A Tale of Two Cities - from Albertopolis to E20
Posted in London on Sunday 23rd June 2013 at 10:47pm
This trip had caught me somewhat unawares, coming at the end of a month which had been pretty eventful and as a result, fairly expensive. So, it was London on a shoestring - something I'd done plenty of times before. Indeed London is a city where it's very easy to do lots and spend little - and while its always easier to do the opposite, there is a kind of purity in keeping it simple. An added complication was the demise of my Oyster Card. I've had the card for years - and despite a few issues which have always been refunded, it's worked fine. But now, TFL have decided to take issue about a payment which was due during my debit card switch over period. I could just pay - but they've decided to cancel the entire account instead. So this felt like a very odd trip in some ways - London without the traditional means of getting around, and with very little planned. A blank canvas?
First stop once at Paddington was to get a new card and load on some credit. From here we made the eastward run to the place we were staying with friends once again. We arrived on a blustery but clear evening - the longest of the year - and relaxed. It was good to kick back after a fairly tough week or so, and the prospect of a day of exploration in areas I hadn't visited for a while was a fine one. With a fairly late start the next day, we set off on foot to Snaresbrook station. The terrain out here is always surprising. Once out of the Lea Valley and over the ridge into the Roding, the change in tone and situation is evident immediately. A little vestige of Epping Forest on the corner is testament to this being a much more salubrious neck of the woods. But just a stop or two down the line and we're in Leyton - closer to my usual wandering zones - comfortable with my discomfort. We press on to Mile End and make the cross-platform leap to the District Line and straight to South Kensington. Exit is by the Museum Tunnel - the second time I've used this - and it's still an impressively engineered, fiercely practical way of moving dry, happy people around this vast complex of knowledge.
After a pleasant morning coffee in the quadrant, surrounded by the fine buildings of the V&A, we perused the South Asian and Indian collections before regrouping in the stunningly tiled refreshment room. Our next plan was to wander up the grand Exhibition Road and find the Albert Memorial. I hadn't walked this way for a very long time, but the geography was quickly recovered - the long, straight planned sweep up to Hyde Park, the huge bulk of the Royal Albert Hall oddly hidden until up really close, the suddenly a flash of gold in the otherwise grey skies as the first glimpse of the memorial appears. We spent a while here, interpreting the text below the figures of great artists and examining the corner groupings which represent each continent - aside of course from examining the gleaming golden man himself, set in a starry-ceilinged booth. It was both spectacularly overdone and deeply touching in once. Seeing it thus, through new eyes after long years, it seemed both fresh and surprisingly real, standing against the wind. Return was a meandering trek - a top-deck bus ride along Oxford Street, a shopping trip on the Caledonian Road, then the Underground back to base.
Another lazy Sunday start led us onto the train, alighting at Stratford and heading to get coffee in Westfield. I remain intrigued by this place - it's odd mixture of public life and private function, and especially the rather zealous security guards who prowl, only an armband and a walkie-talkie between them and real trouble. We whiled away an hour or so, before heading out to press our noses against the fence of "London's most exciting new suburb". The site was quiet and empty, and felt odd. We made a run to John Lewis and headed for the bus back west along Whitechapel Road, switching near the Bell Foundry for the direct bus back to Paddington.
We packed quite a bit into a couple of short lazy days this visit, and a tired but happy run home confirmed this. London opens new doors each time I visit, and even more opportunities arise each time I visit in company. The contrast between the treasures and wonders we saw in South Kensington, and the skeletal pointlessness of the Arcelor Mittal Orbit couldn't be greater - but I still love the eastern fringes much better somehow...
It's fair to say that life has changed quite a bit in recent times - and while my excursions to London are less frequent they have also become a little more important in terms of keeping me connected to the city. This weekend has been a purely tourist jaunt in many ways, though even a sightseeing trip can't avoid re-treading old paths. I found myself stalking the corridors of Windsor Castle around thirty years after I last visited - but also finally explored the tunnel between South Kensington station and the museums which I'd read about so often but never actually needed to use. But on a Sunday afternoon in surprisingly good weather I found myself with a little time for the kind of wandering which wouldn't work well on the tourist itinerary.
I began in the unlikely territory of Wanstead, hopping a bus in the High Street and heading into the suburbs. Curving around the wide, yellowing expanse of Wanstead Flats, we nudged through traffic and shadowed the railway through Maryland to Stratford. In more familiar territory I disembarked and changed for the DLR. It was odd to be unencumbered - no bag, not even a coat - and I felt almost inauthentic and exposed. The DLR took me to All Saints, where I ascended and crossed onto Chrisp Street. No market today, just baked pavements and cars sluggishly trawling, banging out dance music. I felt even more out of place, unwelcome - a rare feeling here and one I wasn't expecting.
My target was the Brownfield Estate. I'd read an article which had extolled the virtues of Balfron Tower - the eastern cousin of Trellick Tower which signalled my arrival at Paddington each time I found myself in London. Trellick is brutal but oddly graceful - tall, set away from other buildings and surrounded by a low-rise development of sister blocks. Balfron Tower soon made it's presence felt too - squatter somehow, the service tower seemingly more delicate against the bulk of the utilitarian residential block. It too was the tallest building for quite a distance, but it didn't seem so completely free of clutter and couldn't been seen clearly until up close. When it did loom up out of the ground, it was stark, shocking and unsympathetic. But, doubtlessly impressive. The ground level area was dirty, empty of people and subject to redevlopment. A few children yelped by after bursting from a nearby door. A student couple looked disdainfully at me as they left the tower, scornfully regarding me flicking my camera out to get a shot of the building. Otherwise, any sound was confined to the hum of the distant East India Dock Road and an occasional Heathrow bound jet scoring the otherwise blue skies.
I picked my way north, skirting Glenkerry House - another block with a Goldfinger style tower attached - but this one was less residential and looked like some sort of lookout tower policing the Blackwall badlands. The lazy summer sunday feeling returned a little as I progressed towards Langdon Park. A bus slowly plopped over the traffic calming measures, and I found myself beside Langdon Park DLR station, where a new youth centre is being built from gleaming pink plates of copper which beat the sun back at me pleasantly. Each platform was adorned with chunky, cast metal writing which looped the name of the station in friendly hand script.
My short excursion was done - and I considered how London and it's environs could still fascinate and draw me in. From the surprising interest of Windsor Castle to the odd, magnetic presence of Ernő Goldfinger's powerfully brutal blocks, the built environment and it's affect on the city and the people remains a strange attraction. As the anniversary of the grand spectacle of 2012 approaches, and I gain a year of perspective on the feverish, almost desperate walks I undertook at such a strangely liminal time of my life, I'm beginning to understand how important the city is to me too.
Flying has always been a solitary experience for me. Save for one ill-fated trip to Glasgow which I took in the company of a small group intent on birthday revelry, I've always been in the company of my own thoughts. Over the past few months I've spent a lot of time flying - and a lot of time thinking...anticipating strange new adventures to come, or miserably regarding a return to reality. In either case, I've rarely slept, and looked too often at the moving map telling me how many of the 4792 miles I'd covered so far. The thing was it didn't feel very far at all...the journey to Heathrow was fraught with obstacles, but once I was in the air it was a mere few footsteps. That was of course until my last jaunt with it's abortive first attempt to pressurise the cabin and a return to Heathrow.
But that seemed like a lifetime ago. This flight had been different. In company I felt calmer, the flight felt shorter, I even slept a little. The last hours dragged of course. We were eager to land - and we did so in suprisingly pleasant weather, not unlike what we'd left in Seattle. It was cold and bright - still Winter in March here. We lingered a while in Terminal 5, just enjoying being here without the pressure of a departure. Then the complicated journey began - five huge suitcases were lugged onto the Heathrow Express, trollied across Paddington and then into a taxi for the short run to Leinster Gardens. The grand but peeling stucco houses of this western corner of the city had been my first taste of London many years ago - but now they took on a new significance. We were back.
Our first excursion after washing away the inexplicable film of grime which air travel seems to leave, was eastwards. We headed out of the hotel and made leisurely progress towards Paddington. It became clear pretty soon that we weren't too far away at all - just at the end of Praed Street, in territory which I'd not walked since getting lost trying to walk from the station into Central London around twenty years ago! On that occasion I'd accidentally zig-zagged off the straight path and managed to get confused by the endless rows of plastered white buildings. It took a moment of panic and an A-Z to get me back on track - no GPS, no 'phone. Just a sense of direction and a map which would eventually become scuffed and torn from similar wanderings. But this little village around the station was more extensive than I remembered. A host of little restaurants - exhibiting a range of cuisines and degrees of dilapidation - alongside charmingly disorganised hardware stores, newsagents, hotels and almost concealed Orthodox churces with mysterious inscriptions on their gates. I remember finding myself here and thinking that the Bureau de Change and Aberdeen Angus Steak Houses were so metropolitan, that this must be London. My view has altered immeasurably over the intervening years, and our eastward bus step described this arc via St.Pancras, Clerkenwell and eventually the City.
So, if you'd been in the English Restaurant in Brushfield Street tonight you might have seen a tired but happy pair quietly reliving an earlier meal, savouring the novelty of being in the same place again, then slipping out into the chilly night to head back to the western suburbs. The entire journey to arrive here - from the Edgewater Hotel, via SeaTac and Heathrow, then the 205 bus route - felt like a single curve. Nowhere felt very far from anywhere anymore. The tiny village at the bottom of Praed Street could be anywhere.
A trip to London has rarely seemed so bleak. I have been kidding myself for weeks that I'd do something significant or defining today, that after leaving Heathrow airport, I'd take some sort of diversionary bus ride east to find the land on which all this began. That I'd stalk the Old River Lea to rediscover the summer locations where I pored over missives from across the ocean, before walking on into the post-Olympic haze across endless expanses of empty ground resplendent with possibility. Of course I've done nothing of the sort. Fresh from a painful parting at Terminal 5, I've stumbled back to London and drowned my sorrows in free coffee. Now I'm sitting in the corner of the station, watching a disinterested falconer chase away pigeons. She chunters into a mobile 'phone while her charge strains at its leash to escape her arm and tear apart a pigeon which, wise to the incarceration, looks quizzically up at the bound bird of prey. There is some sort of metaphor here for not getting what you want, but my tired, emotionally overwhelmed brain can't quite grasp it just now.
But London hasn't always been like this of course - and just a week ago there was another trip here. Originally it would have been the trip on which I wrote about how painful and harrowing things were, but illness and re-arranged flights have changed things - strangely for the better. This left us with half a journey to London booked, which meant a Saturday afternoon departure from home. On arrival we checked into the Hilton Paddington - a hotel I'd always wanted to visit, and which I'd ended up getting an absurdly good deal on. It was by far the best hotel we'd visited during the trip - a beautiful haze of art deco features and furnishings, a curved staircase leading to a period frieze, and rooms which echoed the same heyday of the Great Western Railway perfectly. We settled into this immediately. It was our kind of place.
The purpose of the trip was to take in a comedy show in Wandsworth. I've walked these environs before in search of William Kent, and I knew that this wasn't going to be a salubrious jaunt. We took the bus as far as the ludicrous but oddly interesting ski-ramp roof of Vauxhall bus station, and negotiated the crossings to Wandsworth Road. Passing the hulk of New Covent Garden Flower Market, I reminisced about my 2004 wanderings here to find the address of Kent's father's print works. As we made further progress, side-streets stood out - Larkhall Park, sharing a name with one of his street addresses. Wandsworth has changed little in the intervening eight years - except for the area immediately around Vauxhall. Rebranded St.George's Wharf, an absurd skyscraper is beginnning to loom above a modern, waterfront development which rivals anything the north bank has to offer. But a walk south into the Local Authority blocks sees a distinct cultural and demographic shift. The Lost Theatre is tucked into a curious, modern building - a small but well-equipped venue which puts the audience close to the performer. The audience was a little sparser than I expected - but this provided a perfect, conversational air to Andy Zaltzman's performance. Despite asserting that he's "not a banter-based comedian", his set was gently interactive despite hauling in some of his 'greatest hits' too - including the sprawlingly silly, and very funny tale of "Mickey Paintbrush".
Heading back on the bus, it's good to be out of the cold evening and watching the lights of the city rising as we head north again towards Vauxhall. A quick change here sees us on a 436 heading along Park Lane, the hotels and car dealerships glittering in the winter night, while taxis line up to take people home from the whirling, gaudy fairground rides which are still operating in Hyde Park. It's strange to be arriving at the front of the Hilton and walking up the red carpet into the beautifully appointed reception hall, and even stranger not to be heading into the station for the ride home. There is a sense of luxury, not least at the extra days which seem endless now, and which mean that an early morning trip to Heathrow tomorrow can be deferred. London has rarely seemed so intimately scaled, so rich with possibilities and options for future visits. I think about my plan to head back into the city after the Heathrow trip - at this point almost a week away - and it still seems like the best possible idea...
Back at Paddington, the falconer has moved on and the pigeons have returned to an unconcerned search for discarded food. My train will soon be ready for boarding, and I'm aware that it's going to be an effort to drag my aching back and legs onboard. The flight will have been airborne for almost two hours now - and will have cleared the tip of Scotland for sure. I think of Scotland, of future trips planned - and of desperate dashes around Glasgow last October. Feverish 'phonecalls from dingy music venues, pictures of junk shops, revisited locations seen through new perspectives. The year is starting from a whole new viewpoint for me, informed by that trip and all that came after it. London will figure large in this future I'm certain. It's time to go home - but it doesn't feel quite like home just now. There is something missing...
Lost::MikeGTN
I've had a home on the web for more years than I care to remember, and a few kind souls persuade me it's worth persisting with keeping it updated. This current incarnation of the site is centred around the blog posts which began back in 1999 as 'the daylog' and continued through my travels and tribulations during the following years.
I don't get out and about nearly as much these days, but I do try to record significant events and trips for posterity. You may also have arrived here by following the trail to my former music blog Songs Heard On Fast Trains. That content is preserved here too.
