This Other London

by John Rogers

  Through the quiet streets of Stroud Green, my feet starting to get sore, the sun descending behind the western hills of earlier walks. The temperature drops a degree or two. I’m grateful for the new scarf my mother-in-law recently sent from Italy for my birthday.

  I turn into another Mount Pleasant, once again in close proximity to a covered reservoir. There are no grand mythologies here that I’m aware of, although the pinched-nose Victorian villas lean back from the steep ascent of the pavement in an unnerving manner. Eyes are naturally drawn up to attic windows half expecting to catch a glimpse of a ghostly spectre. Was this the northern suburb Machen was heading to on his poltergeist hunt?

  The Parkland Walk built on the tracks of the railway line to Alexandra Palace passes overhead on a viaduct. Prince of horror Stephen King was inspired to write a short story, ‘Crouch End’, after taking a walk along there.

  Seams of occult history run through these dark hills and valleys. It was the home of revered 15th-century astrologist and necromancer Roger Bolingbroke, arrested for using his powers of communicating with the dead in a plot against Henry VI.

  Somewhere in these streets further north on Devil’s Lane was where the Highgate Vampire was said to reside. The British Psychic and Occult Society conducted vigils and investigations into claims that a ‘black apparition’ or ‘King Vampire’ was at work in the area of Highgate Cemetery on a western spur of the northern heights. For a brief period in 1970 London was gripped in a vampire frenzy that led large mobs of people to converge on the cemetery tooled up with stakes, crucifixes and holy water. This wasn’t a pale, sexy, Twilight Hollywood vampire but a proper red-eyed, demonic, blood-sucking, fox-mutilating one in the Count Dracula tradition. A rivalry sparked off between the two principal vampire slayers, Sean Manchester and David Farrant, which from a distance seems to have taken on an air of pantomime about it. Manchester claims to have finally ‘staked’ the vampire’s corpse in a Hornsey back garden in 1973. Now that vampires are all the rage surely it can’t be long till the Highgate Vampire lurches out of his coffin again, and gets an agent and a publicist.

  I arrive at the junction of Weston Park and Nelson Road in the last ten minutes of twilight, just enough time to carry out the final planned act of this walk. I try not to look as if I’m loitering outside the house that I’m certain was used as the exterior location for Shaun’s house in Shaun of the Dead. I watch the scene I’m about to re-enact on a YouTube clip on my phone. The same scene is repeated twice in a smooth single tracking shot.

  The first time Shaun, played by Simon Pegg, leaves the house on his way to work, a kid is playing football in the street outside (Nelson Road). He crosses Nelson Road and a homeless man with a dog asks him for change. Crossing Weston Park Shaun is nearly hit by a car, a man on the opposite kerb is washing his car. Shaun trips on the kerb, or it could be the bucket. A lady leaves the house next to the shop. A jogger runs past, an old man is sweeping the street. The camera tracks Shaun through the open door of the corner shop, he glances at the biscuits but goes straight to the fridge, picks up a can of Diet Coke, puts it back in favour of a can of proper Coke. There are newspapers on the counter, including a copy of the Hornsey Journal. Nelson the shopkeeper says to Shaun, ‘No beer today? ‘No, it’s a bit early for me,’ Shaun replies.

  The next time Shaun goes to the shop, the morning after a long session in the Winchester Arms with his slacker sidekick Ed, the homeless man is wandering around in the middle of Nelson Road, a shopping trolley is abandoned on the pavement where Shaun was nearly run over, a bollard has been knocked on its side, the windscreen of the car is smashed, a man sprints in panic down the street where there was a jogger, bags of rubbish are spilled over the pavement by the street cleaner’s cart. Shaun’s glance at the biscuits means he doesn’t notice the bloody hand-prints on the fridge door, he picks up the can of Coke but this time puts it back in favour of Diet (he has a note to himself to sort his life out), he nearly slips over on what we can safely assume is blood. He grabs Ed a Cornetto from the freezer by the counter, there are no newspapers. He leaves the change on the counter and ambles back to his house in Nelson Road oblivious to the zombies roaming the streets of Hornsey. After verifying these details standing outside the house in Nelson Road there is just enough light for me to film myself retracing Shaun’s footsteps with my pocket camera.

  There’s no homeless person in Nelson Road. There are no people at all. No car outside the house next to the shops that emit a homely orange glow. No jogger, no street cleaner, no bags of rubbish or passing cars, not even a single zombie outside the shop. The aisle to the fridge is exactly as it is in the film down to the tempting biscuits stacked on the shelves. The fridge is the same, minus the bloody hand-prints. I confess that I paused and looked for a can of Stella for medicinal purposes but couldn’t see one. ‘No beer today’ for me either. There’s also no Diet Coke, only bottles of Coke, no cans.

  As I approached the counter I quickly glanced at the freezer but suddenly felt self-conscious. It was far too cold for a Cornetto. But the shopkeeper had seen me and had a big smile across his face. ‘Don’t suppose you have any Cornettos?’ I asked. He let out a big laugh. He gets a fairly regular stream of Shaun tourists, ‘even from the US’. He opens the freezer for me and I get the last ‘Classic’ Cornetto, just like Shaun. I test his tolerance for Shaun trivia: ‘No papers, Nelson’ – I repeat the line from the film. He looks a bit perplexed. ‘It’s in the film but also it’s a reference to Sean’s Show, the influential early-90s sitcom on Channel 4.’ That baffles him even more. There’s an awkward silence till he says, ‘Simon Pegg even came back here once,’ and he laughs again. This Hornsey shopkeeper is one of the great unsung heroes of the British tourist industry.

  Standing outside the shop trying to open a bottle of Coke and unwrap a Cornetto wearing gloves I feel a deep sense of satisfaction. The timing of my jerky tracking shot is only a couple of seconds longer than Shaun’s – and it’s a fairly good shot-for-shot match; the kids will be suitably impressed.

  Moving through the dark streets towards the Broadway you notice that there’s something curious about Crouch End. Hippies were drawn here in the 1960s by the tales that it was a place where two ley lines crossed, marking it out as a location of great psychic energy. Bob Dylan famously came here to record at Dave Stewart’s studio and accidentally went for tea with the mother of another bloke called Dave. Trapped in the valley between Hornsey and Highgate it is out of time, a lost village accessible only by bus and the Gospel Oak line at the top of Crouch Hill. It’s the place Will Self used as the setting for his short story The North London Book of the Dead – Crouch End, the place where people go to live after they die. This area is continuously linked with tales of the undead.

  I keep an eye out for Sean Hughes. It’s entirely possible that Sean’s Show has continued running in real time in the parallel Crouch End universe. Anywhere else a clock tower represents a moment in history of civic pride, the way that the opening of Costa Coffee in Leytonstone was celebrated. In Crouch End the glowing clock face could be the mark point for the junction of the ley lines, lit up by the power of the earth grid.

  There’s that rarest of oddities on the Broadway – a record shop selling vinyl. I buy the Mission’s first EP, the cover illustrated with an esoteric symbol. A sign in the window invites you to take purchased records over the road to the Harringay Arms where you can spin them on a turntable and claim a discounted pint. The Harringay Arms is a further throwback, a hush as I enter before the quiet chatter resumes, dart flights and stems for sale behind the bar. Looking around the room the drinkers could either be cast as ghosts, zombies or vampire hunters in the various gloomy tales of Crouch End. It would still be a brave man to break the muffled hubbub by spinning goth rock on the record deck. You could end up in a Wicker Man. I’m not prepared to take any risks at this stage of the day. I settle down in a corner with a pint of ale and start to plot the next expedition.

  When the Central L
ine goes down Leytonstone is stranded like an island hemmed in by forest and marshland. The scramble of commuters piling on to rail replacement bus services is like the Fall of Saigon. The fact that the engineering works are ‘scheduled’ makes it no less annoying. I’d ‘scheduled’ a walk in south-west London.

  Weeks of school runs had limited my excursions. There had been further forays across the parish border into Upper Walthamstow and the E17 Bohemian Grove. A wander to the southern tip of Leytonstone, where West Ham Cemetery sits behind the back gardens of Cann Hall Road and bare trees form a long ceremonial arch to the war memorial. But I hadn’t crossed the River Lea since the yomp up to Hornsey.

  The way had finally opened for adventures further afield. The One-Inch map on the box-room wall had a gaping void south of Hounslow and west of Tulse Hill – I had no chance of obtaining the Knowledge but I could at least have a go at adding a slither of the London Borough of Wandsworth to my evolving impression of the city.

  Tooting had been on my mind for a while. It crops up in three principal sources – Walter Bell’s Where London Sleeps, Maxwell’s The Fringe of London and, notably, in the 1970s sitcom Citizen Smith. But most intriguing of all, the name of Tooting is written across the face of Mars. Just west of Olympus Mons on Mars is a 27-km-diameter crater called Tooting, named by planetary scientist Peter Mouginis-Mark in honour of the place of his birth. He couldn’t just arbitrarily scribble Tooting on to the Martian map; the naming had to be approved by the International Astronomical Union. Surely there must have been a temptation to come up with something a bit more cosmic than Tooting when submitting an entry for The Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature. After all the crater sits in the region of Amazonis Planitia. However, Tooting was clearly cosmic enough for the International Astronomical Union. Mouginis-Mark’s website not only points out the scientific and geological characteristics of the Tooting crater, with graphics and images from the Martian surface, but also has some nice pictures of Tooting Bec tube station and the No. 155 bus on the Broadway.

  It took the Curiosity rover 253 days to reach Mars; I’d quite like to get to the Earth Tooting in slightly less time, even with the never-ending tinkering with the 150-year-old tube network. The quickest way was not by rocket but north-east to south-west on the Victoria Line from Blackhorse Road. The first stop south of the river is Vauxhall – that would be as good a place to start as any, my equivalent of Gale Crater where Curiosity touched down.

  I woke up to a blizzard – the week before Easter and spring feels as likely as the Second Coming. The boys invite me to join them building Lego figures for a zombie-survival scenario. It’s a tempting proposition but so is the sight of Battersea Power Station in a snow flurry.

  Breakfast is a crispy-bacon roll munched at Leyton Midland Road Station, biting through layers of greaseproof paper to reach the edible content. The cappuccino froth filled to the brim splatters on the platform as I remove the lid and promptly burn my tongue. The shelter acts more as a wind tunnel than providing protection from the elements. This had been my alternative commute to work, a scenic phantom ride above the rooftops of North London – Walthamstow Queens Road, Blackhorse Road, South Tottenham, Harringay Green Lanes, Upper Holloway, Crouch Hill to Gospel Oak – each stop an invitation to get off the train and explore. Today the departure point is Blackhorse Road to start the descent south – scuttling down the Victoria Line to Vauxhall.

  My use of the tube today could be recast as a clumsy tribute to Harry Beck, born in a street adjacent to Leyton Midland Road and just honoured with a Blue Plaque at the place of his birth. It’s Beck’s revolutionary ‘topological’ map, designed in 1933, that we still use to navigate our way around the London Underground. His great innovation was to separate the geographical reality of the network from the representational map, untangling the matted wad of lines and stations into a fluid diagram. An out-of-hours project that was initially greeted with scepticism eventually became the default model for metro maps around the world, from Moscow to New York and Tokyo. The Victoria Line, however, was added in 1960 without Beck’s knowledge, an act that apparently deeply saddened him. It was like someone working for the king of France daubing a moustache on the Mona Lisa without asking Leonardo da Vinci.

  Vauxhall is a good place to leave – the Vauxhall Cross interchange spits you out of its whirlygig of underground tunnels to be battered by traffic noise and riverine winds. According to Time Out it’s become ‘London’s Gay Village’, home to the infamous Vauxhall Tavern. There are even attempts to rebrand it ‘Voho’.

  It’s commemorated in the title of one of Morrissey’s finest albums, Vauxhall and I – a likely merging of film references – Withnail, and the Free Cinema Movement documentary We Are the Lambeth Boys, shot nearby at Alford House Boys Club in 1959. The track ‘Spring-Heeled Jim’ plays out with snatches of audio from the film.

  The album was released in 1994, the same year as Patrick Keiller’s seminal film, London. The unseen enigmatic central character, Robinson, lives in a council flat in Vauxhall, ‘in the way that people were said to live in the cities of the Soviet Union’. Keiller’s film is shot over the course of 1992 against the backdrop of IRA bombings, an improbable Conservative Party general election victory and the economic meltdown of Black Wednesday. This is the atmosphere in which Robinson undertakes a series of journeys on foot from Vauxhall researching an academic project – ‘The problem of London’.

  The film somehow manages to be elegiac whilst portraying a city in a downward slump, head in hands gazing into a pint of flat beer. It was the year I left polytechnic and was living on the dole in a squat in Hackney – a year that my love for London became fully consummated, on a second-hand mattress on the bare concrete floor. We lived on a dish called ‘Tuna Surprise’ – the surprise being that it often didn’t have any tuna in it. Evenings were spent making our own version of Monopoly for the new London we saw around us – Squatopoly was a minor hit on the Frampton Park Estate. The Bishopsgate bomb that Keiller shows in the film knocked me out of bed one morning and shook all our windows, the BOOM bouncing between the estate blocks. The Tesco on Homerton High Street only sold ‘Value’ own-brand goods that had those plain blue and white striped labels – nothing else, aisles and aisles of blue and white labels. It was like shopping in the Eastern Bloc. Hackney Council were giving away flats in lotteries. You could buy a maisonette in Victoria Park for under thirty grand – where today you’d have to add an extra nought on the end to even open the bidding. London is a 16mm postcard from that strange past.

  Robinson’s expeditions from Vauxhall take him to the haunts of Romantic poets and European exiles. The narrator tells us how he’s adopted a local park for experiments in ‘psychic landscaping, drifting and free association’. I perform my own free association by wandering into the St George Wharf development past the signs pointing pedestrians away from the construction site of the St George Tower.

  When completed, this 150-metre-tall steel and glass Pringles tube will be London’s highest solely residential skyscraper. Where once tower blocks were seen as engines of social decay, One St George Wharf is touted as a ‘catalyst to regeneration in the surrounding neighbourhood’. After hearing for years that high-rise living is the perfect recipe for dysfunction and mental illness, it’s now being sold as the ‘epitome of luxury London living’. That should please Nick in his Childs Hill council block.

  Lifts bearing workers clank up and down an exterior shaft. A crane sits atop, obscured by mist. At 8 a.m. on 16 January 2013 a helicopter clipped the top of the crane, sending it spiralling into the street below and setting Wandsworth Road ablaze. News reports talked of ‘flaming debris’ flying through the air. It’s a miracle that the accident only claimed two lives, the pilot and a pedestrian on his way to work. This wasn’t the kind of PR that the estate agents were after.

  Sitting next to the MI6 building, St George Wharf is like a collision of Brave New World and 1984, a sedated future dystopia under the watchful gaze of Big Br
other. Attempts to walk directly between the buildings to the riverbank are continually thwarted by locked gates and ‘Private’ signs – how can you privatize a reclaimed mudbank? Strictly speaking, this land belongs to Old Father Thames.

  St George Wharf portico

  Joggers shrink-wrapped in lycra pound through the de Chirico porticos, then do laps of the miniature privet mazes till they get giddy and fall over. Gilles Ivain, aka Ivan Chtcheglov, wrote that in his paintings of imagined Italian townscapes, ‘Chirico remains one of the most striking precursors of true architecture. What he was dealing with was absence and presence in time.’ It would take more than Robinson’s ‘psychic landscaping’ to see this concrete migraine as representing ‘true architecture’.

  The ‘absence’ Chtcheglov writes of in this case is of any kind of soul or humanity. Berthold Lubetkin would shake his head in dismay as it reminded him of the Stalinist Russia he’d left behind. St George Wharf would be at home on the outskirts of Bucharest as an asylum for deposed dictators wandering the corridors still plotting world domination. With penthouses apparently selling for several million pounds a pop there could even be a few retired despots looking down wondering why some mad fool is walking around in circles in the snow.