NIGHT AND THE CITY

 A friend gave me a mighty pile of old copies of the London Review of Books - over a decade’s worth - and I’m very slowly working my way through them.

 

Victoria Roth

Inevitably I’m not reading them in historical order, and one of the most tantalizing things in any issue is the Letters page in which correspondents react to reviews from the previous issue, which I’ve generally not seen.

 

In the issue from May 2 2017 there’s a letter from Iain Sinclair reacting to accusations about his ‘failure to supply an adequate headcount of female characters (or influences) in any text I have written.’  To defend himself he calls in the chapter fromThe Last London‘celebrating the flaneuse and photographer Effie Paleologou.’

 

I remember thinking when I read the book that the name seemed so improbable it might be Sinclair’s fictional invention, although in that case I thought he’d have chosen something less improbable. But no, Effie Paleologou is a ‘real’ person with a considerable presence outside of any text by Sinclair.  Her work looks like this:

Most of Paleologou’s work that I’ve seen features this kind of nocturnal cityscapes in London, Athens, and for one project Hastings.  Her books and collections have titles like Mean City and Tales of Estrangement and at least one of the sources I’ve read describes the spaces she depicts as nightmarish, but I don’t find them that way.  I don’t even find them especially mean or estranged.  I just like them is all.

 

It seems that a fair amount of walking must have been involved in taking these pictures, and we know that nocturnal wandering is a very different thing for women than for men; the nocturnal flaneuse seems to be a special category within the ranks of flaneuses.

 

Paleologouis in some sense a street photographer: if you’re an urban walker and you take photographs you’re likely to be a street photographer one way or another.  

 

On many days of the week I think street photography is a dying form, which seems a terrible shame and means that that many of photographers I like - Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, Vivian Maier, Bruce Gilden, Helen Levitt, Daidō Moriyama - may be the end of a certain line.

People are increasingly touchy about those who brandish a camera in the street, with its overtones of intrusion, stalking and sexual harassment.  And when it comes to children -fuggedaboutit:

Helen Levitt

Of course taking photographs at night when the streets are empty is one way of getting past all that.  And in any case it must be as Joe Jackson put it, ‘It’s Different for Girls.’

Therefore I was pleased to discover the work of a ‘global community named Women Street Photographers  - there’s an Instagram account and a website. Some of the work seems to stretch the definition of ‘street photography’ but no doubt that’s the point.

Here’s a great picture by Marisa Popovic titled 'Mrs. "Sarma", Skopje, North Macedonia,' 2019.

 

There may be life in the old form yet.

https://www.womenstreetphotographers.com/photographers-ii

 

WALKING WITH NICHOLSONS

 As I walk through the world I like to think I appreciate the built environment as much as 

the natural environment.  If I had to choose one or other I’d probably go for the former 

but fortunately I don’t have to choose.

 

And I’m always particularly taken by the way the built environment and the natural world come together, even if in some ways they’re in conflict.  Sometimes these may be highly organized and sophisticated and ways but I prefer something a bit more ad hoc – an overgrown house for instance.

 

But the form I like best like is where a single manmade upright, say a telephone pole, a lamppost or a street sign, becomes a support for a creeper or a climber, more often that not ivy.

 

This one’s in Stroud:

This one’s in Dovercourt:

 

This one’s under the pedestrian bridge by the station in Colchester:

 

This one’s in the Hollywood Hills:

And here’s an odd one in Holland Park:

 

In this case the upright is supporting a security camera and although I can understand why the powers that be would want something to grow up it and look ‘natural,’ – I have a suspicion that the ‘ivy’ growing here may be fake. Given the security camera I thought it best not to walk across the grass and investigate.  But it obviously belongs to the same breed.

 

As far as I’m aware there’s no name for this phenomenon and so, unless somebody knows the ‘proper’ term, I’m going to claim this as ‘The Nicholson.’  

Now all I need is for the rest of the world to accept it.  

SOCIETY WALKING

     Here’s a book you might like, though perhaps you know it already: it was published in 2016.

 It’s The Wander Society by Keri Smith, who describes herself on her website as ‘Artist, polymath, illustrator, explorer, conceptual thinker, subverter, mystic, obsessive researcher, reader, querent, introverted, experimenter, honest, curious, maker, defender of trees, defender of human rights, phenomenologist, philosopher, autodidact, LGBTQIA+ ally, inventor.’

         Sounds like a full life. 

 

The book’s McGuffin is that Smith bought a secondhand copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and found it contained annotations such as ‘WW will show you the way,’ ‘Solvitur Ambulando,’ along with the name of the Wander Society and its lightning bolt symbol.

 

         In due course she sleuthed out more information, became a member, and she thinks that you, the reader, might want to do the same.

         The conceit is sustained online by a modest Wander Society website, and the book comes with a quasi-academic introduction by the, I assume, fictional Professor J. Tindleman.

 

         The book is a handsome object containing texts, manifestos, graphic art, photographs, diagrams, meditations, suggested ways of walking (some familiar, some not), quotations from walkers and wanderers, booklists of recommended reading.  And yes, you will find Nicholson’s The Lost Art of Walking in the same list as Perec, Sebald, Dickens, Gary Snyder and Nick Papadimitriou, among others.  Cool.

 

     Some of the ideas may be familiar to experienced walkers, not to say psychogeographers, but of course walking and wandering are not quite the same thing, and Smith assures us it’s OK to wander via the imagination or literature.

         

I was very taken by a section titled ‘Slow Walking’ in which Smith says, ‘Slow down your pace to at least half speed, slower if you can … There is no need to speed up.  Everything you need is right here.’

At a time when I constantly read about the many health benefits of walking ‘briskly’ I find this wonderfully refreshing.

Then, as luck or fate would have it, quite unconnected with Keri Smith as far as I’m aware, I came come across this photograph on the Instagram feed of artist Robert Bean.  (Hi Robert!).

 

Both he and Keri Smith are Canadian though I don’t know if that’s at all significant.

I assume those carved shoes are ‘simply’ art or decoration, but after reading Keri Smith I can’t help wondering if it’s the symbol of some clandestine organisation of walkers, or possibly of shoe fetishists.  I’m no conspiracy theorist but I do like the idea of a universe of secret societies, none of which (I assume) would want me as a member.

 

 

 

HARD WALKING

 We know that all great enterprises, not least great walking enterprises, contain elements of danger and absurdity. Even so, walking 4000 miles from Spain to Qatar, for the World Cup does seem to be asking for trouble.

But that 4000 mile walk is what Santiago Sanchez (that's him above on the right) is doing, or at least was doing, and let’s hope he’ll soon be in a position to continue doing it.

 

In fact that route does look, in some sense, ‘walkable.’ Google maps suggested this way if going by car but says ‘Sorry, we could not calculate the walking directions.'

 

As you will see, it doesn’t require going through Iran, but it seems that Sanchez took a detour there and he ‘disappeared’ at the beginning of October, which in modern parlance means that he stopped posting on Instagram: the last one was dated October 1^st.

It now appears that the detour took him to the grave of Mahsa Amini, the young woman whose death in police custody gave rise to the current anti-government protest movement in Iran.

Credible sources now suggest that Sanchez was arrested at the graveside by security forces and is being held in a detention centre in Sanandaj, capital of Kurdistan Province in western Iran, a fine-looking place if you're not in a detention centre.

Last week Sanchez's mother, Celia Cogedor, told The Associated Press that she’d heard from the Spanish foreign ministry that there was 'a 99% chance he (was) arrested.’ 'We are filled with hope,' she added.

It seems a strange state of affairs when you’re hoping that your boy is incarcerated in an Iranian prison but I’m sure we all feel the same way,  considering the alternatives.

 

My hopes are with him and his mother, and indeed with all walkers who like their walking to contain risk, even if I myself am a complete wimp in these matters.  Walk on brother.  Enjoy the football when you get to Qatar.

39 AND COUNTING

   

This is from John Buchan’s 1914 novel The Thirty-Nine Steps.  The narrator is Richard Hannay.

‘The night was fine and clear as I walked back to the flat I had hired near Portland Place. The crowd surged past me on the pavements, busy and chattering, and I envied the people for having something to do. These shop-girls and clerks and dandies and policemen had some interest in life that kept them going. I gave half-a-crown to a beggar because I saw him yawn; he was a fellow-sufferer. At Oxford Circus I looked up into the spring sky and I made a vow. I would give the Old Country another day to fit me into something; if nothing happened, I would take the next boat for the Cape.’

 

The ‘real’ job I held down longest was managing the paperback department of a bookshop near Oxford Circus.  Most days I walked up Portland Place on my way to work, and I walked down Portland Place on my way home.  Sometimes I walked up and down it at lunchtime.  I was often bored and unhappy in my job, but I never thought of taking a boat to the Cape. That, I think, was because of lack of funds rather than lack of imagination.

                                                                     *

Most people these days know The Thirty-Nine Steps as a film rather than a book – and the best known, I think is the Alfred Hitchcock version of 1935. Mr. Memory is the invention of Hitchcock and/or his scriptwriter Charles Bennett, credited on imdb with ‘adaptation.’

This is from the Kenneth More version:

 

         The Thirty-Nine Steps is a long way from being a walking book, though there’s a good deal of trudging over the Scottish moors while being pursued, sometimes by an aircraft (not entirely unlike Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, 24 years later), and most of the action takes place a long way from London.  But there’s also this London-centric passage from an early chapter.

 

‘I felt curiously at a loose end … I went to the Savoy and ordered very carefully a very good luncheon, and then smoked the best cigar the house could provide. But I was still feeling nervous. When I saw anybody look at me in the lounge, I grew shy, and wondered if they were thinking about the murder.

‘After that I took a taxi and drove miles away up into North London. I walked back through fields and lines of villas and terraces and then slums and mean streets, and it took me pretty nearly two hours. All the while my restlessness was growing worse.’ 

 

         I think we can safely assume that Richard Hannay was a brisk walker, so that a two hour walk would cover, say, 8 miles.  So where did he go in the taxi? Where did he start walking? Hendon?  Upper Edmonton? Bounds Green?  I wish he’d told us more precisely, then we could walk in his fictional literary footsteps.

 

         Incidentally, when Buchan attended Kirkcaldy High School, he had to walk three miles there and three miles home.  That’ll build character in a boy. Today there is the John Buchan Way, a 13 mile walk between Broughton and Peebles.  That’s quite a lot of steps.

            Here is John Buchan, not walking, though looking ready to walk.