A Small Guide for Phantoms and the London Square by The London Archaeologist

I'm now ready to write up my second day in Paris.

The main task was to explore another of the heavily the annotated areas of the map the King's Cross man claimed had been mine, concerning a guide book whose content may be of particular relevance to this blog. The Little Guide of the XVth Arrondissement for the Use of Phantoms has, it transpires, received interesting blog treatment elsewhere, allowing me to confirm the man's account. The guide describes a certain kind of building unaccountably common in that one little area of Paris - the wedge-shaped slice sometimes encountered here in London as a result, particularly, of the course of railways sliced through terrace backs. Their inhabitants, the man explained, are said to be in some way determined by the nature of the buildings. In fact, he said, a grin forming across features otherwise slightly liquid, as I recall, or absent, perhaps from the effect of drink, during his research into the shape the writer finds that these elusive beings include he himself, only now recognising himself, attracted to investigate by obscurer forces than curiosity alone, at last coming to understand that what he's seen as his life's been some kind of illusion, the memories making up his past unreal.

During breakfast, I flicked though the map to plot an itinerary for the day that would take it in, but also allow for research into my other interest in the city - the sense of the French 'square'.

The nearest to my hotel, I noticed with surprise, was that landmark piece of urbanism I'd always known as the famous 'Place des Vosges'. Formerly 'Place Royale', according to the map it was also to be known as 'Sq Louis XIII'.

I'm still working on the question of the London Square. I began last summer, in Hanover Square, where I hoped to establish the effects of geometry on behaviour, but the project remained unfinished. Expect further reports, though I can't say when.

The very term 'square' in its application has obscure roots and entangled branches. A key stage in the development of its form in London was at Covent Garden, where it took on the name, of course, of Piazza to suggest the Italian influence of the buildings lining it and the Palladian purity of plan. The design of the form there, what's more, warrants the individuality of its name. As is again visible now in post-modern souvenir, the mixture of red brick with stone details, and, more still, the open arcades lining its terraces, were continental influences that were to be dropped from what would soon come to be known as the 'square': an open space surrounded by terraced housing as focus for a unified urban development. Inigo Jones visited the Place Royale before designing Covent Garden. Having been an influence on the form, that it was later to borrow back for a name suggested that, when analysing even such a specific entity as our local London square, peering into the behaviours it produces, as is my plan, considerations of its wandering - indeed rambling - abroad will always be à propos.

'Square' in French, according to fr.Wikipedia, is a legal term, brought into use under Haussman, describing only the central open space, not what we would think of as the entire area - their place -, and thus not the address itself, either, hence the ability of the Place des Vosges to be simultaneously also the Square Louis XIII. Furthermore, being legal, the term is less descriptive of the form than ours, as noted of Menilmontant, and defines more the sort of activities allowed and required inside. This I take to confirm my suspicions about the secret relation of the English form to behaviour.

From my research in Hanover Square, I had at first been unable to determine whether these relations were a result of the shape of the square or that of the photographic frame. It seemed possible that the forms that appear result from the coincidence of the two.

In our Foyles Café discussions, the Landless Landlord informed me that Phoebe White's seminal Photography and the Obelisk contains a chapter suggesting that this works on the same principle as - is a form of - photography. The cloister, he suggested, was shown there to function as a camera obscura, cutting out the random noise of terrestrial life to retain only the focused spiritual forces coming directly from the sky. These would then be recorded in the form of the inner state of the monk, spiritual texts such as meditations, or pictorially as illuminations. The same might surely be said of the gymnasium of the ancients, antecedent of both the cloister and the square, the postures of the athletes, the peripatetic philosophies themselves direct representations of a higher cosmic order.

According to the Windlowless Consultant, Marks and Umbridge's Secret History of Photography, which she'd come upon several months earlier, had better claim to seminal status, and contained what she suggested was a more scientifically grounded hypothesis. She herself had proved on British Land Land before his encounter with his book that it was the influence of Daguerre's ramas that first unleashed the photographic potential of planned space.

I'm not convinced arguments about origins are helpful, or that the theories are incompatible. I do, however, suspect that at least one of the books may well have contained a chapter on the town square, arguing that it performs an equivalent function to the gymnasium or cloister. Passers by entering the camera obscura centre would, while obviously maintaining their usual identities, in some way become simultaneously units in a larger representation in exactly the same way that the individual silver crystals, dyes or phototransistors positioned at the back of the camera box maintain their identity as the substances they are, and yet also have a role in representing objects and events from beyond the shutter.

This was the hypothesis I sought to confirm as I stood in the Square St Jacques at the end of the day.

After the Square Louis XIII, my first destination had been Caillois' XV Arrondissement. There, as with the other locations, I was unable to decide with certainty whether any sense of recognition I might have stemmed from having truly been to the place before and read the texts that the King's Cross man, who might on the basis of his activities both on and off duty be called the Legless Lecturer, claimed I had. It was possible the man had implanted in me a false sense of recognition by the powers of suggestion alone. Indeed, as I photographed the oversized air vents the otherworldly beings were said to emerge from or the unnaturally thin buildings they inhabited, and thought back to the man's blurred features and manic grin, I wondered not only whether he himself might be one of the creatures, but also whether he might have been seeking to imply that I too, would be one, trying to entice me to the habitation I would, seeing it, recognise as my own, attempting to rewrite some kind of new past for me.

It was not without trepidation that I made my way to my next destination, the rails behind Montparnasse, also marked on the map as figuring in the work of another writer, whom I've been unable to track down. If I ever were to become sure about my recognition, and yet if this recognition were unfounded, would that not perhaps confirm my status as one of those creatures that it's the object of this blog not to represent but to record?

At Square St Jacques my purpose had not been to follow up annotations on the map - there were none for that location - but to pursue the work on squares. Directing my lens towards the centre, though, I immediately recognised the tower as the subject of innumerable other photographs, including, most notably for me, one in a book I was sure I'd once read. If there were such a work, that would strongly imply that I was in fact able to distinguish true recognition independently of the Legless Lecturer from that vague sense arising from his suggestion. That text, to my relief, I've found. The fact that I do recall enthusiastically reading Breton's L'Amour fou all those years ago when I'd lived in Paris proves beyond doubt that the Legless Lecturer was some sort of impostor. In fact, I seem to remember that early on in our conversation we'd swapped cards. It's in many ways to emerge from a nightmare to realise that if, instead of that I use for my archaeological practice, I'd accidentally given him that of the blog, he could, say with an iPhone in a visit to the toilets, have gleaned from a few posts there much of that information about my past by which he'd convinced me that we'd known each other all those years before.

Notes from the Pompidou, by the Windowless Consultant

Sitting in the Pompidou café, taking notes for the present post, turning towards the window to produce a photographic record, I was unsurprised to hear a young couple to my right speaking French. This, too, should be noted.

I've mentioned our Charing Cross Road Foyle's Caf meetings, where the three of us align sights as to the direction of the blog. In our last meeting, we'd discussed a comment by fellow blogger Izoard, who wonders whether reality may be disappearing under the sheer mass of photography, or indeed whether the reverse is true. Perhaps at some critical point of apparatus ownership rates, the Landless suggested optimistically, starry eyed, I believe, after his experience in Trafalgar Square, with cameras everywhere, things, having no corner to hide in, may at last appear as they truly are.

The Archaeologist demurred. It was his belief that the camera was a tool like any other, a microscope, a brush or a trowel, that could lead as much to error as to truth. What we all agreed on was that, given the growing place of the medium in this blog, we ought to decide where we stood.

What would be needed would be to return to an earlier time and compare the degree of reality then manifest with that now. Consider the comparative camera review now commonplace: does the Nikon XYZ or some equivalent Canon have better performance, they ask, meaning basically, the image of which is more real? The best reviews will display comparable photos side by side, for the reader to judge. You'd want the same basic comparison, but of historical moments rather than models.

The Archaeologist, emerging from silent study of the swirls in his macchiato, agreed. Compare photographs from now with others taken at the medium's inception, when it hasn't saturated the world to the degree it now has. The British Library hold a great collection of these early imprints. Their present exhibition, showing a broad selection, was clearly a perfect time to put this to the test. Surely that should be the subject of my next post - this one. The library being on Euston Road, major artery in itself and locus of several mainline rail termini, he'd wandered over there while waiting for one of the Chunnel trains that never came. We'd all benefit from the inclusion in the blog itself of this comparison. Here would be our opportunity to decide on the proper place of our illustrative photographs.

The Euston Road, along with its continuations east and west, is one we've been on before and one, choking but inspired, toking fumes and blare, as I made my way up it, I knew I'd be back to for more. It has that particular kind of charm that vast amounts of traffic can impose on a place - a roaring anonymity harbouring pools of obscure specificity, its attraction, like the landscape of a distant planet, in part its hostility. Passing from the eponymous station, I felt the hidden force of character that had imprinted itself so clearly in the last century on certain painters: Bohemian but gritty, accomplished but obscure, the Euston Road School were in equal measure favoured and condemned by location alone to approach but never attain illustrious kinship with the Fitrovians or Bloomsburians. A place of transit, I reflected, few would have the strength to grapple with and win.

Whether or not St Pancras New Church won is moot. The alluring caryatids are of course based on the most academically correct models of the Grecian. What the architect couldn't know, building the place just before the advent of rail, was that their roadside poses were soon, with the coming of the stations, the cheap hotels and transient populations, to appear dubiously to reflect those of their living counterparts beckoning drivers from below. Now even with the area being cleaned up and the living girls moved on, the statues still quiz me archly about a return to business as I pass.

As I'm here to blog, I try to take note of things, activities, atmospheres on the way. But it's hard to engage the surroundings, the area changing so entirely it's impossible to decide whether the remaining gas works, the canal, the tenements have any associations anymore, whether, under these vast 'regeneration' projects, those historical sites deemed worth retaining don't become only images of themselves, sucking the visitor with them into bearingless drift. I head to the exhibition, a little relieved to escape the implications of these thoughts, to be back on project.

At the door, though, a change of plan. No photography. I could only research for the blog if I forwent any attempt to gather materials. The instruction at first perplexed me. The photographers represented had all long passed away, surely taking copyright issues with them into dust. What was to stop the free proliferation of their images now? Perhaps it was physical: flash, technology of another time, may destroy these delicate early images. But couldn't we be asked to forgo, not photography itself, but the use of flash? The arguments were idle: there were other necessities at work, though, I suspected as I left a little while later, denying me conclusions from what was in itself a fascinating show.

The circulation and refreshment areas were a little less busy now, but the mood still more studious if anything. This had been my first outing specifically in search of blog material, and I hadn't expected this kind of resistance. Perhaps this itself was what I've elsewhere called the imminent disaster occurring with everything unchanged, the window smashing onto the street, the world becoming props to hover in mid-fall, the subject disappearing. Research in the lobby went on in its near-silence, discussions hushed. In the windy courtyard, Newton bent, noticing nothing, over the same unfinished work. The equal traffic flows opposing their directions still argued out the sense of the Euston Road.

Continuing West, rounding a corner, I come upon a bookshop I've never noticed, but which would appear to have been here since way before the changes. In the window, books on London, local lore. Here, perhaps, I would find material for a post, if not, as planned, on photography, on the local area itself. Entering, I browsed a collection whose difference from what we've become used to with the stranglehold of the chains confirmed what I thought: the shop was a limpit, clung here since long before the recent turn in tides. As I push on in, the focus on London gradually gives way to one on Paris. Eventually, it reaches its zenith in a set of shelves whose label promises to explain: 'The Situation is Movement'. I bought a book promising to explain it on leaving, The Situation is Movement in the City, which I took with me back onto Euston Road to have a first look at in the Pompidou café.

The Situation is Movement would appear to refer to some sort of group originating in the recent past devoted to uncovering qualities within specific places which, as far as I can tell, may be akin to those sought on this blog - may be instructive. One of their methods would seem to be the description of one place by means of another, members, for instance, using a map of London to travel around Berlin, cutting and splicing maps to join non-contiguous locations, investigating deep into the specifities of the commonest locations for powerful but unnoticed effects on the mind, behaviour.

Sitting in the Pompidou, I was unsurprised to hear the young couple to my right speaking French. The rail link tunnelling out of London, under the Channel, into the Gare du Nord, the tube lines now enmeshed, continuous, was only part of wider changes. The student flats arriving, pool halls closing down, the kebab and sex shops clinging on, the cafés forced to spruce or go the way of the junkies, the closure of the Scala cinema with its all-night screenings - The Trip, Into the Valley of the Superdolls, Easy Rider - each a part of broader movements, all to be tracked, logged, mapped.