Tag Archives: Cities

The London Library (Keep It Down There Mr Darwin)

Posted on by
Reply

Need to write something? Want to get that drawing project you started months ago finished? Well, your house is beset with devilish traps to prevent you from doing so. Really. A kitchen full of tea to be made. An Xbox just feet away. A whole world of pointless tasks you can happily procrastinate over. And that’s before actually risking going anywhere near the internet. A total lack of will power prevails and before you know it you’re playing Portal in between another round of Earl Grey.

After piteously moaning about this utter lack of creative discipline a friend offered to loan me their library membership. Well, that’s very sweet. Okay. So slightly discouraged by thoughts of ‘Children’s Book Day’, clusters of cold dodging old folks, crazy people talking to the large print books and other previous library encounters I set off to Westminster. To The London Library.

I then find out why my slight reticence to venture here caused several smiles of amusement.

Set in a gorgeous Georgina town house The London Library turns out to be a fairytale establishment straight out of your favourite fantasy fiction. A deceptively narrow little door on St Jame’s Square leads into a labyrinthine warren of floors. Delightfully confusing. Books shelved up to the ceilings. Crackly old leather armchairs. Oil painting from centuries ago. There’s even a quirky Edwardian cataloguing system. Books filed by subject matter, so random finds of interesting reading matter abound. The place itself is initially so fascinating there’s no chance of getting any actual writing done. But a least I now have a better class of distraction.

This is a place where you imagined Arthur Conan Doyle wrote. Agatha Christie plotted fiendish crimes. Henry James thought about ghosts and governesses whilst Charles Darwin contemplated evolution. And turns out they did.

The London Library was founded in 1841 by Thomas Carlyle. His founding vision was for an institution which would allow subscribers to enjoy the riches of a national library in their own homes.

Carlyle was joined in his vision by eminent early supporters: The Earl of Clarendon, the enlightened early-Victorian politician, was the Library’s first president, Thackeray its first auditor; Gladstone and Sir Edward Bunbury were on the first committee and early members included Charles Dickens and George Eliot.

Over the past 170 years, The London Library’s collection has grown to more than one million volumes covering 2,000 subjects. It has enjoyed the patronage of many eminent writers, academics, politicians and readers throughout its history and has long played a central role in the intellectual life of the nation.

The London Library.

Sadly admission costs here but beg, borrow or steal membership if the opportunity ever arises. Or there’s a free tour on Monday evenings. Just a look round the building alone is worth your time before even getting started into the books shelves.

Oh, and if you’re feeling flush avid readers can adopt their favourite book to make sure it always gets looked after with the care and attention it deserves. Bless.

Eventually, despite a fascinating book find about hidden London tube stations and a guide to Victorian underwear, some writing did get underway. Hey, two thousand words without the aid of Jaffa Cakes. And convinced I may well be sitting in Charles Dickens old chair I didn’t immediately start shoe shopping online. I had a nasty feeling he might be watching.

Slightly Sinister Fiction: Glitch

Posted on by
1

How much misery circulates through the tunnels of the London Underground every day? Really, all things considered, I’m suprised the effects haven’t been a whole lot worse…

Glitch

You don’t really notice till it’s not there. Everybody’s doing their very best to keep the established social norms up to par. No unusual body language. No random screaming. The absence of normal is making you frown slightly but the little glitch is subsumed in the banality of the journey. The robot wants food, sleep, TV Prozac, not to deal an unsettling twitch in your perceived reality.

But the glitch has established itself now. A tiny disruptive pattern on the edge of your thoughts. Settled in for the night unless you can figure out a rational explanation.

Prod the hippocampus. Replay it again.

The man in the white vest clearly entered the lift. You saw him. White vest jarring with the commuter slick suits of your fellow travellers. Not one of the gang. You saw him step into the lift. You saw the lift doors close. Instant claustrophobic terror. Get distracted. Reconfigured the woman in a blue outfit (vast improvement), wondered if Reykjavik is a cool place to go on holiday and think of at least ten reasons why it’s just fine to get a cat. The lift reaches terra firma. Doors open. Franchised storefronts blaring coffee and ties. Panic attack averted.

The spatial awareness of big city living tells you the man in the white vest is close behind as you exit the lift. Step to one side. Let him past whilst you hunt for travel passes stashed somewhere on autopilot. He’s definitely right behind you. You were first to exit the lift. That’s how it works.

He’s not. Hell, he’s not anywhere. Glitch.

Somebody has violated the commuter social contract. People who get into lifts get out of them. There’s no script for how to deal with people simply being no longer there. You can’t miss a human being at less than two meters. They don’t get to sneak past you. Leave right now. Leave the station. This is exactly the sort of thing your brain doesn’t want to deal with.

Your brain likes rational explanations for life’s little reality twitches. Likes them cleaned up and tided away. 1630AD. Meteors showers become messages from god. 1989 and inexplicable lights in the night sky are always lens flare. Pretty much anything will do but it needs some fabrication that will safely recategorise abnormal into a less alarming context. It’s easily conned but demands you at least make an effort to help it out.

But lifts have now moved up to a high-ranking anomaly problem. You can’t ignore the fact they don’t appear to be playing by the rules any more but can’t find a plausible lie to smooth the jarring breach with.

The trains echoing backwash fills the concourse. Gradually slow your pace. Count your imminent fellow lift passengers. These are the rules now. Try to ignore the anticipatory anxiety of claustrophobia. Try not to feel too much like you know this is ridiculous. Seven people. An easy fit into cavernous rush hour lift designed for three times that number. Seven people in. Seven people out. Normality confirmed and your brain can go about its daily business untroubled.

The glitch begins to fade into the indistinct internal chatter of the day-to-day living. Late? Lost? Salad or Sushi? Paper over the crack a little and it’s almost like the it never happed. A cursory check establishes all commuters are present and correct. Number match. They always match. Every single day. They always match until the woman is gone.

She stood the back. Fake Channel Handbag carelessly slung over office sensible shirt. Nineteen are eighteen. One traveller down. No recounts necessary. You swallow. Try to swallow. Your mouth is too dry.

The screaming is in your head. Your body language is only slightly off. At a casual glance you’re troubled, distracted. The end of a relationship? No promotion at work? There’s a myriad selection of life’s less pleasant possibilities. Nobody would consider you might be losing your mind. You only look away for a second. Maybe less. The woman. Vanished. A grey suited businessman swiftly takes ownership of the remaining space as though it never happened. Only you’re sure, utterly sure it did.

It takes you a while to work it out. Numbers in a notebook. Camden station in July and nine people become eight. Euston, August, nine thirty and seventeen commuters become sixteen. Not everybody who walks into lifts continues their journey but who cares to notice? Proximity to anomalies breeds’ encephalon defences and nobody wants to catch a glitch.

People should read signs more. That’s really what they’re there for. In a city only hanging onto functionality by its fingertips you’d think they maybe would. There’s no room for ignoring design confines when thousand of commuters need to reach their destination. The fragmented human input to control waves of travellers creates something greater than the whole. The footfall of thousands fuels cognizance. The desire to be home by seven thirty feeds its instincts.

When the lift says maximum capacity it probably means it now.

I always take the stairs.

Peculiar Places #1

Posted on by
1

Tucked away under the platforms and tracks of Waterloo Station hides Leake Street. It’s 300 metres of ‘legal’ graffitti wall. Just head down York Road then wander off into the most promising looking place for you to get stabbed. You’re actually only likely to find some Nathan Barleys filming a crappy trainer ad, but it’s a curious pictorial zeitgeist of constantly-changing images and ideas. Meet the Fat Slags or take in a comment about Palestine.

Just depends what somebody’s decided to draw today.

Are You Listening?

Reply

The city isn’t a nice place. It has its dirty little secrets. When the city is sleeping it doesn’t have very sweet dreams.

Here’s an idea. Why don’t you look at the street you’re walking along? Look past the repetition of faceless office building and parasitic coffee shops. Take a look at its genesis. Take it from source. You barely even touch its history on your short walk to work but its history is there. Waiting to speak to you. You really think nothing seeps out through the paving stone cracks? Well think again.

The collective resonance of a thousand footfalls is remembered here. The city may be sleeping but the cumulative force of human actions shapes its dreaming thoughts. The city would like to speak to you. It doesn’t matter that you choose not to hear her. You don’t get to entirely tune out a thousand years of her assiduous listening.

The only problem is when you choose to reply.

Smart phones for stupid people. You’d think the banality of the human condition would all but kill anybody’s desire to listen in but the city is used to the platitudes of human interaction. The woman in the ironic t-shirt tweets the names of her fellow Southbank diners to the world as the Southwark boatmen had shouted the price of fresh whores across the Thames. Add a little passion and the cities all ears. Beneath the veneer of cheerful sociability she hears the grasping cries for attention. And remembers.

She always remembers.

The city remembered as a man fell to the gutter on Hercules Road. Stabbed for the price of a meal. The fourteenth of May 1802. She remembered as the outcast dead were buried at Cross Bones cemetery. Paupers and prostitutes. Winchester’s fair geese. 1603. Tourists walk the floors of the Imperial War Museum. Three hundred year ago you visited this building to be amused by the clinically insane. Conveniently Bedlam moved but did it really leave nothing behind?

You don’t think the city has something to say to you? It remembers nothing of these events? Of the plaintive mediocrity of human lives? Take a seat and watch. I can’t really advise it but then maybe you’d started to notice too. Hadn’t you realised you’d begun to watch every step? To circumvent the cracks in the paving stones?

You instinctively avoid waiting on a certain tube platform. Every time. Somebody always wants to start an argument. About anything. For no reason. You don’t want a drink with me? Why? Bitch. A scuffle about football. A relationship ends in screaming ignominy. But move one stop further down the line and you can peacefully wait among taciturn fellow travellers. Your friends advise that you really shouldn’t take that short cut home across the park but nothing, nothing at all unpleasant has ever happen there. The street behind the welcoming coffee shop is always home to a vagrant. The corner of the connecting alleyway always the scene of a traffic accident. Somebody always stands begging by the small shop that sells hardware. An old woman waits at the last bus stop. Every day. Every hour. You’ve never seen a bus arrive.

The house you used to live in never felt like home. A stranger’s rooms you shouldn’t be visiting. A dark hallway that left you grasping for a light switch. Friends who always prefer that you visit with them. Ikea pastels don’t seem to fix a clinging sadness on the stairwell. Another annex of the past that desires to tell you something. Just like you, nobody ever lives there very long. Always easier to say you need to move closer to work.

Start watching for the patterns. They’re barely hidden by the mundanity of your day- to-day life. Pick at a few corners and you’ll be surprised what’s underneath. You don’t need all the jigsaw pieces in place to see what the picture is. What happens on the city’s streets has always happened there. The foundations were laid centuries ago that dictate the behaviour of its fleeting human visitors. But once you’ve noticed, her subtle coercions are too difficult to ignore. All-pervasive. All-encompassing.

Now you’ve noticed the city, the city has noticed you.

She doesn’t have many people to talk to. Thousands lost in gym membership, being seen at the right places, networking a career move. Grimly keeping up the pretence of a happy, productive life is a full-time occupation. Drinks? Tuesday? The work was so inspirational. If you tell enough people you’re fascinating then you obviously are. It’s better if you shout. The city can only whisper to these preoccupied edges of perception, but if she finds somebody who’s listening you’ll have her undivided attention.

The Northbound journey towards the river produces nausea now. The horizon line reeling until you’re clear of the street. Walk to Westminster Pier and the stifling claustrophobia around the new hotel complex leaves you exhausted. Gasping for breath. The adrenaline-fuelled surge of fight or flight forces you from St George’s Park.

A plague cemetery. A railway for the dead. The grounds of an asylum until 1930. The Internet can tell you most things. It’s full of useful information.

Bet you wish you never started to listen.

You learn to plan your route around centuries of slumbering misery. The intonations are faithfully memorised for you to hear, in every step of your journey. You walk in a city that whispers of her ruin. It’s cadence seeps around the stone on which you walk. Only tragedy has happened here. Only tragedy will happen again.

Pick your way between the starvation and the cruelty. Quickly sidle past a house where murderous anger fills the air. Circumvent an unpleasant cross roads. Avoid a former workhouse behind the store façade of elegant clothes.

Now the city has your attention she wants to tell you all about her past. And you really don’t know how to stop listening.

Smart phones for stupid people. Maybe they’re just trying not to listen too.

Glitch

Reply

You don’t really notice till it’s not there. Everybody’s doing their very best to keep the established social norms up to par. No unusual body language. No random screaming. The absence of normal is making you frown slightly but the little glitch is subsumed in the banality of the journey. The robot wants food, sleep, TV Prozac, not to deal an unsettling twitch in your perceived reality.

But the glitch has established itself now. A tiny disruptive pattern on the edge of your thoughts. Settled in for the night unless you can figure out a rational explanation.

Prod the hippocampus. Replay it again.

The man in the white vest clearly entered the lift. You saw him. White vest jarring with the commuter slick suits of your fellow travellers. Not one of the gang. You saw him step into the lift. You saw the lift doors close. Instant claustrophobic terror. Get distracted. Reconfigured the woman in a blue outfit (vast improvement), wondered if Reykjavik is a cool place to go on holiday and think of at least ten reasons why it’s just fine to get a cat. The lift reaches terra firma. Doors open. Franchised storefronts blaring coffee and ties. Panic attack averted.

The spatial awareness of big city living tells you the man in the white vest is close behind as you exit the lift. Step to one side. Let him past whilst you hunt for travel passes stashed somewhere on autopilot. He’s definitely right behind you. You were first to exit the lift. That’s how it works.

He’s not. Hell, he’s not anywhere. Glitch.

Somebody has violated the commuter social contract. People who get into lifts get out of them. There’s no script for how to deal with people simply being no longer there. You can’t miss a human being at less than two meters. They don’t get to sneak past you. Leave right now. Leave the station. This is exactly the sort of thing your brain doesn’t want to deal with.

Your brain likes rational explanations for life’s little reality twitches. Likes them cleaned up and tided away. 1630AD. Meteors showers become messages from god. 1989 and inexplicable lights in the night sky are always lens flare. Pretty much anything will do but it needs some fabrication that will safely recategorise abnormal into a less alarming context. It’s easily conned but demands you at least make an effort to help it out.

But lifts have now moved up to a high-ranking anomaly problem. You can’t ignore the fact they don’t appear to be playing by the rules any more but can’t find a plausible lie to smooth the jarring breach with.

The trains echoing backwash fills the concourse. Gradually slow your pace. Count your imminent fellow lift passengers. These are the rules now. Try to ignore the anticipatory anxiety of claustrophobia. Try not to feel too much like you know this is ridiculous. Seven people. An easy fit into cavernous rush hour lift designed for three times that number. Seven people in. Seven people out. Normality confirmed and your brain can go about its daily business untroubled.

The glitch begins to fade into the indistinct internal chatter of the day-to-day living. Late? Lost? Salad or Sushi? Paper over the crack a little and it’s almost like the it never happed. A cursory check establishes all commuters are present and correct. Number match. They always match. Every single day. They always match until the woman is gone.

She stood the back. Fake Channel Handbag carelessly slung over office sensible shirt. Nineteen are eighteen. One traveller down. No recounts necessary. You swallow. Try to swallow. Your mouth is too dry.

The screaming is in your head. Your body language is only slightly off. At a casual glance you’re troubled, distracted. The end of a relationship? No promotion at work? There’s a myriad selection of life’s less pleasant possibilities. Nobody would consider you might be losing your mind. You only look away for a second. Maybe less. The woman. Vanished. A grey suited businessman swiftly takes ownership of the remaining space as though it never happened. Only you’re sure, utterly sure it did.

It takes you a while to work it out. Numbers in a notebook. Camden station in July and nine people become eight. Euston, August, nine thirty and seventeen commuters become sixteen. Not everybody who walks into lifts continues their journey but who cares to notice? Proximity to anomalies breeds’ encephalon defences and nobody wants to catch a glitch.

People should read signs more. That’s really what they’re there for. In a city only hanging onto functionality by its fingertips you’d think they maybe would. There’s no room for ignoring design confines when thousand of commuters need to reach their destination. The fragmented human input to control waves of travellers creates something greater than the whole. The footfall of thousands fuels cognizance. The desire to be home by seven thirty feeds its instincts.

When the lift says maximum capacity it probably means it now.

I always take the stairs.