So I have decided to keep a diary of my London walks; nothing too ambitious, nothing too pretentious. I’m simply going to describe what I see, although of course I know that the process of seeing is a highly selective one. What I see will reveal as much about me as about London.
At first I thought I might make an entry for every single street in London, set down what I observed in each one, what was special and unique about it. But I immediately realized the folly of that. You can’t force it. You can’t make yourself see things. There’ll be unremarkable streets where I see nothing worth remarking on. That’s fine. London has to offer itself up to me and I have to offer myself to London.
I have decided that I shan’t write anything down while I’m actually doing the walks. I shan’t be taking notes. I don’t want to look like a spy or a journalist, and I don’t want the act of note-taking to get in the way of seeing. Then, when I get home, I’ll type up my recollections of the day as best I can. I only want to remember what I remember. If I forget things, then so be it.
Once the information is on disk I’ll find a place to hide it, somewhere that prying eyes like Anita’s can’t find it. Why this urge for secrecy? I’m not sure, but it feels very real. For that matter, I wonder why Samuel Pepys wrote his diary in code? I’ll check on that.
*
Oxford Street – Not my favourite bit of London but this enterprise is not about playing favourites. De Quincey refers to it as a stony-hearted stepmother who drinks the tears of children, which I think is going a bit far. Certainly on this weekday morning Oxford Street was completely free of children. At nine-thirty few of the shops were open. Outside the shoe shops staff were waiting for their bosses to arrive with their keys to let them in. In a doorway two homeless men were in sleeping-bags, fast asleep, showing no signs of waking despite the daylight and the presence of people. You’d have thought the homeless would be early risers.
Outside Tottenham Court Road tube station a dark girl, maybe Spanish, maybe Italian, was handing out leaflets advertising a language school. She gave one to an old, stocky, grey-haired Londoner who looked at the leaflet and reacted furiously.
‘You’re telling me to learn English?’ he ranted. ‘You’re telling me?’
The girl who’d handed him the card didn’t know what he was talking about. Maybe she didn’t even know what he was saying.
A young black man with a woolly hat and sunglasses came down the street making odd movements with his left hand, a strange sort of action somewhere between mime and martial arts, and he was talking to some invisible companion as he walked along. When he got level with me he half looked at me and said, ‘That’s all right!!’ and swept away.
I saw a man in a tam-o’-shanter. And a boy in a long, dark sinister-looking mac whose head was shaved except for a turd-shaped lump of blue hair on the very top of his skull. He looked like a maniac yet he was with a girl dressed in perfectly ordinary clothes, looking like a secretary, though she was carrying a yellow balloon on a stick.
A sad-looking, camp young man with a pierced ear and nose was holding a Polaroid camera, trying to get a picture of the window display in Top Shop. He was waiting not very patiently. There was a stream of people passing by. You couldn’t imagine when he’d ever get a clear shot.
At Oxford Circus a little Hare Krishna procession with an amazingly mixed group of people, painfully skinny young lads, a very county-looking woman, a fat middle-aged Asian man in a suit and overcoat.
A well-dressed man with a light Australian accent was handing out leaflets. He said, ‘I’m giving these to people who are into health and beauty around the world.’ But he didn’t give one to me.
I realized there were more bureaux de change in Oxford Street than you would ever have imagined possible, tucked into tiny thin premises no wider than a doorway.
There was an ‘authentic Indian buffet’ advertised at the Cumberland Hotel.
Outside Littlewoods there was a busker playing an accordion. In front of him was a strong metal collecting box with the word ‘Blind’ painted neatly on it in four-inch-high letters. I noticed the box was chained to the man, to make sure someone didn’t steal it from him. Are there really people in the world who’d steal money from a blind busker? Then I realized of course there are. Thousands of people. There are people who’d steal his money, his accordion, his white stick, his guide dog, his false teeth.
Finally Marble Arch, which I couldn’t see at first because the traffic was so dense and blocking the view. The arch looked monstrous vet unimpressive, run aground on a traffic island, surrounded by the swirl of buses and cars.
This part of Oxford Street, formerly Tyburn Road, was the end of the route along which prisoners were brought to their place of execution, an obscene parade, the road lined with drunken, jeering crowds who threw stones and dirt and dung at the condemned, there but for the grace of God. Maybe De Quincey was right.
*
I walked along Chester Row, not far from Sloane Square. Charles Dickens used to live at number one, and T. S. Eliot used to live at number five. I don’t know if Thomas Stearns was much of a walker, but he could definitely describe the experience of walking home late at night through certain half-deserted streets.
Dickens too was something of a night walker. He wrote an essay called ‘Night Walks’ in which he described the noise of the city as a ‘distant ringing hum, as if the city were a glass, vibrating.’ When his father died he walked the city on three consecutive nights from dusk till dawn.
But Dickens was a walker, full stop, not just at night. In his era my daily ten miles would have been paltry stuff. People must have thought nothing of walking ten or fifteen miles just to go to work and back, but even by the standards of his day Dickens was an excessive, not to say obsessive walker. Friends who stayed with him would be invited out for a stroll and would return hours later, exhausted, Dickens having taken them twenty-odd miles and walked them into the ground. But he didn’t do it just to impress others. He did it because he needed to. At one point in his life he believed he had a moral duty to spend as many hours walking as he did writing.
And I’m not sure whether he used walking as a way of meditating on his feelings or as a way of escaping from them. Certainly he must have thought about his work and his characters as he walked, maybe he even found material he could use, so it wasn’t wasted time, but more than that he seems to have used walking as a way of driving away melancholy.
For myself, I’m not sure exactly what I feel as I walk. I’ve not got as much on my mind as Dickens had, and yet the walking has rather the opposite effect that it had on him. If anything, London amplifies my melancholy rather than rids me of it. Fortunately the act of writing about what I’ve seen then dispels the melancholy. Does this sound glib?
*
At the corner of St Swithin’s Lane and King William Street; the place where a hoard of Roman coins was discovered in 1840. They were forgeries, but Roman forgeries, eighty-nine silver denarii; but only silver plate, a thin veneer layered over copper. They dated from Boadicea’s time and had perhaps been buried for safe keeping, to be dug up later if only Boadicea hadn’t done such a thorough job.
In Fellows Road, NW3 (I’d call it Swiss Cottage but maybe it was Belsize Park), there was a gaping yellow skip in which a fridge, a cooker and a washing machine had been rather carefully deposited, lined up neatly, side by side. A man in a fiat cap came out of one of the houses carrying a gas fire which he placed painstakingly in the skip, being careful not to spoil the neatness of the design.
In Winchester Road I saw what from a distance looked like an art gallery showing miniature silver and gold sculptures, carefully arranged and spotlit on glass shelves. But when I got nearer I saw the shop was an architectural ironmonger’s and the ‘sculptures’ were gold and silver bath taps.
In Lambolle Road, a narrow street, cars parked tightly on both sides, I saw a sixties Cadillac convertible with its hood up, bright red, huge threatening fins. It was so large it looked too wide to get through the gap between the cars. But it did, making slow, stately progress, growling like a motorboat.
In Merton Rise I saw a building called Villa Henriette.
At the top end of the stretch of Finchley Road that runs from St John’s Wood to Swiss Cottage, the road became a sort of dual carriageway, but the median was no more than two feet wide. However that was wide enough for someone to have set himself up as a flower-seller, buckets of flowers arranged in the middle, selling to drivers of cars stopped at the traffic lights.
A little lower down the road, at a zebra crossing, there were bunches of flowers tied to the illuminated bollards and to the column of the Belisha beacon, and a yellow police accident sign that asked ‘Can You Help?’
I went to 7 Cavendish Avenue because I knew it belonged to Paul McCartney. It was a huge, forbidding, square house, with a high garden wall, solid green gates. There were closed white internal shutters at all the windows. It looked utterly uninhabited. I’d read there was a sun-house in the garden in the form of a geodesic dome, but the walls were too high to see in.
A little way down the road, one of the houses had a bust of a classical god in the window. It was bigger than human size, and maybe that was appropriate it being a god, but the bust had its back to the street and so you could look up into the rear of the head and see that it was completely hollow.
In Eamont Street there was a place called Gorky Park which advertised itself as a ‘cruise bar’. It was boarded up and available to let.
In Circus Road I saw a very smart woman in late middle age who was standing in the street not wearing a coat despite it being a cold day. A taxi pulled up, someone got out, and the woman ran over and I heard her say in very clear, clipped tones, ‘Excuse me could you tell me what day of the week it is. You see I’ve been abroad.’
In Broad Lawn, New Eltham, I saw a workman sitting in a van eating his lunch. I was surprised to see he was gnawing a raw carrot, which didn’t seem like standard workman’s fare. But then I saw the sign on the side of the van that said he was a piano tuner and that seemed perfectly in keeping.
In Mapesbury Road, Willesden, I saw six disused, uprooted telephone boxes lined up in the garden of a semi-detached house.
I walked down Waterloo Passage, Kilburn, a narrow lane behind the Iceland supermarket. There was a sign stating that this was a public walkway and rubbish wasn’t to be dumped there. Needless to say, it was almost impassable because of bags of rubbish. Someone had sprayed ‘IRA Wayne was here’ on a door. I hadn’t imagined that IRA members had names like Wayne.
Kilburn; a lot of people in the High Road looked beaten up by life, by drink, by each other. I saw a fancy goods shop that was having a ‘pot pouri clearance’, and a music shop nearby had a ukelele for sale in the window, but there was a handwritten sign on it saying ‘Junior Guitar’. Someone was going to be very disappointed come Christmas morning.
In Cambridge Avenue I came across a disused church constructed from sheets of corrugated iron, with a sign on the tower that said ‘T. S. Bicester’. I had no idea what that meant, but there was another sign on the door, a sort of wanted poster, asking for people to come along and help with the Willesden Sea Cadets. The T. S. stood for training ship (not Thomas Stearns), and there were two circular holes in the doors meant to look like portholes.
In Golden Square there was a man carrying a pair of tom toms. He went into a phone box, made a call and started talking to someone at the other end of the phone and I heard him say, ‘Hey, I’ve bought some tom toms, listen.’ And he played the tom toms down the phone to his friend.
I was in Roman Road, Bethnal Green, not that far from where Judy used to live; still does for all I know. Judy – the best sex, the wildest sex, pure London sex, I always think of it as.
I’d done my ten miles and it was beginning to rain, so I felt free to bend my rules and go into the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood to take shelter. Inside I was struck by how many of the exhibits were miniaturizations of London. There was a nineteenth-century peep show, a large black box with a tiny eyehole into which you peered and saw the Thames Tunnel, made up of receding planes of paper figures and arches; a pedestrian tunnel then, a train tunnel now, I think.
There was a German model of the Monument and its surrounding buildings, printed on paper to be cut out and constructed. There was Buckingham Palace printed on thick wooden blocks as a backdrop for toy soldiers.
There were also various board games involving London, some very obscure, some as familiar as Monopoly. I’ve never understood Monopoly. The London it refers to seems to bear no relation to the London anybody knows. There’s a story, almost certainly apocryphal, that Waddington’s, who were based in Yorkshire, sent a secretary down to London on a daytrip. She wandered around and jotted down the names of places she saw almost at random, and these names were used on the board.
I don’t see how this can be literally true. It would be a pretty arduous daytrip that took in Whitechapel Road, the Old Kent Road, the Angel, as well as Bond Street, Whitehall, Park Lane, Fleet Street, plus all the train stations. Still, the sense remains that Monopoly was devised by someone who didn’t have much of a grasp of London geography. There are plenty of those about.
Park Lane, Hackney, a wide ugly road, cars jammed in tight, a derelict pub, boarded-up windows that burglars or squatters have unsuccessfully tried to break into. There was an old lady walking along the road: blue beret, a short rain coat, a flowered skirt. Suddenly she lifted up the hem of the skirt and reached underneath for her slip, which she then raised to her face and blew her nose on, good and hard.
Nearby an ugly, uncared for three-storey building and by the door a plaque announcing that this was the Dickens Hotel. The plaque was the shiniest, cleanest, most polished thing in the whole street. I wonder what kind of people stay at a hotel in Park Lane, Hackney. Maybe sad people who come down to London from Yorkshire and don’t have much of a grasp of London geography.