CAN I GO TO THE BRIDGE?

If you’ve read my novel Bleeding London (and I suppose it’s just possible that some of you have) you may have noticed one glaring error.  I’m not saying it’s the only one but it’s the one I’ve been told about.  I say in the book that Hornsey Lane Bridge, which runs high above Archway Road is a railway bridge – it isn’t and I should have known that.  

The more important thing to know (and this is in the book), is that it’s a famous “suicide bridge” – a place where people launch themselves into space, down to the road and traffic below.

So in a very small literary penance, and many years after the event, I decided I’d walk both across and under Hornsey Lane Bridge  As you walk along it, it really doesn’t seem very threatening or scary. People walk or drive or cycle across it and thoughts of death don’t immediately spring to mind, though you may notice it’s a long way down to the road below.

A bit or research reveals that there have long been plans to build anti-suicide features, including a net, but I didn’t see any sign of that.  Sure there were railings and spikes that would make it harder and more unpleasant to get in position to jump, but I don’t think these things would deter the determined suicidalist.  Then again, I suppose even if they deter one or two casual jumpers, then they’re still doing a job. 

There are also various notices, attached to the bridge with phone numbers that you’re invited to call if you’re feeling suicidal.  Presumably somebody at the other end tries to talk you out of it, though not having called the numbers I can‘t absolutely swear to that.

There were two other remarkable things on the bridge.  First this warning sign telling you to avoid whatever electrical gubbins are beneath that metal cover.  Now, I’m no expert but I’d have thought death by electrocution might be an easier option than death by jumping off a bridge, but this is no doubt debatable.

Secondly, this war memorial commemorating servicemen who attended Saint Alosyius College which is just at the western end of the bridge.  (FYI - the fictional Tony Hancock was named “Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock.")  There’s our Lord upon the cross and nearer ground level there’s a certain amount of foot love going on, which I think might be biblically dubious, but I’m sure some would think it’s the kind of thing that might make life worth living.

Walking down below in Archway Road, and looking up, the bridge was far more impressive than I remembered it, and considerably grander than it seemed when walking across it.  It’s a fine bit of Victorian engineering, it's the work of Sir Alexander Binnie who also designed Vauxhall Bridge.

You're likely to see some other interesting stuff as you walk along Archway Road .  My eye was caught by this house that apparently had to be completely reconfigured to accommodate Archway Road:

And a gun shop. But hey, this is England, they’re not going to sell you anything you’re likely to be able to kill yourself with.

WALKING WITH WOOLF

I’m sure I’ve said it before, probably on this blog, that Virginia Woolf, walker though she may well have been, is not an open book to me.  Nevertheless I happened to come across a paperback copy of her A Writer’s Diary, opened it pretty much at random and immediately found this passage:

Monday October 25th, 1920

“Why is life so tragic: so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss.  I look down; I feel giddy; I wonder how I am ever to walk to the end.”

I thought that was a pretty good find. So imagine my angst on discovering that a version of that quotation is all over the interwebs, often superimposed on some cutesy New Agey background.  

Enough to make you want to walk into a river, almost. 

WALKING WITH FURIES

I was staying in London for three weeks last month, in West Hampstead, an area where I used to live a long time ago. Even back then I considered myself a pretty good urban walker, and I certainly explored the neighborhood, but walking around there last month it seemed a very different place.  Of course, some of it was because the neighborhood has changed, gentrified I suppose you’d say, although it was never exactly the mean streets.  But maybe it’s also because I’ve become a different kind of walker, more thorough, more observant, and maybe just a little more intrepid.

Take Billy Fury Way, for instance.  Back in the day it was a scary, and I think nameless, alley running alongside the railway line from West End Lane to Finchley Road.  It looked like a place you wouldn't walk unless you wanted to take your life in your hands, and there are still reports of dodgy goings on there. In fact, dedicating the alley to Billy Fury was part of the effort to make it less scary. This happened in 2010.

It seems to me that Billy Fury, real name Ronald Wycherley, had a fairly tenuous connection to West Hampstead, even if he recorded at Decca Studios in Broadhurst Gardens. Nevertheless, a year after the name change, a mural of Billy’s face was painted on a wall at the entrance to his "way," in the hopes of encouraging the better sort of street artists to express themselves nearby.  This was a limited success.  Before too long Billy’s face was tagged and desecrated, and the powers that be painted him over, reduced the wall to a black expanse to save further embarrassment.  I’m sure it needs a lot of repainting and touching up, but at least the entrance was looking more or less unsullied when I pitched up at my digs in West Hampstead.

In my wanderings I also came across Black Path, running along the railway lines tracks in the opposite direction from Billy Fury Way.  It lived up to its name in that the walls and fences along it were painted black, and it seemed remarkably free of graffiti, though again there was plenty of evidence of repainting­ and touching up.

I also discovered Wayne Kirkum Way, the entrance to which is more or less caged, and therefore feels intimidating as much as protective.  Of course I had never heard of Wayne Kirkum but a little research revealed that he was a young lad who’d been killed on the nearby railways line.  This was some 30 years ago, and the internet is inevitably thin on detail.  Hold that thought.

After I’d been staying in West Hampstead for a while, some new, strange, and very specific tags started to appear all over the place, including the spot where Billy Fury’s face had been.  It was no longer a black expanse.

Maybe it was naive of me but I didn’t immediately read RIP as Rest In Peace, but that was certainly what it meant. In due course the story came out in the newspapers.  Three taggers – Trip, Lover, and K-Bag - had died, been hit by a train on the railway line close to Brixton station while plying their art. 

I don’t know if there’s any such think as a “typical” tagger, but these guys didn’t seem to fit the stereotype. Their names were Harrison Scott-Hood – he was Lover, Jack Gilbert was K-Bag, Alberto Carrasco was Trip.  The first two were twenty-three years old, and Trip was the son of the London correspondent for El Mundo - it turned out that he'd been at sixth form college with the daughter of a friend of mine; so not exactly the deprived bad lads from the council estate.  

It’s not hard to see the attraction of walking where you shouldn’t, of committing urban trespass, putting your tag in the riskiest, most inaccessible places.  Still, it seems rather a trivial thing to die for, which of course makes the deaths more, not less, tragic.  One can only imagine what the families are going through.

The graffiti community (for want of a better term) expressed its commiserations all over the city. The picture below was taken at 7.15 on the morning of Tuesday, June 26^th.  I walked past it again at 11 am, and the graffiti had been painted over, creating another black expanse.

WANDERING STILL

“London the secular city instructs him: turn any corner and he can find himself inside a parable.”

I’ll be away in London for the next month or so, walking of course.  Don’t worry, I won’t become a stranger.

WALKING WHITLEY

I was walking, a couple of weeks back, in Whitley Heights, or perhaps more precisely Hollywood Dell.  Whitley Heights was once a very ritzy little enclave in the Hollywood Hills, home to the likes of Bette Davis, Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino.  Then they built the Hollywood Freeway and split the area into two - Hollywood Dell is the  name given section east and north of the freeway, though I think it still counts as Whitley Heights. 

It’s still fairly ritzy in places, a bit funky and hippyish in others. No doubt a few Hollywood types still live there but nobody with the star power of Bette Davis, I think.

One of the special “only in Hollywood” places to walk by is the Vedanta temple, tucked up against the freeway wall. Vedanta is a form of Hinduism.  “All fear and all misery arise from our sense of separation from the great cosmic unity, the web of being that enfolds us,” says the website. Aldous Huxley was a fan, and for a while Christopher Isherwood slept in what’s now the bookshop.

It was a good and interesting walk, and of course, if you have enough obsessions, even minor ones, a quite modest walk can feed quite a few of them.  Along the walk I saw a headless Buddha:

Curious flora:

Curious architecture:

An extremely emphatic no parking sign:  

It was also a good walk for spotting Volkswagen Beetles, well only one of them in fact, but it was a beauty, this gorgeously distressed little number:

In fact enjoyed the walk so much that I want back and did a longer version of it, although of course I know that you can't walk on the same water twice.  Nevertheless I saw more flora and architectural curiosities, in fact at the same time:

And more VWs, wrapped and unwrapped:

And when I passed the distressed Beetle, the trunk and hood were open, and then a rangy, very friendly, young black man appeared and looked forlornly at the car’s innards.  I said it was a fine car – and he agreed, and said it usually ran pretty well, but it had rained earlier in the week and he thought water had got into the electrics.  I made sympathetic noises, and I thought about taking the guy’s picture but it didn’t seem the right moment. 

I used to be quite good at dating Volkswagens, but I’ve lost the skill lately.  I knew this one was old but I was still surprised and impressed when he told me it was a 1960.  You have to have some cojones to drive a 58 year old car in Los Angeles.

WALKING LEGIT

A legit auto and a ban on assault weapons – ‘tis a consummation devoutly to be wished, although in the current American climate it seems to be asking rather too much.

A closer inspection of the picture reveals that this photograph was taken (by me) at the corner of Eleanor Avenue (and Gower).  Eleanor Avenue is where Buster Keaton had his movie studio from 1920 and 1928 – not very far from the above spot, at the corner of Eleanor and Lillian.  

The above image is from Silent Echoes by John Bengtson, a work of superhuman scholarship in tracking down Keaton locations.

Now, in 1940 Keaton married his third wife who just happened to be named Eleanor (nee Norris).  She was 23 years his junior and they stayed together until Keaton’s death in 1966. She’s widely credited with saving him from alcoholism and salvaging his career.  This is the two of them walking on their wedding day.

I don’t really imagine that Keaton married her because she shared a name with the street where his studio was once located, although people have married for worse reasons.

Here is a picture of Keaton with a very legit auto.

And here with one somewhat less so.

STRIDING WITH SEELIG

I’ve been reading Walks with Walser by Carl Seelig. Robert Walser (1878 – 1956), has been discussed elsewhere on this blog.  He was a German speaking Swiss who published quite a few things in his early life, including the long short story “The Walk,” but spent his last 27 years in a mental asylum.  He was eventually celebrated by Susan Sontag and WG Sebald but if it hadn’t been for Carl Seelig, Walser might well have slipped into an obscurity from which he couldn’t be rescued.

Seelig (1894-1962) was an editor and writer who’d read and admired Walser’s work.  He visited him at the asylum, befriended him, promoted his work, and eventually became his literary executor.

Carl Seelig walking with Albert Einstein

On these asylum visits, which took place between 1936 and 1956, Seelig took Walser out for a walk and lunch.  The book recounts these occasions, and he did some Boswell-style setting down of the things Walser had to say about his life and his work, and about the works of others.  Of course there was a war going on for some of this time and Walser was by no means oblivious to events.

Walser and Seelig sometimes took spectacularly long walks and they had some spectacular lunches. Seelig writes on April 23, 1939,

“We make our way from Herisau to Wil in three and a half hours.  We feel as if we’re on roller skates.”  Well yes.  Google maps suggest various routes, but all of them are about 14 miles long, and none of them take less than four and three quarter hours.  Anyway, the pair do arrive in Wil, and Seelig writes, “we eat at Im Hof; we are tremendously hungry and stop for a bite at one pub after another. Five in total.”

That’s quite a walk. That’s quite a pub crawl.

And then on March 21, 1941, Seelig reports Walser as saying, “I tried to visit him (the author and painter Max Dauthendey) in Munich once.  But I found only his wife, who told me that her husband happened to be in Wurzburg. I therefore took this as an opportunity to set off in that direction, in light sandals and without a collar.  I covered the distance in a little over ten hours.  That was the fastest walk I ever took.  My feet were full of blisters when I arrived.”

I would think so.  This time Google has the route as 154 miles long, and they reckon it takes 51 hours to walk, which sounds about right.  Even on roller skates Walser’s time seems unlikely.

But perhaps the most interesting thing in that entry is that Walser felt it worth mentioning that he wasn’t wearing a collar.  Of all the many items of kit that “serious” walkers find necessary these days, a collar really isn’t one of them.  The vast majority of pictures I’ve seen of Walser show him in a three piece suit with a collar and tie, sometimes there’s a hat, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a photograph of him wearing an overcoat, or anything waterproof, although he does usually carry an umbrella.

SOME WAY FROM THE BEACH

I was walking up Beachwood Drive, which leads to Beachwood Canyon, and used to give pedestrian access to the Hollywood sign, although currently it doesn’t: the neighbors complained - they had a point.  Not that this deters people from driving up there for a “good look” at the sign.

This is, in many ways, absurd. The sign is visible from miles around, and was in fact designed so that it could be seen from Wilshire Boulevard, which at its nearest point is six and a half miles away.

And, of course, tourists always think that Los Angeles is a kind of theme park and so they stand in the middle of the street and take pictures of their friends or themselves with the Hollywood sign looming behind them.

And the most annoying thing of all, nobody ever runs them down, much as I will them to.

Still there are sights to be seen on Beachwood. Obama still rules up there:

And there are Simpsons-esque amusements:

And best of all this house, which admittedly does reinforce the theme park idea, not quite a ruined castle, but close, and I guess it’s being refurbished.  

And I do wonder if they’re going to keep that hell’s mouth arch (or possibly porte-cochere) - though I suspect that may make the place harder to sell.  It reminds me of the l’Enfer Cabaret (the Surrealist met there occasionally) on Boulevard Clichy, a street I have certainly walked down a few times over the years, though I gather l’Enfer has been a Monoprix supermarket since 1950 or so, which would explain why I never saw it.

And it also reminds me of this mouth at Bomarzo (the Park of Monsters) where I still have hopes of walking one of these years.

And now, and obviously this is the actual inspiration, Mr. Matthew Licht send me this image of the facade of the Biblioteca Herziana, the German Academy, on Via Gregoriana in Rome.

WALKING WITH SLACK

I recently interviewed the Los Angeles-based photographer Mike Slack for the British Royal Photographic Society.  Inevitably a certain amount of our conversation ended up on the cutting room floor and some of that concerned walking.  

Mike is creating a series of books with the overall title Walking in Place, in which he walks around various cities, photographing what he sees.  The first book featured New Orleans.  This is a spread from the book:

Perhaps inevitably, we mentioned psychogeography in our conversation.  Now, I’ve learned from experience that when you mention psychogeography to most civilians their eyes just glaze over, so that was one of the first things to be cut, but since I imagine readers of this blog are made of sterner stuff, here’s how the exchange went:

*

GN: I see that notions of walking, maybe psychogeography, pop up in your work.  Can you say anything about that? 

MS: The aimless wandering aspect has always been a really fruitful method for seeing new things and making new pictures. An increasingly important part of it for me is the randomness, just rolling the proverbial dice and ending up somewhere and zeroing in a specific scene, a picture, at whatever scale, which always seems to link somehow to another specific picture from another time and place, and so on, all of the pictures somehow connected. I don’t know if that’s strictly a psychogeographic approach, but the “game” aspect of it is really appealing, using playful methods to tune into your immediate surrounding, and letting chance dictate the content or pathway. 

*

Here's Mr Slack with an image that appears in the New Orleans book: 

And here's the link to the RPS interview:

http://www.rps.org/regions-and-chapters/regions/headquarters/blogs/2018/may/mike-slack