The Walker

by Matthew Beaumont

  In a poem written for a BBC documentary in 1968, John Betjeman lamented that Marble Arch is a place of martyrdoms that is ‘trodden by unheeding feet’. But the ‘greatest crime’ of all, he continued, standing on the roof of the Arch and speaking in the voice of a polite, if irritable prophet, is ‘the martyrdom of London’: ‘For here, where once were pleasant fields, / And no one in a hurry, / Behold the harvest Mammon yields / Of speed and greed and worry …’

  The clock-like face of the commemorative plaque looks as if it has been carefully but pitilessly stamped into the ground by the nearby Arch’s vast and trunkless legs of stone. Marble Arch was originally designed by John Nash, in the later 1820s, as a triumphal entrance for Buckingham Palace; then relocated to Hyde Park, where Thomas Cubitt rebuilt the royal home in 1851. But – not least because Nash’s plans for reliefs commemorating English victories against France in the Napoleonic conflict were never fully executed – the triumph it celebrates is an oddly blank one.

  After it had been ‘islanded’ in 1908, G. K. Chesterton remarked that, ‘in its new insular position, with traffic turning dizzily all about it,’ the Marble Arch seemed ‘a placid monstrosity’. It is a ‘massive symbol of the modern mind’, he added; ‘a door with no house to it; the gigantic gate of Nowhere’. For all its pretensions to imperial grandeur, it is a portal into empty space, empty time. In this respect, it is the imperturbable, self-important Arch, not the shame-faced and secretive plaque, which makes the most fitting memorial to the Tyburn Tree. In its arrogant, impassive refusal to contemplate the scene of destruction on which it has been silently founded, the Arch stands like a sentinel protecting London from a confrontation with the tradition of violent oppression on which the British state is built.

  From 1851, the upper chambers of the Arch were used as a police observation post, with room for a hundred officers if necessary, as Betjeman noted during his tour of its interior – all ‘ready to rush out’ if there were civil disturbances. During the mass demonstration against the Sunday Trading Bill in 1855 – which Karl Marx, who was in attendance, excitedly identified as the beginning of the English Revolution – a detachment of police leapt out from beneath the hollow thighs of the Arch and ambushed protestors.

  During the Reform League’s demonstrations for universal male suffrage in 1866, Marble Arch was once again the scene of scattered battles with police on horseback. And at the riot in 1994 against the Criminal Justice Bill, a raft of measures that targeted ravers, Roma, travellers and young black people who were already susceptible to discriminatory stop-and-search procedures, mounted police repeatedly charged at demonstrators, in a panicky clatter of hooves, from the adamantine precincts of the Arch.

  On that occasion, Marble Arch seemed to have been restored to its secret identity as a monument that, belying its placid appearance, boasted of Britain’s history of state oppression, but at the same time obliterated the memory of it. Perhaps its inner cavities are still used for tactical surveillance.

  If this is the case, Marble Arch makes for a peculiarly short-sighted, or perhaps long-sighted, panopticon. Approximately three hours after I had sloped off from the traffic island in which the Tyburn plaque is roughly embedded, in order to pursue my walk to Newgate through the emptying streets, police who had been called to Marble Arch found a man in his mid-forties lying dead on the central concourse, directly beneath one of the arches. This man was Mark Morrison, a Scot who, though he had formerly worked as a chef, had for some time been homeless. He had been strangled with a strip of green tent fabric. An engineer working for London Underground caught sight of a man stooping over the murder victim at around 3 a.m., but this man ran off when challenged.

  A week later, an Afghan asylum-seeker, Ghodratollah Barani, then in his mid-twenties, was charged with Morrison’s murder. Like the victim of this crime, he was of no fixed address. Psychiatric doctors at both St Thomas’s and the Gordon Hospitals had examined Barani prior to the murder, because he had repeatedly tried to gain entry to Buckingham Palace, claiming voices had informed him that, in order to become the rightful king of England, he needed to kill someone; but he had been discharged. Police officers at the palace, for their part, had ignored his threats on the assumption that they were a ruse to secure asylum. Eventually, in March 2013, Barani pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. He was detained under the Mental Health Act and recommended for deportation on his release.

  The violent climax of this drama encoded a sickly irony: it is as if the horrors of old Tyburn, with its countless, near-anonymous victims of strangulation, many of them itinerant and unemployed, had irrupted beneath the empty portal of Marble Arch in the shape of this corpse. The tomb of the forgotten vagrant.

  II. Eiffel Tower, Paris, 2012

  The picturesque lightshow that, once the sun has set, takes place on the hour, every hour, when the Eiffel Tower is lit up for five minutes by thousands of coruscating bulbs, stops with a final spasm at 1 a.m. It was unlit when I reached it at 3 a.m. on a damp Monday morning. The surrounding streets were deserted.

  The Tower had proved oddly, eerily difficult to find in the darkness. Pursuing it along the left bank of the Seine, in insistent rain, it kept escaping me. In spite of its immense, brutal outline, it seemed to be able to conceal itself behind the solemn buildings that overlook the river. Each time it reappeared, rearing suddenly above me, I experienced a slight sense of shock. Its presence in the darkness was oppressive. I felt as if I’d been trapped in a malign game – like the one Umberto Eco describes in Foucault’s Pendulum (1988), where the narrator stumbles into the Eiffel Tower at night and finally understands that this ‘foul metal spider’ is the symbol and instrument of his enemies’ diabolical power.

  I entered the landscaped park at the base of the Tower, the section of the Champ de Mars closest to the Seine, from the tapered end of the Rue de l’Université. A few streetlamps emitted a sickly gleam. It was almost completely silent. The light rain blanketed the sound of occasional cars on the Quai Branly. For a moment I stood still, faintly disturbed by the scaffold of heavy, shadowy forms in front of me; slabs of cold metal that no longer had the tensile delicacy that characterizes the Tower’s tracery from a distance, especially when it is artificially lit. In the darkness, close up, it resembled the sort of enigmatic, minatory structure that, by accident or design, some alien species might have deposited on our planet.

  When I set off across the Champ de Mars in order to stand beneath the Tower, my footsteps disturbed several rats that had been eating from the ruined litterbins full of tourists’ droppings. The rats loped across the path in front of me and disappeared into the dirty pools of darkness beneath the nearby trees. It reminded me of the repulsive landscape described by Robert Browning in his dream-like quest-poem, ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’, where the grass grows ‘as scant as hair in leprosy’, and rats shriek like babies.

  I felt a little frightened. If I’d seen anyone else standing or walking in the precincts of the Tower, I’d have panicked and run. There was no one. Perhaps that was more ominous. In Eco’s novel, a taxi driver admits to the narrator that at night he always feels compelled to accelerate past the Eiffel Tower, because it scares him. Why? Parce que … parce que ça fait peur, c’est tout. I too felt that fear – and couldn’t remain an instant longer. So I rapidly retraced my steps to the rue de l’Université, spooked by the thought of the Tower rearing up implacably behind me. I felt as if a layer of skin had been coolly scraped from my back beneath my neat, black rucksack and thick clothes.

  Turning into the Avenue de La Bourdonnais I slid into a dark dreamscape. A handgun lay on the doorstep of a building to my left: solid-looking, geometric, shocking. It must have been dropped on the stone step by someone running up the avenue; or tossed from a passing car. I tried to remember the emergency number as I pictured the man who had left it; then imagined him returning for it and finding me. Perhaps it was one of the young men who, an hour or so earlier, had a
lmost run me down at a junction, hip-hop pumping from their car as they shouted unintelligible abuse.

  As I peered more closely at the gun I realized with a creeping sense of the ridiculous that it looked … plastic. Bending lower, I saw it didn’t have a trigger, and must have been bought in one of those shops retailing things, stuff, crap for €1.50 a pop. Behind me, sagging in the rain, a cardboard box filled with broken toys and kids’ clothes had been abandoned on a bench.

  Although steeped in noir clichés, my conspiratorial delusion wasn’t implausible. In April 2012, a forty-three-year-old homeless Bulgarian man had found a cache of weapons discarded near the Place Stalingrad. Sifting through rubbish bins in search of food, he came across one that contained a 6.35-calibre automatic pistol, four grenades, sixteen rounds of ammunition, and a shell designed for the sort of armoured vehicle used by the French army. Beside a dump truck nearby was a wooden box full of grenades.

  The police ascertained soon enough that these arms belonged to a local ‘collector’ – the term sounded euphemistic to me – who had recently died. But it wasn’t entirely clear why the man’s relatives, however desperate to get rid of them, had dumped the weapons in public bins in a densely populated part of Paris. ‘This was a completely inconsiderate act,’ a police spokesman commented humourlessly, ‘because the weapons were still operational and could have fallen into the wrong hands.’

  In Paris, during the fourth year of an economic recession used by both centre-left and centre-right administrations to punish the poorest sections of the population, homeless Bulgarian men who rummage through bins in the city centre are not often thought to possess the right hands. Theirs are dirty, grasping, thieving hands. According to the authorities and the right-wing press, the Roma who have arrived in France in increasing numbers over the last five years, migrating from Bulgaria and Romania, are beggars, pimps, prostitutes and petty criminals.

  As many as 20,000 Romanichels, or Gitans, as they’re known in France, subsist in abject conditions in makeshift camps on the suburban margins of the capital and other cities. There they are often the victims of vigilante attacks by local residents, like the one that ended the life of a sixteen-year old Roma known as Darius near the A1 motorway in June 2014. They are also the target of violent expulsions by the police. The forcible clearing of these camps and the repatriation of their inhabitants commenced under Nicolas Sarkozy, prompting one EU commissioner to compare it to the persecution of Jews during the Occupation. It was continued, even extended, under François Hollande. Amnesty International claims that more than 10,000 Roma were evicted from temporary camps in the first half of 2013.

  The pavements of central Paris are currently home to several hundred Roma. In the course of the night I spent traversing the city on foot I felt I glimpsed most of them, their features distinctive among the scattered forms of the white and black homeless people that also populate the streets. Some slept alone. At 1 a.m., on the Place des Vosges, where Cardinal Richelieu lived in the early seventeenth century, four or five of them were huddled under the arcades in frayed sleeping bags. At 4 a.m., on Boulevard Haussmann, single Roma men slept in the entrances of department stores, their bodies heaped beneath blankets, clothes and rags, their grimy faces often encircled by scarves. Some were stretched out beside the road – in spite of the rain – on mattresses and even battered wooden doors that had been removed from their frames. They looked as if they had been washed up on life rafts.

  Other Roma slept together. Couples had crammed themselves into phone booths dotted along the main avenues and boulevards. In one booth the woman sat huddled at the feet of the man, who stood to attention and stared blankly at me as I passed. In another, the woman’s body was contorted into a V-shape. Her head, at waist height, was wedged in one corner; her naked feet were wedged in the opposite corner. There was something so intimate about the sight of the woman’s calloused soles, pressed up against the Perspex surface of the booth, that I felt as if simply in glancing at their flattened form I had intruded on her.

  Most unnerving of all were the Roma families, who face a struggle to find accommodation in emergency shelters originally designed for single men (many of these hostels have in any case been forced to close down because of government cuts). Sometimes three or four children slept in the entrance of a shop beside their mother and father. These doorways were so heaped with small sleeping bodies, thick clothes and faded quilts that, perversely, they communicated a sense of cosiness. The unhappy faces of their parents as they watched over the children dispelled this illusion.

  So did the presence of others condemned to remain on the street at night. A hundred feet from where the Roma families squatted, I came across six or seven sex workers. It was 4:30 a.m., and they seemed mystified by the grim determination with which I marched through the rain. Five minutes later, sheltering from the downpour in a doorway, I watched two men of North African origin fighting one another. They threw hard, slippery punches, and one of them knocked the other to the ground, sending him skidding along the slick surface of the pavement. A bottle shattered. ‘Ta mère! Ta mère!’ – ‘Motherfucker!’ – the man who was still standing screamed.

  Roma were the most striking presence on the street that night, but innumerable other destitute or desperate people became visible in the city after dark. At about 2 a.m., close to the Musée d’Orsay, I leaned over the parapet above the Seine because of a commotion. Three young men were scrawling something on the embankment while a security guard looked on in bemusement. One of the men hurled himself at the stone wall and smashed his forehead against it repeatedly. When he finally rolled back onto the ground, rocking on his spine with a strangely acrobatic elegance, then staggered to his feet again, the guard reluctantly lifted a mobile phone to his ear.

  I had begun my noctambulisme shortly before 9 p.m. on Sunday, walking northeast from the Place de la République to the périphérique. After a coffee I climbed the hill to Belleville. At the entrance to the Couronnes metro station a black man in his fifties and a white man in his twenties sifted through a tangled stack of broken furniture, like nineteenth-century ragpickers, and poked at the rotten vegetables spilling out of crates that had been dumped there. On the Rue des Couronnes, an elderly, bearded man slept heavily on the pavement in a foetal position, piss leaking from his trousers and forming a runnel as it snaked down the steeply sloping street.

  On the terrace above the Parc de Belleville – where I watched the shivering lights of the Eiffel Tower signal 10 p.m. in the far distance – there were forty or fifty people standing around some trestle tables waiting for something to happen. Africans, Arabs, Eastern Europeans, Roma; and, looking cheerfully incongruous, two dilapidated white men on crutches. Almost everyone clutched shopping trolleys or carried empty bags and holdalls. The rain was only falling lightly, and there was a companionable, if not festive, atmosphere. Some young people were drinking and smoking and listening to a tinny radio. Kids ran around squealing. Everyone was talking, in a riot of different languages.

  Then a van arrived, and several men unloaded its contents onto the tables, lit by a string of bare bulbs. Suddenly the terrace resembled a market: precarious piles of fresh fruit and vegetables; boxes filled with biscuits and pasta; neat stacks of school exercise books, kids’ rucksacks; nappies, tampons. A food bank. Everyone crowded round the trestle tables, but they behaved with generosity, a lack of urgency, in waiting to receive things. Emblazoned on the organizers’ T-shirts was the name of their charity, ‘La Main de l’autre’.

  The bobos – the bohemian-bourgeois class that cultivates what Eric Hazan calls a ‘superficial non-conformism’ – have in recent years moved into Belleville in droves, driving up rents and pushing out immigrants, marginals and the poor. But there was no sign of them this Sunday night. Once the bars and cafés have closed, Paris stubbornly resists gentrification. In the night the Roma and other poor and homeless people – those whom the streets have claimed – reclaim the streets. Only the Eiffel Tower, emblem of
the city of light, encompasses a completely lifeless space.

  Acknowledgements

  For encouragement or editorial advice of one kind or another in producing the chapters that comprise this book, I’d like to thank Pushpa Arabindoo, Kasia Boddy, Rachel Bowlby, Peter Boxall, Ben Campkin, Bob Catterall, Gregory Dart, Mark Ford, Tom Gretton, Andrew Hemingway, Phil Horne, Matthew Ingleby, Tom Keymer, Judith Luna, Colin MacCabe, Josephine McDonagh, Clare Melhuish, China Miéville, Florian Mussgnug, Victoria Noel-Johnson, Jordan Rowe, Vincent Sherry, Iain Sinclair, William Sharpe, Christophe Soligo, Hugh Stevens, Allan Wallach, Martin Willis, and David Young. Special thanks are due to Nick Papadimitriou and Will Self. In terms of production, I am grateful to Mark Martin and Lorna Scott Fox. As ever, I am deeply indebted to my exemplary editor, Leo Hollis.

  The Walker consists of more or less heavily revised versions of the following essays: ‘Urban Convalescence in Lamb, Poe and Baudelaire’, in Transatlantic Romanticism: British and American Art and Literature, 1790–1860, eds Andrew Hemingway and Allan Wallach (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015), pp. 67–80; ‘The Mystery of Master Humphrey: Dickens, Nightwalking and The Old Curiosity Shop’, Review of English Studies 65: 268 (2014), pp. 118–36; ‘The Bourne Identity: On Utopian Psychopathology’, in The Good Place: Comparative Perspectives on Utopia, eds Florian Mussgnug and Matthew Reza (Bern: Peter Lang, 2014), pp. 53–68; ‘Introduction,’ The Invisible Man, ed. Matthew Beaumont (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2017), pp. vii–xxxiii; ‘The Knight Errant in the Street: Chesterton, Childe Roland and the City’, in G. K. Chesterton, London and Modernity, eds Matthew Beaumont and Matthew Ingleby (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 93–112; ‘Ford Madox Ford: Autobiography, Urban Space, Agoraphobia’, Journal of Literature and Science 3 (2010), pp. 37–49; ‘Modernism and the Metropolitan Imaginary: Spectacle and Introspection’, in the Cambridge History of Modernism, ed. Vincent Sherry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 220–34; ‘In the Beginning Was the Big Toe: Bataille, Base Materialism, Bipedalism,’ Textual Practice 29: 5 (2015), pp. 869–83; ‘Stumbling in the Dark: Ray Bradbury’s Pedestrian and the Politics of the Night’, Critical Quarterly 57: 4 (2015), pp. 71–88; ‘The Politics of the Visor: Looking at Buildings Looking at Us’, CITY: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action 22: 1 (2018), pp. 63–77; ‘Short Cuts’, London Review of Books 35: 12 (20 June 2013), p. 22; ‘Paris at Night’, The White Review (September 2014).