The brilliant morning sunshine was calling me out to the London fringe. This urge is best answered with a return to the London Loop. I started my circuit of London’s 150-mile orbital walking trail in January 2018 when feeling just such a push, with no intention of walking the whole thing. Hence I started with Section 17 from Enfield to Cockfosters, walking in the opposite direction to the TFL maps. And I’ve been chipping away at it ever since. My last foray onto the London Loop had been a year ago more or less, I obviously didn’t want my quest to end, but 2025 seemed like the right year to finally close the Loop.
Section 1 must be the most dramatic section of the London Loop. From the roadside of the A2, to the River Cray, the Crayford Creek Road industrial zone. The Dartford Creek in the sunset was stunning, QEII bridge arching away into the distance. The wind turbines, the reflective water, the flood barrier, then the path beside Erith marshes in the dusk. A large boat chugged along the Thames. As I entered Erith town centre in the dark I was starting to feel like a new person even though nothing had actually changed. That is the power of the London Loop.
What was I doing chasing ghosts on the Suffolk coast, staying in a nearly empty Orwell Hotel in Felixstowe named after the river that gave Eric Arthur Blair his pen name? George Orwell saw a ghost just up the Suffolk shoreline in Walberswick and wrote about it in a letter to his friend Dennis Collins in 1931. “I happened to glance over my shoulder, & saw a figure pass along the line of the other arrow, disappearing behind the masonry & presumably emerging into the churchyard …” (George Orwell Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters vol. 1). But it wasn’t those kinds of ghosts that I was hunting. The fact that M.R James had set one of his better known ghost stories in Felixstowe was a coincidence.
Orwell Hotel, Felixstowe
What brought me to Felixstowe was the influential writer and theorist, Mark Fisher, who was largely responsible for popularising the term, Hauntology. Fisher lived, and sadly passed away, in Felixstowe. I’d decided at some point in the past, when trying to wrap my head around the idea of Hauntology, that I’d need to visit Felixstowe in order to fully understand the concept.
Hauntology had first been used by Jacques Derrida in his book ‘Spectres of Marx‘ (1993) in a political context following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Fisher wrote in his 2013 book Ghosts of My Life – writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, that he’d found Derrida “a frustrating thinker”. Fisher had broadened the use of the term and applied it to electronic music, TV and film, exploring the idea of the persistence of the past in the present, often manifesting as a sense of spectrality or haunting. Fisher pointed out how some critics had claimed Hauntology was just another name for Nostalgia. Which raised the question of, nostalgia for what exactly? Lost futures? Unrealised utopias? The idea would follow that somehow we’re haunted by these lost futures. There’s a nostalgia for them, but they’re also present around us. They haunt us, they follow us around. It’s an interesting idea. This could also be applied to the landscape, and I wanted to explore the landscape Mark Fisher had been walking at the time of his writings on hauntology.
My plan to follow the route taken by Fisher and Justin Barton for the recording of their album On Vanishing Land, north along the coast, then inland to Sutton Hoo, had been thwarted by the winter closure of the ferry crossing over the River Deben. Instead I decided to walk south along the coast to Landguard Fort then follow the River Orwell past the U.K’s largest shipping container port and as far towards Ipswich as possible in the available light.
I filled up on the fried breakfast buffet in the grand dining room at the Orwell Hotel, where the only other diners were two solitary men slurping down plates of baked beans. Setting off along the seafront, I passed the mansion built in 1865 for a gun cartridge manufacturer where Augusta Empress of Germany stayed with her family in 1891, putting Felixstowe on the map as a place to come and look at the sea.
I’d read somewhere that Felixstowe was the first place to have permanent beach huts. So it was the home of the beach hut more than the home of Hauntology. Maybe we were haunted by the lost future of the beach hut and bathing German Empresses.
Plodding along the Suffolk beach it was impossible not to think of W.G Sebald and his Suffolk schelp recounted in The Rings of Saturn. In his review of Grant Gee’s film inspired by the book, Patience (After Sebald 2011), Mark Fisher wrote of how he thought Sebald’s book would capture the Tarkovsky-like landscape of the Zone that Fisher saw in the remains of pill-boxes, martello towers, and looming cranes. Instead he found that Sebald had “morosely trudged through the Suffolk spaces without really looking at them …The landscape in The Rings of Saturn functions as a thin conceit, the places operating as triggers for a literary ramble which reads less like a travelogue than a librarian’s listless daydream”.
Fisher wrote about the ‘weird and the eerie’. And you saw that in spades around Landguard Point with its defensive structures and eerie robot-operated port where huge cranes shuffled shipping containers producing a symphony of metal music clanking, chains swaying and hydraulic sighs. He had a vision of staging a hauntology event in Landguard Fort.
The walk along the seafront to the port had taken three hours – the whole morning more or less. I needed to double back in a wide loop to circumnavigate the vast port, stopping for a large cafetiere of coffee in the Rainbow Tea Room which was so quiet you could hear the clock ticking on top of an antique dresser. My placemat was printed with a map of the Desborough Hundred, taking me back to home ground and the formation of the Desborough Hundred Psychogeographical Society with my sister Cathy in 2004. I was reading Herzog’s Of Walking In Ice which seemed the perfect companion as the chill wind whipped in. Herzog’s walk from Munich to Paris had also taken place in December but in far less clement weather.
By the time I’d rounded the container port and reached the River Orwell there was only an hour or two of daylight left. I wouldn’t make it anywhere near Ipswich, but I was more than content with the walk. The high banks that protected the marshes from the flood waters put me in mind of walking the River Blyth near Southwold – just north along the coast. And as I did a lap of Trimley Marshes in the dusk, I started to plot my return to walk the Orwell from Ipswich then continue along Mark Fisher’s Suffolk coast.
The City of Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell – Tudor London walk
Back in November I picked up a copy of the fascinating 1520 map of Tudor London, from the Charterhouse, which is featured on the map (you can also purchase these from St Bartholomew the Great, included in part 2 of this series). One Sunday afternoon I ventured out into the City of London using the map as my guide to see what traces of Tudor London I could find on the street. The walk in this video starts at the Tower of London and the Roman wall then goes past All Hallows by the Tower, along Seething London to Hart Street and Crutched Friars. At Aldgate we pass the Aldgate Pump and walk down Leadenhall Street and visit Leadenhall Market site of the Roman Forum and Basilica. Our walking tour ends at Throgmorten Street, site of the Thomas Cromwell’s mansion.
A day in Paris. Just one day. To be guided by my feet and senses. Arrive on the Eurostar walk all day and depart again from Gare du Nord. I can’t say I was completely without plans. I had three: – visit Re:Voir – see the new Notre Dame – walk – and only walk, no Metro or bus or Tram allowed – have a nice birthday lunch – so ok, that’s four plans.
On my way to Re:Voir I passed Rue du Château d’Eau, where I remember I stayed with my wife on my first trip to Paris, in 1997. I was returning from three years abroad and flew in to Paris from Delhi intent on arriving back in England on the Eurostar which had started running after I’d left the country in 1994. I stood outside Hotel Pacific and the years rolled back and there we were in the summer of 1997 up in that room beside the hotel sign delighted to be back in Europe, downing cans of cold Kronenbourg from the Reception vending machine, gulping down tap water, while ignoring the resident mouse.
Around the corner at Re:Voir I marvelled at the array of Super 8 cameras, had a nice chat with the fella behind the counter and walked away with DVD OF Jonas Mekas’ The Sixties Quartet.
I discovered new passages to me at Passage Ponceau and Passage du Grand Cerf and thought of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project as I always do, but now with the added context of Dan Hancox’s great FT article on Benjamin’s final journey across the Pyrenees.
Re:VoirPolidor
I lunched on Confit of Duck at Le Pave and then marvelled at the newly restored Notre Dame Cathedral before my mandatory visit to Shakespeare and Co. From here I strolled up the hill to the Pantheon and back down again through the wine caves of the Left Bank, over Pont Neuf and just had time for a quick dinner by Gare du Nord before catching the last train back to London.
A walk through London’s Little Italy up to the fields of Islington
This walk is based on the first part of Chapter 8 of my book This Other London. Starting at Chancery Lane Station on High Holborn, we go into the curious anomaly of Ely Place, owned by the Bishops of Ely and once technically part of Cambridgeshire. We visit the Old Mitre Pub where Sir Christopher Hatton danced with Elizabeth I. We go along Hatton Garden, the centre of Britain’s diamond trade, and into Leather Lane Market. The walk through Little Italy takes us in search of Fagin’s den in Saffron Hill, a place visited by Charles Dickens who drank in the One Tun pub. We walk along Hatton Wall into Portpool Lane where the Kings Ditch ran and through the Bourne Estate.
The Heart of London’s Little Italy
The heart of London’s Little Italy lay in the streets falling away from Clerkenwell Road into the Fleet Valley – Back Hill, Eyre Street Hill, Herbal Hill. From here we go up Crawford Passage to Coldbath Square and Mount Pleasant. We stroll through Spa Fields – now Exmouth Market and Wilmington Square where Merlin was said to have a cave in the heart of the hill. The Merlin’s Cave Tavern stood in Merlin House on the site of Charles Rowan House. Next we walk through Lloyd Square to Percy Circus where Lenin stayed in 1905. Back on Amwell Street we recount E.O Gordon’s powerful mythology of London at the head of the Pen Ton Mound, now the New River Head Upper Reservoir on Claremont Square. Passing down Penton Street our walk ends at White Conduit House, once a celebrated pleasure garden and the true home of cricket.
Starting in Old Broad Street we go looking for the Dutch Church in Austin Friars where Vincent Van Gogh Worshipped. We then go along Throgmorton Street and admire the exterior of Drapers’ Hall and Throgmorton Avenue. We emerge behind the Bank of England and get drawn into Tokenhouse Yard, Telegraph Street, Whalebone Yard and King’s Arms Yard. Then we go inside the magnificent St. Margaret Lothbury with its fascinating relics from other City of London Churches and its association with five City Livery Companies.
