Over Lord Hill’s Bridge

Over Easter I listened to one of my favourite albums, “The Good, the Bad, and the Queen”, the 2007 offering by Damon Albarn and friends. It’s a very London record, a work of sonic genius; on the track called “Northern Whale” you can actually hear the mud of the Thames estuary. “Nature Springs” begins with the words “Over Lord Hill’s Bridge we must go”. That’s a very promising first line for a song.

Perhaps you haven’t been over Lord Hill’s Bridge, or don’t know where it is, but if you’ve ever caught a train from Paddington you’ve been under it, while accelerating westwards past Royal Oak. A thought which fills me with anger and frustrated desire, because shortly I was hoping to go that way, so as to visit my elderly friend in Berkshire. I hope he’ll be all right. However, if you go over Lord Hill’s Bridge, it looks like this: 

 If you about turn on the photograph and go the other way, northwards, taking very good care as you cross the Harrow Road beneath the Westway viaduct, and head up through pleasant enough grassy parkland between the blocks that form the Warwick Estate, you reach the Grand Union Canal, in normal times jostling with joggers and lined with colourful houseboats, and a footbridge leading to Formosa Street. Park that image for a moment.

Also, over the Easter weekend, I watched the 1951 Ealing comedy “The Lavender Hill Mob”, a gentle farce about a bullion robbery starring Alec Guinness and Stanley Holloway, and featuring atmospheric scenes of early postwar London, including heavily blitzed areas around St Paul’s. Approximately forty-five minutes into the film, for a couple of seconds you see this:

 

The same Grand Union Canal, more or less at the same spot as you would have reached after your imaginary walk from Lord Hill’s Bridge, with the backs of Clarendon Street on the left. Except that it doesn’t look like this any more because in the early 1960s, Clarendon Street and the whole of Westbourne Green, an entire community of tight little streets, squares and crescents, condemned as slums, was annihilated in the process of creating the city of the future, which is now the city of today, the bit you have just walked through  – thinned out, airy but meaning-lite, visually timid, bland, flaccid and lacking in urbanity.

Because I’m made that way, immediately I saw that filmic image from almost seven decades ago I was seized by an almost physiological sense of longing for somewhere that in any realistic sense no longer exists, by a desperate yearning for a time long past, and for a place with which I have absolutely no personal connection. The film was released a week before my first birthday. It’s nothing to do with me and yet it hurts.

If I were to walk over Lord Hill’s Bridge today, and continue up to the canal and look down on that water, the longing would not be satisfied nor the pain annulled. The object of my desire – a time, a place, a mood, a potential – no longer exists in the real world. So it doesn’t matter whether I go to that spot or not, the longing is the same. Practically, of course, this damned infection means that, even if I wanted to, I can’t.

Longing takes many forms and affects people differently: for times, places, people, ways of life. It’s always driven by absence and loss; it’s a corollary of love. Longing can be for the currently available, the temporarily unreachable, for that which is forever inaccessible, for that which has gone and is never coming back, for that which never was, for times we will never see, for the impossible. All aspects of a world we love and never want to leave. “Nostalgia” would be the cheap sneer, but it goes much deeper than that.

Perhaps it is the constraints imposed by pandemic lockdown that help focus the mind sharply and painfully on that which is missing from our lives. Or perhaps it is a more ambient kind of awareness of the very real, life-devastating losses that so many are suffering around the world as a result of this cruel and unnecessary outbreak. The relentless sadness, the heroism, the heartbreak. Or the increased threat level to personal survival, the memento mori that accompany every news bulletin. 

Or perhaps it is just a chance encounter with music and photography that trips the mind into a mourning mood. Over Lord Hill’s Bridge we must go, and again, I have no doubt, one day we shall.