The Business District on a Sunday Morning
The financial quarter here covers maybe eight streets. On a Wednesday at nine it is impassable. On a Sunday at nine there is nobody in it at all, and I mean that fairly literally, I have walked the whole of it and seen two people, one of them a security guard.
Why nobody goes
Because there is nothing there. No shops that open at weekends, no cafes, no residents, no reason. The whole district exists to be worked in and when nobody is working it serves no function whatsoever.
That is precisely what makes it worth walking. Every other empty space I have written about is empty because of timing or weather or season. This is empty because the buildings themselves have no weekend purpose.
What you actually see
Architecture, without people in front of it. This is the main thing and it is a bigger difference than it sounds.
On a weekday you cannot look at a building in a business district. There are too many people, you are in the way, and the ground floor is obscured by bodies. On a Sunday you can stand in the middle of the street and look up, which is the only way most of these buildings make any sense.
You also see the layers. Business districts in old cities are built on top of much older street plans, and with the crowds gone you can read the pattern: a medieval alley between two glass towers, a church wedged into a corner, a street that bends for a reason that stopped existing four hundred years ago.
And the scale becomes physical. Standing alone at the bottom of a thirty storey canyon with no traffic and no people produces a sensation that I would describe as slightly unnerving, in a way that I have come to enjoy.
The sound
Very odd, and worth going for on its own. Hard surfaces on all sides, no soft material anywhere, and nothing to absorb anything. Your own footsteps come back off the buildings with a delay you can hear.
I have stood still in a plaza and heard a car four streets away, then a gull, then nothing at all for perhaps twenty seconds. In the middle of a major city that is not a thing you expect.
Practicalities
Nothing is open. Nothing at all, in most cases, so bring what you need. This is the least serviced empty space on this site.
Toilets are the real problem and there is no solution other than planning around it. The nearest open ones may be fifteen minutes walk away at a station.
Security is worth knowing about. Many of the plazas in these districts are privately owned, and on a Sunday when you are the only person in one, a guard may well come and ask what you are doing. In my experience this has always been polite and has always ended with them going away, but it happens, and it is more likely if you are photographing.
The best hour
Sunday between eight and eleven. Saturday is not the same because there is more residual activity, some construction, some deliveries.
Sunday afternoon starts to pick up slightly as people cut through on their way elsewhere.
The exceptional version is Sunday morning in the week between Christmas and New Year, when even the security is thin, and which I would put forward as the single emptiest hour available in a major city all year.
The churches inside it
Old business districts almost always contain several churches that predate everything around them, and on a Sunday morning they are the only buildings in the district that are open and in use.
This produces one of the odder juxtapositions available in a city: an eleventh century church holding a service for forty people, surrounded on all sides by empty forty storey towers.
Several of these keep their doors open through the day and their churchyards, where they survive, are the only planted space for several streets. I have written elsewhere about churchyards generally; the ones marooned in a financial district are the strangest and among the best.
Photographing it
Worth a specific warning because it is the activity most likely to attract attention.
Public streets are public and photography on them is not restricted in most places. Private plazas are a different matter and many of them prohibit it in their terms of use, which are posted on a small sign nobody reads.
In practice, a phone gets ignored and a tripod gets approached within about five minutes. If you want the empty architecture pictures, and it is the best place in the city to get them, handheld and moving is the way to avoid a conversation.
The riverside version
If your business district touches water, the waterfront section is the part to prioritise.
Riverside walkways in financial districts are built for lunchtime crowds and are usually well made, with seating and railings and long sight lines. On a Sunday they are empty, and unlike the streets behind them they have something to look at.
The one here runs for about a kilometre and I have walked it on a Sunday morning perhaps a dozen times and rarely passed more than three people. It is also, being open to the sky and facing water, the one part of the district that does not feel oppressive when empty.
