8 minute read
F. Outside the Box
OUTSIDE
THE BOX
Writers get inspiration from everywhere – for Travis Elborough, it is books from the Library’s shelves. Jessica Lack meets the hard-to-categorise author
At the turn of the millennium, Travis Elborough was working at the headquarters of Waterstones on an early version of its website, when he observed the new wave singer Gary Numan looking at a Smart car in the garage opposite. “Right there, I thought, ‘This is the future,’” he says, with a smile. The writer’s infectious enthusiasm for seemingly mundane connections has made him the author of several fascinating books on popular culture, among them Through the Looking Glasses: The Spectacular Life of Spectacles, A Walk in the Park: The Life and Times of a People’s Institution and The Long-Player Goodbye, a history of the LP. When I ask him how he decides on a good subject, he says it usually starts by pulling a random book from the shelves of The London Library. The author has been a member for more than 20 years, having joined at the suggestion of his editor while writing his first book, an essential pocket guide to Friedrich Nietzsche, which he began after being made redundant from Waterstones. His second book, The Bus We Loved: London’s Affair with the Routemaster was inspired by a volume of photographs he found taken around 1907 from the top of the first motorised bus. “I wondered if the images were deliberately blurred to make it look like they were in motion,” he says.
Published in 2005 – just as the hop-on, hop-off Routemaster was being phased out, having been a London fixture since 1954 – the book is an affectionate look at a reassuring presence: “To travel on a Routemaster with the remnants of its original décor intact felt like being conveyed about the city in the lounge of an illustrious, if by now gone-to-seed, club.” With its mix of nostalgia and social history, it became something of a cult book and won praise from the writer Ian Sinclair.
Today Elborough is talking to me by video from his flat in Stoke Newington. Slightly built and wearing National Health specs in the Harry Palmer style (naturally the urbane and laconic spy features in Through the Looking Glasses), the author looks every bit the pop historian. As we talk, I notice a couple of Penguin paperback whodunnits on the shelf behind Elborough, with spectacles on their front covers. Was Dorothy L Sayers also an inspiration? “Actually, they’re props for when I’m teaching over Zoom. They’re a lot more interesting than my kitchen,” he explains. I imagine he’s an entertaining lecturer, freewheeling between gothic literature, synth pop and René Descartes. In the space of five minutes, we go from discussing the early-19th-century Scottish botanist John Claudius Loudon who was “bankrupted twice and lost an arm”, to the medieval mathematician Ibn al-Haytham, via a drunken night spent eating jam roly-poly and custard with actor Tom Baker. I learn that Elborough is named after Travis McGee, the Florida beach-bum detective created by pulp fiction writer John D MacDonald, a character who lives on a boat named The Busted Flush. The author teaches creative writing at Westminster University where he advises his students to read old adverts in magazines. “Society is all there,” he says, and admits he is a devotee of the Periodicals section at The London Library.
His research has uncovered a smallpox hospital, a Cold War spy tunnel and the uninhabited Caribbean island of Redonda
“I spent a year looking at 200-year-old gardening magazines for A Walk in the Park.” Like Elborough’s other books, this entertaining history of our urban green spaces deftly navigates the subject’s evolution, in this case from medieval hunting grounds to today’s green living rooms, while interweaving references to The Great Gatsby, the culture of sunbathing and the dystopian visions of novelist JG Ballard. Such dexterity can make Elborough’s books hard to categorise. Where, for example, does his Routemaster book sit? In it, the author ruminates on the relationship between the big red bus and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, a memory of watching Return of the Jedi and the harmonicaplaying bus conductor Duke Baysee. Travel, design, social history? He concedes this can sometimes be a problem. However, he cites the maverick cultural historians Michael Bracewell and Philip Hoare as inspiration. “They came to Birmingham University when I was an undergraduate and had this amazingly wide-ranging conversation that flitted from Edwardian London to punk to Goldie. It was just like what was going on in my head.”
In recent years, Elborough has been haunting the Topography section in The London Library’s basement. The collection was an invaluable resource while he was researching his Unexpected Atlas series, five books about vanishing, improbable and “untamed” places. Each is beautifully illustrated by a cartographer and features photographs of the world’s strangest places, from ghost towns to subterranean realms and architectural oddities. He uncovered a smallpox hospital and a Cold War spy tunnel, a chapel in a sheer cliff side and the uninhabited Caribbean island of Redonda, with its wonderful proxy court of idiosyncratic grandees.
He took inspiration from old guide books, many of which can be found on the shelves near the Library’s entrance. “There was this period in history when anyone who had enough cash and could travel could write a book, regardless of how poorly executed it was.” Some, he says, “contain incredible period prejudices”, not least about the English coast and his home town of Worthing, a place that he has besmirched in the past: “It is hard to grow up somewhere where everyone else has gone to die.”
In 2010, Elborough published Wish You Were Here, which celebrated the egalitarian nature of UK seaside towns, with their bandstands and boarding houses and charted their decline as holiday-goers abandoned the changeable weather for package holidays in sunnier climates. Like Through the Looking Glasses, which was inspired by the author’s life as a spectacle wearer, there is an element of autobiography to the book. Not that he is a particularly nostalgic person, “but I sometimes wish I had my pre-internet brain back”. The London Library is a refuge from the rabbit holes of the digital world. “For a time, I used an old word processor as a way of avoiding being online, but then my smartphone would ring and…” he throws up his hands in resignation.
Currently the author is working on a film about London’s Soho with Madness frontman Suggs, “although the progress has been somewhat hindered by lockdown”, and looking forward to the publication of his fifth Atlas book, (the fourth won the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards Illustrated Travel Book of the Year in 2020). He is also relieved to be back in the Library after the upheavals of the pandemic. “It’s great to be able to take books home with you, but I really missed just wandering along the shelves and finding the most obscure things.”
What’s the strangest book he’s ever found? “It’s called Motopia,” he says, without missing a beat. Written by architect Geoffrey Jellicoe in 1961, it reimagines London as a series of motorways. “The city just disappears under a network of spiralling dual carriageways,” he says, “I find it odd that a man who lived in a very nice Georgian house on Parliament Hill was quite prepared to obliterate it all.” And Elborough is off again, making connections between Jellicoe and the novelist Alan Sillitoe, and revealing the little-known fact that Bram Stoker came up with Dracula in a nightmare after eating too much dressed crab with Henry Irving. •
Atlas of Forgotten Places: Journey to Abandoned Destinations from Around the Globe by Travis Elborough is out now (White Lion)
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