First we take Clarence Bridge, then it's on to Whitehall

George Orwell, commenting on the generally frustrating organisation of things during wartime, with specific reference to the Home Guard, 21 June 1942: 

Details of organisation, battle positions etc. have been changed so frequently that hardly anyone knows at any given moment what the current arrangements are supposed to be. To give just one example, for well over a year our company has been trying to dig a system of trenches in Regents Park, in case airborne troops land there. Though dug over and over again these trenches have never once been in a completed state, because when they are half done there is always a change of plan and fresh orders. Ditto with everything. Whatever one undertakes, one starts with the knowledge that presently there will come a sudden change of orders, and then another change, and so on indefinitely. Nothing ever happens except continuous dithering, resulting in progressive disillusionment all round. The best one can hope is that it is much the same on the other side.

That reference to Regent's Park caught my eye. When we stay in London, we tend to go jogging there regularly.

I'll not be able to run through the place any more without wondering where it was that Orwell and his Dad's Army chums were digging their 'system of trenches'.

Which got me wondering: if you were going to launch an airborne attack on London, surely St. James's or Hyde Park would be better tactical options? I mean, if your aim was to take out the government?

Not encouraging this, mind, just idly speculating.

While we're at it: anyone know whether there were any genuine Nazi plans to air drop troops into London's parks?

Dodging, artfully

Via the wonders of social networking I have been informed of an event that I would definitely be attending were I in London tonight: the first screening of the short film 'Fits and Starts of Restlessness' by Tim Shore and Gary Thomas, made in collaboration with our friend, Dr. Heather Shore of Leeds Metropolitan University.

It will be shown with other short films at the BFI (Tuesday, 7 February 2012, NFT 1, at BFI Southbank, seems to be starting at 18:20) as part of the celebrations around Dickens's 200th birthday...which is, in fact, today.

Details on the Birthday event are here.

A brief description:

The title is taken from Dickens’ essay Night Walks, and his description of London has having “expiring fits and starts of restlessness”. The film takes its own night ‘walk’ and traces the path of the lost Fleet River, through the night time streets of Saffron Hill – once the site of a notorious rookery – and where Dickens located Fagin’s den in Oliver Twist.

I haven't seen it yet, but the stills that are available are, I must say, very intriguing.

And since part of the research was related to Heather's excellent book Artful Dodgers: Youth and Crime in Early Nineteenth-Century London, I'm sure the style is matched with substance.

On Chesil Road

For work reasons, I spend a fair amount of time in London, and whenever I'm there I spend a fair amount of time along Euston Road (largely because the British Library and St. Pancras Station are located on it).

The Wife and I have come simply to refer to it as The Worst Road in the World, as it is perpetually jammed and loud and crossing it can take what seems like an eternity if you wait for the lights (like good Germans do) or like some kind of crazy death-defying stunt if you don't.

Hence, I rather like this plan:

From 22 September the installation White Sound, created by the American sound artist Bill Fontana, will fill the street with the sound of the sea and the unique beach, an 18-mile long pebble bank which is part of the Jurassic Coast world heritage site.

Now, if were possible to navigate Euston Road with one's eyes shut, this would be perfect...

'As heavy as children but not so tractable'. A reading recommendation

Thanks to the recommendation some months ago from a friend of mine in London -- a remarkably incisive historian of early twentieth century vice and its policing in London -- I have happily discovered the fiction of Patrick Hamilton.

I had not heard of Hamilton before, which at first made me feel rather a philistine (a feeling to which I'm no stranger), but since the edition of one of his works that I immediately bought has no less an authority than Doris Lessing calling him 'a marvellous novelist who's grossly neglected' I've decided to not feel so bad about it.

I quickly devoured two novels -- Hangover Square and The Slaves of Solitude -- and am now nearly finished with the trilogy that made his name, three novels later gathered under the wonderfully evocative title Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky.

I don't really feel up to a full-on review of the novels, but wanted merely to pass on the recommendation to anyone else who might be interested in Hamilton's detailed characterisation and keen observations about London life in the 1930s, more specifically about a social context involving (for the most part) people who are rather down-at-heel without being really 'poor' and who drink rather a lot. (In any literary history of alcohol and drunkenness, Hamilton should have a place of honour.)

The Twenty Thousand Streets... series focuses on three people whose lives are connected through a pub 'in the vicinity of the Euston Road and Warren Street' called 'The Midnight Bell': Bob (the waiter), Ella (the barmaid) and Jenny (a prostitute).

The effect of Hamilton's prose is really, I think, something rather cumulative, and it's hard to summarise or provide a single example to express it.

This is not least because part of Hamilton's skill was to get inside the thoughts of his characters and to highlight their uncertainties about what they were experiencing and their constantly changing views of their situations. Characters are continuously misunderstanding each other (and themselves) and their position; or, alternatively, they diagnose their position very well without feeling that they have a way out of it. (This internal psychological perspective is also what makes the recent BBC version of the Twenty Thousand Streets... series, as good as it is, somehow incomplete.)


He also had a knack for efficient though arch descriptions of the fleeting sensations of everyday life. 

And he manages the interesting trick of conveying a certain amount of sympathy and cold-hearted cynicism -- whether serially or simultaneously -- with regard to pretty much all of his characters. 

I thought I'd give a few excerpts from the different stories that make up the trilogy -- which are more descriptive than anything -- and just let them stand as is.

In the first, from 'The Midnight Bell', Bob climbs the stairs to Jenny's room in a dingy house in Bolsover Street, not far, geographically, from Regents Park but a world away in terms of class:

On each landing three different doors led into three different rooms containing three different families. All the doors were closed, but the awful belligerence of the poor was to be heard and sensed. On the first floor a man was reviling a woman, and a child, in another room, screaming. It did this not as though it was being beaten (which it probably was)  but as though it was being put to death. On the second floor someone was playing a harmonica, but in the front room an old woman groaned. You could not imagine what at, unless it was the harmonica. On the third floor two other children were being put to death. You could hardly believe that three children were being put to death, simultaneously, in the same house, at the precise time of your arrival, but there you were. (169-70)

From 'The Siege of Pleasure', in which Jenny (later to become a prostitute after a single evening goes terribly wrong) takes up a new position as a domestic servant:

It mattered not to Jenny, who had weighty work on hand -- that is not to say weighty in the figurative sense of the term -- but work which involved hauling out mighty bedsteads so as to get round and make the bed, dragging out monstrous furniture so as to dust behind it, emptying vast Edwardian basins of their brimming soap-grey lakes, lifting enormous and replenished jugs and lowering them at arm's length slowly lest they smashed the massive crockery, transporting wabbling pails, as heavy as children but not so tractable, down stairs and along passages, and carrying piled trays about in a world wherein practically everything was breakable, and only terrific muscular exertion and an agonized striving after balance could avert the impending crash -- in brief, 'woman's work'. (258)

From the opening passages of 'The Plains of Cement':

Though it had no wide reputation, all manner of people frequented 'The Midnight Bell'. This was in its nature, of course, since it is notorious that all manner of people frequent all manner of public houses -- which in this respect resemble railway stations and mad-houses. Nevertheless, a student of the streets, conceiving 'The Midnight Bell' as a nucleus of a London zone less than half a mile in diameter, could not have failed to have been impressed by the stupendous variety of humanity huddled within the region thus isolated by the mind's eye. The respectable, residential precincts of Regent's Park, the barracks and lodging-houses of Albany Street, the grim senility of Munster Square, the commercial fury of the Euston and Tottenham Court Roads, the criminal patches and Belgian penury of Charlotte and Whitfield Streets, that vast palace of pain known as Middlesex Hospital, the motor-salesman's paradise in Great Portland Street, the august solemnity of Portland Place itself -- all these would crowd in upon each other in the microcosm thus discriminated -- a microcosm well-nigh as incongruous and grotesque as any that the searcher might be able to alight upon in the endless plains of cement as his disposal. (344)

(All quotations from Patrick Hamilton, Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky [Vintage, 2010]).

A yearly visit of a week to the city of the callous and cynical

I have been meaning to write about the dubious pleasures of British television (outstanding [sic] mucky bathtubs, a mildly sadistic masterchef piercing the plump cheeks of buxom lads from Merseyside with his earnest little hedgehog eyes, speed dating for people with Asperger's syndrome - and, of course, the indomitable Miss Tits), but I don't feel the urge or have the time. Instead I give you more wisdom from my (current) favourite author:

"I should have lived an intelligible life, instead of only trying to live, aiming at modes of life beyond my reach. My mistake was that of numberless men nowadays. Because I was conscious of brains, I thought that the only place for me was London. It's easy enough to understand this common delusion. We form our ideas of London from old literature; we think of London as if it were still the one centre of intellectual life; we think and talk like Chatterton. But the truth is that intellectual men in our day do their best to keep away from London--when once they know the place. There are libraries everywhere; papers and magazines reach the north of Scotland as soon as they reach Brompton; it's only on rare occasions, for special kinds of work, that one is bound to live in London. And as for recreation, why, now that no English theatre exists, what is there in London that you can't enjoy in almost any part of England? At all events, a yearly visit of a week would be quite sufficient for all the special features of the town. London is only a huge shop, with an hotel on the upper storeys. To be sure, if you make it your artistic subject, that's a different thing. But neither you nor I would do that by deliberate choice."

(George Gissing, New Grub Street)

The passage continues:

"It's a huge misfortune, this will-o'-the-wisp attraction exercised by London on young men of brains. They come here to be degraded, or toperish, when their true sphere is a life of peaceful remoteness. The type of man capable of success in London is more or less callous and cynical. If I had the training of boys, I would teach them to think of London as the last place where life can be lived worthily."

Don't get me wrong: I really love London. But how anybody can live here is beyond me.

Welcome to London: fotographieren verboten

Ah, London. Where the law-enforcement fun never stops!

Today's Guardian brings the story of Austrian tourist Klaus Matzka and his son, who were visiting the world-class metropolis and, as one sometimes does, taking some snaps.

This fell rather afoul of a couple of super-vigilant members of London's finest:

Like most visitors to London, Klaus Matzka and his teenage son Loris took several photographs of some of the city's sights, including the famous red double-decker buses. More unusually perhaps, they also took pictures of the Vauxhall bus station, which Matzka regards as "modern sculpture".

But the tourists have said they had to return home to Vienna without their holiday pictures after two policemen forced them to delete the photographs from their cameras in the name of preventing terrorism.

Matkza, a 69-year-old retired television cameraman with a taste for modern architecture, was told that photographing anything to do with transport was "strictly forbidden". The policemen also recorded the pair's details, including passport numbers and hotel addresses.

Matzka and his son, perhaps, stood out due to their unusual--indeed, vaguely Ballardian--tourist interests:

He said he and his son liked to travel to the unfashionable suburbs.

"We typically crisscross cities from the end of railway terminals, we like to go to places not visited by other tourists. You get to know a city by going to places like this, not central squares. Buckingham Palace is also necessary, but you need to go elsewhere to get to know the city," he said.

He said the "nasty incident" had "killed interest in any further trips to the city".

I'm not surprised. I know that feeling myself.

In a telephone interview from his home in Vienna, Matka said: "I've never had these experiences anywhere, never in the world, not even in Communist countries."

Anyway, this might be a semi-amusing anecdote if it weren't part of a broader problem, one that is symbolised by the the arrest around the beginning of the year of artist Reuben Powell, who was photographing an old building as part of an art project. As the Independent reported:

"The car skidded to a halt like something out of Starsky & Hutch and this officer jumped out very dramatically and said 'what are you doing?' I told him I was photographing the building and he said he was going to search me under the Anti-Terrorism Act," he recalled.

For Powell, this brush with the law resulted in five hours in a cell after police seized the lock-blade knife he uses to sharpen his pencils. His release only came after the intervention of the local MP, Simon Hughes, but not before he was handcuffed and his genetic material stored permanently on the DNA database.

But Powell's experience is far from uncommon. Every week photographers wielding their cameras in public find themselves on the receiving end of warnings either by police, who stop them under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, or from over-eager officials who believe that photography in a public area is somehow against the law.

Which it's not.

And, as a service to our readers, we reprint in handy clip'n'save format, the following statement from the Association of Chief Police Officers, quoted in the Independent article noted above:

"Police officers may not prevent someone from taking a photograph in public unless they suspect criminal or terrorist intent. Their powers are strictly regulated by law and once an image has been recorded, the police have no power to delete or confiscate it without a court order. This applies equally to members of the media seeking to record images, who do not need a permit to photograph or film in public places," a spokeswoman said.

Just in case, though, I offer you this image of the Vauxhall Bus Station, so that you don't need to take any unnecessary risks.

(Non-terrorist source)

Sunday Bloody Sunday

Found yesterday, while in pursuit of project-related data:

Riots in St. Giles's

Bow Street--For several Sundays during the summer months, the peaceful inhabitants of St. Giles's and its vicinity were kept in continual alarm by the outrageous conduct of the lower kind of Irish, resident in that neighbourhood, and other parties of Irish who came from Whitechapel , Shadwell, Woolwich, &c. for the express purpose of fighting with those of St. Giles's, in which conflicts much mischief has been frequently done; the savage ferocity of these people (both men and women) inducing them to use bludgeons, knives, cutlasses, rusty swords, shovels, and other dangerous weapons. Complaints of this shocking profanation of the Sabbath were made to the Magistrates, and a strong guard of constables and patroles were ordered to attend, by whom several of the ringleaders were apprehended, and obliged to find bail for their good behaviour, which then had the desired effect of checking the nuisance.

For two or three Sundays past, this practice has been renewed. One of these riots continued almost the whole of Monday last, which being represented to Mr. Read, the Chief Magistrate of this Office, he sent a number of patrole men in the evening, who, notwithstanding they met with great resistance and were assaulted with sticks, brick-bats, &c. took four of the principals in the affray into custody, who were yesterday examined before Mr. Graham, when, appearing to be very able fellows, and not in any particular employ, the Magistrate very properly judged them fit persons to serve his Majesty at sea, and accordingly sent them on board the tender for that purpose: which mode, we understand, will be adopted in future to all others so offending, as the only means of effectually checking such dangerous tumults.

In an age before the Daily Mail, I suppose the Morning Chronicle (Wednesday, 23 September 1807, iss 11966) would have had to suffice.

You don't hear that many references to the 'lower sort of Irish' (both men and women) that often these days.

That's a shame somehow.

Broken English

On our daily treck into the big city we have the great pleasure to use the services of Southern Trains. An ... interesting experience, anthropologically. All those people to watch, all those conversations to overhear! One of the things that really bugs me, though, is the announcement made whenever the train comes to a halt in one of the half dozen stations between here and London Bridge: "Do not leave unattended luggage on the platform."

Now, if you ask me, this announcement entails a logical impossibility. “Unattended luggage” is not something that you can still leave on a platform - it has already been left there. That's why it's unattended. The phrase also suggests that this is somebody else's luggage, really, not something that you yourself could feasibly leave behind. In fact the request - formulated in this way - invites you to take any unattended items of luggage with you should you happen to come across them. To help Southern Trains.

To make sense, the announcement would have to run: “Do not leave luggage unattended on the platform.” Though that, too, sounds a bit tautological to me. Any act of creating a physical distance between you and your suitcase creates the state of unattendance so feared by the London transport authorities. There really is no need to adorn the act of "leaving" with an explanatory adverb, at least not with one of the pseudo-posh (but potentially misleading) type favoured by public companies trying to smarten up linguistically. Such as "due to" and "beverages."

Why not just: "Do not leave your luggage behind"?

Oh well, I guess this provincial bumpkin is being too simple-minded once again.

A momentary lapse of luggage

I would like to think that the willingness to publicly admit having done something Really Fucking Dumb shows a certain degree of character. Perhaps it even marks a refreshing acknowledgement of one's limitations and fellowship with the other sometimes confused mammals we know as Homo sapiens.

On the other hand, it might just be a kind of psychological masochism.

In any case, there I was yesterday, having returned to London from a very fine time at a crime history conference held at my university and making my way to the place where The Wife and I will be staying for a couple of weeks in scenic south London. And what do I do? In a not entirely explainable momentary lapse of reason upon disembarking, I left my suitcase on the train.

Although I realised my mistake within seconds, the doors had closed and the train was already in motion by the time I made it back through the gates.

Yes, this is very stupid.

But it is even more stupid than you think: this is the second time I have done this in the last few years.

Indeed. I am a singularly silly boy.

To make a long and wearisome story short, all is well that ends well. Thanks to the extraordinarily kind, competent and sympathetic assistance of three employees of Southern railways, I had my suitcase back within a couple of hours.

I had the opportunity to thank all of them personally (and wrote a letter to the company commending their work).

However, my gratitude is also due to the unknown fellow passenger who saw me leave the train without my suitcase and who handed it in a few stations down the line, allowing my agony of frustration and self-loathing -- while intense and certainly justified -- to be brief.

Thank you. Whoever you are.

The next couple weeks in this exhausting city will most likely dim the temporary glow of fellow-feeling that that experience gave me.

But still: it has been nice while it's lasted.

Putting things in perspective

So apparently there is a bigoted troglodyte with a peroxided mop of hair running for Mayor of London (and it's not Ken L.). Apparently the chattering classes are up in arms. Zoe Williams at The Guardian gathers sound bites from weighty political commentators like Alan Rickman, Bianca Jagger and Mark F. Ravenhill, who has the following super duper deep thing to say:

Johnson doesn't have a strong instinct for a city that's as multicultural as London. He's not an inclusive politician in that way.

Have I already said that I -- like others out there -- really don't like Ravenhill? I guess I'm not an inclusive person in that way.

Zoe Willams, herself, in a moment of British self-obsession, imagines

... what a laughing stock we'd be, internationally, if we elected Boris Johnson as mayor.

Laughing stock? Internationally? Dear Zoe, let me tell you one thing: The world doesn't care about the Mayor of London. And guess what: Most people on this planet haven't the foggiest who Boris Johnson even is. Aren't we lucky?

(With thanks to Geoff for alerting me to this important article. And with apologies to people who -- for obvious geopolitical reasons -- have to care about this more than we do).