The View From the Train

by Patrick Keiller

  Despite the apparent decline in phantom ride production during the 1900s (in the UK at least) their exhibition continued. In 1904 George C. Hale, a former chief fire officer of Kansas City, began to exhibit phantom rides and other panoramas in spaces fitted out as replicas of American railway carriages, known initially as ‘Hale’s Tours and Scenes of the World’. At the height of their popularity, Hale’s Tours had sites throughout the United States and in many other countries, opening in the UK in 1906 as ‘Hale’s Tours of the World’. In the tradition of the fairground ride, which continues today in simulations of space travel and other kinds of flight, Hale’s Tours offered trips to ‘the colonies or any part of the world (without luggage!)’ for sixpence. Descriptions of their premises, in which the benches shook and the films were accompanied by the sounds of steam and whistles, recall the space described in Robert W. Paul’s October 1895 patent application for a ‘time machine’24 that preceded his first screen projections. This was suggested by H. G. Wells’s novel, and is another indication of the parallel between time travel and the railway panorama alluded to by Louis Jourdan’s line in Letter to an Unknown Woman. In the UK, Hale’s Tours had sites in London (one at 165 Oxford Street) and in other cities, and though the UK company does not appear to have survived for long,25 at the height of their international popularity Hale’s Tours were ‘the largest chain of theatres exclusively showing films before 1906’.26

  Tom Gunning has characterised cinema’s early period as ‘the cinema of attractions’,27 observing that after 1907 ‘the cinema of attractions does not disappear with the dominance of narrative, but rather goes underground, both into certain avant-garde practices and as a component of narrative films’.28 In David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945), there is a curious echo of Promio’s supposed first use of the moving camera. Celia Johnson (‘Laura’) is sitting by the window of a compartment on a train between ‘Milford Junction’ and ‘Ketchworth’, with a back-projected panorama of a near-dark English landscape outside and, in voice-over:

  I stared out of that railway carriage window into the dark, and watched the dim trees and the telegraph posts slipping by, and through them I saw Alec and me – Alec and me – perhaps a little younger than we are now but just as much in love, and with nothing in the way [the panorama is now daylit] – I saw us in Paris [a superimposition appears], in a box at the opera, the orchestra was tuning up – then we were in Venice, drifting along the Grand Canal in a gondola with the sound of mandolins coming to us over the water – I saw us travelling far away together, all the places I’ve always longed to go – I saw us leaning on the rail of a ship looking at the sea and the stars – standing on a tropical beach in the moonlight with the palm trees sighing above us – then the palm trees changed into those pollarded willows by the canal before the level crossing – and all the silly dreams disappeared – and I got out at Ketchworth [the panorama has ended], and gave up my ticket and walked home as usual, quite soberly and without any wings, without any wings at all.

  This sequence, with its added superimpositions and narration, confirms an interpretation of the railway panorama – suggested by Promio’s first examples – as an image of the stream of consciousness. In 1913 Sigmund Freud wrote, famously, that psychoanalysts might usefully tell their patients to ‘say whatever goes through your mind. Act as though, for instance, you were a traveller sitting next to the window of a railway carriage and describing to someone inside the carriage the changing views which you are seeing outside.’29 The phantom ride, on the other hand, more particularly resembles Henri Bergson’s ‘predatory’30 image of duration introduced in Matter and Memory (1896), in which the present is ‘the invisible progress of the past gnawing into the future’.31 The forward-moving cine camera, with its reciprocating claw and rotating shutter, might almost have been expressly devised to accomplish this ‘gnawing’. Bergson’s subsequent interpretation and critique of the cinematographic mechanism as a model of perception was to become a founding text for much contemporary film and other critical theory;32 cinema’s fragmentation of continuous duration is rarely so demonstratively enacted as by the railway and similar forward-moving films of the medium’s first decade.

  Gunning’s distinction between ‘the cinema of attractions’ and what came later parallels other descriptions of the spatial transformations characteristic of the period. For Henri Lefebvre, ‘around 1910 a certain space was shattered’33 so that early cinema, arguably, offers a glimpse of this space just before (or possibly during) the period in which its ‘shattering’ occurred. One might even imagine the cinematographic mechanism itself as implicated in the ‘shattering’.34 As Walter Benjamin wrote, ‘then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second’.35 Benjamin’s ‘dynamite of the tenth of a second’ is usually understood as a reference to montage; his essay mentions nothing of cinema earlier than the work of Gance and Vertov, but it seems to me at least as intriguing to imagine the prison-world burst asunder by juggernauts comprised of cine cameras, locomotives and electric trams, after whose passing nothing was ever the same again.

  13

  Imaging

  On an overcast afternoon at the end of August 2008, I was cycling along Harrow Road, in north-west London, towards Harlesden. Passing Kensal Green Cemetery, I saw that a section of its high wall had collapsed, apparently not long before, so that passers-by could see in from the street for the first time, perhaps, since the wall was built in 1832, and the cemetery opened in January the following year. According to the newsletter of the Greater London Industrial Archaeology Society,1 a hundred-metre section of the half-mile-long wall collapsed at around midnight on 30 August 2006. Most of the bricks fell into the cemetery, so that although many monuments were damaged, no one was injured. The wall varies between ten and twelve feet in height, and is a grade II listed structure, with stone copings and foundations five feet deep. It was built to keep out bodysnatchers.

  I had not seen inside the cemetery since the early 1980s, when I visited a few times as an architectural tourist and would-be photographer. I was reminded of these visits, and that I had cycled along the same route once before on a Sunday afternoon in December 1980, when I set out to look for a place I had seen from a passing train a few days earlier. It was a north-facing hillside of allotments behind the corner of two streets of suburban houses, beyond the railway’s bridge above the North Circular Road. I’m not sure why I went to look for the place on a bicycle, as it was quite a long way: I think it was probably because the vehicle I then owned was out of action. The view had seemed to me a curiously northern-looking landscape to find in outer London, and I had thought it might be a subject for a photograph, which it was; but it led me to another, more compelling spatial subject for both a photograph and, a few months later, a first film, so that this earlier bicycle journey had been, for me, a significant, perhaps even life-changing, event.

  Kensal Green Cemetery, 1980

  It was not the first time that I had been to Harrow Road with a camera during that year. In May, I had resorted to going out very early to various parts of inner London in the hope of producing photographs of the urban landscape. One of these locations was Harrow Road, between the north end of Ladbroke Grove and Harlesden, the stretch that passes Kensal Green Cemetery. None of the resulting photographs, which included some of the cemetery, were very successful, although there is one, of the Harley Gospel Hall, at a bend of Harley Road, NW10, alongside the railway, of which the subject, at least, recalls some of O. G. S. Crawford’s photographs of Southampton in the 1930s. It was not a very original photograph. In the view of the street in Google Earth, someone has posted what looks like a found colour transparency of the same subject,2 seen from almost the same angle, at what looks like about the same date.

  Harley Road, London NW10, 1980

  As far as I know, the literature of urban cycling is not very extensive. The bicycle is better established in a rural context. One of Alain Resnais’s short films, Châte
aux de France (1948), was made on a journey or series of journeys by bicycle. I am not much of a cyclist, but during the last decade I have been cycling as a means of getting around London. My bicycle dates from the early 1970s, or perhaps even earlier. I don’t know exactly how old it is, but it is light and fast, and still has its original Weinmann centre-pull brakes, which were once considered glamorous. In my experience, if the journey is long enough and the road not too busy, the slightly detached condition of cycling can encourage lengthy associations of ideas or recollections. Walking, driving and looking out of the windows of trains, buses, aeroplanes, and so on, offer similar possibilities, but there seems to be something about the experience of riding a bicycle, the way in which one is both connected to and moving above the ground, that promotes a particular state of mind.

  In August 2008, I was about two-thirds through a ten-month period of intermittent cinematography for another film, not yet complete as I write.3 Apart from the collapsed state of the cemetery wall, and the memory of the previous journey, the ride did not lead to any very significant discovery, but it took place in a curious atmosphere of expectation, exacerbated by the weather, which recalled that described in the opening paragraphs of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, in which it was becoming clear that the ‘worst’ of the collapse of the financial sector was still to come, an apprehension confirmed by the failure of Lehman Brothers two weeks later, and subsequent events, all of which felt at the time as if they might constitute a historic moment. Any sense of justification that accompanied this long-predicted turn of events was tempered for me by fear of financial shipwreck, following a misunderstanding with my employer, and especially since I was riding to what advertisements describe as Europe’s largest car supermarket, in Harlesden, where I had identified a possible replacement for my car. I had bought the car in 1995, when making a film called Robinson in Space (1997), which had involved journeys all over England, but did not believe I could realistically expect it to survive another annual test, due very shortly. It was an absurd destination for a bicycle ride, and an absurd time to be contemplating any major purchase, especially something as questionable as a car, but it would have been very difficult to continue the project without one. I had ridden across Kensington Gardens, up Ladbroke Grove, past the junction with Portobello Road, the setting for some of the final moments of The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) and parts of the film of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal (1983), over the railway and the canal into Harrow Road which, with Harlesden, is a part of London I have come to associate with creative anxieties of one kind or another, some of them dating from the years immediately before and after 1979, when I was migrating unsteadily between careers, others earlier. A few days later, I decided to have the old car repaired, so that the journey, and much of the accompanying anxiety, were for nothing.

  * * *

  I arrived in London in September 1967 to become an architecture student, a few weeks after my seventeenth birthday. From around this time, I remember a view of the backs of houses, seen from a train as it passed through what I later identified as Willesden Junction station, and came to recognise as an indication of imminent arrival at Euston. Willesden Junction station is in Harlesden, not Willesden (as a former borough, Willesden, like Hornsey and West Ham, is difficult to place), and is very close to Harrow Road, which continues, crossing the North Circular Road, to Wembley and beyond. I am not sure when I first travelled by the route to Euston, but the journey would probably have been from Coventry, and was either just before or not long after starting university. I remember thinking what an endless undertaking it would be to rebuild the vast area of London’s worn-out Victorian suburbs. I had travelled to London many times before, but usually either by car, when one mostly passes the fronts of houses, or by train to Paddington, and for some reason the house-backs of Ealing and Notting Hill had failed to prompt this sub-Orwellian response to urban dilapidation.

  About eighteen months later, by then an unsettled and not very successful second-year student, not long after the occupation of the University of London Union building in Malet Street by locked-out LSE students and others, into which I had wandered from what then seemed an unfashionably technocratic Bartlett School of Architecture, I first visited Willesden Junction. I was living in surprisingly alienated circumstances with a friend with first-hand experience of student radicalism in Germany, in a small flat not far from Finchley Road and Frognal station, from which we sometimes travelled to Kew Gardens by the North London Line. At Willesden Junction the line is elevated as it crosses the Bakerloo line and the main lines running out of Euston, so the platforms are high up, with long views over the surrounding landscape. The North London Line crosses other radial main lines at several points as it circumnavigates the city, one of which can be seen from Copenhagen Fields, to the north of St Pancras station, in Alexander Mackendrick’s film The Ladykillers (1955); but at Willesden Junction the crossing coincides with a station, so that one can get off and properly explore the view. Beyond it, the line passes through a landscape of railway lines and other marginal territory, its longest stretch between stops. Attracted by the station and its surroundings, we set out on a day, I think, in February. I was reminded of this visit on reading, recently, that George Soros worked at Willesden Junction as a porter when a student at LSE in the 1950s. It was a time when I was managing on very little sleep, which no doubt exacerbated a euphoric experience of the landscape that might have produced photographs, worthwhile or not, had it occurred to me to take a camera. A few years later, this would have been the primary aim of such a trip, but I did not then have any idea of a future making images, so that this first excursion was perhaps closer than any since to a dérive, although there were only two of us, and my clearest memory of it now is that it ended in the Galway Bay Restaurant, a celebrated café of which, sadly, I can find no trace. I think it was in Station Road. The meals were served on oval pictorial plates.

  A few months later, we moved to an unfurnished flat in Kentish Town, a miserable post-war construction in a one-house gap made in a terrace by a bomb, near Kentish Town West station, also on the North London Line. I had found the flat advertised on a shop-window notice board. The rent was £7.00 a week. Six years later, in 1975, by which time I was in full-time professional employment, we moved again, to a flat overlooking Parliament Hill, where I stayed until January 1981, so that I lived on the North London Line for a total of about twelve years. From the flat in Hampstead, we could see the trains, both passenger and freight. Among the latter there were and still are shipments of nuclear waste from the power stations at Bradwell, now being decommissioned, and Sizewell, which join the main west coast route at Willesden Junction, en route to Sellafield.

  In the late 1960s, the North London Line ran from Richmond to Broad Street, in the City. The trains were never very busy except, perhaps, on Saturday afternoons and other occasions when Arsenal were playing at home. They had three carriages, the central one of which had the Victorian no-corridor layout, with nine separate ten-seat compartments in any of which a person might find him- or herself isolated with several possibly ill-disposed fellow-passengers. These carriages were eventually modified in about 1980, in an attempt to reduce vandalism. In the mid 1970s, a style of large-scale multicolour calligraphic graffiti appeared on walls and other surfaces along the line, in which the two leading tags were ‘Colonel Cav’ and ‘Columbo’. Not much of a television viewer, I didn’t find out who Columbo was until later. I wondered if Colonel Cav was a character in a comic. Cav was, I thought, short for Cavendish, but it seems more likely that it was an abbreviation of cavalry. The trains ran every twenty minutes.

  During the 1970s, I sometimes travelled on the line as a commuter from Highbury and Islington to Hampstead Heath, returning from the North East London Polytechnic’s school of architecture in Walthamstow, where I taught one afternoon a week. Until then, I had encountered it mainly in connection with pleasure, sometimes just the pleasure of riding on the trains. I think this arises partl
y from the possibility the route offers to circumnavigate the city, and hence, perhaps, to become more familiar with something that is conventionally unknowable, inadequately experienced in a journey towards or away from the centre. In an essay ‘Benjamin’s Paris, Freud’s Rome: Whose London?’ (1999)4 in which he argues that London is ‘an essentially unsatisfactory and even frustrating linguistic structure’ – assigning it, in the end, to Mrs Wilberforce, the leading character of The Ladykillers – Adrian Rifkin discusses the similar character of the 253 bus route, which then ran between Aldgate and Euston station, via Hackney. These routes recall the ancient practice of circumambulation, which has been carried out in many cultures, over many centuries, for a variety of purposes; recently, for example, by Iain Sinclair for London Orbital (2002).

  Despite a succession of post-privatisation operators, the North London Line still seems to be known by its old name, and has been recognised as the prototype for and already-existing fragment of what one day might be a London orbital railway. In the 1980s it was added to the underground map, since when it has no longer seemed so exclusively the preserve of people who live and work along it. When Broad Street station was demolished, the route was extended east from Dalston to North Woolwich (via West Ham, where it crossed the northern outfall sewer, along the top of which is a path that leads to Beckton), and with this modification, the extraordinary industrial architecture of Silvertown and Beckton, and the Woolwich Ferry, became more easily accessible by train from other parts of London (at the time of writing, the line beyond Stratford is closed, to reopen as part of the Docklands Light Railway).5 Crossing the ferry, a tourist could return to the centre through south London.