Remapping High Wycombe and B.S Johnson

Haven’t blogged here for a while because I’ve been occupied with another project in High Wycombe http://remappinghighwycombe.blogspot.com. I’ve been working with my sister carrying out a psychogeographical survey of the town, doing various derives and some straightforward walks. It threw up another link in my ‘Autopobiography’: writer B.S Johnson who lived in Claremont Square, Islington and also Gordon Road, High Wycombe. I was reading his novel ‘Albert Angelo’ for its topographical descriptions of Islington when someone emailed me to tell me that his book ‘Trawl’ (also in his ‘Omnibus’) had a long description of parts of High Wycombe.
We capped off the project with a long walk circumnavigating the town in the spirit of Iain Sinclair’s ‘London Orbital’ and Andrew Kotting’s ‘Galivant’ sending back 10 second video clips via mobile phone to an installation in the town centre where they were displayed on a screen. This worked really well and is something we may repeat.
But now I can return to the Islington streets, tracking their moods and atmospheres, and anything else that takes my fancy.

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Dobney’s, Penton Street

Dobney's
Penton Street, N1

“Upon the site of Dobney’s Place, at the back of Penton Street, stood an old house, having a bowling-green, and tea-gardens, with ponds, &c. similar to those at White Conduit House….”
This strip is in the midst of a make-over whilst White Conduit House remains a locked up dodgy boozer.

J. Nelson’s History, Topography, and Antiquities of the Parish of St.Mary Islington in the County of Middlesex, pub 1811 also has a nice note about topographical writing:
“The study of our National Antiquities has called forth the talents of the most eminent scholars; and it is generally admitted, that writings on this subject, combining Historical remark with Topographical illustration, are calculated to convey a knowledge of our domestic concerns in a way the most entertaining and instructive.”

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Grays Inn Road-North Devon

Grays Inn Road Mansions
Grays Inn Road Mansions

Dulverton and Dawlish Mansions just up from Holsworthy Square. I’ve checked their alignment with their namesakes in the South West and it yielded no clues to the mystery.

Update: 10/01/2006
Eileen Reid sent me the following by email:
Re all the Devon connections in Rosebery Avenue, etc. They’re there because the developer James Hartnoll was of Devonian extraction. Born in poverty in Southwark, he died worth more than £400,000.. not very psychogeographical, I’m afraid. But true. There was an article in the Camden History journal in 1980 all about him.

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Liberty lies in your feet

It was Elm Street WC1 that set me free and took me through the square that wasn’t there. Holsworthy Square is merely a block of flats with a courtyard. Holsworthy, a town in north Devon, another link in the Rosebery Avenue connection that includes Exmouth Market, Bideford, Braunton, Dulverton , Dawlish, and Barnstaple Mansions.
The Gunmakers closed its doors as I got there, Duke of Yorks was kari-effing-oke. Disillusioned I wandered into Mount Pleasant, then Elm Street. As I strolled onto Grays Inn Road I sensed a more urban ambience, Bloomsbury’s poor cousin. Endless possibilities open up. Should I finally try the Calthorpe Arms? Nah too snug, a real regular’s pub. Further up the Queen’s Head was geezers playing pool and the Percy Arms remains boarded up.
I end up in the comfortable pseudo-trendy Clockwork atop Pentonville Road full of relaxed vibes for the Blank Generation. There are exactly ten people in the place, maybe it picks up the sad souls who can’t get into Salmon & Compasses and the Elbow Room? Upstairs from 10-3am is Skrew! Nu-Electro Dirty Disco & Sleazy Punk with DJs T-Lady and The Real Joan Collins. Dobney’s Tea Gardens, White Conduit House and Busby’s Folly have been replaced by pubs hastily converted into bop-bars, demi-clubs of the Annam ilk that draw the City clerks north and leave them scattered on early morning puke-and-piss-splattered pavements just as in the days that Victorian inheritances were squandered on gin, races and whores and written about by Oliver Goldsmith.

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Into the Bear Pit

Finally ventured into the 1 o’clock club, the bear pit, dragged in by my son. We stood at the door, son struck by shyness. All eyes turned towards us, conversation halted. The scary granny-childminders of my previous post were all smiles and cooes for the little fella’s curly locks. We stayed for a good hour, covering ourselves in bright pink paint. The doors were shut but the real Vera Drakes were sweetness and light; one even gave us a packet of raisins.

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1 O’Clock Club

“Open the doors and let the kids play”, is what one Mum said to me. She was talking about the 1 O’clock club in Barnard Park but I took it on a metaphorical level. Open the doors and let the kids play, take down the barriers and unleash the little tykes’ creative energies. It seems odd that in one of our precious bits of greenspace (Islington has the least amount of greenspace of any Borough in London) the doors at the 1 o’clock club should remain closed keeping the children inside the little concrete cube with the gossiping women. I’m too intimidated to go in myself, I rely on the hearsay of others. It comes across as a tight cabal of fiercesome grannie-childminders and fag smoking baby-mums spouting Daily Mail headlines.
One source reported a conversation about Mike Leigh’s film ‘Vera Drake’ that went along the lines of “Saw that Vera Drake”, “Me too, boring…”, “Dreary,” “I walked out”. The irony being that Leigh has said in his mind the character of Vera Drake lived in Copenhagen Street, the street that runs right past the 1 o’clock club; these lovely ladies could be the real Vera Drakes.
‘Course you’d never find Mike Leigh at the 1 0’clock club, it’s far too working class.
The conversation about getting the doors open literally and metaphorically and ending the club’s status as a free coffee stop for the childless women of the area ignited my political instincts. We were still bathing in the glow of our Sure Start playgroup being taken into the hands of a parent-led management committee and had successfully changed the time of the kids’ morning snack to 11.15. “A coup d’etat”, I suggested, “a 1 o’clock club putsch”.
“Sing song time”. One of the group facilitators rounded us up and soon talk of the march on Barnard Park was drowned out by “Wind the bobbin up, wind the bobbin up…..” A song glorifying exploitative piecework labour practices of capitalist mill owners.

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Autotopobiography

Whilst hoofing it down to Soho the other night I put together a few more fragments of my autotopobiography (a fantastically unwieldy term mis-remembered from Phil Smith’s essay ‘Dread, Route and Time: An Autobiographical Walking of Everything Else’) of the area. I suppose it starts with Barnstaple Mansions on Rosebery Avenue. My parents moved to Barnstaple a few years back. Mulligans pub in the same street also serves up a decent pint of Brakespeare’s which comes from my native Thames Valley and is the brew that I cut my teeth on as a teenager.
Further down I stopped to note down the brown LCC plaque on 22 Theobalds Road to Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield who was born there in 1804. I was born in High Wycombe and Disraeli launched his political career with a disastrous speech from the balcony of the Red Lion Hotel in Wycombe High Street, he lived up the hill in Hughenden and said that there was something in the air of Bucks that leant itself to politics. I studied politics at City Poly.
Not far away at 64 Red Lion Street WC1 there’s a nondescript 60’s seven-storey block of flats called Beaconsfield (probably because of Dizzi’s birthplace round the corner) and Beaconsfield was where I got married, where my first girlfriend lived and where I spent much of my teens drinking that Brakespeare’s.
The rest of journey to the Curzon was free of associations and I spent an hourin Chinatown looking for a small white fortune kitten to replace the one my son had lost and pined for.

Coming home I get drawn off Guilford Street down a dark Doughty Mews to the Duke pub (more of that another time) which sits on the corner of John’s Mews and Roger Street – my name minus an ‘s’ on the end. A previous John Rogers was famous for printing the second complete Bible in English. He used to preach at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre-without Newgate on Holborn Viaduct and was eventually thrown in Newgate prison over the road, tried as Lollard heretic and burnt at the stake in Smithfield in 1555 (ish). All places on my daily drifts.
Lollards have a strong association with Bucks and one leader Thomas Chase was tortured to death in the village of Wooburn Green where I grew up.
I was back down that way last week interviewing this lovely old couple for a psychogeography project I’m working on connected to the area http://remappinghighwycombe.blogspot.com. This couple are practising Methodists and halfway through the evening David presents me with a book he co-authored, ‘250 Years of Chiltern Methodism’. I open it on the train home to read that John Wesley, founder of Methodism, used to worship at the Moravian chapel in Fetter Lane where I walk nearly every day. He went on to open his first Chapel just down the road from me in City Road where he lived.
Now I’m building up countless new associations with Islington and around, each day triggers off echoes of feelings from other times and experiences. My mood map of the borough already has its warm spots glowing yellow and red; the high corner of Highbury Fields where I used to go to soak up the spirit of the French clowns I saw perform there (gave me strength in my own performing days), and the house on Liverpool Road where my son was conceived. Like a lot of stuff on this blog this is a work-in-progress, it’ll change depending on my mood. Martyrs and Heretics just seem to be on my mind at the moment.

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