E-Book, Englisch, 248 Seiten
Kinsella Look Here
1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-914198-13-7
Verlag: Daunt Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
On the Pleasures of Observing the City
E-Book, Englisch, 248 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-914198-13-7
Verlag: Daunt Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Ana Kinsella is an Irish writer living in London. As a journalist she has written for the Guardian, Frieze, Dazed, n+1, AnOther and others and is now the author of the popular newsletter London Review of Looks. Look Here is her first book.
Autoren/Hrsg.
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There is very little logic to how London is laid out. You could be forgiven for getting lost. There is no grid, no structure to explain the way the streets run. Even the river coils its way through the city like an old-fashioned telephone cord. When I was very small, my family briefly lived on a quiet street perpendicular to the Thames. Kenyon Street was one of a ladder of quiet streets between the river and Fulham Palace Road, and later on my mother told me that they were known as the Alphabet Streets, their names running in alphabetical order, south to north. When I moved back to the city at twenty-two, I looked this up in my copy of the London A–Z to see if it was true. From Bishop’s Park north to Hammersmith: Cloncurry, Doneraile, Ellerby, Finlay, Greswell, Harbord, Inglethorpe, Kenyon, Langthorne, Queensmill, Lysia, Niton. Wait, hang on a second. Where exactly did that Q come from?
Often, when navigating London, there is a sensation of the rug being pulled from under you.
Phyllis Pearsall, the painter and writer credited with creating much of London’s modern street atlas – the A to Z, was familiar with the confusion of the city’s streets. From a pedestrian’s point of view, London can be difficult to make sense of. The A–Z’s backstory states that after getting lost on her way to a party in Belgravia in the 1930s, Pearsall, a divorcee in her late twenties and the daughter of a map-maker, took the most up-to-date London map she could find and set out to improve it.
She did this by rising every day at 5 a.m. in her bedsit near Victoria station to walk for eighteen hours, noting places of interest, house numbers, side streets and main roads. Over time, she walked 3,000 miles over 23,000 streets. The map she developed divided London into smaller, more detailed sections, making its streets easier to navigate. Pearsall established the Geographers’ A–Z Map Company to publish her street atlas, the A to Z: Atlas and Guide to London and Suburbs with House Numbers, with its distinctive red and blue cover, and she gave the company a motto in the form of a personal maxim of hers: On we go.
Pearsall’s earliest iteration of the book hit a stumbling block soon after publication: once the Second World War began, maps of such a detailed scale could no longer be sold, due to the risk of local intelligence falling into enemy hands. Pearsall passed the war working in the Ministry of Information, making maps of the frontlines of battle, eventually fracturing her spine in an air accident while bringing a shipment of maps from the Netherlands.
Since her death in 1996 there has been debate over the veracity of the origin story of Pearsall’s A–Z. For one thing, the map that resulted from all her walking claimed to include 9,000 more streets than any other. That was certainly a falsehood. It’s a romantic idea, the image of Pearsall the footloose divorcee on her way to a party, the bohemian painter pounding pavements in a pair of sensible shoes, giving form to the chaos of London’s twisted streets and neighbourhoods – as is Pearsall’s fabled line of delivering early copies to W. H. Smith in a borrowed wheelbarrow. The romance of it all occludes the fact that it’s probable that Pearsall was a master marketer more than she was a pioneering cartographer. But the success of her work does point to an indisputable truth, that London is a labyrinth, one in need of decoding if we are to make sense of it for ourselves.
Today all of this is a little easier. Almost everyone has a map more detailed and powerful than Pearsall’s A–Z in their pockets, all the time. It’s difficult, though not impossible, to get properly lost when you have Google Maps at your fingertips. But when I came to London as a student I didn’t have a smartphone, and I moved through the city at the mercy of the countdown timer at the bus stop and my own errant sense of direction. I pinned a Tube map to the noticeboard above my desk and crossed through a station’s name the first time I entered or exited it. From the very beginning, I found myself entranced by the breadth and depth of the city. Here was a thing so layered and complex that it had grown gnarled, and it was up to me to put myself inside of it. I knew that to move through it would be to move through time itself. I am the index, I thought, crossing out names on my Tube map. On we go.
As my knowledge of the city grew – which neighbourhoods had trees full of parakeets, where the good and peaceful pubs were – memory constructed something organic in my mind that I could call upon at a moment’s notice: a map of my very own.
My first year in London was spent in anonymous student accommodation in the East End. It was my first time away from my family, my friends, and the freedom gave me the feeling of leaning over a balcony rail at a great height. I was fine. I was safe. But the precipice always loomed beneath me. The precipice was loneliness, and although I made new friends, I spent most evenings alone, cooking dinner and eating it while reading or studying in my bedroom. I wasn’t lonely, but the fear of loneliness never quite left.
But walking was a kind of loneliness by choice. It was something more like solitude. Going by foot instead of public transport turned the journey into an undertaking, or maybe a lesson. And anyway, you were not alone on the street. Even when I was lost in thought – about homesickness, or career prospects, or whether my new friends liked me or vice versa, or whether I was a good person or not – I was tuned to the frequency of the street by necessity. My personal morality, the rules and codes that governed how I thought I should live, gave way to the morality of the street. The street has its own codes, determined by those who walk it, and to go out among these strangers is to agree to take part in whatever the street might have in store. My own memories, history, fears, were replaced by those of the city’s populace. What I received on that strange new wavelength was always astounding, or amusing, or just something. I queued for an ATM at South Kensington station behind a gentleman dressed as an astronaut. I watched him make two withdrawals amounting to £800. Taking a wrong turn down an Islington side street, I crossed paths with a group of off-duty street musicians who exploded in spontaneous music together, their day’s work over. Two women danced arm in arm while the others passed around a bottle. Every instance like this became marked on the map in my mind, so much so that if one of my new friends had brought up South Kensington or Islington High Street, I would have had to bite my tongue to keep from blurting out what I’d seen there.
I found it impossible to be truly lonely when walking. It was impossible to dwell on my problems when I was pacing down Pentonville Road, making my way eastbound from King’s Cross after class. Walking in London was a form of connection. I was new here, and I needed to learn what exactly the city was like. I did that by making a network, connecting the dots on foot. Like a path tramped by walkers through a field, my image of London emerged from my journeys across it. A trip to a new area opened something up in my mind: possibility, maybe, or even sometimes just the distraction of novelty. Away from the map my life was insecure and unstable – I was earning little, unsure about the future, frightened by the possibility of it all collapsing and my being forced to return to Ireland in the grip of a recession. I didn’t know what the next day might bring, and the unknown was daunting. Better, then, to approach the unknown on my own terms – take a new route home from work, choose side streets instead of main roads and see what I might find.
As I did this, the only constant was that the city always found new things to show me.
These were little, incidental things. Things of almost no significance, things that popped up and made a tiny mark on my knowledge of London. They were anecdotes that lost their power the moment I tried to retell them. They were usually people – the sight of a well-dressed woman in her sixties reading The Art Newspaper on the train, lying to her colleague on the phone that she was about to go through a tunnel and then giving me a sly wink. They often had a pleasing synchronicity to them – two teenage boys who idly kicked a football in the park, hands backwards on their hips while they chatted. Over the course of an hour they drifted in a semicircle as the ball moved back and forth between them. On their own these incidents were barely noticeable, but when hung together like a string of pearls they started to carry a particular weight and rhythm of their own.
Whatever else happened during that first strange year in London, the time spent walking the city’s streets alone did something to me. It changed me. Some people move to a new city and get a dramatic haircut, alter their personality, choose different kinds of lovers. I just went out walking. I wanted to learn what the city was like. In the process, something within me splintered open, and the way I looked at the world itself changed for good.
A chance encounter or observation is not just a single event. It doesn’t occur in isolation. What I...
