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.