SuperCroydon

First published in ‘The Coelacanth Journal: No. 1: The Order of Things’ – Summer 2008

The Seven Hills of Croydon

1. Dull-useful Information

Our guide loves tours.

His particular fascination began with a little book he owns titled ‘Walks in Rome’ written by Augustus John Cuthbert Hare and edited by St. Clair Baddeley.

Published in 1905, his 17^th Edition copy is pocket-sized in two of its dimensions. In its third dimension it would require a particularly generous Edwardian pocket, being over an inch and a half thick. It has a black cover with narrow stripes in imperial red at the top and bottom. The delicately thin edges of the pages are also coloured red, giving the thickness of the book the pink-red sheen of a slab of salmon steak. On the front is a gold debossed scene of the ruined Temples of Vespasian and Saturn in the Roman Forum.

Our guide had originally found a 1^st Edition copy of ‘Walks in Rome’ in an old library in 1996, immediately attracted to its tiny dense type-face, its eccentric academic obscurity and its series of wispily delicate fold-out maps and plans. That year, he borrowed it from the library, and took it on a trip to Rome to test its impracticality and found it almost completely useless as a conventional guide book. As well as the book being obscure and delicate and hard to read, the Rome of Augustus John Cuthbert Hare had gone. It had been disfigured by the 20^th Century with its fascist typewriters, tacky tourism and autostrade packed with Fiat Cinquecenti.

On his return, the 1^st Edition copy went back to the library.

A year later, our guide discovered a 17^th Edition copy of the same book amongst piles of 1980’s Delia Smith cook books and My Little Pony Annuals in a junkshop close to the old Beejam in West Wickham and purchased it for £5.

Despite being a 17^th Edition rather than a 1^st Edition, apparently this West Wickham junkshop volume is superior to the library volume because of a series of ink and pencil notations on its pages. For instance, at the top of the bastard title page, the original owner of the book has signed their name “Emily S. Machell Smith” in blue ink and with an exquisitely Edwardian hand. At the bottom of the same page, a little note reads: “To my “Brave Comrade” with much love from Kathleen. Jan: 1906…”

These loving little notes and a series of careful underlinings and jottings made throughout by brave Emily and Kathleen seem to our guide to imbue the book with distant preciousness and almost magical powers. It has a Redy-Brek glow.

He has not ever read the whole of ‘Walks in Rome’ – it is not that kind of book – but has read bits and pieces and passages; mainly around Emily’s feint blue pencil notations and careful underlinings. According to him, these little marks focus the reader’s attention. They provide a useful edit of the book’s dense impenetrability and reveal something clear about Augustus and Emily. They are Emily pointing the way – and making a point – with the sharp end of a blue pencil.

In Hare’s introduction, Emily has marked two passages in particular in blue and drawn them to our attention. The first one:

“There is one point which cannot be sufficiently impressed upon those who wish to take away more than a mere surface impression of Rome; it is, never to see too much; never try to ‘do’ Rome.”

And the second one:

“Better by far to leave half the ruins and nine-tenths of the churches unseen, and to see well the rest; to see them not once, but again and often again; to watch them, to live with them, to love them, till they have become part of life and life’s recollections.”

In Chapter 1 of Augustus Hare’s book there is a section sub-titled ‘Dull-Useful Information’. This consists of a directory of useful places and addresses; opening times and dates; warnings and tips. Practical things are there like the times of church services, the location of bicycle hire places and the whereabouts of Sick Nurses. The following oddments are underlined and asterisked by Emily:

Tea-rooms

English churches

Church music

Telegraph Offices

Homoeopathic Physicians

Chemists

Money Changers

Shops selling Roman Pearls, Roman Ribbons and Shawls

Grocers (also for Oil and Wood, &c)

The English Dairy

Significant Churches, Palaces and Villas (with a note in the margins reading ‘Been to those marked’)

A series of organised tours and ‘courses’ ideal for ‘invalids without carriages of their own’

Dates of notable festivals

On a clear page in the back of the book, Emily has made a note of the itinerary for her trip in the same blue pencil, covering dates from February 4^th to February 11^th 1906. Our guide has tried, but cannot read all of the handwriting. However, he has worked out that on Tuesday 6^th February, Emily visited the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, the largest church in Rome. On Wednesday 7^th February she made a trip to the Barbarini Palace and apparently met someone there with the name ‘Beatrice Bonci’.

On Thursday 8^th February 1906, the day of a British General Election in which she would have had no vote, Emily chose instead to take in the Renaissance frescos of the ‘Stanze di Raffaello’. She also visited St Peter’s.

On Friday 9^th February she saw the Villa Borghese, on Saturday the church of San Pietro in Montorio and on Sunday 11^th February she made a trip to the Villa Farnesina.

It seems that Emily preferred churches and palaces to Roman ruins.

A feint note towards the back of ‘Walks in Rome’ reveals that Emily stayed at the ‘Hotel Eden’ on Via Ludovisi. Still there, close to the Villa Medici and the Spanish Steps, it is now a luxury 5 star hotel and ‘host to royalty, aristocrats, leaders and celebrities from the world over’.

“Set in the heart of the Eternal City of Rome, Hotel Eden allows guests to discover the cultural allure of Rome. The nearby attractions—Via Veneto, the Spanish Steps, and Via Condotti—are just a short walk from the hotel’s doorstep, and the hotel itself overlooks the seven historic hills of Rome. Hotel Eden provides the perfect cultural ambiance to immerse oneself in the sights, tastes, and sounds of this enchanting city.”

Our guide imagines Emily S.Machell Smith in the Hotel Eden on the morning of the 4^th February 1906, looking up from Augustus Hare’s dense, academic and eccentric tome to gaze over the seven historic hills of Rome, before devising her February 1906 itinerary. In his imagination she’s something like Helena Bonham-Carter’s Lucy Honeychurch.

He looks up past a pile of un-ironed washing at the Ikea bookshelf in Croydon that is the current home of Emily’s copy of ‘Walks in Rome’. He tries to imagine Helena Bonham-Carter’s Lucy Honeychurch in the same context.

“Cup of tea?” he asks her.

She looks around the room for a moment, eyes resting first on a cream battery-operated megaphone and then a two-headed plastic dinosaur, and then shakes her head. “Um…No, thanks”.

“Coffee? I’ve run out of proper coffee, but…”

“No. Thanks.”

“Pressed apple and mango juice?”

She shakes her head.

For the majority of the time since he purchased the little black book in 1997, it has stayed on that Ikea bookshelf in his living room. He has pulled it down maybe a dozen times to show guests or to examine for half an hour whilst devising his own tours, carefully unfolding its delicate maps before carefully folding them up again. Once or twice he has taken it on a walk around Croydon. Once he took it to Kensington. Another time he took it to Plaistow. Always accompanied by Kathleen, Emily and Augustus. Lucy Honeychurch usually declines.

For years he has wondered about distant and mysterious Emily and Kathleen. Who were they?

It occurred to him last week that these days it might not be that hard at all to find out exactly who they were.

A five minute Google and Kathleen becomes Kathleen Machell-Smith, whilst Emily turns in to Kathleen Machell-Smith’s elderly mother, perhaps explaining her winter trip to seek out Mediterranean warmth, Homoeopathic Physicians and Roman Chemists.

More Maggie Smith than Helena Bonham-Carter.

A bit more of a Google-delve and Kathleen Machell-Smith is now the mother of the novelist Christopher Isherwood, and along with her husband Frank Bradshaw-Isherwood, the subject of his 1971 book ‘Kathleen and Frank’.

Carried away with lazy Yahoo, it turns out that Augustus John Cuthbert Hare – author of numerous weird historical guidebooks and eccentric biographies – was born in Rome in 1834 but lived for most of his life at Holmhurst St Mary’s near Battle in East Sussex where, coincidentally, our guide’s parents have a static holiday caravan.

On our guide’s Ikea bookshelf, Augustus, Kathleen and Emily’s ‘Walks in Rome’ is squeezed in-between a local history book called ‘Croydon From Above’ and a glossy, A3 special supplement of Blueprint Magazine from 1993 entitled ‘Croydon the Future’. These three publications have been rubbing up against each other for over ten years. Edwardian ladies have been climbing through dusty salmon-pink-edged pages to explore empty 1960s concrete tower blocks; Crystal Palace FC have moved from Selhurst Park, through glossy stapled pages, to share the Coliseum with gladiators and take part in exciting red-and-blue-striped mock sea battles to chants of ‘Eagles!’.

On page 16 of the Blueprint special supplement, one of a series of fantastical architectural speculations likens Croydon’s seven multi storey car parks to the seven hills, explicitly inviting our guide to see Rome in Croydon.

2. The Vacant City

Croydon is a ‘big, brash and broad-shouldered’ 20^th Century idea-city with ancient roots. But no one lives there. It is pumped up and massive, but is also empty. It is vacant and full. The town centre, to our guide, is a picturesque landscape of the imagination. If he knew no better, its disconnected urban fabric could hint at a glorious past. Was this a capital of a vast transpontine state? A centre of world religious significance? The seat of some great English Czar? A great land-locked port with connections to Bombay, Shanghai and Alexandria? The film set for a Merchant-Ivory production?

Our guide asks that we seek out some of the old 18^th and 19^th Century paintings of the Roman Forum and look for Croydon in them. Pastoral scenes in oil by Giovanni Paolo Pannini or ones like Claude Lorrain’s ‘Campo Vaccino’ show a great vacant city. A beautifully broken and empty husk that is also fecundly full, with stubbly cloaked shepherds standing chatting, grazing their animals next to crumbling and overgrown triumphal arches.

“You see? Now, look for Rome in Croydon”.

Well, Central Croydon’s triumphal arch is called the ‘Arnhem Gate’. It is a great peculiar crumbling concrete gateway next to Croydon College, with a grand set of steps leading up to it. Walk through the archway and the route leads nowhere. You are confronted with a large concrete wall, a multi-storey car park’s access bridge, overgrown paving slabs and a deep railway cutting. Skateboarders rattle around it and up and down DIY ramps made from bits of old concrete and bits of old Arnhem Gate. It is as if this grand bland suburban monument was always there, and the railway and College and car park grew around it piecemeal over time. Perhaps there was once a grand avenue leading from the Arnhem Gate east towards Kent and west towards the Old Palace, River Wandle and Sutton.

What does the ‘Croydon Gate’ in Arnhem look like though? Is there one?

Elsewhere in Croydon, epic eight-lane roads are cut off and lead nowhere, suggestive of either an incomplete grand projet, or a grand projet that has been eroded, edited and compromised over time. Great towers sit empty, filled with sculptures of old stacked-up office furniture. A large vacant site next to East Croydon station contains mounds of rubble, bits of roadways, Claude Lorrain overgrowth and the Warehouse Theatre.

From Chapter 1 of ‘Walks in Rome’ – in the section sub-titled ‘Dull-Useful Information’ – we learn that “The Population of Rome in 1897 was 489,965; in 1850, 170,824; in 1513, 40,000, and in the time of Hadrian, over a million.” Today, Rome’s population is nearly 3 million.

The gap between the ruinous fullness of that pastoral 40,000 in 1513, the distant emptiness of Hadrian’s Imperial million and the relative irrelevance of today’s population is beautiful. It represents an eternal filling up and emptying out, the prime value of which is to challenge, reflect and form our values.

Dull-Useful Croydon is London’s most populous borough. It has always had a pumped up status because of its roads and canals and railways and its ancient summer seat of the Archbishops of Canterbury, Lords of the Croydon Manor. However, despite the borough housing over 350,000 people, the big-scale urban downtown of Croydon – the very thing that expresses its fullness – is empty. Only around 4,000 people live in its commercial concrete heart. The once densely populated medieval Old Town is now filled with bargain shops and a multiplex cinema. An ancient residential constant can be found in the forty elderly people who have lived in the Whitgift Almshouses since 1599.

Croydon’s full emptiness – its perceived bigness and actual smallness – is now inspiring the creation of radical new visions to really fill it up. Its connections to London and Gatwick and Greater Europe via St Pancras International make it a 21^st Century buzz-city in the making. Forget backwards Eco-towns, this is already the transpontine capital city of the imagination. Schemes for crops of fifty storey villages in the sky – housing thousands of new Croydonians – imagine it eternally transformed in to a positively congested and intensely delirious city of the future.

3. Delirious New Croydon

“Rather than cheering Croydon with a sugar coating of design to its grim multi-slabs of car park, this proposal takes inspiration from the foundation of Rome and pumps up seven of them to make a greener, more contemporary polis. Reclothed as seven hills, they house the sort of cultures Londoners take for granted and Croydoners usually do without: Wellesely is matched to the ICA; Wandle to Heaven; Dingwall to the Ministry of Sound; Surrey to Portobello; Fairfield to the Comedy Store; Lansdowne to Sadlers Wells; Drummond to Holmes Place.

This new Croydon makes its desires apparent in the landscape. Where better to build signs of new times than over the old ones?…”

In 1993 our guide went on a secondary school trip to the Architecture Foundation’s ‘Croydon the Future’ exhibition. Next to the Fairfield Halls, inside a space-aged Future Systems tent that blew away, there were proposals by Branson Coates to turn the seven half redundant concrete multi-storey car parks of central Croydon in to seven culture hills.

Fifteen years later and there are still seven multi storey car parks in Croydon. They are even more redundant than before, in these days of tram-links and highly priced petrol. Despite Clarkson. They are amazingly beautiful in their continued unfashionable-ness and uncultured potential.

Every September for the past four years, our guide has been leading people on ‘Walks in Croydon’ via the flat tops and urine-soaked stairs of these seven man-made hills. Instead of Augustus John Cuthbert Hare’s Aventine, Caelian, Capitoline, Esquiline, Palatine, Quirinal and Viminal, this tour takes in Croydon via Wellesley Road, Wandle, Dingwall Road, Surrey Street, Fairfield, Lansdowne Road and Centrale.

The seven car parks are perfectly arranged in a circuit around the suburban city’s centre. They are equally spaced and publicly accessible. They provide a range of ways up and through them via stairs, lifts and ramps and their landscaped open plateau tops offer rare and beautiful city panoramas.

Focussing again on preparing for another September’s seven hills tour, our guide has a flick through Augustus’ and Emily’s little book before writing a Dull-Useful summary of Croydon’s seven hills on a sheet of A4 paper:

“Allders: Serves Allders of Croydon, third largest department store in Britain. This hill sits amongst a crop of Alphaville tower blocks and allows the visitor a rare perspective. Akin to being inside a three-dimensional black, grey and white Bridget Riley painting. Close to the art deco Electricity Showrooms, the air raid shelter of which had a revolving electric dance floor.

Dingwall: Perfect views across ‘Mini Manhattan’ and the East Croydon Gateway Site, with its Claude Lorraine landscape of crumbling rubble piles, dilapidated warehouse buildings and scrubby overgrowth. Note Richard Seifert’s ‘Thrupenny Bit’ building in the distance and his remarkable cantilevered entrance canopy to Corinthian House. Also see the towers of Crystal Palace – adjacent to Paxton’s ruins – and the floodlights of Selhurst Park to the north.

Whitgift: Here, perch above the epic Wellesley Road, Croydon’s great eight-lane imperial boulevard. See thousands of people arrive from all over the world every day via the great port of Lunar House. Imagine delirious Alsopian visions for hanging gardens, uncovered rivers and colourful villages in the sky.

Le Massif Centrale: Built on the site of Drummond hill, this is Croydon’s most populated hill, busy with House of Fraser shoppers. Views are afforded out towards the ruins of Croydon-B power station (now Ikea), the location for Terry Gilliam’s ‘Brazil’. Also, see Wembley’s arch in the distance.

Surrey Street: Listen to the sounds of the ancient street market, London’s oldest. The Venetian Palace directly to the south is a pumping station extracting water from one of the sources of the River Wandle. Take in views across medieval rooftops and beetroot boilers.

Wandle: A vast empty hillside on the edge of the city. Views across an epic curving vehicular viaduct that spans a valley-gap in the North Downs, locating the River Bourne and the London to Brighton Road. Observe that asphalt lumps on the plateau have melted in to obscene shapes.

College: Good views of the Arnhem Gate and the Chocolate Tower. Located in a place of great pop-cultural significance. Associated with the Beatles, the Pistols, David Bowie, the Damned, Bridget Riley, the Banshees, McLean, MacLaren, Jamie Reid, walnut fairs and a world centre for crooked grinds and ollies.”

Finished for now, our guide puts down his pen, folds up his A4 summary and puts it in his jacket pocket. Emily, Kathleen and Augustus disappear. He squeezes ‘Walks in Rome’ back in between ‘Croydon From Above’ and ‘Croydon the Future’ and turns out the angle-poise lamp clamped to his Ikea bookshelf.