A Journey of Discovery

As a born and bred Londoner I am bound to say that my natal city is the greatest in the world. I fully realise how subjective this statement is, I doubt there is a person alive (or dead) who has managed to visit every city on the planet in order to make comparisons, and I am a particularly impoverished international traveller. However, I stand by what I say simply because London has everything I want and still has the power to surprise and excite me after half a century of living in the bosom of the Great Wen. I also feel as I grow older that the city feels more organic, and that I am part of it, whether this is the premature onset of senility or something more profound I do not know, but I love the idea that all that has passed here is just waiting to be resurrected by an inquisitive mind and that the knowledge to be gained will make me even more of a Londoner than I already am. This particular adventure started in the London section of Foyle's bookshop on the Charing Cross Road on a balmy August Saturday in 2010, I picked up a book call London Plaques by Derek Sumeray and John Sheppard and, as I leafed through the information packed pages it felt like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle was falling into place. I instantly purchased the book and repaired to the Angel public house on nearby St Giles High Street for a pint and a perusal. Like most Londoners I was aware of the blue plaques celebrating the lives and achievements of the capital's finest citizens, now I had in my hands a guide to all of these, and more; Plaques erected by organizations as diverse as the Dead Comics Society and the London Hellenic Society; and not only people, there are plaques commemorating places long gone, especially in the City of London, and these in particular have the power to bring the past alive; some1,800 plaques in total. I decided there and then that I would attempt to visit and photograph them all. My first two forays into the field were made using detailed itineraries compiled from the book planned to include all the plaques in any given area, but I found this approach strangely unrewarding so now I leave the book at home, using it only as a reference tool and just wander the streets photographing the plaques as I find them; using this method it will obviously take more time to visit all of the plaques on offer, but I am not in such a great hurry and, as the good doctor said: when a man is tired of London.......

Thursday, 18 November 2010

Mahatma GHANDI


Kingsley Hall, Powis Road E3 (London County Council)

This is where it all began. I was probably seven or eight years old when I first saw this plaque and even then I was keen to discover who this odd little man with the funny name was. By the time I was about 12 years old Kingsley Hall was unoccupied and semi derelict, I remember me and a few others managed to find a way inside. Unbeknown to us the last occupant of the hall was R D Laing a psychoanalyst who devised the Philadelphia Association, a treatment plan for schizophrenics which more or less gave them a free hand to express their innermost turmoil in any way they chose, the walls of place were covered with nightmarish paintings that even now over 40 years later I call still recall with total clarity; Munchian figures that conveyed the utter despair of the people who had painted them; I believe an adult would have had a hard time reconciling the feelings depicted in these images , as a 12 year old boy I felt troubled by them for a very long time. Needless to say this was the only visit I made to the inside of Kingsley Hall. R D Laing was considered a flawed genius by many of his contempories, others thought he was afflicted by a psychosis, whatever the case I think he is deserving of a plaque himself, but it seems the nature of his work and the questionable state of his mind have contrived to move his file to the bottom of the pile. Ghandi stayed at Kingsley Hall for 12 weeks in 1931 when he was invited to deliver a speech at the Round Table Conference. The Ghandi Foundation is based at Kingsley Hall in a room next to the "cell" occupied by the Mahatma during his stay, the interior of the cell has been restored to how it was when Ghandi stayed here, sparse and ascetic, a physical manifestation of his life. Kingsley Hall will always be a disturbing place for me, it seems to be an oddly disfunctional building; awkward, clumsy and even brutal in design; at odds with its surroundings; today it stands on the outskirts of a 1930s council estate but when it was built in the late 1920s I'm guessing it must have been surrounded by Victorian and Edwardian terraces. Having said that I find Kingsley Hall disturbing it is places like this that I love to seek out; a walk around the Georgian splendour of Bedford Square in central London will produce around a dozen plaques in five minutes, this is to be expected from such a fashionable locale, but it is in seemingly cultural backwaters that the tide of history can flow at its strongest and this is why such places will always have a special attraction for me.
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1 comment:

  1. Jonathan Lethbridge5 December 2010 at 20:10

    Unbelievably interesting! I've always noticed the blue plaques, never imagined that they had been documented. I won't buy the book, I'll just read this.

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