Of making many books about London there is apparently
no end. That’s almost a quotation from Ecclesiastes 12:12, which continues “and much
study is a weariness of the flesh.” And
to the mind too you might say, though some books are more wearisome
than others, obviously.
A few days back I got an email from Jamie Manners, a
friend of a friend who’s been commissioned to write a book about, as he puts
it, the “interesting/quirky details in
London buildings and places.” And he
asked could I think of any “favourite spots, oddities, places with a good story
behind them, or notable features in London buildings that might be good for an
entry.”.
A direct question like that is pretty
much guaranteed to make my mind a complete blank, and as Jamie himself says “of
course, when you look through the 'Secret London/Hidden London' stuff you
realise this book has already been written 20 times and people recycle the same
stuff (Wellington's horseblock outside the Athenaum, etc). They (the
publishers) told me to make sure the City/West End are well represented, but I
think it'd be nice to give equal weight to the areas where the people of London
actually live nowadays.”
Well, I like to make
friends when I can, so I agreed to do my best, which is what I’m doing now.
When I was writing my
novel Bleeding London (which is partly
about a man who tries to walk down every street in London) I too went walking
in London and I started carrying a camera with me, to record any such quirky details
I might see; and I’ve pretty much carried a camera with me on all occasions
when walking ever since. Bleeding London was written in pre-digital
camera days and I certainly took far fewer picture then that I do now, but so
does everybody. I wish I’d taken more.
There’s always a problem, of
course, with “unknown” bits of any city.
The truly unknown bits are likely to remain that way, and then there are
“well-known unknown” bits. I remembering
finding, by chance, the statue of Samuel Johnson’s cat Hodge, complete
with oysters, and thought it was a wonder.
But now every damn fool knows where it is.
Sir Richard Francis Burton’s tomb in Mortlake is much less visited than
the statue of Hodge, largely because it’s in Mortlake, and it’s very odd and
wonderful, but there’s nothing unknown about it.
Digging through my old photo files has revealed
some very dull pictures indeed, but one or two still seem sort of
interesting. And I’ve only Photoshopped
them a little bit in order to retain that “retro” feel. I can’t swear that all the things shown are still
in existence. (The photos of the noses and the space invaders aren't mine, as may be obvious, nor Hodge, nor the book maze, but otherwise, sure.)
Above for instance is a picture
of what I believe is the narrowest building in London (though the internet shows
there’s a lot of competition for that title).
The address is 10 Hyde Park Place, and it
seems once to have been just an alleyway between two other buildings that got
blocked off and became a building in its own right, just 3 feet 6 inches wide. It’s also, I learn, now part of the Tyburn Convent next door, and I’ve always liked this outdoor pulpit
hanging off the side (below). I’ve
always imagined nuns standing out there, delivering fire and brimstone sermons
to the corrupt citizens of London, but I never saw one.
But if you want to be reminded of
mortality and end times you might do better with the stone skulls in the
gateway to St Olave’s churchyard.
As you see, the church is in a
street named Seething Lane, which of course reminds me of the stand up comedian/punk
poet active at more or less the time I was taking this picture, named Seething
Wells. He died prematurely (I discover)
in 2009.
And above is a sign for the “pledge
entrance,” above what must once have been the door to some kind of temperance
hall. It was very near to the flat where I lived
in Sutherland Avenue, Maida Hill. At
the time I moved out the area was becoming increasingly Islamic,
which might lead to a difference kind of temperance, I suppose. Though not necessarily.
I always loved the Eduardo Paolozzi
sculpture at Pimlico tube station, which I believe is actually used to disguise
an air vent from the underground. I used
to have a girlfriend whose flat overlooked the station, and I spent a fair bit
of time there. It seemed the vent was very high-maintenance: there were always
guys on ladders doing something or other to it.
But here’s where the memory
fails, and where the Internet almost saves it. I knew that the above picture
was taken somewhere near London Bridge, but I couldn’t have told you exactly
where. Online evidence shows it was
there to draw attention to a sort of museum named “Winston Churchill’s Britain
at War Experience” though I don’t think Winston Churchill was much involved
with the enterprise. In any case the Internet
also suggests it's now closed. As a long
time Pynchonian, I was pretty excited to see what purported to be a V2 rocket
up on the wall of any building in London, though I feel reasonably certain that
isn’t an actual V2. Unlike this one, which
you can walk around at White Sands in New Mexico:
Incidentally Jamie’s publisher’s want to
call his book The Seven Noses Of Soho,
a reference far too oblique for me to catch, but according to Jamie “Apparently,
in the 90s these bronze and plaster noses appeared all over walls in the West
End and urban myths sprang up that anyone who could locate all "seven
noses of Soho" would come into great wealth. There was one on Admiralty
Arch and people said it was put there to mock Napoleon, & that cavalrymen
would tweak it when they passed under. Eventually an artist came out and said
he had put them all up as a protest against CCTV.” Well, London remains a source of wonder and surprise,
and curious artistic enterprise.
I was never aware of those but I
did like the Space Invader mosaics that appeared around London at about the
same time. The artist also went by the
name of Space Invader. He’s French,
apparently.
I gather he came to Los Angeles
(they all do in the end it seems) for the MOCA “ Art in the Streets” show in 2011,
and was arrested while putting up a mosaic, but released without being charged. Hey, LA cops aren’t all bad.
The last time I walked around
London was May of last year – seems like only yesterday, and I can’t say I
found a lot of full-one quirkiness, but I did find a couple of curiosities that
I hadn’t seen before, this statue of Bela Bartok near to South Kensington tube,
for instance:
This pointy metal thing to tell
you that you’re in Shoreditch:
And this splendidly blank and
inscrutable door to the London Fruit Exchange (I mean, surely we've all got some fruit we'd like to swap). I don’t imagine tourists are flocking there,
but it quite made my day.
