Marathon Medal Map

Images of London on the medal from today's London Marathon. One side shows the route with South London landmarks identified on it including Greenwich Park, the Cutty Sark, 02 Arena, London Eye and Surrey Quays.

The other side shows a view down the river from east of Tower Bridge, with the Shard, London Eye, City Hall and various buildings around Tooley St/London Bridge identifiable.

(this was my marshall's medal - runners had the same design with a gold colour)

London1to365

Today is the last day of photographer Roger Dean's London1to365 project. For every day of the last year, Roger has posted a photograph of a London house number corresponding to the day of the year (e.g. number 200 on the 200th day of the year). He says ' Each of the numbers photographed have caught my eye for some reason, some are elegant, some are funky, some hand written, some carved and almost all of them are grubby however posh they look from a distance'. His journey has taken him all over town, including SE8,  SE13, SE14 etc.

286 New Cross Road by Roger Dean

London: City of Resurrections and other Machen wisdom

You can never have too many London quotes by Arthur Machen (1863-1947), he had a great appreciation for the mysteries to be found in wandering the streets of the city. Here's a few favourites:

'Villiers had emerged from his restaurant after an excellent dinner of many courses, assisted by an ingratiating little flask of Chianti, and, in that frame of mind which was with him almost chronic, had delayed a moment by the door, peering round in the dimly-lighted street in search of those mysterious incidents and persons with which the streets of London teem in every quarter and every hour.  Villiers prided himself as a practised explorer of such obscure mazes and byways of London life, and in this unprofitable pursuit he displayed an assiduity which was worthy of more serious employment.  Thus he stood by the lamp-post surveying the passers-by with undisguised curiosity, and with that gravity known only to the systematic diner, had just enunciated in his mind the formula:  “London has been called the city of encounters; it is more than that, it is the city of Resurrections" (The Great God Pan, 1894).

'I searched for Mrs. Beaumont in the dark waters of the life of London... assuming, as I had to assume, that her record was not of the cleanest, it would be pretty certain that at some previous time she must have moved in circles not quite so refined as her present ones. If you see mud at the top of a stream, you may be sure that it was once at the bottom. I went to the bottom. I have always been fond of diving into Queer Street for my amusement, and I found my knowledge of that locality and its inhabitants very useful' (The Great God Pan, 1894).

'London in September is hard to leave. Doré could not have designed anything more wonderful and mystic than Oxford Street as I saw it the other evening; the sunset flaming, the blue haze transmuting the plain street into a road 'far in the spiritual city'' (The Shining Pyramid, 1895)

'And it is utterly true that he who cannot find wonder, mystery, awe, the sense of a new world and an undiscovered realm in the places by the Gray's Inn Road will never find those secrets elsewhere, not in the heart of Africa, not in the fabled cities of Tibet. 'The matter of our work is everywhere present', wrote the old alchemists, and that is the truth. All the wonders lie within a stone's throw of King's Cross Station" (Things Near and Far, 1923)

OK I would have preferred 'All the wonders lie within a stone's throw of New Cross station' but the same principle applies!

See also: Arthur Machen: South London 'Behind the Scenes of the Universe'

Another London

This week is the last chance to see 'Another London: International Photographers Capture City Life 1930-1980' at Tate Britain (it closes on 16 September). As other reviewers have noted,  I'm not sure that much of it really offers a view of  'another' city - if anything it suggests that great international photographers visiting London tended to reproduce a very familiar version of the city with guardsmen, buses, city gents in hats and cockney characters on market stalls. That was after all what the agencies and magazines they were working for expected to see - artfully executed tourist imagery. Of course there are still some great photographs which capture lost moments, like Edouard Boubat's picture of the 1950s working river by Tower Bridge, or Martine Franck's photo of a bored child in Greenwich at the time of the 1977 silver jubilee.

Another London gets better as you go around it though, and the last half of the exhibition lives up to its title with photographs documenting less commonly seen parts of London. I particularly liked Al Vandenberg's images of 1970s counter-cultural London and Neil Kenlock's pictures from the same period of Black Londoners. They may both have been migrants, from the US and Jamaica respectively, but both were settled in the city when they took their photos. Perhaps you really need to be embedded in a place for a while to step beyond the usual cliches. 

Neil Kinlock's photograph of the aftermath
 of a racist attack in Balham in 1972

One of Vandenberg's photos - featuring Lemmy (centre)

I also liked Leonard Freed's 1971 pictures of Hassidic Jews, though for a Londoner what is frustrating about these images and so many others in the exhibition is that they are simply labelled as London -whereas what you really want to know is whereabouts in London?

Are the contradictions of this exhibition simply about different perspectives of London, or are they representations of the real contradictions of London? In their essay accompanying the exhibition, Ben Gidley and Mike Gidley suggest the latter: 'London has always had an anachronistic relationship to England and Britain, and to Englishness and Britishness. In this representative photographic collection, we see images of pearly kings, milk bottles on the doorstep, guardsmen in bearskins, monarchist crowds and timber-lined pubs that point backwards to an imagined old England that tourists come here to see, while the modernity of its traffic and the relative exoticism of its hippies, Black Panthers and punks suggest a London jerked out of England by war and dislocating change' (in 'Another London: International Photographers Capture City Life 1930-1980', edited by Helen Delaney an Simon Baker, Tate, 2012)

Woody Guthrie in London, 1944

It's the centenary of the birth of the great American singer/songwriter Woody Guthrie, born on 14 July 1912. As far as I know, Guthrie only visited London once, in July 1944. Guthrie had been a merchant seaman on board the SS Sea Porpoise, a ship transporting American troops to Europe. It left Boston on 7 April 1944 and arrived at Newport, Wales on 17 April 1944 with about 3,000 men on board.

photo of Sea Porpoise from Gippetti.com

The ship was torpedoed on 5 July after dropping troops at Normandy beach, and was towed back to England for repairs. Guthrie and fellow folk singer Cisco Houston, who was also on board, were dropped off and made their way by train from Southampton to Waterloo Station (as described in the book Woody, Cisco and Me by Jim Longhi). While in London Guthrie dropped into the offices of the BBC and secured himself a slot on BBC Children's Hour, where he sang two songs "Wabash Cannonball" and "900 Miles" - just a couple of days after being torpedoed at sea. After a brief stay in London, Guthrie got the train on to Glasgow to join transport home.