A walk into the grey soul of London

A walk into the grey soul of London

01 March, 2011
by: Tom Jeffreys

Tom Jeffreys delves into the unknown narratives and hidden histories in and around Finsbury and Clerkenwell.

Psychogeography is a funny thing. Developed in the 1950s by Guy Debord and popularised in recent years by writers like Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd, the notion of what it actually is has now become somewhat diluted and confused – but then I suppose that always happens when a hitherto subversive activity enters into mainstream consciousness. To some, pyschogeography is a playful game of Surrealist nonsense; to others a strategy for personal interaction with the urban environment. For some it revels in the mystical and the occult, and for others it's a deeply political (generally Marxist) activity, ingrained with a righteous social rage.

Generally though, it involves walking around a (usually urban) environment, exploring nooks and unknown narratives, hidden histories and stories in order to generate a reappraisal of the city around us. It's an engaged, engaging stroll basically – something well understood by Robert Kingham, whose Museum of London-commissioned psychogeographic walk, entitled 'The Grey Soul of London' makes for a very pleasant Saturday afternoon of ale and stories.

Billed as a walk across Finsbury – that kind of no man's land between Angel and Clerkenwell – the afternoon kicks off with a drink at the Harlequin pub, just a two-minute walk from Spoonfed Towers, incidentally. From there we amble around the local back streets, stopping from time to time at various pubs around Roseberry Avenue, Exmouth Market and down towards Clerkenwell.

Robert is an engaging guide, mixing lengthy quotations from Welsh mystic Arthur Machen with historical facts, snippets from Victorian authors with personal anecdote and contemporary information. We're introduced to an amazingly entitled play, The Lawyer, the Jew, and the Yorkshireman, which when debuted at Sadler's Wells theatre in 1825 was apparently met with “unbridled risibility”. We're shown evidence of policemen's graffiti (no, it's not a euphemism) and a hidden World War Two bunker that I must have walked past a thousand times, and never noticed. Underground sewers, bawdy tales and strange characters all emerge from the cracks in London's history – cracks painstakingly explored and entertainingly opened up by Robert Kingham.

Compared with my previous first-hand experience of psychogeography – a drift walk around the 2012 Olympic site back in 2009 with contemporary artists Laura Oldfield Ford and Robin Bale – this is a very different experience, and a very different crowd. Then, a circle of scruffy, radical art types watched entranced as, with rage-filled eyes, Bale enacted a strange ritual that involved pouring Special Brew on the ground and growling, “They never had us in mind”. Now, a group of more middle-aged bookish folk smile, listen and potter about.

One moment encapsulates the difference: as we stand on Exmouth Market, Robert begins to tell us about the street's oldest building, when he's interrupted by an old homeless man who's clearly bent on mischief. It's all good-natured for a while, until one of our fellow walkers steps in and asks him to leave. The homeless man quickly loses his rag and we retreat to a nearby pub in rather undignified fashion.

For me, this seems ironic given that many of the tales on the walk are specifically about just these kinds of drunks, fighters and socially rejected ne'er-do-wells. When these characters are in the past, safely distanced, we can all enjoy such things – when they confront us in the flesh it's a different matter altogether. Where Bale and Oldfield Ford would have directly addressed this evidence of contemporary social failure through their politicised version of psychogeography, today it rather ruins the fun.

"There's fine line between psychogeography and tourism," Stewart Home told me when I spoke to him a couple of years back. Home – artist, author, activist and one of the UK's earliest exponents of psychogeography – may well have a point, and there's certainly no sense of radical critique about Kingham's interpretation of psychogeography. But then there's nothing intrinsically wrong with that – and it still makes for a fun and fascinating afternoon of adventure.

A walk into the "grey soul of London" takes place four times in April 2011. Book tickets through the Museum of London.

Click here to see all London exhibitions.
Click here for things to do in London.

Return to Spoonfed's London Art homepage.

Tom Jeffreys