A man walking down the street – sometimes it’s a woman, but more
usually it’s a man – and as he walks he talks, and points at things, and it
seems that he’s talking just to you, explaining those things that aren’t
obvious, that don’t immediately meet the eye.
Sometimes this “talking” may be in book form – a text,
a narrative, a guide book, and often it’s on video, whether a serious documentary
or travelogue or just some wobbly fetish footage shot on somebody’s cellphone
and destined for YouTube and an amazingly low number of views.
And of course this person
almost certainly doesn’t know you, may be addressing an imaginary you, a big audience of “yous.” And there may be a
whole army of intermediaries between you and him – publishers, editors, a film
crew, programmers. Some of these intermediaries
aim for a much higher degree of invisibility than others.
I’ve been thinking about this while reading two
versions of A Survey of London, two
very different versions of what are in some ways the same book. John Stow’s A Survay (sic) of London was
first published in 1598, and he revised and expanded it for a second edition
published in 1603, two years before his death. I did not, alas, read the version below:
Posthumous editions
continued to appear after Stow had departed, often containing maps and illustrations. Some of the
editing was wayward, but there was a “perfected” or at least unlikely to be
improved upon edition by John Strype, often referred to as "Strype’s Stowe,"
published in 1720. It was several times
longer than the original, incorporating all kinds of new material, much of it
necessitated by changes and growth in London, some of it dictated by Strype’s
own personal preferences.
John Stow 1525-1605 was a tailor by trade but more
passionately he was a historian, antiquary, collector of books and manuscripts. And he was also a great walker, an urban
explorer, a psychogeographer some centuries avant
la letter. He was therefore an
ancestor of a whole tribe of writers and historians and TV presenters who use
walking as a mean of investigating the geographic, historic and cultural landscape.
Sometimes this seems a bit old hat. I think Alan Whicker was the first on-screen
walker and talker I ever saw – and he began presenting Whicker’s World in 1958. And I’m
sure there were earlier ones too. But
it’s a tribe that shows no sign of dying out: think Anthony Bourdain, think
Mary Beard, think Simon Sharma, think Jonathan Meades.
Edmond Howes, Stow’s literary executor wrote that Stow
never rode, but always traveled on foot when he visited historic buildings or sought
out historical documents. William
Drummond reports Ben Jonson as saying, “He (Stow) and I walking alone, he asked
two criples (sic), what they would have to take him to their order.” I think Stow protested too much about his
poverty: he left his wife and daughters enough money that they could erect this
elaborate monument to him in the Church of St John Undershaft in EC2. Think you or I will get one like that?
Stow’s prose style is
chatty and he writes as though you’re “there,” walking along with him. He’s your
guide, pointing things out, telling you stories and anecdotes, but he’s not uncritical
about what he sees and knows. Like many
an observer he regrets some of the changes.
“In the East
ende of Forestreete is More lane: then next is Grubstreete, of late yeares
inhabited for the most part by Bowyers, Fletchers, Bowstring makers, and such
like, now little occupied, Archerie giving place to a number of bowling Allies,
and Dicing houses, which in all places are increased, and too much frequented.”
That’s right,
you know the neighborhood’s on the skids when the archers move out and the
bowling alley moves in.
John
Strype’s edition of Stowe is titled A Survey
of the Cities of London and Westminster, and he adheres to Stow’s notion of exploring
the city as though on a walking tour, and he adds
a few
“perambulations” or circuit walks of his own.
It’s very hard for me to see that word “perambulation”
without thinking of Nikolaus Pevsner and his Buildings of England series. He perambulated all over the country. Was he consciously echoing Stow and
Strype? He must surely have been aware
of the Survey. In any case, Pevsner’s
work, just like Stow’s, is now reedited and revised by subsequent diverse hands.
I’m one of that generation who finds it impossible to walk
round an English church or churchyard without noting and mentally cataloging the
features in a Pevsner-esque way - rhenish
helm, blind clerestory, nodding ogee arch – etc. I’m
not sure that this is a necessarily good thing.
Perhaps Jonathan Meades is similarly conflicted. In his documentary Pevsner Revisited he says that while other disaffected youths were
off demonstrating and smashing the state, he was exploring English architecture
clutching a volume of Pevsner.
There’s plenty of footage of Pevsner himself walking
around looking at buildings, and he was seen on TV once in a while, but he
never had the popularity or that “posh but with a common touch” thing that John
Betjeman had. There was a certain
rivalry between them, but Pevsner just wasn’t cuddly, he wasn’t televisual, and
he wasn’t loved - possibly his German origins had something to do with that. Betjeman was a London lad, born in Gospel
Oak, though that surname is Dutch, originally with two n’s – changed precisely
because it sounded German.
And I remember that at some point in my not especially
misspent youth, I used to walk the streets of my hometown of Sheffield,
fantasizing that an imaginary camera crew was following me as I wandered among
the treasures of the Sheffield urbanscape – not that I knew much about the Sheffield
urbanscape.
Now, just occasionally,
in my role as walker, writer, pontificator, and god knows I've been called a "cultural critic," I do get called upon to wander
around, talk and point at things, usually not in Sheffield.
Sometimes there’s even a camera crew.
It’s never as much fun as I once thought it would be, but I do always try
very hard not to look or sound like Alan Whicker.
