Bleeding London

by Geoff Nicholson

  You would pick up The London Walker catalogue if you considered yourself to be the more discriminating, more cultured kind of tourist, the type who wanted to get off the tour bus and walk the streets of London in the company of a knowledgeable and articulate guide. The catalogue had a quotation from Samuel Johnson in it, not the obvious one, but instead, ‘By seeing London I have seen as much of life as the world can show.’ If you liked what you read you might well find yourself signing up for one or more of the following guided tours: the Bloomsbury Walk, the Boswell Walk, the Christopher Wren Walk, the London Crime Walk, the Holmes and Watson Walk, the Art Gallery Walk, the Docklands Walk, and so on and so forth, ad nauseam in Stuart’s opinion.

  Stuart, even though he had never wanted to be a business man, knew that any kind of business was a series of only partially solvable problems, a series of headaches that didn’t wholly respond to treatment. There was no business that had ever ‘run itself, but for the time being at least The London Walker ran without any input from him. That was because he had a wife, and she ran the business for him, for herself too, and she ran it better than he could. It would have been nice to think he could have sat back and grown fat and rich on the profits. In fact he sat back and felt utterly useless and depressed.

  Stuart was not a native of London. He had been born in Colchester in the mid-fifties, but London had always seemed a magical place to him. His father had war stories from when he was a fire watcher in London and, before she was married, his mother had been a great fan of West End musicals and she still talked about them as part of her golden past. When he was a child there had been family excursions, days out in London, an aunt in Finsbury Park who was occasionally visited, but these jaunts were never enough for Stuart. From the earliest age he’d known that he wanted to move to London, live there, be a student there. He’d driven himself to pass O-level Latin so he could study English at UCL, even if his interest in English literature hadn’t survived his first term there.

  As a student in London, the city had drawn him in like a benign spider’s web. He’d sit in the student bar with a copy of Time Out and see what films were showing, what bands were playing, and it would always be the most distant cinemas, the most far-flung venues that attracted him. Whereas other students were attached to the West End by an inelastic tether, he found himself free to bounce around the most inaccessible and provincial parts of the city.

  The majority of these trips had to be solitary. It was generally impossible for him to persuade any of his student friends to come with him to what they called the outer limits, but he was not deterred. Sometimes he would have girlfriends and if they liked him enough they would be prepared to indulge his whims, his urge for the margins. But none of his girlfriends ever lasted very long. His longest relationship was with a girl whose parents lived in Spitalfields, and he sometimes thought the relationship only survived at all because he responded to some archaic poetry in that place-name. Being able to say he was going out with a girl from Spitalfields had, in his own mind if nowhere else, a certain glamour to it. He was profoundly disappointed when in due course he discovered that the ‘spiral’ part of the name was a contraction of the word hospital and not some archaic spelling of spittle, as in saliva.

  But when he had no girlfriend, and when he travelled the city alone, he never felt lonely. The city supported him, engaged him and kept him company, and he was very grateful to it.

  His student years passed rapidly, and although he wasn’t a bad student, he was only interested in what he was interested in. Having abandoned English he dallied with history, then with history of art, with philosophy and anthropology. He got a degree, but only just. He wouldn’t have minded becoming an academic, but his learning was too patchy, and it was impossible to imagine what he would have researched. Instead he found himself doing a series of ‘real’ jobs; working first on a travel magazine, then for a small advertising agency, then as a technical writer for a computer firm. While all his friends seemed to conceive of themselves as over-qualified and unemployable, he found himself constantly facing a working future that promised promotion, security, responsibility, challenge.

  Several years went by in this way, then one day he woke up, knew he was in absolutely the wrong place, the wrong job, the wrong industry, and decided he’d better run. He walked out of his job, moved into a much cheaper flat, lived on his meagre savings and wondered what the hell he was going to do next.

  He knew that he still liked London, that he liked exploring it, walking through it. He knew he wasn’t too bad at talking to groups of people, and surprisingly he found that he quite liked foreigners. He wondered how these interests might be turned into a means of making a living.

  With a recklessness and a nerve that he later found amazing, he set up a series of walking tours of London: the Architectural Walk, the Mob Walk, the Sculpture Walk. He was their only begetter. He led the tours, devised the routes, tore the tickets, made the phonecalls. He had some leaflets printed and strewed them around hotels and tourist information centres, got himself mentioned in the listings magazines, and he was only slightly surprised to find that he soon had a thriving little business, which he called Stuart’s Tours.

  As anticipated, a lot of his work was with groups of American tourists. They were his best audience. His insights, his quirkiness, his jokes, didn’t go down so well with non-English speakers, especially not the Japanese. But his youth and enthusiasm went a long way. Tourists were charmed by his manner and impressed by the depth of knowledge in one apparently so young, although at the age of twenty-six he didn’t feel young at all.

  He quickly honed his skills. Those who took the tours said he was a natural communicator, that he should write a book, have his own TV show. Modestly, and accurately, he said they were wrong. Nevertheless, he could see that he was enough of a communicator to be able to make a living this way. Some seasons of the year were better than others, some years were better than others, but he soldiered on for three summers and winters, and he didn’t go broke.

  He was always concerned to give value for money and he never treated his tourists with anything other than respect, but as time passed he was aware that he was losing some of his original charm. He wasn’t becoming cynical exactly, but he was getting weary.

  The business was a one-man show and that made for a solitary if simple working life. But he had never been very good at the paperwork or admin and he was pleased when the business became busy enough to justify advertising for an assistant. He needed to import some organizational skills but he also needed company.

  The ad must have been badly worded. He only received one reply, from an ambitious, friendly, outgoing, thoroughly business-like young woman called Anita. She had recently returned from a round-the-world trip and said she wanted to be involved in the tourist industry. She also said that she wanted to start at the bottom and work her way up. Stuart was unaware that he was at the bottom, had no idea what the way up might be, and was even more baffled when she talked in the interview about the enormous potential she saw in his business.

  In the absence of competition he employed her, but she would probably have beaten most other candidates. She was obviously going to be good at the job, but what really clinched it was her name. She was called Anita Walker, a name he found as absurd as his own. It was a frivolous reason for employing someone but he never had reason to regret it. Anita could handle the accounts, could handle people, could conduct a walking tour if necessary, could do just about anything she set her mind to. Within six months she had made herself indispensable and within a year she had married the boss, not that Stuart had ever felt like her boss. She became Anita London. ‘A neater London.’ Well, few people ever picked up on that, but her name lived on in the company’s new title. They combined their names to become The London Walker.

  Right from the beginning she told him that a business must expand or die. He didn’t particularly want it to do either, but he settled for expansion. Anita’s idea was simple enough.
Instead of having one man devising and conducting all the tours, she saw that they could find any number of cheap, capable people to do the work of guiding: students, resting actors, retired academics, bored but intelligent housewives. They could be trained quickly and easily and sent on their way to do the job, creating much more work, more turnover, much bigger profits. She also suggested that some of Stuart’s tours were, how could she put it, a little recherche. Why not go for a broader market? Why not the Shakespeare Walk? The Royal Walk? The Rock ’n’ Roll Walk? Stuart briefly objected that this was not what he’d had in mind when he started the business, but, in the face of Anita’s developing business plans and cash-flow forecasts, this was no objection at all. At the time it seemed like a risk and a diversion but he couldn’t deny that it worked.

  The company progressed. There was a new office, a pool of employees, bigger and better business plans, loans, a lot of meetings with bank managers and freeholders. There were times when it all looked very precarious indeed but at the end of each year the accountants, who never appeared to have had any confidence whatsoever in the enterprise, declared that The London Walker was doing surprisingly well.

  Meetings with bank managers and accountants were still not Stuart’s forte, however. At first he continued to lead walks. But Anita had been right. His knowledge of London was detailed and profound, his love of it real, yet as the years went by he had an increasing distaste for the obvious. He genuinely wanted to reveal London to the people who came on the tours but he was bored with its more obvious features. He wanted to show its eccentricities and unknown quarters. Rather than take them to the Tower of London he’d have preferred to take them to the abandoned Severndroog Castle near Oxleas Wood. For Stuart it increasingly wasn’t enough to tell a few old anecdotes and point out a few sights and locations. He felt that truth was more profound in the obscure corners than in the grand sweeps. And on a good day he would find these corners, even while ostensibly showing punters the more orthodox aspects of London. His tours became increasingly abstract, free form, improvised, often turning into a sort of mystery tour. A crowd that had signed up for a canal walk might be treated instead to a tour of sites connected with leprosy. There were a few complaints, some dissatisfied walkers who demanded their money back.

  He organized a walking tour called Stuart London’s London – The City That Nobody Knows. Of course, he saw there was an absurd contradiction in the title of the tour. If it was a London that literally nobody knew then clearly he wouldn’t have known it either. But the real problem was nothing so philosophical as that. Quite simply, nobody ever signed up for the tour. Weeks passed and the other tours did good business. People wanted to see the Beatles’ London, and Virginia Woolf’s London, Pepys’ London and Hogarth’s London, but nobody wanted to know the London they didn’t know. They wanted to know better the London they already knew. Stuart was profoundly depressed.

  It was Anita who eventually told him he should stop pounding the streets and take a more consultative role, maybe have a less hands-on approach. What she meant, simply, was that he should stop conducting these obscure tours that nobody wanted or enjoyed. He was quietly devastated but he agreed to take a four-week break and see how things went. Ostensibly he would use the time to brush up on his already encyclopaedic knowledge, but in reality he sat around the office watching how efficiently the business worked without any help from him. Young, fresh-faced guides who didn’t know too much actually gave the punters far more of what they wanted than he did. It was a terrible revelation but one he couldn’t ignore.

  He agreed to stop leading tours. He stayed in the office and desperately tried to think of a role for himself. He sometimes interviewed potential members of staff but his instinct for spotting potential was fallible. He sometimes trained new guides, but he knew so much about his subject that often he found it impossible to distill information of the right sort and in the right quantities to be useful to new recruits.

  For a while he conceived of his consultative role as thinking up new and original ideas for tours, but this was not an area where novelty or ingenuity were particularly welcomed. The Henry VIII Walk and the Jack the Ripper Walk were always likely to do better business than Stuart’s fancier inventions such as the Thomas Middleton Walk, the Post-Modernist Walk, the Anarchists’ Walk. In fact it was a guide in her first week with the company who came up with the idea of the London Lesbian Walk, which for a while was one of the most popular tours.

  So Stuart began to withdraw even further. He was no longer sure what his job was, but whatever it was, a lot of people seemed to be able to do it better than he could. He had lost something, a spark, an enthusiasm, a common touch. He felt becalmed. He started to work from home, a situation that rapidly turned into sitting around the house not working at all. He knew that madness lay that way. He was not suited to inactivity. If he wasn’t needed by The London Walker then he wasn’t the sort of person who could simply put in an appearance and pretend he was working when he wasn’t.

  There were some ways of disguising his uselessness. There were people he could have meetings with in the name of business, working lunches that could become boozy and prolonged, extended to absorb half the day. But Stuart always felt ashamed to be returning home or to the office half-cut at four o’clock, and by five a fierce alcoholic melancholy would have set in. It felt terrible. There was no way he would be able to pursue a career as a professional London drinker.

  More harmlessly he sometimes slipped away to see a movie. That felt only mildly shameful, but the pleasure it brought was outweighed by the guilt he felt, knowing that his wife and his employees were out there working while he wasn’t.

  He toyed, very briefly, with the idea of becoming a womanizer, of spending his afternoons having affairs, and he succeeded in going to bed with one of the young female guides. But no, it was more than just going to bed. It had very nearly been a full-blown affair. It had been nice enough in its way, intense and exciting and all that, but it really wasn’t nice enough to risk your marriage and therefore your business and livelihood for, and it certainly wasn’t nice enough to want to make a habit of. Once it was over he hadn’t had the energy or the inclination ever to do it again, but the memory of it stayed with him, both sweet and threatening.

  The only kind of clean, simple, honest pleasure that satisfied him was using London in the name of research. Any increase in his knowledge of London must surely be of benefit to the business, or so he told himself. He would spend afternoons in the Museum of London, the V and A, the British Museum. There was nothing academic or systematic about these visits. In fact he would sometimes see other people apparently doing much the same as him, and for them it was obviously nothing more than killing time, sheltering from the cold or rain. But time needed no killing for Stuart. While ever he was engaged with London it passed very swiftly and happily.

  On other occasions Stuart needed nothing so organized as a museum. He got pleasure simply from walking the streets of London. Certainly some streets offered more than others. Some were full of interesting sights or people, others were places he knew well or liked a lot. Sometimes he experienced the pleasures of familiarity, sometimes those of novelty, but it was always a pleasure.

  He didn’t give much thought to what precisely he was doing, but if he’d been compelled to think it through he would undoubtedly have said this phase was a temporary one, a period of transition before he worked out his new role within the firm. But gradually, and it hardly took a genius to work it out, he saw that no such role would ever materialize. He was, in the most ordinary sense, redundant. The London Walker was no longer going to be part of his life, of his self-definition. He would have to find some different reason for being. He thought of trying to get a new job, of starting a fresh career, but he felt far too jaded and old for that. He needed something that connected with his own deep interests, something that was simply more him. He needed a Big Idea, and sure enough, eventually, it came.

  Once it had arrived there
was an inevitability about it, something undeniable. He was sitting in the coffee bar of the Museum of Transport in Covent Garden thinking how much he disliked buses and tubes when the idea finally struck, and the moment it was there he couldn’t see why it had been so long coming. It felt so completely and perfectly right. What he had to do was utterly clear. He was going to walk down every street in London.

  The reasons why a man might choose to walk down every street in London seemed many and obvious to Stuart. It could for example be explained simply in terms of curiosity, in a man’s urge to see new things, to investigate those parts of the city that were off all the tourist maps, that were known only to locals and the more intrepid explorers.

  He would, inevitably, go to places he’d never been before, that was at least partly the point, but he would also find himself in places he didn’t especially want to go. He didn’t think there were any areas in London where it was simply too risky to walk, but he knew he would be going to districts that he had until now consciously avoided – and probably for good reasons – but that was the nature of the beast. Perhaps then his walking would be an act of reclamation, a way of taming the city, a way of saying that London was open and accessible to everyone, that it held no secrets, no unknowable horrors.

  Obsession also fitted the case. A man who walked down every street in London could be considered a superior, more abstract sort of trainspotter, with the obsessive’s desire for completion, for having the whole set. He would walk past every school, every gaol, every theatre, every hospital, every pub, every solicitor’s office, every used-car lot, every folly, every MI5 safe house, every brothel and crack den, every plumbers’ merchant, every delicatessen, every law court, every sports stadium, every everything. He would have been there, seen there, done that. And even if he missed certain things, markets that were only held one day a week, parades that were only held one day a year, great buildings that were hidden behind scaffolding, nightclubs that were known only to members, well, at least, he’d have walked past them, been in the streets where they took place.