One of those surprising, bright, sunny March days that make you think the winter’s over even though you know it really isn’t.
On the Victoria Embankment at Charing Cross Pier. A long row of parked, empty tour buses, hundreds of joggers of all sorts and ages, some looking very professional, some looking as though they were on their last legs, and at one point a man performing the weird heel and toe gait of a road walker. Then an old man riding his bike along the pavement and a jogger shouting at him, ‘Get in the road, mate.’
Benches looking out over the Thames, metal griffins for legs. Then benches with sphinxes, then with camels.
Under Blackfriars Bridge, cardboard boxes, folded blankets, plastic bread trays belonging to the homeless, all arranged and stacked with great precision and symmetry, but no sign of their owners.
At Paul’s Walk the benches were full of people eating their lunches, most of them couples. I wondered if they were having work romances.
You can’t walk straight all the way along the north bank of the river. You get forced up Broken Wharf away from the Thames, into Queen Victoria Street and Upper Thames Street.
I walked down Bull Wharf Lane, a dark, narrow alley leading back to the river, but it was a dead end. There was a black road sweeper working there, and he looked at me like I was daft for entering the street at all.
Under Cannon Street Bridge, a low, bleak concrete tunnel, a place where people don’t belong, and yet there were lots of people there, many of them sharp young men in dark blue suits with ties that were loud but not too loud.
In Angel Passage there were empty drums like giant cotton reels that had once had massive cables coiled around them.
On London Bridge, a painted sign, black on white and now looking old and faded. It said, ‘Less noise. Please consider offices above.’ At that point a hovercraft passed under the bridge, its low, thick engine note reverberating under the broad concrete spans.
Outside a house in Barnes, a huge removal van, the number plates and the name on the side Italian. The van was fully loaded but the back was open and inside, amidst all the packed furniture, two removal men had found a couple of chairs to sit on and they were having a cup of coffee, real Italian espresso, made using a proper metal, screw-top coffee maker, and they were drinking out of rather chic white china cups.
I remember when Christina, the daughter of a friend of ours, was about six years old, and we all went to Brighton for the day. We were walking through the narrow streets up by Kemp Town, when suddenly Christina stopped and looked around her very suspiciously and said, ‘This street’s in London, isn’t it?’
Being a good parent, her father stopped too and asked her to explain exactly what she meant, but that’s all he could get out of her: ‘This street’s in London.’ She was very confused, maybe slightly scared by it, and she didn’t have the vocabulary to be able to explain herself, so we all shrugged it off as one of those silly ideas that kids get, but afterwards I thought about it a lot, and I think I know what she meant.
She somehow thought that towns, or at least streets or neighbourhoods, were manufactured in large chunks, centrally, off-site. She thought they came ready-made and identical and she’d now encountered a block in Brighton that was exactly the same as a block she’d seen in some part of London. I’ve asked her since if she can remember the episode, but it’s gone.
I sometimes think she had a great idea. Let’s imagine you were a town planner; instead of designing and building a whole new city you could say we’ll have a new Hampstead or a new Knightsbridge, or you could order two hundred yards of Oxford Street or a couple of acres of Hyde Park.
Or let’s say you wanted a whole new metropolis; in that case you’d manufacture a brand-new second London, a perfect replica, identical in every physical detail. Then you could set it up in New Zealand or Dubai or Namibia, move in a population, leave it for a year or two, and then go back and see how much the new London had diverged from the old one.
I realize this is ultimately a meaningless idea. London isn’t simply its architecture and hardware. The new London wouldn’t, for example, be a financial centre, wouldn’t be the seat of kings or government. It wouldn’t have any history, wouldn’t contain the same ethnic or social mix as the original. The climate would be different. But I still think it sounds like fun. I still think it might be better than starting from scratch every time someone wants to build something new.
This one I hardly believe. It’s too strange, too anecdotal, too fictional. It’s almost as though someone’s setting these things up for me.
I was walking along Magdala Avenue, near Archway, and there were two women waiting at a bus stop. They weren’t old but they were dowdy, overweight, looking as though they’d led hard, children-filled lives.
They were deep in conversation, but as I got level with them one looked up and turned to me as though she wanted me to settle a difference of opinion they’d been having.
‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘You’ve heard that expression “the seven-year itch”? Well, what does it mean exactly?’
There didn’t appear to be any ulterior motive, she wasn’t sending me up or taking the piss, she just wanted a second, or I suppose third, opinion on what the seven-year itch was. I didn’t feel very articulate, but I said I thought it referred to people who’d been in relationships for seven years, though not literally seven, I pointed out, and one or possibly both of the partners had got bored and had started looking for excitement with someone else.
‘Yes, right,’ the woman went on, but that obviously wasn’t all she wanted to know. ‘But if like the man goes off on a seven-year itch he always comes back, doesn’t he?’
Not wanting to claim any great expertise on the subject I replied, ‘I think sometimes he does, sometimes he doesn’t.’
‘Oh,’ she said, very gloomy and disappointed, and her friend looked on sadly.
I just stood there thinking I’d definitely said the wrong thing and wanting to say something more cheerful and optimistic, but I didn’t know how to phrase it. Eventually, noticing my lack of ease, the other woman said, ‘Thanks very much, sir.’
The use of ‘sir’ crushed me. I walked on feeling like some evil squire who went around dashing the hopes of poor, honest, downtrodden women.
In Bentinck Street, Mayfair, I saw a tall, imposing bay-fronted house with a blue plaque in honour of Edward Gibbon, author of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I looked at the house and thought what a great place it would be to live and write.
But I read the plaque more closely and Gibbon didn’t actually live in this house but in a house ‘on this site’. I felt a little cheated, and then I realized that this was how it was always likely to be. When we say Edward Gibbon lived here, or this was where Elizabeth Browning met Byron, or this is where Christopher Marlowe was killed, or this is where Samuel Johnson walked, what do we mean by ‘here’? The here has gone just as surely as the now. Even if they still exist, the buildings they inhabited have been changed out of all recognition. The streets are no longer the same. They’ve been modernized, transformed. The men and women of the past did not walk these actual paving stones. Their world looked different, smelled different, felt different. They didn’t see the world as we see it now, and it’s a great arrogance to believe we’re treading in their footsteps.
The city, it seems to me, must always be a palimpsest, a series of erasures, of new beginnings, obliterations, of temporary preservations and misguided reconstructions. Much of it is guesswork. There is no authorized text.
As I walk through London I find I’m moved by history but not by nostalgia, and I wonder if what I’m moved by is perhaps something behind history, behind events and personalities; mythic forms, archetypes, the old, old stories, something older than this city, something that is inherent in the very idea of the city.
I was in Upper Street, Islington, at the Highbury end opposite the Union Chapel, when I heard a man shouting, ‘They’re fucked. This government is fucked.’ I thought it might be some lunatic talking to himself but in fact it was a young, smartly dressed man talking to a woman. He was shouting because his politics were so passionate.
‘Just a couple of demonstrations,’ he said, just a couple of strikes, and it’s all over for this government.’
In fact the pair were putting up political posters, cheap, A4-sized, photocopied ones with the slogan, ‘Ditch this rabble NOW.’ The woman was taping them very neatly to the glass sides of a bus stop and the man was giving her quite unnecessarily detailed instructions on how to do it. I wondered why he wasn’t doing it himself. Then I saw he was carrying a white stick. He was blind.
In Uxbridge Road, Ealing, I noticed a pattern, a series of events that I must have seen and heard many times before, but only today did I understand it clearly. It’s what happens when traffic grinds to a complete halt because some vehicle, say a delivery van, is blocking the road. The traffic sits there for a while more or less patiently, then one driver decides he has to sound his horn, then another joins in, then a few more. Then someone (you never seem to see the person) shouts something obscene, ‘Shut up, you cunts,’ or something like that, and then someone else shouts something equally obscene back, and then, strangely enough, the horns stop, the shouting stops, the vehicle causing the problem moves on and the traffic starts to flow again.
The process may take a greater or lesser time but is always very similar. You’re tempted to think that patience would have brought about exactly the same result in exactly the same amount of time, that the traffic was bound to have started moving again with or without the shouting and horn sounding. But it seemed to me that perhaps there is something about the sounding of horns and the shouting of obscenities that’s necessary for the life and traffic flow of any city.
In Station Road, Upper Holloway, a small boy hanging on a railing. He was angelic, blond, smiling, attractive, and he was with another little boy, a year or two older, dark-haired, much less appealing. The latter kicked the former but the little blond boy only giggled. Another harder kick and the little boy giggled even more. Another kick and the boy went into paroxysms of pleasure. I walked on before it all ended in tears.
In Coventry Street, which leads from Piccadilly Circus to Leicester Square, I looked in the window of a souvenir shop. There were lots of models of Tower Bridge and Big Ben for sale. And I thought these were not such bad icons of London, not bad pieces of architecture, after all. There were lots of models of black cabs and double-decker buses for sale too; things not unique to London but certainly part of the scene. However, as I walked past, a group of twenty or so French kids were each buying plastic policeman’s helmets.
In Leicester Square itself, waiting outside the Odeon cinema there were half a dozen young, very fashionable Japanese tourists. One was talking on a portable phone, one was carrying a huge bunch of flowers. They were being quite lively and the two with the flowers and the phone started to have a mock fight, pretending to punch each other with their free hands.
There was an HMV record shop with a poster in the window announcing an EAR OUT SALE. Then I saw that the first two letters were covered up. What it actually said was CLEAROUT SALE.
If certain nineteenth-century enthusiasts had had their way the whole of the south side of Leicester Square would have been taken up by a monument to Sir Isaac Newton. Not prepared to settle for a plaque or a statue, they wanted his whole house to be preserved inside a sort of truncated pyramid, on top of which was to be set a massive stone sphere. His tomb in Westminster Abbey is quite wild enough for most people.
I was in Agar Street, by the Zimbabwe High Commission, and outside was an official limo with the registration number ZIM I. It was parked and the driver wasn’t there, but on the front seat there was a bag of Sainsbury’s shopping.
The High Commission is a huge marble building on a corner with the Strand, and set around it at second floor level are eighteen naked sandstone figures. They were carved by Jacob Epstein and are collectively known as ‘Men and women in stages between life and death’, which seems to me a title you could give to a staggeringly large number of works of art.
The story is that when Epstein carved the figures, the public was so shocked by their nakedness that he had to go back and chip off the genitals. (Only of the males, I assume.) I’m not sure whether the story’s actually true or not, but certainly today it’s more than just the genitals that have gone. It could be chemical pollution in the air, or erosion caused by weather, or maybe it was war damage, but currently the figures are half eaten away, some of them barely recognizable as figures at all. They look like ancient, crumbling ruins, and in that case I suppose they demonstrate a stage that is neither life nor death, but a kind of continuing posthumous decay.
In Sloane Street I saw four men dressed up like chefs. I say dressed up because they somehow looked as though they were playing a part; not like real chefs at all.
In the King’s Road I saw a Chelsea pensioner. I saw a bar done out like a Mexican cantina. I saw plenty of flashy young people in clothes that were either fantastic or ludicrous or both, but I also saw a number of smart old chaps in blazers and trilbys. And I saw an apparently posh old lady walking down the street. She had fiercely permed hair, sunglasses, a black velvet jacket, but she was stopping at rubbish bins, having a root through them. I saw her dig deep into one bin and pull out a discarded copy of Vogue.
I went to Cheyne Walk. I hung around there waiting for something interesting to happen. I read the blue plaques, I looked at the house Keith Richard lived in, but there was nothing worth recording. However at the corner of Cheyne Walk and Milman’s Street I saw a row of three strange garages, their doors shaped like pointed Arabian arches.
In Ventnor Drive, Totteridge, I saw an abandoned wheelbarrow full of hardened concrete. In the concrete there were half a dozen tiny cat’s paw prints and the huge hollow where a man’s workboot had stamped.
It suddenly started to hail, as fiercely as I think I’ve ever seen it, and I had to shelter under a walkway in Handel Street, WC1, by the Brunswick Centre, that ran down into a council estate. I could hear children’s voices not very far away and they were telling each other to look at the rainbow. I stuck my head out and sure enough, visible through sheets of hail was a perfect, vivid rainbow. Just then a bustling little girl, not more than six years old, came past where I was sheltering and said, ‘I can’t stand ’ere lookin’ at rainbows, I’ve gotta find my little bruvva.’
How London resists religious and racial cluché. One: Ridley Road market – the fish stalls and the meat stalls, the groupers and the snappers, the chicken gizzards and the goats’ feet. And there was a stall selling records of religious music. The stall was run by a distinguished-looking black man whose stock mostly consisted of black choirs and spirituals, and if you’d been making a movie of this he’d no doubt have been playing some rousing music of that sort, but in the event he was playing a religious record by Jim Reeves, not the very blackest of men.
Two: If you’d asked me when I started my travels would I one day see a man walking along the street carrying a cross, I’d probably have said that it wouldn’t altogether surprise me. And sure enough I eventually saw him, a black man, bald, fierce, wearing a smart black suit and carrying a white painted wooden cross, taller than himself and made from two lengths of two by one. But the cliché would have had me see him in Brixton or East Ham or somewhere where the black communities are tight, where religion remains strong. In fact I saw him in Kensington Church Street, that expensive street that’s chiefly home to countless up-market antique shops.
Marylebone Road: Madame Tussaud’s and the Planetarium built on the site of the old bombed cinema. Also the scene of the only war story my father ever tells.
My map is gradually darkening. I am gradually filling in the streets, making them coalesce. The end seems a long way off, but perhaps this is no longer a matter of beginnings, middles and ends. The kick I get from walking down the streets of London is enormous, but getting home and writing up this diary is better still. If I broke my leg and couldn’t do any walking for a while, that would be rough but I could live with it. If I broke my hands and couldn’t write the diary that would be a tragedy on the grand scale.
I wonder how big the finished document will be. One is tempted to hope it will be as big, as grand, as detailed, as complex and convoluted as the city itself, but I know that’s not possible. All I can say is it will be as big, grand, detailed, complex and convoluted as I can possibly make it.
I’d stopped for lunch and was sitting outside a pub on Clapham Common. The common and the pub were nearly empty. There was an old man sitting three tables away. I thought he probably wanted to start a conversation with me, but I stared intently at my newspaper. Then a friend of his walked past and the old man said to him, ‘Do you want to buy a telly? Fourteen-inch colour. I want fifty quid for it, or a pound a week for two years, whichever you prefer.’
‘I’ve already got a telly,’ said the friend.
‘Yes, but have you got a telly in your bedroom?’ the old man said, as though he was making an incredibly indecent suggestion.
The friend went in, bought himself a drink and came out to sit with the old man. I couldn’t hear all their conversation but at one point the friend said, ‘I just don’t see the point of having a lesbian behind the bar.’
I was walking along Prince Albert Road and I looked into the car-park in Regent’s Park, and I saw twenty or thirty men each unloading large quantities of equipment from the boots of their cars. This equipment consisted in almost every case of a chunky box on wheels and a long thin case. At first I thought they might be musicians, that the cases might contain instruments, that the boxes might be amplifiers. But then I realized they were far more likely to be fishermen, the long thin case carrying their rods, the box containing the rest of their tackle.
This was more or less confirmed when I saw them heading for the towpath that runs alongside the Grand Union Canal, which in turn skirts the northern boundary of Regent’s Park. I was intending to walk that way myself so I followed them. But they formed a little crowd at the bottom of the stairs and I had to push through to get by.
Then I realized why they’d stopped. About thirty yards ahead of us there was a locked gate right across the path. I was as surprised as the fishermen, but then one of them said, ‘Here’s a man who looks as though he knows how to get a gate unlocked,’ and a few others made relieved, encouraging noises. I looked around and saw they were all turning hopefully towards me. I was the man they thought could get the gate unlocked. Needless to say, they were completely wrong, and I had to tell them so, but I was strangely flattered.