London: Walk With Me

Lockdown. We truly are a nuclear unit: no wider family, no friends. Fixtures in the calendar fall one by one and we begin to doubt that any of the things we planned will take place. Every year, I meet up with two friends for a day of walking during one of the school holidays; we are in an endless break from school now but there is no prospect of a ten-hour trek. With 2020 looking like a write-off, my mind turns back to last Easter when, after ten years of rural walks, the three of us broke with tradition and set off on a Maundy Thursday urban odyssey. As the only Londoner, it fell to me to plan a route across the capital that took in some of the things that always dominate our walking conversations.

Having met at Victoria station – two of us arriving from Sussex and one from Somerset via an Airbnb that was a converted domestic garage in Vauxhall - our first stop was the Regency Café. Designed in an art deco style in 1946 and still retaining the original glazed tiled exterior and interior, the café has featured in film and television many times as a current and period location. Its Formica-topped tables, full English breakfasts and builders’ tea make it popular with workers and tourists alike and it was amid a heaving and noisy atmosphere that we fuelled ourselves for the day ahead.

I had deliberately chosen the timing of our walk to coincide with, not only the Easter holidays, but also an exhibition at Tate Britain. As we walked down to the Tate through the Lutyens-designed council flats of the Grosvenor Estate, and the Millbank Estate where each block is named after a Victorian artist, we discussed why the photographer Don McCullin had always cropped up on our walks: primarily because of his photographs of Somerset and Sussex, but also because we constantly confused his name with television presenter Don Maclean of Crackerjack! (Crackerjack!) and we further confused him with Bernie Clifton, the guy who used to pretend to ride an ostrich on the same television programme. It became a running joke - but perhaps you had to be there. McCullin’s retrospective of sixty years of photography was stunning: the stark monochrome images, each hand-developed himself, of conflicts from Vietnam through to Syria, via Northern Ireland and Cyprus, and poverty in London and Bradford, are a vivid and influential commentary on the post-war world.

Leaving the gallery and walking north up through Westminster, we crossed Parliament Square where the pro and anti-Brexit protesters had temporarily ceded possession to Extinction Rebellion. Cutting through St. James’ Park we headed for Regent Street where we turned off into Heddon Street. Heddon Street is where, on the evening of 13 January 1972, Brian Ward persuaded a young rock musician to leave the warmth of the photographic studio to take some pictures outside in the cold, dark street. Wearing a jumpsuit, with a guitar slung over his shoulder and his foot on a rubbish bin, David Bowie posed under the sign of K.West, a firm of furriers, for a black and white shot that would later be colour tinted and find its way on to the cover of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. In all the years I lived in London, I had never visited this spot. We unfurled a homemade K.West sign to recreate the scene and posed for photographs next to the commemorative plaque. The alfresco diners at the restaurants that now dominate the street didn’t bat an eyelid: this sort of thing must happen all the time.

Crossing Regent Street to start heading east, we made our way through Soho, pausing only for a spot of record buying at Sister Ray and Reckless Records in Berwick Street. One of our number had expressed a wish to eat pie and mash for lunch as a typical London delicacy. Not having the time to cross south of the river to visit Manze’s in Tower Bridge Road, we had to settle for a tourist alternative; at Battersea Pie Station (groan) in Covent Garden we had pie and we had mash but it wasn’t pie and mash.

After our brief lunch stop and a quick cider, we walked north to Bloomsbury and then on to the fringes of Clerkenwell. All three of us being English teachers, two of us having read all of Charles Dickens’s novels and one of us having been taught at Birkbeck by Michael Slater the foremost Dickens academic, a visit to 48 Doughty Street, WC1 was a must. Now a museum, Dickens lived there from 1837; it is the house in which Catherine Dickens gave birth to their first three children and where The Pickwick Papers was completed, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby written and Barnaby Rudge begun. We saw the desk where he wrote and also drafts of his novels and articles for the Evening Chronicle. A tall, narrow Georgian terrace, its interior has been recreated as the Victorian family home the expanding Dickens family left in 1839.

All our walking in recent years having been in open countryside, it struck us that travelling half the distance in London made you twice as tired. It was late afternoon and the stretch of Clerkenwell Road ahead of us seemed a daunting prospect; but the traffic and the crowds temporarily thinned as we progressed further east. The sun had been shining all day and as the shadows lengthened we knew we were nearing our final destination. The roar of traffic from the roundabout increased but we turned off Old Street and plunged into the relative quiet of Bunhill Fields. Graves of the famous – Malcolm Lowry, Spike Milligan, Frankie Howerd, Siegfried Sassoon - have been a feature of our walks over the years but none so illustrious as that of poet, painter and visionary, William Blake. Blake was buried in a shared grave at Bunhill Fields when he died in 1827 at the age of 69 but, until recently, it was only marked by a stone that declared his remains were ‘near by’. In 2018, following 14 years of work, the exact location of Blake’s remains was found. A group of street drinkers directed us from the original stone to the new one with its inscription of a verse from, probably his best-known work, Jerusalem.

Bunhill Fields is now a public garden and, as we sat on a bench reflecting on our walk, we were joined by meditative City workers at the end of their day taking advantage of the oasis of calm the setting provided. Like any well-prepared teacher, I had an extension activity planned in case we finished early but it was not required. One year on, and I’m sure the drinkers will have been moved on and the office workers discouraged from lingering and I know that all the places we visited during the day are now closed. When the lockdown ends, we’ll meet again in Bunhill Fields to complete that extra task; we’ll walk north up City Road to the Angel and visit 25 Noel Road, where playwright Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell so tragically lived and died; then we’ll retire to the legendary Island Queen pub further down the road and spend the rest of the day drinking. I don’t know when that will be but, whenever it is, everybody’s welcome.

Unknown Pleasures

Having grown up on a council estate in the south-eastern corner of the capital city and always been a lover of the urban environment, it was a surprise to me on moving to the East Sussex countryside a dozen years ago to realise that my appreciation of the cityscape had been overtaken by the feelings the rural aesthetic could inspire in me.

Whereas in the city it was those large-canvas sights - the twinkling lights of the office monoliths on the Isle of Dogs viewed from Greenwich Park, the sunset view up and downriver from Waterloo Bridge – that stirred me, in the countryside it is the smaller-scale that stimulates.

Not for me Arcadian pastoral vistas and roses-around-the-door villages much-loved by traditionalists and those who would seek to preserve the countryside in aspic; instead, it is those minor details, the simple pleasures that take me unawares: a gently curving bend in an undiscovered country lane that hints at promise around the corner; a house on a rising piece of land newly revealed behind a freshly-cut hedge; an abandoned piece of agricultural machinery in a field symbolising the power of nature in its relationship with man. And on a spring afternoon this weekend, a just-ploughed asparagus bed, with its deep shaded furrows and sunlit ridges streaming away from me, reminded me that, in this week of weeks, the horizon is filled with the unknown.

Every Picture Tells A Story

Looking at a feature in a national newspaper at the weekend, where mere mortals reflect on being caught in the periphery of a well-known photograph, I idly remarked that I had once been in a picture accompanying a gig review in the NME. Within moments it had been found on the internet and my kids were incredulously asking if the teenager in the photo was the same person as the middle-aged man sat before them. It was.

At the start of January 1978, Siouxsie and the Banshees played two consecutive nights at the Nashville Rooms, just around the corner from West Kensington tube in London, and I was there on the second night. The Nashville was an excellent venue: small, intimate and already revered as one of the few places that had hosted early punk gigs. I would later see The Ruts there – when there was a riot caused by fighting punks and skins – and one of the Psychedelic Furs’ earliest gigs.

Siouxsie and the Banshees did not have a record deal at the time but, like Adam and the Ants and The Slits, their music was familiar to us through the sessions they had recorded for John Peel. We had already seen the Banshees a couple of times: their gigs were always full but, provided you got there early and queued, you got in; there was no advance ticketing in the punk rock revolution.

I remember the night at the Nashville, well. The Banshees seemed to have developed from earlier gigs: the set still contained favourites Love In A Void and Make Up To Break Up, but the sound was starker, more angular, especially on newer songs such as Metal Postcard and Suburban Relapse. And they looked different: Siouxsie was Siouxsie, but the band was all dressed in black; there was not a hooped t-shirt to be seen. The word ‘Gothic’ was first used in connection with modern music to describe Joy Division, but I think Siouxsie and the Banshees can rightly be credited with inventing what we now think of as ‘Goth’.

In the photograph, I do not seem to have quite caught this new mood. There I am at the front, grinning at the camera. Smiling was not something I would do much of in the following years, as I firmly pinned my colours to the mast of gloomy post-punk. I had gone to the gig with my best mate, Ian. I was 15, he was 16. We had made the cross-town trek from south-east London and it is very likely that our mums and dads thought we were at each others’ houses - that old one. Ian is to the left of the man with spectacles in the picture. I can still recall that we were puzzled by his presence: in our youthful arrogance we thought, why would a middle-aged man be at a gig like this? That I still think of the music of the Banshees, Wire, PiL and Joy Division as the most remarkable I have ever heard probably answers that question.

It is an old saw that every picture tells a story, but what puzzles me about this one is the story it does not tell. When we look at the past, we are often guilty of compartmentalising events, constructing a linear narrative. But when we look at actual dates, we realise that our lives were not like that, that different episodes were actually concurrent. This photograph was taken on the 7th January 1978; a couple of days before that, I must have had my first day of six traumatic months at a new secondary school having been expelled from my old school before Christmas. There is not a hint of that trouble in my face: I must have been full of piss and vinegar - or something else.