Tearing the city at the seams #15 - Around the city in a day - A Circumnavigation of London

It is common parlance that to walk in circles is as maddening as it is pointless. The familiar conceit in any narrative regarding being lost in a remote landscape is the rediscovery of your own tracks, eradicating any notion of progress having been made.

With this in mind I found myself, with a week's leave from the usual working routine, pondering the notion of a radial walk around London, the idea being that the everyday contemplation of the city could be decidedly unraveled when viewed from a circular prospective.

In general, we are entranced by the notion of destiny, of a definite and eminently reachable point to which we spend our lives moving in a more or less linear fashion towards. The idea of simply traversing in circles is unpalatable, the antipode view of progress, yet has the capacity to be perversely compulsive.

In 'The Truce' Primo Levi, on making his monumental journey round Eastern Europe having been liberated from Auschwitz en route to his home in Turin, upon reaching Bratislava and being (relatively speaking) so close to the start of his epic journey, he wondered 'would we complete the circle...[and] begin another vain, exhausting circuit of Europe?'

The plan was to set out west from my flat in Brixton and complete a day-long circumnavigation of the city, closing the circle by arriving back at my flat from the eastern approach.

It struck me that very few people, if any, must complete such exaggerated routes as part of their day-to-day relationship with the urban environment. The sheer pointlessness of doing a circular walk on such a scale was what captivated me, as well as my stern conviction that this was as defiant a means as any of subverting the vice-like clench of urban routine, the short spurts of sporadic walking that punctuate our typical day so tightly mandated by fiscal and time imperatives.

This was to be my rebellion-of-sorts against the commercialisation of the city space, by forcing it to adapt to my own will, when so often it is cogently the case that the opposite applies.

As a repudiation of the strict time pressures forever imposed by life in the city, I decided to re-imagine the city as a clockface, on which, starting out from '6' I would conquer the city hour by hour as I progressed from Brixton to Putney through to Islington at the 'hour mark' and ticking round again via Shadwell and Southwark.

As far as I was concerned, I was merely fulfilling the urban walking directive of Joseph Paxton, the designer who, in 1855, proposed the building of a Great Victorian Way. This grand infrastructure project was to be a 10-mile covered arcade loop around most of central and west London, incorporating pedestrians, shops, hotels and other businesses; a vastly ambitious proposal that would have had the impact of Baron Haussmann on Paris, until it was shelved in favour of building the infinitely more useful (if less spectacular) sewer network system.

Setting out at 7.30am, the ice-blue sky thinning and thawing as the sun gained in confidence, I realised that I would also gain a unique perspective on a 'day in the life of a city', crunching my way along pavements behind dog walkers en route to Clapham Common, and commuters hurrying to keep pace with their regimented schedules. Free from thinking about such routine, I was able to view the city from a different patina, as it swiftly yawns into life, almost on a biological level as a complex interweaving network of organisms locking into action once more after the night's interregnum.

Descending onto the Putney embankment I admired the restrained and modest skyline that has been so far maintained in this riverine portion; as yet comparatively free from the pestiferous encroachment of Lego-block apartments and buildings that follow ‘statement’ rather than form.

All the way from the Boat Club to the Hammersmith Bridge I became embroiled in an initially humorous but eventually infuriating overtaking game with a band of middle-aged women out jogging. Harangued by a gangly and high-spirited motivational coach of around my age, the women would jog for 40 or 50 metres before one would give in to the lactic strain and, as though they were mountaineers roped together, drag the others to a weary stop.

At this point I would gain ground and retake the lead on them which would incense them into corralling their collective energies to spurt round me again for another few metres. The whole exchange was in danger of becoming quite farcical until I peeled off across Hammersmith Bridge, reflecting on this (as I am wont to do) as just another example of the consumptive nature of our culture, to the extent that an essentially free activity, such as going for a jog, has to be traded as another fungible asset for those willing to partake in the exchange.

Through Hammersmith and past the ‘Death Star of commerce’ Westfield Shopping Centre, I zeroed-in on Shepherd’s Bush and from there began to bestride the quintessential pale-brick townhouses of Notting Hill. Walking through this highly desirable West London locale I began to think of the hypothesis of the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who stated that if you examined the great cities of the world they were all constructed on a strict declension from the west to east axis in accordant correlation from rich to poor.

Whether this is due to, as he suggested, the fundamental psychological synthesis existent between people and the built environment in alignment with socio-economic hierarchies, is a matter for much debate. The fact is though, that London has always been a patchwork of different social fabrics stitched together with little recourse to reason or grand design. That said, recent developments that can be seen all over the city (and which are nowhere more salient than on such a drawn-out walk as this), threaten to irreparably alter the urban stratiography under the auspices of, at best, gentrification, and at worst, social cleansing.

The traditional London ethos of the working class and the elite co-existing in close proximity is rapidly being abandoned. This has been government policy, acknowledged or otherwise, for the best part of 30 years. The problem is, that as with any major conurbation, low-paid workers will always be needed in the centre as much as the hedge fund managers, who will still need someone on a minimum-wage zero-hour contract to sell them a sandwich from Pret or Tesco Express.

These drastic changes, which are completely in hoc to capital as opposed to social responsibility, can be seen in the redevelopment of Battersea, the evolution of Dalston, Shoreditch, Hackney and Brixton to being places of burgeoning appeal. A prime case-in-point is Elephant & Castle, an area that has all the appearance of having been struck by the eruption of a concrete volcano.

The imminent demolition of the Heygate estate and the planned regeneration of the shopping centre and surrounding areas is the crystallisation of modern trends. The willingness to provide yet more luxury apartment complexes and delay for as long as possible the token quota of affordable housing is too symptomatic of the times to be worth being overly incensed by. The fact is though that far less than the budgeted £1.5 billion could have been spent on simply renovating the Heygate, as the Park Hill estate in Sheffield has been (to the point that it was nominated for this year's Sterling Prize).

Indeed, within the next 10 years the existing denizens of Elephant and Castle will have been replaced with a finance ghetto, a gated community full of bankers and accountants who, like eager sperm will be ejaculated from the testes of their brand new luxury flats across the supine river and all over the waiting face of the City.

But I digress. As midday approached, I hit Marylebone, with its reclusive mews' branching off here and there like streets-in-waiting. From there I trudged along past Euston, St. Pancras and King's Cross, the 3-pins of a plug inserted into the power socket of North London. Making my way through Hoxton and beginning to curve southwards through Bethnal Green, I realised that the walk was beginning to unfairly prejudice my approach to the environs, noting as I did just how boring and non-descript large parts of London actually are when subjected to slow and exacting scrutiny.

At times I found myself oscillating with each step into newly extreme mindsets. For about 3 minutes I decided I hated London, and questioned why the fuck it was that I was wasting my time with such a pursuit?! Normal people do not decide to do this on their days off from work I reasoned. Oh well, by now it was too late to turn back...

As you slice through Stepney towards Shadwell, Levi-Strauss' west-east theory is never more pertinent; layer upon layer of diminutive social accommodation buildings crush up against one another, yielding only occassionally for a bedraggled and featureless public park. The youthful resurgence of Hackney and Shoreditch has yet to inflect this particular quarter of East London, an area that was said to draw benefit from the Olympics of last year, although exactly how was unclear at the time and is even more mystifying after the event.

And yet the imposing behemoths of Canary Wharf manifest themselves almost like an opulent mirage on the horizon, both instilling a sense of futile Madison Avenue-esque aspirationalism and overreaching resentment. There is an arrogant, stand-offish feel to these capitalist monuments that exist apparently detached and enclosed from the rest of London, like a segment of Dubai ostentatiously plonked down, waiting to be islanded by the ox-bow lake of the Thames as the river severs its way decisively across Poplar's flank.

Following this logical train of thought, I began to wonder whether there were any cities built in a circular design or whether they were, in the main, improvised centrifugally in an urban sprawl or laid down in rigid graticule fashion like cables as in American cities? I could think of none, until I remembered the Venus Project, a quasi-cult research hub spearheaded by Jacque Fresco as a design for the complete overhaul of society.

The premise of the Venus Project is that a sustainable resource-based economy would replace all monetary systems, and pre-fabricated 'total cities' would sprout like mushrooms; its nucleus core orbited by ever-thickening layers of residency, industry and leisure, like the utilitarian version of Dante's levels of Hell.

Despite being quite benign, it doesn't take too much intellectual prying into the Project's 'manifesto' to deduce just how chronically utopian and simplistic it actually is, falling well foul of the usual utopian problem that it takes into no consideration at all the myriad varieties of wants and needs that prevent a unified human race from manifesting. The less said about the plans for a 'cybernated government' (linking all computers with automated services, allowing them full day-to-day control) the better, although I'd encourage people to give it a read purely for the entertainment value.

That said, I couldn't but feel a slight yearning for Franco's bucolic Eden as I began to enter the Rotherhithe tunnel to traverse under the Thames and back to London's southern hemisphere. Although technically walk-able, passing through on foot is strongly ill-advised and I could certainly understand why as I made my way through the hot, acrid tunnel, trying to inhale as infrequently as possible for fear the exhaust fumes might shear a good year or so from my life expectancy, trying to avoid the incredulous glances of passing motorists.

Upon reaching daylight after 1.5km of white-tiled exhaust pipe, I paused for some fresh air in Southwark Park. By now the light was beginning to tinge with dusk and as I made my way down through Peckham and then onto the final furlong of Denmark Hill, I entered an almost trance-like state of intoxication, maintaining forward motion whilst my mind slumped into an unapologetic mush of inertia. Cars and buses passed me by, full of the same commuters I had set out with in the morning, returning home after yet another day's work, the comfort of routine maintaining the steady equilibrium of their lives.

Dragging my sore heels through Brockwell Park and the final approach along Brixton Water Lane, I thought of all those explorers and adventurers who in centuries gone by had set off in search of new frontiers, circumnavigating the world when they were more mindful of falling off it, never sure whether they would see the shores of home again.

Relative to my usually quite sedentary existance, this day-long hike around the city would have to serve as a near-enough approximation of such far-flung travails. I had seen the city from a radically new perspective, redefining it according to my own eccentric parameters, in a way that was both invigorating and rewarding. Now though, I was ready to sit down.