Essay on Algernon Newton and other diversions

One can so easily disengage from the unnatural habit of blogging, and so it has been these last few weeks. Apologies to anyone who has missed my rantings; sadly, HS2 hasn’t been abandoned – yet. Travel has been one excuse for my inactivity, lack of inspiration the most honest one, a slow stage in the production of “Tourist In Your Own Town” another. However, things are on the move again.

Since the creative urge will out anyway, in the absence of significant activity on “Tourist” I’ve been letting the muse follow her own channels. She’s been trickling out in several media (that’s enough purple pompous pretentiousness, thank you.-  Ed). Sorry. Musically, I’ve been attending to The Catford Tendency, playing around with some explosive little tunes which, in their raw state, are enjoying the working title of “The Dysfunctionals”. Tunes inspired by some people I know quite well. Anger, despair, other negative emotions. No, you don’t know who you are, do you, you don’t read blogs.

And I’m painting again. Though I’ve never consciously copied anyone, given my appetite for visions of urban grot and aesthetic shabbiness (I’m watching you – Ed), comparisons with the pet themes of Edward Hopper and Algernon Newton are probably inevitable. Especially as I like oblique sunlight and deserted city scenes, early morning stillness and such. Hopper of course is regular fare for calendar producers and TV psychologists steeped in the imagery of metropolitan alienation; Newton is much less well known, probably because he’s British but without the need to boast or to shock as an alternative to  possessing talent. To be honest, much of Newton’s output is naff, it’s flat and lifeless, amateurish and mediocre, and with some of his later works one is left wondering “why ?” Nevertheless, at his best - and that isn’t often - he’s gorgeous.

Relatively little has been written about Algernon Newton, and therefore I decided to indulge myself by writing a little essay about him, a brief biography, and some highly subjective comments on some of his paintings. Anyone who would like a free copy of the essay is welcome, although the accompanying illustrations are not copyright cleared. But it will give you a potted account and some weblinks, if you’re interested.

Rather like Hopper and comments about alienation and loneliness in the big city, Newton routinely attracts remarks about his works portraying menace and ominous foreboding, sometimes regarded as psychological portents of World War Two, or as delayed side effects of his First World War experiences. There’s quite a consensus, apparently, but I’m not sure about this; it seems to me that city scenes can be empty, quiet and still, without necessarily portraying anything sinister. That would be the case as regards my own paintings. Thundery skies can just be thundery skies. Visual or topographical pleasure may need no further analysis.

The quiet city in question is (mostly) London between the wars. Newton became known as the “Regent’s Canaletto”, a neat pun acknowledging his admiration of the Italian maestro plus his frequent choice of the Regent’s Canal for subject matter – mostly in shabby locations in Paddington and Camden Town. Those sort of places are among my favourites too. His very best painting, however,  one that fills me with unfulfillable yearnings, is of Camberwell, an idyllic canal scene now long since obliterated by the banalities of Burgess Park, a location dead and buried along with the age and the values it represented.

Thus stimulated by my brief study of Algernon Newton I have returned to one of my favourite artistic locations, the area of west London close to Trellick Tower, the former Great Western main line and the Grand Union Canal known formally as Kensal Town, a broken off outpost of humanity that at one time might have declared allegiance to Paddington or North Kensington. From the early sixties onwards this area was seen to good and proper by planners, social engineers, architects, you know the sort, the same ilk as the begetters of Burgess Park, all hygiene and fresh air. The best recollection of its ambience remains in the photographs of Roger Mayne, taken in and around Southam Street in the heart of this district. There isn’t much of it left now, hardly anything. The sky looks more or less the same. So all I can paint is an idea, an atmosphere, a might have been, a could have been but never was. Perhaps next time I’ll have something to show you, and more news on “Tourist”, which also includes an account of the district I’m referring to.

One paradox. In the TV series “’Allo ‘Allo’, the character Edith, wife of café owner René, bears a strong facial resemblance to Jo Hopper, the artist’s wife who modelled in many of his paintings. The radio code name Edith and René use for communicating with England is “Nighthawk”. “Nighthawks” is of course one of Hopper’s most famous works. Strange.

“Tourist In Your Own Town” progress report

Progress with “Tourist In Your Own Town” is going well, and proofing is now at an advanced stage. The cover, featuring a stereotyped tourist in a well-known London location, looks great. The first attempt at printing has been undertaken. This has demonstrated that the preferred typeface, Garamond, doesn’t come out too well, with the crossbars on the e’s and the H’s, in particular, tending to vanish. Current thinking is to go for a bolder and denser font for the main text, probably Baskerville Old, and at a larger point size. This will mean a fatter book, currently estimated at around 488 pages. Everything always takes longer than expected!

Allowing for other commitments, publication of “Tourist” is at present projected for early October. For anyone interested in the subjective aspects of geography, the psychology of places, how we experience travel, and what has become known as psychogeography, “Tourist In Your Own Town” will be an essential book to purchase.

Unbuilt HS2

Last night I watched the repeat of the third and last programme of Dr. Olivia Horsfall Turner’s highly intelligent, well researched, superbly presented and thoroughly excellent BBC TV series on “Unbuilt Britain”. The previous two programmes included an examination of Paxton’s “Great Victorian Way” intended to circle inner London, proposals for impossibly massive canals across central Scotland to improve naval defence, and pioneering visions for a fixed crossing of the English Channel.

This week’s programme focused on unrealised plans for London and Glasgow. It was an absolute treat. First of all it compared the merits of the Wren, Evelyn and Hooke proposals for rebuilding London after the Great Fire of 1666. Thanks to commercial imperatives and the urgent requirement to rehouse the displaced citizens, none of these schemes came to fruition, except - in modified form - Wren’s masterpiece, St Paul’s Cathedral, and his other City churches built after the Fire. The second half of the programme was devoted to two postwar plans for the redevelopment of Glasgow, a city that had suffered greatly from the attentions of the Luftwaffe, and which long before WW2 had been a by-word for tenement living, slums, congestion, violence, and other assorted deprivations.

The two competing schemes were by Patrick Abercrombie, who advocated decanting the overcrowded inner districts to exurban New Towns (e.g. Cumbernauld and East Kilbride), and Robert Bruce, who devised a ruthlessly modernistic plan heavily influenced by Le Corbusier. Bruce’s proposal would have erased the existing city, with its wealth of varied and inspired architecture, along with its close-knit communities, and replaced it with a gridiron of concrete and glass monoliths, making the most extreme excesses of East Berlin or Novosibirsk look warm and cuddly in comparison. This monstrous idea came terrifyingly close to implementation, but by the end of the 1940s had been abandoned.

What Glasgow was left with were the New Towns, some sporadic outcrops of high rise, an urban fabric largely untouched and – once decades of grime had been blasted away – magnificent to the eye. In due course it would become the fashionable and lovely city we know today, a treasure trove of architectural gems, but last night’s programme suggested that it had had a narrow scrape. On Clydeside  in those early postwar years the crude forces of politics and finance were seemingly allowed to operate with little to check them, and scant concern was shown for the softer factors crucial to satisfactory urban life. I find it rather disturbing that Bruce’s plan, in particular, was taken so seriously, and that he wasn’t taken away by men in white coats.

Interestingly, though, it was intuited early on that both of these proposals needed some assistance if they were to have a chance of success; their victims – sorry - beneficiaries, had first to be persuaded, softened up. Thus a film was shown at local cinemas, a work of naked propaganda  said to be highly convincing as regards the merits of the Bruce plan, right up until the final few moments, when the jaw-dropping horrible reality of this abysmal scheme, illustrated by a tacky, clunky model, became all too obviously apparent. The propaganda became self-defeating at that instant, and the audience must have filed out in shock and disbelief at what was going to be done to them, to their lives, their memories, their places, their city. Meanwhile,  Patrick Abercrombie – who famously had designs upon London as well, most of them unrealised, thankfully – also made a film, a ghastly Cholmondeley-Warnerish production in which the weirdly monocled protagonist loftily assumed that the vast upheaval and experiment in social engineering that his scheme implied was unquestionably good for Glasgow and Glaswegians, and would be welcomed. Again, he was rumbled, and again – perhaps with hindsight aided by the creations of Harry Enfield – one is amazed that the whole performance wasn’t dismissed as a spoof.

However, it wasn’t. The line between good intentions and overweening arrogance is sometimes hard to discern, but perhaps we shouldn’t be too harsh on what were the standards of the time, not long after the end of a war during which the population had become inured to receiving condescending and irritating instructions on how they ought to behave. Experts and authorities were respected in those days. Sometimes. Wonder how they lost it.

In Glasgow in the 1940s – still regarded as the second city of the Empire - the likely subjective, aesthetic, social and environmental consequences of what was being suggested were ignored; only the vested interests of political power and commercial gain were deemed to be relevant to the discussion. The poor sods who would have to up sticks and go and live in filing cabinets in the sky or out in the middle of nowhere weren’t  of any real interest in the grand scheme of things. The proposals could be rationalised with vaguely socialist smarm about how cosy it would be if everyone lived equally – equally, that is (architects and planners excepted), in habitations of equal awfulness, all part of the preppy postwar zeitgeist, the weary hope for a new and better world, the adoration of all things white and cuboid and soulless, the infatuation with meaningless grassy “lungs”, all carefully, neatly, psychotically arranged - in low density angst, hygienic resentment, and fully functional right angled seething, with the added inducements of an inside loo and a 23rd storey balcony to jump off.

Of course it isn’t like this now, is it. Is it? ‘Course not. We know better now, don’t we. We know that there has to be more to a city than this, even if Cumbernauld New Town does occasionally make it into the catalogues of crap Britain. All about money and power? What? Was it ever? Don’t be ridiculous.

In my “Tourist In Your Own Town”, currently being prepared for publication, I examine the kinds of subjective factors that feature in the appreciation of cities, factors which would have been so cruelly denied in Bruce’s Glasgow, Le Corbusier’s Paris, or Robert Moses’ Manhattan, had any of these atrocities been allowed to proceed. Atro Cities, now, there’s an apt descriptor. No, the core requirement is for a sense of place, and “Tourist” delves into that topic in detail, together with much more - in what should be a rattling good read. Watch this space.

Yes, it would be nice to think we have come a long way in our planning activities  since those flickering monochrome days of postwar austerity. Maybe we have. Certainly we have access to more convoluted wool-pulling techniques, to fancier statistical obfuscation algorithms, we are quite at home with snazzy computer simulations and dodgy data mashups, we simply lurve virtual realities and visualisations; we’re always hugely impressed by the latest software package (yes, it has to be a package, we don’t want anything that might be easy to get into). Etc, etc.

OK, I’m starting to get stroppy. Let’s turn to high speed rail. In principle, a Good Thing. Currently in the UK we have a kind of demented Thomas the Tank Engine character who keeps puffing “I know I’m right, I know I’m right”, every time more voices join the opposition to HS2 and whenever the ludicrously expensive and comprehensively daft project is shown up for what it is. The greater the opposition, the louder he chuffs. So far, he’s getting away with it. I wonder who he is?

“Is your name not Bruce, then ?” “No, it’s Patrick”. “That’s going to cause a little confusion”.

Blurb on the beach

In the throes of preparing for publication of “Tourist In Your Own Town”, and seeking an alternative to being molested by dogs on an otherwise glorious Norfolk beach, it occurred to me that I needed to write a kind of blurb, which would serve as an introduction but also, well, act as a kind of blurb. In a blurbish kind of way. So what I wrote was along the following lines.

“The central theme of “Tourist In Your Own Town” is how, subjectively, we perceive the geographical environment, with an emphasis on the experiencing of ordinary places, as it applies to daily life and to travel and tourism. The book is concerned with how it feels to be alive in the sorts of very ordinary environments most of us inhabit, the impact that places make upon us, the sense of place, and with why some places are interesting or pleasant, and others are not.

Subjects covered include the impressions that places make when we first encounter them, why some places are perceived to have humorous qualities, subjective similarities between places, the recent enthusiasm for psychogeography, nostalgia, the psychology of travelling within and between places, and the associations and imagery that places hold for us.

The book’s primary purpose is to encourage an appreciation and enjoyment of one’s surroundings, drawing on references from geography, planning, architecture, the psychology of perception, autobiography, fictional literature and visual art, in an original synthesis. There are also implications for the sensitive redevelopment of places.

The book will be of interest to anyone who takes an interest in places, plus those with a professional or educational interest in travel, tourism, geography, the built environment, and the psychology of place. “Tourist In Your Own Town” is extensively referenced but is not academic in style, is occasionally humorous, and is accessible to the general reader”.

With that, blurb provisionally completed, a raincloud appeared, and – though probably Normal for Norfolk - it seemed prudent to retreat.

Bad men and bad baguettes

How pleasant – and unusual – to be drafting this piece in the garden, the temperature soaring towards 30 degrees, the sky relentlessly blue, and the only immediate negative the baguette at which I take the occasional half-hearted nibble. This Asda product, fancifully labelled a Parisienne Baguette – “chosen by you” (well, we can all make mistakes) – which I have stuffed with Camembert and cranberry sauce, has all the gustatory appeal of the cardboard inner tube of a toilet roll. Nasty indeed.

But not as nasty as some. As publication of “Tourist In Your Own Town” hovers uncertainly, I was again reminded by news stories this week of the chance factors leading to place creation, a theme from an earlier posting, and one for “Tourist”. San Francisco suffered a plane crash, fortunately not as serious as it might have been, and an event which will add nothing to the sense of place which the wonderful city by the Golden Gate already enjoys aplenty. No discernible effect there, then. Unlike Lac-Mégantic - on the other side of the North American continent in Québec province - a small community which, what’s left of it, will forever have its identity imprinted by a runaway train that caused many fatalities. Such are the random and accidental occurrences which may or may not give rise to, or modify, a sense of placefulness.

Maybe someone at Lac-Mégantic was crucially to blame, maybe not; that remains to be decided, but what of those places definitively linked with infamous people or dreadful deeds? We’re not just talking Asda bakery here. Places with evil subtitles, as it were. Recently I travelled on the partially completed high speed main line across Austria, and found my place-association muscles being activated in an unpleasant way more often than was good for them. “Wir erreichen jetzt Linz Hauptbahnhof”. Nice station, good connections, surprisingly large steelworks close by, but what does one really associate with Linz? Anything other than the Führer’s megalomanic plans for rebuilding, revisited repeatedly as the nightmare empire he had created crumbled about him? Anything else? I thought not, except – maybe - nearby Mauthausen and its diabolical quarry.

The train slowed momentarily from its cruising speed of around 135 mph to pass through Amstetten, which as far as I could recall has only one claim to notoriety, but a pretty big one, in the form of Josef Fritzl. One may recall that a few years ago it came to light that for 24 years Fritzl had imprisoned his daughter in the basement, raping her repeatedly and resulting in her producing seven children, one of whom died in infancy, the others remaining similarly incarcerated. Josef and his wife – in a sick-making hypocritical charade now in principle nauseatingly familiar (recent cases in Derby and New Addington, for instance) appeared on TV from time to time appealing for help in investigating the daughter’s “disappearance”.

Vienna has of course inflicted its own peculiar spin on psychology; one wonders how that subject might have developed if Sigmund Freud had been born in, say, Barcelona, Brisbane or Bristol, or anywhere less conspicuously knicker-twisted than the Austrian capital. For starters, we’d all be less afraid of rats, horses, and/or sex. Or, the other great what-if, if the aforementioned moustachioed one had succeeded as an artist there or, better still, been born half a century later in Dartford or Liverpool and picked up the guitar. Counterfactuals get you nowhere though, least of all Salzburg.

Upon arrival in Salzburg it was impossible to ignore (but effortless to resist) the announcement of an imminent train departure to Braunau-am-Inn, birthplace of the aforementioned ranting one. Not that he can be avoided entirely. The excellent Panorama tours, which operate out of Salzburg and specialise in “The Sound of Music” for those who like that kind of thing, do a Tour Number 4, to the Kehlsteinhaus, otherwise known as the Eagle’s Nest. Cryptically their leaflet refers to brass elevators of WW2 vintage and “a magnificent view of the surrounding snowcapped peaks of the Bavarian Alps and the surrounding countryside”. The blurb intriguingly makes no mention of whom one might have shared the view with some 70 years ago. In the unlikely event that one doesn’t know, I wonder if the sense of placefulness of this majestic alpine summit is diminished – or enhanced – as a consequence? Place creation, as I say, is all so chancy, so subjective.

Budapest: a lesson for us all

It was liberating last week to arrive in a “new” city, one that I had been looking forward to for a long time, and to see how it fared with respect to some of the principles of subjective geography that I have been describing in recent blogs, and which feature in “Tourist In Your Own Town”.

Budapest enjoys a strong sense of place, due in no small way to its location at the point where the Danube breaks free from the hills to the north and enters the great flat Hungarian plain. It celebrates its mighty river and makes the most of it, the same mythic Blue Danube which its upstream neighbour Vienna so churlishly turns its back on, to its loss, and which last week – after a long period of heavy rains – was greyish-green in colour, swollen, littered with uprooted trees, and flowing fast. As the capital of a country with a language that offers few clues to a non-speaker I was surprised at how easy Budapest was to use, at its eagerness to adopt Western values, and at the frequency and competence with which English was spoken. I found the city welcoming and friendly, fun to be in. It’s somewhere that wants to have a good time and knows how to go about it.

First impressions, when arriving at Keleti station off the RailJet from Vienna, were of a frisson of “foreignness”, of Eastern Europeanness, a feeling exacerbated by the presence of dodgy-looking taxi touts and of the disorder caused by the closure of the main station frontage and its surrounding by construction works for metro Line 4. The strangeness quickly dissipated upon approaching the city centre, and I soon realised I was in one of the great European capitals.

Pest includes the commercial heart of the city, while Buda is more relaxed and touristy, with features reflecting a long history. Subjectively, there is no obvious single central place, although conventionally it would be Deák Ferenc Square, where the three metro lines intersect, a location marked by a big wheel and a tourist information office. However, there is a considerable surrounding area where one feels a strong sense of being close to the centre of things. The Danube acts as a focus through the central area, especially in the vicinity of the chain bridge, near where tour guides congregate.

Navigability is easy, aided on the Pest side of the Danube by broad radial avenues and roughly semicircular connectors, and sometimes by views towards the river and the hills to the west, and on the Buda side by the very obvious topographies of the castle area and of Gellert hill. Many parts of the central city provide a satisfying sense of enclosure, with a high information content in terms of street furniture and activity, the visual and aural effects of the ubiquitous yellow trams, a solid, chunky, dense and stylish urbanity, yet with a skyline free from the visual blight of ugly modern highrise that disfigures so many cities, not least London. Budapest is a city that enjoys itself, knows what it has got, appreciates it and – one hopes – doesn’t want to spoil it by pursuing the dreary diktats of “progress”, as understood by egotistical architects, unimaginative financiers and corporate drones. In terms of subjective similarity to other places, Paris is the most obvious candidate, surely not a bad thing. Many of the major thoroughfares are treelined; the variety in the detail of the vernacular architecture is astonishing.

In an earlier blog I commented on the plaque on the bridge across the Thames at Marlow which declares – in English and Magyar – how that Buckinghamshire town is “bridged” with Budapest, thanks to the work of William Tierney Clark and his (unrelated) successor Adam Clark. I was hoping to find a plaque on the Szchenyi chain bridge across the Danube referring to Marlow but, despite the difficulty of deciphering the inscription in Hungarian at the south western corner of the bridge, I don’t think Marlow gets a mention, although both Clarks are cited. But it’s a such a lovely bridge that I attach a photograph.

Finally, I encountered something so strange and wonderful that afterwards I wondered if I had dreamt it. Having explored the delightful city park in the north east of the city I took Line 1 of the metro downtown. This is the Földalatti, the line dating from the 1890s, the first such system in continental Europe. The station at Hösök tere, aka Heroes’ Square, adjacent to the city park, really is the stuff of dreams, and consequently my description may be a little exaggerated or distorted. Entering the station via a stairwell I went to a tardis-like kiosk and bought a block of tickets, the size of one’s little finger, and had to validate one in a machine, under the eye of guards, before entering the platform area proper which – surreally – appeared not much larger than your average bathmat. The train was already in, and seemed to have a capacity for about eight people, all of them tourists. I’m sure this can’t really be true. At each beautifully tiled station, door-closing and departure were announced by an elaborate sequence of chimes. The whole experience was a dreamlike delight.

However, it occurred to me later that much of the line follows the route of Andrassy Street, the straight radial sometimes compared (unreasonably) with the Champs Elysées, and therefore must run close to the hideous basement of Number 60, the House of Terror. Here, the crimes of the Nazi and the Soviet occupiers are recorded in grim detail, along with some of the more gruesome artefacts of repression, and offer a stern message applicable to this day to all those – businessmen and politicians in particular - who toady to nasty regimes that still practise exactly the same kinds of thing. Budapest has found its freedom, values and enjoys it, and understands how precious it is. We should take note.

Marlow: douze points

Working on the absolutely final revision, the third so far, of “Tourist In Your Own Town”, I thought it would be revealing to put some of its ideas to the test. “Tourist” is my projected book on “the subjective geography of everyday life” (a wider take on the subject than ‘psychogeography’ as commonly understood). So last weekend, coincidentally the weekend of the awesomely imbecilic Eurination contest, I visited somewhere “new”, to see how some of the principles played out.

The town in question was Marlow, on the north bank of the River Thames, in Buckinghamshire. I’d visited it three or four times previously, very briefly, and mostly while on my long distance saunter along the Thames Path in stages from Goring Gap to Westminster, but this was the first time I’d actually stayed there. What happened, as so often, was that I completely failed to explore Marlow, but used it as a base for visiting places nearby. However, I can report several observations.

Part of the town, especially that towards the railway station, looks slightly miniaturised, like a 75 per cent scale model. The houses are low and squat, the roads and pavements unnaturally narrow, so that neither cars nor pedestrians (all of normal dimensions, as far as I could tell) are well catered for. The street map I had printed off prior to the visit showed the thoroughfares as being narrow, but I assumed that was just a cartographic anomaly. Not so; they really are. So, this was a noticeable first impression, not an outstanding feature overall in the greater scheme of things, or Marlow in particular, but a comment-worthy one. In terms of the subjective appreciation of places, first impressions are important.

Another interesting aspect of subjective geography consists of those things that the locals no longer notice because they’re so all-pervasive. Well, perhaps they do, but what struck me as an outsider was the constant aircraft noise from the flightpath out of Heathrow, the ambient roar of traffic on the bypass, the sight of red kites soaring and wheeling and swooping, the cheerful bunting across the High Street and, it has to be said, the friendliness of everyone.

Hereness and thereness are important subjective geographical qualities. We’ll skip hereness, as in this context it’s a little pretentious. Thereness, though, is more interesting, can be manifested in several ways, and helps to contextualise places. One artificial technique for enhancing thereness is official twinning. I failed to notice where Marlow is twinned with but, most unusually, it is “bridged” with a major European capital. Marlow bridge, the suspension bridge across the Thames, was designed by William Tierney Clark, who was also responsible for the design of the very similar though larger Széchenyi chain bridge - built by Scottish engineer Adam Clark (no relation) between 1839 and 1849 - which spans the Danube in central Budapest in a single 1,250 feet span. A plaque on the Marlow bridge commemorates the “bridging” of the town with Budapest. I don’t know if there is a similar plaque in the Hungarian capital, but I hope to find out later this summer.

Orientation: absolutely no problem finding my way around, but some intriguing dog-leggy passages near the weir.

The weir: weird.

Cultural associations: Mole, Ratty, Badger, Mr. Toad. There may be others.

Unusual names: Higginson Park, the sort of name that should be Oop North rather than in the Home Counties, but a delight all the same.

Adjacent places: Henley, Bourne End, Cliveden. Disappointed that ye Cliveden gifte shoppe didn’t sell replicas of that chair. After all, it is the half-centenary this year.

Overall verdict on Marlow: a thoroughly nice place and I must look at it properly next time. Forget Azerbaijan, Moldova, Ruritania, Outer Slobodia and other back-of-beyond Euro-dribbles: this one is truly worthy of douze points.

The intuitive meeting point

Airports, as the primary hubs for international travel, take their function seriously as regards the meetings of strangers – something that happens frequently as a consequence of mass travel. Generally – probably in the arrivals hall - they provide a readily identifiable location, typically symbolised as a big dot surrounded by inward pointing arrows, beneath which people who have never met face to face before can do so. The provision of such a facility seems obvious.

In less organised places it may be less so, hence the clichéd recourse to red roses and rolled up copies of the “Daily Telegraph” or the promise to “meet you under the clock”. We’ll all have encountered the problem from time to time and found a way of dealing with it. Though the ubiquity of mobile phones does take away some of the challenge : “I’m over here; I can see you, I’m waving at you”. But what if neither of you has any idea what the other one looks like ?

In the absence of a real need, one may imagine the contrived situation. If someone said he was going to meet you on a particular date at noon, in a specified large city, but he didn’t say exactly where, what would be the spot to make for to have the greatest chance of meeting him successfully? This was the question that the Nobel prizewinning American economist Thomas Schelling asked as long ago as 1960. The city in question was New York, and the answer he came up with was Grand Central Station, and specifically the information booth there. Such focal places are thus known as Schelling points.

At an intersection in Shibuya, Tokyo, 1,500 people are said to cross simultaneously from eight directions every time the traffic lights change, and 250,000 people per day pass through at a weekend. Nearby, the bronze statue of the faithful dog Hachiko, the pet of a professor of agriculture who commuted through Shibuya station and died in the 1920s, acts as an informal meeting place, and in fact as the local Schelling point.

So what of London ?  I guess the answer would be Piccadilly Circus, but I’m unsure if the spot would be right next to Eros, or by the enquiry windows in the Underground concourse. Perhaps it would depend on whether it was raining or not. It’s the most obvious marker of centrality in the city, and maybe some of the people one finds hanging around there are hoping desperately that some personally important character, someone long lost from their life, will turn up there one day. Equally, I’m very sure some aren’t doing this. Piccadilly Circus has several roles in the subjective geography of the metropolis, and for this reason I have chosen it for the front cover illustration for my forthcoming projected book “Tourist In Your Own Town”. Sub-titled “The Psychogeography of Everyday Life”, it includes among its pages discussion of urban centrality, Schelling points, and very many other phenomena – some of  which feature from time to time in these blog entries.