The death of Colin Wilson, encyclopaedic outsider and cultural portal

I was saddened to learn last week of the death at the age of 82 of one of my earliest intellectual heroes  - though some would sniff “pseudo-intellectual”. Colin Wilson was a man curiously both slightly behind and slightly ahead of his time. He was an autodidact with an almost nineteenth century concern for self-improvement, a man with highbrow tastes seemingly unimpressed with modern popular culture, and someone driven by an urge for knowledge and experience who battled with his own information explosion long before the internet made that phenomenon a commonplace for every active, thinking, culturally engaged person.

The basic facts of Colin’s life are well known, including the hype - the early instinct for adopting a mediagenic persona (polo neck sweaters, sleeping bag on Hampstead Heath, the horsewhip episode) – and the unwise declarations of genius which were soon to backfire on him with such long lasting and devastating effect, revenge from the stuffier, less imaginative parts of the English establishment with whom he had not been to school or university.

My first awareness of him, in my mid-teens, a decade after his first (and possibly best) book “The Outsider”, was when he co-authored a rather juicy encyclopaedia of murder which provided a factual background for furtive explorations of dubious locales that I made with a friend, seedy sites that included Hilldrop Crescent, Rillington Place and Hanbury Street. It was evident to me from the start that Colin was a tad pervy, exactly in what way subsequently  revealed with embarrassing detail in his later autobiography, “Dreaming to Some Purpose”. Too much information, Colin.

And that was always it: too much information. As the years passed he became a one man encyclopaedia not just of crime but of … everything, or so it seemed. Eventually almost a self-caricature.

Over the years I gradually caught up on his back catalogue and bought each new book that he brought out. I was never very keen on his novels, but I devoured his non-fiction avidly and was intrigued by his concepts of, for instance, Faculty X and the St Neot margin. His writings acted for me like a portal to the works of philosophers, psychologists and others who otherwise would have remained unknown to me, at least for a long time; his writings provided a gateway and a short cut into areas that I was unfamiliar with, having had primarily a scientific education. Probably the most important thinker he “turned me on to” was Abraham Maslow, with his now-famous hierarchy of needs culminating in self-actualisation and his accounts of peak experiences. I could relate to that kind of thing, and to many other descriptions of essentially subjective experiences that were rarely discussed elsewhere, even in textbooks of psychology. Especially in textbooks of psychology. Colin wrote about things, as it were, from the inside. But he was obviously not quite respectable, for he was too omnivorous, not discriminating enough, with too evidently a taste for intellectually dodgy characters, would-be supermen and deviants of all kinds; there were far too many references to sadism and to what he always spelled as “fetichism” (which made it sound even kinkier than it was) - yet that degree of self-revelation was part of his attraction. Emerging into public life in the same year as Elvis, he built up quite a fan base around the world.

Subjective experiences like involuntary memory, peak experiences and déjà vu – things which, though unusual and disturbing, I thought everyone had - were fascinating to me, and Colin Wilson’s output furthered my interest in what I would call “normal” subjectivity. When he published “The Occult” I was briefly enthralled, but within a few years I began to feel that he had been “taken in” by many aspects of parapsychology and mysticism, which is not to say that even now I necessarily dismiss all such claims. Indeed, Colin was right at the leading edge of the 1970s popular infatuation with all things that became dubbed New Age. I remember going to Claude Gill’s bookshop in Oxford Street sometime in the mid-seventies; Uri Geller was there bending keys, on (I believe) his first visit to Britain, and he kept talking about Colin Wilson, asking if anyone knew him, and he said he was meeting him the following day. I don’t know if Geller is genuine - no one does - but from where I was standing I was convinced – perhaps fooled. Even so, my interest in parapsychology soon declined, and my scepticism grew. I felt that Colin may have been gullible in some respects; I was happier with “normal” subjectivity than with the supposed “paranormal” variety.

For me, Colin was an inspiration not only for what I read, but an encouragement to try writing myself. In more recent years I’ve read anything by or about him that came my way, rather more critically than formerly, while becoming increasingly irritated by his predictable lazy repetition and recycling of earlier themes. But there are other interesting aspects of the “flavour” of the man that enhance his appeal – for instance his association with Soho in the Fifties and Notting Hill in the Sixties, moody periods and places in our recent cultural past – the Angry Young Men, “Absolute Beginners”. And there is the parable of the provincial lad growing up in a town of – as he described it “cow like people” – feeling the draw of the metropolis as a place where he might meet like minded souls and achieve the success he craved; this is such a frequent and popular trope in modern British cultural life.

Colin was someone I could relate to. As a young adult, unsuccessful, provincial, often lonely, working in uncongenial surroundings but interested in ideas, in creativity and psychological phenomena, it was easy for me to identify (pretentiously, perhaps) with the “outsider” condition that he described – but then, unfortunately, so do the Anders Breiviks and Mark Chapmans of this world. The five percent of the population who fall into this bracket, according to Colin, include some very unpleasant people indeed, as well as your average misfit, not to mention your average person who perhaps thinks a bit differently from others and has different interests and concerns from the majority (me on a good day), plus the occasional oddball genius (Bowie fits the mould perfectly and, indeed, once cited “Col” as an influence). Outsiders are motivated by, driven by or tormented by their awareness of mortality, of the limited time available to try and make sense of “it all”, the few years in which to try and leave something behind that will survive a short while and establish that “they were here”. They struggle with the basic existential conundrums long after many people abandon them as impossible, and seek to make the best use of the talents they have been given, and of their allotted time here. It may be, of course, that “the outsider personality” is an overblown concept, and that we all sit somewhere on a spectrum of relative outsiderness.

Where Colin’s work particularly strikes home to me is his urge to devour information. In “The World as Information” (published by Intellect in 1999, immediately before the internet became such a central aspect of our lives), I described in some detail his huge appetite to consume and digest knowledge. In various publications he has given figures for the number of books and recordings he possessed, which were gradually taking over his Cornish bungalow, along with outbuildings constructed specially to house them. For instance, in “Dreaming to Some Purpose”, published in 2004, he wrote: “In July 1961 I note that I had 5,000 books and 1,500 records in the house. By 1963, I had 10,000 books and 4,000 records. Today I have about 25,000 books and the same number of records. This probably goes a long way towards explaining why we never had any money”. In the era we are now entering, when increasingly we are encouraged not to collect but to freely download from the internet, one wonders how he would have reacted and coped.

Being an outsider offers plenty of scope for pathology, but charitably one may say that Colin’s collecting instincts were part and parcel of his larger than life personality, the central motivation that drove his career as an author, and a feature that made him – to the distant reader – so human, so likeable, so easy to identify with. The outsider, whether it’s an exaggeration or not, is a personality type that increasingly we will encounter and will need to understand, to accommodate and to enable to succeed. Whatever the potential dangers, it is so often outsiders who drive things forwards, rather than those who are at ease with themselves, psychologically comfortable - with or without the infamous pram in the hall.

Arguably, Colin’s best output was early on. He once said that he had to write in the same way that a dog with fleas has to scratch; surely, he wrote too much, but quite apart from the dog that had to be scratched there was also the wolf that had to be kept from the door. With his passing, a serious re-evaluation of the life and works of Colin Wilson, especially one in the context of relevance to present day concerns, would be timely.

Colin Wilson was born in Leicester on 26th June 1931 and died in Cornwall on 5th December 2013.

Making it up as you go along

It was amusing to see the Fat Controller on the news this week, launching the microminimally speeded up East Midlandzzz Trainzzz services to London, with four whole minutes shaved off some journey times between Derby and London, and an entire minute saved between Leicester and the capital. He failed to mention that, in the new timetable, some of the services from Nottingham by this most unattractive of train operators are actually taking longer.

When asked whether this thrilling, paradigm-shifting, quantum-leaping acceleration that so underwhelmed interviewed potential passengers didn’t obviate the need for HS2, he countered that more freight was travelling by rail, that we needed more capacity and that, er, more people were travelling. So, three absolutely compelling reasons then. Or maybe two (but what’s mere numbers to politicians, eh ? It’s always being right that counts). Travelling into Birmingham last weekend I couldn’t but help notice the cleared site adjacent to the Curzon Street relic that will form the projected HS2 terminus in the Second City, and I also observed how far it was from New Street and from most of the city centre.

Birmingham, as both a major city and a national transport hub, needs a radical improvement to its rail services, but neither HS2 nor the current redevelopment of New Street Station are the answer. Something with twice (or some multiple, I’m sure the experts would know) the capacity of New Street, incorporating HS2, is needed; perhaps, somehow, a New Street “deep” station, to use the terminology of the Berlin Haupbahnhof. It would cost a vast amount of money and cause huge disruption, but other countries – the Netherlands, for instance – are tackling similar problems in an imaginative way. If only the inspiration lying behind the splendid new Library of Birmingham could be redirected towards relieving the desperate congestion of the existing rail facilities.

More positively, I’ve now completed my promised painting, and though it hasn’t photographed very well, here it is.

It’s a composite, located in a semi-fictional setting in the vicinity of Westbourne Park and Kensal Town in west London, between the Paddington Canal and the Western Region main line, and it has the provisional title, with obvious debts to Algernon Newton and Edward Hopper, of “Terrace by the canal”. Hope you like it.

 © R. Abbott 2013

Hideous buildings for hideous people

This last week has revealed new depths of the quality of UK financial institutions, namely the revelations about the Co-op Bank and its fatuous chairman. This news is hardly a surprise. When I was at school nobody of any intelligence wanted a career in finance, and the only person I knew who became a banker obtained one ‘O’-level at the second attempt, and that was in woodwork. He was, as far as I know, basically honest, though, merely not very bright. We keep hearing how important it is that our bankers don’t run off to Frankfurt or Hong Kong or somewhere, but really, who needs them?

What is surprising, though, at least to someone of a sensitive aesthetic disposition, is the way that the City of London has been allowed to erupt with massive, bulky, bizarrely shaped excrescences of no recognisable geometry, containers for financiers, placed so as to cause maximum visual offence, as per the illustration above. Who has permitted this? Has Boris fallen down on the job (as it were)?

Where’s the Luftwaffe just when you need them? Frankfurt and HK have hideous skylines already; let the bankers go there and let us have our City back, free from shards and spikes, gherkins and gonads, cheesegraters and mutant mushrooms.

On other points – “Tourist In Your Own Town” is delayed while I try to understand US tax requirements (useless financial bureaucracy again), and the painting of Kensal Town, referred to in the previous posting, is nearing completion, and will be featured very soon.

Essay on Algernon Newton and other diversions

One can so easily disengage from the unnatural habit of blogging, and so it has been these last few weeks. Apologies to anyone who has missed my rantings; sadly, HS2 hasn’t been abandoned – yet. Travel has been one excuse for my inactivity, lack of inspiration the most honest one, a slow stage in the production of “Tourist In Your Own Town” another. However, things are on the move again.

Since the creative urge will out anyway, in the absence of significant activity on “Tourist” I’ve been letting the muse follow her own channels. She’s been trickling out in several media (that’s enough purple pompous pretentiousness, thank you.-  Ed). Sorry. Musically, I’ve been attending to The Catford Tendency, playing around with some explosive little tunes which, in their raw state, are enjoying the working title of “The Dysfunctionals”. Tunes inspired by some people I know quite well. Anger, despair, other negative emotions. No, you don’t know who you are, do you, you don’t read blogs.

And I’m painting again. Though I’ve never consciously copied anyone, given my appetite for visions of urban grot and aesthetic shabbiness (I’m watching you – Ed), comparisons with the pet themes of Edward Hopper and Algernon Newton are probably inevitable. Especially as I like oblique sunlight and deserted city scenes, early morning stillness and such. Hopper of course is regular fare for calendar producers and TV psychologists steeped in the imagery of metropolitan alienation; Newton is much less well known, probably because he’s British but without the need to boast or to shock as an alternative to  possessing talent. To be honest, much of Newton’s output is naff, it’s flat and lifeless, amateurish and mediocre, and with some of his later works one is left wondering “why ?” Nevertheless, at his best - and that isn’t often - he’s gorgeous.

Relatively little has been written about Algernon Newton, and therefore I decided to indulge myself by writing a little essay about him, a brief biography, and some highly subjective comments on some of his paintings. Anyone who would like a free copy of the essay is welcome, although the accompanying illustrations are not copyright cleared. But it will give you a potted account and some weblinks, if you’re interested.

Rather like Hopper and comments about alienation and loneliness in the big city, Newton routinely attracts remarks about his works portraying menace and ominous foreboding, sometimes regarded as psychological portents of World War Two, or as delayed side effects of his First World War experiences. There’s quite a consensus, apparently, but I’m not sure about this; it seems to me that city scenes can be empty, quiet and still, without necessarily portraying anything sinister. That would be the case as regards my own paintings. Thundery skies can just be thundery skies. Visual or topographical pleasure may need no further analysis.

The quiet city in question is (mostly) London between the wars. Newton became known as the “Regent’s Canaletto”, a neat pun acknowledging his admiration of the Italian maestro plus his frequent choice of the Regent’s Canal for subject matter – mostly in shabby locations in Paddington and Camden Town. Those sort of places are among my favourites too. His very best painting, however,  one that fills me with unfulfillable yearnings, is of Camberwell, an idyllic canal scene now long since obliterated by the banalities of Burgess Park, a location dead and buried along with the age and the values it represented.

Thus stimulated by my brief study of Algernon Newton I have returned to one of my favourite artistic locations, the area of west London close to Trellick Tower, the former Great Western main line and the Grand Union Canal known formally as Kensal Town, a broken off outpost of humanity that at one time might have declared allegiance to Paddington or North Kensington. From the early sixties onwards this area was seen to good and proper by planners, social engineers, architects, you know the sort, the same ilk as the begetters of Burgess Park, all hygiene and fresh air. The best recollection of its ambience remains in the photographs of Roger Mayne, taken in and around Southam Street in the heart of this district. There isn’t much of it left now, hardly anything. The sky looks more or less the same. So all I can paint is an idea, an atmosphere, a might have been, a could have been but never was. Perhaps next time I’ll have something to show you, and more news on “Tourist”, which also includes an account of the district I’m referring to.

One paradox. In the TV series “’Allo ‘Allo’, the character Edith, wife of café owner René, bears a strong facial resemblance to Jo Hopper, the artist’s wife who modelled in many of his paintings. The radio code name Edith and René use for communicating with England is “Nighthawk”. “Nighthawks” is of course one of Hopper’s most famous works. Strange.

“Tourist In Your Own Town” progress report

Progress with “Tourist In Your Own Town” is going well, and proofing is now at an advanced stage. The cover, featuring a stereotyped tourist in a well-known London location, looks great. The first attempt at printing has been undertaken. This has demonstrated that the preferred typeface, Garamond, doesn’t come out too well, with the crossbars on the e’s and the H’s, in particular, tending to vanish. Current thinking is to go for a bolder and denser font for the main text, probably Baskerville Old, and at a larger point size. This will mean a fatter book, currently estimated at around 488 pages. Everything always takes longer than expected!

Allowing for other commitments, publication of “Tourist” is at present projected for early October. For anyone interested in the subjective aspects of geography, the psychology of places, how we experience travel, and what has become known as psychogeography, “Tourist In Your Own Town” will be an essential book to purchase.

This is the age

Of the ironic way. Le chemin de fer, el ferrocarril, die Eisenbahn. Damn it, we invented it and gave it to the world. I alluded in my last posting to the Thomas the Tank Engine character, can’t quite remember his name (no, not Ringo), whose repetitive strain as regards HS2 is that he’s right and everyone else has got it wrong. Recently he’s been televised, uttering his habitual spiel, on Nottingham station, while it was closed for 5 weeks for infrastructural improvements.  It’s a location highly appropriate, symbolic even, for Thomas the Tank, for this precise spot illustrates so well the historical failures of railway planning.

Right at the start of the Age of Steam, Nottingham decided that it didn’t want anything to do with the new-fangled railway, so Derby got it instead, with good connections and lots of railway-related employment that have lasted down the years and done that city proud. Having missed the – er – train, Nottingham’s wise elders belatedly allowed their city to be connected via a spur to the Midland Railway, which in turn became part of the London Midland division of British Railways, and was subsequently branded the Midland Mainline – all three affiliations commanding respect, loyalty, and a degree of affection. Latterly this route has been operated by East Midlands Trains.

Post-Beeching, Nottingham abandoned its larger and centrally located station, Victoria - a vast cathedral-like, cavernous place, on the former Great Central line - in favour of the Midland, draughtily inconvenient on the dodgy southern periphery of the central area and permanently infused with the ambient whiff of decomposing mailbags (perhaps the 5 week closure has allowed them to be located). Of course it’s true that Derby, Crewe and Birmingham would have been awkward to reach from Victoria, and that the glories of dear old St Pancras itself may have been imperilled by such a loss of traffic if Nottingham Midland had closed. Victoria, however, had the potential for fast services to Sheffield and Leeds, and to Leicester and London. That is, to the centres of those cities, not to “hubs” quite near them. In short, and not to put too fine a point on it, the obvious route for HS2’s proposed north easterly extensions was there, built, ready, waiting for someone with some imagination.

The old Great Central out of Marylebone, the last UK main line to be built before the Eurostar link, was well engineered for high speeds and smooth running. It traversed the centres of Leicester and Nottingham via magnificent viaducts and tunnels. Since the line closed in the Sixties much of this infrastructure has been done away with, vandalised, and the right of way built over.

In Nottingham, lines 2 and 3 of the NET tram network are currently under construction, part of the route being along the old Great Central axis. Other than those who stand to benefit financially, directly, most local people appear lukewarm about these developments in a city already blessed with good bus services that could be improved still further at relatively little extra cost. At present, the construction work is causing considerable road traffic disruption. Naturally, there was a business case for the tram project, with suitably impressive figures – investment, jobs – dreamed up accordingly. The benefits to public transport were apparently incidental, an irrelevance, as were the environmental objections. It was very obviously all about money and politics. Ah yes, a business case. Sound familiar?

Thus it was especially amusing to see Thomas the Tank on the telly, puffing away “I know I’m right, I know I’m right” upon a dreary platform at Nottingham station, a platform which was spanned by a sturdy girder bridge until it was thoughtfully demolished a few years ago. This was the bridge that carried the Great Central from London into Nottingham Victoria and beyond. It’s now being rebuilt as the Karlsruhe Friendship Bridge, since Nottingham is twinned with Karlsruhe (along with Minsk and Harare, both exemplar cities for the democratic process). The KFB will take the unasked-for tram extension, the very system that so effectively helps to block the sensible route for HS2 up to Sheffield and Leeds. I’m glad that Thomas, or whatever his real name is, came to see it. I’m not sure exactly what the bridge is made of, but in certain lights it looks kind of irony.

Unbuilt HS2

Last night I watched the repeat of the third and last programme of Dr. Olivia Horsfall Turner’s highly intelligent, well researched, superbly presented and thoroughly excellent BBC TV series on “Unbuilt Britain”. The previous two programmes included an examination of Paxton’s “Great Victorian Way” intended to circle inner London, proposals for impossibly massive canals across central Scotland to improve naval defence, and pioneering visions for a fixed crossing of the English Channel.

This week’s programme focused on unrealised plans for London and Glasgow. It was an absolute treat. First of all it compared the merits of the Wren, Evelyn and Hooke proposals for rebuilding London after the Great Fire of 1666. Thanks to commercial imperatives and the urgent requirement to rehouse the displaced citizens, none of these schemes came to fruition, except - in modified form - Wren’s masterpiece, St Paul’s Cathedral, and his other City churches built after the Fire. The second half of the programme was devoted to two postwar plans for the redevelopment of Glasgow, a city that had suffered greatly from the attentions of the Luftwaffe, and which long before WW2 had been a by-word for tenement living, slums, congestion, violence, and other assorted deprivations.

The two competing schemes were by Patrick Abercrombie, who advocated decanting the overcrowded inner districts to exurban New Towns (e.g. Cumbernauld and East Kilbride), and Robert Bruce, who devised a ruthlessly modernistic plan heavily influenced by Le Corbusier. Bruce’s proposal would have erased the existing city, with its wealth of varied and inspired architecture, along with its close-knit communities, and replaced it with a gridiron of concrete and glass monoliths, making the most extreme excesses of East Berlin or Novosibirsk look warm and cuddly in comparison. This monstrous idea came terrifyingly close to implementation, but by the end of the 1940s had been abandoned.

What Glasgow was left with were the New Towns, some sporadic outcrops of high rise, an urban fabric largely untouched and – once decades of grime had been blasted away – magnificent to the eye. In due course it would become the fashionable and lovely city we know today, a treasure trove of architectural gems, but last night’s programme suggested that it had had a narrow scrape. On Clydeside  in those early postwar years the crude forces of politics and finance were seemingly allowed to operate with little to check them, and scant concern was shown for the softer factors crucial to satisfactory urban life. I find it rather disturbing that Bruce’s plan, in particular, was taken so seriously, and that he wasn’t taken away by men in white coats.

Interestingly, though, it was intuited early on that both of these proposals needed some assistance if they were to have a chance of success; their victims – sorry - beneficiaries, had first to be persuaded, softened up. Thus a film was shown at local cinemas, a work of naked propaganda  said to be highly convincing as regards the merits of the Bruce plan, right up until the final few moments, when the jaw-dropping horrible reality of this abysmal scheme, illustrated by a tacky, clunky model, became all too obviously apparent. The propaganda became self-defeating at that instant, and the audience must have filed out in shock and disbelief at what was going to be done to them, to their lives, their memories, their places, their city. Meanwhile,  Patrick Abercrombie – who famously had designs upon London as well, most of them unrealised, thankfully – also made a film, a ghastly Cholmondeley-Warnerish production in which the weirdly monocled protagonist loftily assumed that the vast upheaval and experiment in social engineering that his scheme implied was unquestionably good for Glasgow and Glaswegians, and would be welcomed. Again, he was rumbled, and again – perhaps with hindsight aided by the creations of Harry Enfield – one is amazed that the whole performance wasn’t dismissed as a spoof.

However, it wasn’t. The line between good intentions and overweening arrogance is sometimes hard to discern, but perhaps we shouldn’t be too harsh on what were the standards of the time, not long after the end of a war during which the population had become inured to receiving condescending and irritating instructions on how they ought to behave. Experts and authorities were respected in those days. Sometimes. Wonder how they lost it.

In Glasgow in the 1940s – still regarded as the second city of the Empire - the likely subjective, aesthetic, social and environmental consequences of what was being suggested were ignored; only the vested interests of political power and commercial gain were deemed to be relevant to the discussion. The poor sods who would have to up sticks and go and live in filing cabinets in the sky or out in the middle of nowhere weren’t  of any real interest in the grand scheme of things. The proposals could be rationalised with vaguely socialist smarm about how cosy it would be if everyone lived equally – equally, that is (architects and planners excepted), in habitations of equal awfulness, all part of the preppy postwar zeitgeist, the weary hope for a new and better world, the adoration of all things white and cuboid and soulless, the infatuation with meaningless grassy “lungs”, all carefully, neatly, psychotically arranged - in low density angst, hygienic resentment, and fully functional right angled seething, with the added inducements of an inside loo and a 23rd storey balcony to jump off.

Of course it isn’t like this now, is it. Is it? ‘Course not. We know better now, don’t we. We know that there has to be more to a city than this, even if Cumbernauld New Town does occasionally make it into the catalogues of crap Britain. All about money and power? What? Was it ever? Don’t be ridiculous.

In my “Tourist In Your Own Town”, currently being prepared for publication, I examine the kinds of subjective factors that feature in the appreciation of cities, factors which would have been so cruelly denied in Bruce’s Glasgow, Le Corbusier’s Paris, or Robert Moses’ Manhattan, had any of these atrocities been allowed to proceed. Atro Cities, now, there’s an apt descriptor. No, the core requirement is for a sense of place, and “Tourist” delves into that topic in detail, together with much more - in what should be a rattling good read. Watch this space.

Yes, it would be nice to think we have come a long way in our planning activities  since those flickering monochrome days of postwar austerity. Maybe we have. Certainly we have access to more convoluted wool-pulling techniques, to fancier statistical obfuscation algorithms, we are quite at home with snazzy computer simulations and dodgy data mashups, we simply lurve virtual realities and visualisations; we’re always hugely impressed by the latest software package (yes, it has to be a package, we don’t want anything that might be easy to get into). Etc, etc.

OK, I’m starting to get stroppy. Let’s turn to high speed rail. In principle, a Good Thing. Currently in the UK we have a kind of demented Thomas the Tank Engine character who keeps puffing “I know I’m right, I know I’m right”, every time more voices join the opposition to HS2 and whenever the ludicrously expensive and comprehensively daft project is shown up for what it is. The greater the opposition, the louder he chuffs. So far, he’s getting away with it. I wonder who he is?

“Is your name not Bruce, then ?” “No, it’s Patrick”. “That’s going to cause a little confusion”.

Beeching 2

Today the BBC News website reports that the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) now estimates that the extended version of High Speed 2, with its northern projections to Leeds and Manchester, will cost the British taxpayer more than £80 billion, compared with the previous comparatively trivial figure of £42.6 billion. As with all such estimates beloved of our political and financial masters - where millions so easily escalate into billions and trillions and on into completely meaningless-illions – there is a strong whiff of wetting one’s finger and sticking it up into the wind. “Ah yes, um, £80 billion, that sounds about right. It’s only the taxpayer. Pity the poor sods who live in Canterbury or Cardiff or Cornwall who will still have to fork out for HS2 at very little potential benefit to themselves. Never mind.” But to be fair, while the figures may be a bit iffy, the IEA is opposed to the current proposals and they suggest that the money could be better spent on more effective rail improvements. How absolutely true. Carefully thought-through improvements, for instance, the consequences of joined-up thinking and imaginative planning by people sympathetic to, and knowledgeable about, our railway heritage. No, not the Fat Controller.

No one has a clue how much HS2 will cost. Nor how many jobs it will create, or how much business it will generate in different parts of the country, or even if anyone will want to use it, or be able to afford to. Completion date, a couple of decades on, is a long way away. These are fast-moving and scary times. As someone once said, making predictions, especially about the future, is difficult. The big changes are the ones we didn’t see coming : the end of the Soviet bloc, the internet, 9/11 and the insanity that has followed. And so it will be; 20 years is a very long time, even if politicians can’t imagine beyond next weekend or at best beyond the next election – and, all too often, routinely can’t see beyond the tip of their steadily extending noses. Whatever the merits of the estimated figures, the IEA report does note, however, that the scheme is “incredibly poor value for money” – so, then, no different really from what indigenous longterm UK residents have come to expect in general, and fully in line with the effects of successive government policies.

The £80 billion (I’ve just checked and it hasn’t gone up since this morning, though admittedly it is a Sunday and the school holidays) apparently allows for all the bribes, hand-outs, fudges, kludges, bodges and infrastructural bandaids necessary to render the scheme halfway palatable to a captive public, or even do-able at all. The report isn’t officially released until tomorrow, so I’m not sure if the new figure takes care of the tricky bit about going where people actually want to go, e.g. city centres, or stations where there are ongoing connections to other places, rather than stations with fascinating historic columns quite near to city centres or “hubs”  in the middle of nowhere but accessible by an extended tram route with only 15 intermediate stops, just as long as you don’t mind humping your baggage and your small children across the footbridge.

A few weeks ago I voluntarily underwent the profoundly depressing experience of attending a public meeting where the aims, pros and cons of HS2 were explained, with the opportunity for the audience to ask questions and to raise objections. The responses were widely varied, across the spectrum from unquestioning acceptance to unsubtle badge-wearing “Stop HS2 !” fundamentalism, and with many shades of detail and specificity of concern in between. There’s an awful lot to weigh up which – frighteningly – appears to have been brushed under the carpet by the experts who really understand these matters. “Of course, we’ve looked at that in immense detail, and we concluded it was a non-starter. Trust us, we know best. Next?” Sadly, but by no means surprisingly, I came away feeling that the matter has already been decided and that, while there will be some sort of sham of a “consultation” process, and a few minor tweaks reluctantly permitted here and there, if the present government (or its replacement by the other lot in 2015) has anything to do with it, the biggest public transport disaster since Beeching is fully on track – and an expensive, environmentally destructive, and wrongly sited track it is absolutely determined to be.

Britain vs The Axis Powers : Round Three

It’s usually the sign of personally uneventful times and a stagnant mind when one is reduced to blogging about TV programmes. Indeed, such has been my week, despite some socialising, travel, painting, reading, and trying to persuade Microsoft Word to paginate “Tourist In Your Own Town” in the way that I want, rather than as desired by some anonymous 14-year old nerd in Seattle. Be that as it may, the overall result of my TV viewing has been a renewed sense of despair at the inadequacies of our once great nation – the one before Blair, Brown, Cameron and the other bloke who looks like a volleyball teacher, in fact, the one before most of their postwar predecessors.

This strong sense of failure has been mostly down to programmes about Germany, although their food – it has to be said – doesn’t film well, and provokes my latent tendencies towards vegetarianism. Rick Stein’s rather self-indulgent jaunts round his various relatives was thus a disappointment as far as I was concerned and - Beatle-fan though I am - you won’t catch me ordering the Hamburg analogue of scouse. However, that was just the start. Other programmes this week highlighted the superiority of the German car industry compared with our own – as if we needed it pointing it out – and of the rather more robust and thought-through German attitude towards work in general, looking after one’s children properly, drinking in public, Sunday observance, antisocial behaviour und so weiter, compared with poor, greedy, materialistic, drunken, loud, loutish, atheistic, defeatist, crippled by political correctness and elf and safety victim-status Britain – a nation that is becoming embarrassingly out of step with the rest of the civilised world. Or, in a single word, embarrassing.

And then there’s the Japanese, who these days are much like we used to be – quiet, reserved, thoughtful, respectful, industrious, clever, nice to have as tourists, and generally a bit peculiar – in an otaku-ish rather than a shed-o-centric way. The Channel 5 programme, which every several seconds repeatedly referred to Shinjuku as “the world’s busiest train station” for the benefit of viewers with ultra-short attention spans and no experience of railways, did - despite the moronic commentary - feature fascinating scenes of precision timing, crowd control and customer care. For reasons of libel-phobia one would not wish to make invidious comparisons with certain British train operating companies, except to say that the handful of trains that struggle to arrive at and depart from platforms 1 to 4 of St Pancras every hour should not be compared with the 25,000 a day that pass through Shinjuku – which has 30-odd platforms, and that’s not including the metro lines. No, it isn’t a fair comparison at all, except that one may allude vaguely perhaps to a certain difference in generic attitude. Then again, I’m not sure that I would want to be squeezed aboard, by professional squeezers, onto the last train of the evening, inserted into the armpits and other available orifices of suited sararimen rather worse for wear after a night out. Evidently, then, it’s not just the Brits who can’t drink sensibly, but at least the train travellers of greater Tokyo are more discreet about it, and puke quietly and apologetically over their fellow passengers rather than celebrating their inebriation as an intellectual  achievement.

Other depressing programmes of the week featured (1) a call centre in Swansea, run by a man who clearly rates David Brent as a role model and which – compared with a German factory that makes things - produces nothing at all, absolutely nichts that any normal person would want to hear about; and (2) Stephen Fry making an idiot of himself, oh holy moly, oh good heavens, in the City of London, while showing nothing of its monstrous new buildings and saying nothing anywhere near nasty enough about the whizzy bankers who work there. Both programmes had me squirming, especially as I have a high regard for (a) Swansea and its people and (b) Stephen Fry – although he should perhaps be encouraged to take things easy for a while.

But by far the most despair-inducing remark of the week was made by a correspondent on the BBC ten o’clock news on Thursday who – following the tragic death of a girl who had been cyber-bullied – commented that for many young people these days, virtual reality is reality. Thus for them there is no life beyond the gadget, beyond the screen. For someone like me who thrives on the visual environment and on the myriad activities available non-digitally, that is deeply worrying. I just hope it isn’t quite true.

Blurb on the beach

In the throes of preparing for publication of “Tourist In Your Own Town”, and seeking an alternative to being molested by dogs on an otherwise glorious Norfolk beach, it occurred to me that I needed to write a kind of blurb, which would serve as an introduction but also, well, act as a kind of blurb. In a blurbish kind of way. So what I wrote was along the following lines.

“The central theme of “Tourist In Your Own Town” is how, subjectively, we perceive the geographical environment, with an emphasis on the experiencing of ordinary places, as it applies to daily life and to travel and tourism. The book is concerned with how it feels to be alive in the sorts of very ordinary environments most of us inhabit, the impact that places make upon us, the sense of place, and with why some places are interesting or pleasant, and others are not.

Subjects covered include the impressions that places make when we first encounter them, why some places are perceived to have humorous qualities, subjective similarities between places, the recent enthusiasm for psychogeography, nostalgia, the psychology of travelling within and between places, and the associations and imagery that places hold for us.

The book’s primary purpose is to encourage an appreciation and enjoyment of one’s surroundings, drawing on references from geography, planning, architecture, the psychology of perception, autobiography, fictional literature and visual art, in an original synthesis. There are also implications for the sensitive redevelopment of places.

The book will be of interest to anyone who takes an interest in places, plus those with a professional or educational interest in travel, tourism, geography, the built environment, and the psychology of place. “Tourist In Your Own Town” is extensively referenced but is not academic in style, is occasionally humorous, and is accessible to the general reader”.

With that, blurb provisionally completed, a raincloud appeared, and – though probably Normal for Norfolk - it seemed prudent to retreat.

Bad men and bad baguettes

How pleasant – and unusual – to be drafting this piece in the garden, the temperature soaring towards 30 degrees, the sky relentlessly blue, and the only immediate negative the baguette at which I take the occasional half-hearted nibble. This Asda product, fancifully labelled a Parisienne Baguette – “chosen by you” (well, we can all make mistakes) – which I have stuffed with Camembert and cranberry sauce, has all the gustatory appeal of the cardboard inner tube of a toilet roll. Nasty indeed.

But not as nasty as some. As publication of “Tourist In Your Own Town” hovers uncertainly, I was again reminded by news stories this week of the chance factors leading to place creation, a theme from an earlier posting, and one for “Tourist”. San Francisco suffered a plane crash, fortunately not as serious as it might have been, and an event which will add nothing to the sense of place which the wonderful city by the Golden Gate already enjoys aplenty. No discernible effect there, then. Unlike Lac-Mégantic - on the other side of the North American continent in Québec province - a small community which, what’s left of it, will forever have its identity imprinted by a runaway train that caused many fatalities. Such are the random and accidental occurrences which may or may not give rise to, or modify, a sense of placefulness.

Maybe someone at Lac-Mégantic was crucially to blame, maybe not; that remains to be decided, but what of those places definitively linked with infamous people or dreadful deeds? We’re not just talking Asda bakery here. Places with evil subtitles, as it were. Recently I travelled on the partially completed high speed main line across Austria, and found my place-association muscles being activated in an unpleasant way more often than was good for them. “Wir erreichen jetzt Linz Hauptbahnhof”. Nice station, good connections, surprisingly large steelworks close by, but what does one really associate with Linz? Anything other than the Führer’s megalomanic plans for rebuilding, revisited repeatedly as the nightmare empire he had created crumbled about him? Anything else? I thought not, except – maybe - nearby Mauthausen and its diabolical quarry.

The train slowed momentarily from its cruising speed of around 135 mph to pass through Amstetten, which as far as I could recall has only one claim to notoriety, but a pretty big one, in the form of Josef Fritzl. One may recall that a few years ago it came to light that for 24 years Fritzl had imprisoned his daughter in the basement, raping her repeatedly and resulting in her producing seven children, one of whom died in infancy, the others remaining similarly incarcerated. Josef and his wife – in a sick-making hypocritical charade now in principle nauseatingly familiar (recent cases in Derby and New Addington, for instance) appeared on TV from time to time appealing for help in investigating the daughter’s “disappearance”.

Vienna has of course inflicted its own peculiar spin on psychology; one wonders how that subject might have developed if Sigmund Freud had been born in, say, Barcelona, Brisbane or Bristol, or anywhere less conspicuously knicker-twisted than the Austrian capital. For starters, we’d all be less afraid of rats, horses, and/or sex. Or, the other great what-if, if the aforementioned moustachioed one had succeeded as an artist there or, better still, been born half a century later in Dartford or Liverpool and picked up the guitar. Counterfactuals get you nowhere though, least of all Salzburg.

Upon arrival in Salzburg it was impossible to ignore (but effortless to resist) the announcement of an imminent train departure to Braunau-am-Inn, birthplace of the aforementioned ranting one. Not that he can be avoided entirely. The excellent Panorama tours, which operate out of Salzburg and specialise in “The Sound of Music” for those who like that kind of thing, do a Tour Number 4, to the Kehlsteinhaus, otherwise known as the Eagle’s Nest. Cryptically their leaflet refers to brass elevators of WW2 vintage and “a magnificent view of the surrounding snowcapped peaks of the Bavarian Alps and the surrounding countryside”. The blurb intriguingly makes no mention of whom one might have shared the view with some 70 years ago. In the unlikely event that one doesn’t know, I wonder if the sense of placefulness of this majestic alpine summit is diminished – or enhanced – as a consequence? Place creation, as I say, is all so chancy, so subjective.

Budapest: a lesson for us all

It was liberating last week to arrive in a “new” city, one that I had been looking forward to for a long time, and to see how it fared with respect to some of the principles of subjective geography that I have been describing in recent blogs, and which feature in “Tourist In Your Own Town”.

Budapest enjoys a strong sense of place, due in no small way to its location at the point where the Danube breaks free from the hills to the north and enters the great flat Hungarian plain. It celebrates its mighty river and makes the most of it, the same mythic Blue Danube which its upstream neighbour Vienna so churlishly turns its back on, to its loss, and which last week – after a long period of heavy rains – was greyish-green in colour, swollen, littered with uprooted trees, and flowing fast. As the capital of a country with a language that offers few clues to a non-speaker I was surprised at how easy Budapest was to use, at its eagerness to adopt Western values, and at the frequency and competence with which English was spoken. I found the city welcoming and friendly, fun to be in. It’s somewhere that wants to have a good time and knows how to go about it.

First impressions, when arriving at Keleti station off the RailJet from Vienna, were of a frisson of “foreignness”, of Eastern Europeanness, a feeling exacerbated by the presence of dodgy-looking taxi touts and of the disorder caused by the closure of the main station frontage and its surrounding by construction works for metro Line 4. The strangeness quickly dissipated upon approaching the city centre, and I soon realised I was in one of the great European capitals.

Pest includes the commercial heart of the city, while Buda is more relaxed and touristy, with features reflecting a long history. Subjectively, there is no obvious single central place, although conventionally it would be Deák Ferenc Square, where the three metro lines intersect, a location marked by a big wheel and a tourist information office. However, there is a considerable surrounding area where one feels a strong sense of being close to the centre of things. The Danube acts as a focus through the central area, especially in the vicinity of the chain bridge, near where tour guides congregate.

Navigability is easy, aided on the Pest side of the Danube by broad radial avenues and roughly semicircular connectors, and sometimes by views towards the river and the hills to the west, and on the Buda side by the very obvious topographies of the castle area and of Gellert hill. Many parts of the central city provide a satisfying sense of enclosure, with a high information content in terms of street furniture and activity, the visual and aural effects of the ubiquitous yellow trams, a solid, chunky, dense and stylish urbanity, yet with a skyline free from the visual blight of ugly modern highrise that disfigures so many cities, not least London. Budapest is a city that enjoys itself, knows what it has got, appreciates it and – one hopes – doesn’t want to spoil it by pursuing the dreary diktats of “progress”, as understood by egotistical architects, unimaginative financiers and corporate drones. In terms of subjective similarity to other places, Paris is the most obvious candidate, surely not a bad thing. Many of the major thoroughfares are treelined; the variety in the detail of the vernacular architecture is astonishing.

In an earlier blog I commented on the plaque on the bridge across the Thames at Marlow which declares – in English and Magyar – how that Buckinghamshire town is “bridged” with Budapest, thanks to the work of William Tierney Clark and his (unrelated) successor Adam Clark. I was hoping to find a plaque on the Szchenyi chain bridge across the Danube referring to Marlow but, despite the difficulty of deciphering the inscription in Hungarian at the south western corner of the bridge, I don’t think Marlow gets a mention, although both Clarks are cited. But it’s a such a lovely bridge that I attach a photograph.

Finally, I encountered something so strange and wonderful that afterwards I wondered if I had dreamt it. Having explored the delightful city park in the north east of the city I took Line 1 of the metro downtown. This is the Földalatti, the line dating from the 1890s, the first such system in continental Europe. The station at Hösök tere, aka Heroes’ Square, adjacent to the city park, really is the stuff of dreams, and consequently my description may be a little exaggerated or distorted. Entering the station via a stairwell I went to a tardis-like kiosk and bought a block of tickets, the size of one’s little finger, and had to validate one in a machine, under the eye of guards, before entering the platform area proper which – surreally – appeared not much larger than your average bathmat. The train was already in, and seemed to have a capacity for about eight people, all of them tourists. I’m sure this can’t really be true. At each beautifully tiled station, door-closing and departure were announced by an elaborate sequence of chimes. The whole experience was a dreamlike delight.

However, it occurred to me later that much of the line follows the route of Andrassy Street, the straight radial sometimes compared (unreasonably) with the Champs Elysées, and therefore must run close to the hideous basement of Number 60, the House of Terror. Here, the crimes of the Nazi and the Soviet occupiers are recorded in grim detail, along with some of the more gruesome artefacts of repression, and offer a stern message applicable to this day to all those – businessmen and politicians in particular - who toady to nasty regimes that still practise exactly the same kinds of thing. Budapest has found its freedom, values and enjoys it, and understands how precious it is. We should take note.

That Codnor Moment

Synchronicity is a wonderful thing, when you can get it to work for you. This morning, I was fretting away at what I really hope will be the very last revision of the “Humour, Stereotypes and Stigma” section of Chapter 3 of “Tourist In Your Own Town : The Subjective Geography of Everyday Life” (forthcoming). I heard a clattering at the letterbox, and went downstairs to investigate.

Among all the usual rubbish from banks and so forth, our postman had delivered an envelope, bearing an oak leaf logo and addressed “To The Occupier”. It featured the question, prominently, in white on red, “When was the last time a place made you smile simply by thinking about it?” My immediate reaction was to wonder how they knew what I was thinking, and to speculate whether this was a veiled reference to Sidcup. Or Slough. Or Scunthorpe, some of the places mentioned in Chapter 3, which I had just been pondering. I’ve also had Catford on my mind recently, but that’s beside the point, and I have seen the doctor about it and had some blood samples taken. However, amazing coincidence or not, since the senders of today’s communication were the National Trust, seeking new members - I’m one already, so it’s nice to know my subscription is being thoughtfully employed - I imagine that this was not exactly what they were referring to. More probably somewhere like Sissinghurst, Stowe or Saltram, if we’re going to ssstay with ssssibilants. Alliteration has allottoanswerfor.

The humour of place names is far too good a subject for a short blog – you’ll just have to wait for the book – but I can honestly say that, until this morning’s facetious interpretations, the last place I visited that made me smile, actually while there, and completely involuntarily so, was Neasden. Yes, I’m slightly surprised at myself too. Over the years I’ve become inured to the humour value of Neasden, so beloved of Willie Rushton, for instance, with his little song, and I’ve passed through it many times without even noticing, let alone giving in to a micro-smirk. On this recent occasion, however, it took me by surprise. Pausing there momentarily, on a train en route from Queensbury to Dollis Hill (don’t ask), it was the intonation of the recorded announcement that got me: “This station is Neasden”. The slightly longer than absolutely necessary pause before the name, which was spoken in a fractionally lower tone - suggesting an adjectival intent, a judgemental one, perhaps something synonymous with, shall we say, “crap”. I almost erupted into a spontaneous LOL guffaw. Not the done thing on the Jubilee Line, I fear.

For a less obvious source of toponymic mirth we have to head north to Derbyshire, and to the delightful small former mining town of Codnor, in the market place of which are the fabulous Cattermole Buildings. Seeing them always makes me smile and, by association, so does Codnor - just by thinking about it. Buildings give character to a town. Rome has its Colosseum, Berlin its Reichstag, Hollywood its Bowl, Codnor its Cattermole. A town with a Cattermole is a town I like. Codnor is famed in the history of television commercials, of course, for “That Codnor Moment”, every pipe smokers’ idea of nirvana, and in a song on Simon and Garfunkel’s classic “Bridge Over Troubled Water” album, namely “El Codnor Pasa”. I  mean, these were boys from New York City, and they certainly had their cultural antennae pointing at where it’s at. So we’re not talking parochial here; Codnor hasn’t gone entirely unnoticed.

Sadly, though, I have to report that neither Neasden nor Codnor feature in the National Trust Handbook (I’ve checked), but then again, all kinds of things make people smile.

Boring matters

Things that we know in principle how to do (put a man on the Moon, decode the human genome, make smaller microchips) are usually achieved ahead of schedule, while declared objectives for things that we don’t really understand (fixing the economy, creating the semantic web) take much longer than projected, or get shelved indefinitely. What is possible theoretically is often do-able now, and we’re impatient creatures. Transport is one such candidate. In principle we know how to build railways, high speed ones and underground ones, and while in recent months we have read of UK rail proposals estimated for completion in a couple of decades or so hence, we need these facilities – or sensible versions of them - now. So I hope the tendency to unexpected earlier achievement, as described above, will pertain.

Building new lines will be the easy part; agreeing on them will be less easy. What we don’t appear to have is joined-up thinking, a national integrated transport infrastructure plan that can consider all the options - the country-wide, regional and local ones, the schemes for roads, rail and air travel - and put them all together, rationally and synergistically. I’m sure it isn’t easy, even without financial, political and environmental constraints, and I’ve no doubt that some very able minds are addressing the issue. Meanwhile, what we have currently are lots of proposals that don’t add up, that don’t sit comfortably together, that compete with, conflict with, and laugh at each other.

A few weeks ago I wrote about some of the absurdities of the initial HS2 proposals and their apparent aversion to connectivity with the rest of the rail network, and to city centres and airports. At the moment HS2 is certainly creating a great deal of comment and complaint across considerable swathes of our green and pleasant, and I hope in due course a better alternative will gain in prominence and favour. HS2 has national implications, but now, I want to highlight a particular issue that threatens to hinder rail developments within the capital. Here, we’re talking split personalities and the deeply boring.

When the various railway companies wanted to bring their lines into London in the nineteenth century, in most cases they were banned from entering the central area, or found it too expensive or disruptive to do so, giving us a peripheral ring of termini as their legacy. This meant that anyone wanting to reach destinations within the centre, unless within walking distance, had to change to another mode of transport, often the Underground, to complete their journey. Similar situations afflicted many other cities, and have been partially resolved in some places by funneling suburban rail services through the centre, as with the S-Bahn systems in Munich and Berlin, and the RER in Paris. Crossrail, due to open in 2018, will do the same for London, as will the eventually upgraded Thameslink, within the scope of their respective geographies.

So far so good, but there is a potential problem. Debate still rages about how far out of town Crossrail should go; should its western terminus, for instance, be at Maidenhead or Reading? Whatever the answer, there are benefits for the exurban commuter while the in-town section – say that between Paddington and Whitechapel – is threatened with additional congestion. Crossrail - its tunnels bored to main line diameters and the RER its immediate inspiration - is thus attempting to be both a main line railway and an urban metro.

Evidently, the Crossrail philosophy is starting to have an effect on thinking about future projects. Thanks to projected estimates of passenger flow, fears about the capacity of Waterloo and other factors, Crossrail 2, formerly the Chelsea-Hackney line first proposed well over half a century ago, is transforming into something originally not intended. The clichéd new name is itself a giveaway. The original idea was that it would serve areas of inner London (King’s Road, Chelsea, and the Dalston-Hackney area) as well as providing another useful link across the centre and beefing up services along the District Line tracks between Fulham and Wimbledon. Now, it’s seen increasingly as doing all of those things but also of relieving suburban services out of Waterloo and Liverpool Street. Can it meet both objectives? Do they necessarily conflict, or do they complement each other? Who knows, but the implication is that tunnels large enough for main line trains will be necessary. It’s no longer being thought of as a tube line. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not, and it’s extremely important that the added complexities, beyond the original scope, all the myriad permutations involving locations such as Clapham Junction and Tooting Broadway and Euston are considered fully. Whatever the final decision, one hopes that it won’t follow a protracted period of dithering. We need something like this right now.

With a completely new line there should be nothing to stand in the way of doing the right thing, of balancing the options and coming to the best decision, whether a compromise or a move that firmly excludes alternatives. With an existing line, it isn’t so easy. For a long while there has been  a suggestion that the Bakerloo should be extended southwards from its existing terminus at the Elephant & Castle. Rumour has it that an appropriate stretch of tunnel already exists beneath the Walworth Road. Obvious additional stations, according to conventional Underground thinking, are Walworth, Camberwell Green and perhaps Peckham Rye. But now Bromley, Hayes and other traditional “Southern Region” destinations, places much further out,  are mooted ambitions for trains that will have to negotiate the small bore tube tunnels of the existing Bakerloo Line. Camberwell and the rest may suffer in consequence, and may miss out altogether, perceived as insufficiently lucrative, regardless of their social needs and habitual traffic congestion. Likewise the DLR to various proposed destinations – Euston, Oxford Circus, Victoria – in central London. What exactly is this amphibious Dockland creature trying to morph into?

While it’s good that these sort of suggestions are being made, sometimes we appear to be trying to do several things at once, the right hand unaware of what the left hand is doing. As with HS2 and national airports policy, someone needs to sit down and think it all through properly. Let’s get on with it, deeply boring though it ….zzzzzzzzz

Marlow: douze points

Working on the absolutely final revision, the third so far, of “Tourist In Your Own Town”, I thought it would be revealing to put some of its ideas to the test. “Tourist” is my projected book on “the subjective geography of everyday life” (a wider take on the subject than ‘psychogeography’ as commonly understood). So last weekend, coincidentally the weekend of the awesomely imbecilic Eurination contest, I visited somewhere “new”, to see how some of the principles played out.

The town in question was Marlow, on the north bank of the River Thames, in Buckinghamshire. I’d visited it three or four times previously, very briefly, and mostly while on my long distance saunter along the Thames Path in stages from Goring Gap to Westminster, but this was the first time I’d actually stayed there. What happened, as so often, was that I completely failed to explore Marlow, but used it as a base for visiting places nearby. However, I can report several observations.

Part of the town, especially that towards the railway station, looks slightly miniaturised, like a 75 per cent scale model. The houses are low and squat, the roads and pavements unnaturally narrow, so that neither cars nor pedestrians (all of normal dimensions, as far as I could tell) are well catered for. The street map I had printed off prior to the visit showed the thoroughfares as being narrow, but I assumed that was just a cartographic anomaly. Not so; they really are. So, this was a noticeable first impression, not an outstanding feature overall in the greater scheme of things, or Marlow in particular, but a comment-worthy one. In terms of the subjective appreciation of places, first impressions are important.

Another interesting aspect of subjective geography consists of those things that the locals no longer notice because they’re so all-pervasive. Well, perhaps they do, but what struck me as an outsider was the constant aircraft noise from the flightpath out of Heathrow, the ambient roar of traffic on the bypass, the sight of red kites soaring and wheeling and swooping, the cheerful bunting across the High Street and, it has to be said, the friendliness of everyone.

Hereness and thereness are important subjective geographical qualities. We’ll skip hereness, as in this context it’s a little pretentious. Thereness, though, is more interesting, can be manifested in several ways, and helps to contextualise places. One artificial technique for enhancing thereness is official twinning. I failed to notice where Marlow is twinned with but, most unusually, it is “bridged” with a major European capital. Marlow bridge, the suspension bridge across the Thames, was designed by William Tierney Clark, who was also responsible for the design of the very similar though larger Széchenyi chain bridge - built by Scottish engineer Adam Clark (no relation) between 1839 and 1849 - which spans the Danube in central Budapest in a single 1,250 feet span. A plaque on the Marlow bridge commemorates the “bridging” of the town with Budapest. I don’t know if there is a similar plaque in the Hungarian capital, but I hope to find out later this summer.

Orientation: absolutely no problem finding my way around, but some intriguing dog-leggy passages near the weir.

The weir: weird.

Cultural associations: Mole, Ratty, Badger, Mr. Toad. There may be others.

Unusual names: Higginson Park, the sort of name that should be Oop North rather than in the Home Counties, but a delight all the same.

Adjacent places: Henley, Bourne End, Cliveden. Disappointed that ye Cliveden gifte shoppe didn’t sell replicas of that chair. After all, it is the half-centenary this year.

Overall verdict on Marlow: a thoroughly nice place and I must look at it properly next time. Forget Azerbaijan, Moldova, Ruritania, Outer Slobodia and other back-of-beyond Euro-dribbles: this one is truly worthy of douze points.

Coming out about Lansdowns

When I was about ten years old I was taken – over a short period of a few months - on visits to Cheltenham, Bath and Bournemouth.Yes I know, but I should emphasise that generally speaking my parents were loving, caring, and well meaning people. In each of these places I noticed the apparent importance of the word Lansdown (in Bournemouth it was spelled Lansdowne, and was a major bus destination, obtrusive,  rather along the lines of my comments about Cockfosters in my previous posting). Clustered closely together in autobiographical time as they were, and unfamiliar as I then was with most towns and cities of the British Isles, I wondered at the significance of these observations. Everywhere had a town hall, a parish church or a cathedral, a market place, a Woolies and a Marks, so did everywhere have a Lansdown too?

If so, what would one expect to find there? Crumbling Regency crescents, building societies, solicitors’ offices, art galleries, old folk with walking frames? In Cheltenham even the railway station was named for this Lansdown Phenomenon. Clearly it was not to be taken lightly, but my questions were brushed aside as being essentially unanswerable (along with algebra).

For many years I lived with this troubling knowledge, and it is only recently that I’ve dared to speak about it in public. The Lansdown Phenomenon as I’ve called it, giving it due respect and initial capitals. Over the years I’ve grown to realise that it is only the privileged few places that make much of their Lansdown, that for the most part Lansdowns are not that significant in the scheme of things, and certainly not worth losing any sleep over or seeking counselling. They’re not as important as, for example, Caffè Nero or Pizza Express (though they’re more important than algebra).

However, although I can hardly face the psychological implications of what I’m about to confess, in more recent years I’ve also had to accept the possibility that there might be other types of Lansdowns too, not named as such, in fact entirely unnamed ones, clichés of urban form, features that go together, emerging stereotypes of place, archetypal clumps, nuts and bolts of city form as predictable as eggs and bacon or, er, nuts and bolts. Which means that, unlike in Cheltenham Spa et al, you don’t even know that they are Lansdowns. I mean, they could be anywhere. Anywhere and everywhere. They aren’t labelled. Frightening or what?  In fact, this is the first time I’ve raised this suspicion in public, so you’ll appreciate that this is a delicate moment for me. These hidden “other” Lansdowns  resist classification, they have no recognised overall generic name, but with practice one can start to recognise them – conceptual Lansdowns, if you like. At least I hope one can, otherwise I fear I may be entirely alone in this.

Tentatively, I’ll suggest a few possible candidates. How about this one: the scruffy area between the bus station and the back entrance of the 1960s covered market, close to the public conveniences, smelling of fish and slimy and slippery with them, stacked with pallets and parked randomly and untidily with white vans. Sound familiar? Is there somewhere like this in your town? Could this be a secret and novel  form of Lansdown? OK, upmarket a bit: one of those new “quarters” – Manchester and Leeds are full of them, and so is anywhere else currently undergoing regeneration – all orange brick and grey steel, sharp corners, tricked out with a Premier Inn or a Travelodge, and most likely favoured too with a Gregg’s, a Sainsbury’s Local and/or a Tesco Express. Know the sort of place I mean? Repetitive, aren’t they. Likewise the “Docklands” clones – Salford Quays, Cardiff Bay, Swansea Marina, Sovereign Harbour near Eastbourne, and so on. You hadn’t got those down as secret Lansdowns, had you. Well, they are. Then, top of the pile, the “iconic” cultural node, designed to draw the tourists, to put a declining post-industrial has-been on the map: the Royal Armouries in Leeds, the Baltic in Gateshead, the Albert Dock in Liverpool, Eureka in Halifax, the Ikon itself, in the wonderfully named, the kinaesthetically named, the sphinctertastic Oozells Square in Brum. Oh dear, I knew there would be a psychoanalytical subtext.

There are variants, some of them overlapping. For instance, there’s the much lauded but peculiarly shaped building, geometrically counter-intuitive and functionally perverse, the work of a “signature” architect, one where – since it’s so innovatively designed - you might not be able to find the entrance or be able to afford to go up in the lift. Sarkinesses none of which apply to the Sage in Gateshead (best seen at night, from across the river), that armadillo/croissant thing in Glasgow, the unsettling Libeskind war museum in Salford (which so effectively – and so subtly - makes the point that war is, well, unsettling actually, really quite upsetting …), the Shard at London Bridge (best when the cloudbase is extremely low (50 feet-ish) though not, presumably, if you’re on board an aircraft). Not to mention the art galleries where typically one goes simply to say one has been, to enjoy the view out to sea (Margate, St Ives), to admire the internal spaces and volumes (Walsall, Tate Modern), and to mosey round the gift shop, chuckling quietly. All in their way highly appropriate symbols representative of our time, all quasi-Lansdowns of the present era. Bath, Bournemouth and Cheltenham eat your old-fashioned hearts out.

But don’t take my word for it, for it may of course be an outrageously subjective, entirely redundant and ridiculously overblown idea, an over the top psychogeographical delusion. Better still, go out and find some Lansdowns of your own.

The global pull of Cockfosters

Maybe you’ve been travelling since yesterday from half a world away, long haul from JFK or LAX, slightly longer from Singapore or KL, even longer, now totally time-disoriented, from Sydney or Auckland. Or maybe you got up very early this morning to board a plane in Athens, Vienna or Helsinki. Now you’re at Heathrow, rubbing your eyes, and it’s your first time in London. Perhaps you’re there on business, or as a tourist. You will have heard about the Houses of Parliament, of course, and Buckingham Palace, the Tower, St Paul’s, the Eye.

You’ve also heard about the famous Underground, the oldest such system in the world, this year celebrating its 150th birthday. Now you’re below ground, about to board a Piccadilly Line train. And where is it going? The departure screen above the platform tells you. Cockfosters. You step aboard. Digital displays and aural announcements confirm that this train is going to Cockfosters. No matter where on this shrunken planet you started from, now you’re heading for Cockfosters. In the global scheme of things, clearly Cockfosters is a destination of some importance. Planet Cockfosters. London isn’t even in the running.

Wherever you go in the world, you’ll find that names you’d never heard of before, totally insignificant suburbs and minor satellite towns, Cockfosters analogues, Cockfosters wannabes, take on an unexpected significance. In London, if you use the tube, besides being forced against your will to know about Cockfosters, you’ll soon discover the overweening importance of Morden, West Ruislip, High Barnet, Upminster, and Hainault (via Newbury Park), none of which you will actually visit unless you are (a) terminally sad, literally so, or (b) prone to narcolepsy.

It’s the same everywhere else. In New York you’ll similarly be bullied into an unwanted awareness of New Lots, White Plains, Rockaway, and Woodlawn; in Berlin, hoping for a quiet life of U-Bahn pootling, you’ll find your pootlings seriously influenced by Ruhleben, not to mention Alt-Mariendorf, Pankow and Krumme Lanke; in Paris you won’t get far unless you submit to an understanding of the whereabouts of Balard and Créteil, the Porte d’Orléans and the Porte de Clignancourt, Villejuif Louis Aragon and Bobigny Pablo  Picasso. There you are, art lovers, you didn’t know his first name was Bobigny, did you. That’s the educational value of the Metro for you. In Budapest, home to mainland Europe’s oldest subway and one of its knottiest languages, you’ll need to learn to distinguish your Újpest-Központ from your Köbánya-Kispest or you’re soon going to be in trouble.

Everywhere you go you’ll come across strange but apparently important words, dominant in local geography, like Westheimer in Houston and Hennepin in Minneapolis, the ubiquitous Peachtree in Atlanta. Destinations on the fronts of buses will warp your appreciation of what really matters: Churchill Square in Brighton, Broad Marsh in Nottingham, Chorlton Street or Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester. Not to mention Plumstead Common and Clapton Pond. If you want to fully appreciate the glories of Glasgow you’ll need to get a grip on a whole load of Polloks. Such are a few of the more subjective toponymic oddities of urban public transport. I bet you wish now that you’d stayed on the train all the way to Cockfosters.

In GULliver’s Kingdom

Last weekend saw a delightful gathering in Whitby, North Yorkshire, of goths of all persuasions – proper goths, quasi-goths and trans-goths, ortho-, meta- and para-goths, iso-goths, and camera-wielding non-goths like myself. Clearly I’m not up on the nuances of the terminology, but the chemistry of the occasion was wonderful, colourful and happy. On the way there, at Pickering station, the southern terminus of the North Yorks Moors Railway (NYMR), I wandered along the platform, eager to distance myself from that family that follows me everywhere, you know the one I mean, the one that’s always right next to you whenever you board a train or a plane, the large and dysfunctional one that, despite visual evidence of an extensive and varied genetic input, has missed out on the sequences that code for things like intelligence, deferred caloric gratification, not all speaking at once, volume control, and the oral equivalent of an off-switch.

My evasive manoeuvre had the beneficial side effect that, as I wandered along, I noticed a traditional red phone box adjacent to the fence bordering the platform. With these sort of phone boxes it was always difficult to discover on which side was the door, and in this instance the presence of the fence added further intrigue; was the kiosk enterable from the platform, or from the world beyond the fence? Closer inspection revealed that it wasn’t a working phone box at all, but a museum piece, complete with “Press button A” and “Press button B”, devices for instant nostalgia.

On the rear wall was a further delight, a list of named London telephone exchanges. As many will remember, not just in the days before the incontinent ambient babbling permitted by the invention of the mobile phone, but before that, in the era before the demand for phone and fax lines made a numerical system imperative, many cities around the world used mnemonic names for their exchanges, the first two or three letters being convertible by the system into dialable digits.

Thus in London we had GULliver, which translates into 485, and covered part of Kentish Town, and FREmantle, aka 373, an amused nod to the “Kangaroo Valley” of Earl’s Court. Some of these names were much coveted, like MAYfair or KNIghtsbridge, and some became famous, like WHItehall 1212, the number for New Scotland Yard. They were memorable in a way that purely numerical codes scarcely are (supposedly short term memory fails after about deven digits). Besides chunking data into memorable form, they had character and humour.  TERminus was apposite for the area around Euston, King’s Cross and St Pancras; TIDeway was a nice name to give to Deptford, ELGar was elderly, imperial, brown and moustachioed, as (peculiarly) was CUNningham, HOP and RODney were just plain silly, GIBbon was funky, AMBassador had a flavour of its own, as did BAYswater and PADdington, though a different one; GROsvenor, FLEet Street, TEMple Bar and TRAfalgar exuded authority and centrality and Londonness, and so on and so on. So it was a nice surprise to stumble upon the complete list in the unlikely setting of the NYMR.

Fifteen minutes one could do without

Cities, thanks to their multiple roles and functions, rarely get associated with any one particular event to the extent that it defines their identity. As complex places they enjoy a wide range of roles and imagery, and even the most awful fates that happen to them have relatively little impact on how, in the long term, we see them – as places. The London Blitz and the 9/11 attacks on New York, devastating though they were, in time became assimilated into the larger histories of those cities, even while the scars, physical and psychological, endured. A visitor to present-day Berlin will find the several very different and deeply traumatic epochs from that city’s story absorbed into a metropolis that is thoroughly modern and future-facing. The Hitler years, the near-annihilation of 1945, the Wall, and much else, are not forgotten, but none of them defines the city, which rises above its past. Horrible though these events were, over time - collectively, learned from, put into perspective - they are paradoxically strengthening, enriching, atmosphere-providing and place-making.  A lesser city could not have withstood and survived in the same way.

World cities have a resilience of their own; lesser places may be less sturdy in adversity. In the age of single industry towns, place identity was often linked to a specific type of manufacturing – Sheffield  was cutlery; Northampton, boots and shoes; Dundee, marmalade; St Helen’s, glass; Luton, hats. When industries fail in such places, the effects may be devastating. Naturally, many other factors can help to lend a sense of place, a genius loci. Smaller communities might find their identity strongly influenced by some famous or notorious individual (Jarrow, Stiffkey), or an unusual historical event (Tolpuddle, Eyam). The same is true of our own shallow era; oh yes, “The last of the summer wine” was filmed around Holmfirth. Lucky Holmfirth, in consequence now so much more of a place than nearby Glossop or Sowerby Bridge. Fame, televisual fame ! And of course, Pontypridd is the birthplace of … someone-or-other. Unlike nearby Maesteg or Ogmore Vale, both lacking a comparable voice of their own, mere non-places in comparison.

Recent events remind us that still other places have their identity forced upon them in an unwelcome and far from frivolous manner. And I’m not referring obliquely to the American girls who accosted me at King’s Cross and asked about trains to Grantham. Senseless and heartbreaking though the scenes were in Boston this week, the city will recover, and in time its identity will be linked in the popular imagination with this particular pointless atrocity no more than it is with the legendary tea party or the baked bean. Boston is big, multipurpose, cosmopolitan and complex enough to move on from these dark days; it is full of creative and clever people.

The small town of West, between Waco and Dallas, which has also had its Warholian fifteen minutes, unasked, may not be able to shake off the week’s horrors quite so easily. I’d never heard of West before, in exactly the same way that I’ve never heard of thousands of villages and small towns across Texas and the United States and the World; such is the chance nature of the mishap that puts somewhere briefly, or permanently, “on the map”. The fertiliser plant may rise again, and the community will pull together and pick itself up, no doubt, because that’s what communities do.

From the outside, a large-scale catastrophe in a small place so easily becomes all-defining, becomes the publicly-perceived identity of that place : Dunblane, Aberfan, Beslan, Belsen, Lockerbie, Chernobyl, Seveso, Hungerford, Bhopal and countless more - all codes for tragedies of human behaviour, errors, delusions, miscalculations, obsessions. Names which, until the day in question, few who didn’t live nearby had heard of. And now they wish they hadn’t. Symbolic abbreviations of human folly and evil. The new identity is acquired, in the public imagination and in the media, while the locals and the other victims mourn and try to carry on as before.

Remember Flixborough ? Another catastrophic bang, cyclohexane this time. Unlike Flixborough - an unusual name, handy, therefore, as a label - West is a word in common usage. Even its notorious role as a homicidal Gloucester surname doesn’t adhere and taint its regular meaning; it’s far too verbally useful to be appropriated as jourmalistic shortcode for “community devastated by industrial explosion” or “issues around fertiliser manufacture safety”. One may expect, consequently, that the remains of this small place in Texas will sink back into relative invisibility to the rest of the world. One hopes it will thus be able to rebuild in peace, its name invulnerable to simple stigma, and to find its own identity again, maybe a stronger one.

Such are a few of the chance factors which determine what becomes a place, a place with an identity, and what remains a non-place.