London Overground (9 page)

Even today, tramping with Kötting, we experience that sense of otherness, the way these parks invoke exiled French Impressionists in Norwood or Émile Zola wandering around Crystal Place with a camera. The Overground tracks run between the northern border of the park and King's College Hospital. Paths and close-shaven slopes that seem deserted and outside time, on closer inspection are occupied by catatonic recreationalists
on hard benches, and passerines on urgent diagonals, giving off powerful chemical signals: they are no danger. They are not sex-cruising, lurking, or itching to flash. They are going to work. Or railway station. Or hospital appointment. They are adequately medicated.

‘All these big buildings,' Andrew says. ‘It's an obligation to keep them supplied. Do your bit for the NHS Foundation Trust, fall out of a tree.'

John Ruskin, who lent his name to the park, lived on Denmark Hill. His parents, moving from Herne Hill, and holding firmly to the high ground, took the lease on a large, detached, ivy-smothered house in 1842. They were enthusiastic advocates of pre-railway suburbia. Ruskin promoted the new property as exemplifying ‘dignity'; death's waiting room, a vantage point from which the old couple could stare with rheumy eyes out of their western windows into the captured darkness of the
noble cedar tree on the front lawn. John, commandeering the centre of the house for bedroom and study, woke each morning to inspect the latest formations of clouds, mingled with the democratic smoke of industry, over Deptford and Rotherhithe. A discipline he found ‘inestimable for its aid in all healthy thought'. He draped his walls with a flush of Turners, including
Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon Coming On
. Lake District watercolours and refined topographical sketches imported a certain vision of England (depopulated, high-toned) indoors, elevating Ruskin's spirits and allowing the Oxford aesthete to congratulate himself on how swiftly an omnibus could carry him, by way of Vauxhall Road, from his Denmark Hill retreat to St James's Street and Cavendish Square.

We plunged, we dropped. The Overground got away from us. It was a long haul to Clapham High Street. Picking up the airs and graces of superior suburbia, high-ground halts like the hill stations of the British Raj around Simla, the railway declined to take on custom in low-caste Brixton. The whole diaspora of Brixton was station. The place was like a seething platform of hucksters, fast-food peddlers, jerk-chicken joints under bridges and pillars with sparking electrified cables.

Still under the influence of Ruskin, we failed to follow the railway string; we lost the Overground and blundered into Herne Hill, with its myths of stag-antlered forest gods. Herne the Hunter. Along the way, I noted Wellfit Street and a cash business soliciting copper, lead, brass, aluminium, electrical cable. White vans belonging to tribes we took for nocturnal railway strippers waited their turn to make a drop. No journey is worth undertaking, I told Kötting, without at least one fruitful detour. What is another three miles when set against unlooked-for discoveries?

Picking up our feet now in anticipation of a late lunch, we
arrived in Electric Avenue, Brixton. My original London. It wasn't quite a Proustian seizure. I should have been stepping down from the train, not dragging it behind me like an anchor tangled in gravestones. I remember, back in 1962, how the act of arriving here in wide-eyed innocence carried the imprint of a platform as exotic to me as New York City's Third Avenue El. You were, suddenly, without warning, above a street market, with its active press and squeeze and smell. But you were inoculated with resistant visions of Thames, council flats, green plots: the memory-film of the run out of Victoria Station.

I'm still reading Patrick Keiller's
The View from the Train.
Cinema for Keiller begins with the spectacle registered by a fixed camera on the Liverpool Overhead Railway, the first elevated electric railway in the world. There is no cutting away, it's a ride. A journey that runs for as long as the reel of film lasts; a ride that allows the sedentary traveller to experience shifting perspectives, numerous jolts and jumps of attention, incidents, revised alignments. A totality that Keiller associates with James Joyce's enraptured account of the city of Dublin in
Ulysses
, from sweep of bay at Kingstown, to bars, brothels and birthing places at the centre; to fat-frying basements, private schools, Martello towers, and cemeteries of the suburbs.

The poet Apollinaire, when he was still Wilhelm Kostrowicki, or Wilhelm de Kostrowitzky, visited Landor Road in Stockwell, a spit from the railway, in quest of a young woman called Annie Playden. ‘The crowd moved about in all directions,' he wrote in ‘L'Émigrant de Landor Road'. Kostro, as Annie called him, had proposed, when she was a governess in Germany, but she turned him down.

In May 1904, he caught the boat train from Paris Saint-Lazare to London Victoria. And on, it must be supposed, across the Thames. Annie was a big girl of firm opinions. An Apollinaire scholar tracked her down, in 1951, in the United States. So it
was Annie who turned out to be the emigrant, not the poseur of the poem. ‘Tomorrow my ship sails for America.' Apollinaire, wounded in the First War, died in 1918, on the day the Armistice was announced.

The writer James Campbell, like Keiller a committed retriever of the French in London, describes, in ‘To London, for love', how he tracked down the addresses associated with Apollinaire, an Overground circuit of his own: from Oakley Crescent, off the City Road, to Chingford.

Campbell located an Apollinaire notebook that ‘seemed to flash a momentary light on the cubist poet in Islington'.

retour á Angel

Tube en face poste

Demander Clapham Road

4d

Clapham Road Station is now Clapham North, right alongside the Overground. But not a stop. Train rides, with their voyeuristic glimpses, their enforced leisure, are a laboratory for the making of poems. Watch out for those notebooks, those iPads, those scribblers.

‘And I shall never come back,' Apollinaire said. If you can take the word of a poet. I weakened. I relented. I did come back to the high, redbrick enigma of Electric Avenue. The curving, roofless arcade of foods and fancies between Brixton Road, the market and the station. A consciously modern street launched at the time of Jack the Ripper. Tall, narrow windows, two floors of them, reflect their twins on the far side, to recessive infinity. The butcher's shop, whose fatty reek saturated the linoleum stairs to the film school, was under new management:
ZANA, QUALITY HALAL MEAT
&
FISH
.

For me, Electric Avenue was the ideal starting point for half
a century of London venturing. Cinema was doomed but not yet posthumous. Sublimated in train rides. Markets. Spicy lunches. Thump of sound: years before Eddy Grant's 1982 single carried the street's name right up the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. Atlantic Ocean, not Atlantic Road – which spilled into the notorious Railton Road; a battleground from the 1981 Brixton Riots, when more than 200 youths engaged with helmeted police foot patrols. A minicab was stopped and searched. Shops were mobbed and looted. A police van was set on fire. A street-specific local event, heated by festering resentment and mutual misunderstanding, escalated into guerrilla warfare, confirmed and exacerbated by newsreel crews looking for the image: urban apocalypse.

Atlantic Road is a conceit worthy of Apollinaire. A stone beach beside a thread of urban ocean. That's how it felt when I walked up the stairs of the film school. I arrived in the twilight of the first street market to be lit by electricity. There were canopies shading the shops. A walk to the door beside the butcher's slab was a daily experience of dropping into an invocation of Paris, the confidence to dress this arcade with manufactured light. Patrick Keiller places Electric Avenue on the route of one of his fictive pilgrimages in
London
, his documentary tribute to his years as a South London lodger.

Esther Leslie, in her 2013 book,
Derelicts: Thought Worms from the Wreckage
, has a photograph of Passage Choiseul in Paris from 1908 (twenty years after the construction of Electric Avenue). The passage is glassed over, but the commercial impulse is the same; a single spoke of a mercantile hub built for strolling. An anticipation of the much grosser Westfield supermall in Stratford. Which would be a fortress of commerce set
against
the city, rather than a seductive passageway through it. Leslie solicits Walter Benjamin. ‘Benjamin writes of the arcades of Paris, as if he were writing of the labyrinth of
the self, criss-crossed by paths made through encounters with others … The arcades are the stuff of recent history, but they have come to be experienced as ancient, once they – and the lives and relations they incubated – begin to pass into memory.'

The early promotional postcards of Electric Avenue have bulbs in trees, bedazzled windows, lights strung like stars from the canopies, but no pedestrians. Passage Choiseul, in 1908, is frozen: straw boaters of the men, a stopped regiment diminishing into the far distance,
all facing inwards, their backs to the windows.

In April 1999, a man called David Copeland, crazed by his reading of the city, his fear of immigrants, miscegenation, homosexuals, his own impotence in the face of these challenges, placed a nail bomb in Brixton Road. He was hoping to ignite another riot. That old hunger for fire. That image-thirst. For sirens and helicopters. Burning buses. Torched warehouses. A market trader, sharp-eyed and wary of cameras, moved the suspect bag around the corner into Electric Avenue. The bomb detonated, injuring thirty-nine people. Copeland then shifted back across the river, and east, to position the next bomb in Brick Lane.

In my Electric Avenue days my inclination was to head north – Charing Cross Road, Camden Town, Belsize Park, Hampstead – chasing films, meeting friends in Soho coffee bars so uncomfortable in atmosphere they had probably been cursed by William Burroughs. It took a few months before I found Liverpool Street and the 149 bus to Dalston Junction and the Rio Cinema, for Joseph Losey's
The Criminal.
But even then I recognized a connection, crumbling civic pomposity and imported Marxist rhetoric, between the two proud ‘loony left' boroughs, Hackney and Lambeth. Town Halls thumped down like monolithic bookends. Both boroughs were denied a direct
link with the Underground system, a punitive cultural prophylactic. As if they were zones of contamination. Socialism might be catching. Thatcher was not so much interested in abolishing the Greater London Council as abolishing Lambeth and Hackney. In the meantime, it was enough to make it as difficult as possible to get in and out of the renegade boroughs.

Angela Carter opens her final novel,
Wise Children
, with a riff on ‘two cities divided by a river'. Her ageing music-hall twins are marooned in Brixton. ‘The rich lived amidst pleasant verdure in the North speedily whisked to exclusive shopping by abundant public transport while the poor eked out miserable existences in the South in circumstances of urban deprivation condemned to wait for hours at windswept bus-stops …' Carter's feisty old sisters, with their bittersweet Hollywood memories, were not unaware of my film-school street: ‘The whirr and rattle of the trams, the lights of Electric Avenue glowing like bad fish through a good old London fog.'

Hackney, flogging off Shoreditch landholdings, tearing down Georgian properties for the benefit of development packages tied to Overground links, lifted the curse. They kept the white temple of the former Town Hall as a photo op for Saturday-afternoon weddings, while throwing up more glass and steel than Stansted Airport for the new municipal offices. Old, loud, close-packed markets were downgraded or destroyed by overregulation, while farmers' markets and foodie extensions of Borough Market were promoted. The arrival of the Overground, taking up tracks unused and allowed to rot in the Thatcher period, signalled the political emasculation of Hackney and its rebirth as hip boomtown. House prices of terraces condemned in the era of the tower blocks doubled, then tripled, overnight. Locals, mesmerized by daily offers, couldn't decide whether to stick or bust.

Brixton, we felt, although it was moving upward, was not
quite ready for Ginger Line dinner parties. There was a healthy dose of edge to the streets. This was still a parish infected by poetry and the lives of poets who came, perched, passed through, suffered incarceration. Many of the luminaries of the 1960s and 1970s paid their respects to Professor Eric Mottram in his Herne Hill house. Among them Allen Fisher, then a Brixton-based plastic-pipe salesman, later another peripatetic professor. Fisher's
Place
, a serial publication undertaken through fugitive presses, was an epic of local history, international conceptualism, conceived in the spirit of Charles Olson.

before us a land lying waste

not 1026 acres of pasture

     
but a row of streets

strung out in rhythm with the railway