a london diary

2001 12 07 friday

So what do you do when you can't sleep, have just read a chunk of Iain Sinclair's essays on London and don't have to go to work in the morning? Obviously you go for a wander, but given its length, maybe it's more an excursion. It's no matter if the time is 5.40 and it's dark out. You always wanted to see the place at night, right?

It's not that dark, though; no-where in this city ever is, really. There's half a moon shining on a patter of thinnish fish-scale clouds, reflecting back the orange of the sodium that also lights my way. Alan Moore's William Gull, in that Chapter Four, posits masonic and religious energies corraled by London to bind it under a sun god, or its latest incarnation, but this is December; the sun's weak, banished, and the moon can take full reign. It lights me as I walk the quiet Barnsbury streets, past the security lights and safety blankets- those lights down the little half-staircases to basement flats- down to Caledionian Road.

"Cally's" been another of my blind spots; veering off York Road down at King's Cross, tracking north to... well, somewhere; another journey to tick off. Islington borderlands; near enough the main lines to Scotland to make it far less fashionable than Upper Street, despite the fact both are nominally Islington- the latter has fancy interior decorators, posh bar/restaurants, the odd splatter of council offices; the former has gyms, minicab offices, caffs; much more what I'd expect from Hackney or the unclaimed bits of Shoreditch, with the exception of an entire chunk of nice-ish three storey terraces, some with strange lawn decorations. That's more suburban than N1, surely?

Wide, though, especially the pavements; a possible marker for that earnest Victorian habit of demolishing the slums to drive roads down to the city's edge (where ever that was that year). Straight, too, except for a detour once over the canal; 'these gates will be locked from dusk to 7.30 am', so a trip to the edge of the tunnel is denied to me if I don't want to clamber. There's a small burst of waterside housing, the seeds, perhaps, of 'reclaiming' King's Cross in the same way Hoxton and Shoreditch have been over the last five years. Perhaps.

Anyway, I have a plan, so onwards, past the first signs of other human life; down to the station itself, and the area around it, taking my chances on a junction with broken traffic lights and the emptying of a bus from Edmonton until I reach the terminus itself. It's six in the morning, and amazingly quiet; the spaces that will swarm with people for the next fourteen or so hours are deserted, those unfortunate enough to be travelling clinging to the seats at the edge or the Upper Crust baguette takeaway, the only source for sustenance at this point.

Well, that's one target checked. Where now? Heading riverwards; meandering through St Pancras past gluts of cheap hotels, refugees from an off-season Bournemouth, and the always-odd-seeming zone one housing; surely people don't live inside the Circle Line? Wind up stuck to Judd Street past the Brunswick Centre, a geometry of lights with a couple of students playing football in the main road, over a ridiculously oversized roundabout; hall territory, International and bits of UCL or ULU.

On walking past Great Ormond Street hospital, a beacon appears to me; Midcity Place, the new development on High Holborn, which appears to be straight south of here. I fancy making the connection, so down the main road to Red Lion Street. Usually I'm here after seven (at night); now, it's almost as if someone's inverted the street. The pubs are closed, dark, as are the couple of takeaways, but there's a reciprication of sandwich shops, newsagents and even a greengrocer-butcher double act. Duck past the Three Cups, one of the vertices of the London.pm triangle; through the overlit alley by the eastern end of the new building to another point, the Penderel's Oak. There're crates of used bottles here. Run up to the party season.

An abandonment of innovation; carrying on down Holborn, a new destination suggested on Lamb's Conduit Street- Smithfield. Apparently the Chancery Lane deep shelter, requisitioned by BT, lies under the road; one end at Midcity Place, the other at Holborn Circus under the new Sainsbury's Local. (Local to who? No-one lives here. It's commuter territory, but even they're not about yet. 8s and 25s run unhindered up and down the road, not that full yet. Chancery Lane's still closed.) Hatton Garden is inexplicably all lit up, with trees draped in lights and vertical formations on the poles. Pass the Cittie of Yorke, final point of the triangle; it points east, but I veer a little north, up Charterhouse Street.

Suddenly there's another burst of life, and a big one at that. The market is in full flow. I'd half planned to walk through it and see the south side (where there'd be more food places, especially as I'm hungry by now), but it's far too busy to do that. The chains- Manhatten, Coffee Republic- aren't open yet, but the indies sure are, and the butchers, uniformed in white coats, are getting the coffee to stay awake where they can. I avoid the workers, sticking to the north side of the street until I can loop round the east end of the imposing buildings.

There's the hint of dark blue heralding a sunrise behind the Barbican towers now. I dive into the alleys south-east of here, heading, hopefully, for St Pauls, round St Bartolomew's Priory and Hospital, but the medieval and medical maze confounds me, and I lose it completely by the time I get to London Wall, heading east not south for a minute before I find another alley to enter.

Find a couple of food places down Foster Lane (appropriate, given the cranes and the building just past, and his Lloyds building that gave me my bearings), and finally sate the hunger that's grown distracting. Another destination suggests itself; the site of yesterday's Wapping fire; but on the way, St Dunstan's in the East, finally located in Light's Out for the Territory after its mention in the Invisibles (and, again, a connection is made; a (mythical?) Restoration Invisible College, which surely Morrison knew about; more comics with a London edge, Tom O'Bedlam and King Mob leading me through the philistine city of glass and steel).

Of course, down Cheapside there turns out to be plenty of food but nowhere to sit. I defy the City's 'eat whilst walking' mantra and perch on a bench at the entrance to Milk Street while the commuters start to emerge; suits heading up and down the road, the odd tourist-seeming figure interspersed. Of course there are no bins in the city, but there are cleaners, and you can borrow their carts. Job's a good 'un. Past Bank and Monument, staying above ground for once, and down Idol Lane, shanking past the morning's third or fourth Pret, and behind the men with suitcases.

St Dunstan's is pretty well hidden from the City, which is a damn shame, as it's really nice. Tower's intact; a garden, that's locked (although easy enough to jump into, if you're dedicated enough); a wall that's standing, but overgrown, decay biting after only sixty years, the sort of warning that goes unnoticed; and, bizarelly, a Wren Clinic (what?) in the surviving buidling. A loop or two around it, then out of St Dunstan's, heading for the Tower. It's getting quite blue by now; the clouds of Barnsbury blown away, seemingly by the rising sun, but out west it seems greyer than it should do. Turn around, and head under the last bridge in London, through St Katherines and the burbclaves of the City's edge, wending through to the Highway. First glimpses of Canary Wharf, the three towers huddling for protection, almost, sillouthed in the morning sun, with their offspring growing rapidly to the south, spindly, latticework with small cores.

No sign of smoke, but plenty of Sun advertising; no surprise, in the shadow of the News International printing plant, and the Times offices. Then a surprise; St George's in the East, obviously a Hawksmoor from the minute I first spot it, with its square of smaller towers and strange tower. Unfortunately tiredness is kicking back in now, so I have to, sadly, resort to the lights to cross the A1203, a nasty bit of dual carriageway out to Limehouse, which is damned busy for this early in the morning.

The church itself is surprisingly small, and burdened; there are cars in the yard, and it barely has room to assert itself to the north, a narrow corridor between building and some fenced-off grass. Definitely blue, now, though, and heading further down the dual carriageway the gaps in the skyline down towards Shadwell Basin reveal the sun's finally cleared the horizon; Gull's spirit is back in control, and straight lines and tiredness take over; I'll be heading north, here, then west, home.

There's not much to recommend Stepney or Globe Town, to my mind, but I do later realise I should have been looking for the language of the masses, the grafitti, rather than concentrating, as I usually do, on the tracks of transport carved through the area; the flightpath into London City (a steady procession of short-take-off stubby flyers has been with me since Monument, at least), the DLR and its cohort, the Misery Line; Commercial Street and Mile End Road, both gazing in to the marker of the Natwest Tower (turned a glorious gold by the rising son); the Norwich line, over Cambridge Heath Road, then, parallel rather than perpendicular, the line up to Stoke Newington and Cambridge; the canal, once more, this time open but desolate, sneaking past gasometers and under the railway; a little bit of flats trying to be posh, but around here, no-one's fooled.

There's a small temptation to head out to Victoria Park, but I've been to that one; not London Fields. Turns out, though, that the name carries too much power; the place is surprisingly dull, a smallish scrap of grass hemmed between more of the estates I've been trudging through since Wapping, unlikely conglomerations labelled with hopeful community-building names, a hotch-potch of architectures, and probably inhabitants. I have to sit in the park for a while, though; I've been going for a few hours now, and I need the rest. The sun's creeping behind a cover of flat cloud that's bubbled over. A pause.

The rest's just finding my way back, which isn't hard at all. You head west, and perhaps realise you're a tad to far south, but there are roads that help you fix that. Of course, it's tube hinterland round here, so there are buses everywhere, and that means bus maps; it's easy enough. Cut across two clusters of buses (three each way) on Essex Road, and listen to the radio a bit, awkwardly (no headphones, so I end up holding the thing up to my head). Back to the increasingly familiar St Paul's Road; Highbury Corner. Offord Road seems quieter and lighter than usual; welcome home.