Bleeding London

THE WALKER’S DIARY THE PENULTIMATE DAYS

I was worn out today as I walked the city. The weather was bitter and my overcoat was barely warm enough. My feet and my back and my head all ached. As the task nears completion, it becomes more frustrating. The need to be finished, to be at an end, is overwhelming. I have worn myself out on this city. It has eroded me. I have left no mark on it but I have been worn down like a pencil, reduced to a stub.

I have seen it all, the rotting hills, the hangover squares. I have been through the shy neighbourhoods and all the half-deserted streets, and I have been left drained and evacuated.

I have been to the boundary, to the wall, to the places where the city ends, where the train tracks knot together, where the pylons hiss and fizz their dissatisfaction, where the workings show, the innards, the guts, the secretions, to the place where we hone our taste for fragments. Here in this kaleidoscope of ruins, here where the fabric develops stress fractures, where the plots unravel, and the old stories get forgotten, where oral history is speechless, where myth dies, I have been both lost and found.

I have seen history and nostalgia. I have seen love and death and their pale companions sex and violence. I have seen a fine town, a nation, a great cesspool, the modern Babylon. In Phillimore Gardens, Kensington, I looked in through a basement window and watched a heavy woman dressed only in a corset as she kissed a man in a suit and tie.

I saw statues of Boadicea, John Kennedy and Bomber Harris. I saw a minor road accident in Windmill Road, Mitcham. I saw a woman pissing in the street in Wandsworth. I took my stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St Paul’s. It was a day like any other. I walked and I watched. I did my best to be everybody’s blue-eyed boy.

I’m not naive enough to believe I know the whole story, but I think I have seen both the broad sweep and the particulars, annihilation rolling in like a fog, as comic and as zany as consumption; all those forgotten diseases: apoplexy, dropsy, canker, spotted fever, palsy, scrofula. I have developed a nostalgia for sedition, for mob rule, the burning of gaols, the contagion of fury.

I saw the solid, sturdy monuments to trade and its names, the Hoover factory, the Oxo Tower, the Tate Gallery; sweet and sour reminders of empire. I went along wandering roads that waste everybody’s time. I saw a lost London of public executions, of coffee houses, the Euston Arch, Newgate, Bedlam. I heard the unfamiliar poetry of extinct trades, a poetry that speaks of a city’s past, of a long-gone culture: cinder-shifters, tallow-chandlers, ballad-sellers, hawkers of fish, soapboilers, hammermen.

I listened too to the plots and rhythms of pkce names. What was in them? I heard the cracked narratives of the clothed city: the Mozart estate, not famed for its prodigies or genius; the unsnake-like Serpentine; King’s Cross, Queen’s Park, Prince of Wales Road — places not much frequented by royalty. I saw the slew of history, of kings and pretenders, developers and reformers, visionaries and bureaucrats, martyrs and wide boys. I read the obvious eponyms, the roads named after Cromwell, Wellington, Addison, Albert, Mountbatten, Mandela. I saw little pieces of London which are forever foreign: Maida Vale, Trafalgar, Waterloo, Mafeking Road, Sumatra Road, Yukon Road, two Ladysmith Avenues, six Ladysmith Roads. I saw the quixotic and quaint: Artichoke Hill, Quaggy Walk, Yuletide Close, Pansy Gardens, Evangelist Road.

Often the city felt alive, as though it had flesh and blood, arteries, nerve centres, beauty spots, scars, guts, a heart, parasites, an anus. But which was which? Where was the soul? Where was the cloaca?

I followed in their footsteps; all the great Londoners, the native and the adopted: Dickens and Pepys and Boswell and Johnson and Evelyn and Wat Tyler and Guy Fawkes and Betjeman and Nash and Wren and Newton and Marx and Dick Whittington and, well, you name them.

I went to St Anne’s Court in Soho, a little paved alleyway where, according to her autobiography, Marianne Faithfull sat on a wall every day for several years, strung out on heroin. Her only solace was when Kenneth Anger or Brion Gysin came along and fed her. Not exactly the life of our normal street addict.

In Hertford Road, Edmonton, there was a man wheeling a little girl in a pushchair and he kept saying to the child, “If I give you some sweeties you’ll be my friend, won’t you?” He said it over and over again, love and desperation endlessly repeated in his voice.

I saw the City, a place of deals and commodities, of money and electronic transfer, a place that believes in futures, that thrives on confidence, a place where markets are made, where fortunes are composed and dissipated, where chaos is not simply a theory.

In Lupus Street, Pimlico, I saw a traffic warden. He was wearing a little peaked cap, and a blue nylon anorak with the collar turned up. He didn’t look like much, but the way he prowled down the street, muscle-bound and dangerous, you’d have thought he was the villain in a James Bond film.

In Regent Street, in the window of Dickins and Jones, a display assistant was painting the lips of the mannikins a pale cherry red.

I found myself on the bridge, between the shores, connected with the past yet living in some poorly imagined future, in this new place of somebody else’s making, futuristically quaint perhaps with cars like Bakelite radios, men with jet packs strapped to their shoulders, dressed in skin-tight silver synthetics, helicopters and monorails full of commuters. We thought it might be like this, the London of Dan Dare. We were wrong to expect the expected.

London (a city only passingly like hell) is not everything. It is not even all things to some men, but in a certain way it’s more than enough, definitely more than enough for me. It contains all the data from which the ideal city might be constructed; a visible, hard city, a city of forking paths, no city of angels. This also has been one of the dark places of the earth, a place where I have looked to be a victim of someone else’s vengeance, where I have looked for the metropolitan assassin. The city of cross words.

Sometimes I got lost, or perhaps I was always lost, lost before I started and more lost as I travelled. But it was never a matter of geography, not a malaise that the cartographers could rid me of. I developed a taste for spaces cleansed by plague and fire, by blitzes and bulldozers.

Soon I will no longer have use for a map. Maps are euphemisms, clean, clear, self-explanatory substitutes for all the mess and mayhem, the clutter and ambivalence and blurring and intermeshing weft and warp of the real places they purport to describe. They are fake documents, pathetic simplifications and falsifications. They’re no longer necessary since I have created a new London, not one made out of stone and brick, tarmac and concrete, but a London created out of memory, imagination and shoe leather. I have dreamed it. I have made my dreams come true.

Even in the beginning it did not feel like a quest, much less like a journey, though I always suspected there was a destination, a final still point. Although I knew this was not an adventure story, although I did not believe I was paddling up-river, I knew there were things waiting for me in the darkness, in unfamiliar manors, walls with ears, with eyes, with teeth, with everything, things that were unknown and certainly nameless, marked cards, new geographies, bullets with my name on them. Tomorrow I find them or they find me. The end is in my sights.

The London Walker is his own worst enemy.