The big reason I was in England was for an exhibition at London's City Hall, based on my novel
Bleeding London. Faithful readers will recall the character Stuart
London who walks, or at least says he walks, every street in London. The Royal
Photograph Society, in the person of Del Barrett, had organized what you might call
a crowdsourced exhibition for which volunteers had gone out and taken
photograph of every street in the city.
This amazingly, improbably, they’d succeeded in doing – that’s 58,000
streets, 58,000 photographs, and a preliminary display of 1200 images was on
display at London’s City Hall (and as I write still is). The plan is that at some point in the future
there’ll be a gigantic exhibition of all the photographs in a vast warehouse
somewhere in London, and there’ll be an online archive as well.
The launch party/private view coincided with a strike of London tube
drivers so attendance was a bit thinner than it might have been otherwise. But as you see, one of the great attractions
of the party space was the floor - a gigantic map of London, which allowed you
to feel as though you were a giant walking across, and stamping on, its suburbs
and center.
A couple of days after the party Jen Pedler, who’s a walking guide as
well as a photographer, conducted “Stuart’s First Walk” – a nice five mile
meander based on a description in the book of my character’s first foray into tramping
all the streets of London. He (and I)
chose North Pole Road, in W10, as the starting point, simply because of the
name.
“He knew he had to begin somewhere and he knew that in one sense, any
place was as good as another, but he scanned the index of his A-Z looking for a
street name that sounded appropriate. His eyes fell on a line that read North
Pole Road. Next day he went there and started his walk.”
In the beginning Stuart
just walks for the sake of it, but then he starts keeping a diary because he
realizes he’s forgetting what he’s seen, and I do know the feeling, although as
I proved, writing things down is no absolute guarantee that you’ll remember
them. Photographs surely stick in the
mind a bit better. In my occasional
wearying attempts to turn Bleeding London
into a screenplay I’ve always said to producers that in a movie version Stuart
should be keeping a photo or video diary rather than a written one; but that
has always been the least of the problems.
And so we guided walkers went walking along North Pole
Road, following in Stuart London’s, and to some extent my, old footsteps. Full,
unsurprising, disclosure: I by no means walked every street in London while
writing the book. This is the joy of
writing fiction – you can make stuff up, though of course we all know that
writers of non-fiction make stuff up too.
But there were some days when I pretended to be Stuart, walked where he
walked, and certainly the book contains descriptions of things I actually saw
while walking in London, not least in North Pole Road.
Of course having the author himself on a walking tour
based on his book was a curious thing, not least for the author. Someone had
said to Jen that it would be like walking with Dickens, and yeah, sure that’s
EXACTLY what it was like. Jen had
considered having me read out various passage as we waked, but in the event she
decided against it, for which I was truly grateful. I suspect it would have been excruciating for
all concerned, but especially excruciating for me.
Since the book was published (oh good god) eighteen
years ago, and I’m not a great re-reader of my own work, I was pretty vague
about some of the things ‘d seen and described in the novel. Other things, of course seemed clear as
day. Things in North Pole Road however,
fell chiefly into the former category: without the book I’d have remembered hardly
anything at all.
Of course some things had changed – the pub that had
once been called the North Pole and then the New North Pole had been converted into
a Tesco Express after much local protest, apparently. But there was still plenty that hadn’t
changed much at all. There was still a
florist and hairdresser as mentioned in the book, there was still Mick’s Fish
Bar and also the newsagent which in the book I called Varishna’s which I now know
was a misspelling.
And we walked beyond North Pole Road, seeing some things I remembered
and rather more things I’d forgotten. We
walked by Wormwood Scrubs – the prison and the piece of land with the same
name.
We went up Scrubs Lane, along the Harrow Road, across the Grand Union Canal
and eventually past Erno Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower, to Ladbroke Grove.
I guess the most Proustian moment came in the Harrow Road. There’s a moment in the book when Stuart sees “a tyre centre whose frontage had a mural depicting members of staff.” I’d forgotten all
about this, and Jen who’d done a reccie of the route, hadn’t been able to find
it either, and yet suddenly there it was, and all we Bleeding Londoners stood
outside in quiet wonder, celebrating, taking photographs, while the guys who
worked there, the current employees not depicted on the mural, looked on in
suspicion.
photo by Steve Reed |
And of course there was some stuff that surely couldn’t have been there
back in the day: – this gloriously misspelled estate agent sign, for instance,
gave me particular pleasure:
It’s always a hard work to walk in a group – the good thing about being
with a bunch of photographers is that you can wander off by yourself and look
at little curiosities and take pictures and everybody else understands – it
slows the walk down but it also sharpens up your perceptions as you try to find
new things to photograph, avoiding the more obvious stuff that everybody else
is photographing.
In the novel Stuart walks past the Kensal Rise Cemetery, but doesn’t go
inside, I suspect because its paths don’t constitute actual London streets. We had no such inhibition. And while we were there Gareth Philips took
this fairly fab photograph of the author.
(I confess I’ve messed with it a little). If I made record albums it
would surely be on an album cover.
Photo by Gareth Phillips |
You might argue about whether this is a pic
of the author, or a pic the author being his character. I’m pretty happy either way. And maybe it’s both. But I was reminded of this picture of William
Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, authors who I don’t in other ways really resemble
much:
They’re acting out a scene from their collaborative
novel And the Hippos Were Boiled In Their
Tanks, a kind of absurdist Dashiell Hammett pastiche. I’m not sure that anyone has ever looked
better, or greyer, or more sinister in his author pics than Mr. Burroughs. He sure was photogenic, even when he wasn’t –
if you know what I mean.
Jen Pedlar’s website is here: http://footprintsoflondon.com/guides/jen-pedler/
Steve Reed’s blog is here: http://shadowsteve.blogspot.com
The RPS site is here: http://www.bleedinglondon.co.uk
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