"Everything proceeds as if space had been trapped by time, as if there were no history other than the last forty-eight hours of news, as if each individual history were drawing its motives, its words and images, from the inexhaustible stock of an unending history in the present".
Marc Augé - Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (1995)
How to describe the becoming non-place of my place of birth? How to put into words the feeling of homelessness on finding oneself inescapably funnelled into the habits of a tourist in places you have frequented for over four decades?
Southwark is my home borough. It holds my family home, my first years of schooling, and many of the places I most associate with my childhood and youth. At its Southern tip it grazes the edge of Crystal Palace park, home to the ruins of that legendary 19th century edifice, which more than any other symbolised the coming age of transparency and globalisation. A glass house, originally conceived to hold a trade fair; a house with transparent walls, so that the divisions between inside and outside were dissolved, giving the illusion of total visibility, illuminated by the burning sun of commerce and the industrial spirit of the age.
Southwark's midriff comprises the less storied neighbourhoods of Peckham and Camberwell; the one known for being the home of fictional "dodgy-dealer" Del Boy Trotter, the other containing what was formerly London's murder mile (I believe it lost this crown in the mid-2000s to Clapton-Hackney). At one time I had a dentist based on the crossroads at Loughborough Junction; the dark heart of Camberwell on the frontline of a turf war between various competing drugs gangs servicing the local markets in Peckham and Brixton.
I was sixteen or thereabouts and had to go for a filling. For the first time I was given a local anaesthetic in the gums before the drill went in. Now, this wasn't the first filling I'd had and with hindsight I might have inquired why previous tooth doctors felt able to grind away at my pearly whites without a second thought to my state of suffering. In any case when I emerged into the April afternoon the left side of my face was still totally numb. This didn't however stop me from trying to rid my mouth of the taste of dental detritus by pouring a bottle of warm fizzy drink into it. Cue moment of pure physical comedy as I made a futile attempt to keep the liquid from falling out the side of my flaccid mouth onto my new trainers.
Futile as I say, however, my efforts had not gone unnoticed by two gentlemen conducting a no doubt entirely innocent transaction under the cover of a partially derelict railway arch (these were the days when London railways arches were used to store railway equipment or drug dealers, rather than artisan tequila producers ). In the face of their chortling I tried with my unfeeling-flappy-face to explain my temporary palsy, to no effect but to appear even more sub-normal than before. I gave up and had the ignominious experience of being offered a pity rate on whatever happy pills these two noble souls were about to unleash on the borough. I passed, and scampered back up towards Red Post Hill and the safety of East Dulwich.
Southwark's Northern region extends from Elephant and Castle in the West out as far as Rotherhithe and Surrey quays in the East. At the centre of this near five mile stretch of riverside real estate lies London Bridge and the area encompassing Borough market and Southwark cathedral. This is the original Olde Southwark, of the bishops prison, the clink, the black friars and the Winchester Geese; of dozens of coaching inns lining the high street, and of course the famous bridge itself, its Medieval predecessor the site of spiked heads of executed criminals and several multi-storey houses along its length. The present bridge dates from the 1970s and replaced the one that was bought by Missourian entrepreneur Robert P. McCulloch in 1968. The area has seen more change over the last two decades than it probably has in the preceding two centuries, and is for me paradigmatic of the becoming non-place of London, a city of transients, where no-one really lives and for even born and bred locals like me the experience of being there seems to have lost all intelligibility.
If the transformation of London bridge into a non-place has particular emotional resonance for me that may be because I have so much personal history bound up there. I have worked and played, lived, loved and lost within that small enclave. But this history and its sudden impossibility is perhaps the signal experience of a becoming non-place, since now I find I can no longer memorialise, nor take stock of the passing time. The places and the faces are no longer recognisable and do not seem to recognise each other. Ironically this transition coincides with London Bridge having become a "destination" and place to have "experiences"; which is to say it has entered fully into the network of consumer and tourist and thus no longer caters for those who linger, let alone those who dwell.
"The general de-temporalization leads to the disappearance of temporal sections and caesurae, the thresholds and transitions which create meaning. The feeling that time passes more quickly now than before is also due to the absence of a pronounced articulation of time. This feeling is intensified by the fact that events follow each other in quick succession without leaving lasting traces, without becoming experiences. Because of the missing gravitation, things are encountered only fleetingly. Nothing carries weight".
- Byung-Chul Han - The Scent of Time
Borough market is one of the great old markets of London alongside Smithfields and Spitalfields, and was once a place where people actually came routinely to buy produce - mostly wholesale - though in the late 90s the market was rebranded for retail, selling high-end meat, fish, cheese and speciality produce. It was expensive but it still felt like a place you might go to buy quality fresh food, perhaps for a special occasion - my mother and I still maintain this tradition buying our cold meat and cheese there before every Christmas. Until recently the surrounding area, however, still had a somewhat grimy, vaguely Dickensian edge to it. The backstreets running West of Borough High street were a mixture of Georgian terraces, derelict warehouses and the crisscrossing of overhead railway lines that ran out in three directions from the station.
The rhythmic thumping of trains passing across the viaducts above the market are on my playlist for classic London soundscape. The old London Bridge mainline station was on a huge raised platform of arches with road tunnels running beneath, in-between which were a number of longstanding shops and attractions, not least the London Dungeon. Whatever they used to pump into that place to give it that musty old smell would leak out into those tunnels, making them a less than salubrious place to be after dark. On a sweltering night in the summer of 2001 two men died beneath the railway arches there after consuming a lethal combination of drugs and alcohol at the SE1 Nightclub.
The London Dungeon, part of a chain of cheap thrills, historically inaccurate horror based attractions, was based beneath the station from the mid-1970s to 2013. Most of it was rather lame waxworks exhibits themed around things like water torture, garrotting and the black death. The Jack the Ripper section - where you were led from crime-scene to crime-scene as if investigating the murders yourself - used a lot more historical documents, including photographs of the victims. In the darkness, surrounded by the Victorian brickwork of the railway arches, the mocked up Whitechapel streets seemed pretty convincing, as was the piped voiceover reading police reports of the discovery of Mary Ann Nichols and Annie Chapman as a spotlight picked out a partially clothed female form slumped in the doorway.
I remember finding that stuff really quite disturbing, much more so than the depictions of Sweeney Todd or ridiculous looking fake medieval torture instruments. I was 14 when I first went there and remember jokingly asking for a Whisky from the fast food kiosk at the end. I've never liked drama shows that made extreme violence and murder of women into their standard plot device, and I think my experience of the London Dungeon might have played a part in that. My mum always refused to take me there - in the end I went with my Godfather - she would say that they made into entertainment things which were still happening in parts of the world. As I got older I came to agree with her and wouldn't recommend a visit at its current location in County Hall. I still associate Tooley street with that smell, with dark alcoves and grim discoveries.
Now it's all gone, even the roads that ran beneath the station which I would frequently traverse on my way between my student halls and the Absolutely Starving cafe to pick up a bacon baguette. The new incarnation of London bridge station has smashed through most of the old railway arches and replaced them with modern supports which has allowed this huge airy space to appear where before there was a network of occluded passages, walkways and covered streets. Now, it's all bright and shiny and smells of disinfectant and fast food. A transparent space, just like the Crystal Palace. I was once slapped by a girl in the bowels of London Bridge Station. Now that place is gone too, and with it the reminder of the lesson the slap taught me.
"Without the monumental illusion before the eyes of the living, history would be a mere abstraction. The social space bristles with monuments - imposing stone buildings, discreet mud shrines - which may not be directly functional but give every individual the justified feeling that, for the most part, they pre-existed him and will survive him. Strangely, it is a set of breaks and discontinuities in space that expresses continuity in time".
Marc Augé - Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (1995)
Let us unto the stews! And what stews did Southwark once have! Not quite as legendary as the houses of ill repute that Shakespeare's prince Hal would visit on Cheapside, but the sex workers of Olde Southwark have left their mark in the poignant space of Crossbones Graveyard and garden of remembrance on Redcross Way, a dank unprepossessing street that also features the wonderful Boot and Flogger wine bar and, ironically, the Most Precious Blood Catholic Church. The graveyard is a paupers graveyard, and during the Medieval period was unconsecrated ground. The women who worked in the area were known as the Winchester Geese as they were granted a licence by the Bishop of Winchester, who held jurisdiction over what was then something of a lawless area, known as much for its bear baiting and theatres as its brothels. Today the patch of land holds a number of memorials created by the Friends of Crossbones to the "outcast dead" buried there, and is also the site of monthly ceremonies of remembrance and an annual Halloween festival presided over by the poet and playwright John Constable, whose Southwark Mysteries cycle of poems did much to publicise the existence and importance of the site. It is one of the few places of ritual and remembrance to remain in the area. A place where the deep history of London still lives through the people who come together to remember and memorialise.
I described the Shard of Glass in an essay on this site in 2019 as equal parts corporate and military architecture, like a watchtower standing in the Green Zone of an occupied territory. The anomic corporate space and identikit retail experience, the sense of being at the intersection of any number of anonymous capital flows; the tower's smooth glass exterior perfectly allegorizes the faceless world of price signals and an international class who are at home everywhere and no-where on the upper levels of the Crystal Palace, far above the captured city and its bewildered population, staring into the screens of their phones.
I mistakenly compared the giant spire-like construction to a Cathedral consecrated to global finance. Now, this might be true from the perspective of the power of the Qatari royal family who effectively own the thing, but as a metaphor it falls down precisely on the point made by Marc Augé in that the Shard, despite its vast size is no monument, nor does it introduce a discontinuity into space that allows the marking of historical time. It is, just as I said in 2019 just the most recent iteration of that model of total transparency and fluid modernity that characterises the paradigm of the Crystal Palace. It doesn't so much dominate the area as thoroughly consume it, undermining the distinction between inside and outside, drawing everything into its orbit. It's also a giant spectacle that invites professional narcissists to visit and snap a pouting selfie on one of the upper levels. This touristic ephemerality can be seen all over the market and the riverside as businesses and the local council turn every possible corner into an opportunity for spectacle and consumption, not least consumption of the self. As a result of the swarms of tourists dumping food waste the lovely garden surrounding the market side of Southward Cathedral has been closed to the public.
Since the Shard's construction and the completion of the newly transparent station, the collapse of the 'anthropological place' that was London Bridge has only continued at pace. The emptiness and non-relational quality of that building has seeped into the general experience of the area as a whole. The addition of pop-up street food and tent bar shanty villages like Flat Iron Square, Vinegar Yard, and a little further inland Mercato Metropolitano, have only added to the feeling of a superficial pan-international sludge of spectacle and non-place entertainment clogging up the area. This is what it means when a place becomes a "destination" where people anticipate viewing themselves having experiences which are only marked by the selfie or the video taken on the ever present camera eye of mobile phones.
There are still some little havens of genuine life such as the living
community at Crossbones Graveyard, and there is also the Old Operating Theatre
housed at the top of the tower of the 18th century church of old St Thomas'
hospital where my mum now volunteers. Some still hidden gems like the Boot and
Flogger or the Horseshoe Inn remain, but for how long? The latest venture to
open is Borough Yards, which opens up yet more of the copious railway arches
near the market to yet more chain food outlets and designer clothes stores.
Walking through there a few weeks ago I found myself lost and unable to
navigate my way through. The artifice of the construction job had, like the Shard
and the station, rendered transparent and continuous an area that was formerly
full of light and shade, that contained old monumental architecture, some in
decay, some not, but it was a place that existed in time. Now it is little more
than a hellscape of cleaned up brickwork that leads nowhere and turns everyone
who enters into a tourist observing themselves in the endless walls of sheet
glass.
The story of London Bridge over the last twenty years is the story of
London, of its Disneyfication, its selling off and succumbing to plague
tourism, the wilful destruction of its liveable environment and heritage, and
its conversion into a vast space of permanent transience that is always busy
but no-one seems to stick around. A non-anthropological space as Augé would put
it; a non-place, where it is no longer possible to create a form-of-life.
