Tearing the city at the seams #26 - A rediscovery of London by night

Earlier this year I relocated, slipping down the oleaginous Northern Line from Elephant and Castle all the way to Morden, a place I had previously thought was populated exclusively by drunks held in an enclosure to sober up having slept through their tube stop. Since the move into London’s southern fringes, my fondness and enthusiasm for the city has decidedly waned, although I’d be reluctant to conflate this entirely with my move to Morden.

Whereas in Elephant & Castle I would be confronted with the hubbub and bustle of London on a daily basis, barely a 15-minute walk to the river, now on my cycle to and from work at Twickenham I catch a glimpse of the distant Shard, a thorn twisting in my side as a reminder of how divorced from me the city now seems.

Recent excursions have failed to reignite any affection. An attempt to walk the route of the Westway in search of the site of J.G. Ballard’s ‘concrete island’ proved so frustratingly futile that I couldn’t even summon the enthusiasm to write about it. So there was considerable pressure loaded on to a walk across London that I embarked upon one recent Saturday night.

I set off from Morden at just before half-midnight, the early September chill undergoing its autumnal rehearsals, with the aim of walking across London to Hampstead Heath in time for dawn easing itself into Sunday. Not only did the walk surpass expectations but was so suffused with minor revelations as to London’s dynamism and imaginative potency that I would encourage everyone to do the same.

I set out from the slumbering Morden, heading through the equally docile Wimbledon, only encountering the first signs of Saturday nightlife upon reaching Tooting High Street, with the influx of artisan chicken shops and cocktail bars all well attended. Only past Clapham Common and on up the High Street did the night seem to be in full ebullience; perhaps, being 1.30am, just beginning to sink back from its peak, with people spilling from the Infernos club on a high-heeled stagger to KFC. Leaving them behind I passed through the quieter province of Stockwell which appeared to be mostly populated by men loitering in doorways blowing plumes of smoke from spliffs across the pavement.

At Vauxhall, I took to the Embankment, pausing a while on the benches opposite the orange-lit Houses of Parliament glowing like burning wax. It was at this point that I began to remember the depths of thought that can be abseiled down on such travails. By this time I felt I had solved the Syrian refugee crisis, the London housing crisis, and the dilemma of which was the superior Radiohead album, ‘OK Computer’ or ‘Kid A’. (Each solution or answer though was swiftly blown away like psychic cobwebs by the arrival of yet more thought-strands to be woven, the trivial as well as the serious.)

I began to take note of all the different people that I saw and wonder at the disparate stories attached to them. The guy strolling along the Embankment singing along to a song off his iPod; the two French girls arm-in-arm laughing at some event from earlier in the night.

Across the river, I made my way up Whitehall pausing to speak with a lone man encamped opposite Downing Street busy adding to his collection of placards denigrating the government’s efforts at investigating the sexual abuse scandals. Initially a little wary, he soon began talking about how long he had been there (50 days), about how much online attention the protest had received, and how he wouldn’t give up until the “paedo-sadists” were held accountable.

Forging a path through the West End, I became surrounded by the drunken diaspora trying to get home. Smashed young men in blazers clutching a Subway sandwich and blearily trying to interpret the night bus maps as though they were ancient codes to be deciphered. Small groups of girls being hassled by a cavalry of rickshaws plying for trade up and down Charing Cross Road. An abysmally drunk middle-aged couple lodged in a doorway engaged in an amorous embrace oblivious to the less romantic mountain of bin bags right alongside them.

Soho seemed strangely subdued by comparison, with just a couple of wine bars still uncorked for a table or two of smartly-dressed conversations. Although my conscience did give me cause to stop at the edge of Soho Square where a young girl was slumped against some railings. At first I thought she was unconscious but on hearing my “hello?”, it appeared she was only crying, trains of mascara running down her face.

“I thought I’d better check you were okay”, I said. “Do you want me a call a taxi for you?”

“It’s alright, I think one is coming.”

“Shit night huh?”

“Yeah, pretty shit” she said, wiping her eyes on her forearms. She started talking about a guy who had messed her about and made her look stupid, as she did so nodding over the road at an imposing hotel. I sensed there was quite a lot more to the story than she let on but didn’t ask, instead just felt sorry for this girl who could only have been 16 or 17.

“What are you doing?” she asked, and when I explained my walk through London until dawn her reaction was one of mild disbelief. “Why would you want to do that?”

“Dunno, keeps me busy.”

She laughed and said, “You should get a girlfriend instead.”

“Well, I had one until recently. Hence the need to keep busy.”

“That’s a shame”, she said with a sympathetic expression that coming from someone with mascara streaked down their face seemed a little hard to take seriously.

And with that her taxi pulled up and I headed on my way, thinking about this random encounter. This late at night, everyone you pass feels like they are imbued with a different sense of purpose or reason for being out than during the day, each person with their own imaginative sliproad that peels away from the highway of the superficial. No wonder Dickens was so fond of taking his night walks across the city, clearly he became inspired by the interesting, nocturnal characters, each primed with their own unique story to be built around them.

There is a frisson of energy that is transmitted at night, charging places and people with all kinds of possibilities and potential. It is an energy that ripples with the telepathic awareness that things are taking place, things are happening, and though you may not be part of it, you are, in just by sharing the geography, riding the same wave.

This feeling sustains on through Camden, where muffled music seeps from second and third floor windows where people drain the dregs of the night. There is a vague exclusivity about Camden, a sense that it is assessing and judging you on your conformist credentials as a hedonistic ambassador worthy of being inducted into the secretive citadel of the unofficial gathering.

There is a lull that sets in as I reach Belsize Park, the streets deserted, the sound of the slumbering city has a kind of polyphony with the rustling of leaves and the whisper of distant traffic. There is no one around now, the city feels like it has been laid out and arranged purely for me to traverse it, the paving stones ushering my weary feet along on the approach to the Heath.

The night’s deep purple tourniquet loosens to let the dawn bleed across the morning sky, and I trudge through the dew-tipped grass to reach Parliament Hill and the end of my journey. I feel a sense of real achievement, a rejuvenated appreciation for London that is so striking that I remain convinced that everyone should undertake a similar walk at least once. I sit transfixed by the cityscape, a million windows ablaze as the sun hits the glass, construction cranes poised in the air like batons ready to conduct an orchestra through the symphony of a new day.

Tearing the city at the seams #25 - A walk across London in search of British leftism

Two quotes to begin:

‘The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.’

‘At this point it’s worth noting that the economy is not a real thing, it is a man-made system designed to serve us, an ideological machine.  It has gone wrong and is tyrannising us.  We wouldn’t tolerate that from a literal machine...’

The first is attributable to Karl Marx from 1848; the second, some 166 years hence, to Russell Brand.

This is an essay about a walk across London.  A walk that sought to explore the state of contemporary leftism in Britain, and, as the most unpredictable election in decades draws near, what we can possibly expect and draw from left wing ideologies in the future.

The walk began just south of Covent Garden, in the tempest of tourism, on a sunny Saturday afternoon.  On the corner of Russell Street, in what was formerly the Red Lion pub but has now morphed into a branch of All Bar One, Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx were commissioned to write a pamphlet, the aim of which was to formalise in words the burgeoning spectre of disparate revolutionary ideals that at the time was haunting Europe, ‘The Communist Manifesto’.

Some of the Manifesto is now hopelessly archaic, but counterbalancing this is so much that reads as fresh as agit-prop graffiti.  In particular, the revolutionising of production constantly creating an environment of agitation and antagonism for the workers; in its condemning of the global market system that ‘must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere’; and in its assertion that the formation of every society has been based on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes, towards which certain conditions must be kept in perpetuity.

Within the generic surroundings of the All Bar One though, the early afternoon clientele armed with their libations certainly looked as though they’d reject any such assertion of their oppression.  One of the bar staff, a tall and raffish Italian man in his late-20s, was unequivocal in his view that Marx’s theories are still relevant to today’s workers.  “The advantage is definitely all on the side of the employer, especially somewhere like London...I mean, if you don’t like your job there’ll be someone else waiting right behind you to take it off you...and they know that.”

Heading north through the West End, the streets thronged with consumerist bustle, arms locked with chain store bags, restaurants engorged with diners, and coffee shops liberally scattered like a sack of beans split open over a map.

The historian Niall Ferguson has written that our infatuation with the humble bean may have helped fuel our once glorious empire – ‘the English were luckier in their drugs; long habituated to alcohol, they were roused from inebriation in the 17^th century by American tobacco, Arabian coffee and Chinese tea.  The Chinese ended up with the lethargy of the opium den.’

If, as is often mooted, we are living in an age that celebrates the individual, with notions of collectivisation increasingly rendered lacklustre and inert, then one has to search for new arena of communality that this secular post-modern society presents.  Undoubtedly, one such place is the coffee shop; a blend of strong Continental European flavour and aesthetic with the American ‘Friends’-style froth of social discourse.  The Costas, Starbucks and Caffe Neros that sprinkle the country’s streets are where we are elevated to the imaginary realm of the petit-bourgeois, exalting in the freedom of the latte, the cappuccino, the varieties of herbal tea.

The internet, with all its transformative zeal of harnessing a new egalitarian realm, can often be seen in its true atomised form through the window of any high street coffee shop – tables of individuals locked into glowing portals to a digital ether.

Hitching east along Theobald’s Road, one passes by the famous Great Ormond Street Hospital, representing as it does the increasingly taut and frayed rope of socialism that binds our society’s conscience, the NHS.  Forever haemorrhaging capital, the NHS, according to experts, requires a steady and prolonged transfusion of government spending, the acceptable public spending vice that must be satiated just as we crave the caffeine stimulus to fortify us for the day ahead.

Still one of the most fraught battlegrounds of political warfare, with the managerial structure of Kafka’s castle, the NHS occupies a curious, almost fundamentalist, place in the British public consciousness.  For the most part, the NHS is relied upon in the final few years and months of one’s life.  Our unshakable totemic faith in the institution reveals the conviction that, whilst we may cleave to the establishment matrix of class structures and hegemonic institutions, we do all deserve equality in death.  For whilst we may not seek provision for people to avoid indignities and suffering in life, we do at least believe that everyone is entitled to the dignity of a good death.

I peeled off into Clerkenwell, a place whose history is synonymous with radicalism, although you wouldn't think it to stroll through now.  Long gone are the headquarters of the Communist Party, the left wing printing presses, and the places where Bolshevik leaders in exile at the start of the 20^th century would flee to in order to escape the secret police of the tsars and plot the revolution.  On Clerkenwell Green though, there is the Marxist Memorial Library bursting with busts and flags, whilst a beard’s tug away on Farringdon Road is where the Labour Party were founded in 1900.

Winding past the once Brutalist ghetto now eminently prime real estate of the Barbican, one gets a feel for how the post-war collectivisation programme manifested itself in the unforgiving architecture of the concrete jungle.  Not to mention how, decades later, when property in central London has become the sturdiest financial asset attainable, it can be re-imagined and re-marketed as a prestigious retro location (much like the Trellick Tower has been in Notting Hill), to be snaffled up by a shrewd Russian, Saudi or Qatari investor.

Approaching Liverpool Street, the revolutionary history almost reaches its arms up from the ground like necrotic zombies.

For it is here, whilst excavating colossal mounds of earth as part of the Crossrail project, that archaeological work has begun to try and disinter the bones of some 3000 people buried at the Bedlam site during the 16^th and 17^th centuries.  The osteological analysts hope to uncover the skeletons of ‘Freeborn’ John Lilburne and Robert Lockyer who, aged just 23, led the Bishopsgate mutiny of 1649 as part of the Levellers movement during the tumult of the English Civil War in which the monarchy was usurped and various rival factions vied to enshrine a parliamentary executive power.

Executed in front of St. Paul’s by a firing squad for refusing the leave the City of London and face being ordered to obey the whims of the New Model Army without pay, Lockyer’s death brought about tremendous discontent amongst the Leveller movement which had pushed against Oliver Cromwell’s aims for a plutocratic form of Parliament and instead championed ideas of popular sovereignty, extended suffrage to all households, and equality before the law.  But they were only one of many dissenting groups that thrived during the period, one of the which was the Diggers, led by Gerrard Winstanley, who advocated a form of agrarian socialism in which small rural communities would gain prevalence in a renewed interrelationship between man and nature.

Could it not be postulated perhaps that by disturbing the resting place of these long-dead radicals it might serve as an omen of sorts for the brewing discontent and disillusionment with the financial epicentre that is the City of London?  The long-entombed spiritual energy might soon undulate through the strata of history to manifest itself in renewed unrest, or at the least, a new found scepticism in the sanctity of its institutions.

As it is, the City of London is the fulcrum around which the entire nation slowly revolves.  Ever since being un-tethered from 1979 onwards by Thatcher’s New Right programme, it has come to float like a financial Hindenburg destined for cyclical inflation and immolation.  The kind of sums are traded on the derivatives, currency and stock exchange markets each and every day that make government budget quibbling look by comparison like rather small change. 

The astonishing failure of Labour in recent years is that it has allowed the Conservatives to tarnish them as economically profligate and untrustworthy, while defining themselves as prudent and trustworthy.  Whereas, it was Thatcher, taking the lead from Reagan’s America and a squadron of technocratic monetarists, who subjected Britain to a prolonged economic experiment that gave the illusion of prosperity with Right to Buy schemes and easy credit. What was enshrined instead was something close to an elected dictatorship whereby short-term investments, a decimated industrial base and a nation with higher levels of personal debt than anywhere else in the world was to become the basis of a new and unquestionable faith in the market system.  On the other hand though, Labour, along with its vestigial hope of socialism, had at the time never looked so spent and out-of-touch; in 1979 any prospect of leftism being electable rolled over and died. 

Herein lies the fundamental paradox of Thatcherism and modern Conservatives.  Those on the Right claim as their ethos and raison d’être the preservation of intrinsic British values – the institution of family, ‘a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay’, a small state, hierarchy and order – and yet at the same time push wholeheartedly for the kind of rapacious and unregulated technological progress and economic growth that, as a natural consequence, serve to distort and erode them. 

With free market laissez-faire capitalism, Britain (as with America), was left with a breakdown in family life (higher divorce rates, parents working longer for less pay), high crime and incarceration levels, stagnating and in many cases falling wages, and massive levels of state intervention when inevitably the whole edifice looked set to crumble and fall (the bailing out of the banks, austerity measures and Quantitative Easing).  As one of the leading contemporary left wing voices, Owen Jones, has said, that with their protected interests, propped-up wages and next-to-no threat of unemployment, ‘it seems its socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor.’

Make no mistake, the British left is no less confused.  A quick online search dredges up from the ideological swamp innumerable groups, collectives and talking-shops that offer an outlet for left wing politics – Socialist Party, Socialist Workers Party, Left Unity, Solidarity, Respect, Reality, Communist Party of Great Britain....

Socialism, representing as it does a wide plane of moralistic and progressive values, with collectivism and social justice as a fundamental tenet, can only paradoxically splinter into a myriad disparate factions and cliques that cleave to a swathe of idealistic myths about revolution, the working class and Marxist theory, that draw a resilient potency from assuming the perpetual mantle of the embattled underdog.

Britain has not seen the kind of groundswell of public disenchantment that has elevated Syriza to power in Greece or Podemos to the mainstream in Spain; and perhaps that is due to the largely suffocating force of the City of London.  All the same, that no strong coherent voice of the left has emerged to lay a real challenge at the door of economic orthodoxy during the harshest recession in living memory is a damning indictment.

Continuing north through Shoreditch and on through Hoxton, revelers were out on the streets celebrating or lamenting their fortunes in that afternoon’s Grand National race (a sporting event that typifies the entrenched aristocratic conservatism that defines so much of British society and culture).  Perennial events such as this, along with royal family jamborees, all infused with encouraged intoxication serve as both useful distraction agencies and as necessary valves for energy that might otherwise manifest itself in other more deviant and subversive directions.  (I don’t take against them per se, but it’s wise to recognise them for what they are.)

Will Hutton wrote in ‘The State We’re In’, that Conservatism has become anchored into the collective consciousness as the ‘party of instinct’, bestowing a sense of hierarchy, class and ‘born to rule’ politics.  This can be seen from the church, to the legal system, the media (most notably with the monopoly of the Murdoch press), public schools, the Bank of England, and an obsession with property, towards which the ladders of social mobility are poised just within reach.  This was particularly salient when New Labour soared to power and instead of reforming the Westminster system to a more socialist ideal, came to revel in the hegemonic majority-party power structure that Thatcher had enshrined and exploited to great effect.

 Walking through Shoreditch, the hipster central full of Greek philosopher beards, craft beer and fixed-gear bikes, one could be forgiven for forgetting the principal reason why a major political overhaul towards leftism is most unlikely in Britain any time soon – the demographics.  An ageing population looking towards retirement, with property to safeguard and pass on to children, and pension funds woven into the global money markets, has simply too much invested in the economic orthodoxy to challenge it even if they were inspired to do so.

The younger generations are entering adulthood in an era of utmost political confusion, where disillusionment with the contemporary political order – that has itself become more and more toothless – causes people to latch onto the pseudo-anarchic hyperbole of Russell Brand.  

In many ways, Brand’s book ‘Revolution’ is a perfect encapsulation of the confused and fissiparous times in which we live, sliding as it does between hopelessly vague summations, banal presumptions and snatches of refreshingly clear thinking.  It chuffs comfortably along on intellectualisms from the likes of Noam Chomsky, David Graeber, Naomi Klein and Thomas Piketty, but always ends up derailing down the banks of flippancy and spiritual musings of which the following is a choice quote:

‘We human beings are the temporary expression of a greater force that science as yet cannot explain  but is approaching in its fledging understanding of the harmony and translucent principles of the quantum world.’

My walk ended at the recently opened Trew Era Cafe, that Brand has commendably helped finance with the profits from his book, on the New Era Estate that he last year championed in their fight against being eviction by the perfidious Westbrook Partners.

And so, the journey across London returned to its symbolic beginning, immersed within the coffee shop culture that we now invest with such communalism.  One customer there, a girl in her early-20s training to be a primary school teacher said that she “didn’t think much about left or right wing”, that it tended to resort either way to alienating rhetoric.  Instead she said her vote would be going to the Green Party, due to it being the only party seeking to address the environmental calamity that threatens us.

In many ways this is perhaps the most sensible course for British politics to take; surrendering the banjaxed posturing over fatigued policy points, where Labour can’t even raise the issue of basic rent controls without the right opposition accusing them of seeking to emulate Chavez in Venezuela, and focusing instead on installing a green economy that makes some attempt to draw the ever-widening poles of inequality closer together.

As Naomi Klein discusses in ‘This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate’, the main reason those on the right have been so slow-footed in tackling climate change is that they recognise the necessary steps to alleviate long-term global damage happen to be those that lead away from the improvident free markets and rampant consumerist path they would have us all queue along in an orderly line.

Whether Labour succeed at the General Election or not, leftism in Britain is now a confused network of beliefs and ideas in search of an electrode to earth rather than allow them, as ever, to melt into air.

Tearing the city at the seams #24 - The story of John Rae reimagined as a charting of London's Northwest Passage

The sky was an aquarium blue as I disembarked from base camp at Elephant and Castle and made my way to the starting point of my London expedition, a homage-of-sorts to the great Arctic explorer John Rae.

Born in the Orkneys in 1813, Rae trained as a doctor, joined the Hudson’s Bay Company and proceeded to undertake several major Arctic expeditions, charting incalculable stretches of coastline and having strong claim to the prestigious title of being the first man to discover the final link in the mysterious and elusive Northwest Passage.

But it was his discovery and reportage of the shocking fate that befell the doomed Franklin expedition that would transform him from a lauded ‘hero of the age’ to a vilified outsider who found high society, including even the likes of Charles Dickens, sworn to shun and discredit him of his phenomenal accomplishments.

In honour of John Rae then, my own expedition would be to chart a course north from the City and attempt to navigate a Northwest Passage across the top of London, reaching the promontory of Hampstead Heath.  From there I would proceed southwest to Holland Park and the house in which Rae died in 1893 in relative obscurity; and from there east to Westminster Abbey where last year a memorial plaque was installed, bestowing to him at last the commemoration that was withheld throughout his life.  

My journey began on Fenchurch Street in the navel of London’s bloated belly, the street on which the Hudson’s Bay Company offices were situated.  I gazed up at the swollen thumb of the 20 Fenchurch Street (or ‘Walkie-Talkie’) building, and down at the deserted foyer with its escalators continuing their vacant rotation, marvelling at the elephantine hubris of such a development.  A lone man sat islanded at the reception desk, recalling to my mind the security guard of the empty office building in Mike Leigh's 'Naked' - the man with the most boring job in London.

In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, the HBC was a pioneering fur-trading enterprise with outposts scattered across Canada and the Northwest Territories, with intrepid explorers like Rae on their payroll. The discovery of a Northwest Passage that would provide a link between Pacific and Atlantic oceans was a highly lucrative commercial proposition, allowing easier trading routes to China and the East.  

It is impossible to comprehend today, in a world of GPS, Google Streetview and satellite technology that can plot coordinates with keyhole precision, that not so long ago vast expanses of the world map were blank unknown spaces, annexed off by our own physical limitations hindering our ability to conquer them. That being said, heightened knowledge is not necessarily conducive with better understanding, often merely shifting new straits of ignorance.  I would contend that the majority of Londoners today are increasingly disconnected from their actual physical surroundings, the distances between places, the ways in which sections of the city stitch together as one complete whole, and are more au fait with transport routes and mapped directions that they obediently follow with little more cognisance than an orange avatar being lifted and dropped onto a new street.

My interest in John Rae stems as well from the fact that I plan on using his character and experience as a loose inspiration for a central character in a new novel I hope to begin writing soon. In terms of discovering a narrative territory, I am still faced with large amounts of 'blank space' that I continue to stumble forwards hoping to uncover and reveal to myself.

I had been hoping, perhaps rather perversely, for a flurry of snow to descend in time for my walk, for Arctic conditions to imbue my efforts with a little more verity, but alas I was deprived. Nevermind though, for it being January, my breath was still mushroom-clouding before my face. I had also, in the week prior, been racing through Ken McGoogan's excellent book 'Fatal Passage', a thoroughly persuasive encomium to John Rae, and as a result, my imagination was enough to cast a blizzard before my footsteps, animating each surface with frost and each building a different berg of ice sculpted by the elements.

'Fatal Passage' paints a vivid impression of Rae as a consummate adventurer in a very classic sense;  an unrivaled 'snowshoer', huntsman, navigator, capable of traversing incredible distances in the most frigidly harsh conditions. Not only this, but he was almost a post-colonial figure, considering the Victorian-era attitudes of the day. He maintained that the best, perhaps the only, way to survive in those Arctic climes was to respect and learn from the native tribes of Inuits encountered there, ingratiating within their way of life, befriending them and treating them as equals instead of uncultivated inferiorities as the received wisdom of the time decreed.

From Fenchurch Street I plotted a course towards Liverpool Street, keen to get clear of the abundant collossi of commerce with the glassine fronts and glacial steel forms. My head was humming with the evidence of a mild hangover, which gave me cause to reflect on how already I was trailing so far behind John Rae's good character. He seldom touched alcohol, already having discerned through his medical training the implications of over-indulgence. Likewise he refrained from smoking, as I recalled on passing a shiver of young girls huddled in the doorway of a clothes store, their breath exaggerated by the plumes of cigarette smoke. One rather charming anecdote in McGoogan's book tells how on one expedition he was relegated to a separate igloo from those of his companions as they puffed away on their pipes as a barrier against the intense cold.

My route took me through the Bunhill Fields cemetery and onwards up Goswell Road to Angel. By this time, the nomadic herds of Islington were beginning to migrate up and down the peninsula of shops but, refusing to be diverted, I forged on up Liverpool Road before darting inwards to the quieter Barnsbury estates. With its cul-de-sacs and avenues, I could detect the inhabitants were snowbound by their Saturday morning lethargy, with not even the promise of Upper Street's bustle to rouse them.

This was far from shocking, given that given that the glorious morning sky had now curdled to a milky grey, and maybe even warning of rain, a part of me still hoped, an avalanche of extreme weather to be lain like a gauntlet before my steely resolve.

I veered westwards along the dreary stretch of Tufnell Park Road, starting to decipher the aching whimpers from my legs and my enthusiasm for the first time beginning to thaw.  Once I began the slow ascent of Dartmouth Park Hill though, and began to glimpse the fenestrated canopy of the Heath between the terraced rooftops, I was sufficiently fueled by the promise of having successfully charted a course across the northwest climes of sleepy suburbia to continue apace.  I wasn’t to be fazed by the Highgate locals in their assorted knitwear, brunching languorously in fancy delicatessens, and I marched upwards and onto the Heath itself, swinging around to see the Shard in the distance like a shining stalagmite.

 

Considering that I could procure a band of huskies to whisk me south, I approached several of those out walking dogs to try and trade some of the whale blubber that I had brought as my sole provisions. Exuding, as the majority did, an air of aloof diffidence, I decided against such bartering and endeavoured on to the peak of Parliament Hill.

There I marveled at the cityscape stretched out before me and the distance I had traveled over the course of a single morning.  Framed by the blue sky, the buildings appeared like an armada of ships landlocked in a vast ice-field, waiting patiently for the sun to heat up enough and allow them to drift free once more.

I sat for a while to survey the scene and recalled to mind the legacy of John Rae.  In 1854, he was tasked with journeying again to the Arctic to try and discover what had happened to the expedition of Sir John Franklin, another renowned British explorer, who had set sail in 1845 with 128 men, to try and claim the missing piece of the Northwest Passage puzzle.  Having made camp for the winter in the punishing environment in which he seemed to thrive, Rae came across numerous Inuit natives who, after much questioning and the corroboration of several Franklin artefacts found in their possession, enabled him to ascertain the horror of their fate.

Landlocked by ice around King William Island, and blighted by lead poisoning from the tin cans they had taken with them for food, Franklin and his men apparently began trying to make their way southwards, before eventually resorting to cannibalism in a desperate yet vain effort to stay alive.

Luckily I was in little danger of succumbing to the same eventuality, fuelled as I was by my cache of whale blubber and Toblerone; but nonetheless, I certainly wasn’t ruling it out definitively.  I left Hampstead Heath via a muddy isthmus, and began to plod along the plush townhouses of Canfield Gardens.  From there I darted across the Kilburn High Road and on in the direction of Maida Hill.

I thought on about the scornful opprobrium unleashed upon Rae after his return to England and the publication of his findings. The very notion that such noble and Christian exemplars of Western civilisation could resort to such depravities was a hand grenade tossed into the haughty mores of the time; a ‘naked lunch’ if ever there was one. Giving way to the barely suppressed racism of the time, many expounded the theories that the Inuits – as a savage race – could hardly be trusted to impart an accurate account of the truth, and even could be to blame for having attacked the weakened party.  Rae himself, not prone to these superior tendencies of Victorian England, and knowing first-hand the horrendous conditions faced in such terrain, was ambivalent about the acts themselves, and so was unprepared for the vitriolic tirade that sought to destroy his good name.

Lady Jane Franklin, the widow of the dead explorer, set about a prolonged campaign to, not only besmirch John Rae’s reputation (even convincing Charles Dickens to publish essays refuting the cannibalistic charges), but to appropriate his achievements with regard to the Passage and attribute them to her late husband.  As a lady of high society, a prominent hostess of the ‘Upper 10,000’, she was tenacious in her aim of hoisting aloft the pennant of her own name, reaping the rewards vicariously, managing to manipulate funds time and again for more expeditions to search the truth that she had in mind.

My pace now slowing, my feet beginning to drag, I passed beneath the Westway and through Notting Hill, skirted round the crowds billowing along Portobello Road.  From there it was a mere trot to Lower Addison Gardens, where I reach Rae's corner house in which he lived for the last years of his life until 1893 in relative anonymity with his beloved wife Kate.

I decided to pause and recuperate for a while in Holland Park.  Posh women sauntered past with their dogs, all appearing to cheerfully carry a little bag of shit as though it were a dainty purse.  It's funny how exhaustion seems to refract certain things into a new and absurdist light.

Rousing myself at last, I trudged through the bottom of Hyde Park and finally arrived at Westminster Abbey where last year John Rae was memorialised with a plaque.

I felt the circle had been completed quite aptly; meanwhile the blisters on my feet after my 20-mile slog served as a sharp reminder of my abject inadequacy next to Rae and others like him. It's easy to despair, surveying our habitual slump into technologically-mandated lethargy, office-bound sedentary, and prescribed allocations of gym-bound exertion, that the days of such explorers have long since past, and in many ways they have, together - for the most part - with the misguided conviction that with our Enlightened superiority we ascend beyond all other races and nations.

Once I'd limped home though, I scanned through the news, my attention instantly ensnared by the two men who had successfully scaled the perilous Dawn Wall in Yosemite; proof for the sceptics that there are still boundaries to push and challenges to transcend. 

My Favourite Places in London

Maryon Park, Greenwich

This is the park used extensively in Antonioni's seminal film 'Blow-Up'; a film that explores the intricate correlation between the real and unreal, the seen and unseen and the vagaries of imagination. There is real delight to be had in discovering that despite the nearly 50 years since the film's release, the park has barely changed at all which, given the churning rate of change in London, must make it something of an anomaly.

It even seems to have retained the washed-out green and grey 60s patina of the film-stock. Take the steep steps upwards and you find yourself in the beguiling and mysterious plateau of enclosed space where the film's 'murder' is photographed by David Hemmings.

In the three or four times that I've been here it has always been deserted which instils its allure as an undiscovered pocket of London that the city has forgotten about and, since any view into or out of the space is hindered, encourages you to temporarily forget about the city in turn.


Bookmongers, Brixton

A veritable Aladdin's cave of words, the sort of place you can distractedly peruse away time scouring the second-hand spines, too wary of leaving in case in so doing you overlook a real find.

Often with an eclectic selection of Burroughs and the Beats enticingly placed in the front window, and a floppy Alsatian manning the door, the stock - once its been segregated into its rightful category in the scruffy shop - is joyfully anarchic, the pleasure persisting in not knowing what you might come across next

There are still many delightful secondhand book shops in London but this is my first choice; in fact I don't think I've ever left empty-handed.


Gordon's Wine Bar, Villiers Street

This is an antiquated vinous institution tucked away just off the Strand; a dingy stone-walled grotto with a low-arched ceiling that basks in the orange tinge of wax candles. The affordability of the menu might tend toward visits being infrequent, and its predictable congestion persuade towards going at odd times (in my experience, only at around 3 or 4pm on a summer weekday are you guaranteed an inside table).

That being said, it maintains a hold on me in the fact that it conjures up vague and romanticised imaginings of a Dickensian London – subterranean drinking dens, gin houses and decadent wine cellars – a place you can imagine Boswell and Johnson holding court in one corner and Prime Minister Pitt supping on a post (or pre)-Commons port in another.


Brockwell Park, Brixton

Aside from Hampstead Heath, the finest open green space in London has to be Brockwell Park, a protuberant expanse that has been wonderfully adapted to the needs of the local community – the lido, tennis courts, bowling green, play park, etc.

A circuit round the park will take you on a steady incline to a panoramic spread of the city skyline, from the tusks of Battersea Power Station in the west to Canary Wharf in the east. On a summer’s day the congested and manic up-thrust of the Shard and the minions that flank it, appear to shimmer with the heat haze like a mirage of an Emerald City painted onto a bright blue canvas.


The gallery of the Royal Albert Hall

Whilst the Proms purists might gaggle together like over-zealous seals on an outcrop nearest the crashing sonic waves, I prefer to head higher to a promontory on the rim of the great ceremonial bowl. At this higher altitude one can survey the full breadth of the orchestra at a remove from being down in the hubbub of the auditorium, as the symphonic tones evaporate upwards like a musical convection current.

Seeing a great orchestra in full flow is, I like to think, the musical equivalent of a tuna fleet swimming in synchronicity, their motion mandated almost by an instinctual telepathy, and there's still probably nowhere in the UK to rival the Royal Albert Hall as a setting in which to play witness.


Postman's Park

Hidden away like a secret cupboard amidst the bustling corridors and antechambers of the City, this diminutive park is a place of calm reflection hemmed in by the Barbican, St. Paul's and bunches of anonymous office buildings, which succeed in neutralising the constant hum and grind of the operational city.

What marks this particular spot out though is the sombre memorial wall opened in 1900 by George F. Watt, to commemorate ‘those who have heroically lost their lives trying to save another’. Each panel paints a different snapshot of selflessness, like a 19th-century Twitter feed that stirs the mind to pondering further on the enigmatic glimpses of particular characters and situations.

The place was a focal mise en scene for Patrick Marber’s play ‘Closer’, as well as in the underrated film adaptation; centring on Alice Ayres who ‘saved 3 children from a burning house in Union Street, Borough at the cost of her own young life’. Others that are personally intriguing are William Donald – ‘was drowned in the Lea trying to save a lad from a dangerous entanglement of weeds’, and Ernest Benning – ‘upset from a boat one dark night off Pimlico Pier, grasped an oar with one hand supporting a woman with the other but sank as she was rescued’.

In a city that is so often characterised by, or redolent of, the self and all the associated ambition, pride and endeavour bound up with it, it is disarming and affecting to pause in a place emblematic of such antipodal virtues.

The Shacklewell Arms, Dalston

The hipster diaspora may have migrated north-eastwards to envelop the province of Dalston but the Shacklewell Arms retains its grungy ‘armpit-pub’ ethos that even the craft ale and inevitable menu of ‘rustic’ £8 burgers and ‘artisan’ hot dogs cannot dispel.

The gig room itself is the perfect intimate setting for seeing a band raw and without pretension; the stage space is nicely confined with the drummer isolated in a kind of rear alcove, whilst the soundwaves scintillate outwards in ever higher waves of nauseating volume, and sweat drips from the ceiling tiles like the inside of a damp cavern.

Tearing the city at the seams #23 - From Madrid to Valencia to anywhere

Where better to begin a trip in Spain than the very epicentre itself, Puerto del Sol in Madrid, ‘0km’ demarcated by a subtle paving slab beneath the clock-tower. From this nexus point it is possible to envisage the disparate segments from Galicia in the north-west, Andalucía in the south, Extremadura in the west and Catalonia in the north-east all straining, some firmer than others, on the moorings that prevent them from floating free and keep them anchored to the central post of Madrid.

(Side note: maybe this should be a solution for the fractious United Kingdom instead of forever slouching south towards London? A quick online search would tend to place this somewhere in Derbyshire...)

Being profoundly regionalist by nature, Spain is one country watching the developments surrounding the Scottish referendum with the scrutiny of an apprentice surgeon aware that they may soon have to perform a similarly tricky operation themselves.

As detailed in John Hooper’s comprehensive book ‘The New Spaniards’, this is a country that, since the death of General Franco in 1975, has oscillated remarkably across the political spectrum, with democratic socialism and pragmatic conservatism, together with a recline in the influence of the Catholic Church, dragging Spain into a modern Europe where, like many others post-recession, its stability is far from assured.

My girlfriend and I are instantly taken with Madrid, our expectations being somewhat more muted than for Barcelona, and the joie de vivre lifestyle and easy atmosphere seem to immediately corrupt one’s more intense London-centric sensibilities.

Traffic cascades in a steady ribbon up and down the main Gran Via and Calle Alcala but never feels oppressive or intolerable, merely a fixture of the scenery. The city feels pleasantly divested of the tourist maelstrom that we feel confident of in Barcelona; instead there is the air of a functional city – locals chat over coffee in plazas, shop for legs of ham that hang from butchers’ windows like cavemen clubs, and peruse glossy magazines from innumerable kiosks that punctuate the streets. I’m reading Hemingway’s ‘The Sun Also Rises’; his steady prose masterfully portraying the ecstatic abandon of the Spanish fiesta, so much so that I almost expect the tireless revellers to come barrelling round each corner before the running of the bulls commences.

The old heart of Madrid is easily explored on foot; the Plaza Mayor siphons tourists into the cobbled space from passageways leading upwards from the main street. Over the centuries, generations of aristocrats would gaze from their balconies onto the spectacle of the Inquisition’s ‘auto-da-fe’s, monarchs being crowned, fiestas and bull runs; now there is little more activity than Charlie Chaplin impersonators and a posse of waiters trying to reel in tourists to their overpriced restaurants like egregious lifeguards at the side of a swimming pool.

The sinuous alleyways of La Latina, enclosed by ochre walls and spindly iron balconies like stanzas of musical notation, break here and there onto an intimate plaza or small gothic church. We venture down to the El Rastro flea market barrio that with its beggars and street prostitutes instantly takes on a seedier, edgier vent; evidence of the tough realities of life in modern Spain for the down-at-heel.

We shelter from the heat in the Jardines de Sabatini, a Romanesque garden with intricate hedges and ornamental fountains from which the palace appears as imposing and dull as most, especially our own English Queen's pad. Indeed, it is uncertain times for Spain's monarchy, with Juan Carlos, long-feted as the king who helped steer the nation out of its post-Franco daze, withstanding a military coup along the way, deciding to secede the throne to his son Filipe IV.

Polls suggest that there is a rising tide of republican sentiment coursing through particularly the younger generations, which has lead many to conclude that perhaps Juan Carlos' true legacy of achievement is to have helped transform Spain to the point where his own role is now surplus to requirements.

We walk east along the Gran Via and into the Museo del Prado, hunting out Velazquez's realist masterwork 'Las Menines', Hieronymous Bosch's epic 'Garden of Earthly Delights' and Peter Bruegel's cataclysmic rendering of the apocalypse 'Triumph of the Death', in which an army of skeletons unleash hellfire and slaughter upon kings, revellers and countrymen alike in a chaotic danse macabre.

The greatest reverence though is reserved for Francisco de Goya's 'Black Paintings'; a series of 14 enigmatic and haunting murals that document the artist's downward spiral into hermetic madness and despair.

Madrid's artistic keg is not drained there though, for a few minutes' walk brings us to the Reina Sofia which exhibits more modernist works. Here are held numerous pieces by Dali - including 'The Enigma of Hitler' and 'The Grand Masturbator' - and of course, the piece de resistance, Picasso's monumental 'Guernica', a billboard-sized riot of high-octane depravity, chaos and symbology. Indeed so reverential does it feel to be able to examine such an icon up close and in person, it feels a little like sacrilege to leave the gallery.

It's easy to come away with a strong impression of the abstract and surreal visual style that burns brightly through avant garde Spanish culture, almost as though the common causality was the effervescent sunlight refracting colour into new dimensions and forms for the fertile artistic imagination to plunder. From Dali, Picasso and Gaudi, to Juan Gris and Joan Miro, whose starburst shapes of playful colour on everything from street murals to bank logos begin to appear almost as sunspots leaving their imprint on your retinas.

A couple of days later we arrive in Valencia, the young upstart city snapping at the heels of its elder siblings Madrid and Barcelona. It's an appealing and unpretentious place, with a modest medieval centre and its arms open wide onto the Mediterranean.

We stroll around the central plazas, overlooked by the Catedral, and its Miguelete tower. Inside is purported to be one of the prime contenders for the Holy Grail chalice itself; although with a fee of €10 each to take a look we decide against it. The Crystal Palace-like Mercado Central, a cavernous indoor food market is almost a religious experience in its own right, being a veritable cathedral of produce; fruit and vegetables arranged in the dazzling abundance and variety of rare antiquities brought back from foreign lands.

We try some chewy chorizo and sickly sweet sherry, perusing a whole harbour-full of fresh fish dredged up and slapped out on crushed ice for the punters. Racks of paella pans are lined up ranging from cymbal to gong-size, alongside glazed slabs of nougat stacked like gold bullion.

In the afternoons we head for the beach, a place with (for me) alarmingly little shade as the sun blazes on through the top-30s, and populated by young Valencians who look as though they must never migrate far from these white sands. Later on we gorge on seafood paella and get steadily sozzled on wine at the renowned Le Pepica, one-time favourite of Hemingway, Orson Welles and a smattering of legendary bullfighters.

On the subject of bullfighters, the one adversarial moment in my girlfriend's now firm resolve to emigrate to Spain as soon as possible, is when I drag her into the Museo Taurino (Bullfighting Museum). It's nestled just behind the stadium itself, which (if the posters of lederhosen and steins were anything to go by) appeared to be hosting an Oktoberfest in a bizarre cross-pollination of European cultural identities. I imagine that somewhere in Munich, flurries of flamenco dancing were spontaneously breaking out.

It's only through reading something like Hemingway's stolid 'Death in the Afternoon' that its possible to comprehend the deep strata of cultural significance that have built up upon the bedrock of the Spanish bullfight. Indeed, aficionados elevate to an almost balletic precision the drama of man versus beast, the skill and adeptness of the matador in bringing the bull to heel during their dual performance.

It's a necessary by-product of the act of travelling that one becomes exposed to milieus that might shock, surprise or challenge our ingrained sensibilities. Indeed were this not the case, the very praxis of travelling would be entirely moribund.

Trying to remind my girlfriend of this though is futile as museum footage displays bulls goring horses until their guts drape behind them like the train of a wedding dress, and the bull impaled by multiple picas until they can no longer see straight through their own blood. To those not emotionally invested in the ritual, the whole thing looks like what it is - a cruel anachronistic exhibition of human power over animals.

This qualifier aside though, there is something in the flourish the matadors perform, the way they draw the bull towards them before pivoting just out of reach of the horns, I think embodies the same flamboyant energy and poetic passion that can be seen in that other Spanish tradition, flamenco.

In a small bar in Madrid, we are awestruck by the fervent intensity and sensuous power of the dancers; the way the coagulating compas (rhythms) of the acoustic guitar and the jaleo (hand-clapping, feet stomping) interlock with the anguished vocals of the matriarchal cantaora (singer). The long skirts swish in perfect synchronicity and the upper bodies held rigid as heels become a blur, sounding like a jazz drummer trying to cram in as many flourishes as possible within the confines of each bar.

The real surprise of Valencia comes from a walk away from the old centre, following the course of the Rio Turia, a drained river that threads its way through the city, remade into a landscaped stretch of urban community space. It's almost an inversion of the so-called 'Garden Bridge' planned for London, or the High Line in New York; an existing feature reappropriated and exploited for the common use of the inhabitants.

Walking along at around 9pm is a wonderfully enervating experience, families are still out and about, joggers and cyclists as well, and groups of youngsters in the designated skate parks. I couldn't help but think that were this in Britain it would quickly become clouded over by the perils of urban decay and anti-social behaviour; although maybe such thoughts reflect an anticipation of the inevitable mediarised response to such a space and not the reality.

Eventually you arrive at La Ciudad de Las Artes y les Cencies, Europe's largest cultural centre, a gargantuan complex of stunning futurist architecture that is so effective that I find my sense of location gradually ebbing away. One of the structures bulbs out from an artificial lake like a gigantic blue whale breaching the surface; another incorporates streamlined steel limbs and supports; whilst another comprises a skein of sleek arches enclosing an oasis of landscaped vegetation as though it were ancient ruins that nature has sought to reclaim.

Strolling around beneath the walkways and dipping our feet in the icy-blue chlorine water of the pool that makes up this artificial archipelago, surrounded by thrusting high rise blocks and the drone of unseen traffic flows, I'm convinced that this is a vision of the ultra-modern future in which geographic alterity and temporality has been eroded. This could be Los Angeles or Toronto, Brasilia or Berlin, Dubai or Beijing; place itself feels entirely fluid and interchangeable once cultural signifiers are obscured or altogether removed and you are left simply to upload your imagination onto this white sterile template of blank forms. To paraphrase Marx, all that is solid, in terms of being somewhere, melts into the air of anywhere.

Tearing the city at the seams #22 - Manchester, so much to answer for...

Nostalgia is a benign affliction, a symptom that can both swaddle in comfort and smother uncomfortable progression. We are told that turning a blind eye to the past condemns us to its repetition, and yet unduly staring at the bright glare of our history is surely to amble blindly rather than stride purposefully across the expansive hinterland of the future.

A few months back, I revisited Manchester for a weekend. I lived there from 2009 to 2010, on an industrial placement year for my degree and, as punitive as I found the working experience to be, in many other ways that year was a formative one. I find myself looking back to my Manchester days through that disconcerting but telling veil of nostalgia that has set in over the intervening years like a pleasant mist.

In a similar way, Manchester itself is a city that has become contaminated with the lethargy of nostalgia, mediated via the esemplastic powers of culture and industry.

I decided I would undertake a lengthy walk of the city, outwards from the centre along the loose knot of canals that lasso themselves around Salford Quays, my former home, before returning back into the city proper. In so doing, I hoped to gain a certain reappraisal of my time in, and relationship with, this city.

I started out from the top of Oxford Road that branches off from the city centre and away past the wonderful Cornerhouse Arts Centre, slicing through the university complex and on into the student quarter. It was this area, formerly known as ‘Little Ireland’, that Friedrich Engels in his seminal ‘Condition of the Working Class in England’ denounced thus:

‘…the race that lives in these ruinous cottages…in measureless filth and stench…must really have reached the lowest stage of humanity… Only a physically degenerate race, robbed of all humanity, degraded, reduced morally, and physically to bestiality, could feel comfortable and at home’.

Students may not, it could be agreed, be prone to hygienic living, but surely things have improved since Engels’ day?! Working conditions, pressed down under the palm of austerity, might be reminiscent, but now ‘Little England’ is also the ‘Curry Mile’ where the only atmospheric stench is that of baltis, vindaloos and masalas of varying degrees of appetisement.

I headed southwards towards Castlefield, passing the resplendent Georgian-era Midland Hotel, burdened down by the present rain, waiting for the sun to pump the blood around and enliven its red brick visage. By contrast, the priapic Beetham Tower swaggers high above the city like an architectural incarnation of Liam Gallagher’s microphone poise.

It is this high rise that typifies the dubious success of Manchester’s resurgence from the late-90s onwards. Whereas in London, a multitude of architectural tropes do continual battle for predominance and attention; in Manchester, there is a legible informality to the city – the Victorian-era terraces, the red-brick factories and mills of old ‘Cottonopolis’, the concrete high rises – that seem to sit uncomfortably with the brash migration of modernist steel and glass structures that have largely failed to integrate effectively.

Today, the Beetham Tower appears as a figment of the collective imagination, translucent against the grey and dreary sky, a ‘2001’ monolith subconsciously guiding the city of Manchester onwards in its redevelopment and assimilation for the ‘pseudo-modernist’ form.

The term is one coined by the writer Owen Hatherley, who wrote of Manchester in his book ‘The New Ruins of Modern Britain’, that it was ‘a flagship for urban regeneration and immaterial capitalism’, and ‘the ultimate failure of the very recent past, a mausoleum of Blairism’.

Whilst I myself don’t fully subscribe to these somewhat overwrought declarations, he does have an underlying point, that the spate of urban renewal and rejuvenation that grew out of the Blair-era neoliberal ideology of positivism fuelled by unfettered corporate and private wealth with scant regard for either taste or functionality. Hence, the Beetham Tower stands as the totem pole around which the property developers, landowners and market capitalists dance their fervent ritual.

As I headed away from the attractive enclave of Castlefield along the canal, I passed dozens of old red-brick mills and factories that have become appropriated and redeveloped as ‘luxury apartments’; part of the preliminary contractions in the ‘birth of the new Manchester’.

In many ways this can be seen as a necessary taxidermy, it being preferable to rejuvenate buildings whose purpose is now outmoded rather than let them sink into dereliction. Nonetheless, it does elicit one of those unavoidable pangs of solemn nostalgia and a sense of shame at how these dignified structures that served their productive and industrious functions are now seen merely as an in-vogue design aesthetic and a template for a uniform lifestyle choice, free to those who can afford it.

Maybe one day the shopping centres and entertainment complexes will also be transformed into ‘luxury accommodation’, with inhabitants giving meagre thought to the multitudes of people who once adhered to a defunct and technologically redefined pursuit. Speaking of which, the Arndale Centre sits centrally as the pulsing heart of commerce, and as hordes of Saturday shoppers traipse to and fro across Piccadilly Gardens, it brings to mind images of a Lowry painting for the 21st century – weather-beaten, down-trodden stick men and women lurching across a canvas of grey from River Island to Top Shop to H&M…

Continuing along the canal path, it struck me as to just how different Manchester is from London, in that barely 10 minutes’ walk can take you out from under the shadows of the built environment to bask in relative isolation. This stretch of edgeland between Manchester and Salford Quays, known as Pomona, is largely sparse wasteland and overgrown storage plots, with only the passing of a raised tram to sow together the opposing urbanities.

Before long, my former home, the Abito apartment complex, hoved into view; its ‘edgy’ design of a sail-cum-roof hovering above the main frame of the building giving it the appearance of having moored at the quayside. Perhaps this was the architects’ subtle way of evoking the docks, by designing modern apartments that appear to have foregone their sea-faring days in favour of static habitation, like the Queen Mary (now a hotel) in Long Beach, California.

Viewing the Abito complex from the opposite side of the dock, however, gave the impression of it being an open-plan office space hoisted by 90-degrees; rows of identical modular units for people to operate within. I well remember sitting on my balcony staring out over the cosmetic terrain of the Quays, with its high rises standing alone like Mayan temples, trying to superimpose the imagined past of the dockers, ships and machinery over the top of its manicured present.

The primary reason why I was grateful to live in Manchester was that I fully bought into the heady cultural (specifically musical) currency on which the city still seemed to trade quite shamelessly.

Manchester in the late-70s was the British equivalent of Berlin or New York; it was a cauldron of creative energy that seemed to grow its tonality in direct alignment with the bleak aesthetics of the urban space. The notorious (and now redeveloped) Hulme Crescents were the fermentation of industrial estate nihilism; together with the anonymous walkways, dilapidated warehouses and abandoned factories the only feasible backdrop for the monochromatic futurism of Joy Division and the abrasive abandon of The Fall. Harsh concrete and social decay beneath a sky of constantly rain-engorged grey.

This era is mythologised to great effect by, among other things, the photography of Kevin Cummins, the exuberant romp of Michael Winterbottom’s ’24 Hour Party People’, and the more refined Ian Curtis biopic ‘Control’ by Anton Corbijn. Indeed, if you know where to look, Manchester is saturated with pop culture signifiers – of course there’s the ‘Joy Division bridge’ straddling Princess Parkway; you can go and ‘gravely read the stones’ a la Morrissey in ‘Cemetry Gates’; there’s Mr Sifter’s record shop that ‘sold [Oasis] songs’ as recounted in ‘Shakermaker’.

‘You’ll never see the hacienda. It doesn’t exist. The hacienda must be built…’ – Ivan Chtcheglov

Under the helmsman-ship of the civic-punk Tony Wilson, Manchester managed to shrug off its grim industrial shroud to become ‘Madchester’, the epicentre of Britain’s ‘rave culture’ during the 1980s, with his Factory Records championing the likes of New Order and the Happy Mondays, as well as the Hacienda becoming one of the foremost pioneering nightclubs in the world.

Reading Peter Hook’s memoir ‘How Not To Run a Club’, you can only despair at the scale of ineptitude that somehow sustained the Hacienda on a trapeze-of-sorts for so long, at the vanguard of the acid house scene, before finally imploding in a sorry miasma of drugs, debts and gangsterism in the mid-90s.

The whole ethos of the enterprise was of such an anarchic bent that its ultimate downfall ensured that similar ventures could probably never scale the commanding heights of the British music scene again. Too many safety nets have now been placed beneath the high wire, and in any case, no one really cares whether anyone falls off or not.

This is the paradox at the heart of Wilson’s Manchester; that his revolutionary tenacity, adrenalizing the limpid bloodstream of the city, tore down old barriers yet in so doing erected new but culturally bereft watchtowers of commercialised deference to the past that bear down on the city’s once progressive spirit. With his utopian vision of a re-born Manchester and his steely determination for progress, there are parallels to be drawn between him and Thatcher, in that the short-term success of their grand projects failed to herald in the long-term legacy that they had envisaged.

As Chtcheglov says in his ‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’, which Wilson would certainly have been aware of – ‘you can’t take 3 steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends.’

Today, the site of the Hacienda has become the ‘Hacienda Apartments’, and along the canal-side is wrought in steel an inscription of the quote that gave it its name. Nowadays, any by-the-numbers Oceana or Tiger-Tiger ‘superclub’ chain, spewing out alchopopped revellers into the gutters of every major British city, are following beat-for-beat the free-form improvisations of the Hacienda.

During my year in Manchester, I was frequently beset with personal unhappiness, searing through both myself and my circumstances. Often it felt like I was attempting to construct a personal ideal from many separate component parts, the instruction manual for which was illegible, whilst under scrutiny several of the crucial pieces were found to be missing. On the positive side, I learnt to adapt to relative solitude, and instil a creative discipline that still informs me today.

Standing on the quayside of Salford, bristling at the insistent rain, I acknowledged that for me, Manchester will likely always conjure up these conflicting emotions. I felt an urge to reach out from my now more stable, content, yet still confused present to my former self and either put a reassuring arm around his shoulders or slap him across the face, or both at the same time.

In many ways then, my hike around Manchester did yield some cathartic qualities, and give me cause to consider that, similarly with the city itself, the successes and strife of our past should be balanced on the scales of nostalgic reverence; neither glorified nor lamented to the detriment of our appreciation of the present.