Urban Magic

A Change in the Temperature?

Posted on Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 in London | 9 Comments

Was walking home today, and for the first time in… too long… it was before 5 p.m… and for the first time in too long, the sun was still up.  On the way out, the sky a non-descript 10/10 grey with a hint of bruising around the edges, but daylight, not sodium light, was the rule.  And for the first time in… memory fails… I could actually hear birds singing.  You don’t really associate London with the sounds of birds singing, but at dawn and dusk a surprising collection of sparrows, pigeons, yellow tits and blackbirds turn out for a bit of a chorus, and if you listen, and the traffic is a few streets away, you can hear, perhaps, the first signs of spring coming.  And not a moment too soon.

That said… for all that snatches of birdsong heard when the traffic falls briefly silent cannot fail but to be evocative, the kind of feeling that gets evoked when that damn pigeon that’s decided my window sill is a fascinating place to coo in at 6.30 a.m. every damn morning, is probably best not put down in words.

Londonist

Posted on Saturday, February 20th, 2010 in London | 1 Comment

I’m sure there’s a better way to link to another website from a blog, but with the alarm beeping and supper on the go, now is maybe not the best time to explore it, so I’ll just say…

To all and sundry who live/love London, visit here!

www.londonist.com

I mean it!

Go now!

Getting Out of the House Occassionally…

Posted on Tuesday, December 29th, 2009 in London | 2 Comments

So, what with this whole RADA business, and what with Christmas back with the parents and this whole writing-Urban-Magic-3 business, I have neither blogged on anything Londonish for a while.  And while I could do a specific entry, I figured that, while I have this massive archive of photos taken before my camera broke, I may as well put them online and write about them sorta within the caption, with the photos leading the topic rather than visa versa, as a sort of taster for things to come… With which in mind…

Chinatown in London is pretty small, in the grand scheme of things.  It’s just to the North of Leicester Square, and still has many hints of the old city about it, not least in the large number of alleys and rat-runs that wiggle through the area.

Piccadilly Circus is, on the other hand, traffic-heavy, tourist-heavy, and just generally somewhere that locals attempt to avoid.  I mean, cool, in a spectacular look-at-the-shiny-lights kinda way, but unless you’ve gone there specifically to glom on the diversity of mankind, (and oh boy is mankind diverse at Piccadilly Circus) it is usually a place that is passed through on the way to somewhere else.

There aren’t many arcades left in London – proper arcades in the old sense of internally contained passages lined with shops, usually selling extremely silly items at very high prices – but the majority of those surviving are cluttered round Piccadilly and St. James, of which the Burlington Arcade is both the largest, most impressive, and silliest.  Knowing nothing about antiques, I can’t say whether the collection of cigar trimmers, silver pots, gem-studded jewelry and vases are antiques, or just… well… what they are… whatever that is…there was an antique arcade at the Angel, which from the outside looked every bit huge a yellow-brick walk-through bank, but alas in recent years, it has closed down and its fate remains, as far as I know, debatable.

Alright, Hoxton.  Or ‘trendy trendy’ Hoxton as it is less commonly known.  Hoxton went through a long period of being a dump on the north edge of Old Street, but has in recent areas been rediscovered and made into a hip and fashionable place full of converted loft flats, old Hawksmore-esque churches, vibrant street markets, ethnic diversity, artistic independence and reasonable proximity to public transport.  Now it is a place where worlds meet – every language, every age, every wealth band and every taste and style, all moving politely round each other through its refurbished terraced streets and beneath its grey council blocks.

I love this image, and regret that my zoom wasn’t wide enough to do it better.  It is the welcome sign that visitors pass underneath on their way to Guys Hospital, just by London Bridge.  Welcome to Guys – and to McDonalds.  What a union was herein made.

Broadgate

Posted on Sunday, November 29th, 2009 in London | 2 Comments

My camera is broken.

I am deeply upset by this fact for a number of reasons, but thankfully, I discover I’ve built up a silly archive of pics from the last few months, and since I dislike blogs without at least the odd splash of colour here or there, I figured the time had come to write a bit more about favourite topic 1; London.

To be exact…

Broadgate.

I think the best thing to ask about Broadgate, is why.  I mean, not why write about it – I write about it because it’s a not-particularly well-known, rather-obscure-unless-you’re-looking, yet-up-in-your-face-if-you’ve-found-it bit of London that’s worthy of some mention.  No – the question is… why, Broadgate?

First up, Broadgate is sharing a common name, sitting as it is between Moorgate and Aldersgate, above the a road pointedly called London Wall, and none too far from Barbican and Aldgate.  Sensing the pattern here?  There also used to be a Broad Street Station on the site, which was demolished in order that Broadgate as we know and love it, a purpose-built commercial district designed for the financiers of the city could be plonked down next to Liverpool Street Station in the 1980s to general fiscally glamorous rejoicing.  Traffic does not get inside Broadgate, the entire area is pedestrianised and to a large part, raised away from street level by its walls of black-grey and pink-bronze office blocks within which can be found floor after floor of computers, suits and the occasional tax-deductible shrubbery.

It is not what you’d call a discrete, subtle bit of design and yet, rather like the Inns of Court, has pulled off that trick of managing to occupy a considerable splash of land bang smack in the heart of the city without ever really inviting general members of the public to come inside and mull.  At the age of 14 I considered myself to have stumbled on a big secret when, instead of just walking straight out of Liverpool Street Station to catch the bus at Moorgate, I tried climbing those unlabelled silver stairs to one side of the exit, and found myself next to an ice rink, in a wide circle of towering buildings within which lives thronged and passed.  At the age of 21, living in a halls of residence near Brick Lane, I wandered into Broadgate again, and discovered that my initial discoveries had barely scratched the surface of this maze, but whole lost lakes and waterfalls, bars and cafes, tiled passages with glass roofs and carefully tended trees sprouting besides concrete works of art where the skaterboarders liked to learn their trade.  In winter there is indeed an ice rink in Broadgate which is perhaps one of its few public claims to fame; in summer, that same arena can be used for pretty much anything – I think last year it was a site of basketball competitions between well-paid and surprisingly still employed financiers of the city.  An unmarked glass box dropping down through leopard-skin furnishings to a bunker below a courtyard criss-crossed with underfoot LED lights turns out to be a bar where gentlemen of a certain income may flirt with their secretaries.  When the sun comes out, awnings go up by a crystal-clear perpetually flowing shallow waterfall, at the end of which another glass-clad cafe looks down – a long way down – onto the platforms of Liverpool Street station and the freshly painted rolling stock heading to Norfolk.  (Freshly painted, dear reader, because the Norfolk line seems to change ownership every 2 minutes, and heaven forfend a company should keep its predecessor’s colours, if perhaps their inefficiencies.)

For the suited gentleman of Broadgate, Liverpool Street Station itself is an architectural wonder, a reinvented Victorian station whose every bit of iron has been painted and every walkway crammed with shops selling shampoo, soap, ready meals, designer reading glasses and ties.  Do not try to buy a tin of beans on Liverpool Street Station, but if you’re looking for fashion accessories, there’s no where handier within the EC2 postcode.

At the age of maybe 9, I would visit a friend’s house every Friday, and we go swimming and play games for hours on end.  One game I vaguely remember playing (and which I only ever got the demo for, sigh) was called Sim Tower, in which you built, as it suggests on the package, a tower, and populated it with little tiny people who you could see going about their daily lives.  You’d watch great queues forming for the lift, and couples eating in little restaurants on the 7th floor, and security guards with radios on their rounds, and men working late at work, and meetings happening in specially tailored board rooms, and slackers slacking in the rooms next door.  Walking through Broadgate on a winter evening, when the lights are on in the offices and the workers still at work, reminds me of that – a whole little bustling world busy with whatever it is it’s doing, lit up behind glass for me to watch and wonder at.

Inns of Court pt.2

Posted on Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 in London | No Comments

It has been pointed out to me that there are actually 4 Inns of Court – Middle, Inner, Lincoln and Greys.  However, in my defence, I’d like to point out that Inner is inside Middle, or possibly Middle is inside Inner, or maybe they are both in Temple – oh yes, there’s a Temple, but is it a Court?  – (no being my preferred answer of choice) and so it goes.  There a surprisingly amount of mysticism related to the Inns of Court, particularly Middle/Inner, involving ancient ancient churches, burial sites and quite possibly a heady dose of paganism.  There’s also a lot of law happening, and it was, curiously enough, a lawyer who pointed out my mistake.  However, I do not yet know the secret handshake of revelation, so will have to get back to you on that one…

Inns of Court

Posted on Saturday, September 26th, 2009 in London | No Comments

… or, ‘guess which BBC Victorian drama was filmed here…?’

There’s a lot to say about the Inns of Court – for a start, there are three of them; Greys Inn, Lincolns Inn and Middle Temple Inn – and they’re extremely old and have a reasonably exciting history.  So I’m not going to really say much about them yet, and simply put in some of the photos I’ve acquired and say that bang smack in the middle of London are three dead sexy historical bits of the city inhabited almost entirely by lawyers and film crews, covering many, many acres, and almost entirely hidden from public sight, although, oddly enough, entirely free to public access.  And unless you’re seeking legal advice, I heartily recommend them as good places to sit and eat cake.  Although you’re not allowed on the grass, irritatingly enough, without having at the very least a wig to put on your head…

Henry Mayhew

Posted on Saturday, September 19th, 2009 in London, Writing | 2 Comments

So, when not writing the adventures of Matthew Swift as Kate Griffin, I write children’s books – the adventures of Horatio Lyle – as Catherine Webb.  (Which you may or may not enjoy, I dunno…?)  These are stories set in Victorian London about a part-time detective and his unlikely mates, but the real point of this entry, apart from to say all of the above, is to talk about Henry Mayhew.

With my historian’s nerdy hat on, I gotta say right now, I love primary sources.  It’s all very well being told by historians of today that in the dark old days the streets of London were knee-deep in horse manure, but when you read the actual documents written by the people of London who lived in London at the time, you get so much more.  You get a sense of the stink of it, the feel of it, the noise and the bustle, the casual attitude of the inhabitants towards filth and the outrage of the people towards the conditions they live in, all jumbled up together; you get street seller’s cries and verbatim stories of nasty things done by improbable characters – you get, in short, a fantastic story, that has the added benefit of being real.  And Henry Mayhew, praised be to historical fore-thought, left posterity one of the most comprehensive, most exciting accounts of Victorian London as he was living in it that I have ever read.

That said, the guy suffers from statistics, and in doing so arguably proves the point that there are lies, damn lies, and statistics – but he also spent years walking the streets of London and talking to everyone and everything from every class and every walk of society, going into places where even Charles Dickens (a man who prided himself on being indomitable) would hesitate to wander.  The London of Mayhew reads like another world, full of rookeries and slums, no-go areas and vast contrasts and, if you ever find yourself contemplating the history of London and wanting to get to know it a little bit more, I heartily recommend the works of Henry Mayhew as an entertaining and wonderfully enlightening read.

Traffic Wardens

Posted on Monday, September 14th, 2009 in London, Writing | 2 Comments

Is there any creature more universally loathed in the mythology of all big cities than a traffic warden?  I kinda doubt it.  On the moving-in and moving-out days at my first hall of residence, the traffic wardens of Islington seemed to have some magical power that led them to zoom in without fail, dozens at a time, to penalize every single car that dared to park in front of the hall to drop off their kids.  Families that had driven hundreds of miles to deliver their kids to their first day of university found themselves variously ticketed, clamped, and towed, all in the space of time it took to get a clean change of socks and a teddy bear up from the street outside the residence to a room on the 8th floor.  I have never seen such a mean, miserable, miserly sight as gaggles of traffic wardens swarming in to slap fines of over a hundred quid on a proud parent who’d been parked for less than ten minutes to deliver their kids, and not reason nor appeals to emotional sympathy could persuade them otherwise.

My Dad, as the driver in the family, has a bitter on-going battle with traffic wardens.  He has perfected the art of the polite-yet-steely middle class letter of complaint, which, without wanting to imply that legal action is necessary, nevertheless makes it very clear that hear is an eloquant Radio 4 listener who’s just going to be more trouble than he’s worth.  However, this hasn’t stopped a local council for slapping him with a £120 fine for the day his car parked illegally in their borough.  Curiously enough, this was the same day that Dad was at work with a local charity, and the car did not leave Hackney all day or all night.  The cry of ‘numberplate fraud!’ was duly raised and now an intricate battle of suspicion, reasonable doubt and alibi-affirmation rages between a council stoutly refusing to conceed that it may be trying to rob an innocent man, and an ex-publisher with a knack for letter writing.

(On an entirely different, yet curiously related note, I discovered recently in a battle with my local council the existence of a thing called the ‘Postal Rule’ whereby if a council computer claims a letter was dispatched to a certain address on a certain day, that is considered valid evidence in court that it was so.  The only way to argue against this is by proving that you didn’t receive a letter.  Now… answers on a postcard please… how exactly do you go about proving that you haven’t received something?  Do you hold up the empty air where it should have been?)

Whether this is true for all traffic wardens in all cities, I do not know, but the vast majority of traffic wardens that I see around the centre of London are middle aged black ladies who look perfectly cheerful and pleasant to talk to – until you violate that double yellow line, of course.  Since I find it hard to imagine that the people who recruit traffic wardens have a personality test to determine your level of sympathy (lowest score wins), I can only assume that the people who run the traffic warden system as a whole have laid down a policy of go-get-’em-tiger which leads to the kind of swarms that attacked the families trying to unload at my halls of residence.   I was once told that traffic wardens receive extra money based on the number of cars that they manage to ticket – if this is the case (and I have yet to get this confirmed from a viable secondary source) then no wonder these perfectly decent members of the human race undergo such a magical transformation in the presence of an over-run ticket!

In matters such as this, a literal adherence to the word of the law becomes kinda more problematic… yes, these parents come from Leeds and Cardiff and, in one case, the Isle of Skye, were in violating of London parking regulations by being pulled up for more than five minutes on a single yellow line outside the halls of residence.  But they were not posing a threat to the public order and, more to the point, they were dropping off Little Tiddles for day 1 of university, an event as emotional as it is demanding on the size of the suitcase.  The law has them by the throat, and would duly find them guilty of pissing around with traffic regulations.  But in this case, tragically, the law, as enforced by the traffic wardens, is nothing if not a cruel cow.

On the other hand… traffic wardens notoriously suffer more shit from members of the public than any other member of the emergency services.  Angry drivers will do anything from shout abuse to spit to, on occasion, resort to physical violence against people who are, at the end of the day, just doing their job.  And yeah, it’s not exactly a happy thing when cars park parallel across Oxford Street and my Dad, for all that he writes those steely letters, has been rejoicing these last few years to have a residential parking scheme operating in his area.  Rejoicing, that is, were it not for the hundred plus pounds he has to spend a year for the honour of parking anywhere within a 2 mile radius of his front door…

I am, lets be honest here, trying to find some redeeming features in traffic wardens, since I feel it’s unfair to just condemn an entire profession off-hand, and, far worse, to condemn the people that work in it.  (Have none of us cheered when the guy with the big hair and the fast sports car gets ticketed for parking like a prat?)  But let’s face it, when it gets to the stage that, parking for a few moments to buy a round of fish and chips from your local residential chippy, you have to leave someone in the car to keep an eye out for the traffic wardens and, if necessary, circle round the block 5 times until they’re gone, you can’t help but feel this is a system running mad.

And oh yes…

… did I mention?  Randomly enough, traffic wardens may just prove to have their role to play in the life of Matthew Swift and the Midnight Mayor too…

Peregrine Falcons

Posted on Friday, September 11th, 2009 in London | 1 Comment

So, there are peregrine falcons nesting on top of Tate Modern.  About six couples, the nice lady from the RNIB with the telescope said, waving me in the general direction of the tower of the Tate.  They like to nest, it turns out, somewhere high, with an excellent and reliable supply of food near by, and while I instinctively imagined that this meant a diet of discarded cheeseburgers, I am now prepared to no longer be surprised if, sitting one day by St. Pauls Catherdral watching the pigeons, one vanishes without a cluck into the out-stretched talons of a huge sod-off bird of prey.

I suppose upon retrospect that there’s no reason why falcons can’t flourish in London.  There was even a government scheme to introduce falcons into Trafalgar Square to curb the pigeon population, although perhaps upon second thought the great tourist banner – ‘come to Trafalgar Square and watch small grey birds get gutted in front of you and all your family by a bigger grey bird’ – didn’t wash with the London Tourist Board.

Anyway, just thought I’d share that peculiar, slightly surreal thought with anyone who likes their birds of prey big, fast and in London transport zone 1.

Shakespeare’s Globe

Posted on Monday, September 7th, 2009 in London | 1 Comment

So, having done a very brief post on a play at Shakespeare’s Globe, I figured the next logical step was to do a post about the Globe itself.  First up, I really like this theatre.  I mean, speaking as someone who wants to spend the rest of my life doing lighting for the theatre, I doubt I’m ever going to go there as anything other than an audience member, but as an audience member, it’s a fantastic place to be.

The history as I vaguely remember it is something like this… theatre built in Elizabethan times, nabbed a reputation for a place to see Shakespeare (although I have a sneaky suspicion that there was a neighbouring theatre, the Rose, which has equal if not better claim to this reputation and academics are cringing… however, it’s not my period and all this stuff is pretty much postcard level history…) – burnt to the ground by cannons being fired as part of a performance of Henry VIII, owing to its straw roof and, as I’m sure many stage managers would smugly add, a certain disregard for the conventions of health and safety.  For a few hundred years nothing much happened, until some thirty-something years ago a gentleman by the name of Sam Wanamaker decided to try and ressurect the Globe in all its traditional Tudor glory.  Therein followed a fairly standard London Development cliche, involving bureaucracy, fiddling, back and forward local council bickering and finally some rather grudging building permission.  From that cliche came the next cliche of all London building projects, towit constant cash problems and the Great British Builder gag, this last probably not helped, but certainly made interesting, by the commitment to using traditional materials and techniques for as much of the construction as was possible.  Finally, after much angst, the Globe was opened, and stands now on the South Bank, as good a guessed mimic of its Elizabethan predecessor, from the straw roof (+ sprinklers) to the wooden balconies and ground level exposed to the sky.  I have a sneaky suspicion that I may have been there for one of the first plays ever shown at the Globe… suspicion only, because I was, I think, 10 years old at the time, and while I remember loving every second of Henry V, the extensive speeches and dinner that followed after are a bit of a blur.  Do not get the impression, by the by, that my family is exactly known for patronizing the arts; but we do know people who do and sometimes this leads to such bizarre occurrences as described above.

Anyhow, whether or not my suspicions are correct, the Globe first really entered my attention when I was at secondary school, courtesy of a highly cultured friend who, for the sake of anonymity, we’ll call Galadriel.  After an initial dubious encounter involving a jazz production of Macbeth, a thunderstorm and a stinking cold, my love for the Globe was sealed by spending a warm, cheap and surprisingly un-rainy summer watching Richard II and Twelfth Night.  While the Globe can be a bit hit and miss with some of its stuff, when it is good, it is absolutely wonderful, and being a groundling, inches away from the stage and in full cover of the same light that hits the actors is a theatre experience like none other.  I remember being absolutely absorbed by a production of Edward II, and laughing so hard that my face ached for hours after an all-female version of Much Ado About Nothing.  The Globe, by the by, while producing some brilliant stuff often, produces some absolutely brilliant comedy almost all the time.  I have never laughed so hard at Shakespeare’s comedies (which lets face it, are sometimes not as funny as his tragedies…) as I have at the Globe.  I’ve also stood through a lot of non-Shakespearean stuff; being bombarded by bread in the name of the French Revolution being my most recent experience.  There are some snags; being a groundling is undeniably tough on your kneecaps, so that by the 3rd  hour there is a growing urge to grab Hamlet by the throat and scream ‘just kill him already!’  But it is a small price to pay for some of the most exciting summer nights I have ever spent in front of a stage… rained on or otherwise…