Having recently read Joseph Conrad's seminal novel 'The Secret Agent', I set as my target destination the Greenwich Observatory. To get there I plotted my course down Vassal Road and northwards apace along Camberwell Road before slicing a route through Burgess Park. A recent slash-n-burn council project apparently revitalised this sizeable public park, but having only seen it in its current manicured state I couldn't be in a position to judge the merits of the redevelopment (although I understand it was trumpeted proudly by Mayor Boris Johnson). It seemed to me however, that the local authorities' fingerprints were left all over it, smudge marks left as a residue of where they'd mangled and moulded the topography into some kind of aesthetically appropriate public space with all the necessary boxes suitably ticked. There are carefully delineated pathways, allocations of trees and shrubs, designated sectors of leisure - tennis courts here, cycle lanes there, a fishing lake yonder.
This brings me on to another leisurable pasttime that I have often found beguiling - amateur fishing. As I skirted around the lake edge there were a scattering of tents laid out at a few-metre intervals like some kind of protest encampment. All the angling paraphenalia was laid out - the bait buckets, the flasks of hot tea, the assorted hooks and lines like a dentist's table. To some extent I can understand the appeal to someone adopting fishing as a solitary activity, an esconce into the wild to be left to their own thoughts and relationship with their natural environs. But I'll always remain puzzled by those who spend hours in a manufactured public space bordered by hulking lumps of residential concrete, staring into a man-made lake in the hunt for what surely must be a meagre quota of fish?
Misgivings about the leisure pursuits of others aside, I left the far side of the park and struck a hard right onto the Old Kent Road. I'll admit my fair intrigue about this iconic highway and its apparent connotations of a pre-modernised London; the cheapest 'paving slab' on the Monopoly board embodied by its mucky brown colour allocation. I expected a smattering of ye olde pie & mash shops and spit & sawdust boozers. As I trudged along the traffic-weary road, I realised this was just another nostalgic fantasy; the kind of which London might happily indulge in the centre, but out here the illusion had been shrugged off without remorse. The road now is lined with industrial complexes and cloneable retail parks such as an ASDA superstore that, since it was the first one I'd seen in London (and as a former employee), I was lured inside, deviated from my chartered course as though against my will like one of the consumerist zombies in Romero's 'Dawn of the Dead'.
By the time I had tramped along New Cross and up the slope of Greenwich Park to the observatory, the weather had plunged into a dismal raining bitterness with cold winds billowing around the turret of this observation point. The view from which, across to Canary Wharf, the City and the strange inverted-crater that is the Millenium Dome, was nonetheless striking. The hordes of people descending on the shelter and warmth of the observatory and posing for photos with legs bestriding the 'assumed' Meridian line quickly began to grate and I decided to head back downhill.
Conrad's novel 'The Secret Agent' had been inspired by a true attempt of a mysterious failed terrorist attack (perhaps the first such attack in Britain) on the observatory in 1894. A French anarchist had detonated the bomb he had been carrying, apparently accidently. It is intriguing how the aims of Conrad's anarchist protagonists to strike a blow in the belief systems of the populace mirror those of recent terrorist spectacles. The belief system under threat in Conrad’s novel is that of science, mathematics and discovery; with the Observatory – being the apex point for time itself – being the geographical monument to that faith, the Vatican of science in effect. Such a harrowing motivation was transposed into the 21st century when Al-Qaeda destroyed the World Trade Center, thereby condemning the physical embodiment of modernism, commerce and capitalism to ruin and dust. By attacking the United States the terrorists were seeking to puncture the ingrained beliefs of its people and those of the wider western world; their faith in economic order, wealth hierarchies and the infallible strength of America.
Down the hill I observed the newly redeveloped tea-clipper Cutty Sark, frozen afloat on a window pane of solid sea. From there I descended down into the Greenwich Foot Tunnel, an eerie subterranean lamp-lit corridor beneath the Thames linking Greenwich with the Isle of Dogs. It was oddly displacing to duck under a millenia-old natural feature and in the process temporarily become an eutechnical tube train. Whilst the novelty value of traversing the Thames underground is worthwhile, I did lament the fact that I had stranded myself so far from home next to that mysterious and intriguing dot on the extreme edge of the central London tube map – Mudchute.
By now after nearly 9 miles, my feet were beginning to kick up a fair protest and so I increased my pace towards the skyscraping sentinels of Canary Wharf. As I trudged through the achingly dull surroundings of residential housing and playing fields, as though a non-descript London suburb had been up-rooted and re-planted into the squashed Docklands province, I admit to having slight reservations about the value of the lengthy hike I had just undertaken, wearying my way to a disappointing destination and then struggling to find my way to the Canary Wharf tube station.
But it is a compelling pastime nonetheless, one that I very much feel drawn to undertake from time to time, as a means of plotting the physical coordinates inside my head of the map of this vast city in which I live. Even if I admit that to some, the worth and the merit of such a pastime may be as dubious as… I don’t know, urban fishing?!
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