Way-Losing London. A photo record

August 12th 2017

The Wood Green Revisited Tour

Today's tour was of the stalwart North London neighbourhood Wood Green in the affable company of Hugh Chapman. I say stalwart because Wood Green is one of those areas that has the character of always being there but never being too obtrusive, like the waiters in the excellent Kervan Sofrasi Turkish Restaurant on the High Road. This is in complete contrast to attention seeking Dalston, for example. This can mean that the place gets taken for granted, which is a pity because changes, such as the imminent demolition of the gas holder, can just happen like weather: it lurches from grey to grey.

Our tour of Wood Green was not a rehearsed walk with a set script, but Hugh did have several locations in mind to take me to. That is what brought us to the Chocolate Factory, a former industrial building now housing creative businesses. It still bore traces of its history of sweetening the tooth of the British Empire but today it housed such things as overspill from Mountview Theatre Academy. As we were walking around this oversized shoebox and later waking beside some of the other refashioned industrial units in the area, I had a sense of familiarity that I now realise came from the old Middlesex University Fine Art School being based here on Western Road back in the 90s. I first visited it as an undergraduate student and then later as a judgemental life model; a cash-strapped 22-year-old performance artist who looked down on life drawing but had to keep his opinions to himself and humbly take the money. The school has long since moved elsewhere, the building changed its appearance and my attitudes to drawing softened.

Back out into the cool grey we ascended the multi-story car park in search of a view and this is the best we got. Whilst Wood Green's centre has some density, it is surrounded by rows of two-storey houses with cars parked out the front and little back gardens filled with patches of grass, bikes and children's plastic toys.

For an area whose name evokes a Robin Hood-like image of a clearing deep in the forest, the reality is resolutely urban with no wood to see and scarce little green either. The slither of greenery that we did come to was the New River, reached by walking under the train tracks, which neatly slice the urban fabric in two. To the south we arrived at Turnpike Lane Station where the slender Ducketts Common stretched before us but which marked the limit of our walk: we turned around and headed back up High Road. That park is another old haunt of mine: many moons ago I directed A Goat to Grind a performance for six cyclists that briefly interrupted the assembled Special Brew drinkers. Whilst I have been away too long, they looked as if they were still there, still putting the world to rights and peeing in the bushes. It is reassuring that some things don't change.

One of the purposes of the tour was to test out an idea of mine to explore an urban environment via the reproductions of art that can be found in it. This picture on the left, sitting in a charity shop, is an example. I wanted to first identify its origin and with this see if there was a way to connect this Rembrandt (right) to its contemporary environment. The first thing that I noticed doing this was how unevenly art is distributed: there are vast swathes of the city that art barely touches. What you do see everywhere, however, are the byproducts of art, namely design. Looking for both art and the traces of it through the etymology of images, proved to be a quite fascinating exercise that offered an original method of viewing the city. How the art reflects back upon the city remains to be seen but it can be so rich in content - Balthazar's Feast, Rembrandt's life and the painting's history - that these will, without the shadow of a doubt, include stories that could be reactivated in Wood Green.

Hugh is working for the social enterprise Green Rooms, a hotel catering for the arts sector which has its own arts programme. Naturally, they have an affinity with independent local businesses such as the Big Green Bookshop, a sympathetic place tucked away off the main street. Here we met the people running the place who were happy to chat and willing to be involved in some sort of artistic tour too. This is quite a contrast to another one of our stops, the frozen food store Iceland, where a security guard asked us to stop taking photographs, afraid we might be stealing their stellar design concepts. This division between local stores and national chains was predictable but is worth bearing in mind when making a tour. The temptation is to make tours on a personable and local level, bypassing the brightly lit mall, but that would give a very false impression of the neighbourhood. Somehow, it seems to me the resistance or impersonality that you can encounter in the larger places is interesting in itself and a tone not to be avoided altogether. 

All the time that we were looking around the neighbourhood as a form of artistic research, there was also a secondary very practical task of looking for a suitcase going on. This took us up and down High Road in and out of large and small stores alike. I did finally find a decent case in a sale in one of the smaller places and it was put to use immediately as I checked out of Green Rooms. I expect to see more of the area and, in the words of Arnold Schwarzenegger, I will be back. Touch wood (Green). 

The Rewildings Tour: Walking out of London on a line at 200°

Rewildings is a year-long series of walks that I heard about through the Walking Artists Network. I did not know quite what to expect, the instructions were starkly simple: "Meeting @ statue Charles I, Charing Cross Roundabout" ... "come prepared to sleep wherever we get". Oh and over the day we would walk in a line at 200° and should avoid electronic communication and purchases. I arrived a little before the start time of 9AM and sat solitary at the base of the former monarch, notable for being executed for treason and soiled by London traffic fumes. More or less on the stroke of nine, the other five of the group descended upon the traffic island, we exchanged pleasantries and were off.

For the most part we stuck to the roads and public paths and only once did we find ourselves in a true impasse needing to retrace our steps. A little later, in a park, we had to climb out, a task made more sporting by the backpacks laden with camping gear and provisions. 

The river interrupted our flow south south west and sent us upstream in search of a bridge. We were dressed as hikers not urban walkers so, encountering perhaps the single most important landscape feature of the city, we were, in a sense, meeting a kindred spirit.

This was a common dilemma: which direction to follow at a junction? We tended to decide through a form of collective navigation. If you had a compass, you had a say, and we went with majority opinions. There was some room for manoeuvre and persuasion and I heard things like, "it could be argued that it is this way." Walking at 200° was an art not a science and the principles by which we proceeded were never formalised. We instead decided through action such questions as, "how far do you insist on holding to the straight line? Do you go through buildings? Do you allow yourself to act upon foreknowledge of the route? If you are diverted, do you then try to correct for it and find again your original line or do you simply proceed from where your diversion has taken you? 

We passed many curious sites that could be written into a narrative of their own but, in my mind, they simply remain nodes of a suburban esoteric map that slipped by either side of us. This walk was much more about the journey, for me, than about sensitivity to the sites we passed through. The purposeful line and target of reaching the limits of the city saw to that. What remains in my memory is the transformation of the city over the course of the day and the company of the group. These were the two constants.

The southern suburbs also included an industrial estate with an ironically pastoral name. This brought me back to a walk I undertook some years ago, a walk which also started in Trafalgar Square, though at dawn, and which had me walk for one day in the direction of the sun. That walk revealed South London in a different way: grittier estates and industrial decline sat alongside banal burbs and all of them cut across by many more train lines that required continual picking around. Was this difference in texture purely due to the luck of the route? Or, perhaps unconsciously, was I attracted to squalor, or this group to respectability?

We came to the River Wandle. This river has come into vogue of late with a resurgence of interest in the lost rivers of London. That interest is not so far away from the spirit of this walk which reframes the city as the interplay between the natural environment and the very human historical and contemporary construct. I asked the initiator of these walks, a tall energetic research scientist named Morgan who once walked from Mexico to Canada, what the inspiration or purpose of Rewildings was. The walks, he said, were something he wanted to do to gain a perspective upon and connection to London, a city he had moved to after spending several years in California. Taking pictures, scribbling notes and dropping into conversations throughout, I can see how this could, over a year, offer a very rich and rewarding experience of the city.    

As the afternoon wore on, the city started to thin out. We were in the land of the dog walkers. After this came the hills of the North Downs and secretive mansions hidden away behind high wooden fences. We had entered Operation Yewtree arrest zone.

The early evening took us as far as Banstead in deepest South London. While there had been talk earlier of breaking out of London's girdle, the M25, we were consulting no maps and this barrier was still out of sight. We had been walking over unpaved paths for some time and while the presence of the city was never entirely lost, we were in the rolling North Downs and avoiding golf courses more than shopping centres. The line we held, it tuns out, was not at 200° but closer to 190°. Maybe there was some over-correcting for the Thames dragging us westwards, maybe we were not as faithful as we could have been or maybe the roads really do lead in that direction.  

We gazed over the patch of green that chance had brought us to and drank wine as the dusk gathered. When the last of the late summer sun fell behind the trees, we retreated to our woodland clearing campsite. While the communal dinner of smoked tofu and vegetable stew was heated up I picked out stones from below me and set up my tent. What a difference a hot meal makes! Early to bed with warmth inside, I crawled into the tent and quickly relaxed into a deep, restorative sleep.

Restorative, that was, until I awoke with flints poking into my back in the depth of the night. I should have been a little more vigilant with clearing the ground earlier with the price being nocturnal twisting like a kebab turning in slow motion. The following morning we rose early, phones came out in force, located us and plotted a route to the nearest station. The cold light of day revealed us to be depressingly close to London and well within the Oyster card zone. Climbing aboard one of the beleaguered Southern Railways trains, we headed back into the city annulling a day's walking in less than half an hour. The Rewindings walks continue till the end of the tear with a highlight being the 320° New Year's Eve walk.

Way-losing in London: how to get lost in the capital

Some years ago I produced a map, not unlike the one above, which re-imagined London by stripping back the names of tube stations so that they simply described what was to be found at their site. Oxford Circus thus becomes Circus while Westbourne Park can be renamed either bourne or Park. One of the ideas here was to remove the familiar markers, often denoting ownership and association, and to see afresh the city as a collection of sites. 

This is a detail of the above map that includes our starting point. Since we has not decided whether we'd be venturing north or south of the river on our disorientation mission, it felt right to begin our journey in the uncommitted zone of a bridge over The Thames. We set out  in the direction most of us knew the least: North West. This didn't initially yield anything very unusual; we quickly arrived at a barrier clad Trafalgar Square with bikes circling and modest crowds murmuring their modest approval. As we snaked our way through Mayfair and Marylebone we stopped to discuss what being lost might look like and in response to this, we switched our logic of navigation several times so as to remain on the scent of being lost rather than progressing in too calculating a way towards our indeterminate goal. While none of the various approaches could possibly deliver us to the promised land while still in this most familiar of terrains, they all did their part in paving the way. We became more sensitised to the particularities of the sites we encountered, though unlike the above map where they sit isolated from one another in a sea of white, ours were still connected by our mental threads.

We squeezed onto a bustling double decker heading north and after some time stepped out at what was to be a random, and hopefully mysterious, bus stop. Chance delivered us to Golders Green, a Jewish neighbourhood in NW London that was, for a few of us, still relatively familiar. Getting lost was not going to be so easy after all. We walked through some side streets now thinking about an afternoon pause, and whilst I was chatting away on the subject of New York City's space vrs London's, we happened upon a pizza and sushi canteen. Their margherita was indeed the New York style: thin crust loaded with cheese. We ate and took stock of our wanderings.

The afternoon continued with an altogether more concerted attempt to break the mental map by alternately leading and being led through the streets with eyes closed. We must have looked quite a sight: several couples tottering slowly along quiet backroads, narrowly avoiding trees, lampposts and bushes. Forty minutes later, we arrived at a state of complete disorientation. This best stab I could manage at our location would be to say we were 'somewhere in the Golders Green area', beyond that and I'd just be making it up. 

Our endpoint revealed itself when I opened my eyes onto a large suburban house with a curious public / private bench marking its perimeter. Unlike previous attempts at way-losing (Beijing, Birmingham, Santa Cruz de Tenerife) where there was equal emphasis upon the construction of narratives, we were way too solid with our London directions so had to approach the problem of getting lost very directly. This black and white house, then, was familiar as an idea when I looked at it (I had previously lived in Stamford Hill, another Jewish neighbourhood in London) but when I started to examine it and the roads passing in front of and behind me more closely, they became not so familiar after all. The more I looked the stranger and more particular it seemed to become. This corner held all manner of details in excess of my first impression of the place, an impression I might very well have stuck with if I were passing through normally. Not being able to locate this place, then, made it all the more vivid as it had escaped the illusion of control and mastery. Walking on from here and attempting to now find our way, the roads remained more alive. A voice from a distant PA drifted over, an inscrutable enthusiasm that could have been intoning anything from children's sports to ethnic cleansing. Roads looped in on themselves refusing to behave. For a short space of time, I found again the newcomers bewilderment. This makes me realise that this fragile state should not be surrendered so quickly but rather savoured to the very fullest. Watch out for this next time, which should be happening later this autumn: details coming soon!