The Walker

by Matthew Beaumont

  The visored building thus constitutes an insignia, to use Derrida’s term, for the disposition of power in the contemporary metropolis. Its armed gaze is symptomatic of the developments that have for some time been taking place in metropolitan cities such as London, where spaces are not only increasingly privatized but shaped at all levels by the technological apparatus of a surveillance system deployed to consolidate, police and reinforce this relentless process of privatization.

  It is also symptomatic, perhaps, of an architectural practice that is currently being reshaped by ‘the increasing facelessness of the client’.51 The visored building – profoundly implicated in what Mike Davis once called ‘the archisemiotics of class war’52 – thus exhibits the architectural logic of contemporary capitalism. It is a monumental but at the same time everyday embodiment of an urban society that, in both its state and corporate forms, interpellates pedestrians as atomized individuals subject to an insidious system of surveillance.

  We are not at home in the streets of our cities. How then do we respond to this situation? Critics such as Tal Kaminer have rightly insisted on the importance of contemporary citizens’ active participation in the politics of architecture.53 So this conclusion represents a response to that challenge.

  I propose that, dystopian as this scenario might sound, we adopt our own masks, our own visors, in relation to what Walter Benjamin once called ‘the masks of architecture’.54 Only in this way, as inhabitants of cities who are committed to a culture of openness and transparency, to the notion of public space, can we neutralize the uncanny gaze inscribed in an architecture that is persistently private, secretive, subtly intimidating.

  Simmel, with typical perspicacity, grasped the significance of this homeopathic logic in his seminal essay on the ‘Sociology of the Senses’ in 1907. There, exploring the power relationship that is inscribed in the interaction between people’s eyes, the intersection of their looks, he recognizes that when one’s eyes are seen by other eyes, not least in the context of urban life, one is known, and one is therefore disempowered. This can be avoided, though, or at least mitigated – in the interests of what, in ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, he had called ‘self-preservation in the face of the large city’ – if one withdraws one’s gaze, if one screens one’s eyes.55

  ‘Lowering my gaze’, he argues, ‘deprives the other of the possibility of finding out about me.’ Simmel characterizes this defensive response, which he insists has ‘an actual practicality in this directly sensory and sociological relationship’, as the ‘ostrich tactic’. And he concludes that ‘whoever does not look at the other party really does remove him or herself to a certain extent from being seen.’56

  The Occupy movement, with its appropriation of the distinctive Guy Fawkes masks that featured in the 2005 film adaptation of David Lloyd and Alan Moore’s graphic novel V for Vendetta (1988), has been pioneering in this respect (even if it has also, inadvertently, lined the pockets of Time Warner, the corporation that owns the copyright). For it has developed an affordable, uniform device that, rendering the activist resistant to ‘being seen’, and therefore evading state surveillance, neatly but also theatrically deploys or implements the ‘ostrich tactic’. Perhaps these masks should not merely be reserved for demonstrations or protests against finance capital but worn as an everyday uniform, as a form of protective armour, in the dwindling public spaces we traverse in our cities as pedestrians.

  But the ‘hoodie’, a ubiquitous garment on contemporary city streets, not least because it provides partial shelter from the intrusive gaze of CCTV cameras, probably already functions as this everyday uniform. The fact that, like other security companies, More London Estates Management has banned hoodies from the stretch of the South Bank it polices points to precisely this. Certainly, on urban protests and demonstrations, at least since those against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999, hoodies have functioned, in practical terms, as a means of eluding the more primitive systems of surveillance; and, in symbolic terms, as a reciprocal response to the armoured and visored helmets adopted by a more or less militarized urban police force.

  ‘Who are those hooded hordes?’ T. S. Eliot demands in ‘What the Thunder Said’, the final section of The Waste Land (1922), as he invokes apocalyptic images of ‘cracks and reforms’ that burst in ‘the violet air’, and of ‘falling towers’: ‘Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London / Unreal.’57 Let us collectively embrace our identity as hooded hordes among the plains, mazes and chasms of cement and glass and steel and stone that structure the metropolitan cities we inhabit on foot in the twenty-first century. In this way, by blocking and reversing its gaze, we might at least refuse, if not cancel out, the coercive logic of the visored building.

  Here, in other words, is the germ of a politics of the visor, productively paranoiac, that we might use to resist the politics of the visor.

  Afterword

  Walking in London and Paris at Night

  I. Marble Arch, London, 2012

  The plaque commemorating London’s most prominent site of execution, the Tyburn Tree, where criminals and political prisoners were hanged in public from the late twelfth century to the late eighteenth century, isn’t easy to identify amid the lifeless chaos of Marble Arch. I visited it at about midnight one night in June 2012, on a short nightwalk that, though it began and ended in Kilburn, traced a route from Marble Arch to the Old Bailey, the site of what was once Newgate Prison.

  The point of the walk was to re-enact the final journey taken by the victims of Tyburn’s ‘Fatal Tree’ in the eighteenth century, but in reverse. A ‘resurrection walk’, a friend called it. At midnight the night before a hanging day or ‘hanging fair’, which generally took place on a Monday, the bellman of St Sepulchre-without-Newgate recited verses to the men and women who were due to be executed. ‘All you that in the condemn’d Holds do lie, / Prepare you, for to Morrow you shall die,’ he began … The next morning, between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m., a procession left the prison, to the deafening sound of church bells, first those of St Sepulchre, then of other churches along the route.

  The condemned, whose irons were first struck off in the prison’s press yard in front of their friends and relations, climbed into a horse-drawn cart that eventually rumbled off along the cobbled streets on its protracted two- or three-hour journey to the gibbet. In the spirit of clemency, the carter might stop at a series of taverns, starting in Holborn, to enable those about to be executed to inebriate and so anaesthetize themselves.

  The three-mile route, which snaked through St Giles before proceeding along Tyburn Road, today’s Oxford Street, was dense with curious, sometimes riotous spectators, who packed the streets and pressed up against the windows of buildings that adjoined the road. Some handed measures of ale or gin to the condemned, others lobbed orange or apples to them.

  At Tyburn itself, fifty or one hundred thousand people might be in attendance, jostling one another for standing room, teetering on ladders, sitting precariously along the wall that enclosed Hyde Park, or crowding into ‘Mother Proctor’s Pews’, the grandstand on the western side of the Edgware Road (originally Watling Street) – all of them competing for a glimpse of the moment when the condemned man or woman, who would die of strangulation, dangled from the gallows and ‘danced the Paddington frisk’. ‘The whole vagabond population of London,’ wrote the diarist Francis Place, ‘all the thieves, and all the prostitutes, all those who were evil-minded, and some, a comparatively few curious people made up the mob on those brutalizing occasions.’

  From the late sixteenth century, the infamous scaffold at Tyburn took the distinctive form of a ‘Triple Tree’ design. This consisted of three wooden posts, in a triangular formation, connected across the top by three beams. In addition to ensuring almost indestructible stability, this design facilitated mass executions, since each beam could accommodate up to eight bodies, and on occasion as many as twenty-four people were hanged at once.

  The original gallows, in the
Middle Ages, were made from the elms that stood beside Tyburn Brook (a tributary not of the River Tyburn but the River Westbourne, which today runs as an underground stream into the Serpentine). Tyburn was a bucolic site of execution when its first victim, William Longbeard, was hanged in 1196. And even in the mid- and later eighteenth century, when on hanging days a temporary scaffold was erected, before being dismantled until needed for the next execution, the area around Tyburn felt like rough countryside.

  This entire area, some of it farmed, was open land that belonged to the Bishop of London’s Paddington estate. The only building nearby, at least until the 1760s, was Tyburn House, which stood at the junction of Tyburn Road and Watling Street and probably had something to do with the gallows it overlooked. This was the western edge of the capital, with Hyde Park to its south and open land to its north. The outer limits of Georgian London were demarcated by Tyburn Lane, now Park Lane, which ran south-east to Hyde Park Corner; and Tyburn Road, which ran east in the direction of the City.

  In John Rocque’s detailed map of London, first published in 1746, the Triple Tree is starkly marked – printed onto the crook between the roads running west and north like a crude symbol tattooed onto the webbing between index finger and thumb on a prison inmate’s hand. Immediately to its south, along the northern fringe of the park, is the legend, ‘Where Soldiers are Shot’. These are killing fields.

  The last execution at Tyburn, that of one John Austen, took place in November 1783, in part because of the risks of social disorder in an increasingly respectable region of the city. ‘The gradual spread of gentility to the west meant that the old tribal route from Newgate to Tyburn began to impinge upon the fashionable quarters close to Oxford Street,’ as Peter Ackroyd puts it. Thereafter, those sentenced for capital offences were hanged at the Debtors’ Door, Newgate – a mercifully short journey from the condemned’s cell.

  At Marble Arch, I threaded through the rapid stream of late-night cars and taxis, which at this time still had to be cautiously forded, to one of the traffic islands at the junction of Bayswater Road and the Edgware Road; then found myself already standing on the memorial to the site of execution. I hadn’t noticed it. (In the sump at the bottom of the Edgware Road, where the Middle-Eastern restaurants peter out, I had seen a pub called The Tyburn, part of the Wetherspoon’s chain – ‘shit, brown dollops of establishments smeared incontinently across our cities’, as Will Self has daubed them).

  The plaque, embedded in this piece of pavement in 1964, is a cracked, circular piece of stone, the inside perimeter of which is engraved with fine bronze lettering that reads: ‘THE SITE OF TYBURN TREE’. Apart from a mysterious cross that seems to rotate or spiral silently at its centre, this is it. No doubt most of those who do notice it assume that it is the site of – a tree.

  There is at Marble Arch not a single reference to the victims of these infamous gallows, who might in total have numbered as many as 50–60,000 people. This regime of terror reached a climax in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when Britain became a ‘thanatocracy’, in Peter Linebaugh’s term, ‘a government that ruled by the frequent exercise of the death penalty’. In fact, the application of the death penalty declined in this period; but the state nonetheless used the spectacle of the scaffold, with increasing efficiency and intensity, to terrorize people tempted to challenge or infringe a legal and socio-political system to which the protection of property was of more and more totemic importance.

  Right up until the early nineteenth century, England lacked a public police force – in spite of the founding of Henry and John Fielding’s Runners, who were little more than ‘a gang of professional thief takers, with a reputation for brutality and corruption’, in London in 1749. Moreover, unlike France, the British state did not rely on a network of spies and informers to control its subjects (though in the early 1790s, Jacobins such as John Thelwall, shadowed by government agents at meetings of the London Corresponding Society, used to lecture on the ‘moral tendency of spies and informers’). ‘In place of police, however,’ as Douglas Hay confirms, ‘propertied England had a fat and swelling sheaf of laws which threatened thieves with death.’ Approximately 49,000 offences were tried before a jury at the Old Bailey in the course of the eighteenth century, and almost 95 per cent of them were property-related. Through the courts the ruling elite prosecuted a pitiless class war against the poor. This exacerbated the cruelty of a society built on ever more brutal economic inequalities.

  In an essay for the Rambler in 1750, Samuel Johnson provided a powerful critique of capital punishment and the eighteenth-century state’s business of ‘investing lawful authority with terror, and governing by force rather than persuasion’. He grimly conceded that ‘rapine and violence are hourly encreasing’, but complained that few law-makers question the efficacy of ‘capital inflictions’. ‘Of those who employ their speculations upon the present corruption of the people,’ as he sarcastically put it, ‘some propose the introduction of more horrid, lingering and terrifick punishments; some are inclined to accelerate the executions; some to discourage pardons; and all seem to think that lenity has given confidence to wickedness, and that we can only be rescued from the talons of robbery by inflexible rigour, and sanguinary justice.’

  Johnson was acutely sensitive to the contradictions of the criminal justice system, and to the hypocrisies both of the elite that sentenced people to death and the masses that relished the spectacle of their execution. He cited the authority of the Dutch humanist Herman Boerhaave, who related ‘that he never saw a criminal dragged to execution without asking himself, “Who knows whether this man is not less culpable than me.”’

  On the days when ‘the prisons of this city are emptied into the grave,’ Johnson added in a pungent image, ‘let every spectator of the dreadful procession put the same question to his own heart.’ ‘Few among those that croud in thousands to the legal massacre, and look with carelessness, perhaps with triumph, on the utmost exacerbations of human misery, would then be able to return without horror and dejection,’ he concluded; ‘for, who can congratulate himself upon a life passed without some act more mischievous to the peace or prosperity of others, than the theft of a piece of money?’

  Tyburn Tree was in the eighteenth century the symbol not of some crude, outdated order of justice, a remnant of feudal times, but of a legal system engineered and rebuilt by the capitalist bourgeoisie. Most of those executed at Tyburn were ordinary men and women who had been reduced by economic circumstances to a state of desperation – apprentices, ill-paid servants, unemployed labourers, vagrants. As Roy Porter points out, ‘those committing crimes – notably the 1,200 Londoners hanged in the eighteenth century – were less hardened professionals than servants and seamstresses and the labouring poor, down on their luck or out of work, starving, or just fatally tempted.’

  Among them were female nightwalkers, although these were executed not for prostitution but because they had committed crimes against property. Mary Young, for instance, a seamstress from Northern Ireland who became a celebrated thief, was gibbeted at Tyburn in 1741. She had been confined to Bridewell, along with other ‘loose idle and disorderly persons & comon Street Walkers’, in 1737; and was imprisoned there again in 1738, on this occasion with one other woman, both of them ‘Night Walkers’. Nineteen others died at Tyburn alongside Mary Young the day she hanged, and all of them were executed for crimes against property.

  No doubt it is predictable enough that the obscurest, most desperate members of London’s poor population, condemned for committing trifling crimes against property, should remain uncommemorated at Marble Arch. But even the more notorious victims of the Tyburn regime, including Mary Young, who arrived at the gallows in a mourning coach, are unnamed. There is no mention, for example, of Jack Sheppard, the most famous and popularly celebrated thief of the eighteenth century, who twice escaped from Newgate, and whose execution in 1724 drew admiring crowds of as many as 200,000 people.

  There is, furth
ermore, no testament at Marble Arch to Oliver Cromwell – a reminder that Britain continues to be a monarchy, and organizes its heritage accordingly. The remains of his body, along with those of two other regicides, were disinterred in 1661, after the Restoration, before being carried in coffins by cart from Westminster to Holborn, then dragged on to the Fatal Tree at Tyburn. There, in an undignified posthumous execution, the three were hanged before a large crowd, and beheaded. According to John Evelyn, their battered carcasses were ‘then buried under that fatal and ignominious monument in a deep pit’. It is possible that Cromwell’s bones still lie beneath Marble Arch. The turf at the north-eastern corner of Hyde Park, that looks so serene and calm beside the congested, agitated roads that encircle it, should still be soaked in blood.

  The plaque commemorating the Fatal Tree is today lost beneath the feet of teenagers and tourists milling about among the night buses and the pointless, elephantine sculptures that have been deposited, in a passive-aggressive gesture of benevolence and public-spiritedness, at Cumberland Gate. On the cool night I was there these optimists appeared to be trying to persuade themselves that the desolate roundabout on which they were marooned, in a thin mist of carbon monoxide, was in fact a continental piazza in which they might meaningfully congregate.

  Instead, resurfacing at the end of the day as the tide subsides, Marble Arch is a little island of alienated social life that looks as if it has been cut adrift from the end of Oxford Street – the shops and department stores of which, disgorging pedestrians into the road at closing time, stretch like a line of cliffs to the east in the artificial half-light of the night. The arch itself is a picturesque but pointless geological stack around which commuters and shoppers surge.