Walking the M62

Sacrilising the city

I'm at my usual London blog-spot on Tottenham Court Road having just deposited a large cheque in the Cooperative Bank on Southampton Row. A generous bursary from Ecclesiastical Insurance towards my M62 venture. The friendly little awards ceremony and lunch took place in the Chapter House of St Paul's Cathedral and naturally, given that the whole nature of the project which Ecclesiastical are supporting is about urban walking, I journeyed there on foot from Euston.

Great read on the train journey down, Robert Bond's introduction to the work of London's great footsore literary fetishist Iain Sinclair. Whereas I came to Sinclair, like many people, through his mainstream London texts like Lights Out for the Territory and - especially - London Orbital, Bond reminds the reader that Sinclair is first (and possibly still foremost) an underground poet. I also found revealing something that to cleverer readers may be obvious - Bond's suggestion that Sinclair's poetic method of finding signs in the city where others only see stones, of making mystical connections between urban sites which others just could not link - this is a work of sacrilising the city. And I guess I hope my project can do a bit of that, too.

I sit now in the place where another great sacriliser of the city used to roam - William Blake, wanderer of the fields behind Tottenham Court Road, with whom Sinclair may be seen to have quite a bit in common. En-route to St Paul's my walk took me past Newgate, marked now by a plaque which made me momentarily wonder why it had gone and what had happened there at what was once, I guess, a pivotal passing-point into the city.

My quest to enjoy my free time in London led me to do some pilgrim searching - around some underground bookshops on the Sinclair trail and ending up at Bookmarks where I discovered Judy Cox's William Blake: The Scourge of Tyrants, a small book which 'cuts away all the romantic and reactionary drivel written about him, and reveals him as a prophet of liberation - political, artistic and sexual liberation.' [Paul Foot]. Blake can't be too easily placed among the ranks of those Sinclair calls the reforgotton, authors whose urban outpourings have been left outside the canon of London writing, because so much has been written about him, and more will come in this 250th anniversary year. But in attempting to re-member the whole Blake, to recover crucial aspects of the man which have nevertheless slipped from the canon, Cox's is a good and valuable project.

And in that book on Blake I find a reference to Newgate - site of the climax of the Gordon Riots in 1780 when Newgate Jail was burned and the prisoners freed. Blake was one of the ringleaders of this 'proletarian' attack on a major institution of the 'imperial ruling class', the first of its kind in London's history. I tremble now to think that in simply journeying from Newgate back to here (Holburn - High Holburn - St Giles, stopping only to gaze at the stock of Shervingtons the tobacconists) I may have retraced the steps of Blake on that fateful day, clothes scorched, smoke in his wild hair, revolution in his eyes.

I don't quite know what to do with that knowledge, nor do I quite see how it relates to present-day Newgate with its massive sites of international finance, nor contemporary Tottenham Court Road, its internet cafes and audio showrooms a buzzing global marketplace. Maybe these imperfect connections, made on foot, are an encouragement that other spirits are still at work in the city, that hidden, reforgotten works are still being made and though they will always be outside the canon, they are there to be discovered in the city's details.

First bit of kit for the road

When I was a student journo working on Gair Rhydd I bought myself a Walkman which recorded as well as played back. It saw some good service - interviewing the likes of The Housemartins' Paul Heaton and Norman Cook (later Fatboy Slim), the classical guitarist John Williams and the Everest adventurer Chris Bonington, plus many NUS and local politicians and campaigners.

I kept it for years as I continued doing freelance work back home in Liverpool while signing on, but as that work faded in the shadow of the nine-to-five, I used the Walkman less and less, and mostly for listening to music while in the bath. Which probably explains why one day years later, thinking I might have a use for the recorder again, I rediscovered it in a fatal condition - it had rusted up.

The walk will require a voice recorder, to capture the rich conversations I hope to have with various folks en-route and help me translate them to text. And the funding for the project has been quite generous. So after Christmas I decided to invest in my first bit of kit for the road - an Edirol R-09 WAVE/MP3 Recorder. Jeanette, interviewing me for a documentary about Liverpool, introduced me to this ultra-portable and lightweight little box of tricks and the trade reviews are positive. So today mine arrived, all the way from Treppendorf. And it is indeed very good.

So, here's my first recording (there won't be too many of these online, I promise), me reciting today's reading from Growing Hope, which is a great prayer by Tom Gordon: [.mp3] [text downloadable here].

Going places in 2007

The first thing I did in 2007 was to complete the jigsaw I'd started on Christmas Day, of an OS map of Liverpool with my house at the centre (thanks Linda). Interesting reflecting on how I approached the task, not being a jigsaw person usually, but definitely a map person:

1. I started with the River Mersey: mainly as the swathe of gorgeous clear blue which the OS generously use to indicate our old grey waterway made the jigsaw pieces on the Mersey the easiest to identify in a box full of urban-industrial details;

2. Next, I took the motorways: blue again, and so familiar in their shape (M57 arching anticlockwise around the city edges, M62 approaching cautiously from the east, prompting Epiphanies, stopping short in the Broad Green suburbs);

3. Then it was place names, identifiable features which guided me. Not always ones I know well but ones which have for whatever reason stuck in my mind - Southdene, Woolfall Heath, Windy Arbor, Waddicar: places I've never been but somehow know where they are.

4. I was struck by my ignorance of some road numbers and routes: and the leisurely pursuit of doing this jigsaw has educated me about, for instance, the way the A506 links ancient Walton Church with overspill Tower Hill, and the way that the A580 East Lancs splits somewhere near here, one branch ending at Goodison Park and the other at the hilltop T-junction joining Breck Road with Everton Brow where there are wondrous views of the city centre below.

5. I was also struck by how the places I know best were among the last pieces I completed: perhaps because the city centre is reduced to a complex mulch of roads on this particular map, and suburban Crosby bears no obvious identifying marks. Or perhaps because I was saving the best till last.

2007 may be the year when I take one jigsaw piece at a time and let each one guide me on an exploration of that particular area. I just discovered the great potential in this by selecting, at random, this piece, which turns out to be a fascinating bit of Aintree featuring the old Vernons Pools complex, sections of the Trans-Pennine Trail and the Liverpool-Ormskirk railway line, the shopping park where I guess today hundreds of people will be hunting for bargain beds, part of the Leeds-Liverpool Canal and part of Aintree Racecourse which the canal crosses. Above the canal there's a housing estate with a church in it, and the road the church is on is Altway, where I had my first-ever job interview 29 years ago.

So a journey in this map piece will involve nosing around the old Vernons site to see what's going on there now, exploratory wanderings around the boundaries where commercial site and canalside meet, a personal pilgrimage down Altway (which I've never been back to since 1978) and of course, attempts to discover what the Canal Turn looks like out of season and from excluded zones.

There are 255 pieces in this jigsaw. As you can tell, I'll be really going places in 2007.