Just as the Vegetative Buddha of Haggerston Park locks the gravity of London by staying still on his bench through the hours of daylight, so Alan Moore appears to anchor England’s centre, and the centre of that centre, with the steadiness of purpose of the sculptural West Marina Harold staring up at the Pleiades. The myth of the 1066 walk therefore begins at its ostensible point of dissolution: a dripping Northampton garden, with Claudia Barton’s Edith poised between two men making smoky linguistic loops around the vanishing subject.
That night, 22nd June 2016, in the darkness before the dull, numbed morning of the referendum, the London sky tore and split with lightning strokes and running fire. ‘Man’s nature cannot carry the affliction nor the fear.’
Alan Moore builds a thousand-page novel, Jerusalem, from the matter of Britain. Men, afflicted by angels, hang on chimney pots and women give birth on the cobbles. King Harold can be butchered and scattered, or buried under pebbles beside the sea. Or he can continue in a parallel universe, resurrected as Hereward the Wake. In which character he burns witches in their towers and fights a giant bear. The creature returns, on the end of a rope, attached to the mad poet John Clare. And now the Fen monster, this sticky heap of mud and twigs, the Straw Bear of Whittlesey, must be put to the torch. Reborn to suffer again. To dance with blackface mummers in boots and skirts.
Hereward’s wake is also Finnegans: his name on grey stone alongside the grave of James Joyce’s daughter Lucia in the Northampton cemetery where we stood in the rain.
Alan Moore sees Hereward as another mad old ranter on the streets shouting at cars. And Joyce agrees. His own undead Harold from Finnegans Wake raves about how he is condemned to be part of an eternal cycle of Williams killing Harolds and Harolds firing their arrows into the eyes of royalty in private forests.
In the dripping Northampton garden, we sit in line to contemplate Moore’s conceit of the doughnut of time. A magician’s circle burnt in smouldering butts in the carpet around his chair. He scratches his beard and introduces the notion of Six Proud Walkers from the timeless folk song, Green Grow the Rushes, O. ‘Much corrupted and often obscure… An unusual mixture of Christian catechesis, astronomical mnemonics, and what may be pagan cosmology.’ Six for six proud walkers. The prophet Ezekiel speaks of six men with swords come to slaughter the people, whose leaders have filled the land with violence.
‘Following the witch, the princess and the monstrous bear,’ Moore writes, ‘he disappears down urchin-tunnels in the undergrowth and ducks into the English dreamtime; becomes one with the remembered landscape, fuses with its chalk giants and its swerving, street-drinking Tom Cobley songlines, joins the nine bright shiners and the six proud walkers.’
It took this digression to Northampton to identify our troop as nothing more than one verse from an English folk song. As David drummed and the tired but elated pilgrims circled the marble effigies in the municipal garden, those six proud walkers – Kötting, Barton, Finer, Bosch, Aylward, Sinclair – fused into a communal ring, a dance feeding back into the fading memory of itself. Before cold Belgian beers on the damp stone, opposite a white hotel, where the triumphant Duke William first dined. Our particle exchange is accomplished, the trench dug. ‘One is one and all alone / And evermore shall be so.’
I watched the remorseless waves for three days. I couldn’t bring myself to return to London, which was now a city abolished, set against the rest of the land. The stained-glass window of St Leonard, with red bus, Shoreditch Church and chained sinner, to which I had been led by the damaged man on the bench in Haggerston Park, had extended a line of desire to this speculative coastal resort; to a building like a concrete boat, to St Leonards-on-Sea. The right place to be in receipt of bad news, to process the unthinkable.
Seeing no way out, after discussions with Andrew Kötting, who was keeping his own demons in check, and massaging wounds from earlier skirmishes, I decided on a walk with no halts, no respite, St Leonards-on-Sea to Canterbury: dawn to dusk, day through night, through day again. This pilgrimage had been hovering for a long time. Canterbury, where I had a connection at the university, prided itself on its outward vision, its lively Parisian campus. Would that now be lost?
Slumped against the concrete of the sea wall, I let my fatalistic reverie wind back to the start, the decision to follow wherever the Vegetative Buddha’s eyes would have carried him, if he had been capable of lifting his burdened head. The nunnery. Then Hackney Road. I tracked the brash retail signage of this local border, realising that our future had been in plain sight all along, going east from the trader offering FRIENDSHIP VEGAN SHOES. With the suggestion that, if we became peckish on our coastal tramp, we could always eat our footwear.
The shops of Hackney Road underwrote the present debate: PURE WHITE ACCESSORIES (WHOLESALE). EURO CATERING. DECENT INTERNATIONAL LIMITED (JUST BAGS). GREEDY COW (INDIAN). RICHDEMOLITION UK. They dominated established immigrants like Litvinoff & Fawcett, dealers in pine cupboards and chests, bespoke beds and artisan tables.
By choice, we had picked the worst of days to launch our final excursion: cold and wet, with the promise of worse to follow. We took the slippery coast path, sweating up and down numerous muddy steps, blocked by fallen trees, before dropping to rocks where, in season, leathery nudists basked like seals. Then on, through scattered settlements losing their gardens to the sea, past salt-glazed, picture-windowed hideaways for weekend celebrities, until we reached that triumph of paranoid engineering, the military canal excavated from the marshes to keep out Napoleon. Proud Rye squatted on its cobbled toy-town hillock like a fat hen on a nest of pebbles. Traders celebrated the withdrawal of the English Channel. And did their best to exploit, with antiques and tea rooms, the grudging Cinque Port status granted when New Romney silted up.
We would draw in the beads on the necklace of the Cinque Ports – Hastings, New Romney, Hythe – before coming across country, by moonlight, or the luminescence of the battlefield dead, to Canterbury. Andrew had his bone to pick with the cathedral city after another headlong stumble. To keep our non-stop, Trappist walk interesting, he had twisted an ankle, and repeated it, while wrestling with disobedient planks of wood, before falling into his area at home. And this on his already ruined leg: the one ripped, shinbone to groin, in the motorcycle accident on Old Kent Road.
‘I folded the ankle in half,’ he said. He was reduced, without complaint, to hopping, hobbling, and occasionally crawling, like Beckett’s Unnamable, through bogs, across shingle, nettles, tarmac, bullock-patrolled fields and caravan parks. He never repined. He gloried in the pain. ‘I had better exist.’
It was too late for the ossuary. But we had visited it before, testing the legend that bones gathered up from the field of battle, after the slaughter of Harold and his army, had been deposited in a Norman church at Hythe. Like trophies of a cannibal lord. Or worse. Skulls shelved in arched bays, a thousand or so, stamped with black numbers; trepanned, spade-damaged, lacking mandibles. Biting wood. The immense coins of their hollow black sockets confronting our future gaze.
The charnel house was established, an attraction on the Canterbury pilgrim route, from defleshed, separated bones rescued from cemeteries, plague pits, or sites of massacre, according to speculative theory. More females than males, a small proportion having died from blows to the head. The collection, it is now thought, began in the thirteenth century.
My first visit, accompanied by Anna, was a detour from a drive to Folkestone, a lunch on the harbour: so all those chattering diners, happy families, hopeful couples, business associates, were badged by mortality. Every mouthful taken dropped from a missing lower jaw. It was impossible to dissociate the theatre of the skulls, so tactfully laid out by size and shape on their church shelves, with living images from recent conflicts.
When a study was conducted in 1908, to determine the cephalic index, the ratio of maximum breadth to maximum length, in order to discover the origin of these mute relics, it was found that a ‘significant number’ were of Itali
an origin; from the Roman port at Lympne or other sites of trade with mainland Europe.
The Hythe church was a halt on the way to the grave of Saint Thomas à Becket, for pilgrims from beyond our shores. As another Beckett, Sam, endured a few weeks at the Hotel Bristol in Folkestone, so that he could establish English residence before his marriage to Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil, his companion in those bitter years of war. The tramping and the turnips. In a postcard sent to his friend Avigdor Arikha in Paris, Beckett reported that ‘Sang coule plus calme dans la ville de Harvey.’ Blood, he joked, did its duty, circulating in the fashion prescribed by William Harvey – years after the medical pioneer left Folkestone for London.
Beckett circulated too: Hastings, Rye, Canterbury. He road-tested our pedestrian tramp in his Deux Chevaux. The Irish playwright tinkered with Happy Days and lusted after the state of invisibility achieved, in speculative fiction, by HG Wells. Wells, curiously enough, relocated to the Folkestone area in 1896, taking a small furnished property in Sandgate, before finding Spade House, with its commanding view and proximity to a water-powered lift to the Leas: the precise site of the now demolished hotel where Beckett propped up the bar. And counted out his small cigars. The Invisible Man was serialised in Pearson’s Weekly in 1897 and published as a novel the same year.
The world tilted. And we clung on by our fingernails. Climbing, we needed crampons. The older Hythe of period houses and narrow twisting lanes had us leaning back, supported by cushions of hot air. The charnel house was closed for the night, but the waxy glow of the skulls seeped under the heavy door. I registered the name of the church: St Leonard’s. Our occulted triangle was now complete: Haggerston, Hastings (West), Hythe.
In the church porch, where we dragged ourselves for shelter, was a stained-glass window, blooded in the light of Andrew’s elevated phone app. A pamphlet I picked up spelled it out: ‘There was a new spirit across the whole of Europe. Many had expected the world to end in the year 1000. Men had been holding their breath, especially after a comet was seen in 989 (it was Halley’s), but God stayed his hand.’ Edmund Halley, Astronomer Royal, was another lost Haggerston man. His manor house, obliterated now, was close to Haggerston Park.
The iconic St Leonard, left arm raised in benediction, lacks a hand. His eyes are closed in inward meditation. He does not strike off the chains of the kneeling penitent. Instead, he passes him a thick, upside-down book.
Hackney, 1975–2016.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My thanks to the pilgrims, nightwalkers and witnesses who kept these journeys alive and alarming: David Aylward, Claudia Barton, David Erdos, Jem Finer, Bradley L Garrett, Stephen Gill, David Herd, Andrew Kötting, Rachel Lichtenstein, Anthony O’Donnell (Anonymous Bosch), Chris Petit, John Rogers, Anna Sinclair, Martin Stone, Stephen Watts. And Patrick Wright in the last days of Dalston Lane. And to Effie Paleologou for her brilliant forensic analysis of my drowned portrait.
For their company, editorial insights and acts of generosity towards the project, I would like to express my gratitude to Chiara Ambrosio, Adolfo Barberá, Matthew Beaumont, Renchi Bicknell, William Bock, Peter Bush, Jorge Carríon, Sam Carter, Brian Catling, Chris and Anne Currell, Alberto Duman, Gareth Evans, Jürgen Ghebrezgiabiher, Benedetto Lo Giudice, Simon Inglis, Jeff Johnson, Jarett Kobek, Sven Koch, Laura Longrigg, Jock McFadyen, Robert Macfarlane, Stephen McNeilly, Sophie Mason, Mark Morgan, Alan Moore, Tim Noble, Bill Parry-Davies, Simon Prosser, JH Prynne, Karen Russo, Stanley Schtinter, Paul Smith, Susan Stenger, Jessica Treen, Diana Tyler, Sue Webster, Adjoa Wiredu, James Wilson, Ken Worpole.
‘Digging for Victory’, ‘Free Breakfast for Bikes’, ‘Two Swimming Pools’ and ‘Downriver’ were originally published, in very different forms, under different titles, in The London Review of Books. My thanks to the editor and commissioner of these pieces, Jean McNicol.
Some of the WG Sebald material, in an earlier version, was published as a limited edition, ‘Austerlitz & After: Tracking Sebald’, by Test Centre in 2013. My thanks to Jess Chandler and Will Shutes.
Elements of ‘Pigeon Fishing’, in earlier form, were published in 2014, as part of the collection Park Notes, edited by Sarah Pickstone.
An earlier account of the ‘Brexit Means Brexit’ march to the coast was produced in 2016 by Andrew Kötting as part of Edith (The Chronicles), a collaboration by the six walkers and others. This illustrated record, with pinhole portraits, maps and recordings, was published by Badbloodandsibyl.
My thanks to the authors who have allowed me to quote from the following works: The Great Fire of London (Hamish Hamilton, 1982) by Peter Ackroyd, Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London, Chaucer to Dickens (Verso, 2015) by Matthew Beaumont, Savage Messiah (Verso, 2011) by Laura Oldfield Ford, i hate the internet (Serpent’s Tale, 2016) by Jarett Kobek, the Edith ‘Songs’ by Claudia Barton and Andrew Kötting (2016), On Brick Lane (Hamish Hamilton, 2007) and Estuary (Hamish Hamilton, 2016) by Rachel Lichtenstein, The Nine of Diamonds (Bloodaxe Books, 2016) by MacGillivray, Heligoland (Jonathan Cape, 2003) by Shena Mackay, Jerusalem (Knockabout, 2016) and ‘Wake the Dead’ by Alan Moore, Austerlitz (Hamish Hamilton, 2001) by W G Sebald, Ancient Sunlight (Enitharmon, 2014) and Republic of Dogs / Republic of Birds (Test Centre, 2016) by Stephen Watts, A Journey through Ruins (Radius, 1991) by Patrick Wright. And thanks also for permission to quote scattered sentences from B. Catling, David Erdos, the estate of David Gascoyne, James Sallis and Will Self. And to Effie Paleologou and Anonymous Bosch for permission to use their photographs.
INDEX
Ackroyd, Peter 158
Adjaye, David 84–5
Alderney Road 57–8, 62, 63–4
Ambrosio, Chiara 71, 80
Anerley 189–91
Angel Path 162–3
archaeology 78–9
architecture 139–40
Arsenal FC 252–3
Atkins, Marc 274–5
Austerlitz (Sebald) 49, 51, 57–8
Aylward, David 283–4, 289, 296, 299, 306
Balls, Ed 251
Banksy 3
Barber, Ros 210
Barclays Bikes, see Boris bikes
Barker, Nicola 210
Barker, Simon 210
Barking 216, 223–4, 241–5
Barlow, Carl 117–18
Barton, Claudia 282–3, 288–9, 299, 302
basement conversions 71–3, 74
bathhouses 149–50, 153
Battle Abbey 286, 287, 288, 307–8
Baudelaire, Charles 266
Beaumont, Matthew 249, 254, 256, 260
Beckett, Samuel 315
Beckton 216–17
beggars 95, 235–6
Beijing Bicycle (film) 123
Benjamin, Walter 266
Bennett, Alan 124
Bethnal Green 269
Bicknell, Renchi 185–6
Bicycle Thieves (film) 123
bicycles 40, 46, 112–21, 125–6, 137–8
and couriers 128–9, 135–6
and crime 121–2, 126–8
and culture 122–5
and schemes 129–35
Bishopsgate Goods Yard 86
Black Apples of Gower (Sinclair) 265
Blackheath 302–3
Blair, Tony 150
Blake, William 271
Bock, William 77–8, 79
Bolaño, Roberto 6, 7
Boris bikes 40, 46, 112–13, 117, 129–35
Bowles, Andrew 209
Brady Street 55–6
Brand, Russell 162, 237, 253
Brexit 14, 280–90, 296–9, 302–11, 312–14
bricks 108–9
Bridge Academy 148–9, 151
Brill, Patrick 238
Brompton Cemetery 258–9
Burdett-Coutts, Angela 44
Burley Fisher bookshop 249–50
buses 102–3
Bush, Peter 181–3
Byatt, AS 57
Camberton, Roland 110
Cameron, David 120, 122, 238, 309
&nbs
p; canals 10–11, 14, 31–2, 90
and bicycles 120–1, 125
and crime 34–5, 39–42
Canalside 290–1
Catling, B., 36, 57, 317, 318
Céline, L-F 25
Chandler, Jess 80
chewing gum 268–71
China 123–5, 145–6, 267–8
Cinque Ports 313
Clare, John 98–9
Clissold Leisure Centre 151
coastal migration 5–6
coffee culture 132–3, 261–2
Coleridge-Taylor, Samuel 196
Columbia Market Nursery School 44
comic books 165–6, 167
Corbett, Archibald Cameron 240
Corbridge Crescent 165–6
Corbyn, Jeremy 117
Coronation Street (TV show) 123
couriers 128–9, 135–6
crime 121–2, 126–7
Crome, John 61
Cross, Alfred 147, 150
Cross, Neil 45
Crossrail 74, 92, 225
Crouch Hill 227
Croydon 178, 184–5, 189, 195–6, 217–18
Currell, Anne 215–16
Currell, Chris 215, 216, 243
cycling, see bicycles
Darbishire, Henry 44
Dartford 200
Davis, George 32
Day, Jon 135–6
Decaux, JC 130, 140
Denmark Hill 188–9, 260–1
Department of Transport 225
Dickens, Charles 163, 212
Dirty House 85–7
Downriver (Sinclair) 204, 205
Doyle, Arthur Conan 75–6
Duchess M (ferry) 198, 203
Duggan, Mark 234
Duman, Alberto 77, 78–9, 84
EastEnders (TV show) 34, 44
Edith Swan-Neck 281, 283, 286–7, 288–9
The Last London Page 33