Piranesi at Blackfriars by The London Archaeologist

I've mentioned my West City consultancy work, the magic shop it brought me to on a corner of Theobold's Road. The junction's with Leather Lane and the market. While there, I'd noticed what seemed to be the kind of framing effects, produced in this instance by the market stalls, that have in the past accompanied occurrences. Passing this time on my way to an exhibition, I set about to capture them.

Work with the camera's often been likened to hunting, an experience I've never had. For me, fishing's always been a clearer analogy. A world without substance, silent and still, purely of vision, devoid of taste, feel, smell, the element into which we peer through the camera is an alien one, in which we could never survive. Staring at the glistening surface, we are aware of things in there of value, and occasionally there are sufficient signs to allow us to draw them near enough to, the arm a line, perhaps, the camera a hook, with patience, waiting till the twitch, pull, snap, catch. Sometimes you draw out a rusting shopping trolley or bicycle, rotting log, sometimes it's a rare fish, and the urban waterway's long been a favoured place for disposing of a firearm.

Uncertain what they were I stocked them away. I say fishing, but of course only a lost archaeologist, strayed into an alien present, would build up the collection of discarded shopping trolleys I suspected they were, the camera no hook but a trowel, the element obscure as earth.

My plan for the afternoon was neither blogging nor work, though. I was hoping to train my eye. I was on my way, first to Sommerset House, where I hoped to illuminate my own process by that of Frank Auerbach's trowelling through paint in imitation of the London subsoil at the bomb sites. If it made sense to him, perhaps it could to me . My next stop was to be the Tate. If anything should arise on the way - as from the market stalls, for instance, I had hoped - so much the better. If they should not, perhaps that would be due to my inability to see into the alien element, and inspecting how pain

ters, who have the advantage, like Auerbach, of working in a genuinely humous medium, might have managed would certainly help me in future.

However, I left perplexed. The Auerbachs, failing to clear for me into the intensity of vision of his portraits, remained as dark, featureless and obscure as the substances they imitated. This was worrying. If my eyes were unable to draw even from these the fauna that were supposed already to have been labelled and logged, how much less so would they do so from the original element, the outside city itself. After a visit to an interesting adjunct they had on about the representation of the ruined city in art, including Piranesi Inventione, I left, I admit, slightly disappointed. Perhaps the Tate would redeem my intention of learning genuinely to uncover, see into the world I believe the previous posts have proved at least to exist.

It was an odd day, light wise, as many have been recently, clouds coming in and draining out all warmth, then parting and leaving a polished gleam, sinking in, clearing. Sometimes I blamed my lack of vision on their presence, or, in their absence, on their absence. Everywhere I could sense the element that this blog attempts to plot, repeatedly, sensing it near, I'd stick out the machine, click, bring up more waste.

Only the Tate would bring refuge, I hoped, its disused chimney a distant beacon.

On the far side of Blackfriars Bridge there was a sign. The footpath to the gallery was closed, the railway bridge was in need of repair, the station was to be expanded from its present building, among the plainest of all London's termini, to something straddling the river, which seemed a pretty impressive feat of industrialism. Impressive feat of industrialism. I was standing, of course, not only on another, but one which was itself the site of a previous other, the present one, designed by Brunel, whose statue I'd passed with hardly a thought on the way (designer of the first Thames tunnel, of course, a link to that at Greenwich), replacing it. Beneath this, I recalled, was a representation of a representation of it by a man who'd never seen it, but who was sufficiently surprised by what he'd heard about it to have copied up still other representations into an impressive print.

In fact, not only had Piranesi never seen Blackfriars Bridge, he'd never been to London. And yet he'd effected - almost indirectly built - the city's architecture more than many who had. The three strands that have fascinated the Brits have been his representations or vedutas, vedute if you prefer, particularly of ruins, where his dramatic sense of contrast and perspective appealed, perhaps via half-sensed ambivalences about imperialism, in the sublime, his imagined documentary realities, enjoyed for their whimsical eccentricity as Capricios, and, most of all, his darkest conceptions, impossible and cavernous penitentiary interiors, the Carceri di Inventione.

There's no space here to go into this, but I've decided to give it a label, surely come back to the places he's influenced, not least since one has already featured here - an acquaintance of George Dance, (the erstwhile) Newgate Prison shows his influence sufficiently for it to remain evident in Islington's (ex-)electricity substation based on it. I've recently come upon an interesting site for this sort of thing, in fact, that I'll doubtless come back to. But not only Dance did he know, but Chambers, too, of course, his fantasy evident no less in the prison than in the latter's Sommerset House. And not only architects had he influenced, of course, but painters, not least David Hepher, whose visionary series based upon them has proved more than anything else to what extent he's embedded himself in the fabric of the city, in that abstract concrete, imagination. That a great contemporary British composer should have rendered the experience into music is perhaps further testimony.

Something certainly was in the making in the way of what I'd set out to look out for. There had been yet another bridge here. Even the relevant Pevsner, a series usually more marked by sober accuracy than intensity of vision, recognises in its remains the piers 'One of the strangest sights in London, marching across the river, carrying nothing nowhere.'

The Tate would have to wait, the collection I sought there permanent. Here, the building work on the bridge would in not long be over, whatever it revealed folded back into the fabric of the city and its impenetrable air.

Ruined Bank Standing for Today Originally posted by London Archaeologist April 4, 2009.

A clue to what's occurring came on Threadneedle Street the other day, as I turned a corner to the Bank of England.

The building has always intrigued me, ever since I saw Gandy's watercolours as commissioned by the architect, Soane. 

Why would the designer of the national bank begin by imagining it a ruin? This question I first put to myself many years back, in the Soane Museum itself. An archaeologist's dream, it occurs to me that the time I took Jessica to this adventure playground of the past was the beginning of our parting ways – our first date. Since she needed ideas for a project on her interior design course and I needed others on the sublime, I'd suggested we go together. 

As we went round, I was happy to discover that through my knowledge only of European thought and literature – the subject of my degree - I was able to answer many of her questions about the exhibits: what is a stele? why are sarcophagi so large? who was the lady with a  bow? It was in part in the satisfaction at being able to answer the questions I could and the frustration at not knowing the answer to those that I couldn't, and, more interestingly, the vertiginous interest of seeing so many puzzles opening up, the invitation of so many leads that lay the burrowing of my interests subsurface. Re-emerging now from the digs, finding myself with the spare time and attention to encounter these prompts, I look back on someone else's front room from the street, wondering how I got here, the past uninhabitable, from where the room's a ruin. Since the digs, too, are now off bounds, somehow I'll have to wander or rebuild. 

Soane was the student of George Dance the Younger, designer of the old Newgate Prison. Nothing's left of the prison itself, but you'll occasionally see a vestige. There's a plastic reconstruction of part of it in the Museum of London. If I can bring myself to return to what was so long a place of work I'll take a snap to post here. The fate of the prison is famous, of course: as recounted in Dicken's Barnaby Rudge, it was stormed by rioters on Little Bastille Day, the young William Blake one of those to be seen in the crowds, in whose angelic face, flickering in the light from the raging fires, could already be glimpsed the thirst for incendiary images to sear onto the plates, Los reforgeing the canon with Milton. Otherwise, there are two places to go for an idea of the old prison, one of which an old electricity substation in Islington, surprisingly, very clearly modelled on it. 

The other is the Bank of England. It must be remembered that Gandy's vision came earlier than they might have expected, and it is now one of those phenomena so common in the city, a ruin concealed in the form of development so only parts – including, though, much of that snaking perimeter wall – were spared as the grasp of the bank expanded. However, much about the remaining proportions, the dark atmosphere, and the means to breathe ghostly life into a blind wall had all been suggested to Soane by the magnum opus of his teacher – the opus whose ashes must be mixed with the foundations of the Old Bailey taking its place. If what Soane was intending by pre-inscribing ruin I don't know, the effect suggested itself, as I say, as I rounded the corner.

I should have been informed, I suppose, as to what was happening, should have been reading the papers, but have been cutting myself off of late, reducing the flow of information to sensitise myself to the less recorded. That something was, though, happening had long been clear. The people in the city were different. It's not that they weren't in suits, but the suits were different, not that there were no casuals, but many of the casuals differed. What were clearly City office people would walk past in casual clothes, as though pretending to be attempting to conceal themselves, others in City clothes, both apparently in mock. Already, I'd thought, it's happening, what I'd sensed. These were the gods I'd mentioned in my earlier entries, coming into the open out of hiding, waking up to their roles, which, it would appear, involved some sort of acting, but in a way bent on some sort of change. 'Gods' was the wrong word, I realised, seeing them like that, but it was right that it had been wrong – things were different now, there hadn't been a word. It was slightly reeling, then, in search of my own role, I moved, lifting the camera to record a little, but really a little, randomly, since I thought with the arrival the need itself to record had doubtless disappeared, was just pressing the buttons for old times' sake, recording for posterity the last moments of one world as it vanished into another.

The signs and activity at Bank, where the intensity of activity was that much greater, where clear lines were drawn between sides, if on the surface they appeared to explain much away, in reality left the puzzle just as unresolved. Certainly this was the moment that Soane appeared to have plotted, Blake had represented, Milton seen. But although it was indeed the real event I'd guessed at, here I could see it was at the same time still in rehearsal, something keeping the ruined bank standing for today.