Chivers Mount London

1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-1-908058-27-0
Verlag: Penned in the Margins
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 214 Seiten

Did you know that an invisible mountain is rising above the streets of the capital - and, at over 1,400 metres, it is Britain's highest peak? This ingenious new book is an account of the ascent of Mount London by a hardened team of writers, poets and urban cartographers, each one scaling a smaller mountain within the city - from Crystal Palace (112m) to Primrose Hill (78m) - until the accumulative climb exceeds the height of Ben Nevis. Also available as an eBook here. The essays and stories in Mount London unpeel London's history, geography and psychogeography, reimagining the city as mountainous terrain and exploring what it's like to move through the urban landscape. Ascents of London's natural peaks are offset by expeditions to the artificial mountains of the city - the Shard (306m), the chimneys of Battersea Power Station (103m) - and the search for 'ghost hills' in the back streets of Whitechapel and Finsbury. Mount London is a unique and visionary record of the vertical city. With contributions by Iain Sinclair, Helen Mort, Joe Dunthorne, Sarah Butler, Inua Ellams, Bradley Garrett and many more.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Chivers, Tom

Leseproben

STAMFORD HILL

Katy Evans-Bush

The Hill has always been there, of course. Rising above the surrounding everydayness, it raises its head and speaks to the other hills around it: Highgate, misty blue to the west in the evenings; Muswell Hill to the north; and Alexandra Park, where the Palace, with its glorious almost-modern transmitter, catches the sun’s fire like a mirror and scatters it everywhere.

The Hill sees more with its all-seeing eye than the flat places below it, and its people pick up signals unavailable in the narrow Victorian canyons of Finsbury Park — whose name, town of the fens, tells you of its damp, low-lying nature — or Stoke Newington. Stamford Hill is the local apex: here the roads, the traffic, the human movement, have converged for two millennia and maybe more. The sky is huge. The light seems bigger than down below. It is said that when King James I was received here by the Mayor and aldermen on his first approach to London after ascending to the throne, he could see the whole of the city spread out before him.

One afternoon a tiny while ago, a ten-year-old girl was walking with her mum down an alleyway, a sort of narrow way, leading into Stoke Newington High Street. It was a nothing sort of early evening, and we were going from the friend’s house where I had picked her up after work to, I imagine, the Turkish shop, and then home on the bus. Old houses (or cottages) alongside gave nothing away; there was a plant in a pot by a front door, there was a Victorian street lamp — and ahead of them the main road teemed with the usual nonstop traffic: vans, cars, cyclists, and people from all over the globe.

We walked along, each with our bags and thoughts.

I said something: ‘What do you want for supper?’

Or: ‘So how was school?’

D said nothing, then shook her head and said:

‘Oh! That was so weird.’

‘What was?’

‘Everything just disappeared’, D said. ‘Didn’t you see it? It was all gone and it was olden days. The High Street was there, and it wasn’t cars, it was ladies in long dresses and horses and carts.’

And then, just as fast as it went, it had all come tumbling back again, the buses and cyclists, the yummy mummies pushing over-designed buggies, the 20p guy, the off-duty journalists, the crazy Spanish kid with the guitar. The buildings, built in about the 1860s, had remained more or less the same. I asked a few more questions, and then we came out into the High Street itself.

Stoke Newington High Street, which momentarily disappeared on that day in around 2006, makes up a part of the Old North Road — what used to be called, in the very old days, Ermine Street, after the Earningas, a Saxon tribe in the fens — leaving the City at Bishopsgate and running in a straight-ish line all the way to Cambridge. It was a Roman Road, but the Roman name for it is forgotten. It crosses other Roman roads along its way — for instance, Old Street, which connects it to the far more ancient Watling Street (at one end, the scene of Boudicca’s defeat; at the other, the route Chaucer’s pilgrims and others followed from Southwark to Canterbury; and somewhere in the middle, the Old Kent Road, home of evangelical warehouse churches). About half a mile north of our disappearing act, when the road reaches the top of Stamford Hill — or Saundford or Sanford Hill, as it used to be known — it crosses another one, which led at one time down to the larger Saxon settlements by the River Lea, where King Alfred and the locals routed the Danes in a great battle. It now leads to Clapton Pond, where house prices are currently increasing out of all proportion to how nice the place actually is. (And after Clapton Pond you get to Sutton House, home of one of Thomas Cromwell’s brightest henchmen. It still has its beautiful linenfold paneling, and its top floor is haunted by the ghost of a little dog.)

This road, we’re saying, has seen a lot, over a lot of years. Even the Coach and Horses, which stands next to our mysterious narrow way and serves delicious Thai food in an old-fashioned-pub ambience, would have been there in whatever time my daughter tesseracted back to, because it was licensed in 1723. The village of Stoke Newington was spreading out from Church Street, filling out the landscape. There was so much traffic along this road that around 1715 several local parishes had petitioned Parliament for permission to erect toll gates, to raise the money to maintain it. There was a toll gate, or turnpike, in Kingsland to the south, and another on top of Stamford Hill, at the intersection of the two Roman roads.

Everyone passed along here: it was the north-south axis, a hive of enterprise, and also a portal to the green fields and farms beyond in rural Tottenham. You had farmers going to and from market, travellers to the north, and to the south, merchants and gentlemen and cobblers. Parties on their way to the pleasure gardens of the famous Mermaid Tavern in Mare Street. Students, kings and diplomats, highwaymen on their way to lie low in the provinces, brickmakers’ carts, theatrical troupes, preachers.

In the 18th century Hackney was full of brickworks. The epicentre of industry was Hackney Wick, but at the top of Stamford Hill in 1694, one Francis Tyssen leased a property to a brickmaker called Ralph Harwood, and in 1721, ‘One of several strips at Stamford Hill included a cottage, beside a length of nearly 150 feet, which was ‘subleased to a Hoxton brickmaker’’. [1] 

This summit of Stamford Hill, where it crosses the old road to Clapton, forms — nowadays — a very large intersection with a tremendous sense of open space. It’s this space you’re invited to fill as you imagine the expanse of farms and fields stretching north to leafy Tottenham. Or as you think of the carts and carriages rumbling through the toll gate, or as you see in your mind’s eye a gibbet, swinging in the gentle spring breezes of the 1740s with its Tyburn cargo, warning those travelling south to mind their manners while in the vicinity. (By the 1760s this gibbet had been moved to Upper Clapton, perhaps because by this stage there were some rather fine houses going up along the Hill itself, and it probably spoilt the view.)

It was suburban sprawl. It had been creeping up Church Street from Newington Green, and it had been creeping up from Hackney Wick, where the work and money and noise and mess were. And now it had reached to where (touch wood) even the hipsters of 2014 have not yet managed to penetrate: to the top of Stamford Hill. Hills are sacred and fortifying features: associated with mystical properties and faery doings, the sites of ancient rites and burials and sacrifices, stone circles and earthworks, towers and lookouts and hauntings. This one can be no different. It seems integral to its surroundings. Even the name ‘Hackney’, first mentioned in the 11th century, means ‘raised place’.

So, standing on this highest point, let’s pause and take in the fresh air. We’re at a junction on whose corners stand, going clockwise from the northwest corner: an off-license and corner shop stuffed so full that the aisles are barely big enough to get through; Boots the Chemist, next to a bookies and Grodzinski’s bakery; Barclay’s bank in an Edwardian building, next to which the fine, three-storeyed, porticoed Cedar house once stood, leased to a brickmaker; and a Sainsbury’s, cattycorner to the intersection the same way as the neighbourhood cinema was that stood there in the 1950s. In front of us flows the downward northern slope. We are with a Victorian gentleman, a classic of the type: an antiquarian and genealogist, contributor to the Dictionary of National Biography, compiler of Men and Women of the Age, and the man who wrote, in six volumes, a magnificent, anecdotal, exhaustive history of London’s many parts: Old and New London (1878). His name is Edward Walford, and he had the advantage in life of having been educated (before matriculating at Oxford, of course) at the Church of England School in Hackney.

On reaching the summit of the hill, where the two roads meet … an entirely different scene presents itself, and we begin to feel that we have reached almost the limits of our journey in this direction. Green fields, trees, and hedge-rows now burst upon the view; and winding away to the north-east the road leads on towards the village of Tottenham, whither we will presently direct our steps.

Before proceeding thither, however, we will give a glance back over the ground we have wandered; and conjure up to our imagination the sweeping change which must have taken place within the last three or four centuries, when London was walled in on every side, and all away to the north was fields—”Moor Felde,” “Smeeth Felde,” and the like—and forest land, through which passed the lonely road, called “Hermen [or Ermine] Strete” … after emerging from “Creple Gate,” on its way by Stoke Newington, to St. Albans and the north. The swampy nature of the ground, too, in some parts is still indicated by the name of Finsbury (Fensbury); but all this, as we have seen, has long been built upon, and “Moorfields are fields no more.” [2]

Our companion considers his short walk up from Stoke Newington itself:

Both sides of the road, as we pass up the hill, are occupied by rows of...