A London Only Night

Aside from my author friends, there are only five writers I would break even a Belgrade curfew to go hear talk. Ballard, Moore, MacLeod, Sinclair and Self. Even if I was struggling with two broken legs, I would put the weight on my crutches and drag myself across the city for any one of them speaking.

Sinclair and Self on the same bill talking about psychogeography. Dream tickets do not get any dreamier. It was inevitable I would suffer the crashing pain of every concussive step it took to haul myself over to the V&A.

As I hobbled across Hyde Park, the falling sun left behind a wreckage of pink clouds. Twilight turned the walkers, skaters and geese feeders on the banks of the Serpentine to Lowry silhouettes. I limped on. Not even the throbbing curse of my foot could not undermine my excitement.

Brompton Road obtained, I arrived at the V&A ridiculously early. The great thing about having a date at a museum is that if you are premature – or the girl in the red coat is late – you cannot feel like you are actually waiting. You just explore by yourself for a bit. Shamble off to find Giambologna’s Samson and Philistine, a Westwood dress or David Reekie’s A Captive Audience?

When my companion arrived, she found me singing The Lion Sleeps Tonight in the museum shop. It was hard to argue with her assessment that I was like a child overdosed on cordial. By my standards, I felt quite restrained given I was not actually dancing among the statuary.

Desperate for the event to start, I sat on the ornate ceramic staircase outside the lecture room. As two of the greatest writers in the English language arrived, I slipped among their entourage of family, Kevin Jackson and eager museum flunkies. As Sinclair and Self were miked up, I screwed my bottom to a prime spot in the front row, listening to the pair discuss the canonicity of a scurrilous story about a shared acquaintance in a New York elevator. I leaned my head back to take in the lavishly decorated domed ceiling. Gilded stars on a blue sky. Heaven. I was in a literary heaven. Behind me, the rows were soon thick with directors, photographers, actors, academics and fellow fans.

They began by reading from their latest books. Kevin Jackson moderated, trying to tease out the meaning of psychogeography as a term and its significance as a genre. Antecedents beyond Debord were cited: Thomas de Quincey, 1940s Parisians and Orson Welles walking the streets of London in 1955 in-between directing Moby Dick Rehearsed. Ballard was lauded. Stewart Home’s careerist head reared and Self neatly dismissed all the artsy wankers pushing repetitive walking.

Cutting through the crap, Sinclair summed up psychogeography as: ‘A way of thinking about the city.’ His words resonated with me, talk of ‘metatemporal journeys’, ‘landscape as parentage’ and the city an ‘anthology of possibilities’. London as ‘a dense series of memory controlled barriers’. Self’s description of Sinclair’s take on psychogeography as ‘secular shamanism’ made perfect sense when Sinclair said: ‘When I am walking, I am recovering and honouring the ancestors of the city.’

They were meanders into Olympic site conspiracies, secret underground cities in Epsom and the ‘shit one can get into trying to walk from JFK to Manhattan’. Sinclair and Self both fixed on psychogeography as one of the ‘tools of resistance’ the whole ‘Pods vs. Peds’ division among writers and a sense, as I would put it, of the power of walking to restore narrative to our lives. I was beyond chuffed when Sinclair said he ‘profoundly agreed’ with me when I questioned them about CCTV.

Afterwards my date spoke to Sinclair about me, making me feel more embarrassed than any child kissed by its mother in the school playground. She got him to sign a copy of London: City of Disappearances and even browbeat Self into signing his Charing Cross Hospital section on the book. We drifted downstairs to the Pre-Raphaelite glories of the green refreshment room. As we ate pies and roast parsnips amid William Morris plasterwork, Edward Burne-Jones glass and chandeliers resembling Dyson spheres, a pianist played.

Towards home, the tactful ignoring of a celebrity dog walker revelling in his sodium secrecy was the only incident. We tracked the canal, its black mirror bending the streetlight beams. The toll of concussion and tiredness slowed my hobbling, but I was still smiling. As my companion pointed out: ‘Iain Sinclair, Will Self and a pie at the V&A. That is a London only night. You would not get it anywhere else.'

Somewhere between Mordor and Fairyland

The light is failing as I begin the trudge to Essex. The tipping point in a grey afternoon when cars lose the definitions of marque and colour, become nothing but white headlight glare. I move too slowly through the Piccadilly, the neon dream of now obscuring its secret Masonic history. It is near dark as I traverse the ghost zone of Bell Yard.

Stuttering through the streets, I feel a surge of crossroad power at Ludgate Circus. The next mile becomes an imaginary ley as I brush by the sacred sites of Saint Bride’s, Saint Paul’s and the London Stone. I mainline on occulted history till I hit the skulls of Saint Olave Hart Street.

For the next 45 minutes I have to sit cross-legged on the floor of a train. I see nothing but a crowded thicket of legs. Having made the journey so many times in a previous life, I do not need to watch the landscape fall away outside the window to know where I am when. I let the subtle sensation of moving backwards pull my mind towards ideaspace. In reverie, the severed heads once spiked on London Bridge speak old secrets. Tales spat from rotting tongues only silenced by arrival at Leigh-on-Sea.

I climb the hill; look out across the dark blanks in the landscape that memory fills in as fields. Night graces even the blight which is Canvey Island a certain magic. The constant flare of the refinery and the sodium orange glow of the thousands of streetlights give it an aspect somewhere between Mordor and fairyland. Essex is no longer my home, but at least tonight it contains not ghosts, but the prospect of friends and laughter.

Walking Through a Museum of Painful Ghosts

There are parts of London that still make me feel as if I am walking through a museum of painful ghosts. Given they are areas such as St James, the Law Courts and Bell Yard, avoidance is not usually a problem. However, today as I trudged towards the ITN building to record an interview for Channel 4 News, there was no way of evading Chancery Lance and Grays Inn Road.

Sometimes I wish the huge holes in my mind gifted by old traumas were more complete. Instead of the jumble of three-month gaps, I long for whole years of erasement. The blessing of a decade of oblivion.

Yet memory is not static. Our own inner maps linking emotion to place are constantly being redrawn. I am a different person to the scared, hurt and idiotic man that last walked this way. Each step I take allows me to create new associations. This street can be either a Sunday in 1999 or a Tuesday morning in 2008. I move between worlds; walk the temporal line and make my choices.

I choose to focus on the now. Ignore the cicatrix and relish every fresh moment of life. Light rain on my face. The enticing smell of choux pastry and patisserie cream escaping from a briefly opened door. Arguments I will deploy when staring down the lens.

Later in the day, I make a second journey to 200 Grays Inn Road to pre-record an interview for the ITN evening news. This time my thoughts drift only towards which Victorian gas holder we will use as a backdrop and being back canalside tonight. The prospect of homemade soup is heavenly when you stand behind King’s Cross, battered by wind as the cameraman tries to compose a shot of the elegant industrial skeleton which manages to hide the Post Office Tower.

Feeling the Contour Lines of History

I am trying to prepare myself for going to Australia. Beyond the 22-hour flight, beyond travelling into the 11-hour time difference future, I have to be ready for total dislocation from my land.

Wherever I walk in England – from London’s event patined streets to Dorset’s fossil rich beaches – I am always connected. On the green lanes and sweep paths of Kent or Sussex, in the woods of Hereford and copses of Essex, I am connected. I can see the shimmering temporal projections mapping past, present and yet to come. I navigate through feeling the contour lines of history.

Atop the remains of the North Thames Cliff still bearing its Ice Age scars or squeezing through the cobbled claustrophobia of a York alleyway, I can pick out ancestral footsteps. They resonate through earth and stone, resonate through myth and folklore to carve out the invisible, underlying topology of place. In England I can always sense the undertow of temporal currents that manifest in the drifting patterns of psychogeographers.

Under railway bridges, on uncared for industrial estate mud or overgrown boneyards, I can always find imaginary fire. There is forever magic I know I will never fully capture with my words. At every crossroads I am but a step away from English Hoodoo. A step away from being in the English Dreaming.

However, all of this is about to become meaningless. The ley lines of my English imagination are about to give way to Australia’s dreaming tracks, it songlines. I am travelling into the Aboriginal sacred landscaped defined by their ‘Footprints of Ancesotrs’, the ‘Way of the Law’. There is no way to escape the fact that in less than two months, I am going to become an alien.

An Explorer’s Route

Yesterday was the feast of Oshun, Queen of all rivers. Some say all the sweet waters of life come from her tears because she constantly cries; weeping at the knowledge the world is not as beautiful as she knows it could be. Usually honoured with sweet wine, pastries, honey and bronze coins, there seems no better day to travel the water, journeying east to where the Regent’s Canal meets the Thames.

The boat chugs with a rhythmic diesel splutter and leaves its mooring. As we pass Dead Dog Tunnel my mind runs ahead of our four miles per hour speed and I think of the Isle of Dogs. The enigma of its naming dances in the imagination whenever you set out towards it. My mind is awash with Moon Card hounds howling at the towers of Canary Wharf.

To meet the Thames we must fall 86 feet. Our first descent at Hampstead Road Lock sets the pattern. Window drops from towpath to dry stone, then to moss and water slimed wall revealing greened bricks bearing the stamp 1915. It is the same at Hawley Lock and Kentish Town Lock. Wood and iron gates are opened then shut, gears turn, water rushes and foams a boiling white as we descend down.

The boat travels not just through water, but history itself. The first signs come before we have even cleared Hawley Lock. Two-inch grooves have been smoothed into iron by countless years of horses and rope. Elsewhere the turns of fortune are measured in the buildings. Camden Brewery long closed, it brick bones became home to TV-AM. Now that channel is forever dead, phantom static lost to the stars, its egg-adorned ramparts are cracked and rotting while its studios are hijacked by MTV.

We make passage through the patch of St. Pancras where the shanties of Agar Town stood. Now as then, you see what those in London consume most is space. Old buildings are reclaimed. The stones and bricks that once turned their backs to industry of the canal are now forced to embrace it in the form of converted waterfront flats.

Alien species, the hoodoo heritage of being a port flourish in the Camley Street Natural Park. The former Cambridge Street Coal Depot now marsh, meadow and reed bed. Rare tropical grasses mix with hemlock water dropwort and skullcap. The expected herons and moorhens rubbing shoulders with aggressive terrapins.

Travelling under the new Channel Tunnel link, old panels mask new concrete and steel. Tourist glamour as the line to Europe rolls above. It will not be long before the crumbling behemoth of the Great Northern coal depot will be forced to follow the redevelopment path; become yuppy flats with compulsory balconies so small you cannot even put plants on them. Already I envy the coming owners their views – the gas holders’ complex ironwork skeletons are testament to the Victorian ability to grace even choking industry with an element of beauty. Who would not want Battlebridge Basin and the chance to imagine the flicker of Boadicean fire?

We cross over the culverted Fleet, the lost river below us. Currents and flow hidden from the eye, we must soon disappear as well. The boat enters the Islington Tunnel – 960 yards of underworld. Engine echo instead of feet on the ceiling, but the journey through the darkness still feels like hard work. We are reborn in sunlight and enjoy a blue plaque moment, remembering it was at 25 Noel Street that Kenneth killed Joe.

Psychogeography on the water is new and disorientating. The pace does not flag after six miles of concrete. There is no drifting into diversion, only drifting when the engine splutters out and we still inch forward. The push is relentless, the room to manoeuvre set by the bound of the banks. Even at four miles per hour, on the canal our view of London seems to have sped up. This means we lose detail can become but new impressions arise. For the first time I see how violent graffiti blooms in Hackney and Tower Hamlet is rich in crows.

The way ahead takes us under the Fenchurch Street viaduct, under Commercial Road. This is my first ever time below the London start of the A13, key ley of English Hoodoo and as Billy Bragg would have it: ‘The okay road that’s the best.’ (Though others might prefer Jah Wobble’s lyrics proclaiming it: ‘A way of life, a way of death’).

Breaking into the Limehouse Basin, the narrow line of the canal gives way to a lake of green algae that scrunches and pops as we make our way through it. Like a rampant science fiction experiment, it becalms and slowly consumes all flotsam, making it look like all the boats are beached on a field of clover. The skyline is full of enough strangeness to usually keep me occupied for days. The pyramid-topped incongruity of Canary Wharf dominates, but insane Disney-esque giant Sacred Heart statue atop Our Lady Immaculate and the tower of Hawksmoor’s St. Anne can still be seen when the seemingly relentless, replicating flats pause for breath.

Despite the fact it is Ramsay holding, we pause to enjoy potent gin and tonics at The Narrow. Klaxons blast, barriers come down and the whole road beside us swings. Narrow Street has gone, the ship lock open and there is now nothing between the waters of the canal and Thames except an imaginary line imposed by the mind.

The first river of Albion reached and greeted, it is an explorer’s route homeward. We crawl along the Limehouse Cut – its name like a resonant scar in the landscape – then push north ups the River Lee Navigation before turning into the Hertford Union. Trees swish the water, afternoon sun ricochets off of brick and stone to graze the reflections our boat constantly breaks. Bow has never looked more beautiful.

I am seeing another London. One where the presence of water seems to calm the worst excesses of the city, where it is perfectly normal that Neville Staples of The Specials is opening the St. Barnabas fete. Stopping at Old Ford, I search for herb and chillies to grow while Surreal Girl treats me to an ice cream. She also buys a Lotto ticket – she has seen waterside cottages she wants to buy. The trip gives me my own new lottery dreams to take back west.

Heading back, I try to trap memories with the camera, grabbing good shots of the gas holders’ bones against the ripening pink sky. However, my eye is not quick enough to catch the boat topped with a skull and candles or the best of the flourishing graffiti. At least I glimpse the time shade cameo of Hitchcock, haunting the site of Gainsborough Film Studios, huffing at the building’s latest reincarnation as the obligatory luxury apartments.

The arc of our wake creates hits the bank, waves echoing back in hypnotic patterns that would make Bridget Riley proud. Weariness hits me as climb through the locks towards the fading bustle of Camden’s markets. The boat moored, I am more aware than ever for the blessings of the water, dropping my coppers into the darkness with joy.