Shoreditch (last day in London)

“I’ve never really been out of Shoreditch” -Vince Noir

The above is a line from my favorite episode of The Mighty Boosh. This happens to be the first episode I ever saw, and at the time I thought that the suburb was made up. Turns out that a lot of perfectly real UK towns and suburbs sound quite made up (I’ll cite “Eglsywyr” here) and Shoreditch is a real place; one of my favorite places in Lun Dun.

Before we even got to London, I marked out Brick Lane on my map, on the advice of a friend, and we walked there from our hostel for a curry one day. Unfortunately, this was a weekend, and we were duly SWAMPED by Hipsters. Europe’s most curry-concentrated street for one half, the other half could well be Europe’s highest concentration of wayfarers, non-prescription eyewear, found-object jewelry and general eye-melting, eating-disorder inducing, cover-gracing fashionistas. It goes without saying that I was intimidated and impressed in equal measure. Eg: I saw a girl whose idea of trousers was stockings with transparent vertical stripes. The reason for this prolifory of frippery is that Shoreditch rings to the sound of vintage cash registers at dozens of trendy second-hand and hand-made stores. This being our first week in Europe, with a looooong Sherpa-less journey ahead, I bought nothing of the über-cool handmade and vintage offerings, but we did buy coffee and vegan cake, surrounded by ironic furs on coat hangers, at a cafe occupying a stall within one of the huge basement vintage markets. I had fun, but there was really far too many people, and I felt like Daniel was politely waiting to go the whole time -“patience is just a mild form of despair”- so we left soon.

Last Wednesday, I was lucky enough to get into the Alternative London tour, which had been booked when we were in London previously. I walked from our hostel in Southwark to our appointed meeting place: “the statue with the white goat outside Old Spitalfields Markets”, and walked up to the very well-dressed gent who was not my guide at all but Andrew29 (google him), looking for a date. Our guide Gary turned up soon after, replete with urban splendor in strangely fitted grey jeans, a black leather jacket and shiny black and yellow hi-top Nikes. But he wasn’t at all too-cool-for-school in attitude, and when I later made a point of how much crazy high fashion there was around he joked back with “I know; some of ’em even ‘ave blue hair!” Gary is a fierce lover/supporter of his home suburb, and especially it’s prolific street art, which forms the flesh and bones of the Alternative tour.

On the tour we saw hundreds of works by dozens of artists, many of them on the level of the Archibald Prize. Instead of blabbing about them all I’ve ripped some images off da interwebz, but they are coming and going from the streets constantly; this organic cycle growth, predation and renewal is a visible and electrifying undercurrent in the subculture. Many of the best and most difficult works of art were done, illegally, by international artists on 24 hour stop-overs. Most are commissioned though, and the majority of uncommisioned works are appreciated by local residents of all classes and professions, not just an antagonistic group of vandals. The London council is currently conducting a shock-and-awe Sturmrang campaign of arrests and hideous gray-washing, against the wishes of locals in preparation for the cashed-up culture sensitive Olympic tourists. I will rant about this further upon request.

As well as seeing all this inspiring artwork we visited some historically impressive sites, including a building which been a Protestant church, a Catholic church, a synagogue and a mosque respectively, and the match factory where Karl Marx’s daughter started the Matchgirls’ fights for fairer conditions in the workplace. A more recent building of importance is an abandoned railway station which has been renovated, rail cars included, into an Eco-village and collective of affordable artists studios. The aim of the project is to provide affordable accommodation and creative space for Shoreditch locals who are increasingly being priced out of their suburb by the gentrification process, and moreover to prove and point out to the city council that such an option is necessary and possible. The facade of this amazing interstitial habitat is covered with a twenty-foot union jack. Look closely and you may discern the anti-English lyrics a the Sex Pistols’ song.

After the tour I was energized and inspired and felt a real sense of ownership in the Shoreditch art culture. I asked Gary to point me back on the direction of a certain wall I’d glimpsed at one point in the tour, and he offered to take me right there once he grabbed his parked push-bike. He couldn’t help explaining more art all the way back; there’s so much that for every piece Gary talks about there’s ten others in the immediate vicinity that you can only glance at and wonder. The pieces Gary showed me last were intricate stencils of homeless people sprayed in colored layers onto the plinths of a car park for well-paid government workers. Gary split and I admired more of the work alone, then went back to the historic Beigel bakeries, and a Swedish cafe called Fika, for a coffee. The cafe smelled amazingly of marzipan and spices- the girl told me the scent was Semla, special buns baked only in February, spicy dough filled with marzipan and whipped cream 😦

I sat down with my coffee and people-watched all the wonderful weirdos, as well as the counter culture of humble shop owners and blue-collar tradesmen who also make Shoreditch their home.

Spooky London: Highgate Cemetery and the Grim Reapers of London

Friday 21st October

High gate east and west, and the grim reaper tour

We tubed up the northern line again to return to Highgate and the East Cemetery that we missed yesterday. We bought some sweet pastries at a bakery cafe, and I paid more attention to the strange and wonderful buildings in the village.

We walked down from the village via the broad leafy road again, but detoured through the edge of parkland that sits on the side of the road across from the twin properties of Highgate. The tour began momentarily after we arrived, and I had scant time to marvel at the Anglican chapel and entranceway to the lauded East Cemetery. Highgate cemetery is one of the famous Victorian Seven or some such, a collection of seven cemeteries drafted when London city churchyards could no longer fit any more eternal residents. Highgate straddles the summit of one of the highest points in the city, and even in death, people will pay for a room with a view, so Highgate became the most desirable resting place of Victorian London’s well-to-do.

I marveled to learn that my appreciation of cemeteries and joy of spending time in them would have been common in the Victorian era; large parties of ladies and gents would often go to promenade at Highgate, and stand on the balcony of the old mansion to get a view of the tombs along the Egyptian avenue. So far the East cemetery was fitting in perfectly with my two favorite fictional cemeteries; the unnamed location of Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book and Fable II’s Bowestone Cemetery, which I’m now sure were based on Highgate. Walking through the vine-covered pillars at the entrance to the Egyptian avenue would have been impressive even without having read The Graveyard Book, but the twin literary experience heightened and deepened it; I was walking through the historic avenue itself, a beautiful living relic of Victorian style and sensibility, but at the same time I was walking through the fictional avenue, beside the character of Nobody Owens and sharing in all that that place meant to him. I even saw a great big apple tree, and there is indeed a wide sloping corner of unconsecrated ground.

I listened attentively to the guide, and as soon as he finished a story I’d dash off like a Gormenghastian pixie mad thing and take a bazillion photos. I got progressively more and more enrapt in this until Daniel had to call me to catch up with the swiftly traveling group and the dismissive glance of our stern young tour guide told me that I was in Very Big Trouble. I spent the rest of the tour with my proverbial tail between my legs and kept with the group. We were told stories of lion-tamers and world-famous wrestlers, alas for a historian I’ve no head for names or dates. We passed huge inverted black pyramids and obelisks following the Victorian interest in Egyptian art, and i think even heiroglyphics. We saw many more examples of the heavy Victorian symbolism that we’d begun to notice in the West side yesterday, our guide jumping into an excellent explanation or anecdote often just as I noticed a particular trend or stand-out example. The rawness and faithfullness of the symbolism was surprising and arresting; we saw upturned burning torches, extinguished, a lot of skulls, hourglasses with wings (“time flies”) and sleeping angels.

The tour was over far too quickly, ever minute having been a thrill and joy to me, and as I suspected we were not allowed to dally inside, so no more poetic ponderings, or photographs, for me. Time flies indeed.

Grim Reapers of London Tour

We took the northern line back into London central, alighting at bank and wandering through fantastically named streets such as Cheapside that look like the set of Mary Poppins. We walked alongside the themes, smelling the hot caremelised peanuts and hearing vendors hawk their wares, until we were at tower hill, the announced location of the Grim Reapers of London Tour. Wooooh. Scary voice. Claws.

Our guide arrived, inconspicuously dressed in dark casual clothing, with somewhat straggly black hair and large furtive eyes, looking quite a lot like James Nesbit’s Jeckell/Hyde. He took our money, haggled with a tourist over the fact the price had been raised, bought a bottle of water, and then took us to a dark empty patch of tower hill garden to begin the tour. Just after the introductions, a guard strode toward us and kicked us out of the park (“closing time now”) and so we were told about the hill’s history as a medieval beheading pavilion from across the road. I couldn’t tell whether our guide had done the tour too many times to care, or not enough times, but his eyes kept darting and the stories were more dramatic then interesting at first. This could be, though, because I’d heard them all before at the Tower of London. We walked along every fifteen minutes to a different location and a different story, all the while noticing other tour guides aloft, lit by streelights, surrounded by the upturned faces of a crowd of scared or laughing tourists (and secretly thinking e should have gone with one of them instead).

Soon, though, the stories were new and unknown, about Victorian London rather than medieval London, and our guides owl-like eyes became haunting and his stories less dramatic and more sterile facts, suggestive possibilities. The picture that he painted of life on the poverty line in Victorian London was horrifyingly grim in itself. We followed the scenes of Ripper murders like a weird game of connect the dots, crossing over a plague pit that had been excavated and lit under glass. The guide explained the dozens of plagues that decimated the London population over the centuries and finished with an appalling joke about how on a hot day the smell there was terrible, which had all the girls -myself included- exclaiming “yeugh!” and covering our mouths. We toured one f the few surviving Victorian alleyways, now servicing restaurants in the inner east, and were told that for the survival of so few historical laneways we could thank the twentieth century’s most influential city architect; Hitler (the blitz destroyed a huge amount of London among so many cities). Another grim reaper of London, then.

The tour travelled on through Shoreditch (mighty boosh!) and ended in whitechapel, which turns out to be named understatedly for a HUGE white stone church with roman pillared verandah and all. The guide pointed out the boarding house, above the extant Ten Bells pub across the street, and quite convinced me of his suspicions about the identity of Jack, which I have now totally forgotten. All in all, it was a great gloomy, spooky day in wintery London town.

On the London Tube

Belated post: Monday 17th October

We arrived in London early Monday afternoon, and took the tube from Heathrow into the heart of London. The tube was definitely not Hogwarts express: the tube was loud and rickety as it shot through the overland stations on the edge of the Piccadilly Line and rocked and reverberated into the underground. But I was beside myself with joy to be on the Tube, in London, in Europe. At first the scenery was a lot like the Lilydale line: brambles and ivy climbing over mottled brick barriers; chains of old townhouses sprouting crazy bouquets of chimneys; but my eyes were hungry for all the differences; the different colours of bricks, like a mustard colour that a lot of them had, or a cream so old that it’s grey with soot. The crows are different, the buildings are taller and closer together, and of course the sky has to be a different colour blue because you’re on the other side of the world. I didn’t take any photos, but if i had the sights wouldn’t be as special or fascinating as they seemed then. Our hostel was right near the Victorian neo-gothic magnificence of St Pancras Kings Cross Station. We got out of the crazy-busy Underground terminus and strained against our backpacks to try to get a proper look around us. In that quarter of the city it’s not all high rises, but the architecture is generally so old that all the buildings still seem taller than they should be, clamoring for attention along the webs of streets. Our hostel, Clink78, is a refurbished courtroom and gaol, and we climbed the courtrooms steps about as tired as we’ve ever been, and sore of our packs after the admittedly very short trip. We got online in the Internet room -the actual court where the Clash were tried- and notified our mums of our safe arrival, then we fell asleep on our bunks for about fifteen hours straight.