The View From the Train

by Patrick Keiller

  One of the starting points for the film was a passage from the memoirs of Alexander Herzen (1812–70):

  There is no town in the world which is more adapted for training one away from people and training one into solitude than London. The manner of life, the distances, the climate, the very multitude of the population in which personality vanishes, all this together with the absence of Continental diversions conduces to the same effect. One who knows how to live alone has nothing to fear from the tedium of London. The life here, like the air here, is bad for the weak, for the frail, for one who seeks a prop outside himself, for one who seeks welcome, sympathy, attention; the moral lungs here must be as strong as the physical lungs, whose task it is to separate oxygen from the smoky fog. The masses are saved by battling for their daily bread, the commercial classes by their absorption in heaping up wealth, and all by the bustle of business; but nervous and romantic temperaments, fond of living among people, fond of intellectual sloth and of idly luxuriating in emotion, are bored to death here and fall into despair.1

  This passage is part of Herzen’s account of the period soon after his arrival in 1852, when London was physically very different from the city it is now (much more so than it was by, say, 1900), but it was easy to connect it with one’s experience of London in the 1980s. Other people said similar things – I recall, for instance, Zaha Hadid’s suggestion that London was a good place to work, because there were so few distractions.

  The film took the form of a fictional journal (like Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year), an unnamed narrator’s account of the project of his companion and ex-lover Robinson, a disenfranchised, would-be intellectual, petty bourgeois part-time lecturer at the ‘University of Barking’. Robinson’s project was a study of ‘the problem of London’, and the problem of London seemed to be, in essence, that it wasn’t Paris. I had read up on the experiences of various nineteenth-century visitors from France, on the look out for further details of ‘the absence of Continental diversions’, and discovered Paul Verlaine’s description of London as ‘flat as a bed-bug, if bed-bugs were flat’, and his suggestion that the way people drank in pubs confirmed the ‘lamentable inferiority of Anglo-Saxons’.2 Apollinaire’s description of the south London suburbs, seen from the train, was of ‘wounds bleeding in the fog’. Wilhelm Kostrowicki, before he became Apollinaire, had visited London twice in pursuit of a young woman called Annie Playden, whose family lived in Landor Road, SW9, and who soon afterwards emigrated to Texas, where she was discovered by academics in 1951, unaware of her rejected suitor’s subsequent identity.3 Reading Enid Starkie’s biography,4 I found that Arthur Rimbaud probably produced a good deal of his literary output in London (there are likely images of London in, for example, the Illuminations), and that his last address in England was not in Scarborough, as had been suggested, but in Reading. This became the starting point for a sequel to London, Robinson in Space (1997), in which Robinson is exiled to the English provinces.

  Thus far, the film was a fairly Eurocentric, even Anglocentric project, which attempted to combine two strands of critical thinking. On one hand, there was what one might call the ‘urban’ literature of Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Louis Aragon, Walter Benjamin and so on, which had become influential in architectural discourse during the 1970s and ’80s, in the context of which London appeared to be a city where certain kinds of urban experience that one might see as characteristic of European cities were difficult, if not impossible, to find. On the other hand were the various ‘declinist’ scenarios of English capitalism, in particular the idea that England is a backward, failing economy because it has never had a successful bourgeois revolution, and that the City of London’s dominance and priorities reinforce this failure. This view was fairly widespread at the time, and was attractive to people in the art and design professions since it offered an explanation (and, in the context of the political ‘debate’ about the UK’s role in Europe, a cure) for the problematic nature of so many aspects of English visual and material culture – the UK’s attitude to public space and cities; its apparent inability to produce adequately designed buildings, cars and other consumer goods; its unattractive food and problems with agriculture; the predicament of public services like education and transport; and a whole range of other features of everyday life that might be seen as consequences of laissez-faire.

  Landor Road, from London (1994)

  Alongside these predictable concerns, however, was the awareness that Baudelaire, for instance, was just as fed up with the quartier latin as Robinson claimed to be with London. His problem was not really London, but ‘The Great Malady, Horror of Home’.5 Perhaps, one thought, this feeling of restlessness that seemed to be so characteristic of life in London was not really such a problem after all. Perhaps it was something to be valued. London might be uncomfortable to live in, but it avoided the more stupefying aspects of dwelling that a less spatially impoverished, more ‘architectural’ city might encourage. Perhaps London was even, despite its obvious anachronisms, rather modern. Even someone as narrow-minded as Robinson could hardly fail to notice the increasingly cosmopolitan make-up of its population.

  Without ever really losing sight of its architectural and other preconceptions about London as a physical structure, and with occasional references to the life and work of Baudelaire6 and Rimbaud, the film explored these ideas in various more or less convincing, sometimes rather touristic, ways, beginning with its narrator’s introduction of himself as a returning seaman (albeit only a photographer on a cruise liner). Robinson’s first fictional excursion (to Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill in Twickenham) was provoked by the appearance of a non-fictional Portuguese driving school opposite his flat, one of several new undertakings in the neighbourhood that had accompanied the rapid expansion of the Portuguese community in south Lambeth after Portugal joined the European Union in 1987. By the river in Twickenham, near Alexander Pope’s Grotto, the film’s protagonists meet two Peruvian musicians, Aquiles and Carlos Justiniani, whose singing accompanied their walk downstream as far as Kew. Aquiles had been actually encountered busking with a colleague in Vauxhall Underground station, and we had arranged to include one of his recordings in the film.

  Emerging from the arcades of Brixton market, where he had hoped to confirm a visit by Apollinaire in 1901, Robinson noticed a ship depicted on the sign of The Atlantic, the famous public house opposite, which enabled him to mention the arrival of post-war emigrants from Jamaica on the SS Empire Windrush, and the fact that they were initially housed in the deep (air-raid) shelters under Clapham Common. There were similar episodes in cafés and restaurants in the neighbourhoods of Ealing Road, Wembley and Cranford, on the A4 near Heathrow, and a visit to Southall during Diwali. Amid the cultural diversity of Ridley Road market, in Dalston, Robinson ‘became much happier and relaxed, and began to talk more positively about London’s future’, though his companion continued: ‘I was not convinced by this: London has always struck me as a city full of interesting people most of whom, like Robinson, would prefer to be elsewhere.’ This remark was based on the idea that the actual attainment of a cosmopolitan London was somehow restricted, despite the heterogeneity of its population, either by spatial characteristics – an emphasis on private, exclusive spaces, perhaps – or by something else. In an interview in Reece Auguiste’s film Twilight City (Black Audio Film Collective, 1989), Paul Gilroy had spoken of ‘an extraordinary change, in which people are able to inhabit the same space, to be physically proximate and yet to live in different worlds’. In the 1980s I had also become used to a characteristically London conversation in which the participants would share their longing to be somewhere else, with each party nostalgic for a different place – the Caribbean, southern Europe, or perhaps a different part of the UK – usually, though not always, somewhere the speaker might regard as home.

  Myrtle Avenue, Hatton, from London (1994)

  In the sequence after Ridley Road, Robinson ‘discovers’ Defoe’s house in
Stoke Newington, where he wrote most of Robinson Crusoe, and London is revealed to him as a place of ‘shipwreck, and the vision of Protestant isolation’. Not long after this, during footage of the Notting Hill Carnival and the float of the Colombian Carnival Association, the narrator reads:

  He asked me if I found it strange that the largest street festival in Europe should take place in London, the most unsociable and reactionary of cities. I said that I didn’t find it strange at all, for only in the most unsociable of cities would there be a space for it, and in any case, for many people London was not at all unsociable.7

  The suggestion here, and elsewhere in the film, was that there is something about London – some ‘absence’, perhaps – that makes it easier than it might be elsewhere for incoming cultures to establish themselves, but that perhaps also limits the extent to which London’s diverse cultures experience each other.

  Towards the end of the film, Robinson makes his way along Fleet Street, where he has to be prevented from attacking the Lord Mayor during a parade, to the portico of the Royal Exchange, outside the Bank of England, where he declares: ‘The true identity of London is in its absence. As a city, it no longer exists. In this alone it is truly modern: London was the first metropolis to disappear.’ I had wondered if the last line of this rhetorical assertion might not exceed the terms of the character’s licence, but it did seem to echo something about the state of London as an idea. Notions of absence, however, had been implicit in the project from its beginning, whether as ‘the absence of Continental diversions’, as the idea that London suffered – or benefited – from an absence of a (known) identity, or as an identity that could be characterised as a sense of absence. Apart from these generalisations, there were a number of candidates for specific things that were absent – the memory of the historic centre, for instance, obscured by the increasing blandness of the spaces of the banking and finance industries, which had driven out most other forms of economic activity and were staffed to a great extent by commuters from outside London; the port, and its once-numerous shipping in the river. The absence of metropolitan government, of a credible London newspaper (the Evening Standard is read all over the south-east of England), even the lack of topographical logic in London’s territorial subdivision into boroughs, all contributed to a sense that Londoners had only a very vague idea of what London was, or simply did not need to know. Perhaps London’s economic dominance makes this unnecessary. In any case, people who have lived in London all their lives often have only a very limited knowledge of its topography. A good deal of the above can be dismissed as a feature of any large capital city, where the national often eclipses the civic, but anyone who has ever tried to buy a postcard of London will have noticed that it is a city that lacks a contemporary self-image.

  Such images, in any case, have probably always been misleading. In the nineteenth century, London’s population grew from about 860,000 in 1801 to 6.5 million in 1901. Although the children of Londoners stood a better chance of surviving than many elsewhere in the country, most of this increase was the result of in-migration either from the rest of the UK or abroad. Not only that, but many migrants did not stay in the city, so the actual extent of in-migration was even higher than the growth in the population suggests. A ‘typical’ Londoner of the nineteenth century might be imagined, not as a cab-driver or a publican, but as young, isolated, poor and newly arrived from somewhere else, probably more so than today. Even now, net migration into London is principally by people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine.8

  Similar things can be said of other aspects of English culture. Leaving aside industrial items such as white bread, gin and sugar cubes, or niche-market regional revivals, whatever might amount to an ‘English’ cuisine, for instance, has been very hard to find since the decline in the agricultural workforce during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or perhaps for even longer, since the establishment of national markets centred on London. Agricultural decline (which was one of the factors that drove migrants to London) was partly the result of importing cheaper food, often from Britain’s colonies. At the same time, the cuisines of cultures colonised by the British and others began to find their way to Britain. The result is that the stereotype of unattractive ‘British’ food, which is still not difficult to find, contrasts with an enormous variety of imported and hybrid cuisines that is probably more extensive than that in places where some kind of indigenous cuisine survives.

  It is apparently an assumption of ‘classical’ economics that a nation, having established some comparative advantage in producing particular goods or services, should strive to import as much of the remainder of its material and other needs as possible. I came across this idea only recently and, to someone who can remember the 1960s, when there seemed to be a near-permanent balance of payments crisis, it came as something of a surprise. I had always thought that an industrial economy’s success was more likely to be indicated by the volume and quality of its exports. Culturally, an unwillingness to make things might seem unattractive, but as an indicator of wealth, imports do make sense, given that, in the long run, they confirm the ability of the importing economy to generate the means to pay for them. A high level of imports might therefore be seen to indicate success, rather than failure, and certainly seems to have characterised the UK’s economy for long enough for it to be regarded as traditional.

  If the everyday experience of London in the early 1990s really was characterised by some more or less definable sense of absence, combined with an apparent comparative openness to incoming cultures, perhaps this has something to do with London’s or the UK’s economy. In a recent essay,9 the film historian Paul Dave referred to the film London in the context of Ellen Meiksins Wood’s book The Pristine Culture of Capitalism (1991). Having considered the various declinist scenarios of post-war British economic history, Wood asks the question: ‘Is Britain, then, a peculiar capitalism or is it peculiarly capitalist?’ and argues that it is the latter. She also offers an explanation for what sounds rather like Robinson’s ‘problem of London’:

  What American tourists today think of as the characteristically ‘European’ charm of the major Continental cities – the cafés, the fountains, the craftsmanship, the particular uses of public space – owes much to the legacy of burgherdom and urban patriciates … This kind of urban culture was overtaken very early in England by the growth of the national market centred in London … Today’s urban landscape in Britain – the undistinguished modern architecture, the neglect of public services and amenities from the arts to transportation, the general seediness – is not an invention of Thatcherism alone but belongs to a longer pattern of capitalist development and the commodification of all social goods, just as the civic pride of Continental capitals owes as much to the traditions of burgher luxury and absolutist ostentation as to the values of modern urbanism and advanced welfare capitalism.10

  This statement locates the origin of London’s ‘absence of Continental diversions’ in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, at the time that the English began to colonise other parts of the world, and it is not difficult to see a propensity for colonisation in ‘the commodification of all social goods’, as Robinson Crusoe and his contemporaries in the sugar-growing business amply demonstrated. The urban landscape that Wood describes, which is particularly typical of London, can be seen as the current manifestation of a quality that has endured through pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial periods.

  What is particularly intriguing about London in 2003, rather than in 1992, is that the post-colonial, cosmopolitan make-up of its population is juxtaposed with a physical form that, while it largely remains in the dilapidated condition to which Wood alludes, is increasingly the subject of initiatives by people who might be construed as members of a previously absent ‘burgherdom’, whose aim is to make urban experience in London more like that of a certain kind of European city. Examples of this tendency might include Lord Rogers’s Urban Task Force, various p
rojects of the Architecture Foundation, the RIBA’s award of its Gold Medal to the city of Barcelona in 1999, and the creation of new and successful public buildings and other spaces, such as Tate Modern, the London Eye and the central London riverside generally.

  One wonders if the culture that Wood describes, which seems to be very much a characteristic of the era of colonisation, might be changing. Latterday burgherdom has emerged in the context of an economy that, while it shows few signs of becoming a European-style social democracy, is now inevitably more closely linked to that of mainland Europe than for several centuries. The call for an urban revival, for example, is underpinned by the idea that, in order to maintain its appeal to the international financial sector, London needs to upgrade its amenities to the level of more civilised European cities. Generally speaking, this project is largely, though not exclusively, the province of a white, well-heeled middle or even ruling (if not exactly upper) class; but it does, arguably, represent a commitment to the kind of public and other spaces in which London’s potential to become a genuinely cosmopolitan city might be realised.

  At the same time, ‘regeneration’ is both accompanied by and accomplished through the ‘discovery’ of previously overlooked value in neighbourhoods and property often occupied by the people most characteristic of this cosmopolitan city, who are usually among the first to be pushed out when ‘regeneration’ occurs and values rise. This point is frequently made, but a more fundamental question might be whether the cultural diversity and richness of old-fashioned, hard-faced London – the London of ‘capitalist development and the commodification of all social goods’, which is the economic reality from which the present-day post-colonial city has emerged – are actually opposed by the economic and cultural changes that the current attempts at quasi-European make-over arguably exemplify.