London Overground

by Iain Sinclair

  The Belsize Park hinterland, that triangle between Fitzjohn’s Avenue, Adelaide Road and Haverstock Hill, was saturated with anti-psychiatrists, gestalt therapists, kundalinic gymnasts teasing the sex snake from the spinal bow. The shadow of the old man in the garden fell across all of them. Freud’s brief London coda, his dying reveries, the smoke, the flies, the packed library, the bonsai forest of votive figures on the desktop, ice-crawled down the contours. If a social scientist contrived a geological map for class trauma, you would colour this zone as yellow as fine-grained sand.

  Visiting R. D. Laing, the mind-guru of the period, in his Belsize Park basement flat in 1967, was confirming the evolution from the grand bourgeois pretensions of Maresfield Gardens to the nakedness of elective bohemia. But still the patients, the troubled ones, made their appointments with their charismatic prophets. Freud and Laing, outsiders in London, agreed to perform, engage with, challenge and interpret, as part of the price for mastering their true calling as writers. Fictions of truth. A cinema of confession and seduction achieved without film. Laing wanted to fill mainstream television screens with a single struck match that would take half an hour to flare. And with the infinitely slow pouring of a glass of water. It was too shocking. Freud’s special patient, the poet H. D., was part of an experiment in using film to explore extreme psychic states and their relationship to surface reality. In 1930 she appeared with Paul Robeson in a piece called Borderline, funded by her lover, the novelist Bryher. Belsize Park floated on unmade projects, confrontations between psychiatrists, underground documentarists and culture fixers.

  I arrived in Laing’s flat with a film crew of my own. There were no carpets and not much furniture. A gramophone playing the Beatles’ Rubber Soul was tended by a young lad, Laing’s son. The room where we spread ourselves opened on a wilderness garden. Somebody had cut the outline of a horse from one of the Sunday newspapers and positioned it on the wooden floor.

  The youth who accompanied me, recently sent down from Oxford over some standard drug infraction, and soon to become a Laing client, asked a question about tactics and confrontation. With the arrogance of the privileged half-born, he told the anti-psychiatrist that he was guilty of trying to induce a flash of consciousness, with no idea of how it was going to happen.

  They were, both of them, cross-legged, red-eyed and comprehensively stoned.

  ‘You either shoot them or you turn them on,’ Laing said. ‘And there is no violent, coercive, authoritarian mode of persuasion or seduction that will turn people on – except to be turned on oneself, as far as one can allow oneself to go. And that seems to me to be all that you are saying.’

  My own – and only – engagement with place was through mapping. And walking. No sooner was I settled in my Hampstead room in 1966, and travelling to a part-time job force-feeding general studies to motor mechanics in Walthamstow, than I plotted an excursion as a method of linking figures who struck me as binding the territory together, contributing to that underlying and still-unexposed London mythology. Tim Powers, in his 1983 novel The Anubis Gates, managed the trick without leaving California: there is a portal, a time gate, accessible on Hampstead Heath, leading to a subterranea of Egyptian magic (Freud’s figures come to life), chthonic monsters and archaic poetry.

  I roped in a couple of companions, floaters from Dublin, and led them to Golders Green Crematorium, where we paid our respects to Freud’s ashes. All that heat and smoke reduced to an ornamental urn. Between mourners, we processed the paved walkways, the Italianate colonnades, failing to acknowledge the traces of other London figures cremated here. All those already recorded, installed on commemorative tablets. Or those still to come, slots reserved for a future date. Anna Freud and Doris Lessing from Finchley and West Hampstead. The architect Erno Goldfinger with his brutalist towers, twin spectres of Westway and Blackwall Tunnel approach. Concrete obelisks for a city that never happened. And Joe Orton: butchered in Islington. Bram Stoker banishing Count Dracula to Purfleet. But our biggest miss of all was Percy Wyndham Lewis whose trilogy – The Childermass, Monstre Gai, Malign Fiesta – was the most accurate topographic chart I knew of the soul’s attempt to penetrate the labyrinth of the radiant city. ‘Some homing solitary shadow is continually arriving in the restless dust of the turnpike,’ Lewis wrote. Prefiguring past and future pilgrims, from John Bunyan to John Clare. The almost-living in pursuit of the not-quite-dead.

  From Freud to Karl Marx, by way of the Llandin, as Parliament Hill was known to antiquarians. We touched the stone of assembly, a recent intervention proving the site of the Gorsedd of the Druids, a sacred elevation. And moved on to the massive head of Marx in Highgate Cemetery. Here was the materialist antidote to arcane speculations constructing an essentially conservative version of the city involving hierarchies of power, privileged access to the gods, and lines of terrestrial force that squabbled for precedence like our current energy suppliers, the frackers and reckless spendthrifts of fossil resources.

  Karl’s glowering, leonine head was an iron chess piece honoured, on the day of that first London dérive, by small parties of excited Chinese men in long coats and Mao caps. There was no strict pattern to this walk: Freud, Marx, and a vague attempt to identify the room where Rimbaud stayed with Verlaine in Royal College Street. The notion of these provocative exiles taking up residence in London gave that other metropolis, the city within the city, the city of our imagination, a certain lustre.

  Drifting through the graves and memorials of St Pancras Old Church, we found ourselves on the disputed towpath of the Regent’s Canal. The narrative of our pinball zigzag between persons of interest evaporated. We were liberated by the absence of memory. We infiltrated a terrain suspended between eras of economic adventurism; the working barges had gone and the barriers and mesh fences of the energy companies had not yet arrived.

  Railway cathedrals on the horizon. Gas holders. Allotments. Warehouses. We carried on, making a detour around the tunnel under Islington, and pushing east until we arrived at Victoria Park – which reminded one of our party, a Francophile, of Louis Aragon’s surrealist excursion with André Breton to the Buttes-Chaumont. The Parisian park was a ‘shared mirage’. It destroyed boredom. The meandering paths and shaded avenues suggested ‘a great revelation that might transform life and destiny’. We emerged into the streets of somewhere shabby, self-contained, and utterly mysterious: a place called Hackney.

  The cinema has disappeared from Pond Street. The Royal Free Hospital, an intimidating, multi-balconied hulk, links us to Denmark Hill, to the Maudsley and King’s College Hospital. A TV woman, her prompt notes kept out of shot, is delivering a snappy piece about healthy meal initiatives for patients, alongside a KFC monster burger bus stop dressed with the slogan: FILL YOUR TANK. Listening to Andrew’s creaking joints and squelching boots, I can’t decide if we should check him in to outpatients or find a pub.

  With the reappearance of the Overground at Hampstead Heath, our steps quickened. We were returned to the actual, the facts of the street. An architect called Robert Dearman had gussied up his narrow grey strips of window with a set of five bright-coloured Olympic rings. They struck a redundant note on a street with more impatient cars than people, so far from the Stratford development zone. The misted glass panels, I realized, were a design conceit, intended to reference a top-down view of swimming lanes or a section of the running track.

  I let Gospel Oak pass without comment. We were too tight against the railway that loomed above us to go back to my old source book, Prehistoric London: Its Mounds and Circles by E. O. Gordon. ‘At the foot of Parliament Hill is Gospel Oak Station,’ Gordon wrote. ‘A name which connects the Druidic with the Christian religion, and links British and Saxon customs.’ I swallowed the story and recorded Andrew smiling behind his dark glasses, belly rumbling.

  Kentish Town West to Camden Road was suspension of disbelief, a necessary sliding away and letting go. There were too many railways. Too many carpet shops. Too many Hackney migrants from the co
mmunal era of the 1960s had settled on these welcoming slopes. A beggar started his pitch, looked at our ruin, and thought better of it. He gestured towards Kötting with a generous can.

  Marina Warner, inheritor of Angela Carter’s role as fabulist, recaster of fairy stories, wise woman of the west, lives here in a book-filled house threatened by the vibrations of passing trains. Marina investigated the way that local public houses were associated with the myth of old women as witches, predators, baby boilers, cannibals. The loss of the names of hostelries for travellers and traders, Old Mother Red Cap, Jorene Celeste, was felt as much as the loss of the buildings themselves, their inevitable conversion into more commercial enterprises. ‘Does any of this matter?’ Warner asked. ‘On the scale of things, with all the other problems near and far, hardly. But there are reasons for minding, apart from the general loss of memories and stories that connect people and places.’

  Marina regrets the dissolution of spaces in which unsponsored yarn-spinners, drunks, derelicts, ragged passerines, can tell their tales. Oral histories must have legitimacy beyond the remit of respectful academic recorders. Writers with the peculiar ability to process this free-floating material, hard-working soaks like Julian Maclaren-Ross and Robin Cook, have been unhoused. It was breathtaking to watch how Cook could, over a heavy session, after a reading in Compendium Books, take a story involving characters he’d never met, or even heard of, and make it completely his own. An improvement on the original.

  Andrew wasn’t buying it. ‘People drift and leave their marks,’ he said. ‘Dogs’ droppings on the end of the shoe.’

  When I recorded him outside the station at Kentish Town West, he gestured derisively towards the Overground map. It was that time of night, the hour of slippage. A young man coming up from the platform had the rat-chewed hair of runaway Rimbaud. He was prematurely grey. Fever-flushed: burned by booze and pills, not suntanned. He was chewing his nails to the quick. A yawning turnip head secured with the relic of a tartan scarf. Rimbaud was fascinated by the Underground. He wrote about railways emerging on all levels from stations like grand hotels.

  The pub we chose was the Abbey Tavern on Kentish Town Road. I don’t know what Marina Warner makes of that name, but it worked for me: ecclesiastical pit stop with a dash of W. B. Yeats and Dublin. The foundation stone was set on the 3rd of December 1891 by Mr A. T. T. Cowling. The door instructed patrons to DRINK EAT GARDEN.

  Refuelling was a requirement, but sitting down would carry the risk of our not being able to rise again. Pints were delivered, swilled back, replenished, before a bowl of steaming fish pie made it from microwave to table. The pub interior was high-ceilinged and roomy, but intimate enough to allow the lurching approach of a person in a black satin bowling jacket who introduced himself as Tony Martin. He looked like trouble in Christmas wrappings. Kötting had taken off his boots and placed the hideous objects on the table, where he could keep an eye on them as he hobbled towards the bar, hoping to secure a stronger fork, and a linen napkin on which to pop his blisters.

  He was close to done, but the food and drink, and a couple of hours in the Abbey Tavern, should stiffen his resolve for the final haul. This was not the moment to tell him that we’d be detouring by way of Royal College Street.

  ‘I don’t like the way you keep kicking the kerbstones,’ he said, as he set down my pint. ‘You’ve been struggling, son, since Kensal Rise. That library on the pavement took the wind from your sails.’

  Tony Martin, whose hair was black as cuttlefish ink, and whose remaining teeth were yellow as candlewax, offered to sell Kötting a pair of slip-on dancing pumps. His own. For a tenner in the hand. Or another pint of Bacardi and coke. He’d take the old boots in part exchange, for use in the garden, as plant pots for olive trees. Andrew snatched them back. They slopped with blood and worse.

  Our new friend’s name rang a carillon of alarm bells. Could this be Tony Martin the Norfolk farmer convicted of blowing away a burglar from the Travelling community with a pump-action shotgun? Unlikely. It was worse than that: an unemployed impersonator of the well-known San Francisco crooner, once married to Cyd Charisse. Tony was about to launch into his interpretation of ‘Lover Come Back to Me’. It was time to make our excuses and get back on the road.

  A few days later I took the Overground to Camden Town. I wanted to check out the Oxfam bookshop a few yards up the road from the Abbey Tavern. It had been shut when we limped past, but I had an instinct that something in there was waiting for me. Sure enough, after a thorough scan of the usual necrophile stock and overpriced nonentities in the locked glass case, I excavated a copy of Knut Hamsun’s Chapter the Last in a nice 1929 blue-cloth US edition. I parted with £4.99. ‘Truly we are vagabonds in the earth,’ it began. ‘We wander by roads and trackless wastes, at times we crawl, at times we walk upright and trample one another down.’

  Camden Town to Haggerston

  It was that point, around the mid-watch of the night, when walking becomes dreaming. Legs could not remember a time when they weren’t keeping my weight off the pavements. Those grey Camden flagstones were another sky. Tarmac was treacle. My soft cartilage was so worn down that I could hear the grinding of bone on bone. I was a xylophone of improperly attached skeletal parts. Kötting was thick meat, sploshing and squelching, as blister-pods popped and burst in an obscene harvest.

  ‘On islands,’ he said. ‘On small islands, elephants get smaller. And rats get bigger. Until they meet, somewhere in the middle. Imagine a rat the size of a baby elephant.’

  He was losing it fast. A late Overground train, windows illuminated by an uncanny storm-light glow, ferried a party of circling warlocks across the Camden Road bridge: a Jules Verne submarine out of its element.

  The house to which I’d brought Andrew, while letting him believe we were on the most direct route for Hackney, was set with a plain tablet, very much like a gravestone: as if a double coffin had been slid straight into the white wall. THE FRENCH POETS / PAUL VERLAINE / AND / ARTHUR RIMBAUD / LIVED HERE / MAY–JULY 1873.

  It was enough for now to have it confirmed, that this was indeed the location from which the poets, with their few words of English, set out in combative and temporary alliance on long walks across the city that symbolized the moderne. From this window – which window? – Rimbaud registered the secular cathedrals of the stations, King’s Cross and St Pancras. ‘Je vois des spectres nouveaux roulant à travers l’épaisse et éternelle fumée de charbon.’

  Odd couples. Coal smoke. Intertwined smoke serpents from the engravings Gustave Doré made to illustrate Blanchard Jerrold’s London: A Pilgrimage. The two men, the English journalist and the French artist, were yet another pair of questing urban wanderers, tramping in the footsteps of Dickens and Henry Mayhew, in the expectation of forcing the uncatalogued sprawl to give up its secrets.

  London: A Pilgrimage was published in 1872, when Rimbaud and Verlaine visited London for the first time, taking lodgings at 34–5 Howland Street, off Tottenham Court Road. Overground railways and cavernous arches were part of the nightmare dreamscape of the modern city, the new Babylon. Rimbaud, in the period of his runaway vagabondage in Paris, slept under the arches. Edith Sitwell tells us that the hands of the young poet ‘were covered with chilblains, no matter what the weather was like, since they never recovered from the icy nights he spent huddled under the railway arches of Paris’. Doré’s final engraving for Jerrold’s attempt at a microcosm of London is called Under the Arches. It depicts rough sleepers huddled under a bridge alongside a bateau ivre, a drunken boat freighted with the dead. Smoke-shrouded trains, wherever they are found, crawling on ladders above the dark chasms of the imperial city, are ferrying the damned across the Styx.

  Ludgate Hill – A Block in the Street is the best known of Doré’s railway visions: a steam locomotive, frozen mid-bridge, as we look towards the melon dome of St Paul’s, down the stalled highway of Fleet Street, with its omnibuses, carts, hearses, hawkers, idlers and workers in their multitudes. With obe
lisks, spires, chimneys, trade signs.

  Jerrold the nightwalker records the first stirrings of outlying districts: ‘The sometime silent City is filling at a prodigious rate. The trim omnibuses from Clapham and Fulham, from Hackney and Hampstead, make a valiant opposition to the suburban lines of railway. The bridges are choked with vehicles.’

  Doré depicts The Workmen’s Train as an arched subterranean vault illuminated by hanging globes, while the first glimmers of daylight are projected through a line of apertures. Labourers with their bundles crowd into third-class trucks. From the start, railways asserted hierarchy, each in his place. The slave classes setting out before dawn. Clerks next, breakfasted in Hackney and Holloway. And then, first class, the merchants and bankers, in time to make a show before taking a leisurely luncheon at the club. Rimbaud called the regiments of London’s poor ‘poverty’s cattle’.

  The Doré illustration that returns me to our walk is titled Over London by Rail. The arch of a bridge becomes the frame of the engraving; the tight terrace curves away to the next bridge, on which, inevitably, a train is making its black-smoke transit. We are invited to stare down into a nest of backyards, laid out like pens, making this segment of London into a factory or factory farm.

  One of the few English words Rimbaud brought with him to London in September 1872 was ‘railway’. V. P. Underwood in an essay dealing with ‘English influences in Rimbaud’s work’, published by Adam International Review in 1954, describes a period when Rimbaud stayed with his mother and sister at 12 Argyle Square, near King’s Cross. ‘Crowded trains hurry in all directions, and they stop to watch the new Metropolitan line, partly underground, its trains dashing in and out of tunnels. Is it not this that makes Rimbaud imagine, long before Fritz Lang, his vast Palais-Promontoire which leurs railways flanquent, creusent, surplombent? Most of his visionary Villes of modernity or futurity seem to have points de départ in London landscapes.’