A puzzle in SE16

Digital photography – in all its ubiquitous availability, ease and cheapness - challenges us with the question “what to photograph?” (as opposed to “what not to photograph?”). The habit encourages us to observe, and to frame and crop our perceptions automatically. There’s no shortage of subjects – the visible world and its occupants for starters – plus a vast number of stylistic approaches, themes and tropes. Once the province of professionals and clever arty people, all these tricks and techniques are now available to us all every time we venture out of the house.

Traditionally, photographers have loved contrasts – not just visual contrasts of light and dark - but conceptual contrasts such as old and new, ugly and beautiful (which is which?), rich and poor, exceptional and normal. Absurdity, the surreality of things out of context, improbable juxtapositions, the elephant in the high street, have long been popular themes. Today, since most of us routinely go out armed with a device able to capture and record the unexpected and the startling, all we have to do is keep our eyes open, hope we get lucky, and pray that a white van doesn’t come along at the crucial moment.

I’ve long been a fan of monkey puzzle trees (Araucaria araucana). When I was growing up there was one in a front garden at the top of our road. They are intrinsically suburban, arguably naff and of doubtful taste, and for that reason alone I love them. For I am indeed incurably suburban, and I adore the life-affirming, endlessly optimistic attitudes, ambitions, and activities of suburban man and woman. In the suburbs you can have something huge, not particularly pretty, but exotically South American in your front garden (not your back garden – what would be the point ?). Wow.

 
Rotherhithe, London SE16, is not suburban. To the extent that it has survived the Luftwaffe and the rather more determined attempts of “developers” it is intensely urban, following the winding south bank of the Thames. It lies at the southern portal of the Thames Tunnel, the work of the Brunels - father Marc and more famous son Isambard Kingdom – which is now subsumed within (perversely) the Overground network. Commemorating the twin-bore subfluvial achievement is a museum in the former engine house, as shown in the photograph above. The splendid monkey puzzle tree nearby provides, I think, one of those absurd contrasts that delight the photographer, and whose ever-present possibility makes our capital city such an endlessly fascinating territory to explore.

Safe in the city

Enclosure is an important concept in urban planning and in subjective geography. The sense that one is surrounded by buildings, by the city carrying on relentlessly all around while one remains detached from it, is one of the enjoyable features of many successful towns and cities, and is found, for instance, in communities all around the Mediterranean, with the souks of North Africa and the Middle East, and the arcades and piazze of many Italian cities – Milan and Turin in particular – being especially effective in this way. Enclosure creates a sense of manageability, of having part of what might be a vast, complex, and even dangerous metropolis, under one’s immediate control.

A related pleasure can also be obtained from being in enclosed spaces where one can, as it were, see out or, at any rate, “imagine out”. If there is a Freudian explanation for this is I suppose its best facile summary is “a womb with a view”. Intra-uterine experiences apart, my earliest memories of this claustrophilic kind of arrangement relate to Chester, where on the famous Rows, primarily in Eastgate, Watergate Street and Bridge Street, one can shop at first floor level, able to look out and down at the passing scene, while protected from it, and from the weather. Maybe I find this memory so pleasurable (a) because on childhood visits it was usually raining in Chester and (b) because it would have been the preamble to a visit to my favourite toyshop, in St Michael’s Row, which we always called The Arcade. Today this leads into the Grosvenor shopping centre, but in the 1950s it was a dead-end off Bridge Street Row, and especially safe in a psychological sense.

 

Most large internal urban spaces will provide something of this effect – the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, for instance, or the concourses of great terminal stations. I want to illustrate the point with images of two such termini I visited recently, the lovely Glasgow Central (upper picture) and London’s Charing Cross (lower picture) - these days rather less lovely. They are similar in that they are hemmed in by high buildings, have links to underground railway systems, are built on sloping sites giving rise to interesting complexities, can be accessed through several narrow passageways (and remarkably similarly by steep steps from the left hand side as you face the tracks, from Union Street and Villiers Street, respectively), and are approached railside by a massive girder bridge across a major river. One arrives by train slap bang in the centre of the city, yet momentarily protected from it. A minor pleasure for those who are easily pleased.

The Norrington Room

Anyone who has ever had to undertake a significant essay assignment, or even a minor research project, is likely to have encountered the following situation. You are about to embark on the final write-up, and are perhaps just checking the last couple of references, when you discover that there is a whole other approach to the subject, perhaps an opposing stance or a closely related piece of work, whose existence until now you had not suspected. At best you’ll need an extra paragraph, a small insert; at worst, a complete re-write. Or you casually mention to someone what it is you’re doing, and they instantly respond with “Have you read X’s book?”, of which, naturally, you have not heard. “Oh yes, you must read X”. Can you dare not to?

The phenomenon can strike at different times and in different ways, with unpredictable outcomes, but it’s a general consequence of information overload - one of my tiresome themes - of the too-muchness of knowledge, of the difficulty of trying to keep up, and of the problem of trying to funnel the vast amount of what is “out there” into the comparatively extremely limited contents of what you want to have, understand and remember “in here”.

Or perhaps it’s just me. Me being “driven”, as a friend says I am. Well, either you are driven or you drift. I recall that around the age of eleven, when I was precociously obsessed with chemistry, and chemical names (the odder and more obscure the better - rare earths like dysprosium, ytterbium, and lutetium, inert gases like krypton and xenon), of going into the immense circular chamber of Manchester Central Library and finding an entire book about the element rhenium, which had only been discovered in the 1920s, is extraordinarily rare, and even today is not much use to man or beast. How could there be so much to know about something like that?  Then perhaps a year later, getting into organic chemistry and developing an obsession with alkaloids (brucine and veratrine were phonetic favourites), I visited the Picton Library in the centre of Liverpool and found a multi-volume text on the subject, stretching half way along a shelf. Shell-shocked, depressed and defeated I exited and wandered into the gardens across the road, sniffing the ambient hoppy smell, avoiding the winos and the weirdos, and trying to take stock.

As I say, the response to such unfair amounts of unsuspected knowledge is unpredictable. One may be spurred on or flattened down into the ground. Luckily I was at the age when, after these library-based setbacks, I was motivated to study chemistry properly, leading into some sort of career. Though I understood the subject reasonably well, and passed the necessary exams, very early on I realised that I enjoyed the mouthfeel of the terminology, the poetry of the nomenclature, the exoticism of the subject matter, and the visual appeal of molecular structures more than I did the explanatory theory or practical applications of the subject. Soon I recognised that I wasn’t cut out for a practical job in research or anything hands-on, but what I was able to pursue, was a career in information relating to scientific subjects – a kind of meta-science, I suppose. In time I could become an information scientist. I could talk the talk but I wouldn’t have to walk the walk. Or some such contemporary nonsensical non-explanation.

Maintaining motivation in the face of an impossible cognitive onslaught is always difficult, and it’s analogous to the dilemma of the collector; how can you amateurishly collect and admire your puny gap-toothed efforts when you know that somewhere the whole lot exists. Why bother? Before chemistry, philately had been a hobby, but my enthusiasm wasn’t helped by knowing that the Royal Family had just about everything available in the stamp world, that Stanley Gibbons in the Strand certainly did, and so did the National Postal Museum, and the Tapling Collection in the British Museum. Under such circumstances the sensible thing to do is to give up; the wonderful thing is that so many don’t. Nor do they while fully aware that conventional encyclopaedias, or Google or Wikipedia, "know everything". The point being that we want to take it on board, to have it "in here". We want it - stamps or knowledge - to be ours.

Fast forward to the present. Yesterday it was very hot in Oxford, and the city was full of tourists. It occurred to me that being a tourist is slightly like my juvenile approach to chemistry; you can enjoy the good bits, the pretty bits, without the long hard slog of actually having to learn anything properly. It’s neither walking the walk nor talking the talk, and for the tourists in question it appears mostly to consist of taking selfies. 

Never mind. Into Blackwell’s bookshop, and into the famous Norrington Room. I've been there before, and I knew what I was letting myself in for. It looks like this:

And if that isn’t an illustration of information overload I don’t know what is. I was reminded of Ian Dury’s profound song lyrics, “There ain’t ‘alf been some clever bastards”. Indeed, and most of them felt compelled to write. 

Intimidated by the immensity and intensity of it all, but feeling that I ought to benefit from my visit to this amazing bookshop, and in particular to make good use of an extensive 3 for 2 offer, I emerged into the heat with three feeble popular paperbacks. Fairly happily - only a modicum of guilt - I considered it a sensible admission of defeat. Now, I no longer have to pass exams, I'm not even expected to know anything at all; I can be a knowledge tourist.

Nurofen puns downhill

Somehow, in my morning dream, I knew it was 1st August. In a dream shopping street somewhere – possibly Broad Street, Reading – I commented to my dream companion, “Would you believe it? August 1st, and Christmas decorations up already”. Well, it won’t be long, as they say.

Traditionally, in the early part of life, August is a dead month. After the intense scarlet of June and the blazing orange of July, the best we can hope for is a polluted murky magenta, or more likely a grey Deganwy day, one accompanied by the disgusting odour of sandy seaweedy bilingual  public conveniences /cyfleusterau and steamy plastic rainwear. August is the one month of the year that you don’t get to learn in French, août, ironically the one month for which it would be handy to have some advice on spelling and pronunciation. OK, it’s probably the sort of sound a rude French owl – owling in pain and in need of analgesia - would make (not so much a discreet aspirin as a silent aspirate, un hibou profane (oh, do shurrup – Ed.)). August is the hiatus between the long sweaty haul of revision and exams and the return, ideally on a refreshingly nippy September morning, to new intellectual challenges and opportunities.

At the start of this year I blogged complainingly about the discomfort involved in starting a new year, and in having to build it up out of nothing. By August, I’m comfortable in the year, and ready to enjoy coasting downhill again towards Christmas. Yes, I’m ready for that. Once September is out of the way time will speed up alarmingly through the all-too-brief season of getting serious again, of getting things done, of increasing soup frequency and decreasing salad obligations, more plausible excuses for comfort food, the lights coming on earlier and earlier and – eventually – before tea. Sodiumtime. Bliss.

 
August is the month for taking stock and recognising that one hasn’t done half the things one intended to during the year, but there’s still time … When panic finally kicks in it will be too late anyway, and at that point the projects that one really doesn’t want to undertake can be effortlessly deferred into next year. However, so far this year I feel smugly that I have attended to my blogging duties satisfactorily. And as for this week’s effort, well, that’s it.