JOHN SIMPSON

It's 29 years since I last slept here in the heart of Jerusalem's old city. But I have never forgotten the early morning crowing of the roosters, donkeys braying, the clattering of shutters, the first noisy greetings of the shopkeepers and porters, the smell of Turkish coffee and baking, the red, wintry sun shining low on the white limestone buildings.

The previous evening, against the advice of everyone from my colleagues to the hotel porters, I had managed to clamber up to the walls of the old city on my own, and wander along them, my footsteps echoing on the narrow limestone walkways.

From the houses below, voices seeped up through the old wooden shutters: Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, once even French. A baby yowled, dogs barked, there was whimpering and laughter and amorous sighing. But mostly there was nothing except my own loud footfalls; nothing, that is, but the faint background hum of 4,000 years of history.

Abraham came here to sacrifice his only son, Isaac. Down in the Elah Valley, somewhere out there in the darkness, David fought Goliath, and eventually went on to capture Jerusalem itself. His son Solomon built the Temple.

Jesus came here as a child, then entered Jerusalem in triumph. Gethsemane and Golgotha are actual places you can see; though the Via Dolorosa isn't the route Jesus took to his crucifixion, even if no one has told the crowds of pilgrims. At the Antonia Fortress the Emperor Vespasian's son Titus attacked the city in AD70, then captured it and utterly destroyed it. The Prophet Muhammed is said to have ascended into heaven here in the year 620, and until 625 Muslims prayed in the direction of Jerusalem, not Mecca.

History has not made the old city of Jerusalem a happy place. It is as tense and bitter and fearful as it was when I first came here, in 1982. But it had never lost the glory and beauty of its ancient walls.

Or so I thought. Then I read the memoir of a British soldier, Sir Ronald Storrs, who recognised TE Lawrence's potential as a guerrilla leader and sent him to the Arabs. Gratefully, Lawrence called him 'the most brilliant Englishman in the Near East'. For Storrs, 1917 was a good year. He started it as a key player in the war in what is now Iraq, and was promoted to the War Cabinet secretariat in London. By December he was made military governor of Jerusalem, after its capture from the Ottomans.

So at 36 he was the uncrowned king of the world's most numinous city, able (within reason) to do anything he wanted. And what he wanted to do most was to make Jerusalem beautiful again. Especially its walls.

Casting around for a technical adviser, he remembered a lecture he had heard at school, 20 years before, from a disciple of the Arts and Crafts movement. CR Ashbee had been a controversial figure, and now, in his mid-40s, largely forgotten, he was living, washed up, in Egypt, far from his suffragette wife and daughters in England.

Storrs searched him out and brought him to Jerusalem as his architectural adviser.  The Ottomans, during their long occupation, had let the walls of the old city fall into near-ruin. Heaps of rubbish and rubble lay everywhere. There was sometimes open violence between the various religious and ethnic communities. Builders stole the ancient stonework by the cartload.

Storrs and Ashbee stopped all that. Storrs had the authority to clean the place up; Ashbee had the vision to build up the old city as it had once been, and to make the 16th-century walls beautiful again. Later Storrs wrote proudly, '[We] restored and freed from numberless encroachments the medieval ramparts, so that it was possible to "Walk about Zion and go round about her."'

Today, the walls of the old city are a monument to four millennia of history; but they're also a monument to the much-criticised British Mandate, which began with Storrs in 1917 and ended amid the fighting of 1948. Some years ago, I sat at a café near the Jaffa Gate with Israeli historian Tom Segev, and listened, gratified, as he praised the British for trying to keep the peace between Jews and Arabs, and for making the old city the glory that it is today. This isn't a part of the world where people often have much good to say about the British.

I've often been back, but have scarcely added to our national reputation. Some years ago I was doing some filming on the walls of the old city. In the spring rain, the limestone paving shone. It looked wonderful, but it was horribly slick. I had recently had a knee operation in Belgrade, with Nato planes bombing all round the hospital, and was nervous about falling over. The director went to a curio shop and bought me a magnificent walking stick with a dragon's-head handle. I hobbled around with it, looking out at the Mount of Olives, had a cup of  sweet tea, then was taken to the airport.

My carry-on bag and jacket went into the X-ray machine, followed by the handsome walking stick. A klaxon brayed out. Men in uniform came running and pointed their guns at me. It was a swordstick. I had tried to take a weapon onto a plane. In Israel. 

The look on my face convinced everyone that I hadn't realised what it was. They gave it back, and even let me limp round the departure lounge with it. Then I had to hand it to the pilot personally. He gave it back, grinning, when we reached Paris.

I keep it in my flat there. It's the best memory I have — apart from a few photos — of the walls of Jerusalem. Storrs' and Ashbee's walls.

John Simpson is the BBC's world affairs editor and can be seen around the globe on BBC World News, available in 200 countries and territories worldwide, and on selected British Airways flights.