NICHOLSON, DESTROYER OF CITIES

If you’re going to walk all the way around a city, it helps (in once sense) if that city is small.  On the other hand, all the great cities are big, and all the great walks are long. So perhaps some miniaturization is what’s required.

This is a model of Chicago I saw last month, in the Chicago Architecture Center, in a Mies van de Rohe building on upper Wacker Drive.

And this a model of London which is in the Building Center, in Store Street, “a bud for the built environment” since 1932.

The Chicago one even changes color:

I love miniaturization; model buildings, model railways, miniature golf courses.  

It makes me feel a bit like Gulliver and a bit like Godzilla.  I know I could destroy large areas of the tiny city long before any security could get there.  But I don’t do any destroying.  I just walk around.

Here's a picture of Mies van Der Rohe walking with Le Corbusier.  Oh the laughs there must have been.  

And here's another bloke who liked a bit of miniaturization:

AMBIGUITY - HOW MANY TYPES YA GOT?

“I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.”

That’s Henry Miller, the opening lines of Tropic of Cancer, an author and a book I used to spend a lot of time thinking about. I don’t anymore but those lines have evidently stayed with me.  This is a picture of Miller walking (more or less), I think in Brooklyn.  

For my own part, I am living, or at least staying for a couple of weeks, in an Airbnb, in Endsleigh Court, in Bloomsbury.  

The place is indeed very clean, and I can place the chairs wherever I want.  I am certainly alone, but the feelings of wanting to be dead are becoming rarer.  My therapist has views on this.

        Some would say that everybody needs therapy.

       One great thing about Endsleigh Court, since I’m on the 7^thfloor, is that you can look out of the window, down into the street, and at certain times of day the walkers in Upper Woburn Place, are very beautifully lit (or backlit).

         You know, in general I find that whole Bloomsbury Group franchise thing pretty insufferable.  And I’m sure the feeling would have been mutual.  If there were some shift in the space/time continuum and Virginia Woolf actually met me, I’m sure she’d have thought I was the kind of oik who should be taken down a dark Bloomsbury alley and given a good kicking.  Hard to imagine which member of the Bloomsbury Group could have done that: maybe Vanessa Bell.

Still, you can’t object to a geographical area simply on the basis of who used to live there.  Bloomsbury is a very decent area to walk around.  It may lack the grit and grime of the most interesting areas of London but it’s full of curiosities, and you can’t have grit and grime all the time.  

There are blue plaques everywhere, Dickens, Darwin, Dorothy L. Sayers, as well the whole Bloomsbury Bunch.  But this one’s very special:

Empson was the author of Seven Types of Ambiguity, and given that he taught in Tokyo and Peking, he might have been enough of an orientalist to appreciate the Bangladesh connection. 

Empson was also, by adoption, another Sheffield lad, teaching at the university for the best part of 20 years – 1954 to 1972.  He had a bunker-slash-man cave in the basement of 17 Wharncliffe Road. 

Sheffield has always been an essentially tolerant city but the idea that a man could walk its streets with a beard like Empson's and not have the dogs set on him, suggests that the city used to be even more tolerant than I imagined.

Anyway, back in Bloomsbury, my Airbnb is close to one of my favorite London buildings, the Mary Ward House:

And I am suddenly reminded, though I never exactly forgot, of an odd and brief period in my life when I was dating a woman who was a doctor.  She was very accomplished, and obviously smart, saving lives wherever she went, from Nottingham to Lesotho and back again.  So she came down to London and we walked around and we were having a good enough time as far as I could tell, and we walked past the Mary Ward Centre and I said it was one of my favorite London buildings and she looked at me as though I was an idiot, and said something along the lines of “How can anybody have a favorite building?”  

        She found it both absurd and incomprehensible that a person might walk around the built environment and have feelings about what he saw. I didn’t even try to explain. On that same day we walked down to the ICA where there was an exhibition that included Meret Oppenheim’s Object which I said I found really great.

My date, the doctor, did not. You can imagine how well this relationship went. 

Meret in playful mood.

 A last thought about William Empson, from Kenneth Lo, the chef, who was (apparently) Empson’s lodger when they both lived in Hampstead. Lo said that “William was one step removed from contemporary reality and seemed to stroll through life unhindered by its troublesome details.”  Lucky old William, you might say.

A MAN IMPROVED

Strange as it may seem, I was in Bradfield in the Peak District at the weekend.  I was there for an event titled “Walking Through Time: A celebration of Sheffield’s Walking Heritage.”  It was organized by my cousin Margaret and her husband Chris.  I hadn’t seen either of them in a very long time, and I’ve never knew them all that well, but over the years they’ve become keen walkers it seems.

Bradfield, if the local literature is to be believed, “is probably the largest civil Parish in England covering 56 square miles, with over 100 miles of public footpaths,” and it has a boundary walk that’s pretty much 50 miles long. 

There were talks in the village hall about the local wildlife, and rights for walkers including one by a former local MP on the Countryside and Rights of Way (CROW) Act, and there was music from a group called Clarion Call, singing songs about rambling. I was there to do my party piece about walking and trespassing with my dad. 

This guy was there (Terry Howard) - a man you tend to remember:

and so were these two:

This is cousin Margaret, me, and the man on the right is top, Sheffield-based photographer Berris Conolly.

The event didn’t in itself require any actual walking, so between acts I meandered from Low Bradfield to High Bradfield and back, which took me to St Nicholas’s Church which among other attractions has this very, very fine gargoyle:

Back in the village hall there were people selling books, one fellow selling old photographs and postcards of the area, and Terry Howard was selling off the stock from the now defunct Sheffield Clarion Ramblers, including this lovely little volume (about two inches by three) which I bought, produced in the 1950s, still in amazingly good condition, with a fold out map at the back:

And best of all is that line on the front of the book, “The man who was never lost, never went very far,” attributed to GBH (Bert) Ward, who was a local steelworker and walking activist.  It's a sentiment currently very popular with people who call themselves psychogeographers (and even Rebecca Solnit), but the date here is 1952/3 which is interestingly close to the year that Guy DeBord published his “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography” – 1955.

And – (and now set your face to stun) – 1955 was also the year that Chet Baker released the album Chet Baker Sings and Plays containing the song “Let’s Get Lost.”  And lord knows Baker was a man who, for a significant amount of time, lost himself quite spectacularly.

“Ee by gum” as somebody probably said at some time in Bradfield.  

The "Walking Through Time" event raised 310 quid for the restoration of local stiles.  I actually thought the local stiles were pretty wonderful as they were, but no doubt it would be better if there were more or them:

PRAYER WALKS

After the best part of two days on the train to Chicago I decided to walk the mile or so from the station to the hotel – I was carrying very little luggage, as is my way.

I was trying to get to Congress Avenue. The map made it look easy to find, which was just as well because I didn’t want to have to say to somebody, “Excuse me, I’m looking for Congress.”  

As I walked I saw plenty of “street people” on the streets.  In LA we’re used to seeing tents and improvised shelters on the sidewalks, and I couldn’t tell you if these guys hanging out were homeless or not.  Some were certainly what we used to call panhandlers, but some of these guys seemed more interested in talking to each other that approaching passersby.  But as I passed a small group of men at a corner one of then said very loudly, “Motherfucker!” I couldn’t tell whether he was addressing me or the universe in general.  I chose to believe the latter, but I speeded up in any case.

That was not my best walking moment in Chicago, but this was, at the Art  Chicago Institute there was this, an installation by James Webb titled Prayer:

It involves a long broad stretch of carpet with loudspeakers embedded in it, and you experienced the work by taking your shoes off and walking among the speakers each of which is broadcasting a prayer from a different faiths. As you walk you can stop and concentrate on one message or listen simultaneously to two or to many of them in a cacophony.

Apparently some people kneel or even lie on the carpet, but I didn't see any of that, and for quite a bit of the time I was the only one in the time I was there I was the only there, at least until these gals arrived.

WALKING BY TRAIN

I went by train from LA to Chicago: it took 45 hours or so on the Southwest Chief.  I knew I’d do plenty of walking when I got to Chicago but on the train the walking opportunities (obviously) are strictly limited.  

You can walk to the toilet, to the observation car, to the cafe or the dining car but this isn’t real walking, (again obviously).  The train conductor also made many doom-laden announcements about the dangers of walking around the train without shoes.
      And very occasionally you can look out the window and see somebody walking alongside the tracks or along the station platform, but that doesn’t seem very real either. 

However there's lots of opportunity for reading, and I had a copy of the New York Review of Books with me, and in 45 hours you can read every single word of it, including the slightly sniffy review by Ian Jack of Iain Sinclair’s The Last London.  I have only ever seen Ian Jack from a distance and frankly he didn’t look like much of a walker, which may explain something:

In the review he writes, 

“As a playful way of exploring and interpreting urban environments, psychogeography has a history in both England and France that goes back to the 1950s and the Situationism of Guy Debord, but it was Sinclair who resurrected it as a popular, or at least a fashionable, idea. Like ley lines (discovered or invented in 1921), psychogeography wasn’t designed to survive rational scrutiny …”

I think that’s pretty good, especially in a review that is essentially positive, and especially since it echoes my own prejudices about psychogeography and ley lines.