My London

An article by Miranda Gold. Originally published in The London Magazine, August/September 2019.

My map of London stubbornly resists sensible navigation; temporally as much as spatially its tracks crisscross timeframes and boroughs – closer to the logic of a dreamscape than an ordinance survey. Scattered as my version of the city is, it all lies North of the river. Within a few weeks, though, I’ll catch up with the boxes waiting for me in Camberwell –

‘Camberwell?’ A neighbour asked me when I told her I was moving, ‘as in South?’

Moving the other side of the river – whether that means North or South to you – is usually either an invitation for a good humoured raise of the eyebrows or seen as outright defection.

When I was growing up South London was another country – I’ve lost my bearings, my Dad would say as soon as we went over the bridge – and I’m still a tourist there, the streets refreshingly free of association. Yet I don’t feel I’m leaving my London behind (the use of the possessive has stirred all manner of neurosis) in part because I was early to adopt the presumptuous habit of incorporating other people’s Londons into my own, which meant I never felt an exclusive attachment to any given postcode, and in part because much of what I’d like to think of as my London isn’t somewhere I can visit – it’s specific times in specific places in a city where the set changes along with the characters – and rightly so: if London’s theatricality is one of the keys to its vitality, then a sense of the ephemeral is surely inevitable. It can feel relentless, though – up goes the scaffolding and year or two later another office block, chain store, blandly shiny and unperturbed by local protest, making those unexpected alleys and passageways, impermeable to continual reinvention, seem miracles of resilience. I’m thinking now of Cecil Court, almost impossibly situated just a couple of turnings from Leicester Square. Easily tagged quaint, idyllic, picturesque – and though it is indeed, it’s no museum of Victoriana but a quietly passionate, treasurefilled thoroughfare drawing bibliophiles, musicologists, map lovers, theatre enthusiasts, and mystics (stories about Mozart composing his first symphony here and T.S. Eliot’s residency probably help too…) While booksellers row might have been whittled down to just a few shops on the Charing Cross Road, Cecil Court ticks to its own deeply felt rhythm, a haven for when you’re feeling a little caught between worlds. I found Bryars and Bryars about a year after it opened, knowing nothing about maps and antique prints, and the owner, patiently bypassing my ignorance, searched until I decided (bizarrely but appropriately) on a 1914 London Underground map for my brother –

‘Someone had this in their pocket just as the world as they knew it changed forever,’ he said as he rolled it up.

It felt a little morbid as a birthday present but I was sold rather than alarmed, and by that point my mind had already wandered off, imagining this 1914 someone. Discovering Bryars and Bryars coincided with my belated fascination with Greek myth and, on mentioning this to the owner, he immediately offered to show me one or two early editions, handling them with a delicate intensity that would make re-entry on to the Charing Cross Road a jarring contrast.

***

My London came most clearly into focus when I was thousands of miles away: San Miguel de Tucuman, Argentina. Eight months on the other side of the equator, asked to describe this city I call home, I found – much to the disappointment of those who asked – that the centre of my London was Camden Town, ’94 – 2003, and, though it’s become somewhere I’m more likely to change branches on the Northern line than head for a night out, it’s still where I feel my London begins, where I can get sentimental about the beer-sticky floors at The Underworld, the buskers under the bridge competing with the ghetto blasters and a drowsy hour watching the boats drift up the canal (I’ve just discovered that there is a word for this unique form of idleness – ‘gongoozling’). Some elements are harder to romanticise – the canalside was always carnage well before the end of the weekend and crossing West Yard to retreat to Black Gull books presented an obstacle course. Before my first trip to the market aged 12, one of an eager band of emerging indie kids, the only recourses I had to anything that had the semblance of rebellion was refusing to say the grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ in school assembly and dodgy wash out purple hair dye. London as theatre came alive then for me with Camden: the vintage costumes, the garish face paint, the props, all fetishized by now to the point of cliché and as predictable as an I LOVE LONDON mug, but I was entranced. I didn’t have the dedication of the goths and yes, within a couple of years I was part of the influx with Suede in their ears rather The Clash, but it was somewhere you could feel peripheral yet still feel at home. Brit-pop was already part of the scene but I didn’t know it by that name and was oblivious to what it represented to the veterans – if I feel now, passing through, that the heart of Camden has been hollowed out, many of those who set up in the early to mid seventies would say it flat lined circa ’94, that the Good Mixer lived up to it’s name before it became the place where one of the Gallaghers speared Graham Coxon with a jibe about his get up (I think we ended up there because it was relatively cheap and they didn’t question our fake IDs).

Hit by the smell of caramelized peanuts and the crush of bodies as I got out of the tube there a few weeks ago, I realised how long it’s been since Camden’s felt familiar. An audience had gathered round the band playing on the corner I tend to associate with promises blared through a loudspeaker that Jesus will save us all as much as buskers. A man staggered across the set and tumbled into another lying, eyes shut, mouth open, on the pavement. I half expected Gem to come round the next corner. Gem was a girl I got to know when I was renting a studio flat on the corner of Delancey Street… Darlin, darlin, I just need another couple of quid, I don’t do heroin, promise I don’t… She was tiny, fierce, pigtails flying behind her as she sped down Chalk Farm Road, up Parkway and Albert Street, sometimes arm in arm with a policeman. One day I’m gonna write a book about all this you know, she told me. I hadn’t seen her for years but then I’m rarely in Camden and she could have moved on… Further down the high street I saw a friend of hers – she wasn’t shy about telling me who was a good egg, who looked out for her –

Oh you mean Gem… He shrugged, either too exhausted for grief or too exhausted by it. Sorry love, they found her body a little while back, it was – well, you know… sorry love…

***

‘[T]o know her, or anyone, one must seek out the people who completed them, even the places […] certain haunting places…’ reflects Clarissa Dalloway in a novel I’ve returned to so often that it almost feels a part of my London. It’s become one of those ‘certain haunting places’ and perhaps one of the reasons it haunts is not just because it houses so many ghosts, but also because it catches the uneasy, yet vital coexistence of rapture and despair. There’s a euphoric passage just two pages in, the momentum building giddily, irrepressibly:

The insistence still takes me off guard - that thrust into the presence of ‘this moment’. There’s an affectionate mockery of the thrill, swelling as perception co-creates – ‘making it up’ – and yet unfathomable, immediate as Septimus’s terrifying visions. London happens in ‘people’s eyes’ as much as the ceaseless activity – Londoners are the audience and the play; here, for this moment at least, love of London is love of life.

Woolf set what she referred to as ‘the mad scene’ in Regents Park. Strangers, passing by or dozing, seem to brush one another’s lives by catching a glimpse of the same scene. The first performance at the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park wasn’t until 1932, ten years after Mrs Dalloway was published, but nevertheless the theatrical elements of the novel feel somehow more resonant for being set there. A Midsummer Night’s Dream was the first play I saw there and I’ve had a peculiarly sentimental attachment to it ever since (every time I hear ‘Such fools we are…’ in Clarissa’s voice, Puck immediately chips in with ‘Lord what fools these mortals be…’) There’s an infectious warmth and generosity of spirit that can ripple through productions here, not least when actors are competing with the elements (and the sirens). Admittedly it’s the particularity of the mood of the audience, the anticipation, the daylight fading through the final acts of an evening performance, the theatre sharing the city rather than sealed off from it – it’s this that stays with me rather than the detail.

One of the few memories I have of my paternal grandfather, Barnet, is set just down from the boathouse, watching the pedaloes, him reading Beatrix Potter aloud. More recently, almost thirty-five years after he died, my dad told me about the bridge in the Rose Garden that he has always associated with his father. I headed up there last week, hardly much of a pilgrimage but ‘seek[ing] out’, I suppose, one of ‘the places that completed’ him. From the top of a gently curving path – along which a memorial plaque on a bench reads ‘Hail to thee Blithe Spirit’ – you can see a series of tiny waterfalls down towards the lake banked by weeping willows. I’d always have chosen a Sunday on the heath over the intensively manicured Regent’s Park (significantly less chance of getting in the way of wedding snaps, instead the delicious illusion that you can find a spot that’s just yours) but on a 60 stolen Friday morning, seeing a couple give up on dragging their suitcases and take a rest amid what might have been a setting from The Dream (think floral bowers), it was difficult to pull myself away.

***

‘Very interesting,’ says Angela Lansbury’s Eglantine, ‘but where do they sell books?’

I’m not sure the stall I’m thinking of would have what Eglantine had in mind. It’s run by a couple whose enthusiasm is so contagious and was such a balm last November, fingers numb with the cold, London contracting, Londoners apparently automated (more Eliot’s ‘strained time-ridden faces’ than Clarissa Dalloway’s ‘triumph and jingle’) that they and their passion for sharing their love of books has imprinted itself on my London. The market was emptying and most of the stalls were empty by the time I got there, but they weren’t in a hurry to pack up, instead the woman sent her partner off to the van to retrieve another armload of paperbacks while she told me about the little girl who’d discovered Alice In Wonderland ‘right here this morning – and I said to her, right away, when you have a book, my darling, you always have company…’ she was very keen to impress this upon me, but then she was sensibly gloved and be-hatted (I, typically, wasn’t) so the November cold wasn’t rushing her.

A decade before, a couple of stops away on the Goldbourne Road, I was on the hunt for a desk. Of course the only shop that intrigued me was the one that was closed (nothing like unattainability to make something more appealing). The note tacked to the door read Gone to the pub, back after lunch. ‘Heating’s gone on the blink, keeping warm,’ he explained when he appeared, taking the note off the door. The entrance was an obstacle course of furniture, which the owner, not a slender man, navigated with enviable grace. ‘Well you won’t want this,’ he said, showing me the desk where most, if not all, of my stories have come to life since, ‘no one wants that sort of things these days, just want something for their little computers.’

***

I walked through Golders Hill Park every day after school from the age of thirteen to eighteen but once the characters of my novel showed up there I couldn’t quite see it without them. The intensity of their presence there has started to fade a little by now, but their Golders Hill Park is still more vivid to me than mine, no doubt because mine became too familiar. The pockets of London I see through my characters’ eyes create a more coherent map than a set of coordinates, something which makes no sense, of course, morphing as it does on the page. Just before I went to university I started scribbling monologues at The Holly in Hampstead (well, more messing about in words, but at least I got the pen moving). I had the luxury of going late afternoon while it was still quiet, making a drink last till they lit the candles and the bustle began. Better still, I’d go into Keith Fawkes on Flask Walk first and stumble on a book while looking for another, taking it as back up if the blank page got too much. If the Holly is no longer the Holly that’s part of my London, Keith Fawkes is very much located there – unless, of course, I’m so charmed by it as it is now that I’ve blurred my most recent visit with memory. The shop begins a few paces away from the door, with antique furniture trailing towards the end of Flask Walk, a stray chair with Hebrew script isolated a little further along that might have easily have been abandoned as up for sale, tables showing off china and crystal greet you on your way in. Step down from the low ceilinged entrance and into the narrow alley and, if you’re lucky, you’ll be one of two customers at most (the shop can’t really cope with more – this isn’t the spot to get anxious about your personal space) and you’ll be able to squeeze past the crates of books on the floor. It’s somewhere you either find incongruity and miscellany delightful or maddening. I happen to love discovering that round the next corner artwork and a grandfather clock bar my way (though this might have more to do with the fact it forces me to restrict my attention to what’s accessible), that Stevie Smith lives on a shelf next to Dante, and Nature is, according to this system, Crime’s most obvious bedfellow.

***

I should note that I’m writing this under the influence of the late June sunshine, and kind summers, as Sam Selvon evokes through an unpunctuated, sensuous prose poem towards the end of The Lonely Londoners, have a habit of softening London’s edges: ‘everywhere you turn the English people smiling isn’t it a lovely day as if the sun burn away all the tightness and strain that was in their face for the winter…’ Rhythmically it becomes intoxicating, entwining its disturbing undercurrents in a breathless lyricism, sounding a chord of the city that melts, however fleetingly, its contradictions.