Here are some stills from the Super8 film I made of my walk between the prehistoric mounds of London on the summer solstice
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The idea has been with me ever since I first picked up a copy of E.O. Gordon’s ‘Prehistoric London : its mounds and circles’ – to walk between the mounds on the summer solstice. In her criminally under-celebrated book Gordon describes how the mounds and circles of the British Isles are the remnants of a lost culture. No news there when looking at the solstice celebrations at Stonehenge (30,000 pagan celebrants this year), but London?
The only acknowledgement of the significance of these sites was a record of The Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids forsaking Stonehenge in favour of performing ceremonies at Tower Hill in March 1963.
I confess that resonance was added by the fact that at the time I lived yards away from Penton Mound at the top of Pentonville Road. But what vision of the city would be formed by perambulating between its founding sites – the great monuments that were at the centre of a thriving city long before the Romans rocked up.
Westminster/Tothill to Bryn Gwyn/The Tower of London to Penton/ New River Upper Reservoir to The Llandin/ Parliament Hill – a day to achieve it in.
In its original formulation this would have been a grand ritual unifying the city led by the nation’s Druids. In this inaugural event it maybe fitting that it is a family affair – just me and my sister.
I meet Cathy on Broad Sanctuary at 2.15pm after a detour to the Widescreen Centre to pick up a role of TriX black & white Super 8 film to attempt a film of the ritual – a 3 minute in camera edited film. We are delayed longer than planned at Westminster – get caught up with the small good natured demonstration on Parliament Square in support of the Iraqi people. We blow the cover of the supposed Heritage Wardens who confess to being GLA employees spying on the demo (there are barely double figures present). We move on over Westminster Bridge leaving the Royal Gorsedd and cut behind County Hall haunted by the spindly Wicker Man that they call The London Eye. Then its down Roupel Street, Union Street and into the quiet. We ponder upon the fetishisation of dereliction as we marvel at some beautiful crumbling relics – one a stone doorway with the word ‘OFFICE’ carved into the lintel adrift in an empty street. I realise that with my focus being on the film it cancels out words – my notebook virtually empty – the whole 2 hour wander to Tower Hill only inspiring a single note – ‘Great Maze Pond SE1’ which I take to fit in with the pagan theme of the derive (mazes being created in oak groves and markers of places of druidic ritual).
We spend little time at Tower Hill/ Bryn Gwyn – along with Westminster/ Tothill – as I feel an overwhelming urge to deny the desecration of the sites by the invaders – the so-called Parliament at the ancient place of congregation and communal law-making and the Prison on the site of the British people’s fortress where the severed head of Bendigeid Vran, first king of this island, is said to be buried. I record them on camera but we move on enjoying the calm City streets.
Into Barbican from Moorgate through the halls and out into Whitecross Street guided by Hawksmoor’s spire on St Luke’s. On Goswell I show Cathy the Mount Mills fortification and we follow the Cromwellian defences through Northampton Square and out to face Lubetkin’s Spa Green Estate. We skirt its perimeter and I then point out the Mount Zion Chapel – redolent of a riff in Gordon that links the British Mounds to their spiritual cousins in Palestine (a few years ago I emailed Mount Zion Chapel to enquire what had guided the location of their chapel – I received no reply).
Cathy leaves me at the Penton to complete the final leg alone. It’s 7.30pm and I should stop for a cuppa somewhere but Islington at that time on a Saturday is geared up for one thing only. Also as I push on along Penton Street I’m too awash in a sea of memories of my happy years spent living here.
The Penny Farthing has been given a confused make-over and is now a restaurant serving an odd combination of pizza and sushi – I suppose they don‘t attempt to trade in on the pub‘s heritage as the true home of cricket – the pavilion for the club that would become the MCC after they moved across town to Marleybone. Change takes on odd forms – a tattoo parlour has opened next to the corner shop that supplied me with cans of beer and emergency nappies.
Down Copenhagen Street and walks (and blog postings) past come back as do trips to playgroups and the wonderful library on Thornhill Square. I get second wind.
Turning the corner into York Way I shoot some of the old station posts that seemed to have survived the coming of the Eurostar. Then the vista of the day – the cleared scorched earth west of York Way – a train slowly moving across the land below three enormous silos – I consider running off the remainder of my film here – a Tarkovskian landscape worthy of its own 50ft of TriX.
Gordon relates York Way’s original name, Maiden Lane to its purpose of leading people to their places of congregation (Maiden Lane that runs through Covent Garden lines up with Parliament Square). I note the street name of a sorry backstreet behind a warehouse – Vale Royal – the last indicator of the rich mythology linked to this area from Boadicea’s last stand to the first Christian Church (in the world!).
I’ve now decided to keep going without a stop till I ascend the top of the Llandin – a continuous yomp from the south end of Tower Bridge. Up along Brecknock Road where the dark ridge of Highgate Woods marks the horizon. Down through Dartmouth Park and I’m there on Parliament Hill Fields. I must be hallucinating because I see a white robed Druid atop the hill – yes. I grab the camera and zoom in – not a Druid but the freshly painted white monument to right of free speech that exists here. I do a kind of stop-frame dance around the stone till the film runs out and the journey is over – 50 feet of film, 10 miles and 6 hours walking.
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“Christmas ‘should be downgraded to help race relations’”, was the headline that screamed out of the Daily Mail on 1st November.
Quoting a report by “Labour’s favourite think-tank” the IPPR, the Mail stated that the report “robustly defends multiculturalism” and that “If we are going to continue as a nation to mark Christmas – and it would be very hard to expunge it from our national life even if we wanted to – then public organisations should mark other religious festivals too.”
Working on the assumption that if the Mail hates something then I might quite like it, I sought out the original report. The IPPR kindly provided me with a copy – the Mail had somehow managed to get hold of it from the Tory Party (how odd).
So what does the report actually say?
After putting everyone’s DNA on a massive database that would make the Stasi blush and locking up innocent people for months without charge, will the government’s coup de grace be to ban Christmas?
The report is actually called ‘The Power of Belonging’ and Christmas accounts for one paragraph of its 50-odd pages. The central theme is that in order to achieve progressive liberal ideals and strengthen our democratic institutions “we need to do more as a society to foster a common sense of belonging and shared civic identities”. This is most likely what has rattled the formerly Hitler-supporting Daily Mail.
It’d be hard for me to argue with much of the report. “A multiculturalist politics should be combined with a politics of common national and local belonging”, is a sentiment that could be found in declarations from Molmutinus circa 2500BC to Alfred the Great. We’ve been struggling with multiculturalism since the seas rose and cut us off from the continent and we had no option but to settle where we were.
So when the IPPR suggest that “we need to find new and more inclusive sources of British national identity” the only controversy should be over the use of the word “new”.
What we actually need to do is reconnect with the intrinsically inclusive landscape based sense of identity that was once central to the idea of living on these islands. Accessing the ‘genus loci’ is something open to everyone regardless of cultural or ethnic origin.
The report does hint at this direction when it talks of a “new localism”.
But let’s go back to Christmas.
The Mail do not misquote. It’s just that they omit the sentences preceding and following the inflammatory aspiration to cull Santa.
The report states that our national institutions, calendars, museums “will inevitably be dominated by long-standing cultures and religions, which are likely to resonate more with native groups than with immigrant ones”. Fairly obvious.
Then after saying that public organisations should consider marking other religious festivals it says, “However, it is often difficult to draw the line between publicly recognising an ethnic or religious identity and encouraging uncritical submission to it.” That’s the get out clause, it’s a nice idea but not practical and would actually lead to greater division and possibly promoting ideas that run contrary to the liberal democratic ideal. Also, if schools marked every religious holiday celebrated by its pupils then the kids would hardly ever attend in very diverse areas like Leytonstone (for the record my son’s school closed for Diwali, and last year I dressed up as Santa to give out gifts to a gleeful class of kids containing only two white children – so this is already happening to some degree).
It’d be far bolder to assert that there is nothing in the least ‘traditional’ about the Christian Christmas.
From the holy to the Yule log, gift giving and Santa’s elves, Christmas is just the pagan winter feasting season common to many cultures hijacked by an obscure middle-eastern death cult muddled up with the Roman Sun God.
Recasting it as this makes Yuletide a unifying experience because we all live through the cold and dark of midwinter. All we need to do is rough Father Christmas up a bit, get rid of the Coca-Cola sponsored red garb, and once again he’s the ‘Wild Man’ that cultures across the globe used in their winter revelries.
You could achieve the goals of the report not by downgrading Christmas but just by taking the ‘Christ’ out of it.
Community cohesion and a greater sense of civic pride could be achieved not so much by tokenistically respecting the cultures of the newly arrived but by collectively learning to respect the culture of the original settlers – foreigners to us all most likely.
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Yesterday went to the Green Man Playgroup Easter Fayre. That’s a pagan double whammy. The whole idea of an Easter Fayre being the celebration of the Saxon spring goddess of Eostre “whose feast was the vernal equinox and whose animal was the spring hare”. The eggs that the kids hunted for in a box of shredded tissue paper are the symbols of the rebirth of the countryside. That this quaint afternoon out was organised by the Green Man Playgroup (named after the Green Man roundabout, itself named after the famous inn of that name where Dick Turpin was alleged to have drank, but as Nick once said, find me a pub on the edge of London that doesn’t claim a Turpin reference) was apt as the Green Man being the leafy deity of May and is also associate with rebirth:
“…There are legends of him (Khidr) in which, like Osiris, he is dismembered and reborn; and prophecies connecting him, like the Green Man, with the end of time. His name means the Green One or Verdant One, he is the voice of inspiration to the aspirant and committed artist. He can come as a white light or the gleam on a blade of grass, but more often as an inner mood. The sign of his presence is the ability to work or experience with tireless enthusiasm beyond one’s normal capacities. In this there may be a link across cultures, … one reason for the enthusiasm of the medieval sculptors for the Green Man may be that he was the source of inspiration.” — William Anderson, “Green Man: The Archetype of our Oneness with the Earth”
The hall sits in the grounds of the Welsh church – which I reckon is just a modern manifestation of Druidary. It’s my theory that the Druids adopted a tactic of entryism into the church a bit like Trotskyists joining the Labour Party. The atmosphere reminded me of the village jumble sales of my childhood except for the frenzy of excitement over the raffle the like of which I haven’t seen since I witness the raffling of tinned fruit at my Nan’s old people’s home in the early 80’s. I couldn’t convince my 3 year old that the South Park figures were worth buying, but at 10 pence I allowed myself a little indulgence.
The sense of pagan festivities had been signalled by the arrival of an envelope in the morning from the mystical and brilliant Bodmin Moor Explorer. Bodmin’s photo on his/her Myspace profile is of a Humpty Dumpty type character – a pace egg of sorts (I’m sure Bodmin will clarify this – my folklore is a bit sketchy). The envelope contained a copy of Network News a zine of folklore of mystical stuff published by Earthly Delights, some subversive postcards (Bodmin can’t possibly have known that the day before I’d been researching the basis of the fictional ‘red mercury dirty bomb plot’ could he?) and a badge that I shall attach to my walking jacket.
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