Ken and Fin (London Toponymy 2)

When I first began to get interested in the geography of London, at around the age of eight or so, I found it hard to believe that extremely important central places had bizarre names - like St Pancras or Waterloo, Piccadilly Circus or Trafalgar Square. Whaaat? Were these names remotely English? If not, what on earth were they? Shouldn’t such notable locations be called something logical and solid like London Central, or High Street, or England Square, or Royal Avenue? And what about Soho, Marylebone, Pimlico, Euston, Pall Mall? Really? What kind of words were they? Not sensible English ones by any stretch, not for a serious child whose other precocious interests would before long include astronomy and chemistry.

Going through a phase of wanting things to be ordered and straightforward is presumably not uncommon, even if mildly Aspergery. Eventually I grew out of it, but it took long enough, and not everyone does. So no wonder some unimaginative über-rationalist plonker has in more recent times wanted to call Holborn “Midtown”, as though it was an escapee from Manhattan, half way between business and pleasure. Great Britain never became great by being ordinary and predictable, but as a child I had no inkling.

One of my Welsh relatives, who enjoyed a modest degree of dylsexia coupled with an obsession over kitchen accessories, insisted – following a coach trip to the capital - that there was a major thoroughfare called Eggware Road. Perhaps there was, or should have been. Never mind. Gradually, as I explored London, initially via the medium of the A to Z (the best 3/6-worth I ever owned) and from free maps blagged from Piccadilly Circus station, I became aware of features that recurred or sneaked around the capital while nobody was looking. Lots of Kings and Queens as you would expect, lots of Georges and Victorias, dukes and duchesses, castles and cathedrals, country estates and county towns, but some other rather more  unexpected items in the toponymic bagging area.

In time I learned to tell the difference between Gloucester Road, Gloucester Place, Gloucester Terrace and Gloucester Crescent and though - as with any phonetically irregular word “Gloucester” looks more peculiar and improbable the more you stare at it - here, try it in caps: GLOUCESTER - I found that I would never confuse them and, except in artificial circumstances (such as this blog), mention of any one of them would never trigger thoughts of any of the others. Evidently I categorise spatially rather than index alphabetically. That was a discovery that took a while for the penny to drop.

Other themes, insidious or otherwise, began to reveal themselves. There’s the Ken thing, to start with. There’s far too many Kens; so unkind to tourists. We’ll ignore Kennington and Kenton, irrelevant outliers as they are, but just stop a minute and consider all those proper in-town Kens: Kensington – as in High Street Ken (a friend of Portland Bill), plus its South, West and North variants, socially worlds apart. Then there’s Kensal, as in Rise, Green, and Town (sometimes New Town). What’s that all about, then; some kind of adjective meaning “slightly Kensington but not quite Kensington enough”? Then why not Hampstal or Wimbledal? And if so, are Dulwich, Greenwich and Woolwich not quite dull, green or woolly enough?

Close by the Kens are obsessions with Brompton and Westbourne. Westbourne, a long ago culverted river that nerdishly/famously crosses Sloane Square station in a big tube before dribbling into the Thames near Chelsea Bridge, pops up in a variety of places loosely associated with the old borough of Paddington – in Westbourne Green (north of Harrow Road and an area now mostly a dreamy memory), Westbourne Terrace (not recommended when your feet hurt), Westbourne Grove (properly farty nowadays) and Westbourne Park (with a station that helpfully points you to the Sortie and the Ausgang). Westbourne also occurs in Bournemouth, but then, so does almost everything. Brompton is a name that comes and goes between Knightsbridge, South Ken, Earl’s Court, Chelsea and Fulham, and is entirely unpredictable. There’s the Oratory of course, but even more sinister – according to my faithful Martindale, 27th edition -  it lends its name to a Cocktail containing morphine, cocaine, chloroform and 90% alcohol.

Which brings us fairly rapidly, and hopefully painlessly, to Fin. As in Financial, I hasten to add, not the French variety preceded by a definite article – if it’s Finsbury Circus or Finsbury Square – but less so if it’s just Finsbury (a dead borough of UV-heavy health centres), and a lot less so if it’s Finsbury Park (the unnatural home of bridalwear). Then there’s Finchley, really a rather unpleasant word if you hover over it too long. Unpleasant in a peculiarly English way. Finchley appears in the name of four tube stations (including Finchley Road, which is both a long way from the financial hub and from Finchley itself), so it’s more than a little intrusive. Overall, Fin is sort of always there as a persistent though recessive London lexeme.

As is Brent, as in River though not as in David, which crops up in a long arc across what used to be Middlesex, not least as a Greater London Borough, but also as Brentford, Brentham, and Brent Cross. But not Brentwood, which is somewhere else.

Another thing. Old boroughs (and railway termini) have a habit of flavouring widely separated districts that stretch out from the centre, so you get hints of St Pancras up towards Hampstead, and Paddington into the juicier bits of Notting Hill and Maida Vale. Lambeth, a largely destroyed inner district, now finds itself more at home in Stockwell and Brixton, which is rather comforting. Lewisham has a street named after it in Charlottenburg, Berlin, just possibly one of Spike Milligan’s absurdist ingredients in his grand plan for the downfall of the Führer. This has probably gone far enough.

The Burghers of Rutland

I was saddened, as no doubt were many, just before the New Year, by the death of Neil Innes, variously described as the Seventh Python or the Sixth (or Seventh) Beatle, and always as a really nice guy and talented musician who didn’t really receive the recognition he deserved. One of my favourite vignettes was of his Walrus-inspired song about the “Montana Café“, released in the late 70s, which shortly afterwards encouraged me to do a painting called “Sunray Café”. 

“Sunray Café” (detail) © R. Abbott 2020

The location is semi-fictional, Warren Street, or thereabouts, and the slightly Modigliani-ish figures are the consequences not of astigmatism but of inability. However, like the Montana, it’s a café where a sad man could seek solace, a fry-up, and a quiet smoke.

As well as Bonzo Dog, Innes will always be associated with The Rutles, for which he provided the principal musical input, with his accurate Lennon vocal impersonations and Beatles pastiches as group member “Nasty”, including such classics as “The Knicker Elastic King” and “Eine Kleine Middle Klasse Musik”. The Rutles were of course intimately associated with Rutland Weekend Television, a series which managed extremely successfully to combine Pythonesque humour with parodies of the loveable absurdity of the later Beatles, and to put England’s smallest county on the map of popular culture.

Rutland hit the headlines again this week, in news reports that the local council were meeting to discuss the proposal to build a drive-thru McDonalds on the northern outskirts of Oakham, Rutland’s county town. As a planning dispute there was something most unusual about it, namely that both sides of the debate were respected and the inevitable outcome – approval – was received graciously. More specifically unusual was the nature of the argument against the plans, which we will come to in a moment.

In most disputes of this sort there is a strong, positive, objective, forward thrusting, carefully costed, computer modelled proposal to build something – a fast food outlet, a by-pass, a wind farm, a housing estate, a runway, a high speed railway – which it is claimed is desirable, and will improve local conditions, benefit transport, bring in investment and jobs, provide “green” energy, create money, and overall be a good thing. Opposing it is a weak, subjective, negative, backward looking, vague, intangible, highly subjective argument that the proposed construction will spoil the neighbourhood, mean the loss of something valued, damage a treasured view, upset a colony of rare newts, generate traffic and noise and litter, be a waste of money, and overall be a bad thing. The proponents normally have access to all kinds of professional support, including lawyers and people with strong presentational skills; they will in all likelihood have done this kind of thing before, know all the arguments, know all the tricks, be well placed. They will be prepared to play fast and loose with the truth, whatever that is. The opponents are usually ordinary honest people, fearful, defensive, inarticulate, on the back foot, presented with something they don’t want, who rapidly have to learn tactics from first principles, get little help from anyone, endure stress and expense they can ill afford, and can only put together an amateurishly mumbled and feebly hand-drawn objection. The outcome is almost inevitable.

In the Oakham instance there were worries about litter and traffic, but since the proposed site, at Land’s End, on the A606 by-pass is away from housing, on an essentially greenfield site but adjacent to a filling station and other commercial retail premises, those sort of objections were minor. McDonalds is something of a symbolic red rag for people who don’t like matters corporate and in particular American, and it has also been associated with arguments about its employment policies, and about the nutritional quality of its principal products, especially as consumed by young people. Those factors were aired too. People interviewed in the street had differing opinions, many seeing both sides of the debate. Many, especially those with children or grandchildren, could see the attraction of an edge-of-town vendor of fast food. Salivating already.

What was very unusual about this case, though, was the main “soft” or “subjective” argument, the one that normally gets sneered at as mere nimbyism.  Specifically, the defence as to why the proposed development should not go ahead was that Rutland was the last county in England that did not already have a McDonalds, and therefore that it was “special”, was “different”, and it ought to remain that way.

 
So in this instance it was heartening to see the “subjective” case perceived as perfectly valid, unique as it was, and when – as expected – it was defeated, the good citizens of Oakham seemed not unduly troubled. The whole business was civil in  both senses of the word, as befits such a delightful English county. I’d like to think that Neil Innes would have been pleased with the outcome too, the only possible improvement on the situation being that, instead of being just another outlet featuring the Golden Arches, it could be named the Montana Café instead.

Places that come and go (London Toponymy 1)

Not long ago I was sitting with a pint in a pub in Paddington, W2, perusing my A-Z. “Don’t often see one of those, mate” commented some unnecessary geezer at the next table, looking up briefly from his gadget. “It’s a 2012 Olympic Games special edition”, I muttered, “connoisseur’s item”. He grunted and returned to his life on his tiny screen.

Smugly, unfairly, I didn’t mention to him the fact that these days the print in the street atlas is too minuscule for me, so that anything much smaller than Regent’s Park escapes my visual acuity altogether. Be that as it may, I’m one of an old breed, a different cohort of geezers, evidently, who can still obtain a kind of pleasure from maps, proper maps that is, paper ones, relating to the overall shape of places and to what we now have to call infrastructures. An aesthetic pleasure, a topographical pleasure, and a pleasure in nomenclature. Yes, all right, so I’m a simple soul and easily pleased.

Occasionally I still use the A to Z for wayfinding, like I used to when I had places I really needed to go to, when I was alive. Nowadays, whenever strictly necessary (just where is that crematorium?) I’ll resort to the online versions of maps, Streetmap UK especially, but there’s a joy to be had in just looking which screen displays deny.  Maps as art and entertainment, as aesthetic objects, as aids to daydreaming. Oh, the joy of place names and what they suggest. Gospel Oak. Catford. Penge. Not just appetite; this must be love.

One of the things I’ve noticed, both on streetplans of London, and on the ground, is that places come and go, and some names don’t get used properly. If I go to the area round the Elephant and Castle it is, as far as I’m concerned, “the area near the Elephant”. The A to Z offers the name “Newington”. I know there’s Newington Butts and Newington Causeway, but I’ve never heard anyone calling the whole area Newington. Nor does it ever occur to me that it’s anywhere near Southwark. The Elephant is the Elephant, it’s one of a kind, and it’s most definitely in the room.

Names are born, and they die. Head a little further south-east, and there used to be somewhere called Hatcham. I suspect that hardly anyone outside that immediate  locality has heard of Hatcham these days. Or mosey back over the river, into the ragged wedge of Tower Hamlets, where the old names are withering: Ratcliff, Cubitt Town, Millwall, Bromley-by-Bow, Globe Town. Even Limehouse. As indeed are those communities compared with half a century ago. Simultaneously, on the up, and further west, we’re being told that the touristy area of Notting Hill should be called “Portobello”, and that the Soho streets around Carnaby Street should be “Carnaby”. Not by me they shouldn’t. Blackfriars seems to have crept south of the water, towards the Elephant in fact. That’s not right. Honest guv, I wasn’t even there.

In the Greater London Plan of 1944, generally attributed to Patrick Abercrombie, much was made of the city as a tapestry of neighbourhoods, like North Brixton (“Angell Town”) or Westbourne Green (“the Warwick Estate”) or Poplar (“Lansbury”), and of the need to maintain a sense of cohesion in these small communities, or to rebuild them after the cessation of hostilities. Cynically, if you go to any of those places, you may deduce that, whatever the argument, there was sufficient reason to destroy them. Goering was an amateur, but the concept took hold.

More recently the notion of urban “villages” has come to the fore. Estate agents love this idea. Find any back street blessed with a couple of trees and a few shops selling organic whatsits and ethically sourced doodahs, label it a “village”, give it an “identity” (so important these days) and drool copiously as house prices treble. If need be, invent names: Brackenbury in Hammersmith, Abbeville in Clapham, Connaught Village near Marble Arch, or Steele’s Village, with seemingly permanent Christmas decorations, accompanying the long groan of the 168 up Haverstock Hill between Chalk Farm and Belsize Park (not to be confused with Belsize Village).

Places come and go, get invented, are allowed to disappear. Less artificially, the Underground provides names, thus doing wonders for upping local visibility. Even those destinations that normal people know but will never reach, like Stanmore, Cockfosters or Morden. Names that everyone can share and enjoy.  Muswell Hill is great, but Muswell Hill with a tube station, and with a tube station name, well, that would be quite something. It would be really on the map. In the last few years the Overground has – in its slightly anaemic orange way - been trying to emulate the proper tube namewise, so that Haggerston, Brondesbury, Brockley, Homerton and Crouch Hill can now feature more easily in the composite mental map of the capital, and can benefit/suffer from everything that follows. These minor urban gems are more visible thanks to diagrammatic cartography, thanks to the mauled latter day plagiarisms  of Harry Beck. Meanwhile Cricklewood, Palmer’s Green, Anerley, Kidbrooke, Clapton Park and even Wandsworth languish in the “here be dragons” realms of the unknown. They don’t know how lucky they are. Unvisited by outsiders with agendas  they stand a much better chance of surviving as they are, devoid of pretentious self-consciousness, resistant to “progress”. Being visible isn’t necessarily a good thing (unless you’re “in property”).

As one scans the A to Z, the traditional dog-eared bible of the capital’s cartography, one may also become aware of the inequality and inconsistency of density of the naming of city districts. One can find Knightsbridge, Brompton and South Kensington falling over themselves, and likewise Victoria, Belgravia and Pimlico, all in close proximity. Is such intensive and overlapping labelling strictly necessary? Probably. However, other zones are not so lucky. Back again beyond the Elephant lies a huge quadrilateral, the other three points of which are Bricklayer’s Arms, New Cross Gate and Camberwell Green, which lacks a decent name  - Walworth, Camberwell, Peckham, Bermondsey and, indeed, Newington and Hatcham nibble at the edges, but there’s no generic monicker. A deficiency perhaps reflecting the evisceration of this once vibrant district, now holed out by the wastelands of Burgess Park and infilled with terrifying residential megaslabs. Elephant Park isn’t going to do it, but the putative extension of the Bakerloo may force the issue.

Not that this is solely a problem of the deprived and the neglected, for there is a similar large and very affluent area of W1 bounded by Oxford Street, Tottenham Court Road, Marylebone Road and Edgware Road, which is inadequately labelled as “Marylebone”, and with only Fitzrovia and North Soho as slightly jokey additions. Plus “Marylebone Village”, of course. Also up and coming and nameless are the vast and soulless tracts north of King’s Cross and St Pancras, once the “railway lands” characterised by clanking coal trains and clustered gasholders, and now stuffed with office buildings designed by someone evidently familiar with graph paper, a ruler, and a pencil, or their software equivalents. A place with no name. Perhaps that’s exactly as it should be.

 
More next time.

Knowing you know

I’ve been watching, and not entirely enjoying, BBC2’s “Christmas University Challenge” series, in which supposedly distinguished mature alumni take part. All too often I’ve been appalled at the ignorance of former students of prestigious institutions who have gone on in adult life to hold influential positions, many of them in the media, education, popular culture, or as “policy advisers” of some description. It’s not as though any of them slunk out of the University of Billericay with a 2:2 in sociowaffle or psychobabble. No, we’re talking the likes of Oxford or UCL here. Worrying.

A few nights ago we were treated to the unedifying spectacle of a woman with a fancy name who couldn’t distinguish between Caravaggio, Constable and Whistler, and was evidently proud of her ignorance. In the same episode we witnessed a shameless old duffer who thought that sulphur dioxide was an aromatic hydrocarbon. OK, not generally important in the scheme of things, and you can bluff your way through life without it, but if you really can’t make a halfway intelligent guess, please do us all a favour and keep stumm. If these are the sort of people who are helping to mould our present and guide our future as a nation, people who determine taste and decide what is important, what is allowed to succeed and what isn’t, then God help us.

Well, bang on cue, last night, God was on the winning side, in the form of a first rate Leeds team (a no nonsense place, Leeds) led by the splendidly polymathic and multitalented Reverend Richard Coles, vicar of Finedon, Northamptonshire. Unlike some student finalists of recent years who have made great and extremely irritating play out of reasoning aloud the route to their brilliant (but not always correct) answers, on most occasions the Rev Coles instantly, unhesitatingly, gave the right answer. He simply just knew, and he knew he knew. A reflex buttressed by certainty. His colleague, Mr Gee, was likewise blessed with access to a deep and wide fund of correct information.  These two contestants were a joy to behold; one wanted them to win. They deserved to win, and they did.

“Knowing you know” provides a feeling not dissimilar to the one you get when you recognise something significant against an unimportant background, or when you finally retrieve a word after an infuriating period of tip-of-the-tongue inaccessibility. Disturbingly, one sometimes gets the same sensation of certainty when one’s answer is incorrect.

“University Challenge”, as well as being entertaining, can teach us a few things about different levels and types of “knowing”. In English we have just the one key verb, to know - while French, for instance, makes the distinction between savoir and connaître, German likewise between wissen and kennen - to imply knowing a fact or being acquainted with someone or something. However, in any language there is a whole menagerie of species of “knowing”, from an intuitive ‘I absolutely know that perfectly, spot on’ right down to ‘haven’t the faintest’ and ‘don’t even understand the question’. At the top end we have the Rev Coles’ certain and instinctive knowledge, really knowing, as we might say, and at the other end, oh dear, the embarrassing Caravaggio woman, or the contestant who offers a facetious answer, or the one who more sensibly and modestly mutters “pass”.

Between the extremes of knowledgeability are gradations of uncertainty and imprecision and of acceptable and unacceptable error. Here there’s space only to highlight a few of these. There’s the calculated but obvious guess, for instance; there’s “almost right”; and there’s “It’s wrong, but I know why you said that”. Often, in “University Challenge” it appears unrealistic that one would be expected to know the answer in the deeply certain “I know I know” sense, but rather the assumption is that one will be familiar – somehow – with the components and characteristics of a style, a generality, and be able to deduce accordingly. One will recognise the fragment of a language, half of someone’s name, the penumbra of something one really does know. The music and picture rounds frequently work this way; one may have never previously encountered that particular Chopin nocturne or that Pissarro landscape, but one will be able to make an informed guess from what one does know. A musical work will sound Russian or French; a painting will look Dutch or Italian. You don’t know quite why or how, but it does. Other clues are provided and immediately the options narrow; Gerd Gigerenzer is one researcher who has demonstrated how sometimes it’s better not to know too much. A little knowledge may, in this instance, be less dangerous than a little more. If the only Group 1 element you’ve heard of is sodium you aren’t going to be led astray by rubidium.

Indeed, chemistry questions often focus on the periodic table and here, in nearly every case, and unlike Gigerenzer’s findings as applied above, you will need to really know your subject matter. If you’ve never heard of rubidium you won’t be able to guess it. Likewise with quantum mechanics, Shakespeare, exoplanets or complex numbers. All right, ‘the square root of minus one’ may do the trick once in a while. The picture questions, meanwhile, often involve putting a name to a map location and here it’s notable how older contestants, and those with a background in factually intensive subjects, tend to score. The habitual sub-letting of knowledge from cerebral cortex to Google-enabled gadget soon shows through in a contest like this. Knowing that you can “look it up” is no help here; no, it has to be inside, on board, and rapidly retrievable. Traditionally, of course, a claimed ignorance of geography is a marker of superiority amongst a certain type of person. Science likewise. What the bloody hell’s tungsten carbide? Boring, difficult, tiresome subjects best left to spotty anoraks of a Northern persuasion, right?

Wrong. It’s always interesting when a studio contestant makes the same peculiar mistake as oneself, at precisely the same moment as one shouts at the TV from the smug safety of one’s sofa. So often, it seems, the correct answer is the only landmark “fact” both oneself and the contestant - worried by bright lights, stage fright, and a frowning Paxman - knows from within a desert of factual ignorance. Whether it’s history, physics, classical music, literature, or whatever the subject area. “The Holy Roman Emperor”, “Bannockburn”, “Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle” (no, wrong, “Schrödinger’s Cat”, damn), “Smetana” or “Ibsen” extracted successfully out of acres of utter cluelessness. Those “1066 and all that” factoids that one remembers – Alfred burning the cakes, Trotsky and the ice axe – retrieved from the greater unknown. What, really, do we ever learn properly? What do we know? What do we know we know? What and why?

 
As my good and learned friend would say. Indeed. Absolutely.