by John Rogers
Although the Italian community spread out through London – further into Islington along the Caledonian Road, around Highbury Fields and beyond to Hertfordshire – St Peter’s remains at its heart. The interior of the church is wrapped in scaffolding but I venture inside anyhow. When I lived in Modena our explorations of the neighbouring towns always began in the duomo. Departing the station it was my practice to drift, follow scents and moods, traverse the narrow streets peering into gated palazzo courtyards. No matter how many twists and turns you took, how random the route, we always ended up at the doors of the duomo. I never remembered to take my hat off when entering until I was rebuked by a warden, ‘Signore, cappelo, cappelo, per favore.’
Thankfully, the scaffolding in San Pietro doesn’t obscure the frescos depicting St Peter and St Paul by the Piedmontese artists Gauthier and Arnaud. As I crane my neck to look at the painted saints ascending to heaven I realize I’ve yet again failed to remove my hat. I quickly whip it off just in case any of the scaffolders happen to be particularly pious. The clanging of metal brackets and joists being lobbed from high up echo round the cupola. They probably don’t realize there’s anyone down below; I start to fear for my life, divine retribution for my atheistic woolly hat-wearing in a place of solemn worship. I make my escape along Clerkenwell Road and into Eyre Street Hill.
The map of Little Italy shows a dense pattern of icons representing the houses of ‘street musicians, figure makers, ice makers’ in these streets that sharply decline from Clerkenwell Road. At night around Herbal Hill, Back Hill, Vine Hill and Eyre Street Hill some of the former ambience escapes from the brickwork. No longer a squalid slum but a media ghetto, something dank still clings to the fabric of the buildings.
Moving under the viaduct beneath Rosebery Avenue you enter into Black Mary’s Hole, a basin formed by the course of the Fleet and Mount Pleasant. On chill winter evenings you can smell a muddy odour that manages to work its way up through layers of concrete and paving stones. There’s an account by Chesca Potter of a psychic visiting Black Mary’s Hole and reporting that ‘she felt that it was a sacrificial pit to a goddess.’
I bought a bumper book of mysteries in a pound shop in High Wycombe one summer holiday and read about the seemingly plausible idea that ghosts are nothing more than tape recordings. A Cambridge don, T. C. Lethbridge, made the connection between ghost sightings and water – often underground streams that people didn’t realize were there. Tragic events, like death, would make people emit strong discharges of electrical energy that would be recorded in the water, then ‘replayed’ like a video cassette under the right conditions. Apparently this is why ghosts are always in black and white – LCD colour technology won’t run on water.
I don’t believe in ghosts but I have great faith in VHS. Black Mary’s Hole is like a great big video-cassette recorder. Encoded in the underground watercourse could be the murder of John Etheridge that took place here in 1766. Etheridge was driving cattle through the area and one of his bullocks strayed into a field belonging to a William Floyd. Thomas Plymmer, an employee of Floyd, came out of a smith’s shop, struck Etheridge once above the nose, thinking he had dodged paying at the turnpike, whereupon Etheridge collapsed and died.
Potter also speculates that Black Mary’s Hole could have been a place of worship of the Isis cult via the Black Madonna. The more likely explanation of the name was recounted by William Thornbury in his Old and New London (1878), citing an earlier account of a black lady called Mary who sold the waters that came from the spring. The Fleet was known as a ‘river of wells’ before it became what Thornbury described as a ‘sluggish and plague-breeding sewer’. Pentonville and Islington became famous for the pleasure gardens that grew up around its springs. Bagnigge Wells on the higher ground where King’s Cross Road runs gained fame as the house of Nell Gwynn, actress, mistress of Charles II and Restoration ‘It Girl’. If there had been paparazzi in the 1660s they would have been parked up on the pavements outside.
Black Mary’s Hole—there stands a dome superb,
Hight Bagnigge; where from our forefathers hid,
Long have two springs in dull stagnation slept ...
wrote the Grub Street hack William Woty in Shrubs of Parnassus published in 1760. These lines were written some 56 years before Samuel Taylor Coleridge published his famous opium-inspired verse:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran ...
Coleridge’s description of the Mongolian capital with its springs and fertile pastures and a sacred river running between hills echoes the spring-fed grazing uplands of Islington on the slopes of the River Fleet. Woty recorded a ‘dome superb’ on the pleasure garden where Coleridge, off his nut on drugs, saw a ‘stately pleasure dome’ not where the filthy Fleet slithered through Mount Pleasant but ‘Where Alph, the sacred river, ran’.
On this cold, bright, late-winter lunchtime people scurry through Black Mary’s Hole, over the submerged river, to grab a spot at one of the 1950s formica tables at Andrew’s on Gray’s Inn Road, or up along Phoenix Place to Muratori, a favourite with the postal workers at Mount Pleasant Sorting Office. My great aunts Edie and Ethel worked at Mount Pleasant when they returned from South Africa in the 1920s. It has always fascinated me, this enormous building labouring away twenty-four hours a day processing the mail. I used to pass the polyglot queue of uniformed postal workers that stretched down Rosebery Avenue at the end of a shift, waiting for the No. 38 bus. It seemed like a world within a world. It’s one of the great centres of London knowledge – every address in the city has a connection linking it to this building. Imagine the local knowledge contained in the combined brains of all those posties. Collectively they form a major part of the hive mind of the city itself. Maybe that’s why it was targeted with a devastating incendiary bomb in 1943 that destroyed the parcel building, leaving a bombsite that is now used as a rough, open car park.
Black Mary’s Hole
Climbing over Mount Pleasant I duck down a passage leading off Exmouth Market into Spa Green Fields. In the 1800s this was the site of great political gatherings, including a mass meeting in 1816 by followers of the radical Thomas Spence. Spence advocated that all land should be publicly owned by autonomous ‘democratic parishes’ and called for the abolition of the aristocracy. Spa Fields today is largely a piece of public art where workers chat and chew sandwiches rather than plot the overthrow of the established order, but I suppose you can’t be completely sure unless you start eavesdropping on every bench. Lenin lived in exile not far away in Holford Square planning the Russian Revolution – perhaps there was something in the water here. Islington Council have taken precautions against further insurrection by screwing ‘No Dogs’ signs into the grass verges. The ruling class can sleep safely in their beds.
Guy Mannes-Abbott talks about the area being part of a ‘utopian enclosure’ formed by the fortifications erected by the New Model Army of Oliver Cromwell during the English Civil War. There was a defensive line across Finsbury that included Black Mary’s Hole and Waterford Fort, on the site where the Spa Green Estate stands in defence of another ideal – the more practical utopianism of Finsbury Borough Council. Whereas other modernist housing projects are used as icons of urban decay, Berthold Lubetkin’s Spa Green Estate was built to specifications that the Clerkenwell loft builders of today could scarcely match in their million-pound condos.
Finsbury Town Hall now moves to the rhythm of a dance academy after being saved from a Liberal Democrat plan to commit the historical travesty of converting it into luxury apartments. The McDonald’s in Red Square was bad enough – yuppifying the home of municipal socialism would be have been the final insult. I head across Rosebery Avenue to the former ducking ponds in Wilmington Square and take a rest in the bandstand.
Somewhere around here there was the entrance to a cave deep in the heart of this hill that ascends up to Pentonville Road. According to one of the most begu
iling London books ever written, Prehistoric London: Its Mounds and Circles by E. O. Gordon (1914), this was not just any old cave but Merlin’s cave. Whether this is the surly, spotty teenage Merlin of the BBC series or the bearded, old, Ian McKellen/Gandalf-lookalike wizard of legend, it’s too incredible a claim to be dismissed by a lack of serious historical evidence to back it up. Did Romulus and Remus really build Rome? Was Athens built by a half-man, half-snake creature? Was the Cavern Club actually crap? None of this matters to these cities.
E. O. Gordon’s London is a city dominated by four principal ‘sacred mounds’: Tothill at Westminster, Bryn Gwyn or the White Mound (which is now the Tower of London), the Llandin at Parliament Hill and Penton Mound at the top of Pentonville Road (now the New River Head Upper Reservoir). Gordon believed that the Penton, which means ‘head of the sacred mound’, was the ‘probable’ site of a Druidic College. Despite warning of the ‘mean streets’ that are traversed on the approach to the hill she recommends that ‘it is well worth a pilgrimage if only to appreciate the magnificent site of the “Holy Hill”.’ She was writing at a time when the now desirable Georgian squares laid out across the Lloyd Baker estate on the slopes leading up from King’s Cross Road were considered one of London’s more seedy suburbs. The idea that this is one of the most significant sacred sites in London, if not Britain, still seems fanciful on a cold and cloudy winter afternoon.
The top of Amwell Street, on the crest of the mound, still has a grubby look to it. In my experience, Filthy McNasty’s pub is aptly named. But in the four years of walking across here at night nearly every day, the only time it seemed even remotely mean was when the youngest member of a mob of youths flashed his Stanley knife in front of my face. When I stopped to tell him he should go home to bed his hooded mates quickly intervened, told him off and issued me with a profuse apology for his rudeness and explained he was visiting from out of town. One night at this spot I passed Boris Johnson, when he was just an opposition MP, pushing his bike and yelling into his mobile phone, ‘So much for the intellectual powerhouse of the Labour backbenches.’ The sweaty crowd spilling out of Filthy McNasty’s gave him worried looks as if he were some kind of nutter.
Penton Mound
I have performed my own pilgrimage twice on the summer solstice, walking an upside-down number 7 from Westminster across to Waterloo, along Druid Street to Bermondsey over Tower Bridge, up to the Penton and then on to Parliament Hill. Describing a walk as ‘a ritual perambulation of the prehistoric mounds of London’ is a good way of getting friends to join you on an all-day London ramble – it sounds more dramatic than ‘fancy a stroll?’
Whereas you can barely take three strides on Chaucer’s path to Canterbury without tripping over a wandering pilgrim there doesn’t appear to be any fellow holy travellers on this religious trail. That might have been a different story if the Penton had retained the stone circle that Gordon believes ‘crowned’ the summit. Rather than take the inconvenient trip to Stonehenge tourists would merely have to hop on a bus to the Angel.
Going further, she speculates that this megalithic monument, aligned with the May sunrise, was probably ‘the principal observatory of Caer Troia’, the ‘New Troy’ established by ‘Brutus’ when he arrived in Britain following the Trojan Wars. Bearing in mind that Gordon was writing not long after the existence of Troy as a real place beyond the Greek myths had only just been established, she could legitimately have held out hope that the same would happen to the myths of the Welsh triads that she drew from. Gordon records that the underground passageway leading from the cellars of the Merlin’s Cave Tavern to the cave deep within Penton Mound had only just been bricked up. It did exist. There have been ‘prehistoric’ artefacts excavated around the New River Head and Sadler’s Wells – pointing to the presence of some kind of camp or settlement based around the springs.
The New River Upper Head was also the site of ‘a large fort’ in Vertue’s map of Cromwell’s civil war defences of London – the bulwark of the defence of Guy Mannes-Abbott’s ‘utopian enclosure’. This patch of land from Pentonville Road down to Clerkenwell Road that I have just spent two hours forensically criss-crossing, gathering up the deposited memories of years of walking, has been a continuous draw to visionaries, radicals, pleasure-seekers and poets. Why not add a wizard to the list?
I’m prepared to give reason and rationality a day off and take Elizabeth Gordon’s glorious book as gospel. Every city needs its myths and legends, and the ‘sacred mounds’ theory deserves its place within London’s mythology. I’d have it taught in schools. Moreover, the Penton is capped with a large, grassy mound protected by iron railings. You just have to by-pass the fact that it is a covered reservoir at the end of a four hundred-year-old, twenty-eight-mile-long aqueduct built to bring fresh drinking water into London from Hertfordshire – which is noteworthy in its own right, but nowhere nearly as romantic.
‘Many a solar and lunar festival has probably been celebrated upon the summit of the Penton, in which British kings have played their part,’ Gordon records. After this a procession of ‘Bards and trumpeters’, Druids and ‘Ministers of the Sanctuary’ made their way along Maiden Lane (now York Road) to the Llandin at Parliament Hill. My pilgrimage takes me in a slightly different direction north, but first of all to Chapel Market in the hunt for a quick lunch.
On the other side of Pentonville Road a pleasure garden still stands. The traffic thundering on the east–west route makes it hard to see how this would have been an area where, as Charles Harper wrote, ‘the sweet meadows afforded country rambles.’ The Belvedere Tavern was known for its games of rackets and ‘men with learned horses, musical glasses, and sham philosophical performances, gave evening entertainments’. It’s now called the Lexington and offers ‘Live music, rare bourbons, American beers, Home Cooked food, Sexy Bartenders’. People are a lot more easily pleased these days than they were in the 18th century.
The Belvedere Tavern, also previously known as Busby’s Folly, stands on the corner of Penton Street, the first part of the Pentonville development of the early 1800s by Henry Penton. Gordon might argue that his name drew him to Penton Mound but killjoys will tell you that Pentonville was named after him. Whatever Penton’s vision for his ‘new residential suburb’ built on the fields of white saxifrage celebrated not only for their springs but for the dairy herds that grazed here, the Pentonville that grew up around this first row of houses became notorious as a grimy, insalubrious district. Harper describes it as covering ‘from the congested squalid commercialities of King’s Cross to the less congested, but still squalid district of the “Angel”, Islington’. To me this was home when I returned from a bout of travelling to finally plant roots and start a family. The sweeping westward views that drew city clerks on their days off are still there in the breaks between the buildings. Hordes of pleasure-seekers continue to make their way to ‘Merry Islington’ for the bars and restaurants. Early-morning pram walks used to involve slaloming round unconscious revellers and puddles of vomit.
I’d been hoping to pick up a new fold-out cabbies’ map of London that I’d bought in the Knowledge Point opposite the Public Carriage Office, but it’s no longer there. This intimidating grey building is where black-cab drivers come to be tested on the Knowledge – a comprehensive mental map of the roads of London that every cabbie must master. Learning the Knowledge sounds like an initiation rite for entry into a high-powered sect – the London Taxi Drivers. Lawyers practise law, doctors study medicine, freemasons observe ‘the craft’, but cabbies master the Knowledge. Imagine if you could fuse the hive mind of the Mount Pleasant Sorting Office with the Knowledge of the Public Carriage Office – it would form a London Mega-Brain, a super-consciousness of postcodes, rat-runs, open-spaces and one-way systems. We could ask it the answer to the question, ‘Does London Exist?’ The answer could well come out as ‘Gants Hill’, leaving us all none the wiser.
I move on quickly into Chapel Market where I can sate the desire for Manze’s
pie and mash that had been stirred in Walthamstow. I order a small pie and, with a dollop of mash smeared around one side of the plate and swimming in parsley liquor, it is placed on the marble counter top. The tea comes in a glass mug with the spoon standing upright. I settle on a wooden bench in one of the booths under the glow of a line of petal-shaped lights reflecting in the mirrors. It is a gleaming, working-class food palace. The white-tiled walls are broken up with brown borders containing a band of decorated green tiles embossed with a chain of ribboned flowers.
It’s the kind of detail that would have caught the attention of Geoffrey Fletcher, author of books and pamphlets on overlooked London, his most famous being The London Nobody Knows. The film version surreally features James Mason in the sunset of his Hollywood stardom in 1969 wandering around abandoned theatres, street markets and an ‘egg-breaking plant’ in Southwark, wearily pointing out oddities and eccentricities. There is a sequence shot in Manze’s – live eels are sliced into chunks, toothless oldies and mucky-faced toddlers stir bowls of green liquor and fork blobs of mash into their gobs to a weird early-electronic Star Trek-sounding music track. It makes eating pie and mash look like a trip to the Twilight Zone.
The decorative tiles in Manze’s Pie and Mash shop
The market has resisted the endemic gentrification of Islington. There’s something resolutely proletarian about the Chapel even though they’ve opened a Waitrose on the site of Woolworths. The Chapel is all about designer T-shirts for a fiver. Pot-boiler romances third-hand by the box. Pot-smoking paraphernalia (I regret not buying the Bin Laden spliff-holder even though I’ve never smoked). The Arsenal merchandize stall. And, of course, fruit and veg and fresh fish – the backbone of the market. The attempted farmers’ market only lasted a couple of weeks before they realized the taste for over-priced unicorn cheese and loaves of artisan breads costing a quarter of a dole cheque didn’t stretch this far from Barnsbury. When you’re on a tight budget, to pay triple price for a pound of broad beans they’d have to be magic of the Jack variety, rather than organic à la Jamie. The popular image of Islington as the fiefdom of self-satisfied ‘fauxhemians’ smugly reading the Guardian in a hot tub of caffè latte, whilst true of a percentage of the local demographic, is by no means a fair representation, as the farmers’ market found out.