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.

The nineteenth ecstasy

When you can’t have something you want it all the more. When you can’t go somewhere you want to go there all the more. Well, you know how it is. So I’ve been journeying in my imagination.

I’d recently been watching a lot of Michael Portillo before “all this” started. He’s a man who does a lot of real journeying, seemingly without luggage, hassle, or crowds; he’s a well known enthusiast for multicolourturalism, at least in matters sartorial, a believer that acid green, phthalo blue and strip club pink can live together happily, in varied permutations, side by side, in the form of jackets, shirts and strides. Not a bad role model. Probably better than fluorescent mauve, pillarbox red, and dayglo custard. Anyway, now I’m imagining that tiresomely repetitive moment at the beginning of his Great Continental Railway Journeys when he announces “I’m embarking …” and I shout at the telly, “No, you’re not in Barking, you’re at St Pancras”.

And off we go on the Eurostar. Whining up the steep curve past the gasholder-clad apartments, the deep rumble of the bridge-tunnel across the ECML, speeding up, the vertical concrete cavern of Stratford International that would make a fitting location for a Baconian screaming pope, more acceleration, thrust back into one’s seat, container terminals, low cloud over Dagenham, pylons, the Medway Bridge, the upwards thrust from the flyover over Ashford International, very kinaesthetic this, the imaginary Eurostar experience, and then that long unique sound, that distinctive urgent frequency, deep under the sea for 21 minutes or so. Out the other side, sunnier, Calais-Fréthun, a sense of being high up, looking back towards the coast, white buildings, extra-bright, Gravelines or Dunkerque perhaps, think briefly of England, onwards past neat copses, isolated churches, armies of pylons looking simultaneously French and feline, on and on, decelerating close to CDG, the Sacré-Coeur on its summit, almost erotic in its fabulous foreignness, and then slowing right down, right down, surrounded by dark tenements and double decker trains, and into the Gare du Nord. Clonk.

Quickly through the dodgy crowds and out again, probing into the streets of the tenth arrondissement. Down to the Boulevard de Magenta, stretching ahead endlessly, unforgiving in the fierce late morning sun. It goes on for ever, so I’ll stroll just as far as the crossroads with the rue La Fayette. To the right, another long view, it goes for miles, dead straight to the Opéra and the centre of things. Exhausting just to look at. I think I’ll turn the other way. That’s dead straight too, but with some sort of end in sight. Across the big skew girder bridge spanning the tracks out of the Gare de l’Est; thoughts of Strasbourg, Basel, Germany – everything is so close once you’re across the Channel. On, crossing awkward junctions, urban density like it should be.

Suddenly the surrounding dark buildings give way and I’m at Stalingrad, the complex intersection commemorating the battle, beneath which the Canal St Martin segues invisibly with the Bassin de la Villette. At this point the tenth arrondissement becomes the nineteenth. At this precise moment mere imaginary travel, mere journeying in the head, vanishes and my whole body explodes into a painful ecstasy of longing, of yearning, of desire, of some unexpected kind of reality, of desperately needing to be there in the eternal city. Now, this instant.

Line 2 Metro trains rattle overhead along the wibbly-wobbly viaduct, in and out of Jaurès station. I cross over the busy road, the Blvd de la Villette, a kind of inner ring road popular with homicidal lorries, and I head up the slow hill of the Avenue Secrétan, a sense of being out of the central city now, newer buildings, very civilised, urbane, progressive. Past the stairwell leading down into Bolivar station. Someone – actually, Tim Moore in his 2001 “Continental Drifter” - once said that the Metro smells like a combination of popcorn and farts; today it doesn’t, it just smells ecstatically of Paris, of life. To the top, and into the Parc des Buttes Chaumont in all its surreal quarried loveliness. A perfect spot for a picnic. I make a mental note – for real life - just as soon as “all this” is all over.