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.