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.

Coming out about Lansdowns

When I was about ten years old I was taken – over a short period of a few months - on visits to Cheltenham, Bath and Bournemouth.Yes I know, but I should emphasise that generally speaking my parents were loving, caring, and well meaning people. In each of these places I noticed the apparent importance of the word Lansdown (in Bournemouth it was spelled Lansdowne, and was a major bus destination, obtrusive,  rather along the lines of my comments about Cockfosters in my previous posting). Clustered closely together in autobiographical time as they were, and unfamiliar as I then was with most towns and cities of the British Isles, I wondered at the significance of these observations. Everywhere had a town hall, a parish church or a cathedral, a market place, a Woolies and a Marks, so did everywhere have a Lansdown too?

If so, what would one expect to find there? Crumbling Regency crescents, building societies, solicitors’ offices, art galleries, old folk with walking frames? In Cheltenham even the railway station was named for this Lansdown Phenomenon. Clearly it was not to be taken lightly, but my questions were brushed aside as being essentially unanswerable (along with algebra).

For many years I lived with this troubling knowledge, and it is only recently that I’ve dared to speak about it in public. The Lansdown Phenomenon as I’ve called it, giving it due respect and initial capitals. Over the years I’ve grown to realise that it is only the privileged few places that make much of their Lansdown, that for the most part Lansdowns are not that significant in the scheme of things, and certainly not worth losing any sleep over or seeking counselling. They’re not as important as, for example, Caffè Nero or Pizza Express (though they’re more important than algebra).

However, although I can hardly face the psychological implications of what I’m about to confess, in more recent years I’ve also had to accept the possibility that there might be other types of Lansdowns too, not named as such, in fact entirely unnamed ones, clichés of urban form, features that go together, emerging stereotypes of place, archetypal clumps, nuts and bolts of city form as predictable as eggs and bacon or, er, nuts and bolts. Which means that, unlike in Cheltenham Spa et al, you don’t even know that they are Lansdowns. I mean, they could be anywhere. Anywhere and everywhere. They aren’t labelled. Frightening or what?  In fact, this is the first time I’ve raised this suspicion in public, so you’ll appreciate that this is a delicate moment for me. These hidden “other” Lansdowns  resist classification, they have no recognised overall generic name, but with practice one can start to recognise them – conceptual Lansdowns, if you like. At least I hope one can, otherwise I fear I may be entirely alone in this.

Tentatively, I’ll suggest a few possible candidates. How about this one: the scruffy area between the bus station and the back entrance of the 1960s covered market, close to the public conveniences, smelling of fish and slimy and slippery with them, stacked with pallets and parked randomly and untidily with white vans. Sound familiar? Is there somewhere like this in your town? Could this be a secret and novel  form of Lansdown? OK, upmarket a bit: one of those new “quarters” – Manchester and Leeds are full of them, and so is anywhere else currently undergoing regeneration – all orange brick and grey steel, sharp corners, tricked out with a Premier Inn or a Travelodge, and most likely favoured too with a Gregg’s, a Sainsbury’s Local and/or a Tesco Express. Know the sort of place I mean? Repetitive, aren’t they. Likewise the “Docklands” clones – Salford Quays, Cardiff Bay, Swansea Marina, Sovereign Harbour near Eastbourne, and so on. You hadn’t got those down as secret Lansdowns, had you. Well, they are. Then, top of the pile, the “iconic” cultural node, designed to draw the tourists, to put a declining post-industrial has-been on the map: the Royal Armouries in Leeds, the Baltic in Gateshead, the Albert Dock in Liverpool, Eureka in Halifax, the Ikon itself, in the wonderfully named, the kinaesthetically named, the sphinctertastic Oozells Square in Brum. Oh dear, I knew there would be a psychoanalytical subtext.

There are variants, some of them overlapping. For instance, there’s the much lauded but peculiarly shaped building, geometrically counter-intuitive and functionally perverse, the work of a “signature” architect, one where – since it’s so innovatively designed - you might not be able to find the entrance or be able to afford to go up in the lift. Sarkinesses none of which apply to the Sage in Gateshead (best seen at night, from across the river), that armadillo/croissant thing in Glasgow, the unsettling Libeskind war museum in Salford (which so effectively – and so subtly - makes the point that war is, well, unsettling actually, really quite upsetting …), the Shard at London Bridge (best when the cloudbase is extremely low (50 feet-ish) though not, presumably, if you’re on board an aircraft). Not to mention the art galleries where typically one goes simply to say one has been, to enjoy the view out to sea (Margate, St Ives), to admire the internal spaces and volumes (Walsall, Tate Modern), and to mosey round the gift shop, chuckling quietly. All in their way highly appropriate symbols representative of our time, all quasi-Lansdowns of the present era. Bath, Bournemouth and Cheltenham eat your old-fashioned hearts out.

But don’t take my word for it, for it may of course be an outrageously subjective, entirely redundant and ridiculously overblown idea, an over the top psychogeographical delusion. Better still, go out and find some Lansdowns of your own.

The global pull of Cockfosters

Maybe you’ve been travelling since yesterday from half a world away, long haul from JFK or LAX, slightly longer from Singapore or KL, even longer, now totally time-disoriented, from Sydney or Auckland. Or maybe you got up very early this morning to board a plane in Athens, Vienna or Helsinki. Now you’re at Heathrow, rubbing your eyes, and it’s your first time in London. Perhaps you’re there on business, or as a tourist. You will have heard about the Houses of Parliament, of course, and Buckingham Palace, the Tower, St Paul’s, the Eye.

You’ve also heard about the famous Underground, the oldest such system in the world, this year celebrating its 150th birthday. Now you’re below ground, about to board a Piccadilly Line train. And where is it going? The departure screen above the platform tells you. Cockfosters. You step aboard. Digital displays and aural announcements confirm that this train is going to Cockfosters. No matter where on this shrunken planet you started from, now you’re heading for Cockfosters. In the global scheme of things, clearly Cockfosters is a destination of some importance. Planet Cockfosters. London isn’t even in the running.

Wherever you go in the world, you’ll find that names you’d never heard of before, totally insignificant suburbs and minor satellite towns, Cockfosters analogues, Cockfosters wannabes, take on an unexpected significance. In London, if you use the tube, besides being forced against your will to know about Cockfosters, you’ll soon discover the overweening importance of Morden, West Ruislip, High Barnet, Upminster, and Hainault (via Newbury Park), none of which you will actually visit unless you are (a) terminally sad, literally so, or (b) prone to narcolepsy.

It’s the same everywhere else. In New York you’ll similarly be bullied into an unwanted awareness of New Lots, White Plains, Rockaway, and Woodlawn; in Berlin, hoping for a quiet life of U-Bahn pootling, you’ll find your pootlings seriously influenced by Ruhleben, not to mention Alt-Mariendorf, Pankow and Krumme Lanke; in Paris you won’t get far unless you submit to an understanding of the whereabouts of Balard and Créteil, the Porte d’Orléans and the Porte de Clignancourt, Villejuif Louis Aragon and Bobigny Pablo  Picasso. There you are, art lovers, you didn’t know his first name was Bobigny, did you. That’s the educational value of the Metro for you. In Budapest, home to mainland Europe’s oldest subway and one of its knottiest languages, you’ll need to learn to distinguish your Újpest-Központ from your Köbánya-Kispest or you’re soon going to be in trouble.

Everywhere you go you’ll come across strange but apparently important words, dominant in local geography, like Westheimer in Houston and Hennepin in Minneapolis, the ubiquitous Peachtree in Atlanta. Destinations on the fronts of buses will warp your appreciation of what really matters: Churchill Square in Brighton, Broad Marsh in Nottingham, Chorlton Street or Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester. Not to mention Plumstead Common and Clapton Pond. If you want to fully appreciate the glories of Glasgow you’ll need to get a grip on a whole load of Polloks. Such are a few of the more subjective toponymic oddities of urban public transport. I bet you wish now that you’d stayed on the train all the way to Cockfosters.