Moorcock on Preserving the Memory of London
Nice article from one of my favorite authors.
A call to preserve memories of London
By Michael Moorcock
There aren’t many pictures of my childhood London. To get a glimpse of the world I grew up in, I have to give microscopic attention to the backgrounds of English movies made between 1945 and 1955 in the hope of seeing the ruined South Bank in Hue and Cry or the remains of Wapping in Night and the City. If I’m willing to sit through hours of cockney stereotypes, I might occasionally catch a few metres of library footage shot through the windows of a tram with Sid James’s head in the way. My London is fleeting, mysterious, torn down or buried.
London was different up to 1940. In illustrated books, it often seems tranquil and quaint, full of lost churchyards and hidden courts. There were always places where the traffic noise dropped away and you could enjoy a bit of peace. That was before the firestorms blasted the East End into blazing fragments of people and buildings, when so much of that quaint tranquillity became heaps of rubble, tottering walls, fire-blasted windows, cut-aways of people’s private lives, their bathrooms and bedrooms, everything they’d valued, exposed to the hasty curiosity of the survivors.
Wartime London had been a malleable place in which you could leave home in the morning and find your street utterly transformed by the evening; where the house next door could become a pile of junk or your best friend could disappear forever. By 1945, when the bodies and the worst of the rubble had been cleared away, I see from those pathetic scraps of newsreels and old magazine pictures the London I loved and grew up in. It was in some ways a more innocent place. We hadn’t quite taken in the Nazi Holocaust, let alone the A-bomb. We were a bit bewildered by how, having won, we were somehow poorer than when we were losing. The London in which Orwell wrote 1984 was my first peacetime London.
I wouldn’t much want to live through that period again. Most of those films I give so much attention to were terrible, about keeping a stiff upper lip and knowing your place while facing down the chaos. We kept replaying that trauma for years. What had gone wrong?
Our general entertainment in that postwar decade was mostly dreadful and, like our styles, shrunken cheap imitations of what boom-time America was offering. It was a world with no representation in the physical world around me. My ruins have vanished, unfamiliar, often beautiful, buildings erected in their place, offering me few co-ordinates to calibrate my memories.
By the early 1950s, when I had my first job as a messenger for a shipping company in the City, I could take a bus or a train down to the docks and then walk for miles looking for the appropriate ship or customs office: grey cranes, redbrick warehouses, endless rust-grimed ships. I never had any idea of where docklands ended. Apart from the great shipping lines, banks and insurance companies, the City was still an area of small businesses. There were scrap-yards, independent stationers, booksellers, printers, chop houses, eel and pie shops, tea shops: a London whose variety and complexity you didn’t have to guess at.
Then there were the places where London was simply not – a few irregular mounds of grass and weeds with rusted wire sticking through concrete, like broken bones, exposed nerves. These parts of London could very easily be identified because almost nothing survived except the larger 17th- and 18th-century buildings such as Tower Hill, the Customs House, the Mint, the Monument. And, of course, St Paul’s, her dome visible from the river as you came up out of the delicious stink of fresh fish from Billingsgate Market, a snap of cold in the bright morning, and walked between high banks of overgrown debris along lanes trodden to the contour of the land. You had made those paths by choosing the simplest routes through the ruins. Grass and moss and blazing purple fireweed grew in every chink. Sun glinted on Portland stone, and to the west, foggy sunsets turned the river crimson. You never got lost. The surviving buildings themselves were the landmarks you used, like your 18th-century ancestors, to navigate from one place to the other.
Slowly the big brutal blocks of concrete and fake Le Corbusier flats began to dwarf St Paul’s and the Royal Mint, and the familiar trails disappeared, along with the alleys and yards, the little coffee shops and printers. Like an animal driven from its natural environment, I’d turn a corner and run into a newly made cliff. The docks disappeared with astonishing speed. One day the ships were shadows honking out of the smog and the next they were gone. Air freight and containers were replacing the old systems. Without our heavy exports we didn’t need ships; without the ships we didn’t need the docks.
The west London where I got my next job – in 1956 as a 16-year-old “junior consultant” at Harold Whitehead’s management consultants – is a lot easier to identify from 1950s Rex Harrison comedies. Almost everything was dark green and brass: motor cars, front doors, porters’ uniforms. Everything else was bright yellow (driving caps, cars, frocks). Smart young voices imitated Noël Coward or Gertie Lawrence and their owners buzzed about in MGs and Mayflowers. I worked for people rather like them.
For some reason, Jim Sandford Smith, the boss, liked the cut of my jib and made my main job to go the Times library twice a week to pick out books for myself and for him. The staff there were extraordinarily generous. They completed my education. They gave me my taste for good food and wine and introduced me to T.S. Eliot and Proust. I went through a fin-de-siècle phase, reading Oscar Wilde and a literary journal called the Yellow Book, and affected what I hoped was a pale and interesting look. I was regarded as a bit of an enfant terrible and they encouraged me to write. I hardly had to work at all. For a while it was always Maytime in Mayfair and spring in Park Lane. By the time I was 17, I was in Holborn, in the City again, editing Tarzan Adventures, a juvenile weekly where I’d sold most of my early work. But I’d added a lot to my social and literary education.
In Soho I had discovered jazz and skiffle and had played substitute washboard on the radio with the Vipers, who later became The Shadows. I’d cut a demo (which set my musical career back years) and hung out with writers and musicians such as Alexis Korner, Cyril Davies, Long John Baldry and Graham Bond, who introduced me to Howlin’ Wolf and Sonny Terry. I learned Woody Guthrie licks from Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and corresponded with Guthrie and Pete Seeger, who were effectively under house arrest as they were investigated by the House of Un-American Activities committee.
Soho was coffee bars and formica signs, formica table-tops. Formica hid all the old shop signs and looked at least superficially modern. Rock and roll, sex and drugs. Trad jazz became skiffle, and skiffle became blues or R&B. I augmented my living by playing guitar for a while in a whores’ hotel. There were no clothes in the shops. Just grey suits, tweed jackets and corduroys. We took old stiff detachable collars and wore them with thin black ties, a car coat, white shirt, trousers stitched tight to our legs. My children say I was a Mod. I say those were the only clothes we had.
In the early 1960s my digs were in North Kensington and Fulham, which had sustained a bit more of the Blitz and were full of poor immigrants. They were grey, dirty, hopeless and often violent. I did wonder why the posh bits of London were only what you might call lightly bombed and why the working-class suburbs were piles of ashy rubble. When Churchill, as he later explained, was sending back false intelligence about the Nazi strikes, suggesting that Streatham was the centre of our steelyards, he didn’t seem too eager to give the impression that Belgravia was an industrial beehive. But I don’t hate him for it. He did, after all, give me a lot to write about and a strong sense that nothing is permanent.
Around 1963 my wife and I moved to Colville Terrace in Notting Hill, where our next-door neighbour, a big knife-fighting whore called Marie, was regularly noisily arrested at about 2am, and where we had our two daughters in swift succession. One of my best friends was another young father, JG Ballard, who shared my frustration with the state of English fiction. We met often and our wives became good friends too. I took over New Worlds magazine, determined to bring some fresh conventions that Ballard, Barrington Bayley and I felt were needed to reinvigorate English science fiction.
My main contribution to this period of experiment was Jerry Cornelius, whose name was pinched from a greengrocer’s sign in Notting Hill. Like me, Jerry relished ruins. Unlike me, he enjoyed making more of them. Throughout that era we called “the 1960s” – which really ran from about 1963, with the Beatles first No 1 to around 1978 with Stiff’s second tour – we continued to experiment in almost every field and genre; and through the 1970s I frequently performed with Hawkwind and my own band the Deep Fix. We moved to a wonderful flat with a big leafy square behind it.
It was a wonderful time to have kids. I took them to music festivals and to little parks and museums, my secret boltholes like the Derry & Toms’ roof garden, where only old ladies met for tea after doing their shopping. None of these places had yet become self-conscious or been persuaded to exploit their “features”.
I knew we enjoyed a golden age that couldn’t last but I was determined we should get the most out of it. Even with strikes and hard economic times we had the first Notting Hill Carnivals, local open-air gigs and a general improvement in local morale, but we could already see the end coming. One afternoon I was in my garden when a liberal solicitor asked me if I was coming to a newly formed “gardens committee”. When I told him I wasn’t, he cheerfully informed me that that was my right. I knew what my rights were. I also sensed that this was definitely the beginning of the end.
By 1980 the roof garden had become a private club. While it was still possible to lunch there, its casual nature had changed. Slowly, I began to feel like a stranger in my own city. I had, of course, been part of the gentrification process but I didn’t like the way people from the country and the suburbs were beginning to displace the locals. I like my classes mixed. We sold up and moved to Texas.
In all those years I lived around the Portobello Road I learned that what people want more than authenticity is a provenance, a narrative. It wasn’t enough to sell a modern flowery chamber pot as “Victorian”, it had to be GKChesterton’s chamber pot. The developers and remodellers soon learned this lesson. The formica signs were stripped away and now old buildings were made to look older.
By the 1980s good, innovative writers such as Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd, all too aware of our need for authentic as well as virtual memory – and sharing my deep fascination for London – would meet in Clerkenwell and Earls Court to discuss our mutual sense that the city was being dismantled into a kind of Disneyland before our eyes. The media, particularly television, picked up on the idea and soon had created “London”, the character: golden-hearted London, whose dark spine was the Thames, whose dark soul was the Thames. This character appeared again and again, in all those sequels to famous Victorian novels or pastiches that spoke fruitily of Limehouse and Wapping.
By the new millennium, when the giant circus tent was erected on the Isle of Dogs, Ackroyd’s reaction was to play to this dark image, he was filmed for TV, lit from below, with a bearded Dickens impersonator trotting in his wake. Sinclair, however, was having none of it. The first of London’s psychogeographers, he headed for the M25, daring anyone who followed him to make something romantic out of the motorway cafés and discarded Big Mac boxes. While Ballard reflected on the curve of the Westway flyover mirrored in suburban reservoirs, Sinclair peered into the bays underneath, searching for the remains of the population.
The rise of psychogeography was in some ways an impulse to rediscover those old natural paths that I and others like me had trodden through the ruins, to find ways of rediscovering serious memory, something which Peter Ackroyd (with Chatterton), Alan Moore (From Hell) and Will Self (The Book of Dave) were searching out among the virtual ruins of a London that was becoming a shadow played out on the newly tarted-up walls of Notting Hill and Shadwell.
As well as the friends and relatives who have also become memories, we are equally dependent on the geography of our cities for the myths and rituals by which we live. Without conscious ritual, all we have left are buried tram tracks, some vague ideas of what still lies under the steel-and-concrete cladding and a few bits of film footage.
I have nothing against virtuality. We create virtual identities for London. We create them for ourselves. We seek options allowing us to survive and, with luck, be happy. Jerry Cornelius knows, as he strolls – in clothes that have just recently come back into fashion – through virtual ruins, virtual futures, that it’s the only way we’ll survive, as long as we’re fully conscious, so that when fashions such as Dickens World cease to satisfy the tourists, we’ll have another city standing by. I’m hoping for a London that neither swings nor sags, is neither grim nor gay, but rises defiantly, a fresh guarantee against the dying of our memories.