WALKING WITH SEMI-DERELICTION

 I was walking in Stratford, the one in London, not the one upon Avon.  I had my reasons.  Stratford is usually just a place I just pass through on the train but this time I walked its streets and I was glad I did.

 

Stratford shows the world a face that is shiny, glossy, modern, sky-scraperish, zestily architectural, and the buildings have names like The Stratosphere Tower, the Unex Tower, the Legacy Tower, and many more besides, some still in the process of being built.

 

At this point I couldn’t tell you which building is which but collectively they make for some elegantly dramatic backgrounds for the urban pedestrian.  And nearby of course there are towers that are less shiny and glossy – for example the Carpenters Estate, old style council housing, though (as is the way of these things) it’s currently being restored and regenerated: a billion pound rebuild delivering 2022 homes.  You do the maths.

 

And I found myself walking past James Riley Point, part of the Carpenters Estate, which was in an elegant state of decay. It’s described by the architects currently working on it as a “23-storey semi-derelict residential tower” – and this one, they say, is not only being restored and regenerated, but actually reinvented.  Oh boy.

 

I was able to meander around the tower at ground level – I love a bit of ruin, or indeed semi-dereliction - and saw these curious and mysterious objects set into the ground.  Can anybody tell me what they are/were?

 

And I was able to look up at the pebble dashing on the building (I don’t think we’d call it cladding but I could be wrong) – some of which was obviously falling off and there were big lumps of it lying on the ground nearby.

 

Now being a scavenger, curator, collector and occasional recycler I was keen to pick up a lump of the stuff and take it back to the Nicholson Archive. But the lump I wanted was too big and heavy. and I was on foot and had somewhere else to be. If I’d had a car with me it might all have been very different. 

 

And as night drew in I wandered a little further, and I think you know that much as I love a good tower block, I enjoy a good obelisk even more.  And there on the Broadway was/is the Samuel Gurney Memorial, strangely out of place in its current surroundings but nothing wrong with that:

 

Now, need I say that I had never heard of Samuel Gurney but it turns out he was a banker, philanthropist, and MP, pro-penal reform, anti-slavery, anti-capital punishment, and apparently an all round good egg. He died in 1856 and the obelisk was erected in 1861, it’s also a drinking fountain.

        Now, I imagine the billion pound rebuild may contain the odd "hydration station," but I’ll bet it doesn’t contain any new obelisks.  I’d love to be proved wrong.

 

 

 

THE WELL WORN WALKER

A.E. Housman is not an open book to me, and much of what I know about him comes from an essay I read by Alan Bennett. And the most interesting thing in that essay runs as follows, “At Cambridge, where he was professor of Latin, he took a daily walk and after it would change all his underwear – a habit he shared with Swinburne.”

The curious part of that sentence is the word “all.” Just how much, how many kinds, of underwear did he (or they) wear?  More than just vest and underpants?  Combinations? Drawers? Something more exotic?  This kind of thing?

 

        

 

If a work of statuary can be believed, Housman did look like a walker.

Swinburne on the other hand looks like a man who’s got his knickers in a twist.  

Though this is how Swinburne looks in a portrait by Robert M.B. Paxton, at the National Portrait Gallery, which is much more persuasive.

Alan Bennett does look convincingly like a walker.  

His underwear arrangements, to date, must remain a private matter, and personally I prefer it that way.

GONE FOR A BURTON

I’ve been walking in Dublin.  I was there for the 7^thSir Richard Francis Burton Conference, where my pal Anthony Miller and I were presenting a paper (possibly just having an on stage conversation) under the title “Burton as Psychogeographer and Walker.” We looked like this: 

 

PHOTO BY CAROLINE GANNON

I don’t think there was anything controversial about this paper.  Most travelers are psychogeographers to the extent that they “study (or at least experience) the effects of the geographical environment, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.”  And one way or another they often end up doing a fair amount of walking, when the car breaks down, when the bus drops you off in the wrong place, or in Burton’s case when the camel dies under you.  This is Burton walking in his own garden in Trieste - I guess he had to hold still for the camera.

 

I’d thought there must be some connection to be made between Burton and Joyce, and no doubt there is, but as part of my research I tracked down an entry in Harold Nicolson’s diary dated 30^thJuly 1931. Nicolson was lunching with a group of literati including his publisher from Putnam, in order to meet James Joyce.  Joyce was “not a very convenient guest at luncheon” and they struggled for conversation.  

Knowing that Joyce had lived in Trieste where Burton had once been consul, one of the guests, Desmond McCarthy, asked Joyce, “Are you interested in Burton?”

“Not in the very least,” Joyce replied.

 

Still, the conference gave me, and everyone else, plenty of time for walking around the city, and it seems hard to go anywhere without getting the feeling that you’re walking in Joyce’s footsteps, which is no bad thing.

A walker doesn’t necessarily need a project but, I found myself noticing and photographing various “establishments,” whether in business or abandoned or somewhere in between, and in some cases I managed to photograph other walkers, walking past these places.  This kind of thing:

Of course we psychogeographers do love a good map and it was easy to find free maps in Dublin, offered by various tourist attractions but this one, not free, and very hard to slip into your pocket, is one of the best 3-D maps I’ve even seen, metal and stone, about two feet across, depicting (unless I'm mistaken) the outline of Dublin Castle.  I mean you probably wouldn’t use it to get anywhere but as a topographical object it’s hard to beat.

Oh and here’s a thing you might like.  As discussed earlier elsewhere, if you go to the Burton archive at Orleans House in Richmond you’ll see a plaster caster of one of Burton’s hands and one of his feet.

 

And if you were drifting around the Dublin streets up by the Glasnevin Cemetery, you might well see this cast of a foot in the window of a shop called Crafty Studio. 

 

Coincidence?  Synchronicity?  The universe sending me a message?  Nah, there’s no such thing.

 

WALKING AND DIFFERENCE

 This is a photograph of Jaques Derrida walking:

Derrida has been on my mind, well, more than usual, because I just read a review in the LRB, 10 October 2024, by Jonathan Rée, discussing the recent translations of Derrida’s  Hospitality, Volumes 1 and 2.

 

Rée writes “Derrida had a marvellous literary range, and a sharp eye for details that might elude the rest of us.  (Reading him reminds me of taking a walk with a friend who will spot a ghost orchid, a heath fritillary and an alpine swift while I am just enjoying a companionable stroll.”

 

This is a ghost orchid:

This is a heath fritillary: 

 

This is an alpine swift:

Speaking as someone who couldn’t identify any of those things, I do wonder whether it might not be rather annoying to walk with somebody who was constantly pointing out things that I didn’t recognize.  

Though I suppose being with Derrida might create other irritations, such as his obvious vulnerability outside off stump.

WALKING WITH ADDITIONS

 

A note comes over the transom from Jane Freeman, one of my regular correspondents, also walker and top artist (she did some extraordinary pictures inspired by Jane Eyre) like this, 

 

“Thank you, Mr. Rochester, for your great kindness. I am strangely glad to get back again to you: and wherever you are is my home—my only home.” 

I walked on so fast that even he could hardly have overtaken me had he tried.

 

Jane reminds me about William Burroughs' ‘psychogeographic practice’ described as ‘Walking on Colours.’

Let Old Bill explain,“Pick out all the reds on a street, focusing only on red objects–brick, lights, sweaters, signs. Shift to green, blue, orange, yellow. Notice how the colors begin to stand out more sharply of their own accord. I was walking on yellow when I saw a yellow amphibious jeep near the corner of 94th Street and Central Park West. It was called the Thing. This reminded me of the Thing I knew in Mexico. He was nearly seven feet tall and had played the Thing in a horror movie of the same name, and everybody called him the Thing, though his name was James Arness.  I hadn’t thought about the Thing in twenty years, and would not have thought about him except walking on yellow at that particular moment.”  This is James Arness:

 

(The Thing of course is a Volkswagen Type 181, and if you think that sucker is amphibious, well good luck)

         

A lot the time I think I’m ‘over’ Burroughs, but then I reread something like that I think I’m not so over him after all. That passage is from “Ten Years and a Billion Dollars” and appears in The Adding Machine: Selected Essays, 1985.  This is a man with an actual Burroughs adding machine:

I’ve never done the walking on colours thing and I suppose I’m unlikely to, being red/green colour blind.  I’d be following what I thought was a red fire engine and then I’d suddenly realize, or somebody would tell me, I was actually following a green bus.  I exaggerate, but only a little.

 

Admittedly blue and yellow should be less of a problem.