The South Downs Way: excruciating pain in the pleasantest of places

The South Downs Way is a long-distance walking route that meanders its way over a hilly ridge running across the south of England. It stretches some 100 miles from Winchester to Eastbourne, or, if you prefer from Eastbourne to Winchester. It seemed to make more sense to me to walk from west to east, following the direction of the prevailing winds or, moving like the eye dancing over a line of text. When I stop to think about it, however, westward journeys are no less evocative: Columbus sailing to America or The Journey to the West. More modestly, I rolled into Winchester, a rather prim historic city where Downton Abbey must be popular, bought supplies then walked around in circles looking for the starting point and route. I should really have bought a map in the Tourist Information but I was hooked on the simplicity of following the marked path and discovering the trail as I went along. This was my first mistake.

Winchester seemed more interested in itself than in the South Downs Way and I had to be put on track by a retired dog walker as I paced back and forth like a yoyo in and out of a light industrial estate. Finally, heading west out of the city, it receded from view only to be replaced by a colossal music festival in the making. I had stumbled into Boomtown Fair a festival larger in scale than Glastonbury. There was no peace and love going round, the site had a downbeat workaday feel to it. I passed men in hard hats who carefully avoided eye contact and moved hastily aside as four-wheel drives tore through this fictional city in the making.

As the day wore on, my backpack began to dig into my shoulders, the dull ache it produced slowly growing into sharp teeth clenching stabs. I was not kitted out for a six-day trek, I was carrying all my things for the entire summer which, at this point, included gifts for friends such as a thick metallic Tibetan singing bowl. This was my next major mistake. I started to curse that bowl but there was nothing to be done but to drag myself from one post to the next. These markers were sporadic, sometimes vague to the point of setting me off-course, but for the most part clear. They described a broad zig-zag along the South Downs, which could be seen as either showing off its diversity of landscapes or of ensuing the route added up to the tidy number of 100 miles in total.

Nights were spent either camping wild on the side of secluded fields, hidden in woodland clearings or else on campsites. Getting down to the campsites was much like getting to the country pubs that made the whole endeavour so much more bearable. Both of these creature comforts were usually found on the lowland that lay on either side of the downs and which necessitated a descent of a mile or two to reach them. I stopped in some excellent historical coaching inns where food and real ale fuelled body and spirit. The only real exception was The Royal Oak where the landlord said he wasn't open, directed me to another pub which turned out to be a wild goose chase on which I nearly got run over and, when trudging back past his pub, saw that it had in fact opened. It was a snooty place that liked to pick and choose its customers, I suppose, and tired, muddy walkers were little better than gypsies.

Over days two and three my back had more or less resigned itself to the pummelling it was receiving and this pain was, in any case, trumped by hostilities taking place around my feet. I was wearing shoes that were too heavy and without support around the ankles: my third and final major mistake. They resulted in agony dancing up the front of my lower legs as the muscles lifting the feet were all but spent, my feet hanging limp below me. In spite of or even because of these hardships, the walk was putting me into a quite distinct state of mind. Before setting off I had imagined I would think about ideas more acutely as a result of the peace and quiet but actually, the daily exertion simply quieted the mind and put the body in executive control. This was turning into a grim form of meditation relieved only by infrequent drinking stops.

Arriving north of Brighton the weather changed and I had to fight my way through driving rain that was washing over the downs in sheets. The path was deserted and, swinging my shot away feet below me like two golf clubs, I said to myself, this is not fun anymore. I spent a sodden night in my now gently leaking tent, a night that seemed far more removed from civilisation than it actually was. The next morning I pressed on, stumbled through a pig farm and was spat out at a petrol station that seemed like a cornucopia so completely depleted was my food supply. Tucking into a ploughman's sandwich and alarmingly sweetened coffee, I assessed the desperateness of my situation and took a bus into the city.

From there I visited old friends in both Brighton and nearby Seaford putting the South Downs Way and, just as importantly, my ankles on ice. In Seaford my friend took me out to a local scenic spot which turned out to be on my aborted walking route. There, at Seven Sisters, I saw crowds of tourists for the first time. I was then taken elsewhere by work and in all it took a good week to regain the ability to walk naturally.

I was not done with the South Downs Way, however, I picked up the trail once more a few weeks later when I had a couple of days free. I went back up onto the ridge looking over Brighton and set off. While this was not the ideal way to complete the walk, it seemed better than aborting it completely.

As the way progressed, the park narrowed but the terrain remained surprisingly similar. There were few people and the hills had a surprising austerity about them. Coming into the closing stretch, the village of Alfriston was rather like Winchester in the sense that it didn't seem so overly concerned about the South Downs Way. I lost the track and found it again some way out of the village only to realise, a good deal later, that there were two South Downs Ways. I was on the route accessible to mountain bikes which meant I was cutting overland towards Eastbourne and missed out on the most spectacular part of the route, the Seven Sisters cliffs. It is a good thing that I managed to see them during my recuperation break in Seaford.

The final morning's march through thick damp clouds was bleak. I pulled my hat down and pressed on military style. I was not going to be beaten!

The end came as a complete anti-climax. I was expecting epic views over the cliffs of Eastbourne but instead simply stumbled across this signpost stuck in the corner of a suburban park, nestled beside a cafe where pensioners were sipping cappuccinos and sheltering from the drizzle. I asked the waitress if this was it and she said "yeah" in a tone of voice that suggested, "what else do you expect?" There was nothing else to do but order a coffee and readjust to the deeply prosaic world I had re-entered. I probably will do another one of these long-distance walks, quite possibly a longer one still, but I will come better prepared next time, which is a way to say, with the right boots and without a Tibetan bowl. 

The Hampton Court Costume Drama Tour

Hampton Court is a former royal palace situated beside The Thames in deepest suburban  south-west London. I know its main courtyard from a job I did here back in 2004 appearing as an extra in The Libertine, a middling Earl of Rochester bio-pic starring Johnny Depp. I remember that shoot as a Winter's day spent hovering around a vegetable cart that I was purportedly the owner of, dressed up in period costume with shoes one size too small and trying to spend as much time as possible on the crew bus in order to stay warm. This time round the weather was crisp but not frozen, the period costumes were worn not by me but by my tour guides, my shoes fit me like a glove and I was thankfully rid of that vegetable cart.

Included in the general admittance ticket to the palace were a number of activities and tours for the avid heritage tourist. My arrival coincided with the start of the twice daily tour of the Tudor court, led by a courtier who would introduce us to that world. A group of about thirty of us, gathered in the courtyard where a lady claiming to be part of the queen's retinue welcomed us and said she would show us, "her guests", around court. She led us towards a door which, as she reached it, slammed shut. She pretended she did not expect this, paused in thought for a moment, then said something must be amiss. It certainly was.

We were led into a smaller courtyard where the other performer guides made their appearances. The tour was a three-hander and the theme was palace intrigue in the form of the queen's suspected infidelity. The performers stuck to their characters and talked to us as if we, the audience, were also stuck in the Tudor period and were their guests making a tour of the palace. The tour, then, shifted in tone from Tudor tourism to a trial for treason. 

The acting was neither wholly convincing nor was it embarrassing: it simply did the job adequately. Anything too earnest would have jolted the tour into an unwelcome artistic zone so I am guessing the pedestrian tone of it was, quite probably, deliberate. What's more, the twice daily repetition of this show must have drained it of any excess vigour and helped it settle into the quality tourist distraction that it was.

There was a modicum of audience participation. During the scene where the queen's retinue were interrogated, questions were handed out for us to pose to the queen's servants. This did not change the fact that it was a highly controlled tour where genuine interaction would have been seen as a nuisance or even a liability. The questions existed to keep us awake in this historically themed entertainment that offers the impression of having learnt something when basically you have been inside a bumper length soap opera reconfigured as a guided tour.

What the tour did manage to do rather well was to use a variety of spaces around the palace to good effect, showing off its diversity of ambiances. The tour presented us with a series of good photo opportunities not only of the building but of actors in period costumes too. This was a sure-fire hit with the sort of foreign tourists who come to Britain and want to see the country through a historical lens. They come to Hampron Court Palace to see up close what they had previously only been able to watch on the screen. There were no Johnny Depps today to complete the admittedly anachronistic experience, but there were actors recreating the past in this easily digestible package.

Personally, I found the whole thing mildly oppressive. English heritage with its endless palaces and stately homes often has this effect upon me. It is impressive and has been designed to put you (the peasant) in your place and the nobility in theirs. Such architecture and heritage could be very exciting and even liberating if it were not for the fact that Britain still has a very real monarchy and class system. As such, these spaces are all too typically used to celebrate the continuity of that power structure. I tend to regard them and the ways their histories are interpreted as providing an educational role instructing the monarch's subjects on the proper division of power. They urgently require liberating from this narrative and while excellent examples such as counter-tourism exist, and not so great but not unwelcome contemporary art programmes of the likes of the National Trust's also take place, I see no great appetite on the part of the owners or custodians of these heritage sites to use them in a seriously open-ended way that permits questioning the basis of their existence. Their owners instinctively realise that they play an important ideological role and they will not relinquish control of them voluntarily to the riff-raff. It seems to me the alternatives are to ignore them altogether, to subvert them ever so gently or to retell and reuse them covertly.

The Occupy Tour: an anti-capitalist tour of The City of London

Finally I have got round to taking The Occupy Tour, a tour that is based upon the financial crisis and London's role within the historical development and current state of global capitalism. If that sounds like a lot of digest, you're right it is, but it all boils down to an anti-capitalism tour, more or less, and one that proved to be very well attended too.

The tour started on the steps of St Paul's Cathedral, the site that the Occupy protesters took after being prevented from occupying the London Stock Exchange back in 2011. I remember standing on these same steps back then and listening to the geographer David Harvey speaking to a large crowd on the relation of capital to city space and how he strongly supported the Occupy initiatives that were taking place worldwide. I think his writings should be worth looking at in relation to both this tour and The Tour of Tours more generally as he does go into the contested functions of public space quite considerably. This tour began not with a reading from Harvey, however, but instead with a reading from the letters of St Paul about possessions and money, a reading that addressed, rather aptly, the church's compromised role in finally supporting the eviction of the protesters.

The tour made its way from point to point taking shelter whenever possible from the rain. It should not be a shock in London to have to deal with a bit of rain when on a tour, but it has been a particularly damp time recently and I have the feeling I been enduring one sodden tour after another of late. Between stops we were encouraged to play "Spot the Tax Dodger". Predictably enough Starbucks was on the list and so too was Boots who, we were told, have assigned their corporate headquarters to a post office box in Switzerland, a move detailed in the UK Uncut campaign. 

We stopped outside many buildings that belonged to the different people and institutions who, we were told, were in their own ways responsible for the crisis. Our two guides took it in turns to explain the roles each of these different institutions played such as here describing the evolution of the Lord Mayor of London's office. This was quite interesting but what gave the tour an extra twist were the responses of the people inside the buildings. Here, we had someone opening the door and asking the tour to move away. We did... about 10 meters to the right, so that we were now assembled in front of another of their doors. The man then banged futilely on this other door from the inside to show his displeasure, but the street belonged to the crowd so the quotes from then Prime Minister Gordon Brown in 2006 and 2007 on the wisdom of light touch regulation of financial services, kept on flowing.

We came to the headquarters of the Rothschild family's businesses in London and heard how they built their empire, in part, through acting as the financier of national war bonds. Their present status is less important, we were told, as they had relaxed into being merely super wealthy and producing hyper-expensive wine in their vineyards in France. Now I think of it, I was once shown a large number of bottles of their wine whilst taking a truly surreal tour around the Reignwood Wine collection in Beijing. I might have to repeat that wine tour this spring when I will again be in Beijing so I can cover it here on the blog.

Once again we came across disapproving security guards speaking into their radios and not quite knowing what to do with us. Finally a colleague of his emerged and said, "No photographs, private property." It was the best he could come up with, a symbolic way of saying, "We don't like you, you are not welcome."  

They used a lot of laminated A3 pictures to illustrate their stories, such as this one on the founding of the stock exchange. I'm quite familiar with this use of cards having seen it on many other tours but the one thing that was more novel and which I rather liked was their hats. The rest of their clothing was relatively normal and would not attract much attention but their hats gave the whole tour a theatrical, not to say sartorial, lift. Top hats function as historical references that reminded me of the Victorian and Georgian eras, which was quite appropriate with this tour in which the past and present constantly intermingled. This mixing of time frames was, in fact, both the tours strength and weakness. It allowed them to make connections and explain how we got here, however, it was at the same time so scattered that it was impossible to extract a clear argument or thread from the tour, which instead felt like a catalogue of annoying and unjust things about the City of London.

The two of them performed well as a double act; here they are talking about Monty Norman the Nazi sympathising Governor of The Bank of England. What's more, they didn't just rely upon each other, they also brought members of the audience into their act by asking them to answer questions, translate phrases and even sing songs. Compared to the last time I took a tour with two guides who were at crossed purposes, this was a very harmonious duo. 

The tour came to The Guildhall, a site already known to me from The Machiavelli Reinterpreted Tour and here they made a gently provocative gesture through writing on the wall of The Guildhall in chalk. This diagram explains the medieval system of representation in The City of London which today ensures the mayor remains a person appointed by the banks.

We then stood in front of Chicago University's European Campus located in Woolgate Exchange but were cleared off this spot by another zealous security guard who had a contented 'job well done' look on his face when he managed to get us to the other side of the street. I can only think that these men have a very poor understanding of public relations as these actions only heightened the sense that these institutions had something to feel ashamed of and were embarrassed by this attention. Security guards and those who manage them tend to see things differently.

Chalk was again used to good effect to produce this table showing the income of the top 1% and level of public debt in an effort to debunk the free-market theories of the Chicago School of economic thought. The apparent failure of these economic theories and policies to behave as predicted has not yet made any apparent dent on the prestigious university campus located in the heart of the financial city. I would have liked one of their economics professors to have come out of the building and defended the theories, but that was not to be. It was a Saturday after all.

We then went over to Deutsche Bank where the topic was the consolidation of debt and the financial products and instruments that were behind the collapse of sub-prime mortgages. This was made a little more entertaining by including a rap composed by a former employee of the bank on the subject of the Collateralized Debt Obligation Market.

"CDO Oh Baby" to the tune of Ice Ice Baby by Vanilla Ice

Yo vip let's kick it!
C D O oh baby, C D O oh baby
All right, stop, collaborate and listen
Spreads are wide with a technical invasion
Home Eq Subs were trading so tightly
Until Hedge Funds Bot Protection daily and nightly
Will they stop? Yo I don't know

Turn up the Arb and let's go
To the extreme Macro Funds do damage like a vandal
Now, BBBs are trading with a new handle
Print, even if the housing bubble looms
There are never ends to real estate booms
If there is a problem, yo, we'll solve it

Check out the spreads while my structurer revolves it
C D O oh baby, C D O oh baby"

The guards looked on unimpressed as usual but did not intervene. In the background there is some of the bank's substantial art collection on show and I noted that they offer tours of their art collection, I might just have to take one to see things from that point of view. 

The last stop on the tour was the Moorgate branch of Nat West, a bank that is owned by RBS. There was a whole lot more talk about the government bailout of this bank and its unethical investments and as I was listening to this I looked around and saw the sentry box that marks the 'ring of steel' the security checkpoints installed in the 90s to tighten police control of the city's entrances and exits following IRA bombings. It was striking how it seems to more or less follow the old Roman Wall of London which, incidentally, is a tour route as well. This city within a city, or even state within a state, as some consider it, is essential to any understanding of what is going on elsewhere in the city and well beyond. The tour concluded with many thank yous, a steadfast refusal to accept money for the tour, encouragement to get involved with the issues raised and current campaigns such as that to remove the post of The City Remembracer and a final near ubiquitous gesture that I was not expecting. They said, "if you have enjoyed the tour then rate us on Trip Advisor!" It seems like this company and its website is the glue that connects people with tours in London today. 

The tour finished in the Red Lion where the bar staff kept trying to pour short pints, ie not fill up the glass completely, even though it was an over-priced generic city pub. On second thought that might precisely be why they were pouring short but that, in any case, didn't deter a significant tranche of anti-capitalists mixing and talking about the tour, about Occupy and much else besides. I've come to notice that the tours that generally finish in the pub are the ones where there is already a greater degree of connectedness between those taking it: tours around a very specific topic or political tours, like this one. The more general tourist oriented tours rarely have this social dimension. While most of the tours I've reviewed so far that have ended this way have been lefty tours, I would be shocked if this were not also the case with other groups and different political persuasions. I don't quite have it in me to test a BNP or EDL tour, if such a thing exists, but I can well imagine it finishing in a pub too.