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.

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.

The Magnanimity of City Walks

This week John Cleese observed that London “is no longer an English city”. For reasons both good and bad, he’s partly right and partly wrong. London never was entirely English (the Romans and the Normans, remember them?), but having enjoyed previous spells as the psychological “capital of the world” in the late nineteenth century, during the Second World War, and in the 1960s, London has again become the de facto World City. That is something of which we, as a nation, can be proud. That so many of the world’s peoples should, for a myriad reasons - admirable or otherwise - want to make it their home, and that so many more should want to visit it, implies a destination of unusual quality. World Central. London thus occupies a role different from any other British city and most other urban hubs around the globe  - Paris, New York and Los Angeles being obvious rival contenders. It is an English city, but it is both more and less than that.

Be that as it may, today’s London is not the same metropolis that Cleese first encountered, when first up from Weston-super-Mare via Bristol and Cambridge, and if it were otherwise, it would be a dead city, ossified and stagnant. Vital cities change constantly, though not necessarily, and not always, for the better. Some decline (Florence, Istanbul) or go through rough patches (Berlin, Glasgow). While it is Cleese’s observation of the markedly changed demographics of London that has drawn the hysteria of those congenitally hypersensitive to such matters there is much else that makes the city different from how it used to be, the architecture and the sheer busyness to be encountered almost everywhere being two of the most significant factors.

Cleese gets berated for talking about Englishness. Nigel Farage, who probably  knows better than most what it is like to be routinely and mindlessly slandered by the self-appointed arbiters of righteousness, wrote in his 2011 autobiographical ‘Flying Free’ - “Freedom of speech and belief is not subject to approval by a transitory authority. It is absolute or it is nothing.” That’s almost a definition of Englishness itself. Cleese’s generation (and mine, a decade later) flowered at a time when that sentiment was still true and completely unobjectionable. At the same time, Cleese himself was one of the two gigantic Johns (he was taller than the other one, and had better eyesight) who played a huge role in defining key aspects of English culture – comedy and music – in the mid-twentieth century, right across the English-speaking world, and beyond. So I believe he is more than entitled, as indeed we all are, for whatever reason or for no good reason at all, to like and to dislike what and who he chooses to. That’s called freedom. No ifs and buts.

Cleese’s later career has – perhaps inevitably - been less amusing than his earlier one, and because he’s 79 and has lived for many years outside the UK he makes himself an easy target for holier-than-thou finger-waggers. However, the key point he is getting at, and one with which I agree absolutely (and it is not unrelated to the fact of getting older) is that we are a less tolerant society than we used to be. This is ironic, because the more that attempts are made to enforce tolerance, the worse matters become. Fear of saying the wrong thing takes precedence over personal conviction; Cleese has dared to speak his mind, and good for him.

Compared to the mid-twentieth century what we have here today is a society in which everything has to be just-so, algorithmic, pre-defined, budgeted, quantified, formulaic, procedural, box-ticked, programmed, legalistic, deliberate, unironic, simplistic, shallow, sanitised, unimaginative, assertive-aggressive, angry, loud, unsubtle, inflexible, humourless, self-righteous, devoid of initiative, tediously literal, and often profoundly dim and depressing. Oh yes, and of course, smart. Smart is very important.

Seen from the perspective of older age, that’s the nation we have become, the kind of people we have become. Not, it has to be said, what we traditionally think of as English. I think that is really what John Cleese is getting at. Our traditional good-humoured fondness for self-deprecation has been turned round and weaponised by those who don’t appreciate such traits. We’re expected to be very left-brained, as befits a gadget-obsessed, money-fixated, quantitative-minded, secular society. In other words, half-brained. Not all of us, of course, but more than enough. Not much future for Basil or for the Ministry of Silly Walks. Not much future in being old, decent, sensitive, imaginative, or honest. Not much future in being silly.

Cleese’s last TV series “Hold the sunset” unfortunately lacked the focused scripts or hilarity of “Python” or “Fawlty”. Conventionally, perhaps, comedically, it was not a great success, but for me, Cleese limping laconically round the dog-emptying leafy avenues of Richmond was a delight – I was just waiting for him to erupt into some venomous outburst – but even though that never quite happened, his persona seemed spot on for a man of his age and past achievements. I felt I could read his thoughts: now that’s acting for you. What that gentle suburban setting emphasised for me, though, with my peculiar psychogeographical predilections and all that, was the difficulty in finding the kind of London that so many of us grew up to love; it was there in the programme, and it certainly still exists in small pockets, but you have to seek it out. This isn’t about simplistic observations of ethnicity or class, but rather more about the intangibles of subjectivity and atmosphere, of architecture and environment and way of life. England, London, as it used to be.

Nostalgia gets ridiculed, unfairly, but a sense of place and permanence contributes to psychological well-being. That’s a big part of Englishness (or any other national identity) – the streets and houses, not necessarily who lives in them. The trees, the horizons, the sky. Take away your origins, and don’t be surprised by subsequent unhappiness. When you’re getting on, you appreciate the comforts of familiarity, and you don’t always need edginess or change. If you’re younger you do need them, you need to live in the present and in the future, and you’ll reject much of what John Cleese (or I) have to say.

Not everyone will be entranced by Richmond, of course, so you have to wander around the vast and varied city and find what grabs you. Dalston or Catford, perhaps. You need to be generous and open minded, magnanimous (that Churchillian word) towards what you don’t personally get, adopting the attitude of the expectant flâneur (if you can put up with such pompous terminology) - because those moments of revelation that this is London can occur in unexpected locations.  Just round the next corner. Wow !

 
Whatever else it implies, Englishness has a lot to do with a sense of place and belonging, even more so with a sense of respect and love and longing, and – as Cleese has noted - with quietness, good manners, humour, and politeness. An attitude, a way of life, a shared past, a togetherness, a commonality. And – it would be nice to think – a common future goal. Qualities easy to mock as old-fashioned, elitist, reactionary, inefficient, boring and … old.  But, why ever not? They served us fine for long enough. For my money, Cleese is someone who has given me many hours of side-splitting pleasure, and for that I’m immensely grateful. He’s a national treasure and is to be hugely respected. Perhaps he should retire to Weston-super-Mare or to a small hotel in Torquay.

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.