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.

The intuitive meeting point

Airports, as the primary hubs for international travel, take their function seriously as regards the meetings of strangers – something that happens frequently as a consequence of mass travel. Generally – probably in the arrivals hall - they provide a readily identifiable location, typically symbolised as a big dot surrounded by inward pointing arrows, beneath which people who have never met face to face before can do so. The provision of such a facility seems obvious.

In less organised places it may be less so, hence the clichéd recourse to red roses and rolled up copies of the “Daily Telegraph” or the promise to “meet you under the clock”. We’ll all have encountered the problem from time to time and found a way of dealing with it. Though the ubiquity of mobile phones does take away some of the challenge : “I’m over here; I can see you, I’m waving at you”. But what if neither of you has any idea what the other one looks like ?

In the absence of a real need, one may imagine the contrived situation. If someone said he was going to meet you on a particular date at noon, in a specified large city, but he didn’t say exactly where, what would be the spot to make for to have the greatest chance of meeting him successfully? This was the question that the Nobel prizewinning American economist Thomas Schelling asked as long ago as 1960. The city in question was New York, and the answer he came up with was Grand Central Station, and specifically the information booth there. Such focal places are thus known as Schelling points.

At an intersection in Shibuya, Tokyo, 1,500 people are said to cross simultaneously from eight directions every time the traffic lights change, and 250,000 people per day pass through at a weekend. Nearby, the bronze statue of the faithful dog Hachiko, the pet of a professor of agriculture who commuted through Shibuya station and died in the 1920s, acts as an informal meeting place, and in fact as the local Schelling point.

So what of London ?  I guess the answer would be Piccadilly Circus, but I’m unsure if the spot would be right next to Eros, or by the enquiry windows in the Underground concourse. Perhaps it would depend on whether it was raining or not. It’s the most obvious marker of centrality in the city, and maybe some of the people one finds hanging around there are hoping desperately that some personally important character, someone long lost from their life, will turn up there one day. Equally, I’m very sure some aren’t doing this. Piccadilly Circus has several roles in the subjective geography of the metropolis, and for this reason I have chosen it for the front cover illustration for my forthcoming projected book “Tourist In Your Own Town”. Sub-titled “The Psychogeography of Everyday Life”, it includes among its pages discussion of urban centrality, Schelling points, and very many other phenomena – some of  which feature from time to time in these blog entries.