SENSE OF THE CITY: LONDON A WRITERS' PERSPECTIVE Sense of the City: London is an inspiring design project that aims to open up a discourse about the urban landscape using multi-sensory experiences.
A set of design activities involving the public took place in September 2014, enabling people to map their own perception of the Smithfield area through experiential activities utilising the senses. Writers used the participants’ experiences as a starting point for their own re-imaginings of the location. For more information visit: cargocollective.com/senseofthecitylondon facebook.com/senseofthecitylondon
The writers are: Olivia Armstrong Cass Bonner Lou Clement Winnie M Li Sobin Lim Melody Vaughan
THIS CITY
HOMECOMING
BY MELODY VAUGHAN
BY CASS BONNER
A gift to me, this city. And here is where I will build my home, down lanes I can’t quite see, in spaces where the sun is fleeting. A tree, you see. Near a smudge of blue, warm bricks surrounding, inviting.
She sits on the low stone wall and closes her eyes in the soft a unpleasant. It just is. She analyses it, peeling back its layers to cooked meat from the fans of artisan food kitchens exhaling i alley itself. This is the sensory signature of area – the smell of The alley is secluded. She felt that she was intruding when sh where City-bound traffic rumbles by. Once she’d walked into blind to their surroundings, blind to the alley where she sat.
I run my hands everywhere. Dust on my hands, my worn out hands, from touching this place.
She grew up in these streets. They were her stamping ground place. This is her heritage. But coming back, she feels like an unfaithful, forgetting herself, discovering herself, in a place as
So I rest, remembering, hotel carpets and clean sheets, saloon bars and lost letters. Visit me, if you can. You’ll find me if you look for the signs, of picture framers (not actual size). In a half moon court, past the liquorice church, let the quiet draw you nearer.
She opens her eyes and watches the nurses. The smell of thei sitting and talking in the sun soon, leaning against the low wa this city? A heritage had been handed to her at birth and she
She’s been away – off grid. Her adopted home for the last thr No time to think about the grey streets of London. She’d foun get there for her to find? She’d forgotten almost everything e in her body, in the present, inhabiting very muscle she used in butcher’s boots and red butcher’s hands.
She closes her eyes again and wonders if he will come. Will it days spent – hers at school, his at the market? Will he have fo Dad’s girl. All he had left in the world. Was this why she went She’s been a dancer while she’s been away – someone who d
The nurses laugh. They drop their cigarettes to the ground an choreography now. They walk past her. She envies the man an conversation reach her – cut out collage pieces of hospital life don’t look at her once. It’s as if she isn’t there. She already fee
She looks at her phone. He’s not late yet. She’s early. Beyond shells – the hybrid chimera buildings – historic exteriors scoop carrying their briefcases.
Will he come? She feels a small girl’s need growing. Will he co the alley, away from the suited exodus, the other entrance fro
WEST SMITHFIELD BY WINNIE M LI I. He’d answered an ad at Smithfield Market. A single sheet of white A4, black computer print in bold:
Lamb & Beef Cutter Required £ 350, mornings only Good butcher, needed 3-4 mornings a week.
Drifting in from Yorkshire, where his uncle’s farm had closed, he’d found himself in London. Had to be jobs here, all these artisanal markets, free-range poultry and grass-fed beef. We love and pamper our Aberdeen Angus cows before we cut them up into sirloin, brisket, topside. Smithfield wasn’t one of those markets, but he felt more comfortable here. Men working with meat, silent, scraping and cleansing and slicing the flesh, arranging it on display — none of this aimless chit-chat with posh wanna-be chefs, middle-class mums. Just bare hands on raw flesh, the familiar stench of the meat, close and fetid but not unpleasant. Animals freshly killed, heavy legs hauled up on metal counters, the red gleam of muscle marbled with fat, the glistening blue organs, slimy to the touch. Feel for that weak spot in the joint, just hold it firm, push the blade through, hear the crunch and click of bones as it gives way. Satisfaction. Pools of dilute blood washed away down the drain. Pavement made clean again, glistening in the sun. He’d start at 2:00 in the mornings, in the dark silence of the city. And by now — when he looks up at the old Victorian clock in its filigree of wrought iron, when the hands on that clock read 11:00 — he can bunk off. Emerge blinking into the sunlight. Stepping onto the street, he feels the waft of fresh air on his skin, welcome after the thick, carnal stink of the market. On the circular green of West Smithfield, he sits down, lights up a cigarette. Watches everyone in this temporary refuge. Other people, other lives — completely ignorant of cuts and joints and bones, the price of shank, the weight of ribs. Across the green, there’s a slim young woman in all-blue hospital scrubs. Seen her here before. Must work at St. Bart’s, her rectangular security tag dangling on her chest, too far away for him to see. He’d like to get her attention one day, but what do you say? Hi, I cut meat for a living. You? But not today — she is standing up, finishing her cigarette. She walks way from him, back toward the hospital, and he watches her go.
II. She needed that cigarette, even this early in the day. Already feeling the drag of the fluorescent lights, leaching the life out of her, hours upon hours with the overhead lights blaring into her eyes and no escape. Five weeks at Cardiothoracic here. Better than A&E.
III. He stumbles ou his skull, enoug the crowds of p
The cool of the Here at least, she wouldn’t have to deal with teenage gang stabbings. Or nightlife casualties: leering men who’d gotten into drunken fights, or young women with mascara running down their faces, who’d fallen over on precariously high heels and turned an ankle. An ecstasy trip gone wrong. Party people hysterical and sobbing. Or the carnage of auto accidents, cyclists crushed by a hasty drunk driver. Lives almost snuffed out by sheer carelessness.
One too many
It had been fine tongue was wri and synthetic p
No, Cardiothoracic was almost a relief from the frantic hell of A&E. It was methodical compared to that chaos, still tense, but much quieter.
It was enough t lost them. Nine
She’d become used to seeing a chest cavity opened up, the patient’s heart still beating, dutiful. She watched as the surgeon gently poked and prodded at what lay inside, all of them leaning over, observing. She’d held patients down while the gaping cut was sewn together, even sewn the stitches herself, needle and thread puncturing flesh, back and forth over the cleft, securing it in place.
He’s pushed his him. So to get building… Are dark.
You forget these are individual lives, humans. They become just bodies, flesh, a case to be treated. This morning, a worried patient had clutched frantically at her arm, and a nurse had to help her get him off. Now, she wants to shake off the imprint of that, scrub away the unwanted feel of skin on skin — and she hates herself for thinking that of her own patients. What is this city turning her into? Here in the natural light of day — away from the fluorescent lights, the blank monotonous hallways — she closes her eyes and listens. At first, just the incessant beeping of a reversing ambulance. But she listens closer, and there’s the occasional chirping of a bird in a nearby tree. If she breathes in, there’s the smell of grass and pollen, a handful of flowering bushes beside her in this circular island of green.
On Long Lane, patch of park o more out of the dark doorway.
Into that entran old one? Shutt read a sign in th
The Priory Chu
And he wants n solid stonework bumpy, real, an
If he were to ea She wonders when she’ll manage to leave tonight. Hopefully it won’t be like those other nights. Her, hurrying to Farringdon to catch the last Tube, and the queues already starting to build up around the nightclub, the drunk people milling outside the bars. The thought of this makes her even more tired.
11:10 am, and she already feels wrecked.
But this is enou
The thrum of th against the wal eternal night sk
autumn sun. While she waits she notices again that there is an under smell to this place. It’s not pleasant or o examine its component parts – fresh tobacco smoke from the just-lit cigarettes of two nurses on their break, into the alley, raw meat from Smithfield’s carcasses. Then urine, an acrid slap to the senses, the top note from the her home. She’s been away long enough to be able to notice it again. he first stepped into it. There is a church hush about it, an invisible membrane separating the alley from the street it, she felt protected and watched the people who walked past, not glancing sideways, focused ahead or within,
d. Her grandfather worked here, her father, uncle and cousin still work here. They are all part of the fabric of this outsider. Even the alley she was afraid to step into, as though she was intruding, as if the area knew she’d been s far from here in every sense as it was possible to be.
ir cigarettes makes her want to smoke. The sound of their conversation makes her long for company. Will she be all of the old church, casual as any Londoner? Will she ever again carve out a small life for herself from the bricks of e’d cast it off, like an old, too-familiar coat. Now she felt naked without it.
ree years demanded all of her attention. It’s colour, the urgent beauty of its light and the people who embraced her. nd parts of herself in places far away – Mexico, Chile, Argentina. What were those parts doing there? How did they except what was immediately in front of her. That’s what it did – living and dancing in a place like that. She had to be n order to perfect choreographed movements. No room for nostalgia about London, her dad’s bloody apron, white
t be like it used to be, her and him, sitting down to brown tea and chocolate digestives, swapping stories of their orgiven her for going so far away for so long without writing, for breaking their bond and his father’s heart? His girl. away, to climb out from under the bloody apron and the smell of raw meat and find who she was away from all that? danced. ‘Sorry Dad,’ she’d written – but only in her diary. ‘Sorry for abandoning you.’
nd tread on them, moving in unison, as if choreographed themselves. She sees almost all movements in terms of nd the woman their uniforms, their identity tags swinging at their necks, their sense of place. Fragments of their e. ‘If you think that’s bad you should come to a cancer meeting.’ ‘He doesn’t wear a ring. Not everyone does.’ They els unreal in the alley, as though the bulk of her was left behind in Mexico City.
the alley the epic journey home for office workers has begun. They have come out of modern offices with antique ped out and refilled with desks and computers. Men and women in suits are passing, talking on their phones,
ome and hug her, enclose her in his father’s arms? Someone catches her eye – a movement at the other entrance of om the market side. It’s him. He’s there. ‘Dad!’ she calls, standing, running towards him.
PLEASE RESPECT OUR NEIGHBOURS BY LEAVING QUIETLY BY OLIVIA ARMSTRONG 38 Cloth Street, EC1 October 2014. Dear M, Once, at the beginning, when we first met, about a thousand years ago, you asked me to show you the city. Typical me. I had to wait until now and what is left? The sparrows that once foraged all around the edges of the market, moving with the horses as they galloped over Giltspur Street, have gone. Starlings no longer darken the skies. Birdsong is replaced by the electrical vibrations, steel clashing, high pitched, low thrums of progress. The buildings have grown taller since then and some have vanished. When we are inside, how often do we think of the wanderers going by outside, spinning that city dust, the beat of the heat of the city, pulsating, dancing along to the siren call and siren wail of the far distant land of their heart’s desire. All the heartache of the world can be crystallized in one moment by a lit window watching the shadows moving inside. Last night, throughout the night my thoughts lay scattered upon the pillow. I live here now in a small room, nestled like a swallow on the second floor. Just head down that passage-way, look up - a little higher - by the sign of the sun, and there - that is my window. It overlooks the swinging sign. On a good day, I see the sun and on a bad - only the clouds. My room has a beautiful carpet and I tread carefully so as not to crush the tiny red roses. You might see me in the darkness illuminated by my unshaded lamp, framed as an anchoress in her cell. You should be here in the middle of the night, when the sun is yet to rise and the half moon is rocking to and fro upon its horns. You should really be here and take a walk with me, past the mumbling men gathered on the corners swaying to love songs from memory. And I can show you where 27 gentle cats unveil their softness. And I will hold you upon my shoulders so you can see the ribs of the church and heaped up against the window panes, the stained glass saints shivering their prayers amidst the scattered bones. Come with me. There is more than two hours of daylight left. I loved you once as the sunlight loves your skin. I would follow as you would follow the passage of the sun moving from alley to alley trying to outrun your shadow until those backstays rays brought twilight. I felt the turning of the earth that day. I almost fell off the edge of the pavement.
ut of the nightclub, wanting nothing more than to be free of the hot press of bodies, the throb of the house music in gh to make him puke. He pushes his way up the stairs, endless stairs, so many of them — and out the entrance, past people waiting to get in.
e night air washes over his clammy skin. He breathes in and tries to steady himself. pills.
e at first — some girl he hardly knew was dancing with him, her fingers stroking the back of his neck, later her ithing in his mouth. And suddenly he realised, he had no idea who she was — only that she smelled heavily of pizza perfume and Red Bull.
to make him sick — all he wanted to do was get out of there. Where were his friends anyway? He seemed to have e circles of Hell spiralling down into the depths of the earth, and here he was, suffocating at the very bottom of it.
s way up to the surface now. Is standing, gulping the night air, and notices the dead-eyed security guards watching away, he keeps going on, past the meat market — Are the lights on in there already? Figures heading into the people actually going to WORK at this hour? Towards the broad, empty pavement that stretches south into the
, the street is empty, except for a couple making their unsteady way home, mumbling. And he walks on, past a quiet on his right. The hospital up ahead — more lights on, and he turns away. He wants something else — more hidden, e way, somewhere where no one would ever find him. To his left, an ancient, half-timbered facade lurches above a And he thinks: There. That.
nce, like a mouth, the shadows of ancient buildings overlapping. Up ahead — isn’t there a church here? A really tling along pavement — and yes, there it is. Some relic from another era, tucked away down this alley. He strains to he dark.
urch of Saint Bartholomew the Great. In the close, among the shadows, it smells old and damp and forgotten here.
nothing more than to touch the wall of the church. To touch it — not sweaty, moving human flesh — but cold, k— the smooth faces of flintstone, set in an uneven jigsaw against each other. Putting his cheek to it, the wall feels ncient — a bleak invitation from another era.
at it, it would taste like licorice.
ugh. Just to touch the wall of the church, here in this silent, dark alleyway.
he nightclub is a million miles away, half a millennia away, centuries from now. As he sinks onto the ground, leaning ll, he is grateful for the pavement beneath his body, and the medieval stonework against his skin, and the mute, ky that hangs above him, unjudging.
The city is warmer than me. Smithfield stone, concrete, asphalt, soaks up the short wave radiation and stores the warmth. On these warm autumn nights, it releases it slowly, so it is never cold. The wind hits the corner of Suncourt Passage then turns and sweeps along until the leaves rustle, rise, and fall once more and land at your feet like confetti for the never wed. Everyone going along the street overtakes me as I stop and wait and look. They clatter along so fiercely I wonder if they will fall off their shoes and where their life takes them to be filled with such busyness. I flee. The cab driver is waiting for a fare. I can hear him down below. I was always alone. When we would meet, everyone else dissolved, you said, as though I repelled all human contact; like the Smithfield stone that people couldn’t bear to touch. I once thought that London was where love happened, whilst the suburbs slept, but now the telephone boxes are piled with rubbish and the gloss of history has licked the stones repeatedly until no one wants to touch anything anymore, let alone each other. Out in the sodium shadows or the neon reflections from the café we can find something and if it isn’t love, it is still something to pick up and keep in our glass bottles alongside the sunlight and the siren wail and the liquoricey tang of the blood soaked cobbles. Keep all these things and treasure them. They are really all we have. For we are the air people, without roots, desolate spores from the moss creeping along the churchyard wall - flying up and away, never to be caught, sailing on the slipstream. Tomorrow we will be far from London and in two weeks in South America and then much further… When you are next in London perhaps you can visit? I won’t be there but these words are the footsteps you need to follow. All maps of the city are really maps of the human heart. You won’t get out without getting lost. Anything might happen. When I pray, I pray to St Bartholomew and like you- this harsh city wind has stripped me of my layers. I shed my skin under its touch like the dust from a moth. Pray for him Saint Bartholomew, under the fig tree meet him again and take him in your arms. He is lost to me and though he cannot feel you as he walks by the streets that carry your name carry him, bear him up. Protect him. This life is only for two to three years anyway. One day again, I’ll pack a bag and leave an unfinished life and say goodbye to no-one and I’ll walk out down Long Lane under the bridge and I’ll be gone and then London will move on without me. We are all survivors of shipwrecks. Sun is sliced by stone. Love, Ox
LONDON'S TIMEBANK
LISTEN-SCENE 1,2,3,4
BY LOU CLEMENT
BY SOBIN LIM Scene 1
In London it is not unusual to be a stranger in most places. Invariably late, lost, busy, you pass through or under; with fast-paced treads your only connection. Here, London’s ancient boundary walls have long since been overcome and the protection it gave is no longer needed. Instead the city is a phantom-like space; at once full and bustling and then empty with a dusty residue covering every surface. The new day breaks, the first to work in the hours before dawn are the butchers of Smithfield. Delivery trucks hover and move into action with routine ease and splashes of blood on the pavement relate their quiet, fresh cargo. Then the office light and the tourists arrive, filling the church and its surroundings. The hospital is always on the clock, whether it’s the delivery of babies, the regular footfall from shift changes, or weary and worried visitors; its lights stay lit, its work seemingly eternal.
When you are new somewhere Stop on the street. Ask For Nothing. Look, smell, taste, feel. It furnishes you. An introduction from a woman recently arrived to London, she speaks to an organiser of Sense of the City. “I didn’t know anything about the area. With all the things I’ve had to do for moving to a new country I haven’t had a chance to spend any time anywhere, or relax. You have been my tour guide today. It’s an amazing place to be. You know, it’s like when you think of your home – somewhere you really know well – and all the maps you build in your head from where you went and what you did – knowing all those places makes you feel at home – it’s like jigsaw pieces coming together. We spoke to some builders; they said they have found bodies – graves, probably from the plague. They are building on top of them”. The hospital is very old, the oldest, and the church has been side by side for more than 500 years. There is so much to see. Her expression clouds over. Wherever you are from, hospital corridors are inescapable. She pauses, squints with the sun’s arrival in between the buildings and shining into the cobbled lane. “It’s such a lovely, sunny day”. The first leaves of autumn are skating around, nearby a road sweeper scoops up each one. She finishes, “I feel like you have to remember to take time to get to know a place otherwise, you’ll feel alone. Lonely. A stranger”.
My questions, Your carrier bags, My chatter, Your car engine.
Scene 2 His bicycle chain, Her footsteps, His jokes, Her laughter.
Scene 3 Your singing, Your accent, Your silence, Your singing.
Scene 4 His breeze, Her silence, His leaves, Her whispering.
London: the area of Smithfields, St Bartholomew’s and surrounding Sit. Courtyards, cobbles. My eyes closed. Hooves sound and pass, Wraith. I reach for it. The past settles on you in these streets, like walking through an early morning fog, it changes and limits your view. The streets have seen public hangings, flayed bodies dragged through the streets, the mess and noise of the cattle market. Nearby, there is an ancient church with walls feet deep, and windows barred and locked. It is a protected resource. Today, an ornate, neglected courtyard is surrounded by disparate hospital buildings that disturb the planned symmetry. The hospital was a renaissance investment; it has housed and healed the sick and vulnerable since the 12th century. It does not bend under the burden. Close your eyes and stand to its right, the flecks of the great fire were held back along the edge of its building. Here, from the tips of your toes to the ends of your hair, the remnants of the past will make themselves known. And beneath its dust and bullet-hole buildings there is always another story to be told.
For more information about the writers please visit: cargocollective.com/senseofthecitylondon
Olivia Armstrong
Cass Bonner
Visiting the hospital with Dad: Oncology clinic, St Bartholomew’s Hospital Not Alice, or Hell. I push you up the stairwell For hope, or the end.
Lou Clement
We used to decant wine and now they decant their poison in your thin veins. You, who held us above your head, and walked up the stairs when we were just showered and wrapped in towels, my Dad was strong as an ox. You will not be withered here, this hospital and ward have become an add-on to you, an ectopic growth. I wish we could lance it off. Everything looks worn, hidden in the interior of this old and crumbling building, a busy waiting room, and at the helm one or two experts seeking to treat and heal. Then we go to x-ray, bloods, MRI, CT; the meaning to glean from being transparent and lit on the inside. While I wait for you I walk, I find the cloister café in the church, away from the rain, and into a room full of incense, the heavy stone framed windows, somehow take me a little away from this reality. I feel the serenity that its silence and age brings.
Winnie M Li
Sobin Lim St Bartholomew’s the Great Codex, third shelf, left. The shelf belongs to the tree, Fourteenth century.
Melody Vaughan In the church there is a nook with a worn step, which if you stand on it, you can travel back in time. What you see and feel, when you stand there, is only through the form of those who have stood where you are. It may be the sodden, woven hemp skirt of a regular worshipper; the heavy embroidered cotton of the Rector traversing the pulpit before his sermon or the brief hop of a child’s leather soles. Nowadays, only visitors or tourists seem to find it during their endeavours to experience all that they see. But if you find it, you will want to come back to it again. This stone house of God has survived wars, fires, and all the time deep beneath it the river flowed. Nearly 1000 years before, a stream ran broad across the ground, and now beneath your feet the buried tributary, drains to the South, and the strong currents of the Thames. Put your head to floor and you will hear its pulse, ever rushing.
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