‘Ya alus pick onna feckin homeless,’ he shouts, walking off, back to Scotland.
Deep inside the National Institute for Medical Research, Erne’s photographs dress a corridor. Nocturnal streets, White-chapel, Bethnal Green, franchising paradox. Novelties to be nodded at on the way to the buffet. Beyond her dimly lit arcade, fields and greenery are always visible. Land dropping away towards the South Herts Golf Course, Dollis Brook and the beginnings of Enfield Chase. Caught, as ever with Erne’s work, between sodium flare and green window, I listened to the dry morse of a table-tennis ball bouncing from a well-sprung table. The rattle of cups.
Tuesday 28 April 1998. Bill and I decide, independently, in one swoop, to touch the Harold stone at the back of the abbey. Marc is moaning about his swollen foot and his twisted hip, the aftermath of our tramp up the Lea Valley. But he’s got the energy to pitch Bill with plans for books, exhibitions, trips to Northern Ireland. Bill has strange tales of Jimmy Savile — always a good topic — in Aylesbury, at the hospital. An anchorite in a shellsuit. A life of conspicuous charity and public secrets, bolt-holes, cigars, self-mythologising.
I use a couple of photocopied pages from a comic strip as my guide, for the walk from Waltham Cross to Theobalds Park. The story I’m working with is the preamble to a text by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Michael Zulli: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. These days graphic novelists operate with expensive cameras (just like painters of the Hockney lineage). Before laying out a narrative, they will rehearse what they later draw: the envisioned version (dream), the enacted version (logged and recorded), the public version (smoothed, idealised).
I’d collaborated with one of the most respected artists in this field, Dave McKean, on books and films. Dave told me that he had taken part in the original Gaiman outing. He couldn’t remember exactly where they’d gone, somewhere north of the M25, by car. These boys, designer leather jackets and bright shoes, don’t do a lot of walking. They were looking for a gate, a gate to the City of London. It had gone missing from Fleet Street; hence, the connection with the mythic Sweeney Todd. Real heads, hacked off, were displayed on this gate: warning or trophy. The underlying story is occult. The barber, with his priapic pole, his ‘anything-for-the-weekend-sir?’, is an urban prankster. ‘Was your old man a barber?’ is a line of dialogue that reverberates through London pulps and chapbooks until it achieves definitive utterance in the Nicolas Roeg/Donald Cammell film, Performance.
Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, more than any of their peers, have exported contemporary deconstructions of the Gothic. The footnote, the scholarly apparatus of the graphic novel, is the only place where speculations derived from obscure poets, outer-rim science, antiquarian folklore, can frolic and interbreed. The great modernist push, the collage, the cut-up, finds a commercial outlet. Batman reworked. Mary Shelley revisited. Blake. De Quincey. Orwell. The world its own Xerox. Originality as quotation.
Gaiman’s story laid out the experience that anyone, following the trail from Waltham Cross, up Monarch’s Way to Theobalds Grove and Theobalds Lane, might enjoy: watercress beds, a park with a picturesque ruin, a flinty section of wall. ‘Ah!’ cry the unwary. ‘We’ve found it.’ The gate. A transported chunk of London real estate.
‘WE CAN ALWAYS TAKE PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE ROAD,’ announces the Gaiman character, filling his bubble, ‘WE HEADED FOR JUNCTION 25 OF THE M25, SIXTEEN MILES NORTH OF THE CITY OF LONDON.’
I felt the presence of Gaiman, nosing about the Cedars Public Park, six years ahead of us, dowsing for bad memories. The folly in the park is a trap. Some excursionists go no further, believing that they’ve found the object of their quest, the Fleet Street gate. ‘MM. THAT WAS EASIER THAN I THOUGHT…’
But the phantom Gaiman has only achieved the periphery of the haunted wood, a triple-arched gateway to the mysteries. There are difficult decisions still to be taken. The graphic novelist delivers a snappy summary of the gate’s history, ‘IT WAS AT THE ENTRANCE TO FLEET STREET — PROBABLY ORIGINALLY ERECTED BY THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR IN THE TWELFTH CENTURY… IT WAS REPAIRED FOR ANNE BOLEYN’S CORONATION… BUT ANYWAY, CHRISTOPHER WREN BUILT THIS INCARNATION IN THE EARLY 1670S…’
A convenient tea lady serves burgers and puts the seekers right, ‘TEMPLE BAR’S IN THEOBALD’S PARK, OVER THERE. NOT IN CEDAR PARK. OF COURSE THEY WAS ONCE THE SAME PLACE, BUT NOW THERE’S THE AIO IN THE MIDDLE.’
An off-highway day, sky like porridge. My colour shots, Drummond slouching, hands in pockets, are soft: grey road, grey sky. The graphic novella of our walk towards Theobalds Park contrasts with Michael Zulli’s monochrome panels (in cinemascope or church window format). His couple also keep their hands buried deep in their jeans, but they have hair, shoulder-length. Dark glasses for the Gaiman figure. Who smokes. They drive across the AIO. We stand on the verge, waiting for a gap in the morning traffic.
They miss the signs at the edge of the wood.TESCO COUNTRY CLUB. THEOBALDS PARK, ABBEY NATIONAL CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE. The royal palace, the hunting lodge, the gardens laid out by John Tradescant, having passed through the hands of the brewer, Meux, are now in the keeping of a supermarket chain (the source of Lady Shirley Porter’s wealth) and a building society. The gate is spiked. Drummond examines the sign and roars with laughter. Through another set of padlocked gates we can see the New River, heading towards London. NO SWIMMING.
Atkins has his camera out faster than the lads in the comic strip, FALLING MASONRY: an alien structure banged down across the full double-page spread. A turn in the track, the entrance to Lady Meux’s estate (furnished with gate-keepers in Joan Hessayon’s romance), and here is Temple Bar. Christopher Wren’s Fleet Street gate, slightly distressed, rescued and reassembled, lifted beyond the pull of the M25. The brewer Meux made various improvements, extensions, rooms in which to entertain his guests.
It’s still impressive, this Essex captive. There has been talk recently of finding a couple of million quid to knock it down, carry it back to dress a portion of river frontage, around St Paul’s. Much better to extend it, stretch it, slap it over the M25. You can hear the wind, the traffic sirocco, howling through the gap, rattling the corrugated sheets. Temple Bar is reinstated as an energy gate, a switch, a consciousness junction.
Marc scoots around the masonry, finding ways to circumvent the fence, keep it out of shot. Surveillance cameras swivel, not much interested in his antics. From the woods, bird noises that Drummond can identify, if you ask him: garden warbler, blackcap, lesser spotted woodpecker.
A certain unease, ‘IT’S SITTING HERE IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE LIKE AN UNEXPLODED BOMB’, thinks the Gaiman character. His pal, Mike, goes over the fence. As does Marc, factoring images, cramming his camera with potential light-sculptures to be brought back to his London studio. History leaks.
Wren rebuilding London after the Great Fire of 1666 designs a triumphal arch for Fleet Street: Temple Bar (completed 1672). Fire and water (Fleet River) are both invoked by this structure. A gate through which the traffic of the city will flow. A gate aligned with other gates, with Lud Gate, with the effigies of King Lud and his sons.
John Collet’s painting (c. 1760) presents the western prospect of Temple Bar. Narrower and taller in aspect. Lacking the wings that Meux used to unbalance the original design, lacking the stone balustrades. Lacking royal figures in the alcoves on either side of the window above the gate. Perspective is worked, so that Fleet Street gives Temple Bar its wings. There is meaning in this placement. It harks back to the Roman model, the imperium. It’s fated to become a traffic hazard, an absurdity in such a narrow thoroughfare. Displaced, fenced in, misaligned, it has become a provocation, Gothic furniture. The unwieldy backdrop for a Sweeney Todd musical. ‘History out of context,’ as Gaiman has it.