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.

Impossible Worlds by Windowless Consultant
My difficulty, I'd be the first to admit, no, proclaim, is separating the figment of my imagination from what's real. It's not only mine, of course, a pretty good criterion for a bigot being the belief you don't share the problem.

So when I first saw City Limits, I was puzzled:

Did the fact that another world was possible mean that this one was not? That is an opinion I have often held, but tenuously, privately. To see it proclaimed so publicly was puzzling. That the proclamation should be on this board, concealing what had long been part of the backdrop to what, for me, had been this world, to see this world boarded up as impossible was disconcerting, enticing, strange. I looked to see whether things around me had altered, but they hadn't. Perhaps things in the possible world wouldn't need to register the change. Or perhaps, in that little patch by the board, I was in the possible world looking out at the impossible one, which had yet to change.

Bishopsgate. Place names in the city have such historical weight they are heady with the kind of found charm of a stone by a country road, an aura of distance hanging about them, damp and musty behind their immediate presence. Sometimes you turn one over and recall the underside, wriggling with a life that eventually returns to the shadows as you forget all that's behind the word you use. Gate of Bishops; Bishopsgate. But the weight of the past can be a burden, too, however fascinating, you yourself as you slither through the streets a worm under cover of a stone. 

Today this was determined not to be Bishopsgate, though, in any usual sense, look as I would.

What I've been tracking, I've said, have been these moments when the contents of the windows are on the outside, the props everywhere, the sense of real things on the one hand, and unreal on the other somehow vanishes, replaced by something else which, by the time this blog has run its purpose, I hope to have described.

I have, at work and on my other, professional blog, presented the shop window as a suggestion for a life, a sentence beginning 'You, too'. The glass, the wall, the revolving doors, opening hours, security tags and cameras, the notes exchanged or pins punched before you leave, and, most importantly, all the trappings of the stage making sure the next word retains the hypothetical in 'could', the window, I have argued, maintains in life the qualities found in dream.

Turning onto Bishopsgate, the city itself was the proposition.

For an afternoon, I was unable to leave this little stretch of road I'd known so well.

I remembered the disaster, imminent in the Soho cafe, on Broadway Market, London Bridge. The disaster here had happened and been averted. I was dead again, and alive. This was Bishopsgate, but, not as I knew it, it was not.

In this world a bus stop was a banner a family had a picnic on for change, or a bicycle was driving other people, via a sound system it powered - a grinning girl - so they danced. Interesting was a group of meditators. What is Kirtana? You are teaching your mind, you are teaching your ear, what you are saying with you vocal cord. What is that? To take His name, and not so many names - London, Liverpool, Birmingham, Santiago. Certainly this was not the Bishopsgate, the Liverpool Street we knew. Vague as it may have appeared, this place where they were instead, photographers believed in it enough to be tangling very real feet for a shot while it was there. 

That's where I stopped. With no time quite to finish, had to go - left the country for a week with the husband. Researching alternative retail environments a great excuse for ventures overseas.

What I would have added mention of was the frame, yellow and black, awaiting its moment to restore the impossible. In the theatre of that life, the police were the proscenium. Looking back at the photographs as I upload them, I envision myself for a moment on a stage, with the audience, taking shots of the surrounding empty seats. 

Given the nature of the frame, that the shocking - that to bring the curtain down that evening should mean clobbering a man to death - should seem, on retrospect, hardly surprising, was a brutal reiteration of the impossible.

On the following day, the scene was still worth recording, the walls an impromptu account for passers by and boarded statue improvised a cenotaph.

At London Bridge the Changes by Windowless Consultant

At London Bridge the changes are the most explicit yet.

I often go for Borough Market, as of course I have to. Less exclusive than Broadway, it lacks the pure Petri interest, but it's still a phenomenon, with many other qualities to replace it of interest to those in the retail trade. I'd do an entry on it but for the urgency.

Something I've often remarked with disquieted, I have to admit to my shame now amusement is how when they knock a building down - or sometimes even a whole block - even if it might be in some area you felt you knew well, you can't for the life of you remember what it was that had been there. For me it's if the shops there were dud it happens, or if there weren't any. I've noticed that even my sense of orientation works like that: they serve as my landmarks, so when the shops lack interest I get lost.

 

But so here I was passing through this bit of Borough and then suddenly that happened in a kind of way. It wasn't that the things were unrecognisable in themselves, but that they were unrecognisable to me, because I'd never looked. They were duds, I'd always felt, and I was, in my line, right, so it was strange to be feeling what I was feeling, but it was something like that some relative I'd always taken for granted had passed away and suddenly I couldn't, not so much tell them I loved them as find out if I could have loved them had I made the chance. The feeling was wrong. There was no need to feel attached to something gone I hadn't even noticed there, and that was the first sign of something untoward.

My immediate response was just to wander, record, absorb the feeling and see where it led.

In places the sense of disaster was so great that I had trouble believing that what I saw was already real, that I hadn't somehow, my orientation compromised by the lack of shops, wandered lost into what was going to happen, or a model of what might.

I was so relieved to see what was clearly an explanation that it took me some time to see it.

Since I'd originally thought of the Renaissance as a vaguely defined phenomenon rippling across Europe at some fairly distant point in the past, that it should be occurring now promised to elucidate much of what had appeared strange to me.

It is a bubble of some sort of chemical accumulations from the inks being dissolved out and then brought down by water coming beneath the plastic covering and gathering greater and greater weight as it comes in a sort of bag effect.

That would be an explanation of the phenomenon as it appears. And yet it is unsatisfactory. To leave it at that would be to ignore, for instance, what I'd already understood but hadn't yet been able to explain. The poster was just making manifest what I'd already grasped, was the point, although I didn't yet know what that was. I could have stayed there standing, watching it descend and enjoyed it somehow, enjoyed simply watching, as though the city deserved it, stood there for however long it should take to land. 

On the other hand, the world in which it was happening would be irretrievably lost if I did, and that, I somehow knew, was the world to which I belonged, a world that I should be joining in order to save it.

I don't yet know what is under threat of that obliteration, but the signals that is is are getting so much clearer, falling so much thicker that I realise that if I don't find out, the loss not only to myself but to the city as a whole will be massive. It is something like the feeling at the gas station. it is again as a feeling associated with things turning into props, but this time I feel I'm getting closer to the source of it, sicne the thing at the heart of it is so directly identifiable with the disaster. There is going to be a disaster. The disaster has already happened, is happening, must be averted.

Pub Signs of the Times by the Landless Landlord

Don't want to moan, but got to be realistic. 

It's late to start saving these images up. Mine's not the only pub to have gone. Might run a series 'Pub Signs of the Times'.

Where would I start? In the '70's, it was, we set out. Not a happy time at all, you'll recall, which was great for bitter. I started pulling pints on various places on Mile End Road popular with students - St Mary's up the road.

What a bunch. Love them or hate them, beat 'em or join 'em, was the general attitude, and my tactic varied with my mood. My first defense against their unbounded enthusiasm was a wall of moroseness, but they simply failed to notice and I got bored. Next I tried embarrassment, encouraging them with freebies in the hope their discourse would descend to such depths of incoherence that even they would notice, but, of course, their ability to spot nonsense decreased at exactly the same rate as that to produce sense, so only I noticed the decline of reason. In the end, you have to admire them - or I did, at any rate, fell for them and joined them, got philosophy, indulged an urge to compete with the best of them, lock-up bouts of psychobabble lasting into the early hours, smoking out the last vestiges of sense not washed from the cranial nooks by beers with weed before shooting them down with powder and tabs. A time, it felt, of great possibility, which is when I met the wife to be that never was. Here's one I used to work, gone the way of all flesh.

One of the most recent changes has been a tendency of the places to turn into what they call now gentlemen's entertainment venues, which is actually a much more pleasant name than they used to have, implying a much more egalitarian attitude to ladies in the City furnishing them with punters.

 

But what I find interesting about this one you only see looking closely. What the landlords hadn't reckoned with was the concern of the locals. Must be great if you're a local woman to know that there are people out there willing to protect your right to be respected as you walk veiled behind the head of the household. 

Still, life must go on, and enterprise is its means, even at the price of a cut-throat competitiveness amongst glaziers.

While on the subject, this one interested me, too in the same sign of the times way. 

Why someone lets their sign get to that state it was hard to think. 

Although on the sign itself now you can only just make out the battle axe, the faience shows the place was once proud. 

The simple explanation for the decline of signage is visible on the side wall: change of use.

Talking of Whit by the Landless Landlord

Talking of whit, The King's Arms of Chiltern Street, E2, has it to a charming degree. Fact it would win no prizes for execution only adds to the quality - this is a local, and you can bet it pleases the locals. You don't like it, there are plenty of anonymous pubs with anonymous signs on anonymous high streets with perfectly painted heraldic devices looking dourly down on unnoticed.

Don't know what it's like inside. Can't enter the places anymore. Mustn't. If it was her that started it, way ahead of me in capacity to begin, she was, the wife that wasn't, I was soon catching her up at the finishing post - the place, wherever it is, they go that she went. 

Signs that Don't Swing by the Landless Landlord
No need for signs to be restricted only to hanging things that swing. On that criterion, the White Hart, Mile End Road would be excluded, which would be a shame, given the interesting stonework. Clearly Victorian, it speaks of an age of confidence for the industry barely imaginable now. Whoever did it was clearly an architect of serious learning, because here we have a perfectly placed bucranium just a little altered to represent the pub name - bull or ram's skull replaced by a dear's. Sort of whit, really, but subtle and learned.