Infinite City

Continuing on from my last post as I follow Janet Cardiff's mysterious tour of the Whitechapel area....

The voice on the disc guides you through the streets towards Brick Lane and the surrounding area of Spitalfields with its rich and many-layered history.  The area has witnessed waves of immigration over the centuries - Huguenots, Irish, Jews, Bangladeshis have all made their home here. As the sound of her footsteps echoes through the streets and in your brain, you realise that every step of the way you are treading in the paths of previous generations. "How can we just walk over the footsteps and not remember?" she asks, as she relates a story of a man who waited for 20 years for the woman he loved to return, all the while playing his violin in his room.

At every turn there is evidence of London's endless cycle of regeneration, the old cheek by jowl with the new. She wonders whether the construction workers are aware of their role as 'changers of the city, the men who cover up the old stories making room for new ones.'  The tapping of her footsteps on the paving stones seem to emphasise the unfathomable immensity of the city - not just in its spread but in its depth, its layers reaching back far into time and resurfacing at odd moments in an architectural detail or an obscure place name. She observes that "The city is infinite. No-one has ever found an end to the pattern of the streets. Eventually the buildings reproduce themselves - a cornice that mimics another, a door that is the same colour as hundreds of others; every possible permutation - unlimited but cyclical."

This is what Peter Ackroyd refers to when he describes London as 'echoic' - the idea of the city as constantly reinventing itself, yet retaining its basic identity: 

"It has been said that no stone ever leaves London but is reused and redeployed, adding to that great pile upon which the city rests.  The paradox here is of continual change and constant underlying identity; it is at the core of the antiquarian passion for a continually altering and expanding city which nevertheless remains an echo chamber for stray memories and unfulfilled desires." (1)

And as people pass through the labyrinth of streets, they leave traces of their presence behind them as they go....

"Keep walking past the newstand.  Dead Woman Identified." she whispers.

With my imagination fired by the tangled web of narratives and multiple layers of sounds, my perambulations end fittingly in a nearby railway station - a repository of countless unknown stories, criss-crossing briefly but rarely coinciding.  As she stands on the walkway looking down on the concourse, her voice muses "I like watching the people from here.  All of these lives heading off in different directions, one story overlapping with another....."

I follow her instructions, but as I stand there with my camera and survey the scene, I notice that I have been spotted .  I smile in a conciliatory way but three pairs of hostile eyes continue to return my gaze with such intensity, that I scuttle off and head for the tube.  It seems ironic that in these days of constant surveillance and ubiquitous digital camera footage, the mere sight of a photographer with a camera in a railway station can provoke such suspicion.

(1)  Ackroyd, Peter:  London The Biography

Fragments

Although you get the bigger picture by looking at streets and buildings, I often feel it is the small details which can give a place its special character.  Whilst traipsing around Clerkenwell recently, little fragments of life caught my eye which go some way to capturing the spirit of the place, contributing to its rather ambiguous melancholy identity.

A fitting end to this post and this first foray into Clerkenwell comes once again from the pen of Peter Ackroyd:  "So the secret life of Clerkenwell like its well, goes very deep. Many of its inhabitants seem to have imbibed the quixotic and fevered atmosphere of the area:  somehow by being beyond the bars of the city, strange existences are allowed to flourish." (1)   

I didn't come across any particularly unusual characters during my wanderings, but I like to imagine some of the bizarre lives that may be being lived behind some of these windows.

(1)  Ackroyd, Peter, London the Biography

A Sense of Place

One of the things that constantly surprises me about London is the imperceptible way in which the atmosphere of an area can change over a very short distance. The district may be architecturally or topographically almost identical to its neighbours, yet there is a distinct shift in atmosphere.  One such place is Clerkenwell, wedged between the corporate might of the City, intellectual Bloomsbury and trendy Islington.

Travelling through Clerkenwell on a bus many years ago, I remember being struck by its rather desolate and faded air.  Even in the middle of a sunny working day, there seemed an emptiness about the place in stark  contrast to its neighbouring districts. It has since undergone a spectacular regeneration, its warehouses converted into lofts, its streets dotted with interior design and IT offices, smart restaurants, cafés and delis. And yet you don't have to go far to find evidence of the Clerkenwell of former days.  Just turn a corner or venture down one of the many alleyways and courts and the mood can rapidly change....

Peter Ackroyd describes Clerkenwell as one of those enchanted areas which "remain powerful and visible to anyone who cares to look for them." (1)  Despite the recent spate of redevelopment, it still exhibits what he terms "other signs and tokens of a different city ......examples of the many continuities that charge Clerkenwell and its environs with an essential presence."  Over the centuries it has been home to rebels, outcasts, prostitutes, political dissenters and radicals including Jesuits, Chartists, Lollards, Quakers and Freemasons.  Charles Dickens used Clerkenwell Green as the setting for the scene in Oliver Twist where Fagin and the Artful Dodger teach Oliver the art of pickpocketing.  Lenin set up a socialist printing press in the same place, his office now preserved in the Marx Memorial Library.  Clock and watch makers, jewellers and printers practice their trade in the area as they have done for centuries.   Ackroyd claims that this continued human activity contributes to a kind of melancholy which derives from "the weariness of prolonged human settlement with all the cares and woes which it brings."

Whatever the reason, Clerkenwell exerts a powerful fascination - its melancholy atmosphere still tangible after all these years.  In certain corners, time seems to have veritably stood still....

(1)  Ackroyd, Peter  London The Biography

Past Traces

In his masterly work London The Biography Peter Ackroyd describes the history of London as a "palimpsest of different realities and lingering truths".  Evidence of the past manifests itself all over the city - in street names and maps, memorials and statues, churches and ruins but also in the atmosphere of a particular place.  According to Ackroyd in London "the past is a form of occluded but fruitful memory, in which the presence of earlier generations is felt rather than seen".

This is not the London of the tourist guide or sightseeing tour with their historical facts and re-enactments or tales of ghosts and murders.  Rather it is to be felt as a kind of resonance, whilst wandering some unremarkable street, lingering in some old and dusty churchyard, seeing the layers of different architectural styles jostling cheek by jowl - the endless cycle of destruction and renewal.

Nicholas Dyer, the protagonist in Ackroyd's novel Hawksmoor describes this phenomenon thus : 

  "We live off the Past: it is in our Words and our Syllables.  It is reverberant in our streets and courts,so that we can scarce walk across the stones without being reminded of those who walked there before us; the Ages before our own are like an Eclipse which blots out the Clocks and Watches of our present Artificers and, in that Darkness, the Generations jostle one another.  It is the dark of Time from which we come and to which we will return".

As I wander the city streets, I like to think that I am one in a long line of those who have passed this way before.