The London Archaeologist and the Windowless Consultant: Pubsignstakenforwonders

2011-04-10T08:49:00.000-07:00

A Lower Marsh Air by The London Archaeologist

You do realise, when you meet a person, you know nothing about them beyond the minimum, which will anyway probably turn out wrong?

I look around me at the basement of the bookshop, Lower Marsh, which has the signs, I realise, of being Graham Gibberd’s study. The place could not be as damp as the bare brick walls, the small, high up window of the sunken room had led me to believe: from a system of lines strung across near the ceiling hang reproductions, perhaps, beautifully produced, but I suspect also some original prints of historic London maps and views, many with colouring; the walls are lined with books, what would look like a full set of the multi-volume Survey of London among them, were a definitive account of such depth ever achievable during an evolving city’s life. On the table we sit at – strangely large, it now occurs to me, for the room, blocking off the whole back wall and coming almost to the front, leaving mere passages either side – two what I take to be sculptures, perhaps unfinished, modernist frames climbing.

Of course, I agree. We have impressions, never sure, always open to revision.

Someone you’ve spent endless hours with at the pub, he continues, discussing every subject under the sun, turns out to be a surgeon, for instance, and you never realised. Or somebody has a beard, and you see them and you think yes, I know, he has a beard for effect, but perhaps he’s always looked like that.

He looks hard at me, and I nod, waiting for him to go on. In some way he’s resisting me, but I’m not sure how, wait to hear where the point of this will arrive.

Anyway, we don’t meet people because we want to, but because we have to. Perhaps they’re in front of you in the queue for the bus, or you have to ask them something, and that’s how you meet, for instance the man who might be a surgeon, or has a beard.

The window’s behind me, Graham across the corner of the table from me. Although he’s tucked a little back behind a set of shelves that comes out from the wall, enough cold light from outside falls on him to counter the warm tungsten glow with silver highlights, but between them the two directional sources leave room for fairly deep shade to play over his face as he frowns, comes forward, leans back. He comes to an abrupt halt and we look at each other. I’m not sure what the point of that was, he says candidly. But I have to say I don’t like media people, and I don’t agree with advertising, for instance.

Again I’m not sure what these remarks are about, but they seem to be directed at me. I don’t work for the media at all, I say.

How did I find him, then, he wants to know. He is, it appears, frequently sought out by people after an angle on Lambeth, people working on documentaries, films. But in my case, it was Naomi, the woman from the café next door. What, I’d wanted to know, was the secret of Lower Marsh. The arch expression that I’ve come to associate with her suddenly grew steeper as she asked what secret. So many independent traders, I explained, a rock café like her own, for instance, something of an eccentricity, the fare there similar to the usual, sarnies of the chicken coronation type, tarts and cakes, but with the air of the home made, something about the salads, for instance, suggesting a single hand, a marked and surely personal preference for cheese, for instance, and in the pies and cakes a variety of form and content reassuringly ruling out both central planning and mechanical production. It’s not that the businessmen that nip in there for their lunches all have Deep Purple fans disguised within them, though it’s likely many do, the theme clearly rather a thing the patron does to please herself.

I have, in fact, returned several times since to the café, as, since I realised she would take a central part in this account, and has something about her somehow very Marsh, I asked for a portrait shot, which she was kind enough to agree to when she’d have time. Time has in fact proved in short supply, as on my visits so far she’s been clearly at work chopping, cleaning, and, indeed, baking - the chicken patties she sells, for instance, her own handiwork - perhaps with her family in the kitchen chatting and playing around her, a neighbour’s baby under guard, or a couple of locals by for a chat, but always apologetic and always, despite the evident effort to keep on top, with a smile. Though I’ve decided to post now without it, expect one day soon a shot to feature, posing minimally as she is on a break: either in the window, as she sits in less clement weather or, with the sun now warmer, on a little chair out in the street, perhaps with a glass of wine from the Camel and Artichoke.

I knew the bookshop. I’d been keeping an eye on it already for weeks on my odd visit to the area, and had at last found it open that morning.

The collection of books was, as I’d mentioned to his wife, very select for the second hand. Yes, she’d said, with every sign of having found the observation uncomfortably intimate. It might be expected to have seemed paradoxical, this woman’s extreme reticence as compared to her husband’s garrulousness, but in fact it would be hard to doubt that the two have grown together over many years within the shop.

Okay, Graham concedes, he’d got that wrong. But if I’m not media, where’s the funding for this project? He doesn’t seem to accept the idea it could be amateur, always money has to come from somewhere, and I try to soften him a little with what I thought he might find amusing, Walworth’s Craig Indian telling me on an earlier job ‘amateur’’s not the word, but ‘underground’. I think he sees through this attempt to win him over, and for now my smile must die on my own lips, he eyes me only.

The dark has room to gather on a face not lacking in wrinkles, but which are never sharp, always rolling, not the scored and craggy look of the elements, but the result of a roaming inward life, something bespeaking perhaps a conflictedness, years of struggle pitting a gentle youthful freshness against a searching doubt, a distrust with which I would now have to contend, seeking a way past it through the generous expansiveness.

The point would have to arise of his asking me what my project consists of, and it would have to be difficult. Sure enough, on hearing that I, well, go to areas that have some specific identity about them, kind of explore and see what comes up, work it into an account, with photos, the shadows settle deeper in the brow of this professional historian of various carefully researched highly local works.

It’s a slightly Blake inspired project, I try - one of the reasons I’ve chosen this area by where he lived. I’ve been resisting this gambit, which, though true, is perhaps disingenuous. I’ve had a brief moment with his book, his wife having handed me a copy to look at upstairs in the back of the shop – not to buy, since it’s long out of print, she informs me. Following up the tip off from Naomi, I’d come in and asked to speak to Graham. For a moment, it had looked as though the wife’s reticence was going to crack: if it’s history I was after, she didn’t see why she didn’t do the talking for a change, this time, as she, too, knew plenty, but then immediately suggested I take a seat, available there behind her in a waiting area I hadn’t noticed, she’d go and get him, leave me with the book while I waited. Slipped lovingly into the front page, a colour reproduction of the original printed poem the book bears in epigraph. A little child leads a bearded, hunched man through the streets. Below, etched in red letters over yellow, ‘London’:

I wandered through each chartered street,

Near where the chartered Thames does flow

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

This attempt of mine, too, fails, Graham convinced that Blake has been misunderstood by almost anyone who’s ever read him. Besides, that’s precisely the reason why he published the way he did, otherwise his works would have looked entirely different. That’s it, I try, my intention is to self-publish the results of my research in book form, forego the need for publishers, but here, again, the frown comes, effusive salt-and-pepper eyebrows and a balding crown adding, I’m convinced, to the intensity. The more he resists, the more I study him, the more I see of interest to the camera, the man in fact the perfect subject for a portrait at the centre of a post – and, eventually a photobook I do have it in mind to try out, little area guides to peddle through local shops like his.

It had, as I’ve told him, already troubled me not to have seen one of those area guides here in the local bookshops that other areas have – say like Walworth’s - and to discover at the same time that there had been one - his own – and that it had fallen from publication was surprising. Surely, I suggested, a bunch of locals might club together and get it brought back out. There must be demand.

I’ve since spent time with this book, a copy with the local library opposite, and can confirm the quality of its research and insight. Lambeth, Graham sets out to prove, has historically taken its special character from a combination of geographical features and the characteristics of its major landowners, which themselves impacted on population and business types. As I’d earlier found at Vauxhall, proximity to more affluent Westminster and the City conspired with the distancing effect of the river to make of the area a place both cosmopolitan and eccentric, central to the life of the city, but apart, churches tending to the nonconformist (hence Blake), businesses often small, entrepreneurial, and a key aspect the presence of establishments of entertainment – the pub, of course, but, more importantly also, its rowdy extension the music hall or, calmer, theatre. As a good book should, it sets me in mind of a project, considering the wider place of the river as it figures in the entertainment of the city, its place in Shakespeare’s The Tempest typical, the action of crossing the water, the division from the stronger seats of power adding more than adventure to the evening, a sense of ritual magic, symbolic transgression. Fascinating as this all was, it was of course a shame to be reading it only then, after our meeting: perhaps if I’d known at the time I might have been more able to convince him of the compatibility of our ideas and, indeed, procedures.

My camera’s by my side in its little bag as we speak, wouldn’t even want to fiddle with flash in this room with its moody light. So many gestures already have been flashing by, missed, as the man rests his elbows on the table and plunges into contemplation of his joined fingers, his eyes drill into the table or up through beyond the low ceiling before leaping back to search into my own for the character flaws he’s sure he senses – something, perhaps, that will make me want to misrepresent him in some way, take whatever it is that is his secret, I suspect, a deep knowledge of whatever it is he knows is Lower Marsh and, exposing it to the damaging light of a superficial purpose, destroy its properties.

If I’m right, then, my answer to his next question may be crucial, as he asks now what it is that attracts me to Lower Marsh - surely much like so many other areas, he suggests, though I can’t help feeling I see in the raised brow or perhaps a hint in the lips something ironic, this a trap from one who must surely know that this is not true.

In form, Waterloo’s a mound, surrounded at its foot by a roundabout, attached to which at north- and south-west quarters further, satellite roundabouts, the one hosting a circular cinema, the other a hotel tower in the gleaming glass and steel vernacular of roadside brash anonymous; a mound on which converge taxis, buses, passengers, of course, winding up the paths to its top, and, for the final halt, from Winchester, Wymouth, Southampton or Portsmouth, the massive rolling stock. Beneath and around this, passing under rails and platforms at various points, viaducts for trains, cars and pedestrians, a warren of underpasses, and, tucked behind it, Lower Marsh. Something, I feel, about that form gives the Marsh a special feel, the massive earthwork, suggesting a Victorian folly repro of the erstwhile Revolutionary fort at St George’s Fields, protecting it from the central areas so near to the riverine North towards which most visitors head, freezing it into a slower time. And then, with the industry leaving the city a fantasy world of pure service, the scale, rumble and clatter of all those trains, all that iron ground, in distinction to so much of the centre, the atmosphere of the area resounds with echoes of our industrial past. These things are too complicated, though, I suspect, to concretise conversationally and not come over vague, suspiciously psychogeographic, pretentious.

At street level, one of the manifestations of the different time flows in the Marsh is the retail, and this is where I approach in preference. The mere word, though, as I should have guessed it would, extracts a flinch from the man, the eyes close and the head swivels back and forth. Oh no, retail, he says, despairing. I insist, try to claw something back. This is just one side, I’m interested in the number of independents in these times, wherever the area is, my theme’s the things that might tend to resist the centralising forces transforming the city, a great part of which the huge chains taking over the high streets, turning them into outposts of offshores, their staff corporate ciphers, communication branding. Retailers on the Marsh speak in hushed trepidation of the recent appearance of Pret and Nero on the Cut, innumerable chains encroach elsewhere on the shores of the station mound; how long this anomalous escape, no one knows. As a historian with such manifest distrust of the direction of the world’s travel, I’m sure he shares this interest. And then, more specifically, all these places dealing in the past, keeping it in circulation, it’s extremely uncommon, needs explaining. The mod bar with its window Lambretta, second hand music up the way as well as the books, the lovingly select vintage clothes, too, I’d cased a couple of times, noticed a force of character in the staff, who, it turns out, own and run the place.

Because Vicky and Bridget, as I’ve confirmed on later visits, have indeed much of the Marsh air about them. To visit What the Butler Wore is at the same time to enter a warm familiarity and to strike a cool distance from the wider world, to experience a studied frivolity, a measured excess, find fashion in a reversal of the movement of time. There’s something Mr Benn in this calm fascination with discovery, nerdish psychedelics of disguise, a philosophical refusal to take life either more seriously than its absurdity deserves or with more indifference than its seriousness demands.

In fact, I learn from them that, like Naomi, they’re quite familiar with Graham, who pops round daily for a chat, the Marsh something of a little community, they explain, and I realise that of course they share in common with him what Graham has claimed to be one of the area’s defining features long established, resulting from intimate qualities of the place and its history: the predominance of small business, the entrepreneur.

After reading Graham, and already with his ideas in mind, I’d gone there, amongst other things, seeking contemporary confirmation of the central place of the theatre industry at the heart of the Marsh. About this they’re certain, as far as their shop goes: not only the actors and customers who patronise it, but those sent over from producers after costumes, rented or bought. Had I known this at the time, perhaps I could have persuaded Graham. Because the thing’s a pattern, certainly, repeated elsewhere. Vicky and Bridget point out that Festival, a documentary produced for the Festival of Britain, has a Marsh lad as its focus for a working class visitor to the area, and the choice must presumably lie in the area’s being within the media beat, though sufficiently off centre to seem exotic.

Up the road I’d also noted Radio Days, stocking not only the clothes, but furniture/-shings and more, not only for sale but also to rent, as props, and then, I don’t know if you know, I enthuse, hoping to tap into Graham’s historical vein, they’ve got a massive stock of original fifties Picture Posts, Life itself.

Even this, though, fails to impress, the man’s interest in the conversation clearly waning. I think, he suggests, leaning forward on the palms of his hands, pushing himself up from the table, we should stop this now. Perhaps, I realise retrospectively, it was the talk of photojournalistic magazines, the dependence of whose stories on photos, no shot no copy, which depressed the man.

Of course, with nothing to lose, but knowing the request vain, I ask if he wouldn’t mind posing for a portrait. Silly question I understand, but the integrity of my project requires the request, if by no means its being granted.

It’s not truth, you know, what a camera produces. Certainly I know, I say. But everywhere pictures are presented as true, it’s pernicious. We’re at the top of the stairs, now, and he’s pushing on the door back into the shop, his wife still at the till. I believe this may go to the heart of his distrust for me, then, the simple fact, all along, that I’ve had the camera with me, have explained its place at the heart of my project.

I do street shots, I’d explained, shots of people going about their life, to which he’d replied that you can’t possibly know people. That, it occurs to me now, must after all have been the point of his earlier point. Populations are always on the move, he’d said, nothing in a city is stable. I’d agreed with this absolutely. I’m interested in these changes, recording traces of the past, catching glimpses of the future, I’d tried to explain, the conversation moving on, though, Graham telling me about the immigrants to the area in their waves, the Albanians most recent, he says, and the pub down the road, Lounge 34 as it’s now called, with a fateful disregard for continuity, once the Spanish Patriot, so named, apparently, from the war of the Spanish succession – the point, I assume, being the complex international lineages of the European dynasties, the wandering of the families, but this being one of the cul-de-sacs into which we’d wound to look at each other slightly confused as to how we’d got there, knowing only that there was a point of contention between us, which, to myself at least, remained obscure.

Perhaps in the end the central cause of what he sees as the demise of the area, reducing it, he may well in fact believe, and perhaps correctly despite my insistence on seeing it otherwise, to somewhere very much like anywhere else, are the mass media, strangling the life out of popular theatre, leaving it increasingly to the idle hands of the elite, the streets and public venues no match for the couch and its little screen. At the origin, of course, of almost every image on that screen reducing, doubtless, any one area to the status of a nearer and nearer reproduction of any other, was a mechanism very much like that in front of which I’d sought to have him pose, the camera perhaps not the record of the present it pretends to be, but its nemesis, turning it into the past.

His wife, who’d heard the last of our conversation as we’d headed back up to the shop, remarks that he’s spent the morning trying to get maps converted to digital for use. Precisely, though, he says, he’d abandoned the idea as the results were disappointing. However, looking at his book later I realise that it itself in fact has a complex relation to photography amounting to dependence. As well as a handful of actual photographs, maps and prints are selected on the basis of their ‘photographic accuracy’ (the highlight mine), behind which he frequently discerns the role of various instruments ensuring an objectivity both as true and so as false as the camera’s. Indeed, to these he applies principles based on the same sort of projection that is the camera’s weakness, certainly, but also strength, triangulating amongst them with the graphic ingenuity of a student of Moholy Nagy for essential support to the central theses of his book concerning change and continuity.

As ever, though, I agree with the man on principle, and say so, but the point for me’s not to seek to present the images as true at all: surely a necessary means to undermine the truth claims of the medium is through the medium itself, produce images that refute their own veracity. Again, though, this comes out as so much sophism, and the appeal falls flat.

As a last effort to salvage something solid from this, Graham by now half in the shade of the obscure room from which he’d first emerged from beside his wife, perhaps he could just say what, for him, is the genius of Lower Marsh. Again, I realise too late that the question can only confirm the man’s suspicions of me, as though all along I’d sought only a sound bite, and of course this, too, must go without response, for answer only a wan smile, a little shake of the head, and a piece of advice. Just walk, look around you, and above all, not with the camera.

2011-02-06T06:38:00.000-08:00

Westfield Develpments: Proposal for a White City by The Windowless Consultant

The first pre-echoes come in the Underground, my first visit to the station in years. Not only the posters, presumably mostly shared across the network, the sudden deafening lurches of massive speed, but also the carefully tiled stripes, systems of convex mirrors, alignments of walls and voids appear almost deliberately to stage an effect that, having as yet not ventured out, I could only call strange, not yet able to identify it as something tending to undermine senses of difference, distance, stillness and motion, original and image, penetrable or not, surface and depth.

TfL, as is well known, are chary of mechanical reproduction, and, though I had the SLR, I preferred not to use it, afraid the sound of the mechanism, the whir as the system of mirrors chops away from the sensor and back, would bring unwanted attention. The compact, on the other hand, though quieter, and involving a slighter gesture - an appearance, indeed, often more of fiddling than shooting - I discovered in the Underground has other issues, a snowstorm of hexagonal orbs entering any image shot into light over darkness. Blowing to remove dust from the lens, though, found it unmovable, all on the inside, and, worse, moisture from the puffing got in there, too, a thick fog joining the flakes of flare.

It was Ruby, of the Goldhawk Road station café, who’d first made the connection: that a better class of customer could be persuaded in to Westfield from a catchment west as far as Heathrow, east all the way to the sea, suggested to her that more must be made of Goldhawk. Vast engine of gentrification, taking over not only the remaining imperial exhibition White City buildings, but also one of the last of the Inner London goodsyards to have been made over, these spaces around rails – King’s Cross, Paddington Basin, Broadgate one of the first – freed up by the smoother times of IT from goods, Westfield in scale alone a planner’s dream, where the atmosphere, meaning of a vast surrounding area could be transformed in repercussions at a blow. If the council now have eyes on Goldhawk, this is why, and, to sound the depth of the changes – changes echoing across the city, too, gravitational fields realigned - would require a visit.

My 2004 A-Z wall map marks the area in the same cartographic white that drew Conrad’s protagonist, and perhaps before him the man himself, into the dangerous Hell the Europeans were earlier making of the Congo. ‘Site of proposed White City development’ is all it will divulge, adding to the allure with an anomaly: that here in the future could lie the origin of the name.

Because certainly the source is up for grabs when it’s a question no one trustworthy will claim to resolve. Most agree that it appears to have emerged at the time of a 1908 exhibition of imperial flavour, but beyond that will only say that it may have referred to the white stuccoed acres of buildings in the Indian style, negative imports of Lutyens’ export London in Delhi. Having drifted around to the North and West under the gravity of the entertainment industry, the BBC studios and QPR/Fulham grounds, the flavour of the name has now become something of a phantom past or abandoned future, imperial castle perhaps of the air, vast mnemonic blank, calcined battlefront, necropolis or utopia, take your pick.

Above ground, where meteorological indecision veered between rain, grey, and sun to confirm the ambiguities below, shots were equally hard to take. I had of course visited the place many times after a buy, for specific business commissions what with the vast number of windows, or in the general way of research, though the retail world, despite the storm of reviews, is less shaken up by the arrival of something like this in its midst than are the wider behaviour patterns of the city, however much the latter prove less noticed or discussed.

But today I wasn’t there in the way of that sort of research, and, those bearings gone, found myself frequently at a loss for subjects, lacking the pretexts either of work or shopping loosing concentration, drifting for long periods without aim until suddenly a subject appearing to suggest itself shooting something quite other – grasping at what I thought was a shopper and coming out with a reflection, catching a photograph where I’d intended a passerby, fumbling exposure in the vast gulfs staged in the place between light and dark, focus between solid and void, depth of field in a place with multiple layers all surface.

Pushing on into the jungle of crystal and glass, I began to doubt whether the proposed White City development ever happened, the name dropped, after all, for a reason. Although Westfield is certainly in the West as far as the city’s concerned, lying over brownfield land on the junction of the Westway and the West Cross Route, it was in the West of Sydney that the chain the name was formed for drove its first stake into the ground, taking over the field of a farm before mushrooming to include an international portfolio of proprietarily named malls our local’s only a page from. It would of course explain the trouble focusing, the sense of disorientation, repetition of one thing in another, dissolution of scale should Westfield, the concept, turn out more one of activity than place, a sudden change befalling an environment, a removal from context, a gravitational force and set of realignments in which for the visitor to participate must entail the same disorientation I’d been struggling against for shots.

If in Westfield Conrad’s Company comes home, it would be of its Kurtz I should doubtless go in search.

Any attempt at portrait work is of course hard here, few ready to risk being caught by a manager off job, and those who are, not for long – snaps must be quick, slipped in with a sudden chat which itself will illuminate no more than a chance fact from a vast terrain.

Ollie, from Israel, has noticed there a large number of his compatriots, and puts it down to aggression, related to conscription perhaps, a willingness to plunge endlessly into the pressed passage of custom with a smile and a product, an offer to shine the most recalcitrant nails in proof, again and again, undaunted.

Caroline, from Sweden, mobile masseuse, loves the work, a craft, not being in an office all day, meeting people, grabbing a passer by, a laying on of hands alone relieving them of their internalised burdens of the day, leaving them lighter, suppler, happier.

Daniel, from Spain, found the job on Gumtree, has always worked in the food industry, and was happy to find work in what turns out to be one of the few – perhaps only – stores here independent of a chain. Tapas here’s different of course, without the sociality at home, but the quality’s good, the opportunity.

Of those I meet who agree to a photo, Linda comes from the nearest, in from Chiswick to work the Venture photography stall, selling trips to the Knightsbridge studios with the family, the loved one, for the most important story you ever told, bespoke. What she enjoys is the independence, the place, she suggests, a little town, a world in itself. In this little prism, all the world caught up in an image, perhaps, glittering, to measure, of its requirements and aspirations.

It’s Linda, also, who has about her, perhaps, something most resistant to the tendency of the place to seek to draw them into the disorienting terms, polished, of its own surfaces. However, as I attempt to photograph, I am, of course, at my most self-conscious before this confident mover in a world that finds me a baffled explorer. She seems slightly amused by how dark my result is. Flash is out of the question for the security guards, I explain: as I’ve learned from investigations elsewhere, there’s something about this type of space that resists photographers, must monopolise the production of image, reproduction, surface.

Personally, I’m attached to the way her presence retreats from the wider glare. It’s fine, she concedes, and, going innocently for the kill, as a snapshot, just what you want for a blog. Along with the dark it’s the scale, apparently – a portrait should have more focus, my desire to contextualise by the by.

Too late to remedy this here with this subject, the lesson, though, was learned: if Westfield was itself less a place than an upheaval that befalls one, a search for context, solidity or the fixed – the search for Westfield, in fact, at all – would be distracting from an ability to shoot.

2011-01-17T12:04:00.000-08:00

Walworth II: Two Hearts in Example by the London Archaeologist.

Hats to the left, hair in the middle, ears on the right, all at the front, looking onto the street, Moss Side boy, Craig the Indian at his window. When he first came down here, he sold the CDs on the pavement, dodging the council workers, whose job it is, we know, to disrupt those who can be. But the man’s a growing web of connections, and before long the barbers’, catching hold of the flitting presence, suggested he move into their shop, a little stall constructed for the purpose, and there he’s to be seen most evenings, someone ducking down for a chat, a purchase, the hand reaching out into the street for an exchange.

I was there on the way back from more southerly exploration of the area, my attention caught by this set up with the stores, the conversation begun with my asking about a shot of the fronts, since he’d of necessity be in it, the opening of the window, though small, enough to find him part of the street.

In fact, he appears to spend as much time out the front as inside, out chatting to acquaintances, passers by, me – noticing, for instance, before I did, that the lads in the entrance to the block next door didn’t necessarily like the look of this, perhaps a copper, trying to catch shots of them up to something, or at least someone after trouble, which if I wasn’t careful I’d find, but it’s alright boys, he explains, the photographer’s with me, and, as for so many others on this stretch of Walworth Road, it’s true, I am.

Indeed, so much is he out, at the moment, I never seem to find him in, and for a portrait, which I hope he’ll agree to when I eventually track him down, you’ll have to wait till a future posting.

What’s it for, he wants to know, and, learning of the blog, before I go passes me a DVD, just in case, you never know where it might lead. A bunch of skateboarders have made it, passed it to him to see if he couldn’t pass it on to someone who might be interested, perhaps connected, they’ve been doing their thing, looking for an outlet, perhaps I might know someone, or someone who knows someone. The man points out that the photographs I’m taking are not to be described as an amateur affair: underground is the correct word, and immediately the camera holds weightier, sprouts wheels, grows claws.

It was clear from the first a single post would never be enough for Walworth, and don’t think this the last, either. Bermondsey, New Cross, Lewisham, even, Blackheath, Camberwell, Peckham, Vauxhall, Lambeth or Brixton, no less far than Walworth from the northern power centres, are all of them surely in one way or another better known. Of course, a glance at the map will answer for much; if the tendency is to call Walworth at its North the Elephant, hand its East over to Bermondsey, and divide between Peckham and Kennington the South and the West, that will be accounted for by the transport: a station - rail or tube - becoming the heart of a catchment, a maelstrom sucking or geezer spewing population, destination for one leg or outset for another, will tend everywhere to impose name.

The effect of the tube on our impression of the city is huge, hard to grasp, surface space no continuum but a network of interlocking ripples, densest in population around round the stations, thinning out between, and set off by occasional thundering, lights flickering, in the silent darkness below.

And then, anyone seeking to pin the area down with its architecture is confronted by a variety greater than many others better known. There are, there, some of the most attractive of the LCC style estates at their heyday, interrupted by the odd sudden Georgian square, even a church by no less than John Soane. Amongst these are warehouses, workshops or indeed a large park, frowned over by some of London’s largest tower blocks, loosely in the Brutalist style, and to be called equally accurately beautiful, indifferent, or shocking, terrifying, so sublime, in the sheer indifference to human need, flitted with glimpses of an early twentieth-century suburban vernacular looking lost to have found itself so far in, and traversed at its centre and borders with ribbon, again in the Georgian style.

So the visitor must never try to look for the heart of this area any more than of any other, but rather a system of hearts, some pumping objects, some stories, some traffic, and others, for instance, those atmospheres our awareness of which comes and goes.

For the objects, at one point or another it’s to Architectural Rescue they must come, things between owners, down on their luck, looking for a sense or purpose, where, protected from the stifling effects of their slavery to our interests, they’re allowed – encouraged, even, in a form of therapy that has lessons for us all, the mere couch crippling by comparison – mingling and meeting their peers, their predecessors, too, or objects to which they’re completely unrelated, of completely different class – like and unlike minded alike - to reinvent themselves, learn to live a little, imagine for their own and for our benefit a world driven by other needs than function, a world which, since it’s a refusal of meaning, the visitor may be shocked to understand.

Of this universe it’s the Powells to whom the smooth running is entrusted. Luke, cousin to the present owner, presides over the exchanges when I pass by, from an office shed that, so much is it in the spirit of things, threatens at all moments it, too, to join the class of objects removed from functionality. The business, he tells me, has been in the family since before the war. Although most of their stock, of course, of necessity is passing through, certain items, such as the kitten-size cherub I enquire about for some practice with artificial lighting, elect to stay, his uncle clearly as aware of his responsibilities in overseeing the mysterious relations of these objects among themselves as he is of the need to profit from them: like the shark, the locomotive engine, or indeed the mask of Elvis himself, Cupid’s not for sale.

If Architectural Rescue saves our objects, ensuring their healthy circulation, Craig’s trade’s connections themselves, his window where they come to be made, remade, and extended.

The video reveals skateboarding to be not only a sport for the bored, but a method, methodical, a means of experiencing the city, the boarder in fact a flaneur on fast forward, having swapped the absinth for controlled self-admistered adrenaline alone, speed the new slow, the wheels as much a pretext as Nerval’s lobster, of dipping out of the ordinary flow, inventing a new city where at last nothing is as it should be, where movement never leads to progress, must always be repetitive, obsessive, seeking a perfection that ends in itself alone, where bench backs are roads and roads go up walls, where wall tops are banisters, but to slide down the street, bins are bounce boards, bollards bridges, and bridges, little lines between life and death.

Networking, Craig explains with a smile to an older woman who looks admonishingly at him as I pass, someone he clearly knows, and it’s true, but not as many might know it – network being no term for business here, other than the business of life to form relations, which come here to refresh themselves, to extend, branch out, and reconnect.

2011-01-04T12:51:00.000-08:00

After a Portrait off the Lines of Desire, Regent Street in the Sales by the London Archaeologist

It had seemed simple. Go to Regent Street, set up a tripod down one side street after another, photographing the thick paste of pedestrians smudging across the field of vision at its end, occasionally pick out a fleeting face, perhaps with the help of flash.

These plans rarely come off.

I’d long meant to work the street into a post, as a famous first in town planning, beautiful, successful, frightening. Part of the beauty lay in the elegant ensemble linking the new Regent’s Park to the North down to St James’s in the South, with two cleverly handled corners, a kink and the famous curve making picturesque sense of obstructions on the way.

More significant, perhaps, was its other success, the street intended to separate the grime, crime and grind of Soho from the developing Mayfair, forming a barrier to movement, a firewall which, by discouraging the hoi polloi, has managed to this day to see to it that the newer area to the West would remain the most exclusive in London, pompously impressive and, however busy, always dogged by funereal pall.

Soon copied on an enormous scale in the Paris of Haussmann, this first step in a rationalised town planning process has now become only one weapon in a panoply, going under one of the science’s most evocative terms – because what I’d hoped to photograph at work was the phenomenon of the original planned-in ‘line of desire’. A phenomenon originating from informally formed paths across, for instance, grass, and perhaps extending to the internet, to routes between sites, a quick search revealing the term to have generated much traffic of its own, a site dedicated to their sightings perhaps a-plot, with the increasing planning demands of the growing metropoles, someone at some point had to learn to harness its forces for control, and that man was Nash.

If the city’s security forces can use this, clocking citizens as suspect for the simple fact of their having strayed from the more frequented thoroughfare, so surely could the blogger seeking to get a handle on the other forces at work in the city. Through this contrast in these shots, I’d be able to capture in the empty spaces some of what it is that eludes us, bringing us a step further, surely, to pinning down the subject of this blog.

But of course, arriving on site, almost nowhere could such a clear demarcation be found, and when it did seem to show itself, it lacked the expected significance. Clearly activity was much more dense on Regent than the surrounding streets, but the line was blurred, the differences indistinct and, unpredictable, not terribly telling, people forever wandering off down side streets, individually for a rest or to make a call or in couples or groups, to gather thoughts, cuddle, take stock, look at maps, even frequently in vast numbers, endless flows spilling off from the major lines into further others.

At some point, though, as I moved among these formless flows, nevertheless trying to make some sort of sense of it, it occurred to me that there might perhaps be another sort of contrast than that with the quiet side street. A sort of island in the constant movement would frequently occur, and this almost exclusively on the side streets, in the form of smokers, alone, grouped, standing, leaning against a wall, sitting on a step, squatting. Little friendships build up this way, one can see, among people who might usually find no bond between them other than these moments of chilly respite from the hectic activity of the offices or shops indoors, or the rush of pedestrians out-. This evocative sight, unintended consequence of the new smoking laws, was perhaps what would after all furnish something of the contrast I’d set out for, not in any way absolute, but, relative and vague, all the stronger for its instability.

Of course this sort of thinking’s photographic, and would come to nothing without shots. Such shots being almost of necessity portraits, I would have, of course, to approach, and, in the few minutes it would take their pretext to expire, elicit their complicity.

Talking to these people I experienced some of the rare moments when I regret having given up myself, all those years ago. Indeed, I was told by one that he had himself earlier given up, but the Regent Street job had got the better of this, these snatched opportunities too valuable now to forego.

I suspect that the profundity of the pleasure might be related, too, to my own failure to persuade more than a couple to agree to a shot. It’s not that anyone said as much, and the reasons given – because, without wanting to push, I would at least come away with a reason – were surprising for their variety. Some suggested they didn’t want their boss to chance on a posted shot of them, others that they kept their habit secret from absolutely everyone that knew, or felt they knew them. Certainly, when it comes to the big retailers, it proved a general rule that an employee will avoid recourse to a passage next to their own store, but always prefer one up, one down, or across.

Some held that they had something against photographs in general, others only those of themselves. One reason I appreciated, particularly, for its interest, was that she’d in fact given up, really, and a portrait would give her smoking the stamp, the appearance of a reality she’d rather avoid. There were those who were shy or anxious with strangers, and others who clearly didn’t want their colleagues there with them to see them taken for a ride, giving something, be it a mere image of one’s appearance, away to a stranger with nothing in return something of a mug’s game.

But mostly, though no one said it, or even seemed particularly to respond when I offered it as a reason, I suspect that, if the purpose of the moment was withdrawal, release from the hectic transactions of the busiest time of the year on one of the city’s most crowded streets, even in its very midst, to have the lens come rooting around in there on its own agenda would be desecration.

And so the substance of this post is given over to those who, on Regent Street, or mostly off, if only for a moment, cease to engage. The absence of almost all of these is a measure, of their success, certainly, but also perhaps of the blog, at least to have sought, approached what, if unrecordable, may well turn out to have been at the heart of the events considered a city.

2010-12-09T11:40:00.000-08:00

On the Beginning of the End of the End of Goldhawk Road by the Windowless Consultant

Of course a city must always evolve. I don’t mean, only, that not to is death, but rather, for a city, even decay is evolution, just as regeneration can be decay. Think, for the latter, of Westfield shopping centre, subject of a future post, for the former of Goldhawk Road.

In my incarnation as window consultant, I’ve come here often, after materials for commissions, drapes for backdrop. I’ve been doing so for as long as I remember, since some of my first ever jobs, doing my business and heading back off without, I suppose you could say, considering, noticing what it was as a place. It’s not an area you’d recognise as a thing in itself, just a patch of mostly scruffy houses with a low-end market behind, and it’s only a couple of notices pasted here and there, pretext for conversation, a job having fallen through, that had me considering further.

Ruby, of the Goldhawk Road station café, was one of the first to fill me in, happy at the prospect of the market becoming something, as she sees it, more like Borough, serving more quality foods, attracting people after something a little better, more natural, catering to the rising aspirations of the area. Presumably she hoped this business might open avenues for Ruby’s Café itself, allow her to nurture the first shoots already visible in the decorative scheme of olive oil bottles, the freshly squeezed juices, home-made soups of the day and quality herbal teas already insinuating themselves among the more traditional greasy spoon fare. While many are less enthusiastic than she, as to the present shabbiness of the space there is general unanimity, as there is, even among some stall holders, concerning the shoddiness of much on sale.

Something, it’s agreed, must be done, and the council, along with their plans to upgrade the market, find that the strip of houses adjacent along the northern end of Goldhawk Road are of poor quality, and are of frontage inappropriately humble for their scheme.

There is a class of areas whose claim to our affections lies in the melancholy allure with which they seek to be overlooked, to be passed in a hurry by those too busy to notice that the excitement they head for beyond may be surpassed here, less strident, intangible, more profound. And so it was that, discovering that it was to disappear, having visited so often, I at last became aware that this, here, was such an area, its quality, tagged for demolition, suddenly noticeable for having been overlooked.

Who could explain to the council that to knock down the authentic set of the key meeting of Quadrophenia, when Jimmy encounters Kevin, mod meets greaser, is a mistake, in the same way it is to dislodge Turker and Emete from their place at the helm of the last Zippy café, the first Zippy ever in London, perhaps anywhere outside of America? That people come from the States, where the franchise still abounds, to try the only Triple Shake left in the Old World can’t be expected to find its way onto the planning documents, or the pride of the textiles shops in that other local phenomenon, their accelerating proliferation. There were, it appears, a mere five or six years ago just four of these shops, but, with people beginning to cross London for them, another would open, then another and still others, attracting still more customers, until now people come from everywhere, they tell us, Arab royals in limos up to the inappropriately humble little pavement, people up from out of town going to marry, fashion students needing an edge in a new design.

More intriguing still than the facts themselves are their recorders, the shop traders and their quiet pride in their collective creation, or Mr Zippy, as Turker calls himself with a glint, as indefatigable in anecdote as he is in business, his only time for rest, he jokes, at red lights in the van.

Planning documents nowadays are, on the surface, exacting, must bear in mind the existing light quality, aspects of atmosphere, characteristic odours, too, at times. Here at the Bush they delve as far as into the etymology for clues as to character, though skirting over its murkier depths. Shepherd’s Bush, they tell us, refers to the open fields that once characterised the area, and their bucolic exploitation. That this folksier side is cast under doubt by the more scholarly, if superficially less picturesque suggestion that it may well have been a family that went by the occupational name, they fail to mention, missing thereby too a patronymic trail that, who knows? may lead to the notorious crook and prison breaker Jack, whose family, a thrilling legend could potentially be made to have it, once lived here.

It’s the aim of course of this collective blog to capture qualities about an area that pass unnoticed, that are notable, perhaps, for that reason alone, perhaps entice some of the subtler forces of the city out into the open, or furnish routes for a day-to-day with a keener or subtler awareness. It was speaking to the Goldhawk protagonists I began to realise that a study of this area might allow that, by seeking to grasp what the council fail to take account of, perhaps even must ignore – a thing, perhaps, whose existence is dependent on its being unable to be acknowledged by established procedures, a thing that can never quite be grasped.

And yet, even as I sought to record that intangible, I had constantly to suppress at the back of my mind a doubt that it was itself perhaps nothing but the shadow hanging over it, the atmosphere I saw there now not simply inseparable from but an actual product of the demolition order. Certainly I may never have seen the one without the other.

2010-11-27T09:29:00.000-08:00

Walworth I: An Area Through Time by the London Archaeologist

There have been markets in Walworth since the sixteenth century, we’re told, and, if now they’re contained within marked and numbered pitches, things haven’t always been so formal.

Most days, he’d be at the local with the lads, and a bloke would come round with a shirt, a bit of silverware, a leg of lamb, too, a prize in hard times, after an offer. But then one day, a Sunday with the place busy for the markets, this bloke sticks his head round and goes, anybody want to buy a horse?

It amazes me all these years I’ve passed through it never to have noticed the area until now, as they begin demolishing huge chunks of it again, I get called to the sites where they’re digging – something’s come up, I’m told, that may be a mammoth bone, or the limb of a forgotten god.

This informal trading may be the key to cockney London, this skirting stacked odds, a rapid and unrecorded exchange of goods, knowledge, cash, style, opinion, or, in the present instance, anecdote, George Dyer, the Threadneedle Man, passing on a story passed on to him in turn by his friend and associate, publicist, local writer Mark Baxter, a story that may turn out to be the man’s jackpot, already post-production, out soon.

What attracted me into Dyer's wasn’t the cloth, fine as it was, wonderfully styled, but a book for sale – rare enough sight in a tailor’s window to have me passing through the old wood framed door: Walworth Through Time.

If markets figure heavily in these posts, it’s not simply for the photo ops they undoubtedly represent, and the traders in East Lane are justly proud of a stretch that, though those who have been there longest suggest unanimously it’s declining, still manages enough intensity of activity, banter, humour and variety to resist the glacial grip of Iceland, Pound Shops, and Boots.

From the walls around Dyer as we talked, and, slowly realising he’d have to have a central place in the Walworth posts, as I snapped, I gradually became aware of an extent of reputation I hadn’t guessed at, guests – for so even the most notable clients must be of this character the expansiveness of whose character was the stuff to accommodate any number of them, roving with his interests in the few minutes of my visit through Ronnie Scotts, subject of a large print by a local artist up by the ceiling at the front, to the connection between architecture and photography via perspective, film, a good story, what the mods did for the suit, his hands all the while giving the measure of these ideas, reeling them out like so many yards of cloth, chopping them up, realigning, pinning them down before folding them away for the next one – actors, boxers, entertainers, frequent journalists – having each furnished, along with further snippets, signed snapshots on their way.

The book, it transpired, wasn’t there out of interest alone, but found itself caught up in his roaming passion for anecdote, a love of the area he’d bought into with the premises of this, his first business, and itself a product of that, stitched together from shared stories, swapped photos, exchanged accounts of how Clint Eastwood, for instance, had drunk at the Red Lion, subject of local artist Morganic’s refuse bin, the old trades of Boundary Lane, and the crimes on the Heygate Highwalks.

How much truth lies behind the story don’t ask, anymore than you would where it comes from of a juicy leg of lamb in pinched times, and much is under wraps pending release, but it turns out it was a racehorse, and it was the fact the lads took a chance on it that led to a chain of events taking in not only the local area of Walworth, nor even the city as a whole, but, in one way or another, international.

2010-10-10T06:35:00.000-07:00

The Sacraments, Mercy, and the Last Days of Fitzrovia by the Windowless Consultant

After the previous post, the comparison with the Prado, I needed to revisit the National Gallery, see the paintings I knew in the new light, discover others never noticed.

The Prado has a small selection of Poussins, but it's nothing like, as I recalled, that in the National, and I made my way to the room dedicated almost exclusively to the Seven Sacraments with great pleasure. I hadn't seen these for a while - not since before a recent trip to Edinburgh, where I'd spent time with the earlier and rather different version they have. I would now be able to make the comparison I'd been meaning to ever since. Interestingly, although I'd always considered them one of the most powerful groups in their profound mystery, there had never been postcards available in the shop, and in the Taschen Poussin in the gallery shop, they are not reproduced, being, we're told, inferior to the Edinburgh set. This inferiority had by no means been my impression. The National Gallery series, I recalled, made in some, for instance, a much more abstract use of framing triangles, circles and squares to freeze the actions of the paintings into that strange, almost magical intensity of relations among parts that distinguishes Poussin's works, where, for instance, in a device he often makes use of, the simple fact of a figure's being partially cut off from view on movement by an intervening upright - a person walks behind a pillar or through a doorway - seems to imply motion, not out of our sight, only, but between dimensions, out of ours; not passing out of visibility only, but into something else.

My search seemed, though, to be cut off by a re-hang, the Poussins nowhere to be found, and staff I asked were unable to help.

It was on my way to the downstairs computers to locate the paintings that I chanced on a little temporary exhibition being held there at the moment - Edward Cayley Robinson's Middlesex Hospital group Acts of Mercy and recalled that this was something I had been meaning to see.

The Middlesex Hospital is a place I'd occasionally considered a post about, and its effect on Mortimer - or, in its prolongation to the East - Goodge Street. I thought it would be interesting, if depressing, to record the effect of its redevelopment by the Candy brothers into NoHo Square, the name, with its functionless central capital serving as a plastic portico, seeking to align the area off with New York by the magic of branding alone, revealing the attempt to send what is a little island of Fitzrovian independence the way that Marylebone High Street so recently went - tarted up out of dowdy neglect and into the exclusive plaything of the international elite who can afford the sort of housing developed by, well, Candy and Candy for the likes, at Chelsea, of the court of Qatar.

The only thing that had been stopping me had been that the story had already begun, the buildings knocked down before I even knew about it, so the post, beginning in medias res, would be without the necessary visual record. I had never once noticed, I have to admit, passing on innumerable occasions in the past, what the hospital looked like beyond its being red brick with greying stone details. Here, then, at the National, would be an opportunity to redress this.

Robinson's series was a double record of the Middlesex, since not only do they depict scenes of the hospital itself, both inside and out, but also, having been painted for the hospital to be displayed in situ, they are in fact a little piece of it itself, removed from the entrance lobby, for the first time since their installation in 1930, only on demolition.

Robinson was clearly something of a Symbolist, the realism in his paintings set off by a strangely timeless poise giving his figures hints of that mystery that haunts the viewer in Poussin. The canvases are of very large scale, bringing the refectory, the courtyard spaces, with classical foreground porticos framed by Bloomsbury terraces back- from Mortimer Street into the National Gallery's Sunley Room and shrugging off the lack of substance, the hospital twice demolished (the Robinsons are of a previous, reputedly more elegant incarnation), with an ethereal lightness. The viewers in the gallery space entering the friezes of orphans, patients, nurses, families and doctors they contemplated would be a perfect photographic document, I realised, of the hospital that was. In the etherealisation of the transformation to a symbolist framework, the physical sustenance of the orphans became the spiritual of the gallery visitor, coming together with the paintings, given a temporary home, to recreate the hospital in the imagination before its destruction in reality. I left excited that perhaps I'd be able to pursue the Mortimer Street project after all, using shots of the series in this new situ standing for the old, the Sunley room a street saved, briefly, from, if not total destruction, damage beyond recognition.

If that seems naïve - if I should, perhaps, have realised that, since the paintings belonged not to the gallery, but to the Welcome Trust, they wouldn't have even the right to give me that permission - so, perhaps, should my blind confidence that I would again be viewing the Poussin as so often before.

The paintings, like so many others in what we call the permanent collections of what we call our public galleries, I thought of much as I thought of what we call our public spaces - part of our shared landscape, something that would always be there, unproblematically, to visit, whenever I'd need whatever that sustenance is that paintings bring. In fact, it transpired, they were a loan, dependent on the continuing largesse of the Duke of Rutland, an informed and enlightened guard at last informed me, a largesse which the continuing health of the art market has recently been putting such under excessive strain that the man has decided to explore other ways of enjoying his family's rights to privilege.

If the art market's managing to keep it up, the property isn't, and the Middlesex land has dropped sufficiently in value to spare Mortimer Street at least a little more time to itself, albeit diminished, gaping in its middle at the site once given over to charitable causes. This post, then, if it can't reproduce what the street once was, can at least seek to show what it soon no longer will be.

2010-09-21T08:51:00.000-07:00

Prado Itineraries and the Great Court of London, by the Windowless Consultant

We still don't know what the city is. Flesh, stone, or idea, space or word, practice or representation, a mixture of these or something else that they result from, more spiritual, more instinctive or explained by an enlarged idea of the biological, encompassing the social life of ants. Ultimately definable or not, though, it must be lived, and, as part of that life is its description, definitions, however partial, must be attempted.

The solution found by our fellow citizens at Oxford is a 750 word preamble, a grand tour of historical uses before so much as entering the treacherous terrain of definition proper.

Those seeking to establish whether it's stone or idea might visit the British Museum's Great Court. With this rebuilding, the architect, Norman Foster seeks to draw a line through central London, between the British Library to the North, and the riverside/Trafalgar Square attractions to the South: a 'New Heritage Route', he suggests, shading it onto a map in demonstration. An idea, a name, practices, a long line through stone, processional route for tourists, crossed daily and unperceived by inhabitants, recognised only by the relevant planning bodies or those seeking their language to commission, build or describe.

I came here via Madrid, the Passeo del Prado, at first sight a more identifiable entity in its Baroque rhetoric, linking the Reina Sophia to the Thyssen-Bornemisza around the Prado itself.

The idea was inspiration for a London window on a historical Spanish theme, the paintings there to help me, a flamenco night, the streets, plazas, bars, the food, habits, conversation.

My work in windows is self-assured, as it must be if I'm to survive by it, hence this blog, where everything less certain is collected, conglomerates, everything of or pertaining to the city.

The standard Prado guide is admirable in its clarity and, within reasonable limitations, detail. There's no such thing as Spanish painting, any more than there is Italian, Flemish, French or Dutch, as the Passeo del Prado complex is one of the best places to discover. Rather, there are tendencies, investigations, exchanges, discoveries shared, interpreted, forgotten or relearnt by more or less itinerant workers responding to the needs of more or less international clients, working, within and across ever-changing borders, under the rambling movements of battling dynasties.

El Greco's colours, we come to see, came from Venice, where they landed with the dyes from the trade overseas, his space, tormented, fragmented, and without centre, more a spiralling Tintoretto than anything closer to his anyway adopted Toledo. Goya looked to the Flemish, of course, especially to the works garnered by dominating Spain, not only for the portraits, but even in his darkest nightmares. Velasquez' proximity with Rubens is well documented, with Titian, and if there's one certainty to lie in Las Meninas, it concerns the fluidity of space, its changes over time, the defining place of perspective, representation, in who you are, of where you stand. The monarch is standing before it, the viewer, being painted, Philip IV in flip flops and shorts, unconsciously posing for Thomas Struth, wondering whether they grasp it, before the next one, with an audio guide.

I can't be the only one going abroad who on arriving experiences uncertainty about whether they've left. The language is different, the buildings, faces, streets, practices, space, but it's still language, building, streets, practices, space, still here. Whatever the Dutch at Breda made of their Spanish conquerors, the Spanish of the conquering French, may have been largely irrelevant to the maps being drawn and redrawn around them. The places would stay there, the stones, not least the practices, the stories told there and about them, would develop as they remained the same.

The great museums and galleries of Europe perhaps invite, though each in their own way, each just like the others, the same populations, trading flip flops in one place for umbrellas in another, restless drifting sitters, to tableaux musical chairs. Viewed from what perspectives do the cities expand around them mere wings?

2010-09-02T11:34:00.000-07:00

The Putney Debates, with Sally@StMary's by The London Archaeologist

Putney appears from across the bridge very much what it is. This illusion can only be dispelled by the closest inspection and a degree of luck.

My own encounter, though perhaps not repeatable, may serve as example.

It's clear from even across the river that this is a village encased in the city, the swelling city as yet unable to smother the village life out of it as long as the church, increasingly small in its little yard, continues serving tea, maintains the final barrier against the rising tide of chains, holds in barrista Sally that trump card, over Starbucks' biometric product personalisation or Carluccio's sheer nationality, beyond any froth or twist, which is faith.

As a parish, Putney is devoted to the river sports of a type unseen east of Wandsworth, aligning itself less with what might to the more central Londoner seem Thames proper than the upstream back-formed Isis or indeed the Cam, the soul of the place dependent on the hardy rowing of the crews to maintain sufficient westward pace never to hit land on a genuine London shore.

My latest visit was my first solely intended to gather information for the blog.

The only way you can know London is by exploring. To investigate, seek to ascertain or find out, search for, search out, to look into closely, pry into, scrutinize, examine by touch, to probe (a wound), to conduct operations in search for, hence explored. To explore has as many definitions as you might expect, from the talented crew of the OED, and, as usual, enough to make you hesitate: if each individual word in their volumes depends on so many others, are any to be trusted alone? Has nobody thought to seek out words sufficient to themselves? Not even proper nouns?

And so it is with London. To explore in use is open, requires no foreclosed knowledge, a certain blindness, touch. Where what is to be explored appears familiar, this appearance first, before exploration can begin, must be dispelled, and with the appearance the reality, the illusion of familiarity itself, must be foregone.

Putney, then, is not a parish ensconced in a city, the church not a parish church. This would be where investigation could begin and end, prejudice perhaps dispelled, perhaps in the church itself.

It is in large part thanks to the Guardian that, tucked in the heart of the church, the size of a passport photo booth, is a wonderful little museum in itself, where, alongside a (very) potted history, videoed politicos, historians, the parish vicar, and local students discuss the meaning, for the present, of the Putney debates.

At Putney, we know, one of the peaks in that peak moment that was the English Revolution occurred, the notion floored that political representation should be detached from property, at the time expressed most powerfully simply in land. In part as a result of world exploration, the rise of the new empires, in tune with increasing migration, the growing cities, but in tune also, as Tony Benn points out in his televised contribution to the display, with the still more radical notions floated elsewhere by the Diggers, that all private stake in the common property which is the earth is unacceptable domination, Putney briefly put itself at the centre of a rethinking of the meaning of land itself, its relation to representation, commonality, justice and truth.

The overall display is everything you might expect from its host, the Anglican church: space for most of the less radical positions, and even some of the more is found, politely contained in a central message only gradually put, that, in the opinion of the vicar, the men, if somewhat fanatical, were clearly Christian, ergo, the whole thing really came down to religion. Even at Putney, however, of course, the church being on the retreat from the high street, from encroaching chains trying to crowd the café and the church attached into the river with good riddance, what appears to have been the key funding had to come from the Lottery fund, the nation's money tossed into the hat of chance, and, despite the guiding hand of the minister, the visitor's basically free to decide.

As the defensive position of the church on the banks seems, though it can't, to imply, the titular Putney in Rainsborough's time was a village, the city only after grown around it. The revolutionary meaning of the word long since having drifted away from the place, the Guardian, Lady Antonia Fraser, the lottery, Benn, the local vicar have sought to bring it back, to return the debates to Putney, where they can be contemplated over a cup of Sally's tea.

Of course, I myself reflected, as I tossed a tip into a discreet little bowl at the till, that little Putney should have been, centuries ago, briefly at the centre of ideas beyond history even to the present to apply shouldn't surprise me as it must, with the differences in the land from place to place being themselves so different from what they might be. But until such a time as it doesn't, the little church with its gentle dogma must perhaps remain the basis of exploration.

2010-08-14T07:22:00.000-07:00

A Pause at the Elephant and Castle by the Landless Landlord

In the holiday season, even the under-employed have at least the right, if not the means, to some involvement. My own means, and those of my blogging peers, were to be a van I had the use of for a job. The idea was, I'd be off to Sussex to pick up some barrels for London, but pay would consist of the loan of the van for the weekend plus knock-down board at the brewery tap. The Archaeologist reckoned this would be the ideal time for all of us to get a day out of town. Team building, need for an away day to get the city in perspective. The only way you can approach a subject, he enthused, by definition from outside.

The idea was fine, reconnecting with proud traditions: the only way out of the smoke having for many a citizen been hop-picking, the object of our tour would be a nod to their work.

None of us had done such a Saturday morning journey in some while, so none of us was aware of just how many did, London choking under the effort to get away, one road after another strangled to standstill. The three of us, not as used to the South side of the river as we seemed to think, trying to avoid its endlessly clogged arteries, slowly wound the van into a state of desperate exasperation until, lost in some back street, steam billowing from the bonnet, it gave up.

Elephant, apparently, where I was to spend the day. There was no point in the others waiting. They'd make their way to Victoria for the train, I'd wait out the repairs and hope to join them by nightfall.

My stay, I hoped, would not be fruitless, anyway, in its way, the Elephant and Castle a site, thanks to the pub it originally referred to, in need of research.

It's the basic human need for rest the pub responds to, institutionalises, names - rest and recreation.

And since these names are at the heart of the question that may lie behind the whole point of this blog, they need reflection here.

Because it may be that I, the Windowless and the Archaeologist are simply asking: What is a city - in reference this one in particular, because, for its inhabitants, endless as our lives as we know them, it is what a city is.

A pause on a journey, over centuries; continuity, frozen, the fixed.

Where people die, cities endure - cities are foreign to life. Cities, the most familiar no less than the strangest - the most familiar after all the strangest - are left by that foreign race our ancestors on their journey from life to death. Whether they, like us, found or founded it, it was to them as it is to us, as life is - however familiar on the surface, to that extent deeply strange.

Try to imagine a people, however nomadic, who could dispense with place names. Life, and everything in it, must pass. What it must pass is places. The places passed through, the places it pauses, seeks shelter, where it farms, refreshes itself, gathers, meets and makes. These places, the mystery of its opposites, must get proper names, capitals, marking, in the currency of the word, the pole of the fixed - something to talk about, where the talking happens, the conversation is going or will resume.

So it is that the most common siting of the pub sign become toponym is on the old routes out of town. The map of London could have a pin in it, collecting radial threads for roads extending out; on these, guaranteed, the phenomenon will be overrepresented - Angel, Swiss Cottage, the Nag's Head; the Elephant, in its way, pre-eminent. It's because they were coaching inns, of course, discussed from afar as a destination, known as a place someone had stayed, in the nameless spaces of the open road, where the host was, drink, conversation flowed.

The Elephant and Castle, horse and inn; on the journey, but the pause.

There are other suggestions for the origin of the name, of course - always should be - but I don't see why I, of all people, should find them convincing. The origin was a pub, the same pub as is referred to already in the days of Shakespeare for a place of ill repute, which, itself passing away, left its name in legacy.

Every city - built, under construction or perhaps even still in plan - is the abandoned ruin of a past age. Those that cannot bring themselves to see this - a group including not only all its inhabitants, but anyone who uses it so much as to pass through: these are the ghosts that haunt it, giving it, to the unsuspecting eye, the appearance of life.

I wondered, as I circled the roundabout in investigation, waiting for the call from the garage, whether I, for once, had been allowed a glimpse of this by the fact of the accident of my presence there, of being supposed to be far away with the other bloggers on the Sussex coast.

2010-07-18T06:23:00.000-07:00

Sung Like a Canary Wharf: Any Resemblance Denied by the Windowless Consultant

I hold in the camera a head and squeeze, flattening it against the glass, a poster, splayed legs of the Tower and pedestrians beyond, drop it from my eye and await the equation.

The official website, if you include what's silenced along with what's there, says it all: Canary Wharf has been designed with emphasis on creating a pleasant working environment. Careful attention has been given to the provision of public open spaces, including parks, squares and promenades.

Readers with us for the long haul may remember that, largely as a result of my work in window display, I've long had an interest in the -rama, be it dio-, cosmo-, or pano-. Never one to take periods of inaction lying down, I'd decided to fill a gap in work with research, recalling many years previously in the Museum of London Docklands having come across a copy of a London panorama installed in the round, a long lost riverine view recently rediscovered lining the inside of a barrel, or something, as I recalled, image so meticulous in detail people had come to see it -the waterside, boats, buildings, streets, tiny distant people - from all around.

What is that you're taking? asks a voice by my shoulder from behind.

I've been waiting for this moment with anxiety and interest, Canary Wharf notorious for it, but, despite our earlier experiences, I can't quite believe it's true. To the idle eye, the place looks like any other: pavements, trees, roads, cars, people, buildings. Newer, brasher, flash, granted, but with nothing you'd put your finger on as precluding reproduction. Here, then, though, confirmation - as at the British Land Landorama, a place that placed between itself and its appearance this difference by injunction.

I should have seen him coming, doubtless, claims to the photographer's eye surely dependent on the ability to see, but I was absorbed in that one little framed space, all outside it indiscriminately absent, so now there was the uniform demanding answers.

Precision about what it was I was taking would be hard, already the idea that it was taking moot. No, nothing - people, buildings, nothing you know, not taking, just leaving.

This was the first of many times I was to be accosted, and one of the least unpleasant in manner. Certainly intrusive in terms of asking to see other shots in the camera, what it was all for, who I was, whether I had ID, but strangely hesitant, allowing me to skirt the demands, and, if without reason in content, reasoning in form, explaining, for instance, that it was down to the camera, a slightly higher performing model than some (though low-end, SLR), so suspicious; down to me, my dress and demeanour, clearly not from round there; that it was the times, the suspicion of plans to attack; that it may disturb the locals, freak 'em out with sudden shock, psychological warfare of some sort, presumably. Photography was allowed, I was informed, but I needed permission, would be hassled; the street was okay, but not the buildings; the buildings, but not their entrances, exits, windows; anywhere but where there were security cameras, which, there, are everywhere.

As a businesswoman, but as a person, too, I've long been used to gauging dishonesty in explanation by the proffering of multiple cause, laying it on, as they say, and causes incompatible counteract: terror by plot or action, identity, camera type or clothes, the buildings or their users, it was clear, were beside some point that not even he appeared clearly to grasp. Something vaguer, more fundamental, could be felt behind this invisible chasm between London and its first Enterprise Zone.

As a blogger, given the aims within these posts, I've come to see these gaps as key. They are, perhaps, the spaces I'm looking for, may at last afford the camera an uninterrupted glimpse of that moment that I've set myself to track. So, if inconvenient, perhaps the man's confused and contradictory instructions may prove convenient, their restriction liberating.

With this man, as with all those that followed him, pacing the streets looking for issues, standing burly by exits or rushing gesticulating from doors, the response I thought wisest was slippery co-operation, appear at the same time polite, helpful, interested, and yet withhold as much as possible, make no more promises than necessary, express interest in the rules of the place - which required no faking on my part - and yet, once they were gone, ignore them.

Some of the rules, apart from those outlined above, and remembering that contradiction was central to their application, proved to run something like as follows: people dressed in standard-issue business suits enjoyed a basic right to photograph unhindered, though presumably this could be withdrawn should they step outside the expected roles of, for instance, memorialising a business trip at the entrance to a bank HQ visited, or snapping a scene for wives and children at home; photographing the water of the old docks was actively encouraged, though for some reason other than guarantee against further harassment, which was as prompt as at any other scene; retail outlets were strictly off limits, and, lastly, permits were available via the press office, who would drag out the procedure, asking what exactly one sought to photograph at what exact time, though with the proviso that most places were ruled out, what photographic equipment would be used, the purpose, etc., in a game of patience which, in this case, I won, they themselves withdrawing from communication presumably out of boredom before the final details had been worked out, though I didn't let this trouble me, having by then finished the job anyway.

As it's abundantly clear that no terrorist will be hindered by the inability to take photographs, it would be a mistake to believe the danger the Wharf seeks to dispel is that of acts preparatory to terrorism. The absurdity of the overreaction is simply too clear even to imagine that. As the furious response of, say, a be-suited guard to a bemused family of tourists posing in the vicinity of his revolving door for a street shot made clear, the act itself is the object of their hatred, and without any proportion to its consequences - blindly.

Not until my last day there - Saturday, that completely different atmosphere, when the purpose of the place becomes still more obscure, and, as such, a focus of greater interest, clearer - did I get the opportunity to grasp photographically the object of this blindness itself.

If the original purpose of the visit had been, as I say, to capture the panorama, all sight of this idea had long been lost, the behaviour of the guards having distracted me for days, pushed me to research their limits, the effect these had on the images, the space shot, behaviour - that of others and my own; above all, what was behind it, these rigid injunctions half applied, proffered permissions that never came, inconsistencies to the point of whim, one guard placing a not usually where another a never, one allowing what another forbade.

These days I spent wandering this Isle that isn't an isle, and yet, though belonging to London, studiously not, that is. Because the first thing that must be remarked of this corner of East London is the numerous means it employs to suggest it isn't, from the bizarre arrays of clocks displacing its time zone abroad to the toy-town aesthetic, Charliesque checkpoints, retail blingery, price, wage and finally legal exception cutting it off from the rest.

It wasn't till a Saturday I finally entered the museum, getting directions to the panorama at the desk, though I had to revise my intention of photographing it, as here, in distinction to the main site at London Wall, featuring in the previous post, for instance, for their Vauxhall recreation, a no photograph policy's operated, appropriately enough. There, on the wall, I found as instructed the image, shiny, screwed to a wall, and, on closer inspection, a photograph, no less, the original having been shifted. Still, I take the time to look slowly, admire the detail, the reproduction no less useful than the original, though without the installation I recall in the round, recall having visited all those years ago with the Archaeologist in our early days, before we'd lost touch, and then, meeting again, begun blogging together, before blogs even existed, reproducing at least something of what the original set out to achieve. The logic of these things is dependent on the viewer's at the same time viewing what their eyes tell them must be the real thing, and yet being instructed by other details that it's not, a panorama no good of course, if you mistake it for the real, who'd pay to see the real, in distinction to this thing that as exactly as possible reproduces it? There must be that little twinge, the detail that says the buildings here are not buildings, the ways on this land are not ways, this is only a representation, usual life in suspense.

Winding down through the museum, then, I took the opportunity to browse through the displays on the Docklands development, try to uncover something of what the Enterprise Zone meant, the handing of public land over to private investors along with incentives, the extraordinary dispensations as to planning, financing, and transport, the encouragement to think of it as a place apart, a new New World, island without natives, cities of gold, the dreams of a virgin land, strange designations, and, in refrain, the permanent threat of a fall in prices, the endless search for an edge.

On the way out, I took the opportunity to photograph an image from a conversation I'd had on an early day. I'd been trying to take a shot involving shadows and light on some coloured gauze, passers by transparent from motion above. A woman of East-Asian appearance waiting at a bus stop there had smiled, expressed interest in what I was doing. She'd just emerged from Credit Suisse, but details in her appearance suggested she was both of and not of the island, regular visitor, perhaps, from a company based abroad. Perhaps it was just her using the bus, means of transport intended, surely, not for Wharfers proper, but for the cleaners, barworkers, security invited in to serve needs. As ever in these circumstances I was slightly embarrassed about my activities, but let her see the disappointing results, explained what I'd been trying to achieve. The conversation drifting to the specific qualities of the Wharf, I took the opportunity to seek to gauge her reaction to a sign I'd seen posted within the shelter where we stood, almost Brechtian in its eagerness to dispel the illusion elsewhere carefully maintained: This is private land, and no right of way, public or private, is acknowledged over it. The ways of this land have NOT been dedicated as highways, bridleways or footpaths, nor has there been any intention so to dedicate them. All resemblance to real footpaths, bridleways or highways, public squares, promenades or streets is coincidental. The woman had smiled knowingly, though of what I couldn't tell, whether an islander's smile to the foreigner, after all, or one to another. And on the weekends they board the buses and search, she said, even under the seats.