Of Pimlico Now Let us Sing by the Landless Landlord

'Of Pimlyco now let us sing,

Rich Pimlyco, the new-found spring,

Bewitching Pimlyco that tyes

The rich and poor, the foole and wise,

All in one knot. Of that we write;

Inspire your poet to indite,

You Barlie Muses Pimlyconian.

He scornes the Muses Helyconian;

(Poore soules) they none but water drincke,

But Pimlyco dropt into his ink,

His lines shall flye with merry gale,

No muse is like to Pimlyco Ale.'

Thus John Skelton.

If there's disappearance, there's also persistence, resurgence, re-appearance, emergence. Whichever of these it is, the case of Pimlico, particularly strange, is not uncommon. If pubs go under and signs come down, some must stay, others replace them.

I first became interested in Pimlico by way of publicity on a pub wall in Seven Dials recording a discontinued line. Naturally my original assumption was that the area gave its name to the beer, but that isn't in fact the case. The name Pimlico, centuries before it moved snugly into its present West London home, referred to a place in Hoxton. On Early English Books Online, the first references tend to be to an 'ale house', a place of questionable reputation, and best summed up by John Skelton's Pimlyco, or Runne Red-Cap, Tis a Mad World at Hogsdon, written some time before his death in 1529 and quoted in part above.

It opens with the poet wandering around the spring fields on London's then outskirts, admiring the love-makers who meet there for the flowers and rural solitude. As he approaches the city, seeing increasing crowds converging on a little spot in Hoxton, he follows to see what they're after. Pimlyco, man, they tell him, reeling and falling laughing, Pimlyco. Perhaps this is the name of a new play, he thinks at first, the area already associated with drama, but is eventually put straight, and, munching on a local cake, joins them in enjoyment of a pint of what it is they're all enjoying - Pimlyco, it transpires, being a brown ale of exceptional strength.

This then, and despite the later move west, was a phenomenon like that at the Angel - the pub, itself gone, leaves a whole area bearing its name, its mark, shadow, ghost; an area become pub sign, and so material for a post.

Opening an A-Z I was quickly gratified to see there was still a Pimlico Walk in Hoxton, and made my way there.

I was soon confused to realise that it clearly wasn't a continuing presence of the place name, but only a reference, invented, I had to assume, by councillors trying to salvage a sense of continuity from slum clearance/bomb rebuild. Further place names around the local development confirmed this: Macbeth, Oberon and Caliban House all clearly part of a recent street plan, referred back to the time of the original Pimlico moniker, when the place had gained those same associations with the stage Skelton already refers to. Even the Macbeth boozer opposite, I reasoned, must be a nod to this same business.

But if antiquarianism's not the object of these posts, nor could a way in be the present Pimlico Walk, its spawn. Clearly a councillor not too long ago had done the same research I just had, uncovering the theatrical past of the area and the beer, and naming the little passage accordingly. To have come here in this earlier antiquarian's footsteps was to have sent myself in circles, following exactly in my own, believing them another's. The present name was a fictional re-invention of the past, and to make it the object of research was to have entered into that fiction.

Around 3.00pm, it was too late to go wandering around the market looking for a way back in, the stallholders already shutting up, taking with them what may have amounted to subjects for a more concrete post, leaving only the streets, litter, the stalls bare.

Of course I snapped any intriguing pub signs I passed, for the record: the Howl at the Moon, for instance, for its wild feel, the Bacchus for the priapic propagation of the patronym, the Macbeth, opposite Pimlico Walk, remarkable in its cartoon excess, but not with any hope, I admit, of uncovering signs of significance. All this was part of Hoxton, Pimlico was not. And yet it was from Pimlico, pure invention, wandering around the market, I was unable to leave; it was Pimlico, imaginary presence of a distant past, I continued to photograph.

As I reached back to the southern end of Hoxton Street in the evening dark, Old Street was already busy with the night crowd. I followed various flows, up to the station a source, back around, towards the Walk again, following a steady stream of pleasure seekers now, to the Macbeth, where the lights now coming into their own made clear what the excesses of its sign should earlier have suggested to me: this was a pub for the night crowds, not a market pub at all, and I decided to investigate the interior.

On a stage at the end of the bar Girls Names warmed up, watched over by a sound engineer, two men who turned out to be producers for a small local label, and myself, testing the Guinness. A man sat on a bench reading; conversations were quiet, punctuated by the occasional clack and thud of pool balls.

On the wall behind the red baize table an elaborate tiled mural caught my attention. Before his happily carousing guests, Macbeth extends a trembling hand to a ghost only he can see. I studied what was an impressive work in detail, somewhere between a visualisation of what might be a stage production and a direct realisation of the story behind it. Whether this is a genuine visitation or a hallucinatory externalisation of guilt is left undecided. The laughter of the other guests may suggest they attribute their host's vision to inebriation alone, or perhaps simply that they themselves are too drunk to notice anything unusual's going on.

The landlord, whose name I recall as Mark, confirmed that the mural was original - listed, in fact. Though the evening's unfolding events were to blur details, the general subject of our conversation was the picture itself and its place in local history. As the mural confirmed, the name of the pub long predated any council invention of Pimlico Walk. The area's associations with performance were of course not the preserve of the local authority. Others had clearly been drawing on the past to support other, independent agendas.

In the nineteenth century, pubs, especially in a working-class area like Hoxton, were frequently criticised as corrupters of morals. Perhaps the reference to the entertainment associated with the early days of the area, when no less than the Bard himself may have been out here on the piss, was a defence - unassailable in our opinion - of an activity at the heart of the nation's heritage. As an inscription on the front of the building proclaims, gin had originally been distilled here. Perhaps the hallucinatory content of the tiles was a wink, in fact, to the wild deliria of that drink, whose effects on the lower orders were even more concerning to the middle classes than those of ale.

'Last great poet of Catholic England', as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has it, Skelton led what seems a colourful life as tutor to Henry VIII, libertine, satirist, carouser, jester, learned social critic, thorn in tender sides. In Pimlyco, he tears through what reads like an unruly array of poetic styles from classical to doggerel, nonsense, satire and song, apparently, within the situation of the story it tells, under the effect of the generally chaotic joy of carousing.

Meeting the landlady, he learns her secret: the ale, it seems, is brewed under roosters, whose deposits give it that edge over its rivals that excites the insatiable appetite of the crowds. This special quality, he understands, bursting into hallucinatory song, crowned laureate by a hop-spun aureole of confusion, makes of the ale also his muse.

In the pub as a whole, the atmosphere, already pleasant from the outset, appeared to grow ever warmer as the evening wore on, the staff and punters, the sound man, producers bands and fans all equally determined to enjoy themselves. Stella, as I recall the name of Mark's step-daughter, runs not only the upstairs taps but also the Macbeth pub blog. She was contemplating posting about a pub ghost which, she'd heard, may haunt the building. We discussed whether the stories were credible and agreed it was not the point; the fact was they were real - one of the barmen downstairs, for instance, able to raise hairs with them - and as such they deserved inclusion.

Emerging with the last drinkers, I already realised the story of Pimlico was unfinished, will need at least one further post - expect an investigation of the West London area soon. Perhaps the western Pimlico, too, will turn out to be invention. The investigation of how exactly the signs work, the forces that decide which name will spread from a pub to the surrounding area, or leap across the city from East to West, which will disappear and which re-emerge, can only occur piecemeal, but, reality or fiction, both Pimlicos, each on their side of the city, would at least have their post.

Trail to Get Lost: Between Old Street and Barbican by The London Archaeologist

Been doing consultancy work on a recent find in the West City area. Fascinating work, it would have seemed to me when work was something I could count on. Since it ceased being regular, though, I've found myself disengaging, staring out of the window during meetings, or wistfully up at the palisade from digs, thinking only of getting back to the street.

It's not that I know what to do once there, how to approach it, what I'll find. There are none of the protocols as there are on the site, which, for all the mud, ruin and mess, maintain at their best a rigour and purity aligning them with the lab, the operating theatre, the crime scene. The greatest enjoyment of the inner-city dig for me had been, I suspect now, less the research than this ritual, entering a space through a gate shearing it of connections with everyday life, which you might imagine has ceased going on around it. My outing this time was up Old Street. It was the way I'd been going to work every day, and I knew it well, but something drew me back, the suspicion that there were finds of some sort that way even if I couldn't yet know what. I'd made discoveries there before, what's was more - the Well, the nearby Eye hospital -, should be able to do so again.

At the outset as I went, the journey was hobbled, though, with doubt. All the time I'd been working, to have been waiting only for this: to set out as though to work but with neither hope of remuneration nor aim. Around me the street was as busy as it always had been, as purposeful, but with a purpose which appeared to have no place for me.

I looked into the faces of passers by. They appeared at their most normal, but this their most monstrous. A recent post of the Landless Landlord focused my mind a little, reminded me of my own, what I'd been after, if these could all, perhaps, be the angels, if I could find them that way, or what for want of other words I've elsewhere dubbed gods.

But for that, I'd have to see each one not as a person on the way to work, which was what I was doing, still, automatically: making my way to a job that wasn't there for me. Somehow I was going to have to lose not only this, but my sense of the way. Arrive at a dig, but one without recognisable difference from its surroundings, no protocol, no palisade, seamlessly, leave the city without a gate, only ceasing to recognise what I knew.

A major artery, Old Street nevertheless manages to keep a certain hectic intimacy of scale, and its role of drawing a definitive line between the City atmosphere of offices to the South from the northerly residential zones gives itself a mixed feel all its own. It was in Soho I'd realised the place in the window of the glass itself, the worlds in the images it brings. Here would surely be others.

My first recourse was to lose myself among the reflections of the design showrooms - office and residential, furniture, furnishings, paints -, computer shops, cafes, hairdressers, watch repairers, clubs, bookbinders and printers. The sort of place to place the Barbican towers by Parliament, this, in a poster shop, or in a bar draw a plastic monster through a shop front opposite. Propose designs for a plane tree, colour chart a brick wall, screen save a street. A low cloud hung over the morning, refusing to lift in line with the breakfast forecast. There appear to be types of lost, and even with the seemingly propitious combination of windows from which might be hoped to appear the other space, I sensed that something withheld itself.

The cloud was already beginning to clear as I glimpsed what I felt would be my final opportunity. I'd crossed the Fleet valley of Farringdon Road, where Old Street, already having changed nominally to Clerkenwell Road, becomes Theobold's Road, though retaining its atmosphere briefly until Gray's Inn, beyond which the story would have to change. The final shop, on the north corner of the street, would have to turn things around. I knew what was there from having passed before, tagged it for a resort. If the reflection in the window of a magic shop didn't work, nothing would.

With these in the memory as stimulus, I returned back down Old Street, something achieved, perhaps, more sensitive now, clearer about what I was looking for, and with the sun, at last breaking definitively through the cloud, on my side, lifting images from one side of the street to the other, suppressing one detail and replacing it with another, less congruous.

I was surprised to see lunch rush in the cafés. This was a good sign, as it confirmed that at some point I'd lost touch with the time around me, and I joined a queue for service with the reassuring sense of involving myself in a ritual not my own. Indeed, I had to join twice, not having understood the local technique: order first, collect a ticket, and only then queue to pay. That I might have been at the airport, the cinema, the doctor's or a fairground boded well.

Getting up from the terrace table, I abandoned the Old Street plan. Whatever I meant by being lost, I wouldn't achieve - or indeed, if I now was, maintain that state by remaining in a bounded space. I needed to leave the windows. Besides, the light on Goswell Street, north/south, was by now so sharp in contrasts they weren't needed.

Passers were by now behaving strangely, flitting out of the corners of buildings, lost too, in the sense, I wasn't sure that there was a difference, that they can't find their own way or that I couldn't find them in some other way.

Finally, a fence, a trail of tape leading to it and, through it, a sculpture I vaguely recalled from my days at the Museum of London, surely what I'd been looking for but could only now that it confirmed that I and those I'd been tracking had been lost know it.