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.

Roundabout Greenwich by The Windowless Consultant

I thought I'd stopped blogging. Work's been picking up a little recently, and I've had less time or therefore inclination. I'd begun to feel the experiences, a product of indolence alone, would simply prove irrelevant in the new mood, and found myself happy to think I might drop it for the clearer purpose of window design. I don't know if that will ever be possible again.

My journey to Greenwich was by way of research into a nautical-themed display for the window of an upmarket boutique already planning their Spring campaign. I could have gone to the coast, of course, but the expense seemed unnecessary given the village, so I'd at least do this first. Ocular evidence of one's research is becoming increasingly a pre-requisite for expense claims now, the pinched circumstances, even as we might perhaps be emerging from them, leading to increased caution.

The market has long exercised, of course, a powerful attraction over the amateur photographer, and, naively, I presumed that this would make my attempt to produce my own record of the place go unnoticed, but within seconds of my taking out my pocket camera I'd been approached by a market warden warning me that the stall holders objected to photographs being taken without their permission. I thanked her for the information and considered what to do. For proof that I had been there a generic shot of people and stalls was what I'd intended. However, given the number of stallholders I'd have to ask, the difficulty of deciding what really was in the photograph, this would clearly be impractical. Furthermore, if I asked stallholders, I should by rights ask customers too, but since they were so numerous and, given their constant motion, this would be impossible. Instead, then, I approached a single individual trader with the intention of photographing her stall alone.

Where was I from? she wanted to know first. As a question, this was more difficult than she appeared to realise. It would surely be clear from my accent I was from England, and then, how this should be relevant to permission to photograph was unclear. Perhaps she meant which newspaper, permission being dependent on her liking it, but as I was unconnected to a newspaper, this was harder still to answer, the grammar making no room for a negative reply. What's it for? She prompted.

What worried me was that, if I were to suggest that I sought proof that I'd been there looking for ideas, this person would be disposed to hear only 'looking for ideas' and send me packing as some sort of spy, perhaps for the Chinese. Maybe that's what the place question was about after all.

Fearing, then, that if I gave the truth I'd be forbidden to do my work, I tried what I considered a lie: it was, I said, not without trepidation, for a blog. I waited for her to ask me what kind of a blog that was, to be obliged to say that I wasn't sure, that its purpose, for me, was in large part to try to ascertain that; that I, along with some old acquaintances recently re-met, as though by coincidence, but we suspected it was more than that, felt that there were these things happening which, although we couldn't quite say yet what they were, we all felt were of extreme importance if she wouldn't mind just bearing with us.

Blog, came the stallholder's reply, clearly confirming already her suspicion. That's like Facebook, a blog, she didn't approve of Facebook, couldn't see any purpose in that, if she could, she'd do it herself, wouldn’t need me doing it for her, no, sorry, didn't want me taking photographs for a blog.

I could, I suppose, have gone around asking the other traders one by one who would let me include their stall to prove I was there, but I was too confused to want to try. Had I told the truth, that I wanted it as proof in my work as window display consultant, perhaps the woman's suspicions would have been justified, but that it was this lie, its content so innocent, that should have elicited the objection, flummoxed me.

What are they guarding here, I wondered, what are they trying to conceal? Anyone can look at these goods, handle them, even, buy, take them home. What would the camera be able to see, hold, record, that actual physical presence could not, to be allowed to stand, touch, buy, but not to photograph?

I looked around the market, then, again, a place where I would be unable to work, and sought for explanations in line with the blog they perhaps genuinely feared. I recalled, for instance, reading of the Archaeologist's experience on the roundabout at St Agnes' Well, my suspicions at the time that there may be connections between the experience and the form itself. It's true that on my approach, already, in the tunnel, connections to that post could be suspected, but I'd never have thought that Greenwich should harbour a key discovery concerning them.

One hardly thinks of the heart of Greenwich as a roundabout. And yet, of course that's exactly what the market is, when you think about it, albeit one defined, for the most part, by lusciously stuccoed Victoriana, and with the road encircling it ennobled by no less than four independent names: College Approach, Greenwich Church Street, King William Walk, Nelson Road.

I can't be the only person to have realised that the simple need of getting around's insufficient to explain the place of the road in our lives, the almost total control it has over the urban environment, for instance, transforming it into a permanent state of conflict between the foot- and the wheel-bound. The eccentricity of this form of social organisation's nowhere so manifest as on the gyratory, where the apparently innocent path, which the car would share with even the most elementary forms of organisation even down to that of ants in their neat little lines, not only veers brazenly from the logical, but then goes on deviating until it doubles all the way back on itself in a form surely unique.

At St Agnes' Well, I believe, the Archaeologist, perhaps without realising it, began to find an explanation for the eccentricity of the roundabout as social form. At Greenwich, I was beginning to suspect, I might be able to take the explanation a step further.

Greenwich has always appeared something of an eccentric in the London context - if London really is its context, and it seems to do everything it can to suggest that it's not. If, though, that's why I'd repaired there in the first place, little had I considered just how true it was. Mostly, the sense is overdetermined by its position on the river, firstly since the course of the water itself veers so suddenly off the straight to lap the tongue of the Isle of Dogs it leaves the village reeling and lost - on the spine the waterway forms, and yet so far South it might not be the city at all. And then there's the way the water's always steeped the area so deep in naval history no true inland urbanite can possibly feel entirely at home there. But on top of this comes the weirdest thing of all - the Meridian, not only arbitrary in itself as the one zero point that, setting out East or West, the traveller's position grows further away from, until you go far enough and it starts getting nearer again, but which, as a precondition, required an international race to produce the clock that would inscribe it. Here in Greenwich, it appears, no means is permitted to be direct. If it's predetermined, though, that Greenwich should refuse to remain London, the one thing that makes the refusal possible in the present is not this illustrious past, but that road which, veering from the straight, continues to veer further and further off it until it comes back round to itself as the market, the roundabout, which, simply to cross over to its centre, exacts the price from the pedestrian that they must risk their life to gain the heart of the village.

This, then, explained the fierce independence of the locals, their determination to be - that I be - from somewhere else. They needn't be afraid, then. Blog, we know, comes from the marine log, recording a journey in an act of plotting. Its very nature would preserve the village's independence, recording it as the journey that it was.