I set off to try to see an exhibition of photographs by Paul Thompson, of coastal navigation markers, in a gallery close to Old Street. This kind of thing:
But when I got there the place was locked up, and peering in through the windows it definitely didn’t look like there was an exhibition of coastal navigation markers inside.
I’d seen these markers from time to time and hadn’t known what they were: they looked like baskets you might light a fire in. though I never saw one that looked like it had had a fire in it recently. I’d also read that Paul Thompson had done a lot of walking while making these photographs, and if I’d got in and if there’d been anybody to talk to, I’d have asked about the walking aspect, but no, there was none of that.
I was disappointed but not devastated, because I knew I was right by Bunhill Fields, the Noncomformist cemetery, burial place of John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe and William Blake. This is John Bunyan, with pigeon:
I’d been there before and I’d even taken a picture of the Daniel Defoe memorial, and yes I did remember it was an obelisk.
But back then I wasn’t the obelisk obsessive I am today, and now the whole place looks like obelisk central.
I walked around for as long as seemed decent, though you can’t actually walk among the graves, and then I went back to Old Street station. And here’s a thing – the entrance to the Tube has become vaguely Tokyo-esque. I mean there’s no Michelin-starred sushi bar, but there are places to eat and drink, places to buy stuff and even a bookshop – Camden Lock Books, which was great, and they had a pile of Merlin Coverley’s Occult London, which I’ve always been meaning to buy, and it was now reduced in price, so I bought a copy and I do hope the author gets some royalties.
Coverley has also been known to write about walking and psychogeography, and in Occult London he (inevitably) quotes Iain Sinclair:
“The triangle of concentration. A sense of this and all the other triangulations of the city: Blake, Bunyan, Defoe, the dissenting monuments in Bunhil Fields. Everything I believe in, everything London can do to you, starts here.”
I had read that before, of course, and it had, and still does, leave me with the big question: where in the world does everything I believe in start? I have been thinking about this for years. I’m still thinking.
Anyway, here’s Paul Thompson’s website: https://www.paulthompsonstudio.com
