NEW RELEASE: In Search of the English - A Walking History

Announcing the release of a major work: a critical walking history along the Capital Ring trail on the outskirts of London. In Search of the English – A Walking History is now available to everyone, free of charge, at http://www.aichaobang.com.

 

This book is based on a journey I undertook in 2018, wandering in dark personal strife while stranded in a country which, for all the years I’ve spent here, has ever left me an alienated stranger.

 

It so happened that this was also a time of pivotal strife for the English people. Split rancorously at the height of their Brexit contestations, the seams in their three-hundred-year-old United Kingdom had started to crack, and soon COVID-19 would appear on the horizon. But perhaps a different event represented, most powerfully and painfully, the distress to which English modernity had fallen. The burnt-out husk of Grenfell Tower, consumed in a disastrous fire the previous year, stood in towering symbolism of the shameful failures and abusive power relations in which the English national reality had come to ruin – and in staggering contrast with the ideals of freedom, democracy, prosperity and rule of law which, in spite of it all, stand on so insistent in their national storytelling.

 

Somehow, then, my bitter and despondent wander grew into a thorough immersion in English stories and problems as encountered on this circuit round their centre of power. The outcome is a reflective blend of travelogue, history and mythography: a fifteen-chapter exploration of these strands of Englishness on a quest for who they think they are, who they actually are, how it all went so wrong for them, and just perhaps, what they might do for a better future.

 

In Search of the English: A Walking History now available here:

http://www.aichaobang.com

 

THAMES: 2) The Great English Power Struggle

‘The Tower’, they call the shortest of these buildings. Do they not get the feeling its name has been somewhat overtaken?

Upstream of Tower Bridge, the tidal Thames ebbs and flows through the current power centres of both the English nation and the larger constitutional vehicle it presently rides, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (a.k.a. ‘the Union’) – although that ride feels wobblier by the day.

Many people think of this country as a democracy, and one of the oldest in the world at that. Its civilised, courteous, tea-sipping national persona fuses in their minds with the landscape of its capital city’s riverside, where red buses link the likes of the Palace of Westminster, the Victoria Embankment and St. Paul’s Cathedral. It is in pride of place at the downstream culmination of this catalogue of modern wonders that stands the Tower of London, which draws in some three million awestruck visitors per year.

The original Tower consisted only of the central keep, the White Tower, built in 1078. Wards, lodgings, and fortifications were layered onto it down the centuries, and then a moat, filled in the 1840s. More recent restorations have polished it up into the postcard-friendly attraction we see today.

But there is a problem here.

The Tower was a political prison, torture dungeon and killing field. Erected by William of Normandy as part of a network of castles to scare his conquered populace into submission, by the time the English nation consolidated under the Tudor dynasty (1509-1603) the main use of this fortress had shifted to confining, torturing, and oftentimes decapitating high-profile political dissidents and prisoners of war. Thomas More, Anne Boleyn, Lady Jane Grey and William Laud were among the dozens who had their heads handed to them here, and even four hundred years later it was dragging German spies in front of its firing squads in both World Wars. Yet nowadays you can pay a hefty £24.70 per head – and keep the head – to go in and take carefree selfies on top of those corpses while marvelling at this architectural symbol of a country which, they would have you believe, has political freedom and human rights in its national DNA.

That story of democratic destiny has been incredibly powerful in the English self-consciousness. But as we follow the Thames right through the middle of its ancient nuclei – the City of London and the City of Westminster – the river will have a quite different story to show us: of a heritage packed, like everyone else’s, with greed, oppression, and violent struggle. A story in which for every piece of democracy these people have scrapped together, they have had to fight and die for it and could never be sure they wouldn’t lose it again at any moment – and in which its worst enemies have not been external threats, but the impulse for the abuse of power that has ever lurked in their own culture.

Power. Yes. That will be the Dark River’s melody today.

The King’s Reach – the stretch of the Thames beside the old city – as seen from Tower Bridge, looking upriver. Yet never forget that twice a day the water goes in, and twice a day it goes out. Can you see the real power in this picture, far exceeding any of these glass pretenders as it looks on from high in the sky at left?

Start: Tower Bridge (nearest station: Tower Hill)

End: Putney Bridge (nearest stations: Putney Bridge, Vauxhall)

Length: 16km (10 miles)

Location: Greater London – Borough of Southwark, Borough of Lambeth, Borough of Wandsworth

Topics: Power versus democracy amongst the City of London merchants, Southwark bishops, Bankside and Lambeth recreationalists and the English Parliament in Westminster, then escaping through Vauxhall, Battersea, Wandsworth and Putney.

Today’s exploration is long. If you want to keep to the three main discussions, they are the City of London (immediately below), the story of Parliament (skip to ‘City of Westminster’), and the Putney Debates (skip to ‘Putney’ at the end.)

London Outer Orbital Path (LOOP) - Other Worlds, Other Stories

This walk is not actually in London.

When you hear London, perhaps your internal atlas opens on a shape somewhat like this:

Officially, this is the present extent of what is tellingly titled Greater London: thirty-two boroughs bound within the eternal chain of the M25 motorway. And yet, this map and that concept of London would have been unrecognisable to anyone in it for most of the last two thousand years.

London has traditionally meant a nucleus upon the river Thames – the City of London. This was later supplemented with a second nucleus, the City of Westminster. Most of the rest of this territory was a mix of tiny villages, rolling farmlands, forbidding forests and bandit-ridden wasteland till the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

It was only then, in the living memories of present-day grandparents, that industrial urbanisation and suburbanisation flung out London’s tentacles of road and rail to seize chunks off its neighbouring provinces (or counties as the English call them, a word with Norman French origins). Middlesex, west of the city and north of the Thames, was completely devoured, while most of the remainder of this map was taken off Kent in the southeast, Surrey in the south, Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire in the northwest, and Essex in the northeast. And it is those lands, now absorbed into the London amoeba but retaining stories, cultures, landscapes and accents that clearly belong to different worlds, that you will come into contact with if you attempt the so-called London Outer Orbital Path long-distance walking trail. better known by its acronym, the LOOP.

The route of the LOOP, as appears on its Transport for London webpage

Most of this route's 24 sections still cover farms, fields, woodlands, riverbanks, parks, or little villages that hold onto distinct identities. They are largely devoid of bandits now (the traditional kind at any rate – it does pass through the constituencies of several unsavoury Conservative Party MPs, among them Uxbridge and South Ruislip, seat of a certain Boris Johnson). It is very green, and people tend to greet you when they pass - itself a sign that London is far, far away.

Many of these locals might well be descendants of people who resisted the encroachment of London and fought to preserve their homes from its all-crushing notions of development. In the mid-twentieth century they managed to get that preservation formalised as the Metropolitan Green Belt: a ring around the capital where new construction has been heavily restricted, much to the consternation of the evangelical free-marketeers and property speculators who have taken over the English housing sector.

The ‘Happy Valley’ in deeper Croydon (Section 5). The ‘green and pleasant land’ is an important image in English national culture and has deep and historic significance for both its celebrants and its critics.

In the 1990s, an expanded London’s municipal officials started getting together with walkers’ organisations like the Ramblers to consider the creation of walking routes, to encourage people to get out and explore these surroundings on foot. The London LOOP was the most ambitious route to be proposed. Over the following years they worked improve its trails to be as safe, accessible and well-signposted as possible. The resulting quality varies, as many separate local authorities are responsible for maintaining it, but the overall outcome is a high-standard continuous route fully endorsed by the Mayor and Transport for London (TfL).

Still stranded in this city, I set out to roam these outskirts in January this year. I began its first section from the town of Erith, far to the east on the south bank of the Thames, and taking it section by section as time and weather made feasible, managed to complete the route on the opposite bank eight months later. But that's only one way to do it; with a dedicated effort you could probably do the whole thing in one or two weeks.

Whether to escape the city for more natural surroundings, to exercise, or to learn more about the English capital’s context first-hand, this is a walk I recommend. 

London in the distance from Havering Country Park (Section 20).

Deer in Bushy Park (Section 9).

Route Details:

Length: Approx. 242km (150 miles) total. Officially divided into 24 sections, which range in length from short 5-6km strolls to day walks of 17-18km.

Access: All sections can be reached by public transport, i.e. trains or London Underground (Oyster Card accepted with one exception), or buses for more remote locations. Most have convenient places to leave or return to the route part-way, so you can split up or combine sections and tackle it however works best for you. Because it is England, always check live transport service status before travelling.

All sections contain excellent picnic opportunities and most pass pubs, cafés and/or kiosks.

The best starting point is the official TfL London LOOP website, which contains maps, route guidance and further information for each of the 24 sections (here’s Section 1 for example). But if you would like to learn more about what you are walking through, or have more detailed directions that will help when the signposting is not so good, I strongly recommend walking with a guidebook as well; I found Colin Saunders’s The London Loop (Aurum Press) helpful.

(For those who would prefer a shorter walking project closer to the city, there is also the Capital Ring, which shares the same origins but is a more manageable 126km/78 miles. Alternatively, if you prefer a more ambitious and transgressive approach to walking, have a look at what the psychogeographer Iain Sinclair did in London Orbital.)

The chalky Farthing Downs over Coulsdon, actually a piece of the North Downs projecting towards the Thames valley (Section 5).

The London Monster as confronted from the Addington Hills, Croydon (Section 4).

Wetlands in the valley of the Ingrebourne, one of the Thames’s many tributaries, near Upminster, Havering (Section 23).

A flavour of this journey’s stories and creatures follows.

On the Lamentable Condition of Public Toilets in London

During recent walks in various parts of London, it has come to my notice that this city suffers from a distinct shortage of public toilets. On top of that, where these essential facilities happen to be present, such as in the central parks and major train stations, they almost always charge a significant entry fee. Many also lack stair-free access, while others still are dilapidated or closed altogether from obvious lack of maintenance.

Perhaps my attention is all the more drawn to this problem after five years in Tokyo, a city which for all its flaws is quite respectable on the question of free and accessible public latrines. Almost every station on the city’s rail and metro network has one in at least decent condition, as do the public parks, or if all else fails there is usually a department store or konbini nearby whose facilities you can use without fear or shame. The train station toilets are usually inside the ticket barrier, but even that is preferable to the situation in London where most stations have none at all, and thus the possibility that you will be able to pee after a long London Underground journey is a matter of hit and miss (usually miss).

Typical condition of a public toilet in a major London train station: locked behind a toll gate, wheelchair-inaccessible, and out of order so no-one can use it anyway.

The Politics of the Disappearance of Public Toilets

On further investigation this deficiency is not a coincidence. Last year (2016) the BBC reported that over 1,782 public toilets had been closed across the UK over the preceding decade. With no legal requirement for local authorities to provide them, they have apparently been one of the first things to go as the austerity movement eats into councils’ budgets.

It is an easy issue to joke about or trivialize – from a place of privilege, say if you travel by car or have private access to toilets in your place of work, and thus take regular relief of your bodily fluids for granted. But as with much of austerity, the greater your level of vulnerability or distance from mainstream norms and expectations, the less of a position you are in to treat this as a laughing matter. Consider for example women, who in general use the facilities to deal with more complex sanitary needs; people with bowel or bladder problems or other physical or mental health concerns which require more frequent recourse to the loo; people in wheelchairs or with otherwise limited mobility, who are often forgotten in the design of the facilities’ spaces; small children and elderly people; transgender people, who face discrimination concerning toilets that recent events in the US have made internationally notorious; and unemployed or homeless people, for whom 50p per use might not be an insignificant blow.

Thus it seems difficult to summarily dismiss the cynical view: that the collapse in public toilet provision in London, and in the UK more widely, is but one more component of the established belief system and political agenda of the day: that society should not exist, that the public sphere should be ruined for private profit, and that life should be made as miserable as possible for those who are vulnerable or seen as different.

Can we imagine a strike directed more perfectly (and literally) below the belt? Perhaps there is no topic on which the distance between privilege and oppression more starkly divides between reflexive, comfortable amusement on the part of those least affected by this problem, and the distress and utter collapse of dignity suffered by those it impacts the most.

Public Toilets as a Human Right and Public Interest

Who could dispute the case for free, accessible and clean public toilets? In the first instance, because our nature as human beings carries with it the frequent imperative to relieve both the greater and lesser calls of nature, the safe and hygienic means to do so should be considered a basic human right, and was as much as recognized as such by the UN General Assembly in 2010.

But even supposing we come at this issue from perspectives that for whatever reason reject human rights, we would be hard-pressed to deny that having this means available is much in the public interest. The thing about the aforementioned imperative to release our waste products is that it is ultimately going to happen anyway whether there is a safe and hygienic place to do it or not, and certain cities around the world whose embarrassment we shall spare here are well familiar with the consequences of failing to cater for it.

However, the prospect of monied, international London joining their ranks might be quite shocking to some. Many of its most overcrowded tourist destinations lack any toilets at all, including Underground stations such as Tower Hill, serving the single most popular attraction in the country, where one account has it that ‘visitors to the Tower brave a filthy concrete tunnel that reeks of urine at night’. Not only does this suggest how we all pay the cost of inadequate latrines in the form of a deeply unhealthy and unpleasant common environment (excepting perhaps those individuals who take a rare prurient interest in the substances in question), but it also perhaps ought to lead Londoners to wonder how many thousands of those visitors later return to, say, Paris or Beijing, to regale friends and families with stories of their experiences whose effect is that the very mention of London is from then on linked in their minds with the stains and odours of human excreta.

To avoid conflicts about whose responsibility it is to resolve this, perhaps we should all take on a share of it. On the surface it appears simple. On the one hand, a legal requirement should be introduced for local authorities to provide a bare minimum of free, accessible and hygienic public toilets, and the necessary resources be allocated them to do so. On the other, there should also be some manner of legal obligation on businesses and private organizations – restaurants, cafés, pubs, department stores – to offer the facilities, and these should be usable without shame or cost by anyone, regardless of whether or not they be paying customers.

As ever, the real challenge is the politics of this: it is hard to imagine responsibility being accepted either by a government which disdains human rights and the public interest in principle and is ideologically committed to their destruction, or by those businesses which operate to the same belief systems and insist that as businesses they have no obligations whatsoever other than to their own profit. We might predict then that the international image of London will become ever more drenched in urine until a substantial shift away from free-market capitalist culture is achieved, towards more socially responsible paradigms of what it means to be either a government or a business.

In the meantime there seem numerous efforts emerging as frustrated citizens go out of their way to pick up the burdens of these structural failings. Among them, the British Toilet Association has been campaigning for more and better public loos for almost twenty years, while researchers at the Royal College of Art have published both a design guide for publicly accessible toilets (very clear and illustrated, well worth a look) and a ‘Great British Public Toilet Map’, an open-data project which attempts to chart locations and information about public toilets in the UK. Also commendable are those local authorities and businesses which really have been making an effort: certain train stations which used to charge a fee for using the toilet, such as Victoria and Fenchurch Street, have now scrapped it and allow free access for anyone, while councils and businesses in some areas together operate Community Toilet Schemes by which the public can use the toilets on the premises of any of their participants.

This still falls short of the standard expectable of a global centre like London of course, but perhaps not all is lost. Once the more general free-market abolition of society has been reversed, these existing civic movements could become a valuable launchpad for the restoration of a public toilet network worthy of a respectable city.

The Grenfell Tower Disaster: the Noble Idea and the Non-Society

It should not have happened.

Words repeated thousands of times in the news this week, no less true for every repeat. But to think them, to agree with them, is one thing. To see the remains of Grenfell Tower for yourself is to find that to feel them is quite another.

It is not like seeing it on a TV screen. But then, seeing something that should not be never is.

The effect is sharpened by the local architecture. Kensington is a densely built-up suburb, and from many of its boxed-in streets there is no line of sight to the tower, or what remains of it.

Hence how it punches you in the face, when you glimpse it over the rooftops or framed in the sky at the end of a lane. Even in a warzone the sight would appal. Outside one it is all the worse for its incongruousness, least of all in the wealthiest ward of a modern international city.

 

It was chilling. The tower has been so utterly blasted by the flames that it is as though it has been not merely gutted but ripped into another dimension, a dark and twisted mirror of our own. A patch in the bottom left stands intact; the unblemished grey walls with windows still in place are a stark contrast, the only part of the structure to have resisted the forces that tore it from this reality. The rest has been left a mass of shades and shapes that do not belong in the world, punctuated only by flashes of fluorescent orange: firefighters who flit in and out behind the windows like solid spectres, combing through the ruin and no doubt witnessing things that will haunt them for the rest of their lives.

To think that each little square housed a home. The dreams, the pain and the love that each would have harboured as their occupants negotiated their daily struggles through this troubled country.

The hope, and the despair, snuffed out alike in final moments that no-one was there to witness, and no-one will know while still in this reality.

But the universe knows. Everything that happens, it records, and it remembers.

The tower stands in North Kensington, an ethnically and culturally diverse neighbourhood which we might generalize as a ‘low-income area’. And then, ten minutes’ walk to the south, you have streets like this.

Notting Hill and the Ladbroke estate emerged from the 19th Century redevelopment of this area as one of the wealthiest and most fashionable zones in London. And now, barely in the shadow of Grenfell Tower, it feels so many worlds away from the communities next door. Broad leafy terraces lined end to end with houses, mansions, plastered and pillared and terraced and decked in the kinds of architectural features that would send most people reaching for a dictionary.

We may wonder how many of those fancy houses were among those that opened their doors to the survivors of Grenfell Tower following the disaster – in the same moment as wondering how many are owned by corrupt tycoons and oligarchs far, far away and kept empty on purpose.

The effect is surreal. London has many rich parts and many impoverished parts, but their uneasy coexistence here in Kensington is surely distinct. It is a patchwork of concentrations of affluence and abandonment, which phase in and out of each other in the spaces in between like waves in the fabric of time and space, vying for expression. The Portobello Road market, which reflects that shifting character as it stretches from the Westway into the monied heart of Kensington, is one such kaleidoscope.

RBKC = Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

And now there is rage here, and so there should be. It should not have happened.

But it did, and so it joins a catalogue of atrocities through London’s history for which those kicked to the bottom of the social hierarchy have always paid the harshest price. Northern Kensington has long been a microcosm of this. Before sections of it were redeveloped and gentrified, the area was known for its potting, brick-making and pig farming, a hell of clay mines and slurries and gravel pits which the London historian Andrew Duncan, in his Favourite London Walks, calls ‘one of the most notorious slums in Victorian England. Somehow’, he observes, ‘all this squalor existed until the 1870s side by side with the middle-class suburb on the slopes of the hill above’. It seems the threads of the Kensington puzzle run some way back.

An old pottery kiln, from when ‘potteries and brickfields were established here amid some of the poorest housing conditions in London.’ Opposite it is Avondale Park, ‘then a vast pit of stinking slurry known as the Ocean’.

But the horror at Grenfell Tower has a distinctly modern dimension that none of the history, however important, suffices to explain. It is a dimension best captured by the MP David Lammy in his Channel 4 News interview a few days after the disaster, one of the rawest and most poignantly sincere you might ever see from a standing politician.

‘We need to live in a society where we care for the poorest and the vulnerable’, he says. ‘And that means housing. It means somewhere decent to live. It was a noble idea that we built…and it’s falling apart around our eyes.’

What is important here is that that ‘noble idea’, the welfare state, is not merely an economic safety net but rather an explicitly political concept. It was the outcome of a conscious decision, taken by the Labour Party government amidst the ruins of World War II, for a new kind of British society: a vision that rejected the rich-eat-poor heritage that has blighted London for countless generations. Its pathfinder was a character called William Beveridge, who declared he was going to slay five giants: Want (i.e. poverty), Disease, Ignorance, Squalor, and Idleness. And it would be the state, the government, that took the responsibility of standing in the front line of this battle, laying down the infrastructure of free healthcare, free education, social housing, railways, unemployment support, and everything else necessary to make this possible. Just as importantly was the example it set, the principles it embodied: Lammy’s ‘noble idea’ that society should care about the poor and the vulnerable and leave nobody behind.

In a country like the UK with its incorrigible ways of abuse towards the poor, this was a revolutionary accomplishment. And they knew it: they referred to it as building a ‘New Jerusalem’. And these visionaries would have had something to say about magic money trees too, standing as they were in blitzed-out cities with rationing still in effect and an empire crumbling around them.

Of course the New Jerusalem did not go entirely to plan, to say the least. But it laid a foundation, set a legacy, in values as much as in practice, until another revolution in the 1980s began to tear chunks off this infrastructure and hurl those values back out of reality.

This was the market fundamentalist revolution of Margaret Thatcher, and its goal was to abolish society. Its core principles were the opposite of those that built the welfare state: that people should not care about others, only about themselves.

That alone did not cause the Grenfell Tower disaster. Thatcher and her followers set about breaking up the welfare state because, objectionable as their logic may be, they somehow really believed that was best for the country. But they are no longer the pilots. They have since been replaced in the role by the only possible products of their ideology: people who believe in nothing, and whose every political act is calculated – typically with spectacular ineptitude – to serve their own shallow interests.

It may be no coincidence that many of these individuals, including David Cameron and George Osborne, the architects of the austerity project, are known as the Notting Hill Set and cut their teeth in these very realms of affluence that adjoin Grenfell Tower. It is on their account that the programme to strike down welfare state Britain has been transformed from a political movement into an entire culture: a pervading atmosphere of cruelty and contempt that squats upon all dimensions of British life today, by where the kindest and most courageous people are kicked where they struggle, damned as scroungers and skivers and unpatriotic saboteurs not only by the politicians but by the bulk of the mainstream media, their employers, their services, and the cloud of popular hatred that swells at every sign of difference or suffering.

A culture, in short, where it is normal not to listen, not to bother, and not to care – indeed to scoff in mockery at the very idea you are meant to. Society has been turned into non-society; the welfare state has become a hellfare state.

That is why the government, the council, and everyone else in a position to ensure the fire safety of Grenfell Tower so spectacularly failed in their duty in every possible way. Whether we want to talk about sprinklers or fire extinguishers or emergency exits or fire instructions or cladding is beside the point: it is reasonable to presume that if even a single one of any of the key aspects had been attended to, then the disaster could have been prevented, or at least mitigated so as not to result in the comprehensive catastrophe it became.

Only a perfect fuck-you culture could have caused the Grenfell Tower disaster. And perhaps only by it coming to a disaster like this, in the same period as a bombardment of terror attacks and political turmoil, could the country be shaken awake to just how perfect a fuck-you culture it has been reduced to. There is no doubt now that that awakening has started, at least in some segments of the population. People know it should not have happened, as they should. People are angry, as they should be. People are demanding justice, as they have every right to expect. And they are demanding that an atrocity like this must never happen again.

The only way they can achieve this is by vanquishing that fuck-you culture that now infests so many layers of British life: the government, the councils, the companies, the newspapers, and the very institutions of the welfare state it rots away from within. In its place, they must build a new culture where to not care is wrong and will be held to account.

Can they do it? Can they banish once and for all the very idea of the non-society, and make a renewed attempt to establish obligations of care as the driving force of life in this country? Can they bring back that noblest of ideas, the idea of society itself?

There is an opportunity now. It has come at an abominable cost, one that should not have been necessary and must never be paid again.