MODESTY FORBIDS, VANITY COMPELS

My pal and fellow writer David Belbin was staying in the INK hotel in Amsterdam, which describes itself as – “a bohemian lifestyle hotel where the traditional rules of hospitality are freely translated to the modern day, writing a contemporary story in INK.”   There in the room, David tells me, perhaps in all the rooms, was a copy of the Soft Atlas of Amsterdam by Jan Rothuizen, a book of hand drawn, very personal, annotated maps of the city, though also usable (I imagine) for getting around.  

Not only that, the walls had wallpaper based on drawings from the book.  As an occasional map obsessive this sounds like a fine idea to me. What could make it finer?  Why the appearance of Nicholson.  I'm not absolutely sure if I'm on the walls, but definitely in the book.  Rothuizen bought a copy of my Lost Art of Walking -  it says so!!

I can hardly tell you how chuffed I am by this.  Writers are simple creatures.  We toil in melancholy darkness, and very small things can sometimes make us very happy, and this is absolutely one of them.  Thanks to David and to the hotel, and even more to Jan Rothuizen.

Naturally I did some research.  Rothuizen is everywhere, not only in Amsterdam, Tokyo, Colombia, drawing, map-making and walking, but also in London where he had a rat thrown at him.  I know this after watching a TED talk he did (available online) in which he talks about walking in New York, “This has to do with the hierarchy of information like I would see things, think about memories, I would hear songs, there were a lot of different things going on at the same time and I thought this was very worthwhile but also very rich.”

Yes, this is what we do, some of us.  And I was feeling very good to have discovered a fellow-traveler, and one that was a new name to me, but then – knock me down with a feather – it clicked and I suddenly realized I haveseen his work before, and that the two of us can be found between the covers of this book, edited by the very wonderful Katharine Harmon.

It’s a small world, unless you decided to walk it all.

ALWAYS BEST TO KEEP AN EYE OUT FOR THE A23

WHEN IN DOUBT QUOTE DE CERTEAU

From The Practice of Everyday Life, of course.

‘The ordinary practitioners of the city live “down below,” down below the threshold at which visibility begins. They walk – an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmanner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘”text” they write without being able to read it … The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author not spectator, shaped by fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other.’

I think from you could argue that in fact there are spectators of this manifiold story  - has he never heard of 'people watching' - but you know, who’d want to get into an argument with Michel de Certeau?

THE FORECASTLE WALK

I’ve been reading GK Chesterton’s English Journey, ‘being a rambling but truthful account of what one man saw and heard and felt and thought during a journey through England during the autumn of the year 1933,’ published a year later.

Chesterton doesn’t look like much of a walker from the photographs I’ve seen of him:

Nevertheless, the book has him doing a fair bit of walking.  He finds himself in Liverpool and is given a walking tour by a local vicar.

‘We set out to explore this queer parish of his, which was in the very middle of Liverpool’s more picturesque and exotic slums, populated by the human flotsam and jetsam of a great seaport.  We had not gone twenty yards when he pointed his stick at some figures mooching in the square.  “I call that the fo’c’sle walk,” he remarked.  “Old sailors. Just watch them. You see? A few short paces one way, then the same number back again.  They do it all day.  It’s the result of spending years in ships.  Yes, that’s the fo’c’sle walk.”  We passed near the men and he waved a greeting with his stick.’

         I had never heard of the fo’c’sle walk before.

Later Chesterton is in Blackpool, about which he has ambivalent feelings (as do most of us). ‘If you do not like industrial democracy, you will not like Blackpool,’ he writes, and although he does like industrial democracy (as do most of us) he doesn’t find Blackpool a very joyous place.   He goes for a ‘sharp walk’ along the prom in bad weather.  ‘I trudged on like some purposeful little insect moving along a dark wet shelf.’  

         This sounds very, very familiar from my boyhood visits to Blackpool.  My memories have not been colorized, unlike this postcard:

And some other wise words from Mr C:

THE KING'S RIBBON

I like maps and you like maps, of course we do, otherwise we wouldn’t be such good friends.  And if you’re a regular reader with a moderately good memory you may recall this pic of me unfurling a map I bought in Tokyo, showing the whole of Japan:

I suppose it’s a kind of ribbon map, but I’m sure the Japanese have a much better word of their own for it.

And here’s an 1866 ribbon map of the Mississippi that appeared on Atlas Obscura recently, from the David Rumsey Map Collection.  It’s eleven feet long and three inches wide, totally pocket-sized, and its title is Ribbon Map of the Father of The Waters.

Now that I’m temporarily living in Chelsea, in London, every time I walk up to the tube station I pass, and in some cases walk over, this map set in the ground near to Duke of York Square:

If there’s any onsite information explaining the map I’ve yet to find it.  It’s near to the Saatchi Gallery so it might be a work of contemporary art, but I can neither confirm or deny that.

However, digging around online I did find this map on the National Archives website.  

Paper and concrete versions aren’t identical, not least in the variant spellings of Majesty’s and road, but they're close.

The paper map dates from 1830, but according to the National Archives  it shows King’s Road (nobody seems to care either way about the apostrophe) as it was in the early 18^thcentury.  Before that, King’s Road, was the road belonging to the King, in this case Charles II, for the use of the royal family, travelling between London and the out of London palaces.  I don't suppose they walked.

1830 was the year it cased to be a private road and became a public highway, but from 1720 or it had been a toll road that the public could use if they paid for the privilege.  So the map is a kind of route finder and a guide to the fare stages.

In vaguely-related matters, a few weeks back I picked up, for a quid, a copy of the Ladybird Book, Understanding Maps.  No mention of ribbon maps, but there is this totally wonderful guide to help you understand gradients: