A Choice of Catastrophe: Tacita Dean's JG and Hari Kunzru's Memory Palace

There have been two alternative post-catastrophe worlds on view in London galleries of late, both involving collaborations between writers and visual artists. Tacita Dean’s JG, inspired by the works of JG Ballard, was on show in the Soho Frith Street Gallery (confusingly not in Frith Street itself, which became apparent after a fruitless stroll along its length). Once found, in the wonderful 17th/18th century environs of Golden Square, it offered a rather imposing façade, with a front entrance seemingly designed to give the impression that the gallery was closed, as if to put off the uncommitted visitor. The basement bunker would have been a fittingly Ballardian place to project the film, with its achingly cool exposed concrete, but it was in fact shown in the street level gallery, just to the side of the busy office space. Memory Palace at the V&A was a visual realisation of a science fiction story written by Hari Kunzru, set in a de-technologised future in which a new form of fundamentalism has become dominant. It took place in a specially partitioned off area whose darkened spaces with their high dividing walls were designed to usher the visitor into this newly created world, shutting them off from the familiar one beyond.

Tacita Dean’s meditative film JG has its origins in her correspondence with JG Ballard, and particularly with their mutual fascination with Robert Smithson’s renowned work of land art Spiral Jetty. The film acts both as a reflection on Ballard’s work and as a personal valediction for her friend. It depicts a Ballardian landscape of rich desolation, a surrealist plane onto which significant objects can be placed or into which geometrical patterns can be carved. Both carry meanings which communicate directly with the subconscious. Dean uses digital superimposition and split screen techniques to achieve the effects which Ballard and his beloved surrealists created through prose, paint and various forms of collage. She found the perfect landscapes in Death Valley, Great Salt Lake, Utah, Monolake, California and other places in the US. Signs of human habitation are few and far between. We see industrial machinery, slow-moving trucks and trains on the horizon or a worksite hut with a light on suggesting recent habitation. But there are no actual human figures. Salt deposits, dessicated and rock-strewn vistas, milky rivulets and lakes tinted an unnaturally royal blue by mining deposits suggest the transformed planets of The Drowned World, The Drought, The Crystal World and Vermilion Sands. Swollen sunsets hanging above crumbling cliffs beyond the edge of the lake are suggestive of The Terminal Beach and other stories in which entropic scenery anticipates the winding down of time and human consciousness.

There are brief readings by Jim Broadbent (chosen for his initials?) from two early Ballard stories, The Voices of Time and Prisoner of the Coral Deep. They are sparse and spaced widely apart, reflecting the primacy of landscape (be it inner or outer) over dialogue and character in Ballard’s work. Both stories involve an altered temporal perspective – an entropic winding down of the evolutionary process in The Voices of Time and a shift into geological scale in Prisoner of the Coral Deep, which takes place on the Dorset shore. The image of the spiral is a recurrent one in Dean’s film, superimposed over water or rock. It makes reference both to the fossilised shell which acts as a trigger for the interior timeslip in Prisoner of the Coral Deep, and to Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. Ballard wrote about this work, which fascinated him so, in his essay Robert Smithson as Cargo Cultist from 1997 (unfortunately just too late to be included in his essay collection A User’s Guide to the Millenium). Smithson’s rock spiral, extending out into Salt Lake in Utah, was deliberately constructed at a site in which the waters stilled within its coils would be turned red by algae, contrasting with the vividly unreal colours surrounding it, the legacy of effluent from the abandoned industrial plant. Robert Hughes writes about it in American Visions, his history of American art. He notes how ‘Smithson had been preoccupied with entropy’, and that his ‘imagination had a strong component of the higher sort of science fiction, such as the apocalyptic, time-drenched landscapes of JG Ballard, whom the artist read avidly and admired’. The admiration was mutual. In his brief essay, Ballard hitched Smithson’s works to his own perennial concerns. He wonders ‘what cargo might have berthed at Spiral Jetty’ and imagines a ‘craft captained by a rare captain, a minotaur obsessed by inexplicable geometries’. He suggests that ‘his structures seem to be analogues of advanced neurological processes that have yet to articulate themselves’ and that ‘his monuments… (are) the ground plans of heroic psychological edifices that will one day erect themselves and whose shadows we can already see from the corners of our eyes’. The jetty has long since been washed away by the geological and tidal forces of erosion. It was always intended to be a piece which lasted little longer than a handful of years, offering a condensed vision of the processes of deep time. Dean resurrects its spirit in the place where it was briefly a curious feature of the landscape, a mystery which Ballard suggested she might try to solve.

Robert Smithson - Spiral Jetty

The colouring of the pools in Dean’s film by mineral extraction and the outflow of industrial processes echo this transformation of the environment by a mixture of human and natural agency. We also see a digger at the start of the film scooping out geometrical channels in the rocky desert plain. This relates both to Smithson’s extraction of materials for his spiral, and to the compulsion which drives Ballard’s characters to make patterns, abstract markings in the landscape which express some interior symbology. In The Voices of Time, the protagonist expends some of the last of his dwindling energy on customising the concrete bunkers, towers and targets of an abandoned Air Force weapons range into a monolithic mandala in which he can take his own insignificant place. Another character carves patterns in the floor of an empty swimming pool ‘to form an elaborate ideogram like a Chinese character’. The empty swimming pool is another favourite Ballard image, which his autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun suggests may derive from childhood memories. The blue rectangles of water superimposed on desert and lake backdrops can be seen as Dean’s recognition and adoption of this motif. The spiral is sometimes set against geometrical landscapes, curling, natural forms contrasting with the rectilinear patterns of human design. It also depicts a journey inward or outward, furling or unfurling, It connects the inner to the outer landscape, the body of water to the land, and also hints at a nonlinear or vastly expanded view of time. The film’s narrative quotes from Prisoner of the Coral Deep, the protagonist of which contemplates a fossilised shell and comments ‘if only one could unwind this spiral it would probably play back to us a picture of all the landscapes it’s ever seen’. It would be like an unspooling reel of mineral film.

This is one reason why Dean makes the film strip visible in several scenes, giving it a sense of non-digital materiality, of time unwinding as a reel of film does. And, of course, a film can be rewound onto its spool, time stored in readiness for another cycle. The visibility of the film strip also alludes to the watchers and observers, directors and conductors present in many of Ballard’s stories. Their presence beyond the frame is also hinted at by the occasional click of a shutter or whir of running film. Gurus and psychopaths are often on hand to guide the protagonist along inward paths, helping him (and it is always him) to find his true place at the heart of the catastrophe, or to realise his own unique psychopathology to its fullest extent. The screen is split at times, images competing for our attention, forcing us to splice our own coherent pictures together. This makes us aware of their mediated nature, and points to the media landscape which was increasingly central in Ballard’s late 60s work. The split screen and sudden edits also create something of the feel of the fractured narratives in his ‘condensed novels’ of this period, many of which were collected together in The Atrocity Exhibition. Creatures making scurrying or scuttling appearances make further reference to the two source stories. A lizard alludes to the transformation of the siren of geological time at the end of Prisoners of the Coral Deep: ‘on the ledge where she had stood a large lizard watched me with empty eyes’. An armadillo, meanwhile, stands in for the desert animals in The Voices of Time who are mutating in anticipation of a steady increase in solar radiation, growing hardened, lead-lined shells. Dean’s film has a dreamlike quality all of its own, but also acts as a carefully and lovingly compiled compendium of Ballard’s themes and concerns – his grand, intoxicating obsessions.

The Memory Palace exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum derived from a new story by Hari Kunzru. He has created an post-catastrophe science fiction world whose key attributes, both in terms of significant differences from our time and of a future historiography which recasts the present, with ironic or satirical effect, are outlined under clearly delineated headings – proper verb nouns which make the newness of an invented reality readily and swiftly comprehensible. This is often a fault of non-genre authors attempting to write SF or fantasy who take an overly schematic approach which leaves the plans to their thinly constructed worlds plainly visible. Kunzru is no literary arriviste on genre terrain, however. He first came to my attention through an interview he conducted with Michael Moorcock for The Guardian some time ago, in which he revealed his youthful love of New Worlds and the new wave SF of the 60s and 70s. This was a prime period for post-apocalyptic scenarios, which ranged from Angela Carter’s Heroes and Villains and Samuel Delany’s city-based Dhalgren through to some of Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius stories, Keith Roberts’ dark pastorals The Chalk Giants and Pavane; from JG Ballard’s inner landscapes, cleared of all the inessential clutter of civilisation to M.John Harrison’s savage The Committed Men and John Crowley’s bucolic Engine Summer. The latter provides an interesting contrast with Kunzru’s world in that it is set in a post-literate and post-technological but essentially peaceful and civilised future; a future in which our present is a barely remembered dream. Kunzru reverses the ecotopian trend of the 70s (also to be found in Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time) and presents a green theocracy as a new inquisitorial force of oppression and tyranny in a post-disaster world long stripped of its former technologies.

The schematic outlining of the future world works in the context of the exhibition. Its basic contours need to be clearly and concisely presented in a few easily absorbed phrases. Familiarity with the accompanying story certainly cannot be assumed (I hadn’t read it, for a start). Thus, three ages are swiftly laid out: The Booming, which is our time of globalised capital and lightning communications; The Withering, the period of chaos and collapse in which the story is set; and The Wilding, the deep green future envisaged and worked towards by the ecotopian council known as The Thing in which humanity will diminish and become absorbed into the natural order once more. This will involve a surrender of all knowledge harboured from the time before the Magnetisation, the name for the devastating magnetic storms which brought our technological era to an end. Reading, writing or any form of representation or recording of the world, past, present or future, is outlawed. The Thing wish to create a post-literate world in which humanity returns with dumb humility to take its place in the recrudescent wilderness. But there is opposition.

The protagonist whose progress we follow around the various points of the exhibition space, and through whose perspective we piece together a picture of the world, is one of a rebel band of intellectuals who defy this retreat from civilisation by reviving the old idea of the memory palace. This can be used to create and foster libraries of knowledge within the seemingly unassailable spaces of the mind. The memory palace was a system for remembering facts and ideas by building up a mental architecture, perhaps replicating a well-known building from the external world. Each brick or window or piece of furniture would be associated with a particular node of knowledge, and all would be carefully arranged in categorical order. John Crowley depicts the use of such a system by the Renaissance scholar, scientist and philosopher Giordano Bruno in the 16th century. It leads to his persecution and eventual execution by Inquisitorial forces. Kunzru’s narrator follows a similar path, the knowledge accumulated and stored within his interior architecture a challenge to a different idea of divine order, and by extension of the authority of the priestly hierarchy which propounds it. Our narrator is arrested and imprisoned from the outset of the story. We see his pentangular cell (made here by artists Frank Laws) and peer through the gaps in its walls to the confined space which he expands into his own memory palace. A meagre mental canvas whose every crack and splinter he makes use of. We glimpse some of the pictures which he has begun to project on the dismal, dimly lit brickwork of his prison.

The exhibition space itself was constructed around the idea of the memory palace, with ghost outlines of arching rooftops and windows rising above the partition walls. There was also a kind of junk memory palace in the far corner of the last ‘room’, a church-like bunker built from baled-up breezeblocks of recycled papers. This is a construct of unfiltered information, a conglomerated mass of newsnoise in which anything of value gets drowned out in the undifferentiated torrent.

One of the great pleasures of post-apocalyptic stories is seeing or reading about familiar buildings or monuments which have been transformed in some way. Either they have fallen into ruin or they have been used for some purpose utterly at odds with their original function. The Statue of Liberty was always the most popular choice to mark the fall of us all, so much so that magazine covers depicting it half submerged by a great deluge, with shattered crown or lying toppled on its side became something of a cliché. In this exhibition, it is London landmarks which are subject to picturesque ruin and the invasion of the London cityscape by a resurgent wilderness. Nemo Tral’s lightbox prints present these scenes as sacred stained glass images, the new religious order celebrating the disintegration of the steel and glass monuments of the old metropolitan age. Further images of the city overrun are presented in Isabel Greenberg’s digital prints which, like the stained glass, resemble black and white comic book illustrations. The Shard is shattered (hooray), vines entwine the trunk of the Post Office Tower and enmesh St Pancras station, shanty towns cluster in the shadow of the Olympic Stadium and the Barbican flats and walkways rise above a central lake.

A museum cabinet by Abäke contains semi-abstract objects of transparent Perspex which seem to have been denuded of meaning and are on the verge of dematerialisation. It’s reminiscent of the abandoned museum the traveller in HG Wells’ The Time Machine comes across in the future, whose exhibits are all dusty and disintegrating through the neglect of centuries by the intellectually enfeebled Eloi. A later sculpture, which resembles a 3D comic image in boldly outlined black and white, allows us a close-up look at a NHS wagon. Drawn by four foxes, it looks more like a funerary hearse. The stacked up boxes and bottles of snake oils and quack cures on offer, all with voodoo brands offering instant salvation, betoken a retreat from empirical rationalism into magical thinking. Any idea of universal care has long been abandoned, and the NHS letters are nothing more than a totemistic remnant from the past. This is Death’s wagon, spreading the plagues it loudly claims to ward off. It was made by Le Gun – hmm, just an ‘i’ off from Ursula K.

Henning Wagenbreth builds up his view of the old metropolis from brightly coloured wooden blocks. It’s a childlike construct incorporating distinctly unchildlike subject matter. It suggests both a simplified view of the past and a technological tower of Babel which is all too easy to sweep aside into a rubbled heap. Several walls are covered with comic strip panels in austere black and white, resembling Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta (as originally published in monochrome in Warrior) and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. These told the story of our narrator’s arrest, trial and interrogation, during which he comes face to face (or hood) with his own version of Winston Smith’s O’Brien. The Inquisitorial figures which confront him look like something out of Goya’s Los Caprichos adapted for a British mythos. Perhaps the most impressive work in the display was Jim Kay’s sculpture, a hybrid of altarpiece and museum cabinet of curiosities. The two doors opening out from this wooden cabinet formed a diptych, the first panel depicting the violent collapse of civilisation and the second the post-apocalyptic world. A small drawer, pulled out in front, contained a variety of simple objects sorted into tiny individual trays, the humble beginnings of a curatorial mindset. The centre of the altarpiece was taken by a branching tree of gold, upon which tokens with images of birds were dangled. The difference in the shapes of their beaks made this a sacred tree of diverging evolutionary variation. It alluded to Darwin’s observations of the variations in the beaks of finches made on his world travels which contributed to the formulation of his evolutionary theories of natural selection. Hung on golden boughs, they have become symbols of a new worldview which is more in tune with Charles Frazer’s survey of primitive mythological beliefs than with The Origin of the Species. On the top of it all perches a large crow, a death’s head token held in its beak.

Not everything here worked, but the central idea of artworks bringing an extra dimension to a story was a good one, ripe for further exploration. At the end (and stop now if you intend reading Kunzru’s story) our narrator’s life fades away. But before he dies, he is contacted by the resistance, who speak to him through a tiny crack in his cell wall. They tell him that he can leave one sentence behind for them to take out into the world – one brick from his memory palace. The final panels fade to black. No matter how elaborately constructed, the memory palace fades into nothingness once the mind which has so painstakingly planned and built it ceases to exist. This exhibition memorialises one such imaginary palace with its various works, and thereby points to the way in which art can immortalise aspects of an individual’s unique consciousness, their particular way of seeing the world. At the end, the blank panels morph into a series filled with messages, doodleboards onto which the visitor has been encouraged to add a memory precious to them. The present, with all its Babel of voices, its obsession with constant communication and occult finance, is ultimately seen as a time in which there is still much joy and happiness. This is one of the lessons of the post-apocalyptic tale. We see the seeds of its creation in our own world, but it also makes look at what’s good in that world, what we would miss if it was gone. At the heart of the imagined catastrophe lies an utopian urge.

Out of this World at the British Library

The first thing you encounter as you enter the Out of This World exhibition at the British Library is a plaster relief sculpture of an UFO crashing into a shelf of books. It stands as a symbol of a ram-raiding, disruptive force ploughing across the carefully ordered rows of literary respectability, an intrusive invasion which is impossible to ignore, but is entirely unwelcome. The blank colourlessness of this sculpture is also suggestive of the empty page. The flying saucer is one of the abiding clichés of pulp SF, one of its embarrassments really, as it serves as the perfect embodiment of the widespread apprehension that this is a genre which is the province of obsessives who have difficulty in distinguishing between the real and the imagined. The exhibition aims to colour in the UFO of SF, to suggest that its visitation is a good thing and hopefully to provids a corrective to its bastardisation and exile into the mutant haunted hinterlands by the literary establishment. The genre still has some of its own issues of low self-esteem to deal with too. The prominent words on the wall facing the entrance lobby come from Margaret Atwood, who weighs in with a quote worthy of an inspirational corporate byline: ‘If we can imagine it, we’ll be able to do it’. It seems that no matter how many times she rejects the label of SF and consigns it to the realms of sub-literature, she is still invited to participate in events such as this (and seems always to accept, too) in a needy bid on the part of SF enthusiasts for acceptance and recognition. Atwood turns up later in a filmed interview, scrupulously defining her novels Oryx and Crake and Year of the Flood as ‘end of the world literature’ and making sure that the s and f words never pass her lips when referring to her own work.

Other talking head figures are shown in this opening section attempting the notoriously difficult trick of summing up the manifold elements of the genre in one overarching definition. The winner of this years Arthur C.Clarke award, Lauren Beukes, is amongst them, as is the public face of British SF, China Mieville. Also lending their perspective on the genre as they see it are author Gwyneth Jones, the popular science writer John Gribbin, and Sumit Paul-Choudhury, the editor of New Scientist magazine, which recently published a special science fiction issue edited by Kim Stanley Robinson. Descending to the main area of the exhibition, we find a display focussing on some of the progenitors of SF, which gives the British Library the opportunity to showcase some of its venerable texts. These date back as far as the classical Greek writer Lucian of Samosata’s A True History of a Trip to the Moon from 2AD (here in a 1647 edition), a satirical tale which mocks the fantastic tales of his fellow countrymen. Further fantastic voyages are described by John Mandeville in his Travels from the 14th century (this edition dating from 1484), in which he encounters a wide variety of fabulous monsters (including men with heads below their shoulders), all of which are claimed to be authentic. An early example of the confusion between the real and imagined which derives from such rationalised fantasy. Thomas More’s Utopia of 1516, the first edition of which is presented here, is the progenitor of the politically minded strand of SF which seeks to define the ideal society, and the pitfall involved in realising it (utopia, of course, derives from Greek words, and means no-place, or nowehere). The wood cut map of the island (and maps or plans of other worlds would of course become commonplace in SF and fantasy literature) resembles the profile of a human head, suggesting that this is where such speculations should remain. There are trips to the moon described by Cyrano de Bergerac in his Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon and the Sun, a partial version of his satirical 1657 work. SF, with its ability to portray distortions of the known world whilst remaining in the same essential continuum, is an ideal vehicle for satire. The comic peregrinations and philosophical musings of Cyrano’s protagonist were evidently a little too close to the bone, since his work was only every published in extensively censored form. The illustration features splendid brass airships, a civilised mode of interplanetary travel. A slightly more farfetched means of transport is offered by Bishop Godwine in his Man in the Moon (1638), in which the lunar explorer rides a chariot drawn by a number of swans.

The exhibition is divided into sections covering particular themes and variations which have played throughout the genre’s history. The first we encounter are aliens, of course, the (green) lifeblood of SF and a great means through which the latter day Bosch-like imagination can be let loose, creating grotesque and fantastic forms. The range and diversity of SF literature becomes clear as we wander through displays centring on and orbiting around subjects such as space travel, parallel worlds and alternate histories (here linked together under the Moorcock-coined heading ‘multiverse’), Inner Space (the preoccupation of Ballard and the 60s new waves), space travel, dreamworlds and cyberpunk virtualities (gathered together under the title What is Reality?), the end of the world, alien invasion (and its precursor, Victorian tales of the invasion of England), imaginary worlds, future worlds, utopias and dystopias, time travel, and robots and artificial beings. Steampunk, the offshoot of cyberpunk which imagines Victorian and Edwardian futures past, is represented and included some of my favourite books and authors: Tim Powers’ The Anubis Gates, James Blaylock’s Homonculus and Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. All of these different themes and settings can be use with varying degrees of metaphor or genuine speculation – advanced science or none.

There are a good number of original author’s manuscripts here, drawn both from the British Library’s own collections and from those held by the Science Fiction Foundation Collection at Liverpool University, whose librarian, Andy Sawyer, played a major part in the curation of the exhibition. The Foundation holds the papers of Olaf Stapledon, and from these, some pages of the small, holed notebook paper on which he wrote Star Maker are on display. His writing is neat and rigidly straight even though the paper is unlined. There is also a fantastic future history time line for Last and First Men charted on graph paper and highlighted in various colours of felt tip. It’s the perfect amalgam of geometry and art, a good metaphor for SF in general. Other manuscripts here include Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights, scrawled in biro on A4 paper (probably in the garden shed in which he works), with plentiful crossings out and arrows placing additional sentences or phrases. Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffmann is written in ink pen on large paper with Japanese ‘kanji’ alphabetical pictograms on the front, relics of her time in the country. The sums scribbled on the first page suggest that this is re-used paper. Stars and numbers point the way to additional passages to be inserted, and crossings out are made in felt pen. There are examples of Victorian science fiction, with three pages of the manuscript for Richard Jeffries’ post catastrophe novel After London (1875), in which wild nature has reclaimed the home counties, and Edward (or Lord) Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871), a hollow earth story of a hidden race of beings vastly superior to man. There is a playscript of Karel Capek’s RUR (1921) which was submitted to the Lord Chamberlain for approval, as all plays had to be at the time. RUR stands for Rossum’s Universal Robots, and this was the first time the word was used (it derives from the Czech word robota, meaning statute labour). George Orwell’s preliminary notebook for 1984, meanwhile, contains lists in which he sketches out ideas and slogans, some of which are familiar from the final novel.

There is a typed page from a JG Ballard story dating from the Vermillion Sands period, which is apparently unpublished. Words are xxxxed out and others scribbled over with purple pen. It’s a very active manuscript page. Ballard makes reference to Francis Bacon on this page, an indication of the influence of surrealist and other modern art on his work. The other page of his here, from the 1965 novel The Drought, makes reference to Yves Tanguy, the surrealist whose planar perspectives are inhabited with strange, mercurially viscous or sharply shrapnel-like forms which, seen through an SF perspective, are alien in nature, and which are echoed in many of Ballard’s desert or concrete landscapes. This page again has extensive ink pen corrections. Ballard was clearly someone who worked hard to get the phrasing just right. One of the most interesting manuscripts here is the opening page of John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids. Except that it isn’t. This was a beginning which he ended up rejecting, and it’s fascinating to compare it with the novel’s opening as eventually published (the final text is available to read by the manuscript’s side). The original attempt reads ‘on the day when the great calamity put an end to the world I had known for almost 30 years, I happened to be in bed with a bandage all around my head and over my eyes. Just a matter of luck, like most survival’. It’s a rather prosaic introductory passage, hardly drawing the reader irresistibly in to the ensuing story. The final version does this much more compellingly, with one succinct and intriguing sentence which lets us know that time is out of joint and which creates a sense of mystery which we immediately want to find out more about: ‘When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere’.

The exhibition is greatly indebted to John Clute's collection of science fiction first editions, which are scattered throughout, and whose covers will be familiar to anyone who has a copy of his Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia. Iain Sinclair observes Clute amongst the trawlers of the old London street book markets in Skating On Thin Eyes, the first chapter in his book of walks through the capital, Lights Out For The Territory. There was ‘the science fiction and fantasy encyclopaedist John Clute – a pundit who virtually invented his own field of studies (and amassed an important 20,000 volume collection in the process)’. Having the results of his assiduous quests showcased in British Library displays must make those searches for the jewels amongst the mounds of moulding rubbish seem worthwhile. Philip K Dick’s Man in the High Castle has a strikingly simple design, placing the red Nazi and Japanese sunburst flags against a black background. The cover of Dick’s Ubik, with the title vertically displayed on a spray can, has never been bettered. Ballard’s The Crystal World uses Max Ernst’s After The Rain, which would certainly have met with the author’s approval (and which perhaps arose from his suggestion?) His High Rise has a photocollage, with the picture of the grey concrete flats ripped through at several points to reveal blue sky and clouds behind. John Christopher’s Death of Grass, George R Stewart’s Earth Abides and Brian Aldiss’ Greybeard offer a choice of catastrophes. Arthur C Clarke’s City and the Stars has a classic image of conceptual breakthrough on its cover (a similar image is to be found on the cover of the British Library brochure – this one a woodcut from Camille Flammarion’s L’Atmosphere: Meteorologie Populaire).

The 1968 anthology England Swings SF, edited by Judith Merril, has a pop art collage cover, a mix of photography, varied typography and bold shapes and squiggles. It offers ‘speculative’ rather than science fiction (the 60s saw attempts by several sf figures to shift genre definitions) and promises ‘a new kind of trip’. It leaves us in little doubt as to the period from which it emerged. Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker (1937) has a graphic design redolent of its times, with two translucent hands juggling a planet as if it is a plaything, with a corona of stars looking like the insignia of an interplanetary League of Nations. I was surprised to note that this first edition was in fact a paperback. Stapledon’s First and Last Men, presented here in its 1931 New York edition, has a very art deco cover, with a string of globes (representing the planets of the solar system to which mankind expands) floating in front of a row of elegant skyscrapers. It could be the backdrop for a Fred and Ginger number – tripping the light fantastic across vast gulfs of time and space. Finally, Hannes Bok’s cover for John W Campbell’s Who Goes There (the basis for Howard Hawks’ foray into SF, The Thing) is simply wonderful; a striking contrast of bluish grey and red with a strangely feminised monster filling up the space, squatting awkwardly as if still not fully formed. Its nails are varnished red, its three eyes circled with long lashes and a smeared paint swirl of red hair stiffly unfurls behind its head. Its mouth is a red gash punctured by vampiric teeth. It’s a grotesque image of terror and desire combined. Heady stuff for 1947.

There are a couple of listening posts at which you can hear music which has drawn on science fiction, although the exhibition itself is accompanied by everpresent, atmospheric drones of the sort employed to evoke interstellar drift. The obvious examples are present, including, of course, Space Oddity. Actually, Bowie’s perennial favourite is an interesting example, reflecting the disillusion with the space programme and the sense of alienation for which it stands as a metaphor which were recurrent themes in the fiction of the likes of JG Ballard and Barry Malzberg at the time. There is a good selection of less well known music here too, however. Peter Hammill’s Red Shift is one of a number of songs he wrote, either for his solo LPs or with Van der Graaf Generator, which make sophisticated use of science fiction ideas, or science as metaphor (which amounts to the same thing); others include Fog Walking, Man Erg, Pioneers Over C, Traintime, Breakthrough, the Clarke-quoting Childlike Faith in Childhood’s End, and that great end of the word epic After the Flood. New wave gets a look in with Spizzenergi’s increasingly desperate repetition of the question Where’s Captain Kirk? Robots are the protagonists and antagonists of Kraftwerk’s Robots and Flaming Lips’ Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots (from an LP which ends with the splendidly and quintessentially science fictionally titled track Approaching Pavonis Mons by Balloon – Utopia Planitia). The space programme is represented by Brian Eno’s twinkling piece of ambience Under Stars from the Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks record, and Blur’s Beagle 2, which was composed as the call sign for the ill-fated Mars lander of that name. Sun Ra was a personal embodiment of everything science fictional, cloaking himself and his Arkestra in his own SF mythology (and often in an actual spangly and brightly coloured cloak, too). He is represented here by the lengthy invocational chant and free jazz number Space is the Place. The Comsat Angels score a double with their track Eye of the Lens, which references the excellent Langdon Jones story from New Worlds, whereas there name is derived from a JG Ballard of a similar vintage. Ballard has inspired a number of artists, and gets a display case all to himself, where you can hear The Normal’s Warm Leatherette (essentially Crash as electronic pop, later persuasively covered by Grace Jones) and The Buggles’ Video Killed the Radio Star, apparently inspired by the short story Sound Sweep.

Ballard can also be heard talking about his fiction and views on SF in general. He rejects the narrow definition of the genre created by Star Wars and Doctor Who (not sure I’d agree with him that Who is imaginatively constricted) and the American magazine tradition and draws attention to scientific romance and the ‘great river of imaginative fiction’ which has run through literature since time immemorial. The recording seems to be of a rather low sampling rate, which results in a strangely appropriate digital breakdown of the sound, creating an artificial, cybernetic feel to this version of Ballard. Not a great deal of attention is paid to the cinematic side of the genre, which is perfectly understandable in an exhibition taking place in the country’s largest and most venerable library. There is a full-sized Tardis here, however, in front of which you can pose for photos, and also a page of manuscript from a Who score. Unfortunately, it’s not some graphic depiction of a radiophonic workshop theme or the music for a Dudley Simpson soundtrack, but the rather less thrilling manuscript of Francis Chagrin’s score for the Dalek Invasion of Earth movie. There is also a lovely model of K-9 made by James Richardson-Brown in the brass, pipes and rivets steampunk style.

The visual side is represented not only by some fine book covers, but also by magazine and book illustrations such as Alvim-Correa’s depiction of the Martian war machines wreaking havoc with their death rays in a 1906 Belgian edition of The War of the Worlds (or La Guerre des Mondes in this case, of course). This powerful and quite brutal image (we see two smoking bodies lying in the garden of the cottages which are being destroyed) has been used in the British Library’s publicity for the exhibition, and you can see why. A stylised print from an 1899 Dutch edition is also very striking, with the machines, here made to look rather more anthropomorphic, towering in godlike fashion above hills and houses alike, casually tossing off swirls of lightning in their path. A 1931 edition of The Time Machine, meanwhile, has a fine 4 colour print illustration of the terminal, end of world beach which the traveller gazes over. Sidney Sime’s illustration for Lord Dunsany’s the Gods of Pegana is characteristically atmospheric, depicting a spectral figure emerging from a sepia tinted night forest whose trees seem to glow with a mysterious bioluminescence. Most enjoyable are the visions of futurity envisioned in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Here we have a series of pictures from an 1874 Pall Mall magazine, in which the street lighting of a future city is suspended from floating balloons, and a series of 1914 Russian postcards imagining a magical Moscow, complete with the usual elevated monorail network threading between high-rise buildings. Albert Robida’s Le Vingtieme Siecle – La Vie Electrique from 1892 somewhat satirically shows a future in which Parisians have taken to the skyways in their flying cars, and must negotiate a thicket of intertwining telegraph cables, above which airship serenely glide. Fashions don’t seem to have changed a great deal, and gentlemen still take off their hats to a passing lady. Perhaps the most remarkable visual work on display here is Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphiniarus (1981). Serafini, an architect and designer, has created and illustrated an imaginary world complete with flora, fauna, inhabitants and an alien civilisation. As a sustained act of detailed imaginative invention, it is remarkable, and the images on display are remarkable; dream architecture merging with mountainous land and seascapes.

There are some surprising inclusions here, fully justifying the exhibition’s subtitle Science Fiction But Not As You Know It. Most startling (an probably particularly vexing to the dedicated literary snob) are the notebooks of the Bronte Sisters, in which they detail, in tiny, neat writing in small notebooks, their imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal, vaguely located in Africa and the North Pacific. Another such imaginary land was created in great detail in the early twentieth century by the American legal teacher and scholar Austin Tappan Wright, who built up the world of Islandia over a period of many years, having originally dreamed of it as a boy. There was no apparent intention to publish the results, this was creation for its own sake. Other writers who would not normally be associated with SF are also included. Bertrand Russell’s late collection of stories Nightmares contains several science fiction tales, and Joseph Conrad’s The Inheritors (1901) imagines a superior race from the future, the Dimensionists. There are several examples of samizdat literature, illicitly published copies, from beyond the iron curtain, which focus on the great dystopian novels of the twentieth century. A Polish version of Zamyatin’s 1924 novel My (also known as We) dates from 1985, 3 years before its eventual official publication in the Soviet Union. There is also a 1985 samizdat copy of Brave New World. In such forms, dystopian fiction found an underground readership under conditions of dystopian reality, allowing people to compare and contrast. Further dytopian fiction comes in the form of the British government’s 1980 Protect and Survive booklet, which offers entirely useless tips as to what to do in the event of a nuclear attack. One such suggests that you can ‘lie flat in a ditch’, presumably to make it easier for the burial crews. One final book to note is the original 1895 US edition of The Time Machine, published in New York and prominently attributed on the cover to one H.S.Wells. Whatever happened to him? This is a great exhibition for the SF fan, and hopefully for the mildly curious, too. It demonstrates the widespread reach of the literary genre, and its ability to address the bewildering transformations of our technological age. It’s also colourful, imaginatively rich and damn good fun. It’s a space well worth exploring.

Peake's Alice and the Invasion of Fitzrovia

We (that is Mrs W. and I) started a day out in London last weekend with a trip to the British Library, an appropriate destination given that it was World Book Day. The last time I visited this noble institution, it was still nestled at the heart of the British Museum, where you can of course still see the famous reading room (as featured in Night of the Demon, where sinister occultist Dr Karswell slips some cursed runes between the covers of the hero's book) at the heart of the new(ish) Richard Rogers glass-covered atrium. From Kings Cross, we cut through the back end of St Pancras Station into the small side road which separates it from the library. Off in the near distance, on the other side of a stretch of waste ground which will no doubt be filled-in in due course, was a block of white-facaded flats, patterned with a series of slits along some sections of the balconies. This was Levita House, a grade II listed building which has regained some of its faded glory after a recent refurbishment. It was built by the London County Council between 1928 and 1937 as part of a slum clearance programme, but had degraded into the familiar patterns of neglect, underinvestment and resultant physical and social decay. It was recently used as a backdrop for Shane Meadows’ short black and white film Somers Town, where the two young protagonists leaned over the parapets and watched the trains wind in and out of the station.

Taking the route through the station is a good way to get to the library, as is avoids the permanently traffic-choked hell of the Euston Road, and affords a marvellous side-view of the St Pancras Hotel, an obscure and seldom seen angle which has some remarkable features. A huge gothic arched window, steeply rising roofs and a smoking chimney, with the canopy covering the platforms snaking off behind, all add to the hybrid nature of the building: part cathedral, part Teutonic castle and part cast-iron monument to proud Victorian engineering. It really feels as though it should have jagged mountainscapes rearing in the background, and it stands in towering contrast to its shabby surrounds (particularly now that the Victorian terraces of the Culross Buildings in Battle Bridge Road have been demolished and only one of the old black and red cast iron gas-holders remains). On the other side of the street, you pass through a gap to enter the concourse in front of the British Library. It’s use of red brick links it with its distinguished and long-established neighbour, but it contrasts the hotel’s soaring vertical spires and chimneys with a more horizontal form, elongated and with gently ascending, neatly stacked levels (like books lying on top of one another) and the smoothly descending slope of a roof. The eastern side rests on a series of black and red pillars, and the area around the concourse has the look of a Japanese palace. Inside, all is cool and cavernous, with a wide cascade of steps leading you upwards towards a massive central stack of books contained in elegant glass casings which, in any other building, you might assume gave access to the lifts. They rise vertiginously above and below the ground floor levels and seem to act as a symbolic supporting column, the foundation for the surrounding edifice. The reading rooms for different subjects branch discretely off from this civilised central space (complete with the obligatory café), open to registered users only. But there is plentiful exhibition space in which to display the Library’s many treasures.

The PACCAR gallery, below ground, currently houses an exhibition on the evolution of the English language, with awe-inspiring artefacts such as the original Beowulf manuscript (the only one – without the object you see here, this tale would be entirely lost to us), the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, an early illuminated copy of the Canterbury Tales, and Dr Johnson’s dictionary (we were later to pass his house in Gough Square in the City), all enclosed in a reverent hush of crepuscular gloom. Later objects include a 1929 BBC broadcaster’s guide to received pronunciation which would dictate the sound of the airwaves for decades to come, and James Joyce’s handwritten manuscript of Finnegan’s Wake, with adjacent headphones to allow you to follow the author’s own reading of the densely punning text on the open page before you. But, for all the magnificence of these marvels, the words on paper which have been the carriers of our culture (and still will be, despite the proclamations of digital doomsayers) it was in the Treasures of the British Library exhibition in the Sir John Ritblat Gallery that I came across the pages which made me draw a sharp breath and test the tensile strength of the glass which contained them as I leant over to get as close as possible. They were Mervyn Peake’s illustrations to the Alice books.

There were three of Peake’s original illustrations, all from Through the Looking Glass: The Walrus and the Carpenter, Humpty Dumpty on the wall and Alice crowned as Queen. The Walrus and the Carpenter (the characters from Tweedledee’s poem). Peake draws them as elderly figures, shabby and worn, looking ruminatively off beyond the frame into some unknown distance which they don’t seem to be focussing on anyway. The carpenter’s face, with its sharp edges and squared-off ends, looks like it has been planed and sanded with his own tools. These he carries about on his person, a saw slung over his shoulder like a saw-toothed rifle, hammer and pencils and a broken setsquare peering out of a bulging jacket pocket which sags from a weight for which it was never fashioned. The Walrus leans on a bamboo cane, and grasps the lapel of his coat in the manner of one who once enjoyed the pomp of official office. In a nice little detail, the pointed arms of a starfish are sketched out just below the Walrus’ flippered feet, which peek out beneath the crumpled cuffs of his pin-striped trousers. These two weary creatures lean on each other like old friends accustomed to each other’s company, and the Walrus rather touchingly twines his forefinger around the Carpenter’s pinkie in a tentative expression of intimacy (perhaps Peake’s interpretation of the lines which state that they ‘were walking close at hand’). Peake’s mastery of cross-hatching (and simple hatching), evident throughout his literary illustrations, is used here to convey the paradoxical luminescence of a sun which shines on the sea even thought it is night, with the moon at the same time ‘shining sulkily/Because she thought the sun/Had got no business to be there’. Dark and dense cross-hatching above the ocean horizon gradually expands and lightens, until the upper layers of the sky are airily rendered with undulant broken lines. These suggest the lambent shimmer of moonlight, as well as replicating the swell of the waves below.

Peake’s depicts many of the bizarre inhabitants of the worlds beyond the rabbit hole and through the looking glass as run down, vagrant, with ill-fitting clothes and battered shoes which curl up at the toes, where sole and upper part with a fishy gape. They gaze upwards to one side with mad distraction or look on with empty and blank vacancy. Even his Queen of Hearts has toes which poke through holes in her stockings, and the tense, erect curl of those toes conveys the rage which inhabits every fibre of her being. His aristocratic characters are characterised by exaggerated noses, from the upturned Kenneth Williams flare of the Red Queen to the pug snout beneath black piggish eyes of the Queen of Hearts. He favours the perspective on the Alice books which Jonathan Miller brought to his 1966 TV adaptation, which sees the inverted world of mad anti-logic which they portray as being on the borders of nightmare, a depiction of an overactive mentality thinking its way towards insanity. Such interpretations of necessity go beyond the lightness of the actual books, which largely maintain a light and humorous air, partly through the use of nonsense verse. Peake would have appreciated the odd collisions of incongruent ideas and images, absurd improbabilities and figures of speech taken literally which Carroll’s verse contains. He wrote nonsense poems himself, many of them collected in his Rhymes Without Reason and A Book Of Nonsense, and he produced his own book illustrating Figures of Speech in a humorously literal fashion. He also produced two children’s books which combined fantastic voyages with illustrations – Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor and Letters from a Lost Uncle, the drawings for both of which bear much resemblance to those he made for the Alice stories.

Peake’s Humpty Dumpty (click this link and then scroll down to find the picture amongst the row beneath the Mad Hatter), perched pompously atop his wall, is set against a darkly lowering cross-hatched sky, which evokes the wintry setting of the story (the obverse of Alice in Wonderland’s dream of a summer’s day). This darkness also serves to give a clear outline to the ovoid curve of Humpty’s indivisible head and body. One face of his round form is cast into penumbral shadow, a hint at the rather threatening side of his character. He is a stern looking creature, with a rigidity conveyed by the tight-pressed line of his mouth and downward curve of his protruding lip, and the hard and unresponsive glaze of his stare. His eyebrows rise in angry arches and the outward fold of his pointed ear somehow manages to convey an alert sense of arrogant superiority. His hands rest on his knees, and Peake depicts the relaxed bend of a stubby forefinger, ready to be brought into action to point out any errors or inexactitude. His feet are like dainty pig trotters, crossed neatly over each other as if he is engaged in zen meditation (and paradoxical nonsense is a good way of achieving the zen goal of breaking free from established patterns of thought). These inhuman feet counter his otherwise anthropomorphic features (although anthropomorphised from what? An egg?), suggesting a bestial nature which his pedantic and intellectually overdemonstrative manner seems an attempt to overcome. As a further indication of a dual nature, these trotters also somewhat resemble the nibs of ink pens. Humpty even has what looks like a light fuzz of hair atop its head (a feathery down?) which adds to its thuggish mien, and also echoes the moss which fringes the ledge upon which he primly perches. Perhaps he has sat there for so long, and with such stillness, that he too has grown his own crop. Around the corner, a tree or vine has thrust upwards through the brickwork, leaving a ragged hole around its branch. This gives the idea that the wall is not as stable as once it was, and presages the egghead’s disastrous and shattering fall.

The picture of Alice shows her proudly displaying the Queen’s crown which she wins in the latter stages of the chess game which provides the carefully worked out framework for her progress (and that of the other characters) in Through the Looking Glass. Carroll gives a key to the moves in the game at the start of the book, and further clarifications are offered by Martin Gardner in his fascinatingly discursive The Annotated Alice. Alice’s crown, as depicted by Peake, is a tall, three tiered affair, its separate layers fanning out around a central column like a baroque fountain. A symbolic object of power, it looks like it would take a constant effort of careful balancing to keep it from toppling from the head. Peake’s Alice looks a lot less prim and well-groomed than the more familiar figure depicted by John Tenniel. Her hair is a wild tumble, with an untamed fringe struggling out from beneath the crown’s metallic brim. Peake has given her wide, bright eyes and a look of innocent delight, very different from the self-contained and rather sulky hauteur of the Tenniel Alice. She’s also a lot more lithe and loose-limbed than Tenniel’s squat, big-headed figure. She appears filled with dreamy wonder, and you can quite believe that this world has sprung from her wayward imagination. She’s like a girl approaching the dawning horizon of adolescence. In some senses, she’s like a slightly younger version of Fuschia from the Gormenghast books. Peake’s depiction is a good counterbalance to the sometimes rather prissy manner in which the Alice books can come across, particularly when read aloud in a particular kind of voice. He brings back the sense of a wild imagination, slightly out of control and verging on the sinister. It’s a perfect marriage of artist and story.

The divergence between Peake and Tenniel’s view of the world of the Alice books can also be seen in their representation of animals, and cats in particular. The black kitten with which Alice plays a the beginning and end of Through the Looking Glass is a cutesy fluffball with a bow around its neck in Tenniel’s illustration. In the picture with which Peake ends the book, its paws droop in pugilistic readiness, and it casts a sideways look of undisguised malevolence at Alice, whose grasping hand is all that we see. Similarly, Tenniel’s Cheshire Cat in Alice In Wonderland is a fat, grinning goofball. Peake recasts it as a round. disembodied head hanging in the sky, slab-toothed and sharp-eared, its eyes glaring down with wicked intensity, radiating sick waves of fear like an evil sun. It’s the Gnostic demi-god of this contrariwise sub-world, as envisaged by Peake’s burning imagination. This can be seen in action in the rough sketch which lies alongside the three completed illustrations. Thick scribbles of heavy pencil approximate to automatic drawing, directly conducted from the visions flashing across the mind. These are overlaid with the more controlled lines of ink pen, which begin to give form to the raw material of the imagination. You can almost feel the process of creation as you stare down at this piece of paper. It’s very exciting to know that there is so much more material now in the possession of the Library, available for study and hopefully for future exhibitions and publications.

Across from the Alice display is an array of manuscripts which trace the development of the novel. These culminate in the work of two writers whose archives have also recently been acquired by the Library. Angela Carter’s handwritten manuscript for Nights at the Circus was a particular thrill for me to see, as she is one of my favourite writers. I’ve also just finished reading this book (it was my choice for a book club which I participate in) so the words were still fresh in my mind. Seeing it in this unedited state made you wonder about variances from the text as finally printed. I’d need to have had the book with me, but I don’t believe the phrase about the Helen of Hackney (if I remember that aright) made it to the opening pages. Carter may have decided on the soubriquet ‘Helen of the high wires’ as a preferable replacement. Additional sentences angle in from the margins, accreted afterthoughts and curlicues of florid detail flowing from her profligate imagination, spinning off here and there. You sense that she could have continued coming up with such baroque additions, but the line had to be drawn somewhere.

A page from JG Ballard’s manuscript of Crash is on display, words fired out and impressed onto paper with the violent, rapid fire keys of an old manual typewriter. The resultant type is crossed through and scribbled out at regular intervals, and innumerable corrections made, with corrections to the corrections in some instances. The whole thing looks a mess. But indicates the care with which he searched for exactly the right word. Crash was an extension of the style and thematic concerns of his ‘condensed novels’ of the mid to late 60s, which were essentially a form of prose poetry. The need for precision of expression was all important, as was the modulation between styles. The novel is essentially a collision of language from lab reports, ad copy, pornography, tabloid newsprint and pop art. The style, in a sense, is the content and creates the novel psychopathology which is a the novel’s core. Here, you get a glimpse at how Ballard arrived at it, and how much work it required.

Communications Tower, Barcelona - the PO Tower's Spanish cousin

After leaving the Library, we went for a wander across the city, meandering through Regents Park from Camden and following an arc of Nash terraces to thread our way through the narrow streets of Fitzrovia, soon arriving at Fitzroy Square, which has been home to the likes of the mid-nineteenth century Prime Minister Lord John Russell, George Bernard Shaw and Virginia Woolf, with Whistler, Rossetti and Sickert as near neighbours. Its neat terraces of Georgian houses and central garden penned in by wrought iron railings is overshadowed by that priapic icon of 60s technological optimism and concrete modernism, the Post Office Tower (never mind about its subsequent privatised rechristening). The feeling of architectural schizophrenia engendered by standing in a perfectly formed 18th century residential square and looking up at London’s quintessential piece of 60s space age futurism is also embodied in the house which used to be the residence of Robert Adam, who had begun the construction of the square. This is now occupied by the Ove Arup and Partners architectural firm. Ove Arup, from whom they take their name, was a Danish engineer who emigrated to England in the 20s. He was a consultant to the Tecton team and worked in close association with Berthold Lubetkin on the construction of Highpoint in Highgate, which was indeed the high-point of 30s white-walled modernism in London. Arup advised Lubetkin as to the viability of allowing the outer walls to carry the weight of the building, the whole being balanced on a series of columns or piloti. It was the realisation of some of le Corbusier’s ideas, with the ‘eggshell’ exterior allowing for greater internal space. Arup later worked extensively on the engineering design of the Sydney Opera House, another instantly recognisable beacon of modern architecture. He died in 1988, but the firm he set up continues his work. They are responsible for the Broadgate Centre in the City, an arena which has a theatrical feel, and forms a kind of circular ‘square’ in the midst of the crowded and faceless glass monoliths which dominate the area. With poetic appropriateness, they also engineered the construction of Norman Foster’s design for a communications tower which rises on the hills above Barcelona like the Skylon reborn. Perhaps it even receives signals sent out from the Post Office Tower, and sends back a few of its own.

War Machine loose in Fitzrovia

The William Hartnell Doctor Who story The War Machines is set around this area, with the Post Office Tower as its central focus. It makes good use of surrounding locations, as well as those in nearby Bedford Square (just beside the British Museum) and Covent Garden, then still a working fruit, veg and flower market (as it was when Hitchcock came to make Frenzy there in 1972. The War Machines was made just as the Tower was first opening to the public in 1965, and offered a corrective blast of technological paranoia to set against all the white heat excitement in the air at the time. The top tier is home to a new supercomputer called Wotan, its one blinking and dilating eye presumably reminding its makers of the Wagnerian god. Indeed, it’s a computer of such magnitude that it pretty much takes up the entire level by itself. Soon after it’s turned on, it decides it can do a far more efficient job of running the world, ushering in a new era of technological domination. It plans to form an international network, a kind of web spanning the world (if only there were a simple name for this) with its computer brethren and produce armoured machines which will be activated on cue and eliminate any resistance. Soon they are let loose in the streets of Fitzrovia, gratuitously knock down stacks of empty fruit boxes around Covent Garden and grind to a confused halt at the end of Cornwall Gardens in Chelsea. Apparently, viewers at the time found the whole idea of computers coming to dominate our lives preposterous, one commenting that ‘I like science fiction, but this was ridiculous’.

Newman's Passage framed

A little further south, and with a little direction from Kim Newman’s Movies, Murder and the Macabre contribution to the Time Out Book of London Walks, we came across (appropriately enough) Newman Passage. The corner of Rathbone Street which you take to arrive at its entrance also seemed very familiar, possibly from two Soho in the fifties films I’ve recently seen: The Small World of Sammy Lee and Expresso Bongo (ignore Cliff, it’s a really interesting picture). The dark and clammy stretch of Newman Passage is the setting for the murder of a prostitute which opens Michael Powell’s study in the voyeurism inherent in cinema, Peeping Tom. Kim Newman quotes Powell’s description of it as ‘a narrow, arched passageway that gives you goose-pimples just to look at it’. It remains essentially as it was in the film, although the gas lamp has gone, alas, as have the brightly painted facades of the surrounding shops. If anything, it is now even more dark and forbidding. Peeping Tom is now widely regarded as the film which marked the end of Michael Powell’s career, although it has to be said that it hadn’t really been in great shape for some time previously. Reviews were viciously vituperative, and there was a faint sense of scores being settled. Derek Hill’s comments in The Tribune are often quoted. He wrote ‘the only satisfactory way to dispose of Peeping Tom would be to shovel it up and flush it swiftly down the nearest sewer. Even then the stench would remain’. He does then go on to heap scorn on previous Powell (and Pressburger) films, accusing such works as A Canterbury Tale, A Matter of Life and Death, The Red Shoes and Tales of Hoffmann of vulgarity, and of displaying ‘bizarre tendencies’. All of which suggests that some critics felt that Powell, with his extravagant romantic imagination, had it coming. As is often the case with works initially vilified by all and sundry, Peeping Tom has now come to be considered a classic.

The Cittie of Yorke

Finally, we came to rest at The Cittie of York, a wonderful grade II listed pub opposite Chancery Lane Tube Station (although, as usual, you get a better view if you travel on the top deck of a bus). A place of considerable antiquity, its back room has a vaulting wooden ceiling, with huge barrels suspended over the bar area. Intriguingly, there is a suspended iron walkway which runs alongside them. Much coveted enclosed wooden booths, somewhat akin to confessionals, line the wall opposite the bar, and we swiftly nabbed one as another party left. This is one of a trail of pubs featured in William Heaney’s (aka Graham Joyce) Memoirs of a Master Forger. His protagonist describes it as being 'one of London's oldest inn sites', although at this point in the story he's not in a fit state to provide his usual psychogeographical anecdotes as he makes his way 'through the gloom of the great hall bar' to make a rendezvous 'at teh back where there are intimate drinking booths'. According to the Good Pub Guide, there's been an inn on this site since 1430, with a coffee house (known as the Gray's Inn Coffee House) built behind a garden in 1695, and a Victorian reconstruction using 17th materials making up much of the modern site. The cellar bar (closed whilst we were there) is the cellar of the old coffee house. It’s a Samuel Smith pub, which meant that we got a couple of pints (and in the centre of London, too) and still had change from a fiver! You can’t say fairer than that.