The Shaping of Space

There are days that even the worst abuses of pain cannot spoil. Today is one of them. Beyond the charms of a strong September sun doing its best to pretend summer is not dead and the company of Tim Dedopulos, remarkable blessings flicker around me.

Time is spent gazing at Charles Robert Cockerell’s A Tribute To Christopher Wren. An assemblage of all the buildings once thought to have been designed by Wren. The imaginary skyline of the painting shimmers with light bouncing of the soft silver hue of Portland stone, giving it the quality of being a glimpse of an elseword. Even its foreground buildings of usually solid red brick and white stone seem to be gently phasing in from another reality. I lose myself in it, feel as if I am walking within its fictional streets. Feel as if I have become part of a dream the city is dreaming of itself.

Along the galleries and passages of the V&A, I float from Cockerell induced reverie to mind-expanding words of curator Charles Hind. His passionate scholarship walks me through an original architectural model of Easton Neston. He turns the purposeful lines of nearly 300 year-old plans into a greater appreciation of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s playing with gothic adaptation and distorted classical themes. Better understand what his sometimes imposing, bullying stone dramas were trying to achieve.

My fingers turn the pages of one of Hawksmoor’s early original sketchbooks. Attempts from the early 1680s to capture the topography of English towns, castles and churches. The seventeenth century paper is crisp but firm, the sharp confident lines of his labels at contrasting with a hesitation in the drawings that comes from someone still learning the skill of perspective. As I flick through the book, it changes from relic to temporal transport. Through its pages I glimpse not just Nottingham or Oxford as Hawksmoor saw them, but Hawksmoor himself. An ink ghost telling stories in line and hatching

Later, we meet Iain Sinclair at Christ Church, Spitalfields. He graciously signs my copy of Orbital, comments on how the book records this building as one of his gates into and out of the imaginary city. I am long beyond the age of having heroes, but that does not stop me being in absolute awe at Sinclair’s talent. He is not only my favourite writer, but the possibly the greatest living user of the English language. No-one creates more perfect and powerful sentences than him.

He talks to us of the barbarism of Thatcherite Britain. Of how the detonation of its brute logic in the City of London resulted in an explosive front radiating out, obliterating the old symbolic landscape that had surrounded the church. The disruption of London’s ancient patterns and the excavation of plague energies.

He talks of memories, the ghost buildings of Cheshire Street and tangible psychic boundaries marked by Hare Marsh. The fear of fire wardens stationed on the highest point of Christchurch during the Blitz. Abandoned temples of primitive Christians, the visual echoes between this building and Truman Brewery in Brick Lane where he used to work. Patterns seemingly encoded in the ether by Hawksmoor.

He talks of Hawksmoor’s buildings being plural in time. Of the dense codes of complex mysticism embodied within the structure of his elegant churches. Of the architect’s towers linking the forces of earthy commerce to the higher realms of the imagination. The church as a movement from Malkuth to Kether.

Sinclair talks of the inspiration of his own early works when he was a council gardener in the shadow of Christ Church. I ask him if the kabbalistic drama of the building and the energies spread throughout the surrounding landscape of the area had almost ridden him Vodou-style, kicked his arse and forced him to start writing. Surprisingly he agrees. Speaking of Moon card dreams and power of place to possess a writer.

The day ends in the last of Hawksmoor’s London churches. We arrive at St. George’s, Bloomsbury as the last burst of afternoon sun paints the interior columns with all the colours of the stained glass. The essential magic of the building is not in keystone carved with the Tetragrammaton, the alchemical pelican nor the echoing of Baalbek. It is in the shaping of space, reclaiming and revealing a glimpse of some sacred mystery despite the boiling rush of the city beyond its walls.

Marching to the Fault Line

Politicisation is rarely a process with a clean line. Any easy narrative to explain where we find ourselves on the Nolan Chart is usually a false construct. Why we think what we do is almost always messy.

Our views on liberty, the role of the state and how to make the world a better place come from a hoodoo brew of parental influence, cultural DNA, education and events. Other factors apply as well. I have more than one friend who owes their current political orientation in part to falling for pretty face. Where hormones lead, philosophies on the best way to order an economy can often follow and grow deep roots.

The stuttering route to my current weltanschauung takes in everything from the deep poverty my family experienced when I was a child to dystopian novels and the Dead Kennedys. Individual acts of kindness and pointless bureaucratic obstruction. The power cuts of the three-day week and police brutality at Wapping. A raft of writers from John Pilger to Sébastien Faure. Images from the 1970s nightly news acid-etched in my memory as important to my development as the words of Karl Popper or Moh Kohn.

One element from my teenhood that helped shaped how I think and feel politically was the 1984-1985 miners’ strike. The events of the period spiralled so far beyond industrial action the dispute became a rift in the fabric of the country. It divided. Placed you on a side whether you wanted to be on one or not. You knew at some intestinal level that the gears of history were shifting. After the strike, whoever won, everything was going to be different.

Today, on the 25th anniversary of one of the arbitrary, but most commonly accepted, start dates for the strike, I feel the need to mark it. To ignore, turn my face away from the collisions of history would be a denial of my own narrative. However, London is not coal mining territory. My options for communal remembrance and discussion of the strike are somewhat limited.

It seems the only apposite action I can take is to attend the launch of Marching to the Fault Line – Francis Beckett and David Hencke’s account of the strike. Therefore I leave Millbank and head towards Bloomsbury. Dusk is slow in coming tonight and I enjoy the last gulps of sun before the crowed sodium blare of traffic and advertising begins.

Hitting Whitehall, I walk into a wall of sound. The political artery is lined along the whole length of one side by hundreds of Tamils and supporters of the Tamil Tigers. They are arm-linked in a human chain that simultaneously chants for mercy and shouts for justice. Signs are pinned to their clothing proclaiming ‘Genocide’, ‘Don’t commit a sin, let food and medicine in’ and that old classic ‘We need bread not bombs’.

The high number of protestors wearing Tamil Tiger scarves gives the crowd something of the football terrace mob. For a moment I imagine some parallel dimension where Yam Yam Army hooligans have adopted both Wolverhampton Wanderers and Tamil independence as causes worthy of militant support. This mind’s eye chimera quickly banished by the fact that chants are neither racist, homophobic or related to anyone going home in an ambulance.

Groups of police officers sit in riot vans waiting to be called into action while increasing numbers of their colleagues patrol the crowd’s perimeter. I cross the road, walk crablike along the central reservation. Take in the protestors’ placards and the way their cries remix the sound of Gabriel Fauré playing on my iPod.

The launch is somewhat dispiriting. The red wine is good, the bookshop redolent of the time when Thatcher was the enemy. However, hearing members of the Left still fighting battles lost decades ago rubs with an exasperated tiredness. The dreamed revolutions of then are corroded. Lost in a now which has forgotten so much more than just the names of the past.

Amid and on top of this scrummage for blame and dominant analysis, Beckett and Hencke’s are on fine form. Anecdotes roll, questions volleyed back with grace and humour. Marching to the Fault Line is a grand example of good journalism. It is also the perfect model of how FoI requests can further the recording and understanding of events already receding into the fuzzy horizon of history. It exposes secrets, helps capture the hidden factors that at times seemed to be pushing towards undeclared civil war. I am glad to get my copy signed.

I drift home. Try to take in a country where the spirit of resistance is found more easily in expat Tamils than my own generation. The strike really did change things. Later, canalside, I drink tea and enjoy a supper of beans on toast. Simple pleasures, resonant of the year I have spent so much time remembering today. The television adaptation of David Peace’s Red Riding plays. Channel 4 might have missed a trick. Tonight of all nights, they should have been broadcasting GB84.