OF WALKING AND BLEEDING

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.

Jen Pedlar - by Steve Reed

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

WALKING BLOODILY

Back in the day, I wrote a novel titled Bleeding London.   Among many other things it contains a character called Stuart London who sets out to walk down every street in London.  He carries an A to Z with him, blacking out the streets once he’s walked them, so he ends up with a completely obliterated (and useless) map.  Go pick the symbolism out of that one, kids. 

         The book was considered a success (these things are always comparative). Time Out ran a piece titled “London’s Most Erotic Writers” and I came in 19^th on the basis of Bleeding London, which I thought wasn’t bad, considering that Walter, author of My Secret Life came in number one, and Shakespeare came in number seven.  And I was thrilled to find that I was ten places ahead of JG Ballard. 

Over the years various people have wanted to “do something” with my novel, turn it into a movie, or TV series, or comic book.  I’ve always said, “Great, go ahead,” but ultimately nothing has ever come of it; it has steadfastly remained a book.  So when I got an email from Del Barrett of the Royal Photographic Society saying she wanted to curate a photographic exhibition based on Bleeding London, I again said sure, go for it, but never really expected to hear from her again.

         Oh me of little faith.  On the 15^th of May I was in London for the official launch of Bleeding London: the exhibition, which according to the press release is “the most ambitious photo project that the capital has ever seen – to photograph every street in London.  Based on the Whitbread short-listed novel, Bleeding London by Geoff Nicholson, we are challenging Londoners and visitors to follow in the footsteps of Stuart London and cover the entire A to Z.” 

         If the standard A to Z is to be believed, that will involve covering 73,000 streets, an enterprise that sometimes strikes me as utterly insane.  At other times however, I think well, let’s imagine the RPS can round up 1000 committed photographers, that’s only 73 streets each, and these guys can take a couple of hundred pictures in a day, so that seems perfectly doable.  Here’s a picture (by Roger Kelly) of me and the infinitely generous, infinitely tireless (and infinitely able to marshal the troops) Del Barrett, at the launch party.  We're about to start obliterating London.

         Wanting to be involved, and determined to show willing, while I was in London I walked all the streets in a single square of the A to Z as determined by Del, covering part of Lewisham.  The annotations and the wear are all mine.  And frankly it was absolutely knackering, mentally as much as physically (although the expedition only took a little more than three hours), as I walked up Algernon Street and tramped along Marsala Street and flogged along Shell Street and meandered the length of Vicar’s Hill (among many others) and finally ended up in Loampit Vale, snapping as I went.

In fact I often carry a camera with me when I go walking, but if I take half a dozen photographs in the course of an afternoon I think that’s plenty.  Here there was the impetus, the necessity, of finding something to photograph in every single street.  You could argue that there’s something very democratic about this, maybe something very Zen.  Every street becomes equal, you have to find something of interest, something “worth” observing and photographing regardless of where you are.

It wasn’t always easy.  Certain streets seemed to offer multiple attractions, some seemed a bit dull, and offered nothing whatsoever at first glance.  The job therefore was to look harder, to see through the perceived dullness and find the things that are worthy of attention.  And although the majority of the streets were suburban and very quiet (I like suburban streets very much), there were some oddities, this thing, and I can’t decide if it’s a sidecar from a motorbike or a rocket ship from an old fairground ride (I suppose it's the former, but I hope it's the latter),

and a Zombie Outbreak Response Vehicle, among them.

Inevitably not every picture I took was massively interesting, and there was a certain reliance on my own set of clichés: show me a corrugated metal fence or and I’ll snap away with the best.

And sometimes – and this was a curious and unexpected thing - the street signs themselves were as fascinating and picturesque as anything in the street.

All in all it was a strange mission, involving a curious sort of discipline.  It was definitely a walk with a purpose, but by no means a walk from A to B (let alone from A to Z).  It represented a way of exploring the territory, making it your own, exhausting it even as you exhaust yourself.  I write about this a lot in the novel.

And I kept thinking it was like a sort of minimalist or conceptualist art project, something Sol LeWitt would have approved of. I don’t claim that Sol LeWitt is a completely open book to me, but I do know that he said, "When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art."  Who wouldn’t want that? 

I also discover that in his early work, LeWitt was influenced by Eadweard Muybridge’s serial photographs, not least of walkers.  Well yes.

You can find out a whole lot more about the Bleeding London, RPS project right here:

http://www.bleedinglondon.co.uk