NINE
THINGS THAT AREN'T THERE
a manoeuvre around The Elephant & Castle
You are wrong to try and pass through from, say, the nice end of London Rd
across to the traffic island (the Faraday monument - a very large silver box)
and then across to the beginning of the Old Kent Rd. Despite that seemingly
correct assumption of directions, you would be completely wrong.
Criss-crossing the place called the Elephant & Castle, a locale just South
of The Thames in London Town, is the right way to go about things. This is
because there is no other way to pass through the area. Not least because
the six off-sprouts of majorroads that spike off of The Elephant are ready
to spin your head in a very demonic fashion. Nor because most of the ways
through it are actually under the groundand lead one not to the intended destination
but to a parallel destination completely somewhere else. Neither is it any
other complicated excuse or reason. And the Elephant is complicated. Rather
it is that the place itself, for over 2000 years or onwards, has been a meeting
point of travellers, persons, escapees and maybe me and you, and demands random
behaviour, stop 'n' start motion and a Kwik saviouring of the terrain. There
is much to miss here and you have already missed much. I also suggest that
just passing through would be rude.
I
There is an arrangement
of twelve stones that form a perfect stone circle. Closer inspection reveals
that some of the stones are different colours. In fact, there are four sets
of different mineral forms that make up the circle. Some Redstone, some Portland
stone, granites, base concretes? There seems to be no logic to the placing
of the monument, as it corresponds to no passage of the sun or moon or flow
of water. There seems to be no alignment between points on it's compass and
the ways and passages, roads and flows that encircle it. Any precise correlation
is in the hands of the town-planning shamans of the local municipal works.
Astrologically, on a wider repeat circumference of this stone circle, there
may be some higgledy-piggeldy web-weaving going on. Leo is The Coade Lion
at Westminster, a Mithraic Bullring at Waterloo for Taurus, another clue –
Tower Bridge, a Libran scales of justice? But Dog knows!
Surrounded and enclosed by trees, visitors to the site will immediately notice
its sunken irregular distortion of all known sacred geometries. This all leads
me to believe that we are not privy to any intuitive or physical initiation
into this cult organg. The bluff of the mishapen landscaping and the counter-bluff
of the perfect circle throw us merely bones to chew on, scraps and tidbits,
rather than invitations to an earthy feast or hyp-gnotic service. In this,
we find the first unsettling edges of anElephant paradigm. That much here
is not what it seem, is not for what it has ended up as. This is the land
of a thousand disappearing acts. Magicians tricks without rabbits. Izzy-wizzy
- lets get busy. Let's uncover some more, shall we?
II
Nearby, there runs the remains of a very old passage way. This is Clock Place,
a truncation of a way through from West Walworth to Kennington. It has been
known as Church Passage, Clock Passage but today we settle for less. Now merely
a Place that arrives at Newington Butts, all cars et cetera and departs from
a backwater of behind-the-shops predictability. Cars parked. Wheelie Bins.
Signs preventing the parking of wrong vehicles and another that warns of the
dumping of 'bulky items' specifying 'fridges etc'. It is a non-human space,
a skirting zone. Hurry past here and get to Hampton St, Marlborough Place,
The Newington Estate. No lingering, it says.
Clock Passage was a muddy track, Then a building or two jumped in. It became
occluded, darkened. Secrets joined the edges of the path together.
Let me warn you, weary traveller, lost in your miserable search for a tavern.
Someone is watching you but you can't watch back. Jack is his name and he
is often around. Comes and goes, you see. They don't know how. A warning on
the main thoroughfare you ignored.
Just then! A shuffle, a flash in the dark, a knife? a robber? A brown McDonalds
bag, a piece of foil blown by the wind. Had you worried, eh?
Jack Sheppard. Dreamer, rebel, robber and master escaper from the best of
prisons. The local rumour is it that the two-storey house off-set from Church
Passage, and I'll assume a whisper here, is the entrance to a subterranean
passage that leads to the water side.
But of Jack? We speak of a lad, a classic idler turned robber. His first criminal
mischief, to steal the silverware from the Rummer Tavern in Covent Garden.
Then a procession through the capital's merchant's basements, some cloth here,
some folding stuff there, a circular path that leads him through some of the
capital's greatest establishments.
• St Anne's Roundhouse - he springs his lover Edgeworth
Bess in Spring 1723.
• Escapes St Giles Roundhouse in February 1724.
• New Prison, Clerkenwell - escaped May 1724.
• Took the jackrabbit parole from Newgate, in August, in October, in
November 1724!
• His last escape meant tackling the pounds of chains and manacles,
fetters, leg irons and padlocks his gaolers had locked him to the floor of
the Stone Room with. He picked the locks with a nail, climbed up a chimney,
clawed through masonry and came out through a fireplace. Then tackling four
inner locked and bolted doors with scraps of metal he made his way out to
the roof. The drop was too high so he returned all the way back to his cell
and fetched a blanket to use as a rope. Then he was gone, back to Covent Garden
for a drunken night with his gal.
That Jack! A classic, a cliche of the criminal rebel. Suave, self-assured,
cocky. They hung him in Winter 1724 but not before he'd tried another escape
attempt from the very cart that led him towards Tyburn. His murder was watched
by an estimated 200,000 people and a bloody riot ensured as the crowd snatched
his body to save it from the surgeons, doctors who practiced their carvery
on the freshly executed.
So here, on Clock Place, as in The Mint up by The Borough, Jack's ghost is
watching everything. Waiting for something...Skipping off in the dark tunnel
to arrive where?
That The Thief-Taker himself, Jonathon Wild had a warehouse near here on Newington
Butts full of booty, bounty of watches, wigs, silks, purses, proceeds of
nocturnal levitations of other people's stuff makes you wonder at the coincidence.
Wild and Sheppard, their lives a double-helix of 18th Century intrigue. Clever
men. Missing nothing.
So, here in this dilapidated Church Passage building, which felonies and malfeasance
continues? The spirits of the work of locals like Obidiah Lemon, a Rattling
Lay who'd whip the bags from your carriage in a flash. Or Samuel 'The Lynx'
Linn. Or Richard Greatorex, the keeper of Wild's 'lock' in Redcross St, up
at The Boro'. James 'Hell & Fury' Sykes who stitched Jack Sheppard up
in February 1724. The Carrick Gang. All Rest In Peace.
Now it doesn't take too much map-reading, detective work and feeling the gurgle
of an underground flow to know that the olde River Neckinger, one of London's
many lost rivers, exists beneath the bitter surface of the Elephant &
Castle. In fact, is this the exit point for Jack Sheppard's tunnel? Away with
him.
III
Criss-crossing remember? Green-cross-code yourself over to Newington Butts
and land in a very sacred spot. Un-announced as such, this land denies everything.
You are standing on St Mary Newington's Churchyard. All remains of church
are long since removed. But here, at the left-hand side, of course, are ancient
graves. Blackened tombstones, the example of Mrs Elizabeth Cross, Late of
this Parifh , Who died in Jan 1806, will suffice.
You can witness the building and re-building, the overlaying of monuments
here like nobody's business. And it always seems like that. More erections,
monoliths, masquerades of nobody's business except themselves. But this land
is fertile soil still,consecrated years back, in times of chain-mail and Holy
Grail. Skirted by The Neckinger, the Devil's Neckerchief, a wash of ancient
waters, the land itself destroys the pious sanctity of what they'd intended
here. This turbulent land, continuing torque from the backspin of rejecting
any edifice, is pagan land. Feel it. Pre-Christian, spitting out Gods and
Goddeses. Pre-idol, pre-totem, beginning at nothing. A wonderful place.
Here lies another border of the place they named The Elephant. The territory
denying permanence. St Mary Newington, the parish Church for Walworth. A village
created on Saxon land given by King Edmund Ironside to Hitard, his joker.
Maybe this goes some way to explaining the cauldron of mystery we are currently
exploring. The joker's lot, eternal, without time, space-less. History and
future and awaiting the punchline. Our motto here - a local vernacular version
of St Paul's declaration: "For Christ's sake, let's be fools".
The church itself? When records begin, we learn of it's demolition in 1720
after worshippers heard the audible cracking of the walls during a service.
A new church in 1721 but demolished in June 1791 when the North and South
walls were found to be 'in ruinous condition'. It's purely functional resurrection
in 1793.
The parish books sub Anno 1686, of November 1703, of July 1706, of April 3rd
1716 record tales of many payments made in the hope of 'making the timepiece
do its duty in a proper style'. Here is a Church clock that is subject to
a time-keeping of its own.
Our own time and motion study of this parcel of sacred land also reports the
failure of the church's bell tower (in accordance to the failings of it's
friend the clock) over time. The cash for the two cracked bells, sold for
scrap to raise money for a steeple, was never recovered. The new 1793 church
itself cost 'a mint of money' in constant repairs. In 1819, a magnificent
series of scurrilous pamphlets circulated in the parish. Scribo Scratchum
Esq, the unGodly author, lampooned the Parish Council, a motley collection
of do-gooders - Glutton Swallowfee, Brandy Bumbrusher, Younge Bugman, Limp
Carrionhunter – to recall a few names. Then the forces that be gave
up trying, abandoned the site in 1876 and re-located the whole she-bang further
down on Kennington Park Rd as a spiffy Gothic masterwerk. In true local style,
it was blown to pieces by Hitler's bombs mid-1940's. But there's more...
...A benevolent functionary of the St Mary Newington Parish Council, local
chemist Robert Faulconer Esq, paid for the erection of a wonderful 100ft Clock
Tower in 1877. By 1908, the tower was in an advanced state of decay. It was
patched up but by 1924 the structure had become 'dangerous'. Further repairs
were enacted. The wonderful Bath stone tower stood proud in the Gardens, recorded
in the 'Diary of a Supertramp' by W.H.Davies (1908), a writer then catalogued
at the British Library as 'the one-legged tramp poet'. By 1971, it was all
over. Falling masonry, a lack ofwill, the power of the meaninglessness of
time itself, and the local Council called in the bulldozers.
Here again was the skirting board (without mousehole) of The Elephant conundrum.
Will any monument fit here? The evidence is skewed by the architectures but
crime seems to be the hopes of those pagans, long since forced to live underground.
Crime versus the promised Heavens of the Christians. The crime? To live life
fully.
The forensic tests we are conducting here give up two patterns. Continuous
pagan demolition. Continuous pagan construction. The battle for heathen earth.
What the religious throw up, they subvert, re-cycle. The mysteries pull their
formal towers down. Unwind their clocks. Damp their bells. Here, The Clock
Tower is an accurate alignment, at last, from East to West, the path of the
Sun over the Elephant. At sundown, the tower becomes a gnomon on the landscape
casting a phallic shadow into the womb of the Elephant & Castle Shopping
Centre.
IV
Take time to find your way to the Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre. There
are many, many entrances. Take time because only one is the narthex.
Let me explain. The narthex is the long narrow enclosed porch of a Mithraeum.
You would step through and wait. Then enter the underground temple for all
Temples to the sungod Mithra were constructed underground. Passing the guardians
of the temple, Cautes and Cautopates, life and light, dark and death, you
would then be inside the Mithraeum. A row of columns would lead you down to
the alter. Behind the columns were places for reclining and relaxing. Drinking
spring water and wine, (the blood of a bull?), being lulled by the burning
of pine cones. This was a place of initiation. Of stages to transcendence.
From The Raven, The Bride, The Soldier, The Lion, The Persian, The Sun and
The Father. In death there is life. Mithra's slaying of The Bull. Here were
initiations through endurance and ordeal.
It is possible to locate the architecture in the underground shopping centre.
Constructed with joy by urban planners who knew the way ahead for inner city
life, the shopping centre was sunk into the ground in the mid-Sixties. Below
car level, foot level. A lack-of-concentration camp without fences. A bunker.
Every Mithraic element re-defined here. Pillars. Iniatory codings. The hidden
Neckinger river a spring for the temple.
Visit the Sundial Restaurant inside this modern Unisex Mithraeum and feast.
Endure Woolworths, Superdrug and the pull of the rather good second-hand bookshop,
Tlön Books (straight outta Borges). Find your own honey, your red wine,
your Toilet Duck(smelling of Pine) in Tescos. Your directions thru' here are
magnetic. Pulled into the mysteries. (It is impossible to find a Sol beer
at the E+C). 'THIS WAY TO THE UNDERGROUND CAR-PARK', the sign promises us
more. An Under-underground?
A clue: The first acid-house club in Britain was SHOOM by The Thames in Southwark.
The acid-house smiley a totem for a sungod?
V
There is resistance here. Friction. This is a land of struggle but let's not
get maudlin round our cosy fireside. We are here for a reason. It has been
said that the defence of this land may at times be necessary and that, the
other large Southside re-development of the 60's, the South Bank, is the ramparts
of our defences. An elongated concrete bulwark against invasion. It is here
that the ever-tightening concrete molecules lock down our own artistic Maginot
Line and provide us with the first line of defence. The battle may have been
lost at the Elephant but the war has not yet been won.
What The Blitz did for the area, the local Council finished. Southwark, the
borough home of the Elephant, was destroyed by bombs. From the Thames riverside
wharves and industries to the beautiful buildings set along the massive historical
junction of the Elephant & Castle, the place was mangled to fuck. The
explosives punctured the land around here, wounded the sealed earth, uncovered
mysteries that had lain dormant for centuries. Here, on the site of concrete
myth, heavy history, the past wrapped up in the permanence, the demons were
let loose. The area was re-built in the late Sixties in a monster showpiece
re-development. The surround, the body and the core were flattened, removed
to landfill in surburbia. The place was concreted over. It was the art of
war, lightning war, scorched earth led by hip architects. Here is a cenotaph
of horizontal badland flatness, concrete roundabouts and subway tunnels..
but their emphasis was always on the Ascension. Buildings rose higher and
higher as the shell-shocked residents of an ancient community wondered where
it would all end up. The upward thrust of Hannibal House, the London College
of Printing, Draper House. Banal microcosm - as above (awful), so below (even
more awful).
Displaced, divided by the destruction of this collection of inner-city villages,
the metaphorical pink Elephant roared. The planners baked pie-in-the-sky here
and force fed it to those still standing. As a final piss-take, in the early
1990's, long after the battle was over, the owners of the Shopping Centre,
went one further, a final assault and painted their mammoth temple pink from
top to bottom. The physical manifestation of a long-standing clever-clever
insult.
VI
In 1576, across the plains of The Elephant came Peter Hunningbourne to build
his theatre at Newington Butts. The perfect microcosm for the inner and outer
worlds. Here were plays, in situ in our ancient terrains, performed beneath
the signs of the zodiac twenty-five years before The Globe or The Rose at
Bankside and Shakespeare's fame.
The struggle continues here. This land, separated by elemental Thames, is
always a microcosmic world within a world. A balance of forces, inner and
outer. The facts add up and the myths multiply. There is a certain replication
of the North and South of The Thames. What chances of two Mithraic temples,
one here and the discovery of the Walbrook Mithraeum in 1954 in the City of
London? Why does Thomas Maurice, in a 1799 poem concerning The Grove in Camberwell
(south of The Elephant) present us with the extra inclusion of his marvellous
'Ode To Mithras'? An excavation of Southwark Cathedral in 1977 unearthed an
oolitic limestone figure of a Hunter-God. The speculation includes a Mithraic
one. Here the simlarities flow. APhrygian cap, a bow and a short sword. Hunting
dogs.
Here, South of the Thames, the connections muddy water. A mirror image of
The Whitechapel murders of 1888 concurs with a skewing of the London map.
Each point in time, each local lore re-assembling itself at other sites. Catherine
Eddowes, a Jack the Ripper victim and previous resident of Southwark. Mary
Anne Nichols, a previous resdident of Walworth. Martha Tabram (a early murder
attributed by some Ripperoligists to Jack) a previous resident of The Elephant.
The Ripper suspected doctor-surgeon, the strange Russian Dr Alexander Pedachenko
was a resident in Walworth. Sir William Gull, obsessive surgeon and Ripper
suspect #1 is a doctor at Guy's Hospital in Southwark. Thomas Cutbush, Ripper
suspect, stabber from behind of young ladies and gruesome collagist of pictures
of mutilated women lived near The Elephant. The local library reveals Mary
Jane Staples 'The Lodger' (1991), a book of horrific murders set around the
Elephant at the turn of the century. One gruesome murder occurs behind Clock
Passage. And do take note of the misprint on the re-issue of 'Mord Emily',
William Pett Ridge's 1898 account of a girl-gang set entirely in Walworth.
The back-cover switches 'Walworth' for 'Whitechapel' when the East End is
not mentioned once in the book? The 'phony chink' Herve Sosthene de Rodiencourt
in Celine's great London book 'Guignols Band' lives in 'Rotherhithe, the section
just after Poplar'. Like Whitechapel-on-Thames, no? Like Tony Wilkinson, posing
as a dosser in his 80's reportage 'Down and Out', "setting off for the
East End of London", to "arrive at Tooley St"!
Or a stealthy mirror-image or a swivel through locations and times? A reversal?
The discovery of an Isuem, a Temple for the worship of Isis, on Tooley St,
just south of the Thames, just south of the Walbrook Mithraeum, a counter-point
for the bull slayers. Here, the religious connections are in perfect opposition.
The harmony of Isis and Mithra, yin and yang.
The Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre has enclosed a lot. It is our job
to free the land.
VII
And The Butts? A public house situated within a concrete spur from the Shopping
Centre. What is it that makes it No.7 of things that aren't there? It is the
sense of time itself. Please go and see.
VIII
And beneath The Butts? Where was that place? Beneath the roundabout in the
midst of the rush of traffic? Beneath the South South-West corner of the red
(once
pink) Shopping Centre? It is very hard to pinpoint. The locus, the omphalos,
the centrifugal heart of the territory of Austin Osman Spare - artist and
magician
but much, more more. Going past Alistair Crowley (whose Argenteum Astrum Spare
was once a member of), part William Blake (Lambeth son, poet-seer and
visionary whose spirit possessed Austin Spare), here is the start of the emergence
of a post-modern magics. Towards an alchemy of the self. 'Desire nothing and
there is nothing you shall not realise' - The Book of Pleasure (1913), a time-travelling
reminder (to me) of Situationist theoriser, Raoul Vaneigem's poetical hints
at magic and alchemy in his own 'The Book of Pleasures'! History revolving
around it's own occult axis.
The shadow of Austin Osman Spare is cast across a giant chunk of Southwark.
Which roads and alleyways remain ignorant of his constant back and forths?
His art and his sorcery fanned out from his little Council flat at 52 Beckett
House, Tabard St; from the top-floor studio of 56a Walworth Rd (a building
dead-set in the grand junction that the Elephant & Castle creates); from
a temporary wartime stay hostel at 86 Walworth Rd; walking through Clock Passage;
drifting to The Thames at Bankside; to the (until very recently) obscure Green
Dragon Court in Borough Market; to exhibit paintings in local pubs (The Temple
Bar on Walworth Rd, The Mansion House and White Bear on Kennington Park Rd
- all still warm and welcoming).
Blitzed by 'The... er! ...Blitz' in 1941, Spare's art disappearing up in smoke
like a cheap conjuring trick.Trying to stand on that central E+C spot, is
now an act of the impossible. No Spare rubble, hardcore, no grains left here.
Built over, erased from the mind by the Protestant work + shop ethic of the
disastrous Willett's re-development of the 60's. Here lies nothing. Central
to our Spare mythology, is this emptyness, where once stood his studio, a
vanished garrett, on terrain that now defies our attempts to
embody ourself as Spare. In both his practice and posthumous legacy, neither
famous nor infamous, Austin Spare, dissolved himself back through Magical
History, in the opposite direction to Crowley or The Golden Dawn. He occludes
himself, becomes part of the cult, the underground heritage of an ever-subterranean
moving Elephant & Castle. Spare fans do long-hard detective work. There
is a slow, leak of expensive Ltd. Ed pamphlets, reprints and recreations of
Spare, that find their way in a mad dash from magical shops to immagical book
collections. It's a race after the hare. The electrical trick hare, a robot,
fake flesh 'n' blood, no meat. All speed and saliva. The Elephant & Castle
has done well hide him but please poke around. It's worth it. For unlike our
un-enclosure of land, a physical act of restoration, his magic works against
constructing playgrounds. This is un-enclosure of time/space, a 5th, 6th,
7th, Nth dimensional freedom. This is the real Void of the E+C area. Chaos
flowing.
IX
A final memory. Those who seek to un-enclose land and property rights are
often called criminals. The Elephant boasts an impressive role call of self-styled
criminals. People self-titling their fight for un-enclosure as criminal. Re-appropriating
language and history. Seeing yourself as a rebel. These people are often nameless.
It is my 'job' to remember them. Let us remember some of the names together.
There was once a gang called The Forty Thieves. It was a woman's gang. A gang
of hoisters, for that is what they did with pride. The activity was shoplifing
and Alice Diamond was their chief. There was also Nelly Waites, Mary Whitely,
Ruby Cohen, Florrie Holmes, Maggie Hill, Ada Welman, Nora Nolan, Shirley Pitts
and many others.
They robbed the rich stores of The West End and brought it all back down South.
Down to the Elephant.PS.
Criss-crossing, remember?
Christopher
Jones
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