St Pancras to Kings Cross station
Walking from St Pancras to Kings Cross, I’m eager not to keep John waiting in the train station bar, but also to not appear out of the sync with the pace of London. There is also an anxiety about ‘getting it right’, not missing another sailing ship.
Coming to London always feels like touching base. I can’t put my finger on it, it’s not quite a recharge, maybe more like having your thumb on the start button on of another stopwatch, as if each ‘last chance’ was a fresh stopwatch, only for each one to be smashed against a wall at an high point of failure, like all those phones you literally did that to.
It’s as if London is always a starting point, out of which arises the same old impetus to do that thing that’s always been on the precipice of cognition.
Extortionate drink prices aren’t really that more unbelievable than anywhere else in the country, and you’ve mentally prepared for it here. London remains instantly recognisable even as it continuously changes; the many skins of gentrification that you see, you have already seen everywhere else, especially in the overly proud North. What is different is that last time was before the burn-outs, a state of being than neither myself, or potentially an entire generation who expected something different to ‘this’, can regain.
Tube and Overground to New Cross Gate
I begin to question my idea to travel down to New Cross as the train is far more crowded than anything myself or John are used to these days, and we wonder if this is the busiest train we’ve ever been on, as two delivery cyclists board into spaceless space, something that was probably novel even in London last time I spent time here.
Opposing thoughts cross my mind upon seeing miserable Friday faces cramped together as they head south of the river. I recognise that despite this city’s vastly superior transport system to the rest of the country, they are also sucked of joy by the same mechanisms as the rest of us (probably more so) and lack the liberation that you’d think such transport could afford them. Yet I equally feel both guilt and envy for not being a ‘Londoner’ – this heroic breed of human.
New Cross will admittedly always now be a ritualistic pilgrimage I feel driven to make once I’ve been absorbed into the belly of the city, and if I’m with a Northern friend I will drag them here. A part of me was made here, and in a brief 3 months another part was lost here. I’m still searching for it, as silly as I know this sounds.
New Cross
The first recognisable site as we approach New Cross is the large Sainsbury’s that projects its orange glow into the urban night sky. Strong memories cling to such inglorious spaces, perhaps because nothing else stakes any claims to them.
As we climb the steps to the wooden walkways, I’m reminded that there’s a ‘look’ to certain older architecture in South London that feels intrinsically ‘south of the river’, chalk-like, mimicking the south downs and the white cliffs. Yet memory has shrunken this place like long-term anxiety has shrunken my lung capacity, because I have totally forgotten how expansive this maze of a walkway is.
John suggests going to a pub that I’ve never heard of, which turns out to be a bland makeover of the previously boozy ‘Hobgoblin’ where I recall New Cross undergrads making the dance music of my childhood fashionable again, as New Cross students always do. Yet no transcendence, no convergence was ever personally achieved down here, a pattern that would continue through my 30s.
Yet apart from this makeover, New Cross looks like it hasn’t really changed one bit. No posh makeover (not really), and all that seems to have vanished is the internet cafes that once provided a necessary function. It looks like my default 2012 picture of the place, unlike Manchester which has altered beyond recognition to my default memory of it.
The Marquis of Granby equally feels cut loose from the mass nationwide gentrification of our souls. Somehow the kids down here, although donning fashions from previous eras, do not seem to reify and cgi the hell out it like everywhere else, and still seem to mix with tutors in and out the pub. It’s always easy to romanticise on a flying visit, but perhaps I’m seeing what I want to see as a prompt to start myself up again
Saturday Morning: Lewisham
I try to employ a ‘military mindset’ to evade the nauseating limbo of this hangover, and especially the embarrasment. The rumbling sound from the close proximity of trains, sometimes I could smell it as the trams rumbled by in Sheffield, but it now feels so exotic, from a long-lost pathway.
I head out onto the street with haste, leaving John to catch up, and I am spooked by the friendliness of the shopkeeper as I buy the necessary bottle of Lucozade, as if the childhood magic trick will finally work. But nothing is working at the moment: last time I was down here the hangover was part of the process of a lifestyle I still had faith in leaving behind, but now I am haunted by the prospect that this is permanent.
We walk through Lewisham centre, noticing the rare point of exposure of one of London’s many hidden rivers now condemned to exist like concealed sewage systems. Above us is something resembling a citadel made up of the kind of architecture that seems like it gleefully wants to double down on the flattening process done to life by smart tech. This kind of architecture would have once sparked intense debate between myself and John when the affects of smart tech and gentrification still possessed a element of novelty to them, but now the conversation seems reliant on what, between us, are basically dead sentences.
Once again I have fallen victim to false memory, miss-measuring the stretch between New Cross and Lewisham, perhaps to my younger lung capacity and tolerance for urban walking. I am worried I have messed up the gallery trip we came here for, and as we pass by the places in which we drank too much the night before, I worry that my tendency to try to rekindle a past moment has made me lose sight of the present.
As we pass by Goldsmiths College I recall how a receptionist gave me pennies for an incredibly necessary phone call when I’d financially and mentally reached rock bottom. This perhaps make me feel more embarrassed about this hangover, and I daren’t ask to stop for another Lucozade when we are already running late. We head straight for the next train to London Bridge.
Green Park to Embankment
After we visit the gallery we aim to find the river, what else would you walk towards? But I feel nothing as we walk through this area of London, it means nothing to me. The Mall, the galleries, it all feels pertaining to something I am almost aggressively indifferent to, especially when hungover with little tolerance for meaningless avenues of pomp.
Yet I cannot help but make a potentially inappropriate joke upon seeing the flags outside the Italian embassy, in that in the UK you could easily just think it was a pizza restaurant. But the joke is really on me, or on us: a time where this country had an ability to laugh at others and take others for granted has long passed, and nothing reassuring is guaranteed now as we solemnly cling onto warm meals provided to us by other countries.
My bones are heavier, everything is heavier. I recall that catalytic year of 2011. Even I was here! Sat on the plinth upon which Nelson’s Column stands, surrounded by Red Flags, at a fiery anti Austerity March. Myself and John respond with surprise as to why people were so angry back then, compared to how things are now. But that’s just it: we had every right to demand better back then, but after 15 years of austerity it’s not just me, but everyone who lacks that lung capacity to demand such a thing. I cannot imagine hauling my heavier bones onto this plinth now.
The waste of hangovers, it’s bothering me so much as I try to stare into the river and retrieve something, some sense of purpose, something to match the earnest aims of the ‘quiet activism’ myself and John are now collaborating on. Countless immigrant workers riding ‘vejazzeled’ rickshaws cycle past us, pumping the music of Abba and Dua Lipa onto the road. I shy away in embarrassment for them, and in shame for how I can’t pertain to the mantra of my home town to ‘toughen up’ and take whatever job you have to. So much shame clings to me as I follow this river.
Yet I came here with acorns from an unusually fertile oak tree down the road from where I’m from, whilst John collected some conkers from his home city of Leeds. Planting them is little about whether they will grow or not, it’s entirely about the rebirth of something; something the starts at the impulse to create despite the circumstances and reaches towards the impulse to fight for what you believe in despite the circumstances. Planting these seeds is meaningful because of its seeming futility, and I need to hold this thought close as we walk and walk slowly towards our exit out of the city.
John B Ledger 