Take that! Badger-culling scum!

When you look for one thing you find another. I went up to look at an ivy-clad house in a street just north-west of Sloane Square and found this:

I was actually on a Quest For The Mysteriously Aligned Building. I’d been looking at the western part of central London on Google Earth and noticed an odd building inserted into a block at a strange angle to the rest near Victoria Station (51°29′31.03″ N 0° 09′11.69″ W). So I went to have a look.

It’s almost exactly over the road from St Mary’s Bourne Street, where the grid plans of Belgravia, Sloane Street, and Pimlico meet at funny angles. It turned out to be nothing very special – though exactly what it is I have no idea. All over London blocks of buildings are involuting, alleyways and mews are opening up into courtyards, blocks that once only had an outside now have an outside and an inside, increasing both the density of building plan and the surface area across which interior space can meet exterior space. Prokaryotic townscapes are vacuolating and becoming eukaryotic, solid blocks of cells are invaginating, gastrulating, diploblastic structures becoming triploblastic, interior space is breaking out to the exterior through pores and gateways.

But that doesn’t make for good pictures.

Unlike Battersea Power Station

taken in darkness with a long exposure, resting the camera on a wall at the bottom of Chelsea Bridge.

Spring Sprang Sprung

Only two days after the previous post and spring is in Deptford already. Walking towards church this morning I noticed little clumps of flowers growing out the base of some council estate walls. Afterwards I saw at least a dozen species of flowers blooming on the old railway embankment at Brookmill Park – though I’m not going to risk naming them till I get home and look at my books! Well, not the various yellow groundsels and suchlike daisy relatives anyway… I think I can safely say that we have white dead nettle back

And the flower buds of the magnolia outside the college door have now opened!

(I hope those pictures work – I’m still trying to see what I can get away with here…)

Blessed are the Cheesemakers

Spring is late this year. The plants obviously believes all those TV news scares about us having a cold winter, We didn’t – well not here in London anyway – but things are growing later than before.

None of the main kinds of street tree round here in leaf yet, not anywhere near, not even breaking bud. There’s a frosting of bright green on the hawthorns along the railway line around New Cross, and Buddleia is just about in leaf, but then it was never really out of leaf in the winter.

Weedy stuff is a bit behind as well. There are a few ragworts along the track that look as if they have flower buds on them, but no flowers yet. The annual mercury is in flower (“How can you tell?” they ask) but then it flowers in just about every month (is that why they call it “annual?”) Its taking over my grotty garden, as it does every winter when there is little competition from more robust plants, except for the ivy which is creeping along from the other side.

It was a lovely morning though. Cool and over-cast just as I like it. A cormorant flew over the 188 bus as we crossed Waterloo Bridge, and there were flocks of herring gulls calling overhead when I arrived at work.

The magnolia outside the front door of the college hasn’t broken flower bud yet. It usually blooms before it leafs. Last year the buds broke on the 13th of March so its already over ten days behind. The rather lovely magnolias outside St Mary’s in the Strand were blooming on the 19th last year – no sign yet from the bus (I didn’t look that closely)

On the train up to Waterloo there were a couple of women talking (I almost said “old women” but the chances are they aren’t actually that much older than I am nowadays. Self-image seems to take a few decades to catch up with reality). One seemed to be talking about a divorce or similar, she kept on saying how it was useful to meet on “neutral territory” – that’s the word that caught my attention and turned my eavesdropping on. She said it loudly and significantly. Its good because you can meet and talk in public, with no shouting (tell me about it). She was telling the story of her last meeting: “He came round to the house but he didn’t come in. I met him at the door and we went to the pub. He did come back to the house for a coffee as far as he was concerned”

“…as far as he was concerned”? What does that mean?

And then she was worried about food. Someone else came round to her house for the first time – someone who apparently was going to be visiting a lot in the future. I couldn’t catch who. A new boyfriend? A son-in-law? A work colleague?. She was worried about what to feed him. Another friend is – horror! – a vegetarian and she had reason for thinking this new person might be too. Apparently this makes it almost impossible to know what food to give someone. It seems to be a real problem, a cause of panic, sufficient reason not to invite someone to the house. She talked for a while about planning menus, all sorts of reliable advice about re-using some things and freezing others and chicken and lamb and stew and curry. And then said that she had asked X out for a meal and he had ordered steak and eaten a huge portion “so I’ve got no problem there”. My mood changed from fellow-feeling to perplexity. What was she on about? How could someone else not eating dead animals cause her such self-doubt?

But while I was feeling superior I began to have my own self-doubt. What if I read the whole conversation wrongly? What if this mysterious meat-eater was in fact the same person who had to be met with on neutral territory, and I had misread her anxiety about not being able to feed him with large amounts of meat as the emotional baggage of a messy break-up? What complexities life on the Bexley-Sidcup Borders must have. People are hard to read, or else I’m bad at reading them.

A little later, on the bus, there was a dark-skinned young woman with a headscarf and a long dress and long coat down to her ankles. She was reading from a book and writing notes in another. “Ha” I thought. “Obviously a Muslim” Perhaps she is reading some devotional book about the Koran, or how to wear long dresses. Obviously she is in thrall to oppressive society that keeps her wrapped up in such clothes. When she got up to go I saw it was A Foucault Primer: Discourse, Power, and the Subject

Which reminded me of an old woman, a genuinely old woman this time, perhaps in her 80s, a sweet granny type, who was reading on a bus I got on at Lee Green after having a pint in the The Prince Arthur where the local police used to hang out after hours. I was trying to guess what she was reading. Some romance? Maybe The People’s Friend? No, it was what is to be done by V.I. Lenin.

Blessed are the Cheesemakers.

Croydon and Chelsea

Start as we don’t mean to go on. No real walking yet. I actually did get to Croydon last weekend, though not for a walk but a drink, a Ship of Fools meeting in the Dog and Bull.

The centre of Croydon is an interesting place, London’s most large-scale urban suburb, the sort of place that might be less unfamiliar to Americans than most, with a decent-sized central business district of its own. Back in the 1970s and 80s the council used to make absurd references to its “Manhattan skyline” in their publicity, but one of them must have bought a cheap flight to New York and seen what it really looks like and now they have stopped. But now they have trams. The trams are shiny.

The tram system works. Not because its cheaper or more efficient than buses (it isn’t, except when heavily loaded) or faster (it depends) but because it looks serious. It plonks itself in front of cars and says “Hey! We mean it! Pay attention!” It excludes them by being there, a congestion charge on wires. The day it started central Croydon became a slightly more pleasant place to be in.

Which is one of the few recent changes in Croydon that has made it more pleasant. Like a lot of outer London suburbs its been ruined by traffic over the last few decades, Attempts to “pedestrianise” usually make things worse because they are almost always put through alongside an attempt to build a ring roads round the old centre, isolating it from the network of streets that keeps towns alive. (This happens to real towns as well as suburbs – Ipswich and Preston both have bad cases of it, only working well because the “ring road” only gets round half the centre not all of it because their respective rivers get in the way.) Add that to the habit of replanning large areas at once instead of a building at a time, and shopping malls dedicated to car traffic, and most better-off people driving out to large out of town stores to shop anyway, and you get a centre that is isolated and cut off from normal life once the high street shops close, dominated by huge chain pubs selling expensive lager to teenagers out on the piss.

Croydon’s not as bad as some. Bromley is about the same, and Kingston is worse, and Romford is a shithole after 7pm on a Saturday. The time I got to Romford on my walk I looked around to see if there was a pub I fancied going to – there wasn’t, so I tried the railway station for a train back and found seventeen police, with dogs, just keeping an eye on the kids. So I made my excuses and left – ending up lost on the ring road, and waiting for half an hour for a bus while some poor kid of about fourteen was abandoned by his mates and threw up all over the next bus shelter but one and lay down as if to collapse.

Croydon also had police on Saturday. And, even more worryingly, it had about half a dozen emergency ambulances parked on the High Street (which, Croydon being Croydon is only about the seventh most significant main street). The sort of things that you see when something blows up. Engines running. I hope it was an exercise of some sort.

And a queue to get into Wetherspoons. Where else has a queue to get into Wetherspoon’s? It’s a chain that prospers selling cheap real ale to broke middle-aged men. And where else does Wetherspoon’s have bouncers? Ok, that’s a rhetorical question – I saw someone get bounced from a Wetherspoon’s in Argyll Street in Glasgow only just before Christmas. But bouncers are usually is enough to put me off a pub. Anywhere with bouncers must have people they don’t want to get in. So either I’m one of the people they want to protect their other customers from, presumably because I am too old or fat or unfashionable for their sensitive eyes) in which case I don’t want to be there, or else there is someone else who is trying to get in that the management want to protect me from. In which case I’ll make it easier for them by not taking the risk of being there.

The shipmeet was good fun, if a little quiet (my photos of everyone might be for Another Place), the resolutely unbouncered Dog and Bull has nice people in it and good beer (not that expensive either) and on the way out we saw that the ambulances were still there. I hope they had warm coats.

Then at East Croydon Station an unexpected phone call from my cousin who has come down to London to see a Black Crowes concert on Sunday night and wonders if I want a pint on Sunday afternoon? I said yes of course. After all its a long way to come for a gig someone who works for the Forestry Commission in north-east Scotland. Though once he went, by public transport (plane, train, bus, taxi) to a remote village in the west of Ireland to see someone play in a pub. And went back the next day.

So on Sunday afternoon off to South Kensington and down the Fulham Road to have a drink in Finch’s and find him already talking to a woman called Wendy who seems somehow to resemble a garrulous Sandy Toksvig. When the TV started showing the local derby between Chelsea and Fulham (why did we choose that day?) we went off to the Pig’s Ear in Old Church Street. Which was a lot more crowded and I was almost certainly the oldest person present. Lovely beer though.

Its true about Chelsea. The pub, like the street, was full of attractive young women with posh accents who seem to have spent the gross national product of a small Central American nation on the kind of makeup that looks as if it isn’t there. (I passed a shop and thought I saw two dummies in the window, they moved and they turned out to be real.) And, very different from Lewisham, nearly everyone was white & those that weren’t were mostly east Asian.

Apparently it hasn’t always been like that. It was a very mixed area once, before the seriously rich overflowed Belgravia to the west, and decided they no longer needed servants so they let out their mews to the upper middle classes. Those upper middle classes have now got as far as Fulham – which was a mostly working-class district in my own memory – and have got Hammersmith surrounded as they try to link up with their more suburban friends coming in from Chiswick and Turnham Green.

Not all the buildings are up-market Georgian terraces, gorgeous Queen Anne houses that we couldn’t afford to rent breathing air in, or twee converted mews. I was impressed by Hereford Buildings built for Octavia Hill in the 1870s, once apparently “Chelsea’s tenements”, small flats for industrial workers, and now a posh-looking Gothick block of flats home to Royston Hughes, the first pensioner to be given an ASBO to prevent him using the tube.

And there is a dinky but of apparently 1970s (or later?) brutalism in the same street. I’ve no idea what it is but its wonderfully out of keeping with the area. You wouldn’t get away with that these days. Not unless it was well over twenty stories high.

Filling in the Yellow Lines

So what’s this all about then?

Well, so far & tentatively, the Third Circumnavigation of London.

This is all going to sound very nerdish and very unlike what most people think is fun, but I walk (or cycle) round cities for fun. I’ve been doing it for decades. I fill in my copy of the AtoZ so I know where I’ve been. I now have eleven A to Zs of London. And a couple each of Newcastle and Glasgow and Manchester, three or four street atlases of Brighton, and one-off maps of at least a dozen other towns, all with yellow lines of felt-tip pen filling in the streets I’ve walked on (*). I must be the only person in the world who thought that the day the A to Z company moved to coloured maps was a disaster. These days, with cheap(ish) digital cameras I even take quite a lot of photos. And (I’m really sorry about this) I take notes. In a little notebook.

Now my First Circumnavigation was at the outer edge of Zone 2. I realised that if you have a Zone 1 & 2 travelcard you can go to the last station in Zone 2 on any underground or mainline railway sometime in the early evening, walk round to the next one, have a pint in any decent-looking pub you found, and be back home in time for dinner (or, in my case, more likely last orders at the local). So I set off to the station intending to get the first train going anywhere, then to change to the first train going anywhere else. “Anywhere Else” turned out to be Willesden Green. Walk from there to Kensal Green, take the train back – and return some other time to start off again at the same place.

That was cheap and cheerful and took about a year. Not particularly hard work either, around one walk a month.

The next London project was to cycle to or from college across every river crossing on the tidal Thames. Not very difficult (though going from Lewisham to Bloomsbury by way of Dartford was a little extreme) so I combined it with the attempt to walk or cycle either along or across every street in Lewisham.

The Second Circumnavigation is a larger scale thing. I’m going out to (usually) Zone Five and instead of each walk starting where the last one left off, I’ve been doing them in overlapping sections, big zig-zags that cross each other on the map. So far its been good. Sort of fun, I’ve seen a great many places I’d not have gone to deliberatly,
And gave me lots of photos for my forthcoming amazing websites Thirty-six views of Battersea Power Station and Every Building on the Old Kent Road. Not just amazing but so far completely virtual, they live in Imaginary Storage, which is the best kind.

But events – some alluded to on blogs on this very site, others to do with me finishing off an MSc, but most to do with rather tedious health problems (**) – intervened, as events do, and my journey petered out somewhere in the region of Mitcham Common. But its time to start again. My project for the year is to see if I can get back out of doors at least once a week or so. First to finish the Second Circumnavigation – watch out Croydon! And then some other project. What. I’m not sure yet. A Third Circumnavigation? More of the photos? Cycling London’s rivers?

Whatever it will be, there will be notes. Loads of notes. I’m as voluble (or as much of a bullshitter) in private as I am in public. Its hard to see things without having ideas about them, or forming opinions. When walking around London those ideas Mostly about, well, not so much architecture as how the places people live fit together. Which I have a couple of notebooks full of already. So, I intend to write it up then post it here.

And that’s it really.

(*) Actually they aren’t all yellow – the colour schemes are complex and intricate, depending on the details of my mood, the phase of the moon, the Greenness of the local transport system, but mostly whichever colour of pen I happened to have in my bag at the time I first used the map.

(**) My wrists and ankles knees started to give way. RSI and some kind of beginning of osteoarthritis. And gout sneaked up (you really don’t want to know about gout). And I mostly was forced to stop walking any great distance and started taking the bus everywhere. And I has to stop cycling almost entirely. The last time I tried to cycle any distance over about a mile was the September before last, and I had to give up and walk for the last two miles home because my wrists hurt too much to operate the brakes. Because of that the Second Circumnavigation is in abeyance, almost finished, but suspended for a year. I started somewhere near Eltham and I’ve worked my way round to the south-western approaches to Croydon. Only a few miles to go.

And now the nice doctor tells me I have dangerously high blood pressure and need to do something about it pretty drastically. He made me have an ECG and seemed slightly surprised that my heartbeat appears normal (though very fast). Apparently it means I’m much more likely than average to have a heart attack (and three or four other Bad Things) and much more likely to suffer badly from it if I do. And the way out of it is to change my lifestyle and have less stress. This puts me in a double bind. The middle-aged fatso’s Catch 22. The kind of behaviour I need to adopt to circumvent the long-term problem – basically more exercise and less fags, food, and booze – is the kind of behaviour that exacerbates the short-term one. Walking & cycling put pressure on the joints, swimming would be better but more than a few minutes gets very boring and therefore stressful. In fact exercise as such is stressful, not only because it is boring but because it reminds me of school sport, a subject that can have me shouting and ranting at the drop of a hat. And I’m not intending to do rants here so I won’t.

I don’t know about anyone else but for me being out and about and in the presence of other people is relaxing. I don’t much like being on my own (well, not after lunch anyway… mornings are different) There have been times when I’ve gone and got on a train or a bus just because I feel more comfortable with others around, even total strangers, than I do on my own. I often hate getting back home at night and shutting the door behind me and sitting on my own. It is as if I have killed the day, nothing more can happen, opportunities and chances are dribbling away. And when I’m at home I can’t avoid the terrible state of the place and I have to cast around for another displacement activity from getting the floor repaired, which is what I really ought to be doing but can hardly face.

But the knees and wrists have calmed down a little, and I really need to get out some more, so armed with some of the twentieth century’s best drugs – allopurinol to prevent gout (and cause itchy red blotches – but what do you expect from backing up one of the central biochemical pathways), diclofenac supposedly to ease the knees, moxonidine to cut the blood pressure (and do all sorts of odd things to every body system from sleep cycles to temperature control) indomethacin actually to ease them (and cause bleeding from orifices if I’m unlucky ,and no, I think maybe I’m not going to take it with the diclofenac, even though the doctor said it was alright, the pharmacist looked sensibly slighly surprised that both were on the same prescription & I know who I am more likely to believe) – I’ll be throwing myself back into that road that goes ever ever on (though mostly just round the corner to the pub)

Hmmmmm…..

The first entry in one of these things is always going to be a problem. I’m still worrying about what colour I want the wallpaper and the first guests are begining to arrive.

Or even worse, not.

So I think I’ll just stick up a few links and relax for a while, and leave whatever it was I was going to say to that Difficult Second Posting that should probably turn up sometime this evening.