IN WHICH OUR HERO WALKS IN WOODFORD AND DEVELOPS A THEORY ABOUT SHANGRI-LA.

 I went for a walk in Woodford with my friend Sue, who lives there but doesn’t like to be photographed (at least not from the front).

Down at the station there was Popeye, 

and up on the Green there was Winston Churchill 

and in between there was much to fascinate the urban or suburban walker; this kind of thing:

But I had given myself a small mission, to see the house of James Hilton, the author of the novel Lost Horizon.  He was living in Oak Hill Gardens when he wrote that book (now part of Woodford, but part Walthamstow at the time.  He was also there when he wrote his other  greatest hit Goodbye, Mr. Chips.

Now, I suspect few youngsters and even quite a few oldsters are unfamiliar with Lost Horizon although as you see, Hilton was once famous enough that his name was thought powerful enough to sell booze.

But everybody’s surely heard of Shangri-La, the mythical Tibetan kingdom run by lamas, where people can live to an unheard of great age.  It’s still a surprisingly readable book - I just read it - and it seems extremely modern in a lot of respects. The sexual politics are inevitably a bit dodgy, the racial politics less dodgy than you might expect.

There’s a film too, starring Ronald Coleman as the heroic Conway, directed by Frank Capra, which is ruthlessly unfaithful to the original – the missionary from the novel becomes a floozy, Conway suddenly has a brother, and Edward Everett Horton pops up as a paleontologist.

Actually there's a later film, a musical version (OMG), starring Peter Finch and Liv Ullman which is generally said to be cosmically awful.

The book was written in the winter of 1932 when Hilton already knew that things were already looking bleak for the world, even from the suburban outpost in Walthamstow, and he imagined a place where a small pocket of civilization could survive however terrible the approaching cataclysm.

It wasn’t hard to find James Hilton’s house – it has a blue plaque, and whoever lives in the house now isn’t shy about expressing their personality. And if you look closely you can see a skeleton hanging in the front window. and it could be a leftover from Halloween but since my visit was in February they’ve obviously grown fond of having it around.  Their mailbox, if that's what is, is impressive too.

Woodford is about as suburban and respectable a place as you can imagine, and although I haven’t been able to find any comments Hilton made about the place, his description of Shangri-La seems extraordinary sounds very much like Middle England.

Chang explains how things are in Shangri-La: “If I were to put it into a very few words, my dear sir, I should say that our prevalent belief is in moderation. We inculcate the virtue of avoiding excesses of all kinds   -even including, if you will pardon the paradox, excess of virtue itself … And I think I can claim that our people are moderately sober, moderately chaste and moderately honest.”  This sounds more Church of England vicar than Tibetan lama.

And Chang describes the lack of crime in Shangri-La, attributing it to the fact that only serious things were considered crimes and “partly because everyone enjoyed a sufficiency of everything he could reasonably desire.”

You think it’s starting to go off the rails a bit when Chang says, “You English inculcate the same feeling in your publics schools,”  but then there’s a wonderful swerve, as he says, “but not I fear for the same things.  The inhabitants of our valley, for instance feel that it is ‘not done’ to be inhospitable to strangers, to dispute acrimoniously, or to strive for priority amongst one another.  The idea of enjoying what your English headmasters call the mimic warfare of the playing field would seem to them entirely barbarous, indeed, a sheer wanton simulation of all the lower instincts.” By which I suppose we can assume Hilton wasn’t good at sports.

Hilton became a very successful Hollywood screen writer and moved to California, where he won an Oscar for the script of Mrs. Miniver but interestingly (to me) he didn’t live in Beverley Hills or the Hollywood Hills where so many successful writers go; for the last ten years of his life (he died youngish, aged 54) he lived in Long Beach, in a bungalow on Argonne Avenue. I haven’t been able to find the number of the house, but part of the street looks like this on Streetview:

I’ve certainly walked around in Long Beach, though not down Argonne Street, and it’s a very different kind of suburbia from Woodford (or Walthamstow), but it’s still a member of the species.

Even at the time it evidently seemed an odd place for an Oscar-winning writer to make his home and Hilton was happy to explain in an interview: “I want to live in America. I want to write about it. You can’t get the feel of the country from Hollywood, so I came to Long Beach.”

Perhaps the same could be said about England and Woodford.  Depending on how you slice it, Hilton either came a long way or not very far at all.  That horizon wasn’t so lost, or distant, after all.

            

POUNDING DOWN IN POUNDBURY

I went for a walk in Poundbury, in Dorset.  It wasn’t completely awful but it was weird, and in fact bits of it were pretty awful.

Poundbury, you know, is Prince Charles’s utopian stab at urban development, planned by his tame architectural theorist Leon Krier.  Neither of these dudes lives in Poundbury, you’ll be surprised to hear.  Krier does drawings like this:

Poundbury gets compared to Disneyland and Stepford (where the wives comes from) but I kept thinking of The Prisoner - not the actual Portmeirion designed by Clough Williams-Ellis, the location where the tv show was filmed, but the fictional village – a place so calm and tranquil and well-ordered, you just knew something absolutely terrible was about to happen.

There is a town square of sorts in Poundbury, with a statue of the late Queen Mum – Krier designed the base.  



This is Queen Mother Square. Nearby is a pub named after Prince Charles’s wife - The Duchess of Cornwall Inn (what woman doesn’t want to have a pub named after her?), and just over the way, opposite the Waitrose, is a block of luxury flats that looks, deliberately, like a faux Buckingham Place, because you know, the real original Buckingham Place looks so awesome.

Incidentally, as you see, there is no grass in this public square, no benches, no identifiable pavements, nowhere to hang out.  There is also very little separation between pedestrians and cars, though there are some bollards protecting the statue.  They might also protect pedestrians, but that’s obviously not their prime reason for existing. The walker would do well to keep moving.

This lack of pedestrian friendliness comes as something of a surprise.  Poundbury was supposedly built to be a super-pedestrian-friendly place. The Prince would have you believe he’s a great believer in walking.  In 2004, he set down his ten design principles.  Number five asks for:  “The creation of well-designed enclosures. Rather than clusters of separate houses set at jagged angles, spaces that are bounded and enclosed by buildings are not only more visually satisfying, they encourage walking and feel safer.”

         

In this he’s echoing Leon Krier who posits a city made up of quarters or quadrants, the centers of which can be crossed in the course of a ten-minute walk.  For most of us, that’s no more than a half-mile stroll, which seems a little unambitious, and just pitiful for anybody who enjoys walking in a big city.

In fact one of the first things this walker noticed was just how car-friendly Poundbury seemed, perhaps because, at the moment there’s a great deal of free parking.  However, since the population is scheduled to double in size in the next few years, a parking spot adjacent to the Duchess of Cornwall Inn may be increasingly hard to come by. 

Along with this, I noticed just how many garages there are in Poundbury – huge numbers, most of them not attached to the dwelling of the car owner.  In fact there were quite a few examples of flats built on top of one or more garages belonging to other people, the disadvantage of which seem utterly obvious.

There are a few exceptions, but the vast majority of the garage doors are painted plain black.  Now, I’m not suggesting than selecting the paint color for your garage door is an inalienable freedom or a great mark of self-expression, but my own feeling is that I’d prefer any color so long as it’s not plain black.  I also thought those plain black “canvases” might represent a challenge and a provocation to the youth of Poundbury, but apparently not, and that may be because Poundbury the youth is in such short supply.

Of course I saw other people walking, some with dogs.

One woman with a Highgrove bag 

I also saw a couple of cats, of which this is one

The place was clean, it was safe, it was nice, and I’m not an idiot, I’m not against any of those things, 

but oh boy did my heart leap up when I eventually found the council estate.

The only graffiti I saw were there or thereabouts, and I’m no snowflake when It comes to graffiti, and these was pretty rubbish in themselves but they came as a kind of relief.  

These acts of self-expression were on one side of this classical temple type thing, which was actually an electricity substation.

The graffiti were on the side that looked towards the sports ground and away from the council estate, which I suppose was basicalily a good thing.  And this “social housing” had so much that Poundbury houses didn’t have: life, an unruliness, a genuine if sometimes naff urge for eccentricity and self-expression.  There were front gardens for instance – there were very few of those in Poundbury proper.

Here, some of them had been paved over to accommodate a car, some were carefully tended with topiary, some had am ugly heap of rubbish on the grass but at least the residents had made their own choice of paint color for the garage doors.

But the thing that made the whole Poundbury walking expedition worthwhile for me, was this sign in the front garden of a house evidently belonging to a small local businessman.  

Just possibly Poundbury is more diverse than many people think, or want it to be.

NATURALLY

Well they certainly do look like they're having fun.

And Britishness is invoked, since the British certainly do know how to have fun.

MEAN STREETS, I SUPPOSE

I’ve been reading a rather good book titled A Spy’s London, by Roy Berkeley.  It’s a sort of travel book and walking guide, complete with maps, that allows you to wander around London and see where various spies lived, and where various acts of espionage were planned or committed.  Chelsea is full of them, it seems.

There’s 111, Old Church Street where the SIS trained refugees from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and turned them into secret agents. There’s the flat in Drayton Gardens where Kim Philby lived with his mother.  And there’s the home of Ian Fleming in Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk. 

Authors just love to pose as though they're reading their own books.

Berkeley, like many before him, is skeptical about the extent of Fleming’s work as a spy, and calls him an intelligence wannabe. Fleming moved into Carlyle Mansions in 1952, taking his gold typewriter with him, bought specially to finish Casino Royale. 

Fleming’s flat was some floors above TS Eliot who, as I understand it, was living there at the time, at number 19, in an austere room, its walls bare except for a crucifix, and Eliot himself was living immediately beneath a flat where Henry James had lived. 

If the internet is to be believed, number 19 was subsequently the place where the serial killer Patrick Mackay murdered an elderly widow named Isabella Griffiths in 1974. ("There will be time to murder and create")

A more optimistic confluence has it that in 1958 Raymond Chandler was living very close to Cheyne Walk, in Swan Walk.  He was in desperate straits, grieving for his late wife, drinking too much, and working on his last, unfinished, and doomed Marlowe novel, Poodle Springs.  It seems that Fleming lived in a considerably better building, but Chandler was only staying for one summer.

I think it’s unlikely that Chandler and Fleming ever walked to each other’s flat.  I did, of course, and then back again.  On the way I passed a door to The London Sketch Club,

and I walked by Clover Mews, “This is a PRIVATE Mews” 

Frankly, it didn’t feel much like Bond territory, and understandably it felt even less like Marlowe territory. 

But Chandler and Fleming did have at least one encounter, not in the street while walking, but in a broadcast they did together on BBC radio in 1958 – Chandler was 70, Fleming 50 - and Fleming adopts the position of the junior partner, very wise given than Chandler (who of course I love more than life itself) sounds in the broadcast to be a bit of cantankerous old know it all, and very possibly drunk.  Thus:

Fleming: I see they had another killing last week in New York. One of these men connected with that dock union man—what’s his name?

Chandler: Albert Anastasia?

Fleming: Anastasia, yes. How’s a killing like that arranged?

Chandler: Very simply. You want me to describe how it’s done?

Fleming: Yes, yes.

Chandler: ... So they go to where the man lives, and they get an apartment or a room across the street from him.  They study him for days and days and days until they know exactly when he goes out, and when he comes home, what he does.  And when they’re ready, they simply walk up to him and shoot him.

Walking, it’s not for wimps.

SUBURBAN STROLLS

The best photo I can find of Tracey Thorne walking.

Tracey Thorn is OK by me.  She said some nice things about my book The Lost Art of Walking, and now she’s written a second memoir Another Planet: A Teenager in Suburbia, the title of which says it all, about growing up in Brookmans Park, a place I’d certainly never heard of. Unsurprisingly, as a teenager, she has arguments with her parents

“I told them I wanted to marry a poet and live in London. I wanted to get out. I couldn’t understand why they had ever moved here in the first place. Why would anyone want to? Who would choose suburbia? It’s for squares, for drones, worst of all, for PARENTS, who love it for the quality of life it offers. Young people don’t care about such things as comfort and cleanliness – they want culture, and nightlife, and energy. There are no clubs or pavement cafes in suburbia. You can’t explore it at night, as – say – Dickens walked the streets of London. Who walks around suburbia at night? You can’t be a suburban flâneur.  Suburbia is for those who want a quiet life with no alarms or surprises. It goes to bed early, and after dark, when a teenager comes alive, the streets are silent.

No wonder we looked at suburbia and wanted to burn it down.

I will say only a coupla things, that you can have better arguments with your parents even if you don’t live in suburbia, and even if you don’t want to marry a poet.  I will also say that some of us do in fact enjoy being nocturnal, suburban flâneurs.  And it’s not just me, it’s Jack Kerouac too, apparently, as here in The Dharma Bums

“Everything was fine with the Zen Lunatics, the nut wagon was too far away to hear us. But there was a wisdom in it all, as you'll see if you take a walk some night on a suburban street and pass house after house on both sides of the street each with the lamplight of the living room, shining golden, and inside the little blue square of the television, each living family riveting its attention on probably one show; nobody talking; silence in the yards; dogs barking at you because you pass on human feet instead of on wheels. You'll see what I mean, when it begins to appear like everybody in the world is soon going to be thinking the same way and the Zen Lunatics have long joined dust, laughter on their dust lips.”

The best pictures I can find of Jack Kerouac walking.  And yes, I do realize it's not night, and he's not in a suburb.

Kerouac never married a poet but he did date and/or marry a lot of women who subsequently went on to write memoirs detailing what a shit he was.