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.

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.