Studies in Toponymy at St Agnes' Well by London Archaeologist

A car park on a roundabout - that has to be your first thought: why? Who needs to park in the middle there? And then where do they go? When there's nowhere to go?

That had been my question, long been my question, seeing the circulation around it as I passed almost daily, nobody there, just the cars, marooned.

As I sped round, always too busy to investigate, the question had always simply put itself, then receded with the vision to be forgotten till I returned.

Things having changed now, though, the question began pressing itself more firmly on my mind, less distractions brushing it aside. Not only did it press itself on me with new force: I also had, now, time to seek out an answer.

Before arriving at the island, I had taken the trouble to do a little early research on the net. The Open Guide to London suggests, correctly, that someone ought to do some research into the issue, which, as I agreed, I set out to do, first on the web. Most references were to a location in Vancouver, the relation to the London one likely to be very tenuous indeed, but, rooting through a forest of ephemera, I came eventually upon the following on A Megalithic Portal. It's worth quoting at some length.

'This is a delightful find: an ancient conical well house often swamped by tall horsetails and covered in fernery and herbs, which lends a rustic and mysterious feel to the site.

Removing the surrounding vegetation will reveal more of this little six foot high conical stone structure. It resembles many such sites encountered in Cornwall, and one can agree with Horne (1923) author of a book of Somerset Holy wells, who describes it as "the most beautiful of the Holy wells of Somerset".

Its water is accessed via an arched doorway on the west side, believed by Horne (1923) to show clearly its Perpendicular origins (although there is no written evidence). Once opening the small wooden door, one can see that a large volume of clear shallow water. According to Horne (1923) the water rises from the centre and flows under the step to an underground channel some distance to emerge as a large pool : obviously for livestock. A pipe leads out of the well indicating that it is directly tanked for farm use.

Horne (1923) suggests that the dedication may have been inspired by a lady of the manor of the name of Agnes Cheney, who married the local squire, Edward Stowel. The well was once visited by lovers, usually on St Agnes' Eve to find their futures.

It is a bit difficult to find look for a small iron gate set in the side of the road to Cothelstone Hill. Cross a stream and turning right the well will be clearly seen, if probably immersed in foliage.'

Although a description of a Somerset homonym, the research seemed good and authentic, and at first I believed it likely to furnish applications here in London. However, I suspect that it may have been compromised by over reliance on a single source, as its origin in the name of a local individual would seem to beg the question of why the same name should be used elsewhere.

At the time, then, I believed that the trail died out there, and I'd quit the web research, preferring to make my own reccy on foot. However, if I quoted the entry in depth, it is because, retrospectively, I believe it may harbour other relevances.

My own preferred means of transport is the pushbike - silent, clean, almost free, leaving the slightest trace possible, neither entirely with the cars, nor quite with the pedestrians, you are amongst the street life in a way that's not true of the car, and yet, unlike on foot, at a slight remove.

I had only before sped round the edge, where the cars, in waves with the lights, lap more thinly, a certain amount constantly spilling out at the exits. To advance round further into the torrent towards the centre of the well was harder than I had imagined, where, as the gravitational force of habit grew stronger at the centre, drivers expected me least.

As I neared the parking area, feeling something wrong in my wheel, and turning to see what approached in the lane to my right, where the island lay, I attempted to meet the impassive gaze I encountered there. In his hand was a wheel, guiding several tons of steel between me and the safety of the car park area at the centre. The squashy sluggishness grew under my feet. If I didn't act, the puncture it betokened would worsen, and my already diminishing control would only deteriorate still further. Leaning, then, suddenly over, turning the wheel, throwing every miserable scrap of power I could find onto my right leg, down onto the foot, I flung the bicycle madly over, saw briefly a flash of confusion illuminate the impassive gaze, heard a screech and horn, felt a skid, the tyre at last completely flat, and found myself sprawled on the tarmac of the island, somehow almost unhurt, the bicycle now beside me where I lay.

My first task on arriving on the island was to fix the inner tube. In fact, I am in the habit of having always with me in my cycle bag not only a camera and notebook, but also a puncture repair kit. To my extreme annoyance, however, I must at some point have taken out the tyre levers and forgotten to return them to their place. The traffic around me would not ease even with nightfall. If I was ever to be safe to leave, then, I surmised, I would have to find some long, thin object hard enough to replace it.

Glancing over the island, I quickly confirmed what I had expected: no one there, the rustle of bushes the only indigenous sound, itself barely perceptible above the tides of traffic. My first thought, whether intelligent I never did find out, was to seek in the bushes for something - for some reason the image came to me of an unwanted teaspoon, fork, knife - flung from a passing car.

Pushing into the underbrush, though, and studying the ground, I was soon distracted. A pit raised slightly to where it finished in a glass cover had me naturally looking down. There a liquid light mistily washed by the sun made me think back to the purpose of my search. Here, then, was the well. Distracted from my hunt for the lever, raising my camera, I focused as well as I could given conditions, and pressed the shutter control. To my amazement, just as I did, something passed rapidly through the viewfinder, the misty trail of limy green-blue water in its wake. Looking at the image as it formed on the camera screen, there, indeed, was the blur.

Magnification of the image revealed what I had hardly dared hope: there did appear, in fact, to be life on the island, the well, a light well, dry. Perhaps it was some sort of worker down there whose tools I might borrow. As I peered to see what might emerge, though, several more figures passed, of all ages, dressed in all kinds of clothes, of both sexes, of whatever gate, all apparently busy. There was, in fact, an almost constant, though intermittent flow, all passing about down there, unperturbed by the environment, evincing as great a resignation to it as only the force of the greatest habit could create. These people appeared to live here.

As the glass cover was firmly fixed, and, what is more, this would hardly have been the most discreet place to attempt to enter the world of these people, I decided to reconnoitre the island first in search of a more convenient entrance to the area below before attempting the glass.

Sure enough, nearby was a skylight the people obviously use for air and some sort of contact with the elements, and I found myself peering into a world whose strangeness now found itself still more pronounced for its familiarity. That those who lived there shared habits almost exactly reproducing our own, with no visible contact with the street, the world outside. In a pit. On a roundabout.

Turning from the skylight and surveying further I soon found a door, unlocked and open as though I had been expected.

Beneath street level, I further confirmed that St Agnes' Well did indeed prove to boast many of the amenities available in London proper. A bookshop, newsagents', hairdresser's, various cafés, a full-blown restaurant and even a key cutter's, a mobile phone unblocking service, clothes shops and florist's together ensured that the inhabitants could keep themselves in life's essentials while maintaining a neat appearance and despite being entirely cut off. Indeed, the presence of live music, the bookshop, suggested that there, as elsewhere, a life of essentials was not considered enough. 

Whether the people there missed the world outside and were attempting to reproduce it in model or were somehow perhaps even mocking it, there was no indication.

The easy course would have been for me to leave these people from the Well, making my way to the street by a course other than that by which I had entered. I would then have been able to convince myself, no doubt, that the place I had encountered was an illusion resulting in some way from changes in the ground level, from the light, etymological deposits in the name, or perhaps even the mode of discovery. But the easy way is rarely the honest or the true, and, after a coffee and a bun which, within reasonable limitations, tasted much the same as anywhere else, and having secured the kind loan of a pair of teaspoons, I returned by the way that I'd come, refreshed, certainly, but staggered to see that, so near the more ordinary space of London, where people go about what, in all honesty, must be agreed to be very similar activities one to another over a very broad space indeed, should be this other kind of life led in this other kind of place, as though entirely undiscovered, as though reproducing it in restriction.

 

Selfridges Centenary as World Model by the Windowless Consultant

In the work of a window consultant, certain stores have to be observed closely as trend setters, and one of these, so goes the orthodoxy, must be Selfridges. I say the orthodoxy not in the least dismissively, I think - that, in my other blog, is the firm belief I espouse. However, for the substance of this blog to emerge, the first requirement is that that of the other be, if not quite dismissed, at least not assumed.

The content of the present post, though, was originally intended for the other. Readers will recall that this all began in my increasing down time from the consultancy work. The occasion was this feeling of having wandered into a different kind of space from the one I was used to, my task to identify and record the changes.

Well it's happened again, I think, but this time in a different way, in a way that makes it more urgent than ever for me to identify what it is that happens, what I've described elsewhere, as I recall, as the opening of the windows on the street. The windows this time were those of Selfridges, but that they stood for all windows, and very possibly still do, accounts for the sense of urgency.

I'd long heard about the celebrations at the store, of course, and the exhibition, and seen it as my duty to check it all out at some point. I get myself quite worked up about these things, about my mission (I? She? the blogger elsewhere) to transform the street. So, since the two are a mere stride away, when a Mayfair job was cancelled recently there seemed an obvious way to turn the loss to profit.

This is how it happened. Immediately I arrived in front of the store, I began to take notes and shots of the windows and how the public interacted with them - which they did, what's more, to an almost unprecedented degree, photographing, pointing, standing back, moving close, commenting, smiling, frowning, none of which I include here in the interests of clarity - lest anyone, including myself, confuse my roles, this being an attempt at the contrary to that elsewhere. Besides, my main interest lay in the exhibition downstairs, the purpose of my visit to pick up what I could of the knowledge of a century of shopping.

The exhibition was downstairs, and what first struck me was how well presented it was, with what imagination. We learn, in fact, that presentation has always been Selfridges' thing, throughout the century of its existence, and, indeed, if this was its first exhibition so named, in spirit, the store had always been engaged in something more than mere retailing, always had a curatorial role, been a collection of items of interest, excitement, exploration, education.

There was no reason to expect that the information in the exhibition should have included reference to any other store than Selfridges, of course, the subject as described. And yet, going around, seeing the history of the century from the standpoint of the store - a century of Selfridges firsts, biggests, onlys and bests, learning that it was the first department store to feature a plane complete with pilot, the first to sell a telephone, the only to have used I forget what, the best at something else, I began to wonder whether this was an exhibition at all, whether I hadn't in fact wandered into the wrong department.

This was a department in which what was on offer was not particular items, but the store itself, its image, an intangible going free. But at some point that changed. It was clear that in fact, as the image on offer was that of display, exhibition, and this, not an exhibition at all, was an exhibition of an exhibition, and, what is more, an exhibition of an exhibition which was Selfridges, this was a model of the shop that I was inside. The fact of being inside a model of the place that I was inside made me wonder whether I was included in the model, whether I might encounter myself here, in what light, if so, I'd be shown. I looked at the other customers or visitors, they looked at me. Since they exhibited so perfectly the spirit of Selfridges for me, so must I, I supposed, for them. Walking mannequins, we negotiated a model of the world as store, a model, I realised, the world to negotiate intangible, of the extent to which I was unsure.

The activities on display in that world, though I had seen them all in reality before, never had I seen modelled in that detail, with that precision, and, in my duty to report, though at the time unsure of what I might, I photographed avidly.

It was when I arrived outside that it struck me.

Some while ago, to much media attention, the Metropolitan police announced that a deal had been struck such that any shoplifters caught on Oxford Street would be held in a cell on the street itself. A deal had been struck such that a room would be rented from a department store for the purpose. I recalled that the store had been Selfridges, the room somewhere tucked away inside. I'd thought from the first it had been something of a publicity coup for them, but also something of a strange one, this desire to be known as a prison service. For some reason the story simply petered out, and I had heard nothing more of it. For it to have happened, then, it had to have been in a way entirely unexpected. I wondered what I might have stolen, not to be free to go, since, the world Selfridges, there was nowhere else to go. It was not, since I'd picked nothing up, anything tangible, that was sure, which meant, I feared, that I would be unable also to put it down, protest my innocence, be free to go.

The thing I might have picked up was a belief, I decided, concerning the true extent of the exhibition, and the only way to put that down might be to retrace my steps, seek out the boundary where the exhibition ended, photograph that point - those points, since there were several entrances - hold onto it as evidence of the limitations on the extent of the exhibition.

I present them, then, here below, in the hope that they might establish what I hope: that the exhibition was untrue, that the world does not end at the window, is not contained in the exhibition, is not only a model, that we can escape. But, as I look at the pictures of where the boundary is supposed to lie, I realise that they are by no means the most compelling, lack the power to convince, that I may have to keep on trying, using this blog as a means, to identify how I might prove that I had come away with nothing - to escape.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.