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This is my city. This is our city. When I hang up my bag on
the Met Line. When I hang from the pole of a Routemaster. When I skip
through the tunnels at King’s Cross. When I run for front seat on the
Docklands Light Railway. When the chimneys of Battersea loom into view.
When I spot Canary Wharf from a precious new place. When I walk the
warm streets of Brixton. When I run round the clock tower at Golders
Green. When I wake up, half-drunk, at High Barnet. When I wake
up, still dreaming, at Morden. When I find a new postcode with
which I fall in love. When I find a short-cut never spotted before.
When my breath catches me, suddenly, as it did that first time,
and all the others, when crossing Westminster Bridge. When I wander the
streets, half-tired, half-there perhaps, with friends and companions,
or sometimes alone, and suddenly see
it again, in the air above. [Introduction to Smoke#1, Jude Rogers] The first
of these thoughts, of course, was that God Himself was speaking to me.
Maybe he’d twigged, found me wanting, and was about to smite me with
His wrath again? Or maybe He’d suddenly come up with a real humdinger
of an 11th commandment, and now wanted me to fetch the relevant stone
tablet from somewhere of truly Biblical awkwardness like the top of a
bald mountain or the stomach of a giant fish or that bit of Kingsland
Road that’s no longer Dalston but not quite Shoreditch. I quickly
dismissed all this on epistemological grounds, however, mentally citing
in evidence the existence of so much inexplicable suffering in the
world, and
also of a small loudspeaker in the roof-panel above my head. Rimbaud
spent longer in London than he ever did in Paris. It shows. It was
where he perfected his poetry; and where he abandoned it, at just 21.
How perfect to think of him on the seedy backstreets of Somers Town and
King’s Cross with the whores and rent boys, slipping along the path by
the Regent’s Canal with its waters “yellow like death”. Sometimes I
think I catch a glimpse of him on the streets: drunk and crazy and
impossibly beautiful as only a seventeen-year-old can be. John
Constantine doesn’t write social commentary. He just happens to live in
London. A London where a nun is slaughtered in Mornington Crescent tube
by a man whose limbs have all been disjointed. Where demon yuppies
slumming it in trendy Spitalfields bars have the upwardly mobile
queueing to sell their souls. Where dead homeless men desperate for a
hug haunt Camden council estate towers. Where Arsenal fans get hooked
on smack after watching Victorian ghosts re-enact their own murders
night after night. Where deceased fictional characters have a pint with
readers at Death’s boozer in Southwark. DANGER:
VOID BEHIND DOOR... you’ve read it many times but never quite believed
it; you’re a rational chap at heart and, even though you’re prepared to
concede the possibility of an arid and formless netherworld – and even
that there might be points at which it lies mere inches behind the dull
surface of our own familiar realm – the idea that a portal into such
mind-terrorising nothingness could be accessed via a small yellow door
on the southbound Bakerloo Line platform at Waterloo has always seemed
preposterous. Until now. Enter The
Settle Inn in the grim shadow of Suicide Bridge on a Tuesday; a
challenge of honour, for the princely sum of nought pence. Bring along
a masterful friend with knowledge of far-flung currencies, ancient
dictatorships and 1920s FA Cup Results, and you, friend, will
prosper. We
perfected the art of gaining free entry to all the capital’s
fashionable concerts, clubs, aftershow parties and music biz exclusive
functions, even if many of the organisers had accidentally forgotten to
invite us. We knew that most gigs by third division Britpop bands were
simply a front for the real event of the evening: the
aftershow. Here you could meet and attempt to befriend the artistes,
network with the important movers and shakers who could help your
career and, most importantly of all, get drunk for free.
Our technique for acquiring places on closed guest-lists was talked
about in hushed tones by undiscovered rainforest tribes. ... at
times, the 253 is a hotbed of romantic intrigue. I confess to having
got a date on board one drunken Saturday. I was wearing a studded dog
collar (a punkette phase I was going through), and
he was intrigued enough by it to approach me – although seeing as
how I was coming back from Camden, it didn’t seem that unusual. It
was a one-date wonder but, as I’d only just moved to London
at the time, the whole affair made me feel impossibly sophisticated and
urban. So now,
rather than being turned away from the gates of London’s over-stuffed
churchyards and forced to resort to back-street cremations,
surreptitious tippings over Battersea Bridge on moonless nights, or
amateur taxidermy, the newly bereaved could have their previously
beloved casketed up and carted off on the back of a horse-led hearse to
Waterloo, where they would be loaded into the stately black carriages
of a Funeral Express and whisked non-stop to
Brookwood for a mere two shillings and sixpence per coffin – with
30% off if the occupant’s Network Card hadn’t expired before they
had. The sad,
shameful fact that he’s been colonised by a van rental firm can’t mar
his magnificence, nor can the fact that his erection in this forsaken
spot was ultimately unnecessary (if you’ll pardon my French). The
promise was there in the grand plans of expansion in
the early 20th century – a time of industrial optimism that’s
left us with ghost stations in all corners of the city. There were
other regulars in the park along with myself: the career mom tugging
her son towards the posh school in his ill-fitting hat and shorts and
the Asian man who smiled and said “Hello” as I passed. Like the words
of the bagel-seller who greets me with a “plain
raisin bagel” and a compliment each morning when I walk out of the York
Street subway station on my way to work in Brooklyn,
this man’s morning smile meant the world to me. Here I was in a
foreign country, and I had become a part of someone else’s routine. Nadia
leaves the flat of the man she’s just had hollow second-date sex with
to take the night-bus home. N171: Trafalgar Square – Camberwell –
Peckham – Brockley – Catford – Hither Green. It’s as simple
as that. She lingers on the doorstep, hopeful, pathetic; he kisses her
on the cheek, leaning across her mouth. She leaves; he finishes his
beer, lights a cigarette, shakes his head slowly. Michael Nyman’s
strings stab in the background and the bus skims through the November
rain down Waterloo Road. In Iain
Sinclair’s most recent work, London Orbital, the author walks
anticlockwise round the M25, “trying to exorcise the shame of the
Dome”, accompanied by a photographer, Marc Atkins. The parallels with Downmarket
– in which the author walks clockwise round the Elephant & Castle
one-way system trying to find
out where they’ve moved the bus-stop for the 188 to Surrey Quays,
accompanied by a man in a dressing-gown who keeps shouting at him – are
potentially actionable. Stage
4: Hackney Wick to Stratford. I pass a sign soldered to a
crumbling tenement block, proclaiming ‘Mine Is The Voice In Your Head’.
I double-take, to see if conditions have induced hallucinations, and it
is still there... is my Bovril spiked?... the sparseness of
surroundings doing little to ease paranoia... waste ground,
pylons, industrial noise... the realisation that I have as yet not
passed this point... and then... an abyss of a tunnel...
is this... is this the end? My local
landmark, I see it framed at the end of my street as I approach from
Hammersmith, side-on from the Cromwell Road as I lug the shopping back
from Tesco, from the Millennium Wheel (never quite in the direction I
expect it to be in, like everything else), and from planes to Heathrow,
just before the wings tip up and I lose all sense
of where we are and start to focus instead on passport control,
customs, getting home, getting to work... How far, I
wonder, would this man follow a subject? On a Tube strike day, for
example, it’s perfectly reasonable that someone would start a walk in
Charing Cross Road and end up in Hammersmith. Perhaps he
circumnavigates this problem by having a carefully marked out patch
with a border that cannot be crossed; he sees the “Welcome To
Islington” sign and feels the same dread as a criminal facing “You are
now entering Texas”. I’ve
always loved
the Woolwich Ferry. I love the fact that in 1889 parliament decreed
that there must be a free ferry here in perpetuity; so, come greenhouse
summer or nuclear winter, the Thames – be it a raging flood,
mud-flavoured ice-pop or dusty hollow stuck with rusted trolleys and
the bleached skulls of Beckton pit-bulls – will always be crossable at
Woolwich, and for free, because Lord Salisbury said so. And I love the
fact that it’s part of the North Circular – that London’s only major
ring-road inside the M25 completes its circuit only at the whim of a
ferry called Ernest Bevin, for whom you must queue. But mostly I love
the fact that north and south London can still be cut off from each
other by fog. These
days, EastEnders rarely snarls a pull, it being too
far-fetched, too bloody stupid. Consider the Mitchells’ dubious links
with the Cockney mafia, or the possibility of three sentient women
wedding and bedding Ian Beale. Or maybe this distaste for the present
is coloured by my love for ye olde Walford lore; my rain-stained,
mid-Eighties childhood forever tainted by Den and Angie, Ethel and
Willie, Lofty and ‘Chelle. Long after
she herself was viewed as pop passé, invitations to her parties
were still sought by every bright, trendy young thing and massive star
alike. Fans of the Beatles or Stones would camp outside Alma’s pad as
often as at the “real” homes of their favourites, and one legendary
night at Stafford Court saw Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Chuck Berry,
Gene Pitney and Cliff Richard all enjoying a singalong with Alma’s mum. Midnight,
Saturday, piled-up on the stairs of an N3 as birthday gifts are passed
round for appraisal – “Do I look like the sort of man who
needs a sorbet-maker?” he asks us, crestfallen. The
gallows was
removed in 1783, but there’s a small plaque at Marble Arch at the top
of Subway 14 to mark where it stood, although obviously
the subway wasn’t there in those days, and people took their life
in their hands when crossing the bottom end of Edgware Road – indeed,
quite a trade grew up in small boys offering to cross the road
on your behalf in return for a shiny farthing, and this continued right
up until Victorian times when, at his own expense, an appalled Lord
Shaftesbury Avenue arranged for two men – one
entirely dressed in green, the other entirely in red – to be installed
at the junction in a sentry-box, from which they would emerge
alternately
to beckon or stay the throng. He then relocated the trade in small boys
to a new street he’d just invented at Piccadilly
Circus. Curl up
sweet Regent Street, round the deep crescent. I hear music of water and
the teeth of guitar. The swift sound of knocks on Brook Street. A
conflict of sorts. In a hot haze of indigo, Jimi’s making a racket,
evading all major thirds. George Frederic emerges, reams of crotcheted
paper... I’d write another Messiah, young Hendrix, to force
you from next door! And now,
as the
Channel Tunnel link bullies its way through from Hackney, St Pancras is
once more a victim of railway driven desecration. The stark skeleton
frames of the gasometers whose rusted black tracery once crowned this
brooding vale have gone – like Hardy’s corpses, they were in the way. A
new home for them, away from the tracks, has been promised – but not
named, so I’m cynical: and if no-one remembers to label the dismantled
parts, I guess they too will have to make do with a poem. ... plus many small silly things and photos, cartoons and drawings which a website wouldn't really do justice to. |