After a Portrait off the Lines of Desire, Regent Street in the Sales by the London Archaeologist

It had seemed simple. Go to Regent Street, set up a tripod down one side street after another, photographing the thick paste of pedestrians smudging across the field of vision at its end, occasionally pick out a fleeting face, perhaps with the help of flash.

These plans rarely come off.

I’d long meant to work the street into a post, as a famous first in town planning, beautiful, successful, frightening. Part of the beauty lay in the elegant ensemble linking the new Regent’s Park to the North down to St James’s in the South, with two cleverly handled corners, a kink and the famous curve making picturesque sense of obstructions on the way.

More significant, perhaps, was its other success, the street intended to separate the grime, crime and grind of Soho from the developing Mayfair, forming a barrier to movement, a firewall which, by discouraging the hoi polloi, has managed to this day to see to it that the newer area to the West would remain the most exclusive in London, pompously impressive and, however busy, always dogged by funereal pall.

Soon copied on an enormous scale in the Paris of Haussmann, this first step in a rationalised town planning process has now become only one weapon in a panoply, going under one of the science’s most evocative terms – because what I’d hoped to photograph at work was the phenomenon of the original planned-in ‘line of desire’. A phenomenon originating from informally formed paths across, for instance, grass, and perhaps extending to the internet, to routes between sites, a quick search revealing the term to have generated much traffic of its own, a site dedicated to their sightings perhaps a-plot, with the increasing planning demands of the growing metropoles, someone at some point had to learn to harness its forces for control, and that man was Nash.

If the city’s security forces can use this, clocking citizens as suspect for the simple fact of their having strayed from the more frequented thoroughfare, so surely could the blogger seeking to get a handle on the other forces at work in the city. Through this contrast in these shots, I’d be able to capture in the empty spaces some of what it is that eludes us, bringing us a step further, surely, to pinning down the subject of this blog.

But of course, arriving on site, almost nowhere could such a clear demarcation be found, and when it did seem to show itself, it lacked the expected significance. Clearly activity was much more dense on Regent than the surrounding streets, but the line was blurred, the differences indistinct and, unpredictable, not terribly telling, people forever wandering off down side streets, individually for a rest or to make a call or in couples or groups, to gather thoughts, cuddle, take stock, look at maps, even frequently in vast numbers, endless flows spilling off from the major lines into further others.

At some point, though, as I moved among these formless flows, nevertheless trying to make some sort of sense of it, it occurred to me that there might perhaps be another sort of contrast than that with the quiet side street. A sort of island in the constant movement would frequently occur, and this almost exclusively on the side streets, in the form of smokers, alone, grouped, standing, leaning against a wall, sitting on a step, squatting. Little friendships build up this way, one can see, among people who might usually find no bond between them other than these moments of chilly respite from the hectic activity of the offices or shops indoors, or the rush of pedestrians out-. This evocative sight, unintended consequence of the new smoking laws, was perhaps what would after all furnish something of the contrast I’d set out for, not in any way absolute, but, relative and vague, all the stronger for its instability.

Of course this sort of thinking’s photographic, and would come to nothing without shots. Such shots being almost of necessity portraits, I would have, of course, to approach, and, in the few minutes it would take their pretext to expire, elicit their complicity.

Talking to these people I experienced some of the rare moments when I regret having given up myself, all those years ago. Indeed, I was told by one that he had himself earlier given up, but the Regent Street job had got the better of this, these snatched opportunities too valuable now to forego.

I suspect that the profundity of the pleasure might be related, too, to my own failure to persuade more than a couple to agree to a shot. It’s not that anyone said as much, and the reasons given – because, without wanting to push, I would at least come away with a reason – were surprising for their variety. Some suggested they didn’t want their boss to chance on a posted shot of them, others that they kept their habit secret from absolutely everyone that knew, or felt they knew them. Certainly, when it comes to the big retailers, it proved a general rule that an employee will avoid recourse to a passage next to their own store, but always prefer one up, one down, or across.

Some held that they had something against photographs in general, others only those of themselves. One reason I appreciated, particularly, for its interest, was that she’d in fact given up, really, and a portrait would give her smoking the stamp, the appearance of a reality she’d rather avoid. There were those who were shy or anxious with strangers, and others who clearly didn’t want their colleagues there with them to see them taken for a ride, giving something, be it a mere image of one’s appearance, away to a stranger with nothing in return something of a mug’s game.

But mostly, though no one said it, or even seemed particularly to respond when I offered it as a reason, I suspect that, if the purpose of the moment was withdrawal, release from the hectic transactions of the busiest time of the year on one of the city’s most crowded streets, even in its very midst, to have the lens come rooting around in there on its own agenda would be desecration.

And so the substance of this post is given over to those who, on Regent Street, or mostly off, if only for a moment, cease to engage. The absence of almost all of these is a measure, of their success, certainly, but also perhaps of the blog, at least to have sought, approached what, if unrecordable, may well turn out to have been at the heart of the events considered a city.

Reflections on Soho Society by London Archaeologist

Almost every time I come out of a brown study, I am struck by the etymology. Colours, we know from the linguists, are, in the growth of a language, only slowly differentiated, and the order of their appearance is physiologically determined by the nature of the eye. The bright and primaries come early and the murky mixes late, after adumbrating only the broadest distinctions in shade: light and its opposite, dark, to which 'brown' without chromatic precision originally referred. And it's from that time that the expression concerning inwardness comes down to us. The literal term having taken on colour, though, the expression now always seems slightly unaccountable, and as I emerge from reverie, it is frequently into renewed surprise that what had felt only like a distant inner shade should be given such a precise character of tone, but then I recall that the sepia tints adhere in the present sense alone, the term for the journey inward having originally had a logic that, emerging in the present, becomes blurred.

A recent time was on Charing Cross Road. I was standing outside Border's thinking about nothing special, looking at nothing in particular. A bus had pulled up, stopped at lights. Absently, I read. Border's, sex shop, arrows pointed downstairs in the doorway. At first I thought nothing of it. Soho is a place of fronts. Soho Books, for instance, with its apparently innocent entrances to artish bookshops hiding steps down to porn in the basement. 'Soho' there means porn, just as it means art, the one, it suggests, a front for the other. But Border's, it slowly dawned on me, was not a bookshop of the sort. It was, for a start, on the wrong side of Charing Cross Road. St Giles, more accurately than Soho. Looking back at the shop to check, I confirmed: no sign.

For a minute I believed I must have dredged the image up from some unguessed associations in my inwardness, and, at the same time troubled, interested and amused, raised my eyebrows, shook my head, and was soon again engrossed in nothing. However, not long into this, something in the colours and shapes before me reminded me again of what I had seen before. Looking up, there it was in the window of a bus, again waiting at the lights.

It would have been easy to dismiss this as illusion, and in many ways of course it was: the licensed sex shop in the basement of Border's would illude, as the etymology for the fictional image is, any attempt to visit it by simply entering through the door. And yet, to have stopped there, accepted that there was no other Border's, perhaps visitable by others than ourselves, would have been to reject the discoveries at the heart of this blog as a whole, to regress, wilfully to forget: to hide. My very presence on the outskirts of Soho, indeed, since I had gone in search of such signs, would have been inexplicable.

I've been, from the very first post, seeking out the presences, characters, lives that go unrecognised even – indeed mostly - by they themselves that live them, are them. That the inhabitant of slower times, the fascinated statue, those on the line to the eye hospital all go unremarked is what qualified them for entry. I have always known, too, the role of the camera in capturing what might otherwise pass itself off as belonging in a more ordinary way to the world.

Something that I have come to understand during this process is that the events, situations and spaces revealed in partial reflection on glass are a central part of this unrecognised world. Generally ignored as illusion, they capture realities otherwise concealed. It is through the senses that we construct our world. If your senses tell you that a tiny couple is sitting round a little table on a bar in Marlborough Street, in the shade of cocktail parasols dwarved by the bottles; that a man stares baffled in a hard hat at images of London on a steak house wall; that an artist's wooden manikin has grown, the street reduced, to walk among surprised pedestrians, to doubt them is, accusing the sole medium by which it is perceived of invention, to doubt the world itself. Indeed, if these images disappear as the light changes, when you step back or draw close, if the space crumbles when you move a fraction up or down or on the passing of a cloud, that only suggests that they are not less, but, more fragile, more valuable, so much more urgently to be hunted out, captured and contemplated in an attempt to learn as much as possible about what world or worlds it is these fleeting glimpses illuminate, what lives their denizens lead, what trials and triumphs are theirs and whether we might share in them.

Certainly their space has many features in common with ours, and, no less variegated, its atmospheric modulations themselves reflect our own. 

If antique sculptures, for instance, come alive on City Road, and fireplaces appear in the street, if puddles hold woods of silver trees on Old Street, viaducts houses, houses cranes in Islington, in Soho one would expect - one gets - quite other things.

Soho, we know, goes back for its name to a hunting cry. My own suspicion is that this itself was a contraction of 'Southward ho!'. For the street plan we have farming strips which, bought up for development lot by lot, create the tight network easy to get lost in and hard to cross east/west - a place imposing a change of direction, then, on those in search of game, an imposition finding its way into the name.

It is a place that has always resisted efforts to tame it. The developers of Mayfair, for instance, could only think of containment - that Regent's Street has ever since formed a clear cut strip to stop the atmosphere spreading west has helped not only to prevent the neighbouring areas from absorbing its wanton atmosphere, but Soho itself from loosing it. It was here that De Quincey came for opium, found and lost a love and, wandering in search of her, feverish on laudanum, by fits and turns his mind; here that the anarchist Verloc in his sex shop plotted to bomb the Observatory on the Meridian line. That the zero point, pure abstraction, was by its nature unassailable might have warned him that what his explosives found there would be none other than his own envoy, letting it off in his face. That it did not is perhaps a gage of the extent to which the Empire's to Soho's space was alien. It was to Soho that the Huguenots came, wandering, stateless, progressive, of the forces that would topple the king, alluring, mistrusted. Long Bohemian, it was always destined to become at some point an artists' centre, too, and, though it took till the 1950's for painters to catch up and embrace it, since then they've never let go, the creative industries as a whole, and the services that service them -  moving in on a permanent basis and somehow managing, not only not to suck the life from it, but to contribute to its life, not only not to the camera shops, couriers and cabs, the cutters and the runners, the boozers and cafs all benefitting from a bustle almost industrial, as Soho, in order reduce the rest of the world into image, must maintain all the clunk, click and whir of the machine required to do it. 

It was the area, too, that became the focus of Snow's great nineteenth-century study of the causes of the cholera ravishing the city. Said by some to result from the proximity of plague pits and others the thirst for immorality, Snow revealed that the disease in fact followed patterns of consumption, the potion of transformation water from public wells. Finally, distilling all these other characteristics, it was here that Dr Jeckyll chose to lodge for his own experiments with consumption and destruction, disease and cure, drugs, desire and murder, all in the service of a dark experimental art veering into the most lurid low-brow. A building with a concealed back door, from one angle respectable and another corrupt, only one visible at a time, it reflected what he saw in the mirror: impossible but real, one thing by turns one thing and another.

To anthropomorphose geography, if the North's the head and West is best, East is left, which leaves the South: tufts, folds, poles and posts, a little mound, a place for hunting, a struck boar, place of game. The camera in my hands is a tool less of fixing than of groping out, finding. Directed at a window, the parameters that decide what it will see where, in relation to what, seem wild. Seeing becomes a series of bright flashes illuminating an obscure landscape. 

In Soho, the windows tell me, a shop sells not birds of prey, but the experience of becoming a bird of prey, stuffed, behind glass, but alert, hands in pockets, human, determined, walking on by. As a man turns around from browsing record covers his head swivels onto the shoulders of a strip club spectator from the fifties. Whatever it is I'm looking for, I grope, vicarious claws in it, human or animal, viscous, feel it move. Another flash and a faceless woman with folds of cloth lifts images from passers by. Soho, a place of sweating, of insights to come, where fever, drugs redundant, brings water with death in bed.

That from a brown study here, a reverie of the sort that I had been having, should emerge the vision that I had had, of an innocent-looking bookshop harbouring a special entrance dependent on the passing of a bus was too appropriate to dismiss.

Having photographed that too, I began to cross the road to see what else I might make of the corner by the window of the Soho Books branch responsible for its part of the entrance, when I saw someone there, bending down, photographing.

Something, I don't know what, made me guess that she was photographing not the contents of the window but me in reflection. Under the circumstances of my own search, this was both exciting and unsettling, but I continued to cross. As I did so, the woman bent up, and something in her movements that I recognised, as it trumped the previous coincidence with another, made her presence there seem as natural as if we had an appointment: as the one that I've been calling Jessica, when we had separated, was a trained window dresser, recording the contents of a window was exactly how I should have expected to see her, and our conversation proceeded in certain ways as naturally as though our last conversation, instead of years previously, had occured perhaps only that morning to set up the afternoon's rendezvous.

In certain ways, that was perhaps a result of the social ease that Jessica had always had, and which had since the first attracted me to her, even as I had found it slightly threatening. But then, her ease with me had, I seemed to recall, ceased to make itself felt as our relationship had begun to sour. The time apart, it seemed, had mellowed us both, and it was with genuine pleasure that I accepted the business card, as I thought it was, that she offered me; not necessarily for the prospect of seeing her again, but as a genuine expression of an interest in our associating once more.

That was a couple of weeks back now. I chose not to post about it at the time for two reasons: firstly, because the job was not finished - I was still hunting down reflections - but secondly, I had not pursued the anomalies on her card, not thought of investigating a blog which it had been my assumption was one of the sort that, in the years since our separation, I had heard on the grapevine she was having a certain success with:  some sort of window dressing tips thing for retailers. But at some point I did look closely, and realised that it did not seem to be that at all, looked it up and confirmed.

The parallels with my own blog I will leave for the reader to uncover, their significance to time, but that parallels there are, it must be acknowledged. To make it easier, though, for these to emerge, we have decided to blog together. This is not without precedent in the blogosphere. It was the Windowless Consultant, as I shall now call her who I have previously here called Jessica, who suggested this, and emailed me a link in example.