London Lives

Saturday was frustrating. It didn’t start out being frustrating. After listening to Saturday Live I managed to have a lovely bath and breakfast and be out of the door by 10.45. Early indeed.

The problem is the transport at weekends. Victoria line completely closed. Circle, Metropolitan, Hammersmith and City closed at random points. All these connecting arteries not really connecting. I hope the Olympics will be worth it.

And then the buses were diverted around the Square Mile because of the Lord Mayor’s Show. So, a combination of tradition and modernity conspired to snarl up a simple journey to the library to write.

When I got to the library to write, a power cut had snarled up the computers.

So, writing today was not to be and I was feeling philosophical about it by this stage. I chatted with an officer from the City of London police and established that yes, the buses were still diverted and what a bloody nuisance it all was. At 1.30 I gave up the ghost to go home.

There was relative sanity on the Piccadilly line.  Opposite sat a beautiful man asleep with his book open. And above him, part of the Poems on the Underground series, was this newly-discovered gem by Katharine Towers entitled The Way We Go:

the way we go about our lives
trying out each empty room
like houses we might own
eavesdropping for clues in corridors until

standing at a gate or attic window
seeing beauty in a flag of sky
we’re gone, leaving the doors open
all the lights burning

(copyright Katharine Towers)

Simple and beautiful.

I was very pleased to see this earlier today about Nathaniel Bryceson:
http://wcclibraries.wordpress.com/2010/07/21/nathaniel-bryceson-lives-on/

I wrote about his diary in my Research in Westminster post (7 Feb 2010)

Echoes of the East End, Venetia Murray (1989)

We get Maundy Thursday off work so I headed to Barbican Library to catch up on some reading and writing. This book was on the ‘Returned Today’ shelves (I always like to look at these shelves – you never know what you’ll find).

Echoes of the East End contains chapters from ‘ordinary’ people describing their lives in the East End of London in the early years of the twentieth century.  We meet girls who grew up on ‘The Island’ (area of housing demolished in 1970) in Clapton E5 and others who lived in Hoxton N1. This is an East End still receiving heavy immigration and a mix of communities finding their feet with ‘native’ Londoners (some of these a generation or two from elsewhere; some of them with deep roots to the area in which they lived).

Some of it is is grim in its description of grinding poverty, inevitable hunger and seemingly endless threats of violence. It seems clichéd to say that these tales are tempered with heart-warming tales of community and neighbourliness, but they are. And there are scholarships won to the local grammar school and birthday celebrations and street parties held on the occasion of King George V and Queen Mary’s Jubilee (1935).

There are also fabulous pictures and descriptions of work and church outings. Much as in the pictures at the Tate Exhibition (in my earlier post Disappearing London:1) these pictures tell us so much of the social history of the time and I sit and pore over the faces and clothes of those lined up for the picture.

Over the last few weeks I’ve expanded my living room by looking for other spaces in which to write. This has led me to those apparently unsung heroes: libraries. All the boroughs have a number of libraries, with a couple of larger ones in each of them. You used to have to live or work in the relevant borough to get a membership card, but no more! Now you only need a UK address to join any of them.

I have mentioned earlier the lovely reference libraries and writing spaces at Marylebone, Paddington and Westminster Reference Library (all part of City of Westminster Libraries). Now, I have added City of London Libraries to my list of Spaces. I spent some time at the Guildhall Library, which has a brilliant and extensive specialist collection about the history of London and is a great space in which to write: modernity among so much history. Lovely bookshop too; I bought a postcard of Fleet Street from c1905.

Similarly, the Barbican Library has a splendid London collection and a huge range of books covering hundreds of other subjects. The Barbican itself is intriguing (an iconic 1960s living space and arts centre built on the ruins of the bombed area of Cripplegate). You wander along the Moorgate Highwalk  to get to the arts centre and are entering a special concrete space.

The thing that’s struck me about all the different libraries is just how well-used they are. Westminster’s are busy on Sundays with teenagers doing homework and noodling on laptops. The City’s libraries have a broader range of people there at any given time than I had anticipated. So, you might need to wait for that desk or one of the computers. But this is a good thing, right? These are important public spaces that are being well-used by, well, the public. Long live it. It seems the libraries are not such unsung heroes after all.

I plan to investigate the Bishopsgate Institute next. These spaces are important.

Anyway, it’s nearly Easter. The weather is (inevitably) somewhat blustery and rainy. And the libraries are closed for four days now.

Now that I’ve been bitten again by the writing bug, it’s good to explore other writing spaces and to research ideas. So this week I joined Westminster Libraries (one of them is a good research library too). Off to lovely Marylebone to  collect my card and explore the facilities. The upstairs has an extensive research collection and study area and I sat for a while reading up on John Dickson Carr and locked room mysteries.

Then I hopped on the bus to Paddington to look in another of the borough’s libraries. All fab again. Both are in lovely old buildings. I shall look in the Charing Cross one and the Westminster Research Library this coming week or at the weekend (although I have an LSE lecture and a friend’s play on Saturday).

This is intriguing, too: Westminster’s Archives Centre is serialising an 1846 diary written by Nathaniel Bryceson, a Victorian clerk in Pimlico. His mother was born in 1797 and Nathaniel himself died in 1911. That’s just two generations crossing a very significant period of time. Incredible. I look forward to reading the entries.

When I left the library in Paddington, the day had become suddenly spring-like.

Gloucester Terrace, London W2

Porchester Square, London W2