Bohemian London – stroll through Fitzrovia and Bloomsbury

Leaving the Robert Elms Show at Broadcasting House I follow my nose through the streets of Fitzrovia. I notice the name change of Union Street to Riding House Street and the home of Olaudah Equiano whose autobiography describing his experiences of Slavery helped bring about its abolition.

I take in the new development of Pearson Square, which appears left-over from the Kings Cross redevelopment and designed to funnel the wind through its walkways.

The old apartment blocks remind me of the world of Patrick Hamilton in his novel The Midnight Bell, lonely boarding rooms for clerks and shop-girls, typists, and workers in the rag trade.

Soon my feet carry me into Charlotte Street and to the door of what in my experience is the most authentic Italian Cafe in London – people chatting in Italian, well-read copy of Gazetta Dello Sport folded up on the counter, bank of TVs with the latest Italian football news.

The Brunswick Centre

A quick look at the Persian and Bronze Age Britain galleries in the British Museum before strolling down Woburn Walk to Judd Books and the unavoidable purchases. At this point I’m on autopilot, well-worn tracks from my days living at the Angel, an afternoon amble, baby in the pram on the way to Coram’s Fields. The Bruswick Centre a glorious hunk of sculpted utopia rendered in concrete.

Sometimes in my desire to push the boundaries of London, to venture out beyond the city fringe into the provinces, it’s easy to overlook the multiple wonders of a mazy wander round the streets of Fitzrovia and Bloomsbury.

 

Leytonstone on BBC London Robert Elms Show ‘Round Your Manor’

BBC London Robert Elms John Rogers Leytonstone

It was a real pleasure to go on the Robert Elms Show on BBC London yesterday to talk about the wonders of Leytonstone as part of the ‘Round Your Manor’ feature. There was a great response from Leytonstonians online to Robert’s request for information about the area – he was particularly amused to hear that Fanny Craddock had lived in Leytonstone.

You can listen again to the show here on the BBC iPlayer (I come in at about 1hr 38mins)

Lights Out: Iain Sinclair, Andrew Kotting and John Rogers

Andrew Kotting Lights Out

Looking forward to presenting the film of the excursions I made with Iain Sinclair, Andrew Kötting, and Anne Caron-Deline along Watling Street with a fascinating detour following the trail of Alan Moore from Shooter’s Hill. The event will also include a new film and performance by Andrew Kötting, plus readings and conversation with Iain Sinclair and whatever else occurs on the night.

Here’s the information for the event at Kino-Teatr, Saint Leonards 29th October 6pm:

“Lights Out for the Last London: Down Watling Street with Iain Sinclair, Andrew Kotting and John Rogers.

The Last London, described by Alan Moore as ‘the masterpiece in a career of masterpieces’, is Iain Sinclair’s final reckoning with a city stretched beyond its limits.

To pull away from its gravity, he sets off on a Watling Street pilgrimage with longterm collaborators (and filmmakers) Andrew Kötting and John Rogers.

Their adventures, told through differing and contradictory memories, become a live performance, a conversation, a film of record.

The collision at Kino-Teatr in St Leonards is a unique coming together for the three walkers. Anything could happen.

The collaborators will be happy to sign copies of books (including Last London) at the event.”

Tickets are £12 available from Kino-Teatr box office and online from Ticketsource

Why I Blog

London Loop Uxbridge

This is something I’ve composed in my head I number of times in the past but never actually written, mainly because of the feeling that it somehow has to be definitive – that once placed here on my blog will be cast in stone. Which of course is nonsense, and ironically the freedom to evolve ideas as they occur in a public forum is one of the reasons I started blogging in the first place 14 years ago. So I’m just going to freewheel it a bit here. Please bear with me. I’m not even writing this on a document first, just typing it straight into the blog.

I published my first blog on 7th July 2003. I was coming to the end of 4 weeks paternity leave and had read an article in the Guardian about a new platform called Blogger. The blog post was a variation on an article I’d pitched to The Guardian’s G2 section and they’d rejected on the basis that it was a few days too late to be newsworthy enough. So the new self-publishing platform seemed like the ideal alternative to the commissioning process. I stuck a version of the piece there and I don’t think I’ve pitched an article to anyone ever since.

The birth of my first child also meant re-evaluating my priorities. I’d been half-heartedly doing some occasional stand-up comedy, more as a means to develop and showcase my writing rather than try and build a career as a comic (in fact when approached by a representative from mega-agency Avalon after my third gig I turned them down – which in retrospect was a stupid decision). Doing stand-up had come out of the satirical comedy revue show I’d written and directed (and later performed in) which then gave its name to the blog – The Soapbox Cabaret. As a new Dad, working full-time in a low-paid job, blogging would allow me to continue my work without spending evenings in half-empty rooms above pubs. There was a strong political dimension to my work back then, which seemed to fit with the nature of blogging at that time so it seemed like a good match.

*

This articlation of my blogging started a year later on 7th June 2004. I think it came from the desire to write more about the world around me, vignettes from the streets. I’d kept a regular journal since I’d gone backpacking 10 years before, my backpacking journal became a walking journal when back schlepping around London – so I wanted my blog to become more reflective of that, rather than the polemicising and satirical asides of my first blog. This very quickly became my more natural home.

I got some local press almost immediately. Funny to think now but blogging was still a bit of a novelty in 2004. Social media was still in its infancy really – there was no Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. New platforms would launch then fold in a couple of months. It was quite a volatile but exciting digital landscape. I also started getting comments on those early posts – something that seems to have dried up in recent years whereas most of my interaction now comes on Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, reflecting wider online trends. (Anyone remember internet forums ?- they seemed to have died a death along with Friends Reunited and MySpace).

In some ways I feel like I’m at a pivotal point at the moment – it’s 4 years since my book was published, I’m freelance now so constantly on the look-out for work, the baby who I had sleeping on my shoulder as I wrote those first blog posts is now a strapping teenager. I’m in my mid-40’s not my early 30’s. But the blog has been a constant through all of this. When I try to unpack the course of my – I hate to use the word ‘career’ but I can’t think of an adequate alternative – over the last 10 years or so, many wonderful things have happened.

The graft in those half-empty pubs paid some dividends when I went to work for a production company. One of my briefs was to look after his online platforms. Turns out TV professionals didn’t have much experience of blogs, social media and online video back then (I’d started a YouTube channel in 2006 just after it launched) and so it came in very useful – particularly when we went to America where they’d embraced the digital realm much earlier than in the UK which was still focused on ‘legacy’ media. I made my own documentaries that were shown at festivals and in cinemas. I produced and presented a radio show. Then I got a book deal with Harper Collins – an incredible moment. The shape and tone of that book, the basic idea, came directly out of this blog.

It’s only now, in this moment of reflection trying to untangle it all, that I realise all those wonderful things, and many more, grew out of this blog.

*

So in some ways I find myself at a similar point to where I was on paternity leave in 2003. I’m a stay-at-home Dad, the kids still come first. I don’t have a publisher for my next book as yet. My primary creative output is this blog and my YouTube channel. I still get knock-backs for proposals and applications – getting institutional support hasn’t gotten any easier. Blogging has been an ever-present, the activity that has carried me through, and keeps me going. I feel incredibly fortunate to have had your support as readers, sympathetic ears.

This blog post has gone on a bit, thanks if you’ve made it through this far. It’s come out a bit drier and more earnest than I would have liked but that’s the nature of the beast. I could save it and review later but that would just be an excuse to consign it to the digital bottom drawer.

Thanks for your support through all of this – it’s hugely, colosally, appreciated.

Right, I’m off out on a walk then I have to finish off another proposal before the kids get home from school and we sit round watching Meme compilations on YouTube.

Walking The Thames from Waterloo to Putney

This was a walk of many wonders, starting on Lower Marsh behind Waterloo Station and linking William Blake at Lambeth with Blake at St. Mary’s Battersea where he married Catherine Boucher in 1782. I saw the same view from the church that Turner studied and believed I saw his chair until someone in the know told me otherwise after watching the video. I walked on the Thames foreshore coating my boots in riverine mud and marvelled at the Buddhas in Battersea Park. The horrors of Nine Elms had a duty to be logged for posterity, added to the early impressions I noted in This Other London. Crossing the Wandle where it makes its sacred confluence with The Thames I vowed to return and walk the Wandle Trail as I had planned to do for This Other London but went to Tooting Common instead (taking in Nine Elms and Battersea). And the ending where I accidentally found myself attending Evensong at The Leveller Church of St. Mary’s Putney.

Nine Elms London

Nine Elms

St. Mary's Battersea

St. Mary’s Battersea

On a personal level though one of the most rewarding echoes came after  I’d packed the camera away and headed for the train home. Stopping for a mooch in the second-hand bookshop near Putney Bridge Tube I find a copy of Bruce Chatwin’s What Am I Doing Here that I instantly buy. I was delighted. Back at St. Mary’s Battersea I recalled walking here with Iain Sinclair during the shooting of London Overground, we schlepped on through Clapham Junction to Lavender Hill where Iain told the story (also in the book) of Andrew Kötting buying a copy of Chatwin’s collection of essays which Iain later annotated and deposited further along the route. I told my son the story and he said that perhaps this was Iain’s copy. It hadn’t occured to me, I checked, but alas no.

River Wandle at Wandsworth

River Wandle at Wandsworth

The Last London – in conversation with Iain Sinclair

Last week at the Wanstead Tap I had the great pleasure to talk to Iain Sinclair about his new book The Last London.

He read a passage about a walk along the Barking to Gospel Oak branch of the London Overground, a walk that I accompanied him on for a short section through Leytonstone, on the morning of Donald Trump’s US election victory.

“My theories at the time of Lud Heat, deriving from E.O Gordon, Alfred Watkins, John Michell, Nigel Pennick, were about lines of force connecting the churches, making patterns, and provoking crimes, rituals visitations, within an unregistered sphere of influence. What I now understood, in steady rain, on this morning of political madness, tracking an inoperative railway to a place nobody wants to go, is that the walks we are compelled to make are the only story. Walks are autobiography with author.”

Iain Sinclair the Last London

photo by Keith kandrphoto.com

Iain Sinclair’s work has had such a profound influence on London writing over the last 30 years at least, an influence that has stretched into film and visual arts. He synthesised a way of understanding the city and helped codify a new form psychogeography, distinct from its intellectual French roots. He expanded on the background to his hugely influential book Lud Heat:

“There was a period when you were able to absorb so many eccentric influences from all over and it goes back for me to a kind of collision for me between cinema and poetry which were my twin obsessives when I was very young and coming to London to be in film school and beginning to do long rambles and wanders and generally just to find one cinema to the next, whatever it was, and later as a gardener realising that the structure of these churches were enormously powerful and were in some ways, if you looked from the top of Greenwich Hill, connected. London was an irrational city but with rational plans put on top of it at various times generally doomed to fail in their own way but to become part of the story of the city.

I got very intrigued by that and from those kind of interests emerged a hybrid form of writing that was live day-to-day reportage of what I was doing as a gardener in an exciting part of London that I was only beginning to discover. And secondly then having the time to research the churches and their history in places like the Bancroft Road Library, which is sort of more or less gone now, which is a huge resource of local history and the librarians were so knowledgeable, they’d open up dusty boxes and show you all this stuff. It all fused together into a kind of writing that combined wild speculations, satires to do with the awful way the workers were treated down there and the idea that these jobs would disappear and that the landscape itself would disappear because we were treading on the ghosts of the future Docklands, ghosts come from both sides you know, ghosts of the things you find in the past, the ‘scarlet tracings’, but there were also ghosts of the future and they met in that landscape.”

Listen to the full audio of the conversation above.

Iain Sinclair and John Rogers

photo by Keith kandrphoto.com

 

Photos by Keith Event photos by Keith www.kandrphoto.com
https://www.facebook.com/kjmartin88