by John Rogers
I’ve inherited Katy’s table and seatless hipsters are eagerly eyeing my under-occupied space. It’s an odd assembly. Over-thirties, with good haircuts and serious faces, the men with sculpted facial hair, the women in designer vintage clothes. A Twitter acquaintance quipped that Walthamstow Village has been officially annexed by Stoke Newington. It becomes clear that I don’t belong here in my Clarks boots caked in marsh mud and fleece from Sports Direct, although I note a few admiring glances towards my beard, which I’d recently attempted to trim when the battery ran out half-way through and had decided to leave it as it was.
The only thing that stops me getting on a W15 bus now is my dedication to completing the journey on foot and the desire to sup a couple of pints of Brodie’s beer at the William IV at Bakers Arms, Leyton, which is en route.
The vibe in the William IV couldn’t be more different from the Nags Head. It’s a beautiful old London boozer with large, painted mirrors that in my eyes rival anything William Morris produced. The bar is edged with framed Victorian prints of country scenes mounted on a wooden border like a suspended gallery. The back room has a domed glass roof and roaring open fire. And best of all, in the back yard Brodie’s Brewery turns out some of the finest ales ever to pass your lips.
The punters are a bricolage of locals of all varieties: young smartly dressed Eastern European couples, old fellas on their own, blokes left over from watching the Tottenham vs QPR game on the large screen, men with long hair and tattoos. A woman comes in pushing a pram. This is more my scene.
The barmaid greets me with a broad, friendly smile and I trust her to serve me the best ale they have on. At times there are upwards of ten different Brodie’s on draft, ranging from Pomegranate Pale Ale through to the treacly Elizabethan ales five times the normal strength and served in one-third-of-a-pint glasses. You could drink your way round East London with their Bethnal Green Bitter, Shoreditch Sunshine, Whitechapel Weizen, London Fields Pale, Hackney Red IPA and Mile End Mild.
A little later she brings over the burger and chips I’d ordered served on a platter with a big side salad for less than the price of a Big Mac Meal. I tell her what a good choice the ale was and add how much I love Brodie’s beers. ‘It isn’t a Brodie’s. It’s one of our guest ales.’ Oh well, you can’t have it all, I suppose.
The last leg of the loop takes me past the Grot Shop where I found the old photos of the cycling club and back down into the valley of the Philly Brook where Dennis is still behind the counter of his shop. I buy a bottle of Young’s London Gold ale for the final libation and head home.
Ollie has just emerged from the bath so is politely dismissive of my call to wassail the pear tree in the back garden. Joe has his puffer jacket and wellies on in an instant. I empty the spent batteries and Lego blocks from a red Celtic goblet on the mantelpiece and we go out into the pitch black, Heidi bringing the bread without a single word about what we’re doing and why. I still have the unopened can of Strongbow from the morning and Joe pours that into the goblet. He and Heidi dip in the bread and skewer it on the branches of the pear tree. We sing two verses of the Wassail Song led by Joe, who gives it his own tune. I ask Joe to pour the libation under the tree.
‘You mean the cider?’ he says.
‘Yes, that’s it,’ I say.
‘I poured a coin as well by accident,’ he reports as the Strongbow soaks into the soil.
‘That’s OK.’
I feel a deep sense of satisfaction and completion, that I have somehow connected with the ancient spirit of place that sits beneath the pavements that we walk over daily and that stretch back into the Ice Age.
‘It’ll grow nice pears now,’ I tell him.
‘Just because it had cider and bread?’ Joe shouts out incredulously.
‘That’s all it takes, and the singing, because anything that may have been stopping it growing has been banished.’
‘Dad, you know that’s hippy talk,’ he says, before going back inside to his Lego.
I first became aware of Hornsey as a student living in a large house on the Harringay Ladder, the name given to a succession of streets strung between the upright struts of Green Lanes and Wightman Road, with the New River dangling through the middle like a stray length of watery rope. It was a time when we were collectively trying to get our heads round the idea of postmodernism and there was much debate in the household about exactly what it meant aside from EVERYTHING and NOTHING at the same time.
Then one Friday night we were sat watching Sean’s Show on Channel 4. The set-up was the traditional scene of a studio-based sitcom with the principal character, the eponymous Sean Hughes, in the living room of his flat. Sean broke off from his monologue, made a reference to the script, then walked across the studio set, past the balsawood scenery of the exterior of his lounge, said hello to the cameraman and entered the clearly visible ‘set’ for the next scene taking place in the corner shop. The penny dropped – that would do for us as an explanation of postmodernism.
But what left a more enduring impression after this deconstructed conceit wore off were the posters for the Hornsey Journal that decorated the ‘exterior’ sets. It added to the allure of the show for our raggle-taggle polytechnic mob that Sean’s world was not located in fashionable Notting Hill or Camden Town but in Hornsey, a mystical land that happened to lie just the other side of the railway tracks at the bottom of our garden.
It was during these years that I really discovered my love of suburban exploration. I had a light timetable in my final term and used this time to go on long schleps around the streets of Hornsey, up through Crouch End to Muswell Hill and Alexandra Palace, then back down to Wood Green Shopping City. This realm beyond the reach of the tube became a dreaming space for me. As Bruce Chatwin had yearned for Patagonia, the deep furrows of Victorian houses laid out on the slopes of the northern heights seemed to be holding back precious secrets.
I’d stretched my horizons – west to Hounslow Heath, south-east to Crayford Ness, across the Norwood Ridge, up to Uxendon and Horsenden Hills. Coming home to the Lea Valley brought up the desire to return to further old ground. For a few years I had lived just off Penton Street at the Angel and walked to work every day to and from the South Bank. In those four years I walked everywhere from that high ground that rises up from the valley of the Fleet, barely ever moving by any form of mechanized transport.
Thoughts, feelings and associations become engraved into paving slabs and brickwork through the process of repeatedly tramping the same route again and again. There were fragments of unfinished research from the daily foot commutes that I wanted to attempt to connect, ambulatory thoughts and mobile-phone photos posted to my blog. I look back on these posts in a similar way to how I flick through my travel journals. One question I’d toyed with was what traces were left behind by the lost pleasure gardens of Finsbury and Islington that grew up around natural springs? Long before Islington became shorthand for a certain type of designer faux leftie and the birthplace of New Labour, it was famed as a verdant land of hills and magical pleasure gardens on the city’s outer limits before travellers entered the dark and dangerous Middlesex Forest.
There was also the romantic mythology attached to Penton Mound, legends of Merlin and London’s earliest foundation. And Hornsey had gained a new kudos as the setting of the greatest zombie comedy ever made in an area already drenched with stories of the undead. It began to feel like one of William Morris’s Icelandic sagas. It was time to re-explore this once familiar landscape – to crack open some of its secrets that I had only previously skimmed across – and gather up some of the memories I’d deposited on those daily walks.
The departure point for this epic was over wet pavements and on the Underground to Chancery Lane, where a vicious wind whipped through the tunnels. A mile-long subterranean city lies beneath the platforms in a Second World War deep-level air-raid shelter. After the war it became a top-security telephone exchange that carried the ‘hot-line’ linking the leaders of the USS
R and the US. The staff entered this secret world via a nondescript door on High Holborn.
The escalator up to the street is decorated not with adverts for West End shows and David Beckham pants but for diamond merchants in Hatton Garden. It was a decidedly unromantic work-a-day Wednesday scene as bunches of suited men beat fast footsteps along High Holborn – you can see why nobody suspected the secret life contained beneath the pavement. There’s an easy escape from this mercantile city that doesn’t involve descending down a deep shaft; it’s a left turning through a barrier by the beadle’s watch house and into a sequestered street that for centuries was part of Cambridgeshire.
Ely Place is one of London’s curious anachronisms. The mighty City of London has no authority over this terrace of Georgian buildings – technically speaking even the police need permission to enter. It’s a peculiar mini city state, a micro-Vatican. It was the London home of the bishops of Ely, who built their palace here after falling out with the Knights Templar. Shakespeare used it as the setting in Richard II where John of Gaunt makes the famous scepter’d isle speech:
This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise ...
This other London that set its own rates and where the beadle would call out ‘the hour and the weather like the old watch’, the man in the top hat was the source of law and order. Aside from the beadle in his brick cabin by the gate there are only two other people about – a man sauntering back to his office with a take-away coffee and a woman languidly sucking on a fag.
A dark passageway leads into Ely Court where Elizabeth I danced with one of her ‘favourites’, Sir Christopher Hatton, around the cherry tree at the door of the Old Mitre pub. They may have been jiving in celebration of his acquisition of the bishop’s garden, which Hatton gained through coercion with Queen Bess’s help. The Ingolsby Legends suggest that his wife, Lady Hatton, engaged in sorcery, summoning the help of hobgoblins and sprites to ‘inwiggle’ the queen and obtain the land. Hatton built his own mansion in the grounds and today Hatton Garden is one of the world’s most famous diamond districts.
A doorway in the wall blocking off the end of the street leads through to yet another world, away from Cambridgeshire and beadles into the rough cobblestone courtyard of Bleeding Heart Yard. This is where the Ingolsby Legends tells us Sir Christopher’s dancing took a more sinister turn when Lady Hatton engaged with the devil ‘in terrible circumgyration’. The next morning she had completely disappeared but a still-bleeding heart was found by the water pump in this yard. Her ghost was said to be seen by the pump, working the handle to no avail.
Dickens recounts a different version of the legend in his novel Little Dorrit. He writes of
the legend of a young lady of former times closely imprisoned in her chamber by a cruel father for remaining true to her own true love, and refusing to marry the suitor he chose for her. The legend related how that the young lady used to be seen up at her window behind the bars, murmuring a love-lorn song of which the burden was, ‘Bleeding Heart, Bleeding Heart, bleeding away,’ until she died.
The wind rattles the metal sign of the Bleeding Heart Restaurant. A chef empties the bins. I check to see if they have heart on the menu but it looks as if it’s out of season.
Emerging from Bleeding Heart Yard on to Greville Street the sun starts to crack through the grey clouds. A pretty redhead checks her hair in the window of a jeweller’s as she walks along the street that descends into the River Fleet running beneath Farringdon Road. The buildings obscure the steepness of this western bank of the ‘Holeborne Vale’. Clear them away in your mind and to the east you look down upon the twin hills of the old City of London divided by the Walbrook. Walter Besant wrote in 1893 of the prosperous town that the Britons built on the western hill that pre-dates the Roman city, ‘a high earthwork … with a stockade’. Stretching from Farringdon Road to Walbrook it sat atop Ludgate Hill, now dominated by St Paul’s Cathedral. Ludgate Hill is supposedly named after the British King Lud, credited by the 12th-century historian Geoffrey of Monmouth with building the first walls of this early London. On the western banks of the Walbrook the Romans later built their Temple of Mithras, where ‘the Pompeii of the North’ has recently been discovered. The slopes that I make my way along towards Leather Lane would have been open fields and fenland fringing the great forest of Middlesex.
There’s a strong breeze from the east that would have brought a terrible stink from the open sewer that the ‘Fleet Ditch’ became before it was filled in. The International Precious Metal Co. bullion dealers occupy a shabby-looking building above a café. The entrance to Elite Jewellery is similarly inauspicious. This is the business end of the trade away from the swanky stores in Hatton Garden with their burly, black-suited security guards prowling the pavements.
The traders in Leather Lane street market ply their trade on a decidedly different scale. Hollywood studio fodder on DVD knocked out for £2 a pop, plastic BB guns, rails of sweatshirts and onesies with the word ‘Geek’ emblazoned across the chest. They look like a taunt aimed at the Department of Coffee and Social Affairs on the other pavement. There are stalls of socks and pants, fruit and veg, long lunchtime queues at the Mexican and Mediterranean food stalls, and plenty of empty pitches.
Leather Lane street market
When H. V. Morton visited one lunch hour in 1926 he reported a more vibrant scene and no onesies. A jazz band appeared, a man dressed as a chef demonstrated handy kitchen implements. The stalls stretched the length of Leather Lane on both sides ‘from which the connoisseur of old bed knobs, rusty keys, or stray lengths of iron piping can recognize many rare specimens’. You could witness ‘the decapitation of live eels and the head refuses to die’. It was so crowded that ‘a two-horse dray delivering acid in big glass bottles is hopelessly marooned.’
The brisk trade in Leather Lane today is not among the jumbo knickers and socks for a pound but the effortlessly cool new coffee bars and healthy eateries offering thimbles of rare Amazonian cloud forest dew and crushed berries from the Tree of Knowledge. The smell of ground Guatemalan coffee beans is so intoxicating that I wander into Prufrock’s where your espresso is made by an official world champion barista and the staff are as likely to have an MA in fine art or an album playing on Xfm as a food hygiene certificate. There are also a lot of men with beards so I feel oddly at home, but sadly can’t get a table.
I loiter in the hope that my membership of the ‘fellowship of bearded men’ will get me moved up the queue. Admittedly, my own beard is not a fashion statement but a facial manifesto on laziness – put simply, I can’t be bothered to shave. So when I see legions of otherwise stylish young men with great, bushy, Taliban beehive beards I can’t help wondering if it’s an accidental fad that grew from one particularly lazy but cool bloke who just happened to be the trendsetter amongst his group of impressionable friends. They were probably having a coffee here at Prufrock’s and got photographed by Vice magazine and before you can say ‘Nathan Barley’ fashionable males all over the urban centres of the western world are sporting these hairy conical growths on their chins.
It didn’t work. I didn’t get a table, so moved on. The horologist just around the corner in Portpool Lane seems as if it could be a vestige of H. V. Morton’s London. A fantastic collection of old watch parts and the insides of precision instruments are displayed in glass cases. Inside, the man offers me a book of foot-baller’s haircuts for £3.50. A few of them have beards but the fashion in those days was more for Burt Reynolds moustaches, so I decide to leave it.
This was once an area of specialist trades – organ grinders, barometer makers, glass craftsmen – knotted together in the nest of streets that formed London’s ‘Little Italy’ in the 19th century. A notorious rookery once existed in these dark, narrow streets between Gray’s Inn Road and the Fleet. It was a lawless land that lay outside the jurisdiction of the City and the Crown, one of the
‘liberties of Holborn’ where criminals could seek sanctuary for forty days. Fagin’s den in Oliver Twist was located in Saffron Hill, which runs parallel to Leather Lane. Portpool Lane was at the end of a murky waterway known as the ‘Kings Ditch’. The high walls of the Bourne Estate restrict the sunlight and squeeze the lane, casting a Victorian gloom. Through the gated arch is Baldwin’s Gardens, one of the dodgiest parts of the old ghetto.
Today, Saffron Hill is a development opportunity: loft apartments offering a zippy urban lifestyle, offices for design and web companies. Aside from two joggers in fluorescent vests and a delivery man there is no one around. No plank walks strung between the upper floors of the tenements making this a malefactor’s safe haven, a labyrinth of crime, a no-go area, bandit country, where barely a word of English was spoken. The only criminal thing round here now is the £2.9 million for a two-bed flat in the Ziggurat Building.
Going by a map in the Camden History Review showing the houses occupied by Italians in 1871, the heart of Little Italy lay on the other side of Clerkenwell Road in the tight cluster of streets that fall away behind the Italian Church of San Pietro. The Vespa showroom and deli on Clerkenwell Road extend the Italian presence in the area beyond the church, which was established in 1863 by a missionary who came to London with the blessing of the pope to build a Catholic church for the Italian diaspora settled around the ‘teeming and fetid alleys of Saffron Hill’. It was built as a bridgehead to bring England back into the Catholic fold after centuries of persecution. Building a Catholic church in mid-Victorian London was a radical act and correspondence from the pope in Rome to his London missionaries urged caution and discretion.