shade.

Around here the textile sellers and underwear vendors from years back are giving way to merchants from the East. Merchants from China whose shop signs are bilingual; Spanish and Chinese. Aesthetics are sacrificed to space utilization. Clothes hang on mannequins like they hang on hangers. Strip lighting banishes tones and textures. The charms of modern marketing have no place here. If you want it you buy it, price dictates.

A fair day on Sant Pere Més Alt brought the local commercial fauna onto the streets. The council had set up tables and stalls along the thoroughfare where the shopkeepers who sold and NGO volunteers who, sold too, shielded themselves from the sun that cut the street in two in mid-afternoon. The lower bank was glaring white, the upper cast in a somnolent shadow. Parasols and tarpaulins covered the conversation that emanated from many mouths sat on fold-up wooden chairs. The kind they pull off dancehalls when the politicians have gone.

Down by the Mercat de Santa Catalina the squares of earth where buildings were razed have been replanted with the life of new architecture. Improbable concrete outcrops hang above our heads as the workers clear away the pallets and place latticed steel sheets across holes in the ground. Turn a corner and the whole block is gone, cordoned off now with two-metre lengths of metal fencing anchored in long and narrow concrete shoes.

The market has changed everything. Her years as a refugee on the Avinguda de Lluís Campanys near the Arc de Triomf have ended and she has gained an eternity of splendour under waves of colourful mosaic.

Frank Gehry and a reporter from the New York Times called on Lino’s door one day to see the undulating roof. From Lino’s front room the whole roofscape can been seen unobstructed. Gehry was impressed, with Lino’s apartment, I am sure.

The streets are being re-paved and bollards inhibit parking. Fashionable types stroll about and stop for coffee in a square like this. A square that was lost to a neighbourhood that seemed too far down the street past the Palau de la Música.

Sant Pere, a matrix on a map tucked invisibly between Laietana and the Arc, between the Ronda Sant Pere and Princesa. All of them, streets that took us somewhere that existed in a time when this place did not.