Tearing the City at the Seams - London hike no.1

The city reclines as a vast uncontrollable vista, open-armed with opportunity and ripe for exploration.  Having lived in London for close to 4 months, I thought it was time I started to stride forth, with the intent of a contemporary urban flaneur, and grasp the geography, the scale and the ordinance of this swollen conurbation.  Of late I have become increasingly amoured with the concept of psychogeography; intrigued with the theories involved with shaking the rigid confines and systems of the city into flux like a snowglobe. 

The urban dweller exists in a defined, orderly system of geography, a series of pivot points between work, home and miscelleneous forms of leisure and social activity.  The links between each are like a chain, heavy and compulsive in their application.  We are psychologically land-locked into these habitual modes and methods of orientating and navigating ourselves in our relationship with the city.  I have come to subscribe to the psychogeographer's credo that the personal perambulation of the city over long, un-determinated distances can serve almost as a kind of therapy in terms of how we view ourselves in relation to our environment.  In effect, a way of liberating ourselves from the physical rigidity of routine.

By spending several hours on foot, progressing through the urban landscape at random or with an end destination in mind, we temporarily re-model the city for ourselves, translating the purpose and conformities of the city into a better-suited language whose native tongue is your's alone.  This is my attempt to shrug off the straitjacket of the urban, the comfort of the familiar, to tear the city at the seams.

I began on an ashtray-grey Sunday lunchtime, leaving my apartment on Brixton Road, South London, and heading towards Stockwell.  Down Landsdowne Way I passed the London Bus Garage - a building that acts as the refuge for all the city's double-decker shepherds that seal so many of us into the convenient routine of daily life traversing this city.  The building itself is shaped with a humpback arched design like rising and falling concrete waves, or the ribs of a large whale, in and out of which flow the buses like shoals of red plankton.

Overpowering the far end of the garage is a tall 1960s tower block of the brutalist style, with balconies jutting out here and there like enormous Jenga pieces being edged out from behind by a wary finger.  Teetering right down Guildford Road - a curious juxtaposition between a concrete migraine of cracked council flats on one side and quite elegant Victorian terraced townhouses on the other - one of the latter dwellings being home to Will Self.  A towering intellectual and himself a keen psychogeographer, Self has played a pivotal role in my own fumbling orientation within this idea-set of city hiking and walking, and more generally as a thinker, of civilisation and its discontents.

Progressing along Wandsworth Road, two different structures flirt for the eye's attention.  On the right hand side is a breathtakingly drab industrial tower with pipes and vents sprouting off at all angles like an abandoned plant left to grow unweildy and out of control.  Two anorexic pipes scale one side acting as the crutches upon which the rest of the building staggers; a decrepit remnant to the industrial decades gone before.  Meanwhile on the left, the new St George's Wharf tower hurtles upwards like a glass cigar stood upended.  Similarly devoid of any apparent human interaction, it almost seems as though it too has been left to grow entirely at its own volition, fuelled by a structural photosynthesis towards the sky.

I walk across the great River Thames over the Vauxhall Bridge and through the upmarket enclave of Victoria; all wide pavements, white-wall terraced townhouses and private gardens sealed off for each of these gated communities.  From there I headed into Hyde Park from the south side, cutting across Rotten Row, the world's first major bridleway - in a sense the King's personal motorway - and also the first to be lit at night in an effort at deterring highwaymen intent on muggings.

I was reminded of the time, some 5 or 6 years ago, when my Dad and I came to Hyde Park to see Roger Waters play an exemplary concert and then, because it was one of the hottest days of the year, sleep under a tree along the perimeter of Park Lane.  At dawn the next morning I remember we walked through the park past a panoply of wasted people, collapsed revellers who had not made it home and had given in to exhaustion; casualties of their own excess.  Strolling around Embankment and Buckingham Palace at that early Sunday morning time provoked scenes eerily cut-and-pasted from the opening of '28 Days Later' - a city abandoned for indiscernible reasons.

I completed this first hike by blazing on up through the park towards the Paddington Basin area, and from there along Regents Canal and Euston Road to my final destination of the British Library.  The reason I wanted to end my walk at this hulking red-brick monolith of words was to attend their current exhibition – ‘Writing Britain:  Wastelands to Wonderlands’.  It presented a glut of well-known writers and their works that had been directly inspired by or written as reflection of the British landscape throughout the centuries, from Milton’s dark satanic mills of industrialised Britain, to Emily Bronte’s ‘Wuthering Heights’, Ted Hughes’ poetry and JG Ballard’s urban dystopias. 

It served as a stark reminder of the hallowed names that have moved through the city of London in the times gone by, plundering it for metaphor and rhyme, allowing the prose to absorb the vibrant environment like wet sand.  Escaping the rigid confines of the city’s order, defying its constricting logic is the modest aim of these hikes across London.  I lay considerable hopes on them facilitating, to some extent, the pulling back of the veil on new realms of inspiration and possibilities of perception.