London Guide

st.helens - that spencer girl

2011-05-16T20:25:00.001+01:00

st.helens_43, a photo by streetphotos-london on Flickr.

she got what she prayed for!

Tile at the Bell

2010-04-02T02:27:00.000+01:00

The Bell on Fleet Street 1670's by Sir Chris Wren to house his crew who were building St.Brides after the Great Fire of 1666

Brewery Horse

2010-04-02T02:23:00.000+01:00

Once was London

RagnBoneMan Praed Street 1965

2010-04-02T02:21:00.000+01:00

Once was London

Highgate

2010-04-02T02:15:00.000+01:00

Whittington's Cat and Nell Gwynne

2010-04-02T02:13:00.000+01:00

Neil was Chucky 2's main squeeze -She and Highgate have history

Sid the Coffeeman- Drury's New Row

2010-04-02T02:09:00.000+01:00

Ghost Sign Junction Road

2010-03-28T13:45:00.000+01:00

Old Signage - Goodge Street Area

2010-03-28T13:40:00.001+01:00

Suicide Bridge Highgate

2010-03-22T23:05:00.000+00:00

Highgate Views at and near Suicide Bridge

Charterhouse Ironwork

2010-03-19T18:07:00.001+00:00

Charterhouse

2010-03-19T17:54:00.001+00:00

London Images

2010-03-12T01:24:00.000+00:00

Tufnell Park

2010-03-11T20:05:00.001+00:00

Faces

2010-03-05T02:01:00.001+00:00

London City Images

2010-03-05T01:59:00.000+00:00

Iain Sinclair Interview

2010-03-01T02:05:00.002+00:00

His works may be celebrated as foundation stones of modern psychogeography, but Iain Sinclair refuses to be seen as the genre’s newest prophet. he tells Patrick Kingsley about the footprint London 2012 will leave on Hackney

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For an author who supposedly personifies its revival, Iain Sinclair is startlingly ambivalent about psychogeography. “It’s nothing to do with me,” he says softly, swivelling on a Union chair after last week’s Olympics debate. “It’s a nuisance. It’s something which existed in the late 50s and early 60s that disappeared for many years and then was reinvented simply as a provocative device. And now it’s become pretty much anything you want it to mean.”

Sinclair’s attitude is unexpected: the man is an icon of psychogeography. He has published nearly 30 works associable with the subject, he’s shot Super-8 films about it, and one of his early works – Lud Heat – went on to exemplify the London psychogeographical resurgence. Peter Ackroyd calls him a ‘Visionary’ of the genre. Will Self describes Sinclair’s books as must-reads. And Merlin Coverley notes in his introductory survey, Psychogeography, that “if there is one person who is responsible for the current popularity that psychogeography enjoys, then it is Iain Sinclair.”

Why, then, is Sinclair almost scornful of the genre? Perhaps psychogeography’s transition – from a marginal, almost occult fascination to a very marketable, middle-class brand – has caused him to drift away from the subject. But Sinclair himself denies even this: “I never drifted into it! My use of it was pretty minimal in terms of my writing. At the start of my book, Lights Out For The Territory, I did do a V-shaped walk which was a sort of psychogeographical project. But the walking round the M25 [inLondon Orbital] – that wasn’t a psychogeographical project. It was just a project of human perversity, a geographical project about deciding what London topography was and where London finished.”

And what of Lud Heat, which explored the behavioural effect Hawksmoor’s London churches had on their neighbouring, non-Christian population in the 70s? “That was not psychogeography; that was much more to with an English tradition belonging to people like Alfred Watkins [a nineteenth-century archaeologist]. Though Lud Heat has become this psychogeographical text in retrospect, psychogeography was never even heard of or thought of at that time. The subject didn’t occur to me when I was writing it. I was writing it simply from the perspective of a gardener.”

Yet, perhaps it’s not surprising that the flagbearer for such an ambiguous genre has such an ambiguous attitude to it himself. After all: what is psychogeography? No one seems sure. It’s a very hazy idea. It concerns cities – traditionally London and Paris – and it involves walking: this much is certain. And it involves recording – with words or photography – what happened on the walk. But the purpose of psychogeography has always been unclear. For some, it’s a means of examining how buildings affect our behaviour; for others, it’s a vaguer, more intangible way of ‘reading’ a city. For the French, it was a political medium; for the British, it’s more literary. And whereas Guy Debord and his gang of 60s Parisian Situationalists said it was subversive – a rebellion against typical, workaday city activity, Peter Ackroyd argues the opposite: for him, psychogeography simply recognises the way the city controls our every action. In short, then, psychogeography’s only defining feature is its lack of definition, and if the man who reinvented the concept states that “I never was a psychogeographer” and denies “much sympathy or interest in its manifestations”, perhaps it’s only fitting.

But if Sinclair doesn’t identify himself psychogeographically, how exactly would he define his writing? Very simply, as it turns out: “I buy into a union between writing and walking. I think there is as much of that going on – or more – than what could be described as psychogeography. I have this notion that there are two kinds of writers: there’s one called ‘pods’, and there’s another called ‘peds’. Peds are the kind of writers who very definitely have, within their writing, this rhythm of journeys and walks and pilgrimages and quests. And pods are these other writers who sit in a room and just draw the world to them in whatever ways they want to. And there is a very distinct gap between the two.”

By his own definition, Iain Sinclair is clearly a walking writer, a ped. And it follows that his latest work, Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, though without “anything that could really be described as psychogeographical”, consists of a series of walks through his hometown in north-east London – one of which features Emmanuel’s English DoS, Robert Macfarlane. It’s a timely celebration of Hackney, an area already massively affected – for the worse, Sinclair feels strongly – by the new Olympic site. The book argues that while “Hackney itself is magnificent, it’s always battling with a level of input from whoever’s trying to control it from above, for generation after generation.”

For this particular generation, Sinclair suggests, the battle is with the Olympic developers and their lackies on the local council. “There is suffering on an enormous scale because of [the Olympic developments]… Local people have been kicked out, the building works have released toxins into the water, we’ve lost allotments, we’ve lost the football pitches in Hackney Marshes, we’ve lost 14 swimming pools, cycle lanes…” And while Sinclair does take some positives from the rebuilding – “quite conservative people have become very active as a result of it”, in general he is despondent. “What I once thought was a disaster is now much worse than that: it’s a catastrophe.”

Yet, perhaps there are encouraging comparisons between the Olympic site and the Hawksmoor churches? Will the former not contribute to London’s palimpestic nature in the same way as the latter? “No, I don’t think so. I don’t think any of this will last long enough to do that. The actual Olympic structures are so tawdry that they’ll be gone soon, whereas the Hawksmoor churches are so massive that even though they went through periods of neglect, somehow they hung on. The Olympic site, by contrast, will be a totally transitional landscape. It has no notion of permanence. It’s built to be destroyed, to be revised.”

Sinclair’s forthright views hilariously have seen him banned from his local library by the Hackney council, where he was scheduled to give a talk. Publicity-wise, this was a blessing: “It proved the thesis of the book and it was a catastrophic piece of PR [for the council]. Instead of being a very small event with ten or twelve of us sitting around a library chatting about a book, I’m on the Today programme defending the freedom of speech.” The underlying argument, however, still causes Sinclair rancour – “the whole thing was about mendacity, and spin, and lies” – and he’s still visibly irritated by it all when his debating partner Andrew Gilligan – a hack who certainly knows about spin – swaggers into the room.

Gilligan joins in the Olympic grumbling. “I am simply going to leave town,” he promises, before reiterating points he made during the debate itself: the Games will clog up the city; they’ll be expensive. Sinclair smiles: “We’re more or less obliged to have a major terrorist attack to justify the expense.” Gilligan, ever the journo, turns to me: “There’s your quote.”

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Download the pdf.

Masonic architecture: Hawksmoor's London churches restored

2010-02-28T01:47:00.002+00:00

by Burning taper

Masonic architecture: Hawksmoor's London churches restored

—0 COMMENTS —

On this side of the Atlantic, Masonic conspiracy theory often involves the Illuminati and other sinister forces bent on world domination. In Britain, though, much Masonic mystique is found in pagan symbols and 18th century gothic architecture.

Nicholas Hawksmoor was a mysterious Freemason and an architectural collaborator of Christopher Wren and John Vanbrugh. Known as the "devil's architect," after the Great Fire of London, Hawksmoor designed six of the twelve new churches built, and co-designed two more.

His work

has been woven into a parallel history of London's underworld, particularly his Christ Church Spitalfields, near which Jack the Ripper performed his grisly murders in the 1880s. Published in 1975, Iain Sinclair's feverish poem Lud Heat suggests that the sites of Hawksmoor's London churches form an invisible geometry of power lines in the city, corresponding to an Egyptian hieroglyph. Peter Ackroyd built on this myth a decade later with his murder thriller Hawksmoor; and more recently, graphic novelist Alan Moore threw his pointy hat into the ring with the encyclopaedic From Hell, in which Hawksmoor, the Ripper, freemasonry and the monarchy were conflated into a grand Victorian conspiracy.

By the 1950s, Hawksmoor's obelisk-and-pyramid churches had fallen into dark disrepair.

In 2004, after many years of work, Christ Church was reopened. St. Luke's Old Space has been restored, too, and in 2003 became rehearsal space for the London Symphony Orchestra.

In 2002, restoration began on St. George's Bloomsbury, one of Hawksmoor's more "devilish" creations. Today's Guardian Unlimited says:

St George's Bloomsbury was more of a challenge than most for Hawksmoor, although it doesn't look it. Perhaps it is secretly part of a giant Masonic hieroglyph, but the church was positioned here, on Bloomsbury Way, to cater both to the posh folks to the north, and the crime-ridden area known as The Rookery to the south. (As an indication of the area's social standing, you can see the church's unmistakable spire in the background of Hogarth's Gin Lane.)

Unlike Christ Church, the Bloomsbury church had to be sandwiched into an existing street. The allotted site posed considerable problems, since it was longer running north-south than east-west. Ideally, in Christian tradition, the altar would be at the eastern end of the church, but in this case, that would have made for a short, wide nave rather than a long, narrow one. A sort of limited competition, between James Gibbs, Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor, was held to see who could come up with the best solution. The commissioners chose Vanbrugh's design, which put the altar to the north. But Hawksmoor persisted, and eventually won through, with an ingenious plan that allowed for an east-west orientation.

The nave of the church appears to be a perfect cube, with the altar in an apse to the east. The grand six-pillared portico to the south, facing the street, was largely ornamental, and the real entrance was beneath the tower to the west, at the "back" of the nave. But the interior is actually asymmetrical, with an extra strip of space beyond the pillars at the northern end of the cube, screened off and used as a private space for the rector.

Within a year of the church's opening in 1731, however, there were complaints about the lack of space. By 1781, the entire church had been re-oriented to the north to make more room. The pews were shifted round 90 degrees, the huge wooden reredos (the wooden screen behind the altar) was moved to the north wall, and the windows behind it were blanked out. And that is more or less how the building stayed.

Like Christ Church Spitalfields, St. George's will host music events, and the crypt has been transformed. Formerly a corridor with walled-up chambers of bodies either side, it is now an open space that will house an unspecified long-term tenant and a permanent exhibition on Hawksmoor and Bloomsbury.

Then there's the tower. This is surely the oddest church tower in the land: a pyramid, of all things, topped by a statue of George I in Roman garb, with pairs of lions and unicorns cavorting around its base. These lively beasts are a new addition by sculptor Tim Crawley, based on what evidence remained of the originals, which were re-carved into baroque knots in the 19th century. Hawksmoor modelled the pyramid itself on descriptions of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, one of the seven wonders of the world. For some, this representation of a pagan temple on top of a Christian church is exhibit A in the case for Hawksmoor as "devil's architect," but Kerr thinks the explanation is more innocent: "He'd been fascinated by the mausoleum since he was a young architect working in Wren's office. When the church was started, George I was on the throne, but by the time it was completed he was dead. So I think of this as the apotheosis of George I, with these great beasts as his protectors."

Hawksmoor, like Wren, was a freemason, but in the 18th century the term didn't suggest estate agents with rolled-up trouser legs — more a devotion to religious construction. And where Wren was a scientist until he was in his 30s, and Vanbrugh had formerly been a soldier and a playwright, Hawksmoor was one of the country's first life-long professional architects.

He was passionate about all forms of religious architecture, from ancient Egypt, to Greece and Rome, to Islamic mosques and the English Gothic tradition. The cube form of St. George's Bloomsbury is an allusion to the temple of Solomon in Jerusalem — the original temple and the key work for freemasons. The obelisks and pyramids scattered through his work might indeed form some elaborate "Hawksmoor code" revealing the location of the Holy Grail; or they could simply be architectural quotations from a tirelessly inventive artist.

It would be a shame to dispel all the mysteries that surround Hawksmoor. Whether or not they misrepresent the architect, they have sustained our interest in him. But, as with Christ Church Spitalfields, the restored St George's Bloomsbury is almost entirely free of funereal gloom. The interior is gloriously light and airy, and the outside, exfoliated of a few centuries of grime, is bright and clean. It still holds the shadows in places, and will doubtless look more sinister on drizzly winter nights than it does in sunshine; but it's now more difficult to imagine strange rites taking place in Hawksmoor's churches, and easier to picture scenes of everyday worship.

A brilliant photoblog on some of London's creepier churches by Melanie

2010-02-26T01:28:00.003+00:00

Christ Church, Spitalfields

October 25, 2009 by Melanie

Looming like an uncomfortably angular white wedding cake over the ramshackle stained Victorian buildings that surround it, Christ Church in Spitalfields looks utterly incongruous.

It is hard to describe the unsettling atmosphere that surrounds it produced partially by its location at the very heart of the Ripper murders of 1888 but also by the oddly unbalanced appearance when you peer up at it.

Fans of Peter Ackroyd will of course remember it from his masterpiece (in my opinion) Hawksmoor, in which history is subverted and a modern day policeman Nicholas Hawksmoor is on the trail of a series of murders with links to the works of the seventeent century architect Nicholas Dyer,who is a fictional reworking of the real architect of Christ Church, Nicholas Hawksmoor. Still with me? It’s as confusing as hell but well worth a read.

Hawksmoor is the architect of six London churches, dubbed by me ‘The Creepy Churches’ because they all share the same overly orderly approach to geometric design and the same brooding sense of menace. They were commissioned in 1711 as part of the Act of Parliament ‘Commission for Building Fifty New Churches’, of which only twelve churches in total were ever fully realised.

The Commission was quite forward thinking – it was an attempt to replace the churches lost in the Great Fire and also to provide a spiritual focus for the several new communities that were springing up around the historic city as it expanded and consumed the surrounding villages and towns. Christ Church was designed to provide a church for the huge Huguenot (French protestants that had been hounded out of their own country) community that had settled in the Whitechapel area and made it a centre for the production of the Spitalfields Silk so beloved on the continent.

Christ Church was built between 1714 and 1724 and its startling plainess and austerity must have come as a huge cultural shock to a generation who were more used to the Baroque excesses that were so prevalent in contemporary architecture, although it also marks a turning point in taste as the Baroque gave way to the Palladian influenced style of buildings like Marble Hill House in Twickenham.

From Hell fans will of course recognise it as the church that looms forbidding and temple like over the churning, debauched streets of 1888 Whitechapel with the Ten Bells next door, tramps and whores sleeping in the once orderly churchyard and a warren of foul alleyways running around it.

Nowadays, it has had the benefit of a sympathetic restoration programme and is now open again for worship and as a venue for hire. The Ten Bells is still next door but is now an overly noisy, faintly bohemian East End boozer with a bad reputation, just like so many others. The alleyways are no longer frightening but instead are a useful means of getting to the curry heaven that is Brick Lane that lies behind.

Ah, I miss Whitechapel. My family come from the East End of London – my great grandfather was a manager at Truman’s on Brick Lane and took part in the Battle of Cable Street in October 1936 and my grandmother was always very proud of the fact that she and the rest of her family had been born within the all important range of the Bow bells (like most East End families we undoubtedly come from hot headed immigrant stock, either Irish or Italian) and I feel like on many levels it is my spiritual home. Maybe one day I will get to move back again but in the meantime I can plan more gin fuelled, cackling nights out on Commercial Street.

Closing Down

2010-02-25T15:48:00.001+00:00

matt the harp-leicester square tube

2010-02-25T15:44:00.000+00:00

Hodge - Dr.Johnson's Cat

2010-02-25T15:06:00.000+00:00

St.Pancras Ironworks

2010-02-25T15:05:00.000+00:00

Fernando makes Coffee

2010-02-25T14:47:00.000+00:00

Fernando's on St.Martin's Lane

Bunhill Fields

2010-02-09T00:12:00.001+00:00